Dallas W. Smythe in “On the Audience Commodity and its Work,” (2006) formulates important concepts he calls “audience commodity” and “audience work”:

“To suggest that the mass media audience is a commodity and that audiences ‘ work' is to raise many questions which unsettle established ways of thinking. As most audience “work” centers in the home , all the other functions of the family become involved in considering the implications of the proposition focus on the family…. In order to analyze our largely commoditized society, we must beware thinking of people and commodities as disconnected things and see them as relationships in a social process.”

Audience ‘work' is chiefly centered on the following areas:

There is therefore a concomitant focus on issues of audience subjectivity and identity. What happens to the subjectivity of individuals when they peruse media products? How do people construct and reconstruct identities based on media forms?

One orientation or approach in media studies termed the ‘uses and gratification' school argues that issues of subjectivity and identity are central to media forms and texts and have considerable impact in the following:

We are always in dialogue with mass media forms and there is a dialectical relation between these forms and ourselves.