ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the author/message relation. It focuses on a wide range of material. The manufacturer and the teachers are in a sense gatekeepers; without their approval the author is without an audience. McQuail identified four characteristic ways in which communicators, as authors, negotiate the uncertainty generated by this ignorance of the audience: paternalism, specialisation, professionalism and ritualism. The chapter identifies some of the issues, and highlights the lack of any real direct control that the author might have on the audience/message relation. The very technology which makes such large-scale communication possible is by its nature basically insensitive to the needs of its audience. Audience research is, in the history of communication, a relative newcomer frequently treated as an interloper. It has grown out of the combined skills of social science survey techniques, psychological testing, demography and statistics.
