Over at Swarming Media, I’ve posted an article written for the upcoming web-publication Audience 2.0, for which other P2P Foundation contributors have written.  Entitled (The) Audience (2.0), the piece takes a brief look at different implications of the word “audience” within several historical, cultural, and technological contexts.  Below is an excerpt, but the full text can be found here:

“In the pre-internet era, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience has a high value, there are few hearers and many speakers (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity is the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, an ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end—few to many.”