9781841501291
Distributed for Intellect Ltd
Audiences 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, individualised, while publics are valued as active, critically engaged and politically significant.
Table of Contents
Author Biographies
Sonia Livingstone
Introduction
Sonia Livingstone
Chapter 1: On the relation between audiences and publics
Daniel Dayan
Chapter 2: Mothers, midwives and abortionists: genealogy, obstetrics, audiences and publics
Dominique Mehl
Chapter 3: The public on the television screen: towards a public sphere of exhibition
Mirca Madianou
Chapter 4: The elusive public of television news
Ulrike Hanna Meinhof
Chapter 5: Initiating a public: Malagasy music and live audiences in differentiated cultural contexts
Roberta Pearson and Maire Messenger Davies
Chapter 6: Class acts? Public and private values and the cultural habits of theatre-goers
Sonia Livingstone
Chapter 7: In defense of privacy: mediating the public/private boundary at home
Kirsten Drotner
Chapter 8: Media on the move: personalised media and the transformation of publicness
Appendix: Audiences and publics: comparing semantic fields across different languages
Overview by Ulrike Hanna Meinhof. Particular entries on English (Sonia Livingstone); German (Ulrike H. Meinhof); Danish (Kirsten Drotner); Greek (Mirca Madianou); Slovenian (Sabina Mihelj); French (Daniel Dayan).
Index