There are no audiences anymore, only participants.

distinction — attributed to Mary Boone

Boone rejects the word audience as a leftover from a model in which the microphone defined the meeting. I have the microphone, I control the message, you are listening to me. That model assumed the room existed to receive a broadcast. The contemporary meeting is built on the opposite assumption: everybody should have a voice, everybody should be interacting, and the purpose is to move people into commitment and ownership rather than to deliver content at them. The vocabulary matters because it governs the design. Calling the room an audience produces one meeting. Calling them participants produces a different one.

For meeting designers, facilitators, and corporate event teams whose vocabulary still defaults to audience even when the format is interactive. The vocabulary shift is the precondition for design changes that follow.

participant-centered-design, audience, engagement, voice