Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere (IB-Changing Media, Changing Europe)

In today’s thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently. Indeed, it is commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public: in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant.

When is an audience a public, ask these European media scholars and social scientists, and when is a public an audience. Their underlying contention is that understandings, values, and identities of the public, and the fora in which these are expressed, are increasingly mediated technologically, materially, and discursively. They explore whether and how this mediation of publics matters by examining the intersection between the public and media audiences. Distributed in the US by ISBN. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"In today's thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently."--Jacket