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Section Two

Audience

5 Five Traditions in Search

of the Audience

Klaus Br uhn Jensen and
Karl Erik Rosengr en

Introduction

In the beginning, the word was directly communicated, even to mass audiences.
Building on their own experience, practitioners/theoreticians of oratory, rhetoric
and poetics gradually accumulated a vast fund of systematic knowledge about
characteristics of verbal messages (oral and written, fictional and non-fictional)
supposedly affecting listeners in a powerful way. This fund of knowledge was
codified in classic writings by, for instance, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian. Taught
in schools and academies, it lived on through the Middle Ages, being revitalized
and revised in the Renaissance and afterwards (Arnold and Frandsen, 1984).
In spite of the fact that modern mass communication is mediated rather than
direct, parts of the truly classic fund of knowledge originally emanating from the
rhetorics of antiquity have flowed into modern audience research. Tracing this
influence in detail is not our task, however. Our task is broader and yet more
specific to the field of communication research as it currently exists: to present
and discuss the major research traditions focusing their interest on the nexus
between the mass media and their audiences.
The approaches in the area have been many and diverse, drawing on a
number of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Even in cases where
obvious similarities may be found between different traditions, their representa-
tives have not always seemed to be aware of each other’s existence. Recently,
however, in this area as in some other areas of the emerging discipline of commu-
nication research, signs of increasing contacts between different research traditions

Source: EJC (1990), vol. 5: 207–238.