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In her book Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real, audience-studies scholar Virginia Nightingale (1996) places television audiences into the context of the everyday. She draws on the work of sociologist Goffman (1959) and cultural theorists de Certeau (1984) and Lefebvre (1971) (among others), to create a model of “the conceptualisation of audience as a relation [italics added]” (p. 149). In her definition of the types of relations audiences engage in, Nightingale (1996) points out that understanding audiences is always both text- and context-driven and, importantly, that
This key point about the essential power relations involved in performance is one that will be taken up in later chapters, in which I criticize the lack of meaningful contact between performers and audience in most contemporary theatre practice. The curriculum theory I propose is intended to offer higher levels of participation (and therefore, power) to members of an AIP. As Nightingale (1996) says, “audience is a relation of complicity in which people actively live and make the cultural imaginary, the web of intrigue which the complex contemporary Text has become” (p. 144). These concepts of complicit relations, cultural imaginings, and webs of intrigue all heighten a spectator’s awareness of his or her essential role in the live and living forms of performance and can be explored as educational undertakings.
A third audience-studies text that speaks to the topic is Bird’s (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. Bird, an American anthropologist and ethnographer, has carried out a number of studies on audience in popular media (tabloids, newspapers and news reports, and television series). She articulates her thoughts about our immersion in a mediatized world: