Invisible Audiences: Structure and Agency in Post-socialist Media Studies

The study of media audiences was not assigned an especially prominent place in Central and East European (CEE) academia after ‘the big bang’ in 1989. Even now, almost 25 years later, the audience research is not performed in a consistent manner and pronounced in a firm voice in this region. We could say that media audiences – people who receive, co-create, interpret, understand and appropriate media messages – were rendered almost invisible in the post-socialist study of media.1 This state of affairs may seem like a coincidence of idiosyncratic factors but it is in fact a repercussion of larger socio-political logics which established themselves as unquestioned mainstream discourses underlying the period of post-socialist transformation. The trifling, petty problem of media audiences (from the societal perspective, not for us) thus becomes an access point which enables us not only to understand the reasons for its suppression but also to gain a deeper insight into the character of the post-socialist times in general.