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Interaction versus Integration 147
Media producers as agents of cultural consensus

Media consumers as divided and unified
Figure 5.1 Ritual model: high integration/high reciprocity

persons appearing on documentaries, reality TV programmes, and the
high visibility of members of a ‘live’ audience.
• Broadcast is indirectly dialogical via the ratings system. Media pro-
ducers may shape audience tastes, but, equally, audiences react to
trends in broadcast as a whole and may withdraw their patronage,
leading to changes in programming.
• At an individual level, media consumers do not simply comprise ‘an
indefinite range of recipients’. Audiences are specific to definite genres
and times, and constitute a remarkably high degree of solidarity. This
solidarity is channelled totemically and ritually through ‘media
agents’ – the characters, the presenters, the hosts and the media workers
who facilitate the structural architecture of broadcast. It is through these
agents that individual members of a given audience indirectly ‘inter-
act’ with each other. Instead of having a directly horizontal commu-
12
nicative relationship with others, a detour is taken via these media
agents. It enables a form of the many speaking to the many via the
performative quality of the apparatus proving itself in every act of
broadcast. 13
• As Thompson points out, the peculiar form of quasi-interaction con-
summates itself directly between audience members when they find
themselves in a face-to-face interaction. In fact the reason they may
associate is because of the common bond they feel with media agents
who have already brought them together. They may otherwise routinely
associate face-to-face, but make of broadcast media a primary basis for
mutual conversation.