In the field of mass communication, the audience refers to the recipients of mass media information, that is, newspaper readers, radio listeners and television viewers. The current audience also includes “netizens” or Internet users in the Internet era

extensive

Mixture

Concealment

The audience as members of social groups is an audience discourse that emerged based on the limited effect theory research of communication science represented by Lazarsfeld and others. This view of the audience believes that the audience is not a scattered and isolated existence like the above-mentioned "public". The audience itself is among certain specific groups and has complex social relationships and social backgrounds. Although the audience's contact with mass media is a personal activity, it is usually restricted by their social relationships, and these social relationships will weaken or strengthen the effect of media information and affect the achievement of the communicator's purpose.

As the audience of the market, this sentence regards the audience as the consumers of information products and the market of mass media. The audience is defined as the collection of potential consumers directed by a specific media or message. Mass media is a business organization that meets the various needs of consumers in response to fierce market competition, thereby attracting audiences and converting audience gathering into economic benefits. This kind of audience view is a typical "communicator-oriented" audience view. It starts from the interests of media organizations and focuses on how to make more money. It fixes the antagonistic relationship between the media and the audience as buyers and sellers, and puts the economic Benefit is the only criterion for judging communication effectiveness, rather than considering issues from the audience's perspective. Such an audience view can easily lead the media to fall into the quagmire of flow theory, which is not conducive to the media's social responsibility.

Audiences as rights subjects, this discourse believes that audiences are not only users and consumers of media information, but also have various legitimate rights as members of the social community or the public. In the context of news dissemination, these rights mainly include the right to disseminate, the right to know, the right to supervise, the right to media access, the right to privacy, etc.

The public is a specific concept that emerged with the formation of the theory of mass society. The public is a new unorganized social group.

enormity of scale

Dispersion and heterogeneity

anonymity

fluidity

disorganized

homogeneity

Concept: The audience is a socially diverse group of people. In terms of demographic characteristics, there are very large individual differences in gender, age, education, social group affiliation and psychological characteristics.

core content

In 1962, Elihu Katz proposed the basic hypothesis of uses and gratifications: the social and psychological attributes of individuals and groups determine the ways in which they use mass media. He emphasized that the core issue is not what impact mass media has on people, but how people use mass media.

Specifically, the basic meaning of uses and gratifications is that the needs of individuals and groups (based on social and psychological roots) give rise to their expectations of mass media or other sources, which in turn triggers different modes of media contact (or other activities participation), ultimately leading to the satisfaction of needs and other unintended consequences.

The key words include: needs (the needs of the audience based on social and psychological factors), media contact (selection and contact with media in order to realize these needs), and satisfaction (the needs are met or other results).

1. Of great significance

2. Limitations of theoretical research

The audience commodity theory was proposed by Smythe, a Canadian communication political economist. His article "Communication: The Blind Spot of Western Marxism" published in 1977 marked the formation of the audience commodity theory.

Smythe believes that radio and television programs are "free lunches" in the nature of "bait", with the purpose of luring the audience to come to the television. At this point, audience measurement companies can count their sizes and classify people into categories, and then sell this data to advertisers. The media charges advertisers based on the size and quality of the audience. This reveals the real commodity of commercial broadcast television - its audience.

It reflects the unique research perspective of communication political economy and reveals the real commodity of commercial radio and television - audience group. Critics, however, say his view reduces ideology to economic fundamentals and, at the same time, reduces active people to inanimate passive commodities.

Moss provided a supplementary explanation of Smythe's "audience commodity theory" and proposed "controlling commodities".

The Frankfurt School believes that the so-called "popular culture" produced by the media is nothing more than a thing that enslaves, oppresses, and binds people. It is a spiritual shackles and cultural opium. They emphasize the "multifaceted and omnipresent nature" of alienation, which is manifested in the production process, production relations and ideology, as well as in the relationship between man and nature, and between man and himself.

There are so many explanations for alienation. One of the more popular explanations is that alienation refers to an abnormal phenomenon in which people's material and spiritual production and their products become separated from the producers, and in turn become dominant over the producers.

general speaking,

The process of alienation is the complete loss of human subjectivity and the process of being enslaved by material and spiritual forces that were originally created by oneself but have now become alien.

In the field of communication, media carries information and shapes people's cognitive world.

On the one hand, the emergence of new media has improved the efficiency of communication, but at the same time, it will also intensify human alienation and cause humans to be overly dependent on technology.

The manifestations of alienation can be divided into communication alienation, leisure alienation, consumption alienation, aesthetic alienation, and thinking alienation.

Second sale theory

It refers to the process in which media units first sell media products to end consumers (readers, listeners, viewers), and then sell consumers' time (or attention) to advertisers or advertisers.

In short, for the first sale, the media provides information to the audience, meets the audience's demand for information, and eliminates the random uncertainty of the trustee. What is sold here is information, and information is a commodity. The second sale is to sell the audience’s attention to advertisers. Audience attention is a commodity. It is the "attention economy" and the "influence economy".

As a popular form of labor force in the current digital era, digital labor refers to workers who generate corresponding value through interaction with information and communication technology.

The current research on digital labor is mainly developed in two directions: taking professional digital practitioners as the main research object; taking productive consumption digital practitioners as the main research object. The former continues the narrow understanding of creative labor in the early days of Marx's political economy, and advocates paying attention to the daily work and life experience of professional workers in the digital industry, such as engineers in high-tech industries, thereby criticizing the accumulation of capital in new fields for the exploitation of the labor value of professional workers. . The latter originates from Dallas Smythe's audience commodity theory, originates from the concept of immaterial labor of the autonomous Marxist school, and focuses on productive consumption workers represented by Internet users.