Positional Configurations of Media-Audience Interaction in Current Media Process

Abstract

The author analyzes various types of structural and functional connections between two key elements of the communication process – mass media and its audience. The configurations of such connections are a reflection of the realities of modern media landscape and the result of objective and subjective factors: mass communication drift towards the digital Internet Galaxy, dramatic extension of media interactivity area, equalizing influence of the net structure and rhizomorphic constitution of cyberspace on the communicators’ subjectivity and the statuses of media products; spread of event-and-news paradigm, active search of new forms of interaction with the audience, redefining the mission of journalism and its place in media space. Based on the research of modern journalism practices, their theoretical grounds and their supporters’ notes, the article identifies and describes five basic configurations of interaction between media and the audience: media dominating the audience, media determining the audience, media and audience being equal and influencing each other, media and audience collaborating in creating media products, media serving the everyday needs of their audience. The analysis of the positions that journalists take towards the audience or get into under the circumstances reveals the modes of media process from the communicator’s subjectivity point of view, ways of making content, selection of topics, values and meanings the product contains; and their ideal substance updates the issues of the meaning and the mission of journalism.