Audience theory

Audience theory is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies.

With a specific focus on rhetoric, some, such as Walter Ong, have suggested that the audience is a construct made up by the rhetoric and the rhetorical situation the text is addressing. Others, such as Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor, have said writers and speakers actually can target their communication to address a real audience. Some others, such as Ede and Lunsford, try to mingle these two approaches and create situations where audience is "fictionalized", as Ong would say, but in recognition of some real attributes of the actual audience.

There is also a wide range of media studies and communication studies theories about the audience's role in any kind of mediated communication. A sub-culturally focussed and Marxism-inflected take on the subject arose as the "new audience theory" or "active audience theory" from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1980s.

Early research into media audiences was dominated by the debate about "media effects", in particular the link between screen violence and real-life aggression. Several moral panics fuelled the claims, such as the incorrect presumptions that Rambo had influenced Michael Robert Ryan to commit the Hungerford massacre, and that Child's Play 3 had motivated the killers of James Bulger.

In the 1990s, David Gauntlett published critiques on media "effects", most notably the "Ten things wrong with the media effects model" article. Then, in the 2000s, he sought to develop new methods which would explore possible media influences using "creative" approaches, in which participants were asked to make things such as collage, video, drawings, and Lego models using metaphors.

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