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Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences
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2011
Year
Digital SocietyEmerging MediaDigital MarketingMedia InnovationMobile CollaborationCommunicationMedia TechnologySocial NetworkMedia StudiesJournalismMedia SystemsSocial MediaAudience EvolutionContent AnalysisMobile MultimediaMobile Social NetworkArtsMedia DistributionMedia InfluenceDigital MediaDigital EntertainmentBob GarfieldMedia ConsumptionMedium ChangeSocial ComputingAudience StudiesDigital Video RecorderMass CommunicationTechnologyAudience Reception
The media landscape has shifted from a passive, mass audience model to an active, niche audience due to rapid technological advances such as DVRs, smartphones, and early social networks, which have fragmented production, distribution, and consumption. The study examines how emerging media technologies drive audience fragmentation and the rise of autonomous audiences, highlighting challenges for the media industry. The author synthesizes academic and industry research, analyzing historical trends, technological progress, methodological developments, and policy changes to assess the impact of new media technologies on audiences. The analysis shows a transition from a production-focused culture to a consumption-oriented one, indicating that the media industry must adapt its models to accommodate autonomous audiences.
When Bob Garfield outlined his “Chaos Scenario” in 2005, he argued that the existing media model was collapsing and that the consumer was gaining more control in the media marketplace (Garfield, 2005). At the time, digital video recorder (DVR) technology was still relatively new, the most up-to-date cellular phone was Motorola's ROKR with the capacity for 100 songs to be played using Apple's iTunes software and the idea of social networking was in the early stages—MySpace was just about a year older than Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Smartphones can now be used to program a DVR, make a phone call, watch a movie, listen to thousands of songs, capture video, send a text message, surf the Internet and post a status update to a social network that boasts approximately 500 million users. These types of advances in media production, distribution, and consumption technologies have played a major role in the fragmentation of the industry, as well as the evolution of the media audience from a predominantly passive, mass audience to an active niche audience with more autonomy, power, and control of media choices. Through a careful analysis of historical trends, technological advances, developments in research methodologies and shifts in policy and regulations, Philip Napoli synthesizes academic studies and industry research to explore new media technologies and their effect on the transformation of media audiences, especially in the context of media and audience fragmentation. The end result is a shift from a production culture where the philosophy of the media is to provide content to large and passive audiences to a consumption culture where the media's control of content and distribution decisions have diminished in favor of the autonomous audience. It is in the contextualization of the autonomous audience that Napoli outlines the current problems facing a media industry where audience migration is leading to dwindling advertising revenue. The reality is that the industry needs to rethink the traditional models and embrace an autonomous audience that controls media consumption.