“… I don’t believe that the ordinary people in fact resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. I put it another way: that there are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.”

Raymond Williams in Everyday Life Reader. p.98

In our week 9 lecture Brian discussed the idea of audience shifting from the previous theorisation of a passively ‘brainwashed’ commodity to a more engaged and active interpretation of the viewer being a participant. Catalyst to the second age of modernity, there has been a shifting paradigm from broadcast to the post-broadcast era. Consequently, people who were formally known as the ‘audience’ – referring to a degree of spectatorship but not influence – now have their own social platforms allowing them to engage and control content by choice. Thus, it is important when thinking about media and its ‘message’ to starting interpreting citizens’ role as less of an audience and more of a consumer. Media 2.0’s shifted approach and power structure, exemplified through the structural contrast of Australia’s first media broadcast (featuring Robert and Dame Menzies addressing the nation of Australia) to now. Formal communicative tools appealed to the ethos of the “average housewives”, credentialing through address Australian citizenship, and thus a pathos of a united country. By addressing the formal and elite addressing the less formal (women of 1960’s), the broadcast demonstrates ideas surrounding the eras influence over audience as personal approach exemplifies is sphere of influence over Australian lifestyle. Nowadays however, there is a lack of public domain and unified ethos as private commercialisation saturates media platforms, dismissing the rhetoric of nation and instead affirming an individual’s right to a ‘neo-liberal way’. By looking at audience and exploring the rhetorics of communication, societal change becomes apparent. As the broadcast era’s relationship with audience was generalised through a nationalistic unity that put faith and truth in the ‘higher powers’ of media broadcasters, contemporarily the indefinite diversities and possibilities of technology provides an abundance of choice to the audience which only further reiterates their desire for the power of choice.

This means a re-figuration of ethos appeals, enforcing the right to privatised (demonstrated in technology’s current sharing economy approach). Tailor made for a specific audiences, language is used to recognise the unified mass and categorise audience by their participation of choice. This demonstrates Brian’s point that the term audience isn’t an accurate description as the media’s interaction can be about consumption, viewing, distribution, etc. The terms complication is based around personal consumption characteristics by of each individual choice, producing an identity for the viewer that within the broadcast media did not exist. This is seen through the social emergence and acceptance of fans, where transmedia relies on the unpaid labour of an individuals to dedicate themselves to a specific forum.