Comments on Reading 2.1 & 2.2

I find the history of the 'audience' concept is very interesting. Amazing how it has changed in a relatively short period of time. How the 'theatre-audience' concept lasted for several hundred years in the age of Greek and Roman empire, and how it's definition has changed because the audience no longer has to be on a specific place to 'receive the message' due to the vast development of mass media in the 19th-20th century.

I'm just wondering, does the concept of audience has room to change yet again? Let's say, from the ways of information recording or storage, that maybe sometime in the future there will be a technology that can enable people to access TV or internet by mind? In that way, the concept of audience where "no one will be obliged to accept the same package of information at the same time as anyone else" can exist, which is the exact opposite of the earliest concept of audience. I guess it's fair to say that as long technology can develop, so does the media.

I'm also wondering wether audience-as-public paradigm can survive, because apparently it seems that the primary purpose of mass media has shifted from education/culture transmission to profit.