ABSTRACT
In a critical exchange on audience theory, James Lull entered the plea that when speaking about television, people should get rid of the terms "texts" and "readers". It is not difficult to see why. The literary bias of both terms is obvious, as is the inappropriateness of their unqualified application to audiovisual media. The modern concept of the audience as the receivers of messages from a centralized source of transmission, then, was not present at the birth of the modern media but has emerged in tandem with their development and, in part, as a product of their own practices. Moreover, it is clear that there is a self-fueling momentum built into the relationship between museum practices and visitor observation in the sense that new fields of museum policy are constantly being generated as the grid of observation to which visitors are subjected becomes more refined.
