Reconceptualising Audience Theory for African Digital Media: An Original Framework from Nigerian Media Experience

This study reconceptualises audience theory for African digital media contexts, developing an original theoretical framework grounded in the distinctive audience practices, social structures, and communication cultures of Nigerian media users. Dominant audience theories including active audience theory, uses and gratifications, encoding-decoding, and reception theory were developed in Western contexts and inadequately account for the collectivist social structures, oral communication integration, religious meaning-making, extended family audience sharing practices, and postcolonial media scepticism that characterise Nigerian media audiences. This study employs an epistemologically pluralist research design across four phases: secondary analysis of existing Nigerian audience research to map theoretical adequacy gaps (Phase 1); a large-scale reception study combining ethnographic audience observation (18 months in six communities across geopolitical zones), in-depth interviews (n = 96), and experience sampling surveys (n = 240) to generate empirically grounded accounts of Nigerian audience practices (Phase 2); participatory theory workshops with 35 Nigerian mass communication scholars to develop framework propositions (Phase 3); and formal theory construction and validation (Phase 4). Findings generate an original Nigerian Audience Theory Framework built on eight core propositions that depart significantly from Western audience theory assumptions: communal interpretation as the primary mode of media meaning-making, oral-digital media integration in everyday practice, religious epistemology as an audience framework, sceptical acceptance as a default stance toward media institutions, relational media sharing as the primary distribution mechanism, generational differentiation in media trust foundations, and ethnic identity as a dynamic rather than fixed audience perspective. The study contributes a foundational theoretical contribution to African audience studies.

Keywords: audience theory, African digital media, Nigeria, theoretical framework, reconceptualisation.