Audience and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere

In today's thoroughly mass-mediated world, audiences and publics are, of course, composed of the same people. Yet social science traditionally treats them quite differently. Indeed, it is commonplace to define audiences in opposition to the public: in both popular and elite discourses, audiences are denigrated as trivial, passive and individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant. This volume rejects this view and asks instead when and how the activities of audiences overlap with, or contribute to, those of publics, and vice versa. It locates the analysis in relation to the fast-changing media environment which, in turn, poses theoretical, empirical and policy questions. These are explored in a European context.

Keywords: Cultural