Gender approach in Titanic film

II. Nature of “audience”
2.1 Historical development of “audience”
Actually, the nature of audience had came to existence many years ago, when there was a crowd to a group of people gathering in circle and seeing what happening in the middle. To understand clearly about the appearance of audience, Peter Brook (1968) had imagined in his book “The empty space” about “a man walked across the empty space whilst someone else is watching him”. “Someone” in this sentence is indicated as audiences in some years later.
Audience development came from the idea of Danny Newman (1977). He assumed subscription packaging starting in the 1960’s or in other words, audiences in this period are called “subscriptions”. After two years from the initial inspiration of Danny, Lisa Ede (1979) had seen audience as one of the most widely discussed from a neglected concept. As proved above, people had felt “audience” unknown; they only saw “someone else” or “subscriptions”. The “audience” was not recognized as a concept until 1988, when Allor suggested that “the concept of audience is more importantly the underpinning prop for the analysis of the social impact of mass communication in general”.
Extending the concept of “audience”, Mary Jo Reiff (1996) also pointed out that audience seemed to be not stable and combine of both oral and written rhetoric. In previous time, audience is identified as “someone else watching”, it means that people are considered as audiences through only images, actions and speeches. However, Reiff (1996) broadened the concept of “audience” into written scope. Few years later, idea raised by Reiff was measured to be more complicated (Willey, 1998). It is not until the latter half of 20th century that the complexity of “audience” has been shifted from oral to written rhetoric. For other researchers, the word “audience” had been also classified in terms of potential listeners as their ages and stations (Willard and Brown, 1993).
In addition to the development of “audience” as a concept, many authors had evaluated the notion of “audience” from different perspectives, including individuals, groups and organizations. Kuhn (2002) argued that the key problem for attracting audiences is not volume of stories, histories or memories, but how to analyze and interpret them, since the notion of audience may be different in understanding and conveying messages. Raboy et al. (2001) explored “audience” has been regularly approached as individual perspective. That said, under either the group or organization view, the notion of audience is described in the similar opinions, thoughts, and behaviors due to their cultures. Under this circumstance, Sharon Crowley (1898) asserted the uniformity of audience from the perspective of group or organization which referred that all readers/ listeners believe, feel and act in the same manner. Therefore, the concern of an individual audience is put at the lower level. However, in fact, different persons also have different thoughts regardless the similar points under the same group or organization. It finally indicated that information will not only be gathered, tabulated and analyzed in the timely manner but also have to be analyzed by individual users (Balnaves & O’Regan, 2002). In supporting this idea, Hagen (1999) had explained the need of analysis individual audience information as service media sector gradually moved from public to privatized and commercialized. In the past, systematic efforts to serve the needs and wants of audience in term of individuals had been raised by Emmett (1968).
Survey of BBC (1940s) had been taken in order to clarify the meaning of audience from the perspective of individual. The survey was built to collect assessment of audience reactions, how they enjoyed the individual broadcasting in their own opinions. At last, an Appreciation Index came into force to sustain this perspective.