ABSTRACT

In today’s thoroughly mediated societies people spend many hours in the role of audiences, while powerful organizations, including governments, corporations and schools, reach people via the media. Consequently, how people think about, and organizations treat, audiences has considerable significance.

This ground-breaking collection offers original, empirical studies of discourses about audiences by bringing together a genuinely international range of work. With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts.

Suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is a valuable and original contribution to media and communication studies. It will be particularly useful to those studying audiences and international media.

chapter 1|19 pages

Introduction

“Translating” audiences, provincializing Europe

chapter 3|13 pages

When Curiosity Met Printing

Audiences and new media in early modern history

chapter 4|14 pages

Shoppers, Dupes and Other Types

The television audience in post-Soviet Russian discourses

chapter 5|16 pages

Between Unruliness and Sociality

Discourses on diasporic cinema audiences for Turkish and Indian films

chapter 6|17 pages

Producing Loyal Citizens and Entertaining Volatile Subjects

Imagining audience agency in colonial Rhodesia and post-colonial Zimbabwe

chapter 7|14 pages

A Consuming Public

Movie audiences in the Bengali cultural imaginary

chapter 8|12 pages

“The Mass Wants This!”

How politics, religion, and media industries shape discourses about audiences in the Arab world

chapter 12|17 pages

From Qunzhong to Guanzhong

The evolving conceptualization of audience in mainland China

chapter 13|16 pages

Active citizenship

The politics of imagining internet audiences in Taiwan