Kirsty Sedgman describes herself as a Doctor of Audiences, and her wildly popular and highly readable books include On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better (Faber & Faber, 2023) and The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (Palgrave, 2018) – as well as the collection Theatre Fandom (U Iowa 2025), coedited by Matt Hills and me.
Her latest book, How To Understand Theatre Audiences, was just released in the UK and is forthcoming in the US. Her contribution to Fanhackers is from a foundational scholar: Raymond Williams. –FC
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The title and author of the work:
Williams, Raymond (1960) Culture & Society, New York: Anchor Books
‘I do not think of my relatives, friends, neighbours, colleagues, acquaintances, as masses; we none of us can or do. The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. Yet now, in our kind of society, we see these others regularly, in their myriad variations; stand, physically, beside them. They are here, and we are here with them. And that we are with them is of course the whole point. To other people, we also are masses. Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.’ (319)
How I use this:
It’s easy to think about ourselves as complexly nuanced individuals who have power and agency over how we make use of mass and social media, and about other people as passively vulnerable, easily manipulated or influenced by the things they watch, read, and hear. This quote reminds me not to fall into the trap of seeing fans in this way, as an undifferentiated mass.
–Dr Kirsty Sedgman, University of Bristol
Posted: Francesca Coppa