ABSTRACT
AUDIENCE analysis has always been one of the most active areas of mass communication research. Although specific conceptions of the audience have been challenged and subsequently modified as a result of different research findings, the category of the audience itself has never been radically problematized. Instead of trying to refine our understanding of the nature of the audience (whose composition, to make the matter more complicated, is as changing as the media, communication technologies, and research methods that target it), this chapter attempts to deconstruct (Chang, 1985; Chang, in press a; Derrida, 1976, 1978) the dominant notion of audience in mass communication research by questioning its usefulness as a theoretical category or concept whose supposed referent, as I will try to show, is an essentially “discursive” reality. 1 I will then propose an alternative way of viewing the familiar object previously labeled audience as both constitutive of and constituted by various “discursive practices” and ideological determinations involved in the social production and reproduction of meaning. Such a discursive notion of the audience might work toward displacing what I call the “psychological/sociological image” of the reader/audience implied in the sender-media-receiver model of communication process.
