Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination

Audiences are problematic and the study of audiences has represented a key site of activity in the social sciences and humanities. Offering a timely review of the past 50 years of theoretical and methodological debate Audiences argues the case for a paradigmatic shift in audience research.

This shift, argue the authors, is necessitated by the emergence of the `diffused audience′. Audience experience can no longer be simply classified as `simple′ or `mass′, for in modern advanced capitalist societies, people are members of an audience all the time. Being a member of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor even an everyday event, rather it is constitutive of everyday life. This book offers an invaluable rev