ABSTRACT
Audience feedback forums are one of the most enduring ways for individuals to engage in the world. They provide channels through which individuals can have their opinions entered into the historical record. The forums allow individuals to vent their frustrations against the seemingly unresponsive behemoths that are governments, corporations, and major institutions. It also find fellowship with people who share their same interests, if not their same opinions.By engaging in audience feedback forums, individuals are collaborating in a number of phenomena, but one of the most noteworthy is that of "imagined community". When media professionals become so detached from their feedback forums that they no longer consider participants to be individuals, but rather a faceless mob, those professionals also can lose credibility within their community. Journalists often view audience feedback in a predominantly collective sense, as feedback from "the public" or "the audience" who are collectively engaged in discourse in virtual "village squares".
