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112 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
than the kind of text which it communicates. Genres and texts may be
organized in repetitious ways that facilitate strong identification with a
common language of meaning, but a large part of an audience will be
drawn to a broadcast event simply out of its performativity. In fact, it is
possible for some audiences to form only out of the performativity of a
broadcast. In such cases, the idea that everyone is consuming the same
message is more important to audience members than are the affect and
meaning of the text. This is especially true if the media event is synchro-
nous. This adds a dimension of simultaneity to media consumption, or, as
Hills (2001) argues, in applying Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of
‘imagined community’ to fan communities: ‘The kind of imagining char-
acteristic of a nation is therefore one of pseudo-simultaneity, the assump-
tion that thousands of anonymous, unseen and unknown individuals are
watching the same television programme at the same time’ (Hills, 2001:
152). This simultaneity effect is particularly true of spectacle events and
breaking news, but it is also true of channel surfers, who are immersing
themselves in the medium much more than in any narrative content.
The fact that the formation of a given audience rests, in whole or in
part, on the performativity which a broadcast medium supplies to the
texts which are communicated in them problematizes developments in
audience studies which advance the oxymoronic notion of the ‘active
audience’ (see Nightingale, 1996: 7–8). In this assignation audiences are
active users of mass media insofar as broadcast messages are useful.
Paradoxically, the postmodern thesis on the active audience rests largely
on the behaviourist premises of the uses and gratifications approach to
audience research (see Katz et al., 1974).
The account of the active audience is ultimately tautological insofar
as audiences do not antedate broadcast events, but are internal to them.
The active audience argument conflates the audience of a particular tech-
nical medium like radio or print with patronage of the texts and genres of
these media. To say, for example, that radio audiences are ‘diversified’ is
to misconceive an audience as abstractly belonging to a technical medium,
rather than to a particular media event (which may happen to be made
possible by radio, television or print). This can be seen from the realities
of actual audience measurement. Few audience survey instruments are
ever conducted in relation to a technical medium, only in relation to actual
media events, such as an edition of a newspaper or magazine, or the
screening of an electronic media programme.
In UK audience research, such as Dave Morley’s study of the UK
current affairs programme ‘Nationwide’ (1980), the active audience was
defined in relation to interaction with texts rather than mediums. Morley’s
analysis drew on Hall’s encoding/decoding schema, which allowed for
negotiated and oppositional readings, rather than just the usual dominant
reading that in implied in processual models of communication. Virginia
Nightingale (1996: 16) suggests that Morley’s ‘audience’ might best be
described as a constituency – a group defined by its common use of the