The Mass Audience

Rediscovering the Dominant Model

James Webster, Patricia F. Phalen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136685934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

In the early 20th century, a new and distinctive concept of the audience rose to prominence. The audience was seen as a mass -- a large collection of people mostly unknown to one another -- that was unified through exposure to media. This construct offered a pragmatic way to map audiences that was relevant to industry, government, and social theorists. In a relatively short period of time, it became the dominant model for studying the audience. Today, it is so pervasive that most people simply take it for granted. Recently, media scholars have reopened inquiry into the meaning of "audience." They question the utility of the mass audience concept, characterizing it as insensitive to differences among audience members inescapably bound up with discredited notions of mass society, or serving only a narrow set of industrial interests. The authors of this volume find that these assertions are often false and unwarranted either by the historical record or by contemporary industry practice. Instead, they argue for a rediscovery of the dominant model by summarizing and critiquing the very considerable body of literature on audience behavior, and by demonstrating different ways of analyzing mass audiences. Further, they provide a framework for understanding the future of the audience in the new media environment, and suggest how the concept of mass audience can illuminate research on media effects, cultural studies, and media policy.

Chapter 1

The Concept of Mass Audience

The audience is essential to our understanding of the media. It is the public in whose name programs are made and laws are passed. It is the commodity that supports commercial broadcasting. It is the arena in which the effects of mass communications are played out. It is the place where the meanings and pleasures of media use are ultimately realized. The audience, in short, is the foundation of the media's economic and cultural power. Without it, the entire enterprise has very little purpose.

Not surprisingly, the idea of an audience is common to both academic theory and industry practice. As McQuail (1994) noted, “it is one of the few terms which can be shared without difficulty by media practitioners and theorists alike“ (p. 283). Most often, the audience is conceptualized as a large, loosely connected mass on the receiving end of the media. This vision of the audience seems so obvious, so natural, that no others may even come to mind. But audiences are not natural things. They are “man-made.“ And in the case of the television audience, a good deal goes into the making. Where do our notions of the audience come from?

In English, the word audience first appeared in the 14th century. Its original usage implied a hearing, as in “giving an audience.“ Eventually, that definition expanded to include an “assembly of listeners.“ Not until the mid-19th century, however, did the word take on a more modern meaning by denoting the readers of a particular author or publication. With the advent of electronic media in the early 20th century, the word was easily adapted to include the far-flung listeners of radio and television (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989).

Etymologies aside, the practice of assembling to see a performance is at least as old as civilization itself. Even the earliest audiences reflected something of the social structures and technologies of their day. In that sense, they share an important attribute with contemporary audiences. Each is a product of human engineering. Unlike media audiences, the first audiences gathered at specific times and places and could be seen in their totality by the performers. Just as importantly, the spectators could see and hear one another. Those in attendance were undoubtedly aware of their membership in a larger audience and would act accordingly. As Brockett (1968) noted of early Greek theater, “the audience expressed its opinions noisily and at times hissed actors off the stage. Tradition has it that Aeschylus once had to take refuge on the altar to escape the wrath of the spectators“ (pp. 39-40).

The existence of a media audience is less self-evident, partly because our knowledge of that audience is less immediate. It is unseen, and its members largely unknown to one another. At times, the broadcast audience seems as immaterial as the airwaves that bind it together. Yet, it is as real as those who first gathered to hear the plays of Aeschylus. In fact, the idea of a mass audience is so potent that it has come to dominate other ways of seeing the audience. This chapter explores the history, meaning, and remarkable durability of the mass audience concept.

SETTING THE STAGE

The idea of a mass audience can be seen as the outgrowth of trends dating back to the Industrial Revolution. Urbanization, mass production, the spread of public education, and the rise of a middle class all played a role in bringing the mass audience into being. The more immediate causes were the growth of advertiser-supported media and the increasing popularity of statistical analysis as a way to study mass social phenomena. Both of these factors deserve some comment.

The Rise of Mass Media

The mass media emerged in the 19th century in close association with manufacturing. During that period, manufacturers perfected the means of mass production. Indeed, they were so successful that their output could sometimes flood the market. Buzzard (1990) explained:

As manufacturing became more and more efficient, manufacturers became victims of their own success: they could now produce goods at a much faster rate than the jobber/retailer network could sell them. When they recognized the problem, manufacturers began to examine it with the same analytical attitude and skills which had worked so well on the assembly line. Their conclusion, in effect, was that advertising would be the key ingredient in effective marketing. (p. 3)

Promoting brand images and uniquely packaged products became popular strategies for managing demand. But manufacturers still needed efficient ways to reach customers with their message. As luck would have it, at about the same time a series of developments in press and paper technology enabled the first inexpensive, high-speed printing. This combination of the manufacturers′ desire to reach the mass market, and the technical means to distribute messages cheaply gave powerful impetus to the growth of mass media (Beniger, 1986).

For their part, the newly literate masses seemed hungry for low cost publications, made cheaper still by the presence of advertising. In the 1830s, the New York Sun began selling newspapers on the street for a penny apiece. The penny press placed a premium on circulation and encouraged editors to pander to their readers. Although some papers resisted these pressures and relied instead on the upscale quality of their readership to attract advertisers, by the end of the century, even the conservative Chicago Tribune had lowered its newsstand price to a penny. Newspapers had become a mass medium dependent on circulation for profitability. By the end of World War I, readership reached its zenith, with daily circulation actually surpassing the total number of U.S. households (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 1982).

The growth of commercial broadcasting was even more phenomenal. Marconi had developed the first “wireless“ around the turn of the century. Although it was originally conceptualized as a point-to-point mode of communication, it spawned a growing number of hobbyists who simply enjoyed tuning in. In 1906, inventor Reginald Fessenden transmitted what some consider the first deliberate broadcast.

He played the violin, sang, recited poetry, and played a phonograph record. Then, the electrical engineer promised to be back on the air again for New Year's Eve and asked anyone who had heard the broadcast to write him. Apparently he got a number of letters especially from radio operators astonished to hear more than Morse code on their headphones. (Webster & Lichty, 1991, p. 68)

In 1920, KDKA, a station owned by Westinghouse, began a regular schedule of broadcasts designed to encourage the sale of radio receivers. By year's end, the federal government had issued 30 licenses. Five years later, more than 500 stations were on the air (Lichty & Topping, 1975).

At first it seemed that the sale of receivers might cover the expense of broadcasting. In 1922 alone, 100,000 sets were sold (Head & Sterling, 1987). But advertising quickly took hold. One of the new stations in New York City, WEAF, was owned by AT&T. For the telephone company, which made a practice of leasing its facilities to others, it was a short step to toll broadcasting (Banning, 1946). In 1922, a real estate company paid WEAF $50 for 10 minutes of air time to extol the virtues of an apartment complex. The same factors that brought advertising to newspapers now brought it to broadcasting. Almost overnight, radio became an advertiser-supported medium, free to listeners and intent on increasing its circulation (Spaulding, 1963). When television began growing in the 1940s, it simply followed suit.

But the broadcast audience was different from newspaper readership. It was more expansive and abstract. Unlike print media, it reached every segment of society. It could, and often did, entertain the youngest of listeners. It imposed no formal requirements of literacy. It opened the door to a vast national audience. Broadcasting, it seemed, was the ideal advertising medium. As Galbraith (1967) later wrote,

Coincidentally with rising mass incomes came first radio and then television. These, in their capacity to hold effortless interest, their accessibility over the entire cultural spectrum, and their independence of any educational qualification, were admirably suited to mass persuasion. Radio and more especially television have, in consequence, become the prime instruments for the management of consumer demand. (p. 208)

Statistical Thinking

The realization of a modern mass audience, however, required a concurrent change in how social phenomena were conceptualized. Porter (1986) called that change the rise of statistical thinking. By the late 18th century, those who studied society had discovered that most social events, when measured in the aggregate, demonstrated unseen and remarkably lawlike regularities. The total number of births, marriages, crimes, suicides, even the number of dead letters in the post office, revealed predictable patterns that could be captured in statistical summaries of the mass. These regularities were all the more remarkable because the individual events on which they were based were themselves the result of countless, idiosyncratic circumstances and decisions. The social order that emerged from chaos occasioned much comment. Kant (cited in Porter, 1986), for example, wrote “since the free will of man has obvious influence upon marriage, births, and deaths, they seem to be subject to no rule by which the number of them could be reckoned in advance. Yet the annual table of them in major countries prove that they occur according to laws“ (p. 51).

Throughout the 1800s, the practice of using statistics to understand and manage increasingly complex societies gained adherents in science, business, and public administration. As Porter (1986) observed, “After the mid-nineteenth century, it became common to investigate collective phenomena using what came to be called the statistical method, the method of reasoning about events in large numbers without being troubled by the intractability of individuals“ (p. 12). By the beginning of the 20th century, most of the tools of statistical analysis had been invented and the stage was set to study the mass media audience as a knowable entity in its own right.

This entity was far more malleable and predictable than any one of its constituent audience members.

THE MASS AUDIENCE CONCEPT TAKES HOLD1

It is impossible to identify a precise moment when the idea of a mass audience took hold, but a confluence of factors in the 1930s, including methodological innovations in audience measurement, key developments in social theory, and the arrival of Paul Lazarsfeld in the United States, suggest that the concept finally crystallized during that decade.

Audience Measurement

Advertisers had an obvious, pragmatic interest in knowing the size of the audience for any advertising medium. The more people there were in attendance, the greater the reach would be of their advertising message. For newspapers, this information could be obtained in reports of circulation, although some publishers were notorious for inflating claims of readership. The accuracy of such information improved after 1914 when advertisers established the Audit Bureau of Circulation to verify readership (Beniger, 1986).

The ephemeral quality of broadcasting made it even harder to measure its audience. Early techniques for assessing radio listenership included counting the number of receivers sold in a given market or tallying the fan mail received by a particular program. These techniques had obvious drawbacks (Beville, 1988).

In the late 1920s, Archibald Crossley, a market researcher and well-known pollster, suggested to the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) that more accurate measurement of radio listenership might be obtained by using telephones to survey the audience. Crossley's first report, The Advertiser Looks at Radio was widely distributed, and ANA members quickly agreed to pay for more regular reports (Webster & Lichty, 1991). In March 1930, Crossley initiated a new measurement service that he dubbed the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB). The CAB eventually went out of business, but the demand for audience measurement had been established. In the coming years, firms like A.C. Nielsen took on the task of providing estimates of audience size in radio and, eventually, television.

What came to be called ratings research coincided with similar advances in readership surveys. Marketing and advertising research began to take on the trappings of a profession. The U.S. Census Bureau developed the sampling theory needed for large-scale survey research, and textbooks codifying acceptable practice were published (Beniger, 1986). For those who studied the media audience, the 1930s were something of a watershed. As Chandon (1976) observed, studies of the press had “opened the field of media exposure by shifting the emphasis from counting the number of physical media units distributed to counting the number of individuals entering into contact with the media“ (p. 3).

Certainly by the end of the decade, there was a well-established set of procedures that had the effect of defining the mass audience. Membership in the audience was to be a matter of exposure, of entering into contact with the media. Contact was to be assessed, in the aggregate, through the use of sample survey techniques and summarized in a variety of statistics. This provided a workable definition of the audience that was easily adaptable to the needs of advertiser-supported media.

The Mass In Social Theory

It would be a mistake however, to assume that the mass audience was nothing more than a device invented for the convenience of advertisers. Social theorists had a parallel set of interests. The dramatic, and often troubling, social changes of the 19th century, gave rise to a new science of sociology. Among the objects of its scrutiny were group behaviors that seemed ungoverned by law or social convention such as the action of crowds, fads, or other mass movements. These topics of interest eventually coalesced into a distinct field of study within sociology called collective behavior.

But, by the late 1930s, it became clear that a new sort of collective behavior had to be reckoned with. Blumer (1946) identified the mass as an increasingly important social entity, and described its characteristics as follows:

1.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.

2.The mass is an anonymous group, or more exactly, is composed of anonymous individuals.

3.There exists little interaction or exchange 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 the members of the crowd.

4.The mass is very loosely organized and is not able to act with the concertedness or unity that marks the crowd. (pp. 185-186)

The mass, then, is a heterogeneous collection of individuals who are separate from one another and act autonomously. That being the case, one is tempted to ask what defines it as a social formation? What makes it a thing that we can study?

A mass is unified by a common object of attention. It forms when a multitude of individuals select something as the focus of their interest. This act of choice-making defines individual membership in the mass and, in the aggregate, makes the mass a powerful social force. As Blumer (1946) noted, for each individual in the mass, the essential activities are

primarily in the form of selections—such as the selection of a new dentifrice, a book, a play, a party platform, a new fashion, a philosophy, or a gospel—selections which are made in response to the vague impulses and feelings which are awakened by the object of mass interest. Mass behavior, even though a congeries of individual lines of action, may become of momentous significance. If these lines converge, the influence of the mass may be enormous, as is shown by the far-reaching effects on institutions ensuing from shifts in the selective interest of the mass. (p. 187)

Although these concerns are not unrelated to those of a merchandiser, the concept of a mass has broader applicability to the study of society. Furthermore, there is nothing in Blumer's definition of the mass that implies passivity or manipulation. To the contrary, the mass exercises power through independent, if unorganized, choice making.

The Lazarsfeld Tradition

The third factor that brought popular notions of the mass audience to fruition was the brand of communications research practiced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• 1 The Concept of Mass Audience
• 2 Mass Audience Behavior
• 3 The Audience Commodity
• 4 Inheritance Effects
• 5 Repeat Viewing
• 6 Television News Audiences
• 7 The New Media Environment
• 8 The Mass Audience in Media Theory
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index