the Spectator (1711-1712)
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, editors
it "developed a reflexivity about its own circulation, coordinating its readers' relations to other readers," thus perfecting "the representation of its own circulation"
104: "The result [was] a sense of a general public, by definition not embodied in any person or class but realized by the sense of circulation as the reception context of a common object"
contemporary devices like "viewer mail, call-in shows, 900-number polling, home-video shows, game-show contestants, town meetings, studio audiences, man-on-the-street interviews" owe a debt to Addison and Steele, and also wish to "characterize their own space of consumption"
contemporary mass media endeavors "to fake a reciprocity" even while it is "conspicuously asymmetrical" (100)