Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences

Abstract

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.