‘Text, audience and reception’ Text is defined in different ways by various scholars; Stubs (1996) defines text as an instance of language in use either spoken or written or apiece of language behavior of the linguist for example a lecture or a newspaper article. Hart (ibid) is of the opinion that something that conveys a message to the audience to interpret is a text and it might be a movie, works of art, newspaper and others. Greaseproof (2004) notes that some certain characteristics of the text arguing that texts do not have a single meaning as they can be read from numerous perspectives and various analysis.
Texts can be identified as leading to various responses to provisions of information of things that no longer exist or things that are now currently intangible, for instance one may note the text of dinosaurs, in this light the text try put forward what was once in existence and how it looked like or how it was presented. Cohen (2000) define text as the main body of the matter in a book, manuscript, or computer document, he denotes that text therefore refer to the actual words spoken or written or a direct quotation from the scripture.
Curran and Chirurgic (2005) define an audience as a diverse consumer’s market which accentuates in the name of choice. It is an act of compromising a mass of isolated individuals vulnerable to the influence of the powerful new media such as cinema and hence label mass manipulation . McLain, M (1992) notes that an audience can be defined in different ways and he define it as asset of regular readers, viewers of a given media sector for example the cinema audience as recorded at a given point of time. According to www. Baber. AC. K/media audience can be groups or individuals laagered by and often created by media industries and they can be active that is constant filtering or resisting content or passive that is complying and vulnerably small, representative focus groups brought in to react for a given text. Audiences are also defined as consumers of media products. Roberts (2002) in pursuit of Cohen (2000) assert that Media audiences are studied by academics in media audience studies. Audience theory offers scholarly insight into audiences in general. These insights shape our knowledge of Just how audiences affect and are affected by different forms of art.
Moreover Chain and Albrecht-Teach (2007) asserts that in rhetoric, particular audiences depend on circumstance and situation, and are characterized by the individuals that make up the audience. Particular audiences are subject to persuasion and engage with the ideas of the speaker. Ranging in size and composition, particular audiences can come together to form a “composite” audience to multiple particular groups. Chain and Albrecht-Teach (2007) further notes that an immediate audience is a type of particular audience that is composed of individuals who are face-to-face objects with a speaker and a speaker’s rhetorical text or speech.
This type of audience directly listens to, engages with, and consumes the rhetorical text in an unmediated fashion. In measuring immediate audience reception and feedback, (audience measurement), one can depend on personal interviews, applause, and verbal comments made during and after a rhetorical speech. In contrast to immediate audiences, mediated audiences are composed of individuals who consume rhetorical texts in a manner that is different from the time or place in which the speaker presents a text.
Audiences who consume texts or speeches through television, radio, and Internet are considered mediated audiences because those mediums separate the rhetoric and the audience. Understanding the size and composition of mediated audiences can be difficult because mediums such as television, radio, and Internet can displace the audience from the time and circumstance of a rhetorical text or speech. In measuring mediated audience reception and feedback, “audience measurement”, one can depend on opinion polls and ratings, as well as comments and forums that may be treated on a website.
This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. Receptions refer to how people actually read newspapers, watch television, listen to the radio, or browse the net. The thrust is how the receiver receives the text. Matter (1998) postulates that receptions are the successive concretions of a work, the dialogue between the text and the reader which releases, in every historical period, the semantic artistic potential of the work and places within the literary radiation.
