ABSTRACT
Americans spend a remarkable amount of time as audiences: adults spent over nine hours per day using media in 2004, more than half of all waking hours; and this does not include unmediated live performances and spectator sports, let alone church and school where people act largely as audiences.1 It is important therefore what is said about these audiences.Today, as in the past, people have been criticized for how they play their role as entertainment audiences.Audiences have been depicted variously as good or bad, threatening public order or politically disengaged, cultivated or cultural dupes, ideal citizens or pathological, and so on.This book seeks to make sense out of the profusion of representations of audiences in the historical record and the political implications of those representations.
