The Breakdown of the "Canonical Audience"

Indlof’s and Gunter’s articles bring together intellectual trends that are symptomatic of a larger phenomenon. What we can see before us is the progressive breakdown of the “canonical audience.” I am not referring here to a breakdown of a specific gathering of media users. What is occurring is a breakdown of the referent for the word audience in the communication research from both the humanities and the social sciences. Our earlier notions of the mass media audience rested on the extrapolations from and idealizations of physical gatherings, the theater audience, the audience at the political rally, the street-running mob. This primordial audience we can call the “physical audience.” The canonical audience, the theoretical entity at the center of much mass communication theory, was modeled upon this physical audience of the theater, the meeting, the mob. Borrowing from common notions of mob psychology, the canonical audience came to be perceived as responsive, pliable, and even “passive.”.