Audiences in the Age of Media and Content Fragmentation

The emergence of various new technologies has transformed many ways of carrying out tasks or activities at the micro, meso, and macro levels across ages, gender, race, and other demographics. As technology developers continue to develop new features that improve users’ experiences, content producers who use media content driven technologies face the challenge of finding better ways to use the features for the development and dissemination of tailored messages. Audiences, on the other hand, are unsure of how to use the features as producers gain a better understanding of how to use them. In this piece, our analyst examines some academic studies and draws conclusions that may be useful to producers and prosumers (audiences who produce and consume content at the same time).

Ytre-Arne & Das (2018) An agenda in the interest of audiences: Facing the challenges of intrusive media technologies

The scholars submit that as the new technologies keep evolving from different perspectives towards meeting the needs of humanity, which also keep changing every day, researching the use of the technologies has also remained challenging. Audiences are in a serious dilemma as it becomes difficult to find appropriate ways of using and benefiting from intrusive media technologies. On the other hand, media researchers with a particular interest in audience analysis are in a critical situation where they need to think like journalists, who use who, what, where, when, why, and how when writing news. Though the 5Ws and H is an age-long approach for news writing, it is a method that aligns with the dynamism of technologies that people are being exposed to every day. The scholars argue that since new technologies emerge from the surveillance and correlation of people’s needs by the developers, using critical research approaches for understanding audiences in relation to the technologies they use without necessarily neglecting peculiar socioeconomic, political, and power relations is essential for helping them escape various impeding challenges or problems for getting appropriate benefits from the emerging technologies.

These submissions emerged from the outcomes of research conducted by a research network consortium with an interest in finding appropriate directions for researching audiences as social media and other emerging technologies proliferate with a growing concern about big data, which is being aggregated and commodified. In this regard, audience researchers are in the best position, through their research outcomes, to let the technology users know the implications of their digital traces and always remind technology capitalists about the need for sustained ethical conduct regarding users’ privacy and personal data protection. The scholars conclude that some audiences in the age of the Internet are invisible, but this does not mean that audience researchers should not explore identity, communality, resistance, and politics that matter most to audiences using different approaches.

Das (2017) audiences: a decade of transformations – reflections from the CEDAR network on emerging directions in audience analysis

A decade of technological transformation that shaped the direction of audience analysis was explored by the scholar. The reflections from a research network were used to pinpoint how audiences experienced a fragmented media environment due to the different waves of the new media. The scholar posits that new media with unique features usually shapes how audiences use and interact with the new technologies. This has really called for different ways of interpreting and/or engaging with the content developed from using the features. As audiences struggle with the best ways to use the new technologies, the scholar posits that emerging categories of texts, readers, and interpretive work are changing the way audiences should be studied as both physical and digitally mediated spheres become more fragmented.

Therefore, there is a need to theorise the audience using different theoretical assumptions or propositions because of the dynamism of the audience and the texts (printed and non-printed) they are consuming in different forms and contexts on a daily basis. This is premised on the fact that readers or audiences are no longer traditional or linear while using and benefiting from the new technologies. Rather, they are now hyper-readers or audiences as the technologies evolve in different patterns in order to meet their needs effectively. The theorization should be done with total consideration of different genealogies of the technologies as well as key moments of audience participation because audience analysis has reached a newer, more unknown, but very significant phase. For instance, with emerging technologies and their disruptive features, audience appropriation of the technologies is unstable at micro, meso, and macro levels. This has really pushed the frontier of contemporary audience research to the de-westernisation of how audience research is being conducted. In other words, audience analysis should be conducted with a peculiaristic approach and not a universalistic one, which solely considers the perspectives of the global north’s researchers or scholars.

Litt & Hargittai (2016) The imagined audience on social network sites

The main argument is that social network sites have enabled people to communicate with diverse audiences, but users are unable to separate abstract imagined audience from targeted imagined audience. Specifically, the scholars use empirical data from a mixed research method to explore how SNS users determine their abstract and targeted imagined audiences, with the objective being that users post without knowing who is likely to read or access their post [abstract imagined audience], while the targeted imagined audience occurs when users have specific persons from their social and professional networks in mind. The scholars argue that fragmented features of social network sites can be problematic for users as they have to move from one feature to another without getting the right audience for their messages. Examples of this include reshare, retweet, and other algorithms-driven features. However, offline interactions are more persistent, searchable, archivable, and shareable due to no technological facilitated challenges.

These nuances motivate the scholars to explore the imagined audience on social network sites using follow-up interviews and observations of participants’ posts, as well as four diary surveys sent via email for determining the composition and characteristics of the two classifications of the imagined audience. The findings show that users often imagined broad, abstract, and targeted audiences, ranging from personal ties to professional ties, communal ties, and/or phantasmal ties. These audiences were homogeneous and made up of people’s friends and family. However, users’ imaginations fluctuated when posting, even though the potential audience did not change frequently. These findings led to the conclusion that more research is required to gain a better understanding of why and how users manage their privacy, as well as how they cope with thinking about the two audience classifications.

Jensen (2019) The double hermeneutics of audience research

The scholar dissociates himself from the idea that audiences are passive in the age of digital media. Instead, he argues that the digital media have actually shaped how audience researchers should see the users of the emerging technologies. This is premised on the fact that users are “prosumers” or “produsage”. In this context, they produce and, at the same time, consume. Therefore, exploring the interplay between changing media environments and changing conceptions of audiences with a particular reference to how the tripod (meta) of communicating on digital media is essential for interpreting and reinterpreting the audience’s linear and non-linear relationship with the media in any communicative event

Doing this requires the consideration of double hermeneutics and reception analysis. Double hermeneutics is a mechanism that interprets a lived reality that has already been interpreted by the sender and receivers of media. Reception analysis is a reaction to uses-and-gratifications studies and wider intellectual and public debates in which audiences are assigned new kinds and degrees of agency as co-creators of culture and society. It anticipates the understanding of the Internet as a medium that would empower audiences beyond the interpretation of media interfaces, and the phenomenon of Web 2.0 is a first attempt to come to terms with a reconfigured media environment.

To properly understand the double hermeneutics as communicative practice in the context of audience research, the scholar argues that reception analysis that combines social contexts with the users’ ability to decode messages is highly desirable. This will help in determining how communication and culture serve to orient both human agency and social structuration. On a concluding note, the scholar sees audience’s interpretation of media and audience research reinterpretation as a double-edged sword needed for meaningful engagement of media professionals, policymakers, and other practitioners with audiences in the digital media environment.