Audiences and publics: reflections on the growing importance of mediated participation

Who are the people addressed by the media – audiences, readers, consumers, citizens, the public? Academic discourse has often favoured pejorative terms, construing them as mindless, privatized and inconsequential; media, governmental and policy discourses have tended to follow suit. This chapter celebrates the work of Jay Blumler, long-time advocate of a more laudatory conception of audiences as publics: thoughtful, civic-minded, reflexive about the collective consequences of media engagement. This matters because it invites a nuanced empirical investigation of how people construct identities, find shared concerns and express voice through their responses to media, and because elite discourses about ‘the everyday’ tend to reinforce top-down social control. Instead, Jay Blumler has sought to recognise the descriptive and normative potential of a lively, diverse and deliberative mediated public sphere.