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This paper traces the types of audience role from task oriented computer systems, where the software is designed around the user’s role, to books, theatre, radio, film and television where the role of the audience is, for the most part, decided by the content creator and has been changed by social engineering.

It explores how the use of both a distinct narrator to guide the audience and a frame story to set the stage for the main narrative can introduce audiences to new ideas and package new types of media in the form of a familiar one. The paper then shows how cultural context can remove the need for both the frame story and narrator and how audiences co-opt traditional forms of media along with the way streaming platforms introduce new audience roles.

The paper moves on to computer games where the audience is given a degree of control as protagonist along with immersive and augmented media where audience roles are distinct from rectilinear video. It then looks at the challenges faced when creating interactive content; whilst some are simply the selection of user preferences, others involve more active audience roles which can be framed by a user dialogue, a quiz or a personality test, including examples that suffer from a dissonance between a passive viewing mode and an active intervention in the narrative. The paper then explores examples of media experiences designed to serve the needs of the audience during the pandemic, helping guide the audience through important tasks such as mood management and point to the role of the audience as a product delivered to advertisers. The paper concludes with an outline ontology of the different types of audience roles and discusses the changing technological and social context.

This white paper includes parts of a paper written for the MIX2021 Conference, "Creating cross-boundary roles for the audience: developing new relationships between creators and audiences" and parts of our White Paper, "Object-Based Media: An Overview of The User Experience". It has been greatly expanded to include a broader range of media examples and roles. This paper has been inspired by our collaborations with Bristol + Bath Creative R+D (1), the Pervasive Media Studio (2) and the University of the West of England's Digital Cultures Research (3) and the questions and challenges that have come about from our discussions.

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