Audience

The audience as “Mass”
· The media are often experienced by people alone. Some critics have talked about media audiences as atomised – cut off from other people like separate atoms.
· Wherever they are in the world, the audiences for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.

Herbert Blumer’s description of 1950
· First, its membership may come from all walks of life, and from all distinguishable social strata; it may include people of different class position, of different vocation, of different cultural attainment, and of different wealth.
· Secondly, the mass is an anonymous group, or more exactly is composed of anonymous individuals, Blumer means anonymous in the sense that unlike the citizens of earlier communities, the people who are members of the mass audience for the media do not know each other.
· Third, there exists little interaction or change of experience between members of the mass. They are usually physically separated from one another, and, being anonymous, do not have the opportunity to mill as do members of the crowd.
· Fourth, the mass is very loosely organised and it not able to act with the unity of a crowd.