ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a new way of understanding Indonesia’s citizen-
audiences in the context of post-Suharto regime transformation and a fully
commercialized media sector which penetrates every aspect of urban social
and cultural life. The audience has been crucial to our understanding of
communicative processes even if the shaping of radio and television tech-
nologies by the challenge of overcoming space tended to place more
emphasis on the projection of messages rather than their reception (Shannon
and Weaver 1949). In academic research on audiences, however, we can observe a gradual shift away from audiences as (vulnerable) objects of
communication processes to ideas of the audience as active, differentiated
interpreters (McQuail 1997).
