Explanation
An audience comprises the actual, anticipated, or textually projected addressees of a public presentation. It is not homogeneous: participants differ in knowledge, role, assent, access, and attention. Speakers imagine an audience and select examples, assumptions, tone, and arguments accordingly; actual audiences may reject that position, respond differently, or divide into several publics. Absent future readers may also be co-addressed. The concept reveals that public communication does not merely find its recipients but partly produces them through address and assumed common ground. Analysis must therefore ask who is treated as knowledgeable, affected, or capable of judgment and who remains invisible.
Movement of thought
1. A public utterance first encounters actual and possible recipients with different knowledge, roles, and expectations. 2. Through address, examples, and presupposed knowledge, the presentation projects an audience for whom it should be intelligible and relevant. 3. Those present accept, alter, or resist the offered role and may form sub-audiences with distinct readings. 4. A counter-test separates empirical audience, intended target group, and textually projected addressee and avoids assuming one uniform response. 5. The speech returns as a relation to plural hearers: its form reveals whom it invites to judge and whom it places at the margin.
Scientific use case
Rhetoric, audience research, and reception studies compare intended audience images with surveys, observation, and actual use. Analysis also examines exclusions produced by access and assumed knowledge.
Example
A public science lecture explains technical terms for interested non-specialists while including methodological cues for colleagues, thereby creating overlapping sub-audiences.
Counterexample
A demographic list of everyone in a hall records presence but does not yet describe their participation roles, address, or reception as an audience.
Distinction
Distinguish it from addressee as a concrete recipient, target group as a planning category, public sphere, listeners, readership, mass, double address, implied reader, and empirical reach.
Effect on thought and perception
Constructing an audience guides selection, intelligibility, and legitimacy and distributes roles among insiders, learners, affected persons, and judges.
Resonance
A speech imagines the ears it hopes to reach; actual responses alter that image and let several audiences become audible in one space.
Etymology
Technical core term; individual etymological review pending
Provenance
Unresolved relation network → second core-concept review → Metzler/HWRh cross-check → ATLAS 239
Cite this entry
Reich, Michael (Hrsg./ed.): „Audience“. Atlas der Sprache, AT-CORE-239-048. ATLAS 260, data model 1.6.0. https://atlasoflanguage.com/concept/AT-CORE-239-048The address remains stable; editorial content may evolve. Editorial reading state: 2026-10-15. Include your access date for precise references.
Historical background
Bergson stresses that laughter takes place in relation to other people and discusses the effect of an audience in the theatre. His account makes reception more than the sum of isolated individual responses: shared expectations and group participation help determine what is recognised as comic. The Atlas can ask which knowledge a speaker assumes the audience shares and how visible reactions alter subsequent performance. Bergson’s generalisations about collective laughter are philosophical claims, not universal experimental results. Nor does one theatrical situation define every audience, from readers to dispersed digital publics. The source nevertheless provides a historical conceptual witness to reception as socially organised. Further research must establish the English term’s history and distinguish audiences that can respond directly from those encountered only through anticipated interpretation.
How conceptual history changes the analysis
Examine the knowledge and expectations the presentation assumes in its audience. Separate observable reactions from imagined agreement: shared laughter establishes neither shared reasons nor the truth of what was said.
References for the historical section
- Henri Bergson, Laughter, authorised English translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell; Gutenberg transcription, print edition date not established · Chapter I: laughter, groups and the theatre audience
Selected historical witness, not a complete genealogy or a first English attestation. Atlas comparisons and applications are original editorial interpretations. Authorised English translation; the original French and print edition have not been collated. Bergson’s general theory of comedy is an attributed philosophical account, not an experimentally established universal law.