The Audience as "Mass"

The audience can be referred to as the “mass” because no matter where we are situated as audience, we will always receive the exact same information that the media is advertising. Nowadays, there is not a day that goes past without us encountering the media in some kind of form, whether it is in the form of the sound of the radio in the morning, passing billboards when walking down the street to watching a film in the evening.

The key ideas about media audiences that are very essential to take into consideration and remember are the facts that:

1) The media are often experienced by people alone. This can be looked upon in a way in which that people are cut off from other people like separate atoms.

2) Wherever the audience is in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.

When looking at the early history of the media, it is fairly easy to see where the ideas of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, film, radio and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have been restricted to the number of people who could fit into an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly the same form to enormous numbers of people in different parts of the world.

Herbert Blumer in 1950 (before Hitler in Germany attempted to use the media as propaganda) referred to the audience as being the mass in an anonymous group, and their membership may come from all walks of life and from all distinguishable social backgrounds from different cultures, vocation and wealth. Also, Blumer made it clear that the mass have very little interaction with one another as they are all physically separated.