The concept of audience in the age of the Internet. A meta-analysis

This study consists in a meta-analysis of the ‘audience’ in communication research about the internet. The typology of audiences on which the meta-analysis is based combines two dimensions: the audience as collective actor and the audience as attending actor. The corpus is composed of 186 research papers about the internet published between 1994 and 2002 in six European and American communication journals. Results demonstrate that while the audience as collective actor is studied in a rather innovative way, the audience as attending actor is examined along traditional lines. Moreover, it appears that the ‘internet audience’ is not an international concept as European and American scholars study different kinds of audiences and internet objects. These findings point to several avenues of research for internet scholars in general and European ones in particular.