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We had a cool event yesterday at work on the subject ‘Do Agencies Innovate?’, so that knocked out last night (far-too-long and elaborate write-up here). Excellent speakers and great debate from the audience.
I want to know a better word for ‘audience’ in this sort of scenario, and the sort of involvement in the creation of media that we write about. I see ‘the former audience’ (scare quotes not optional) quite frequently, but that seems a bit poncy. I tried to use the word ‘participants’ in my write up since that seemed best to capture what these particular events are about. It’s like a Roman forum, with the panellists as senators, I guess. But at the same time, I find ‘participants’ a bit of a mouthful, too.
I could just say ‘people’, but how would you construe this: “One of the participants, X from Y, said that blah blah blah”. One of the people? bleuch!
Delegates, maybe? But that seems to imply that we totally identify with the organisations we work for and those organisations speak with one voice.
It seems like a petty, semantic quibble, but if you can’t find an elegant, demotic way to say what you mean, then that means this new environment isn’t quite culturally accepted yet. Maybe it’s like the word ‘chair’. People used to laugh when you used it as a replacement for ‘chairman’. You don’t see many people laughing now.
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Social tools, devices and web evolution are creating epochal change in media, society and business. The plan is to 
People should generally refer to each other as dude or dudette! :-)
Promising… not entirely sure it has the gravitas I was looking for, but still.
You got me on this one. I was thinking of participant, member, user, constituent, citizen, overseer, committee members, etc.
It’s something I’ve never thought about really, but the fact that I haven’t thought about it disturbs me more than not being able to come up with a good term.
It reminds me of Wittgenstein’s “logik,†which goes something like, “that which is not spoken, is most important.â€
Very useful comment. Like the postmodernists’ idea of the space between the words being the most telling. Is our culture so hooked into the idea of performer and audience that it can’t (yet) verbalise a different state of affairs?
You could use game terminology to lighten the load – players, competitors, entrants, dice-throwers?
It just seems that “people” is the best general description of all. We know the vagaries of people, so it covers all the bases.
I like dice-throwers! I mean isn’t that what it’s all about ANYWAY?!!! :)
People>peupel,>populus>
People meaning: “”body of persons comprising a community.”
Ian, isn’t “community” the operative term? Audience is NOT community. Audience is a sudden grouping. Community is something more persistent. A persistent “audience” is a community.
Better yet…a persistent, interactive audience is a community…somehow community is one of those words that is greater than the sum of its parts. So the word “audience” is still lackluster…it doesn’t fulfill community.