Remarkable as it may seem, Americans spend more of their lifetime being an audience than working or sleeping. This reflects the cornucopia of entertainment and communication that surrounds us in the latter part of the twentieth century. Its pervasiveness makes it central to understanding our culture and our society today.

This was not always the case. We did not consume as many hours of our lives with radio and movies, even at their height of popularity, as we do with television. In the nineteenth century, theatergoing was far more popular than it is today. Nevertheless, it did not reach the same proportion of the population, with the same regularity, as movies, radio, and television have in the twentieth century. Nor was it an everyday, or even weekly, source of entertainment for the vast majority of the population as the mass media became. Attendance records confirm the difference. Compare the estimated 36 million tickets sold annually for theater in the last half of the 1860s, about one ticket per person per year, to the approximate 4 billion tickets annually for movies in the late 1940s, about twenty-seven per person per year, or the audiences of approximately 20 million for the average primetime network television program every night. While in the nineteenth century some Americans were weekly audiences, by the mid-twentieth century, being an entertainment audience was a daily activity for almost everyone in the United States.