Audience Definition

By: Dominic Jones

When searching for a definition of an audience I found that most definitions did not properly reflect what audiences truly are, especially today.  Most sources wanted to differentiate between an audience that is in the same room as a performance or screening and an audience made up of people all watching the same thing from separate locations.  Meriam-Webster, TheFreeDictionary.com, MacMillan Dictionary, and Oxford Dictionaries all made this distinction in their definitions.  Because of this, I settled on the simple definition from WordReference.com as my definition of choice for audience,

audience

the group of people listening to or viewing a public event.

While this may seem overly simplistic, I feel it is the most accurate definition given today's changing landscape.  I feel that an audience is all the people viewing an event, rather than just those in the location.  I believe this especially now due to live broadcasts and streaming of public events.  The practice of broadcasting events live has existed for a long time, through television broadcasts of live sports and other moments of cultural significance.  Whether a person is there in person or not, bears little significance on what they see.  Both "groups" (for lack of a better term) can still relate to and connect over what they just saw.

In some cases, such as TV shows, the only audience is people watching from separate locations.  But even then, all people who watched will be able to connect with and relate to other people who also watched, even though they didn't watch from the same location.

For some anecdotal evidence, last April I attended Star Wars Celebration - a massive fan convention celebration the Star Wars franchise.  There were 60,000 fans in attendance, but a good portion of the convention was also live streamed on YouTube.  One of the events that was live streamed on YouTube was a presentation about the upcoming film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, during which a fully functioning BB-8 droid (a new character from the new movie, pictured right - on stage at Celebration next to R2-D2) rolled out on stage.  A friend of mine couldn't attend Celebration, but was able to experience this moment on the live stream and we were able to discuss our reactions to seeing this happen live even though I was there in person and he was watching for a computer thousands of kilometres away.

While there may be some superficial differences, ultimately everybody watching experiences the same event, whether they are there or not.  "The group of people listening to or viewing a public event" to me has to include those who are not there in person but are watching via television or the internet.  In this day and age where virtually everything is live streamed online, it is foolish to not differentiate between those watching, but not present in person at the event and those who are present at the event.