Publics, médias de masse et participation culturelle. Trois concepts interdépendants

The notion of “audience” has different acceptations and it still arouses several discourses of social actors involved in its use. This research area is also the focus of main topics treated by sciences of information and communication which concerns, specifically, social phenomena through the communicational dimension of media and information and cultural industries. In order to understand these questions around the audience in its singularity in relation to its representations, this article develops successively, and in three parts, the relationship between media analysis and cultural practices. First of all, it reaches a theoretical abutment of theses approaches by outlining a brief tour of theories that aims to define the notion of “audiences”, as both a subject of study and a research field. Then, it highlights the main forms of achieved sociography that were based on the measure of audiences and cultural participation. Finally, it questions the sociabilities and social logics analysis in media and cultural practices at the end of understand contemporary research perspectives in the field of information and communication sciences