Afterword: The Place of the Audience: Beyond Audience Studies

"Audience", as semiotics would remind us, is a subject and concept that is the product of convention. Discussions about audiences contribute to the spatial organization of places people inhabit and are in turn conditioned by a world that is spatially organized and practiced. Audiences get defined from particular sites, in relation to particular places, and within particular contexts. Audience analysis may lead to the recognition of everyday life, but there are also a number of problems about the term "audience" that an attention to everyday life makes acute. Being an audience is only one activity in everyday life, even though the analysis may obscure this fact. Ultimately, audience has a double role: audience serves as a reminder of the contingencies and fragility of any system, pattern, structure, institution, conclusion, or map, but audience also potentially becomes a way of privileging a set of practices and fixing a set of relations in everyday life.