For more than a century, scholars have alluded to the notion of an “imagined audience”—a person's mental conceptualization of the people with whom he or she is communicating. The imagined audience has long guided our thoughts and actions during everyday writing and speaking. However, in today's world of social media where users must navigate through highly public spaces with potentially large and invisible audiences, scholars have begun to ask: Who do people envision as their public or audience as they perform in these spaces? This article contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical framework that broadly defines the construct; identifies its significance in contemporary society and the existing tensions between the imagined and actual audiences; and drawing on Giddens's concept of structuration, theorizes what influences variations in people's imagined audience compositions. It concludes with a research agenda highlighting essential areas of inquiry.

Introduction In today's media-saturated and performance-driven society, social and cultural factors related to consumerism, aestheticism, and narcissism, as well as the advent of communication technologies have led to the hyper-sensitization of the self, performance, and the imagination (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998 Abercrombie, N. and Longhurst, B. 1998. Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage.. ). We have come to think that “life is a constant performance; we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time” (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998 Abercrombie, N. and Longhurst, B. 1998. Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage.. p. 73). This obsession has led to the popularization of tools that afford people the ability to interact with many individuals at once vitalizing the performer/audience relationship. These popular sites and services encompass a variety of forms including social network sites, blogs, and microblogs, referred to collectively as social media (Smith, 2011 Smith, A. 2011. Why Americans use social media: Pew Internet & American Life Project ). While media studies have long explored many aspects related to the audience construct in general, as social media's importance and prevalence increases, recent research has begun to focus on the concept of audience within the context of everyday interpersonal communication on such platforms. Scholars have started to research with whom individuals interact, who users consider to be a part of their audience, and how they navigate the audience perception difficulties that social media environments produce. More recently, scholars have specifically called attention to the construct of the “imagined audience” (e.g., boyd, 2008 boyd, d. 2008. Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics. Berkeley , CA : University of California at Berkeley.. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation); Brake, 2012 Brake, D. R. 2012. Who do they think they're talking to? Framings of the audience by social media users. International Journal of Communication, 6: 1056–1076. ; Marwick & boyd, 2010 Marwick, A. E. 2010. I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, : boyd, d. doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313). However, little work has theorized the imagined audience. What exactly is it? Why is it in the academic limelight now? Synthesizing scholarly research from psychology, sociology, and communication, as well as media studies research that has long studied many aspects of audience, this article provides a framework for the imagined audience's purpose in everyday mediated publics, emphasizing its importance and theorizing what influences its construction. Given the limited work that has explored the explicitness of the imagined audience, the article concludes by discussing related areas in need of more research.

Defining the Imagined Audience To understand the imagined audience, it is helpful first to consider the influence that the actual audience typically has on everyday face-to-face communication. According to theories of self-presentation and impression management, to help control the impressions others form, individuals interact and adapt their behavior based on who is in the actual audience (Goffman, 1959 Goffman, E. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life New York : Doubleday.. ; Schlenker, 1980 Schlenker, B. R. 1980. Impression management: The self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations Monterey , CA : Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.. ). As the audience and context change, so does one's behavior: “We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club companions, to our masters and employers as to our intimate friends” (James, 1890 James, W. 1890. The principles of psychology New York : Holt.. , p. 294). If the actual audience typically plays the most influential role on behavior, what happens when the audience is unknown or difficult to determine, such as during mediated communication? People tend to rely on whatever limited cues may be “given off” by the audience (e.g., tone of voice) (Goffman, 1959 Goffman, E. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life New York : Doubleday.. ), as well as their envisioning of the audience (Ong, 1975 Ong, W. J. 1975. The writer's audience is always a fiction. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 90(1): 9–21. ). Enter the imagined audience. The imagined audience is the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating, our audience. It is one of the most fundamental attributes of being human (Cooley, 1902 Cooley, C. H. 1902. Human nature and the social order New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.. ). The cognitive guide is “invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent” (Freud, 1922 Freud, S. 1922. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego New York : Boni and Liveright.. , p. 1) as we fantasize about future exchanges, interact with large audiences, and communicate in mediated contexts. The less an actual audience is visible or known, the more individuals become dependent on their imagination. Therefore, people are typically more reliant on the imagined audience during mediated communication, such as letter and email writing or talking on the phone, than in face-to-face settings (Ong, 1975 Ong, W. J. 1975. The writer's audience is always a fiction. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 90(1): 9–21. ), because of the reduced verbal and nonverbal cues of audience members (Walther, 1996 Walther, J. B. 1996. Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23: 3–43. doi: 10.1177/009365096023001001). Researchers have concluded that the mere imagined audience can be just as influential as the actual audience in determining behavior (Baldwin & Holmes, 1987 Baldwin, M. W. and Holmes, J. G. 1987. Salient private audiences and awareness of the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6): 1087–1098. ; Fridlund, 1991 Fridlund, A. J. 1991. Sociality of solitary smiling: Potentiation by an implicit audience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2): 229–240. ). For example, Fridlund (1991) Fridlund, A. J. 1991. Sociality of solitary smiling: Potentiation by an implicit audience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2): 229–240. found that participants smiled more, regardless of their happiness, when they were either watching a movie with a friend or when they believed a friend was watching the same video in another room than when they were alone or thought their friend was partaking in a different activity. He concluded, “solitary faces occur for the same reasons as public ones, if only because when we are alone we create social interactions in our imaginations” (p. 238). In Imagined Communities, Anderson (2006) Anderson, B. 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, , revised ed. London : Verso.. also highlights the role and importance of our imagination arguing that because it is nearly impossible to determine all of a nation's members, it is the imagination of its existence that is important—an argument that has been extended to the media realm (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998 Abercrombie, N. and Longhurst, B. 1998. Audiences: A sociological theory of performance and imagination Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage.. ), as well as the social media platform Twitter (Gruzd, Wellman, & Takhteyev, 2011 Gruzd, A., Wellman, B. and Takhteyev, Y. 2011. Imagining twitter as an imagined community. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(10): 1294–1318. doi: 10.1177/0002764211409378).

Understanding the Imagined Audience's Role During Social Media Use While people have long engaged with the imagined audience, it is social media's characteristics in combination with its popularity that challenge the average person's understanding of communication, audience, and public (Livingstone, 2005 Livingstone, S. 2005. On the relation between audiences and publics: Why audience and public? London LSE Research Online. Retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000437) making the role of the imagined audience and our dependence on it so critical. During face-to-face settings, and even some one-to-one mediated communication, people typically interact with small and explicit audiences relying more on who they can see or hear in the actual audience, rather than their imagination. However, characteristics of social media platforms have altered the size, composition, boundaries, accessibility, and cue availability of our communication partners during everyday interactions making it nearly impossible to determine the actual audience. Such characteristics include the ease of sharing across the Web, the vast amount of available information, and the persistence and archivability of content (boyd, 2007 boyd, d. 2007. “Why youth (heart) social network sites: the role of networked publics in teenage social life.”. In Youth, identity, and digital media Edited by: Buckingham, D. 119–142. Cambridge , MA : MIT Press.. ) that make it difficult to tell who is out there and when. An individual may read another's Facebook status update immediately after it is posted, while others may not encounter the same post until months later while perusing through a user's timeline. The popularity of these services has also given individuals the opportunity to interact with large and diverse audiences—dozens, hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of people. For example, a Pew Internet report found that the Facebook users in its national sample had, on average, 245 Facebook friends (Hampton, Goulet, Marlow, & Rainie, 2012 Hampton, K., Goulet, L. S., Marlow, C. and Rainie, L. 2012. Why most Facebook users get more than they give: Pew Internet and American Life Project ). Even on social network sites, where lists of potential audience members exist (boyd & Ellison, 2007 Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C. and Lampe, C. 2007. The benefits of Facebook “friends:” Social capital and college students' use of online social network sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 12(4): 1143–1168. ), a cognitive limit may dampen the number of people that one can attend to simultaneously (Dunbar, 1992 Dunbar, R. I. M. 1992. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6): 469–493. ). Confounding the situation further, many social media platforms by default “collapse” contexts and audiences that were once physically explicit in the offline realm (boyd, 2010 boyd, d. 2010. “Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications.”. In A networked self: Identity, community and culture on social network sites Edited by: Papacharissi, Z. 39–58. New York : Routledge.. ; Meyrowitz, 1985 Meyrowitz, J. 1985. No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior New York : Oxford University Press.. ). Who does one attend to if friends, family, colleagues, and coworkers are all in the same actual audience? While media professionals and public figures have long experienced similar audience challenges (Meyrowitz, 1985 Meyrowitz, J. 1985. No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social behavior New York : Oxford University Press.. ), it is now everyday individuals during everyday interactions who must navigate through these challenges and cope with such realities. The Actual/Imagined Audience Tension Without being able to know the actual audience, social media users create and attend to an imagined audience for their everyday interactions. The imagined audience construct is worth understanding better because, while we are dependent on the imagination as a guide during social media use, it is the actual audience on the other side of the screen reacting and judging the performance. Therefore, potential tensions between the two audiences may lead to consequential outcomes. The conundrum then becomes how do people's imagined audiences compare to their actual audiences? And what influences the alignment of an individual's perception of the audience with the actual audience? In contemporary society where people have a tendency to want to be well-received and so seek to act appropriately (Hogan, Jones, & Cheek, 1985 Hogan, R., Jones, W. H. and Cheek, J. M. 1985. “Socioanalytic theory: An alternative to armadillo psychology.”. In The self and social life Edited by: Schlenker, B. R. 175–198. New York , NY : McGraw-Hill.. ; Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, Westerman, & Tom Tong, 2008 Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Kim, S., Westerman, D. and Tom Tong, S. 2008. The role of friends' appearance and behavior on evaluations of individuals on Facebook: Are we known by the company we keep?. Human Communication Research, 34: 18–49. doi: 10.1111/j.1468–2958.2007.00312.x), and where the “the ability to present oneself has become a critical economic asset” (Sternberg, 1998 Sternberg, E. 1998. Phantasmagoric labor: The new economics of self-presentation. Futures, 30(1): 3–21. doi: 10.1016/S0016–3287(98)00003–2, p. 5), a large enough misalignment between one's imagined and actual audience could lead to negative consequences. Take, for example, the repercussions that may result if individuals imagine their friends as their Facebook audience and alter their behaviors to this particular group, but in actuality their audience is broader and includes colleagues and bosses as well. While a misalignment between the imagined and actual audiences in more traditional mediated settings could also be troublesome, such misalignments on social media are even more dangerous since larger audiences means more eyes judging and ready to catch social faux pas. While additional research is needed on the prevalence of actual versus imagined incoordination, misalignments have been documented; many of which have resulted in psychological, social, and economic turmoil such as job loss, reprimands at work, rejections to universities, loss of health insurance benefits, and other life consequences (e.g., Lavrusik, 2010 Lavrusik, V. 2010. CNN editor resigns following controversial tweet about Hezbollah leader Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2010/07/08/octavia-nasr-cnn/; The Huffington Post, 2009 The Huffington Post. 2009. “Nathalie Blanchard loses health benefits over Facebook photo.”. In The Huffington Post Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/22/nathalie-blanchard-loses-_n_366777.html). If the imagined audience plays such a powerful role in determining how and what we communicate to our actual audience during these everyday interactions, it is necessary to understand better what influences its construction. A better understanding of the imagined audience could yield significant insight into peoples' behaviors, struggles, and desires, as well as lead to policies and tools to help everyday users better navigate such spaces.