Another example of unwise strategy killing newspapers

A publisher shared this article in the NYT:

“We’re focusing The News more and more on its online activities,” Mr. Zuckerman said in an interview last week, “because that’s where the audience is going. It’s a younger audience and that’s what advertisers want. If people don’t want horses and buggies anymore and they want to ride in automobiles, then you better damn well get into the auto business.”

It is hardly news that newspapers everywhere are grappling with the challenges of the Internet, but the ways in which The Daily News has approached this wrestling match have left some members of its staff worried that the paper has betrayed its mission in exchange for digital clicks. It was not just the bloodletting in the feature, sports and business pages, which, people noted, were some of the paper’s most beloved sections; several employees said that The News’s top executives, in their scramble for solutions, had made the paper more down-market and sensational — a tepid imitation of the Post.

“The mantra in the building is web, web, web,” said one reporter who lost his job this month. “But they haven’t figured out how to monetize the web yet. And so it just gets trashier and trashier in an effort to juice the numbers.”

...

Mr. Zuckerman insisted that The News would continue to cover the city with the same deep sourcing and doorstep reporting it has always used, not least because New York, he said, is a subject that intrigues the world. But in the wake of the layoffs, in tearful and occasionally drunken conversations, his troops expressed concern that the culture of the paper had irreparably changed.

“When I first got to The News, it was about all reporting and writing, but now it’s about self-promotion,” said one former veteran reporter. “I can’t remember the last time someone on the staff sent a note saying, ‘Hey, good piece.’ What they say now is, ‘Hey, we broke the March record for page views!’ ”

Digital Ad Engagement

As I usually focus on user engagement with news stories or political messages, the reading materials related to advertising provided me with new lens to look at online engagement. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, ad engagement is a spectrum of "activities and experiences – cognitive, emotional, and physical – that will have a positive impact on a Brand" (p. 6). While I think that the three offered forms of engagement could also be applied to messages pertaining to public affairs, achieving "a positive impact" may be more complicated in a political context. If, for example, people keep posting or reading nasty comments, or start using Facebook's dislike button, would it have a positive impact on political attitudes and participation? It could also make things worse

  In addition, it was interesting to read about Facebook advertising, as I was not aware of some ad options. As a Facebook user I will probably be more suspicious when I look at my newsfeed. I do not  know to what extent these ads are effective, but advertisers are willing to spend more money on .Facebook ads, as indicated by Pew's report 

Readings for Sept. 29

From the three readings, I believe the three main takeaways for modern audience advertising are:

1- Dig deeply into defining your audience using the advanced user data available.
The book chapter had a lot of emphasis on how specific an advertiser can target users, even to the level of uploading a customer list and having Facebook match it with their Facebook profiles. As we talked about in class, it can even use cookies to target "website abandoners" and generate ad content based on what they were looking at or considering. I found it interesting how he pointed out that our "cultural comfort" with Facebook's data mining has changed over the years as we find it more and more acceptable (well, mostly).

2- Look past "the click" as a measure of success and instead focus on engagement from cognitive, emotional and physical levels.
The white paper took some of the chapter and updated it along with adding to the idea that a successful digital ad campaign should be measured in more than just a "click." I liked the model of measuring cognitive, emotional and physical engagement. To me, it appears to try and strip away the distractions of technology and return to the roots of what makes an advertising campaign successful. I feel like sometimes we get so wrapped up in the shiny new gadget that we forget the fundamentals. These metrics apply good principals to new technology.

3- Seek users on the growing mobile platforms.
As hinted briefly in the book chapter from 2013, mobile is a growing area of audience participation that is becoming more and more important for advertisers to remember in their planning. While the fact sheet only shows 37% of digital advertising spending was mobile in 2014, it's up 12% from 2013. I think it's interesting to note how much Facebook's mobile display ad revenue grew, and feel that the book author could likely add an entire chapter on mobile advertising (with the same caveat that it will probably be out of date before it even hits the printer).

Connecting Brands with Consumers

I think it's very important for scholars to read texts like Funk's chapter 5, to really understand the motivations and "shop talk," of the media environments they are studying. Funk does an excellent job of laying out Facebook's advertising ecosystem as well as best practices for brands to reach potential audiences (of course this is a bit dated as Jina pointed out). Here's a few things that stood out to me: 

1.) Funk makes an important point that it isn't good enough for brands to just dump money in to a Facebook ad campaign and expect it to work. There is so much nuance and many layers to actually achieving something with your campaign. A 2 year old company with 1000 likes to their fan page approach Facebook advertising much different than a Fortune 500 company. 

2.) It was fascinating to read that 90% of people who like a fan page never actually return and thus brands have to pump out messages through their newsfeed. I found it interesting that Facebook doesn't actually let all those messages go through, but plays the role of gatekeeper to ensure roughly 16% of those messages get to its users. This is with good reason of course. If users feel like they are just getting bombarded with ads there is more incentive to leave the platform because the user experience is getting bad. Then everyone essentially loses. Facebook as we've seen in recent years has gotten backlash several times in recent years for policy changes, though it's important to note that people have never left in droves. 

3.) This chapter also made me reflect on the complete disconnect I have with the digital brands I purchase goods from. I often care about one thing: Am I getting the best deal? However, brands are trying to use spaces like Facebook to tell me their story and why they are important to my life. Facebook limits the amount of text they can use, how many times they can connect with me, and also these brands are charged just to interact with me. Essentially the brands are playing baseball with broken bats in hopes of hitting a home run. I do not go to a brand's website from Facebook. Generally speaking, I go to Retailmenot or some other coupon site to find a coupon, find the good on the brand's site, apply the coupon, and then check out. 

Reflecting on the iab. document, what stood out to me was the metrics being used to track audiences (pages 8-10). All of the measures are  quantitative with exception to social listening. I understand psychological and advertising research are largely predicated on quantitative research, but I think it is important to observe peoples' behaviors while they are making decisions regarding brands. 

Audience measurement for online advertising; Google AdWords and Facebook

Funk's chapter on Facebook Advertising was impressive in that I had no idea how many and what kinds of advertising was going on on Facebook until now. I had a basic idea of digital advertising on Facebook, but it was impressive how intricate their advertising system was. What is confusing though, is that I have never noticed half of these strategies implemented on Facebook. The sponsored search result was an interesting idea but I had never seen it before so I went onto Facebook and searched "Obama" and "Nike." However, it did not return a sponsored search result as Funk had written. After careful examination of my own newsfeed, I noticed many "your friend shared this post" versus sponsored ads. Funk's methods may be outdated as it was written 2 years ago sine the digital world is evolving at a fast rate. I think a section about sponsored user generated content should have been written.

Also, I liked the post by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and their description of engagement as a continuum from cognitive, emotional to behavioral. Engagement is important as is awareness, perception, and intent. I think the IAB put an emphasis on engagement because the digital platform makes it easy for interactivity versus other platforms such as television, radio, and print. Digital advertising has and always will continue to evolve, and I believe the emphasis is now on consumer engagement and consumer generated content. 

Social media marketing and engagement

Not coming from advertising or marketing background, Funk’s article was particularly hard for me to comprehend. However, one of his remarks I found interesting is how “Facebook has been criticized and has publicly criticized itself for being late to the mobile game.” In East Asia where it’s known for having well-developed computer game industry, I think linking social media apps to ad-serving mobile games happens quite frequently. For instance, Kakao Talk is equivalent to a combination of Facebook and WhatsApp in Korea. Kakao Talk often invites its users on social network sphere to download mobile games and compete with other Kakato Talk users in order to make users more engaged, promote certain ads and make profit.

Also, providing users super cute emoji (or stickers) worth only a couple of dollars is another way to make some profit. There’s another highly used social media/messenger app in East Asia called LINE. One interesting fact about LINE is that although it’s from Korea, it’s mainly used by Japanese and Taiwanese because Korean market was already predominated by Kakao Talk. Once critical mass is exclusively formed and clustered in a certain social media, it’s extremely difficult for other companies to enter the domain.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau provides three groups of core engagement metrics that can be comparably defined across the industry: Cognition, Emotion and Behavior. As for the “pre-engagement” phase, I wonder whether unconsciousness could possibly be measured.

Evaluating Research Topics

"Size": For one single research paper, some topics are too big, and some are too small.

"Important?" Theoretical and/or practical

"Interesting?" How so? Counter-intuitive? Super new? And "to whom?"

"So what?"


"Doable?" "How to collect data?"

---------
Exploratory secondary data analysis --

Start with the data.

Review the data closely.

Identify important/interesting/unusual patterns.

Make sense of those patterns. What do they suggest?

Theorize what you found.

---------

Secondary Data Sources:

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press -- Biennial Media Consumption 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012
http://people-press.org/dataarchive/

Newspaper Association of America -- Trends and Numbers: Newspaper Web sites (Reach by DMA)
(Click on menu items on the top and on the left for more stuff)
http://www.naa.org/Trends-and-Numbers.aspx

Newspaper/Magazine Print Circulation Data (click on eCirc)
http://www.accessabc.com/products/freereports.htm

ABC's Audience-FAX^* eTrends Tool:
The tool is designed to allow users to create trending reports by reporting period on newspaper's average circulation, average print and online readership, total combined audience, and total unique Web site users.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/audience-fax/default.aspx

ABC's Audience-FAX online database (registration required, free):
Data on newspapers' average circulation, average print and online readership, total combined audience, and total unique Web site users as well as a variety of print demographic information for both national and local newspapers.
http://abcas3.accessabc.com/scarborough/login.aspx

Nielsen/Scarborough -- Free Reports
http://www.scarborough.com/freeStudies.php

1. Does user generated content set the agenda on social media?

User generated content ranges from product reviews, homemade YouTube videos, reactions to newly released entertainment pieces, and much more. Platforms especially designed for ordinary people to communicate with one another, such as social networking sites, are infiltrated with user generated content. Often times such content is controlled by social media “influentials” who regularly post self-generated content to be consumed by his or her followers.  Although the motive behind each post is unclear, it is clear that the content is being consumed by thousands of people and being shared amongst one another for further consumption by their friends. There used to be a clear distinction between user generated content and advertisements. It was easy to tell who had commercial motives and who was being paid to send out certain messages. However, with paid reviews and hidden endorsements by ordinary but popular individuals, it is becoming more difficult to tell.

When a phenomenon occurs, one can tell what is going on even without watching the news or reading the newspaper because people post things and talk about it actively through social media. Therefore, I believe it has the ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda. This would be interesting to practitioners and academics alike because this is an application of agenda setting to a new context. Society at large would be interested because they would have control over the salience of topics rather than it being decided for them.

2. Does branded user generated content improve recall?

Branded user generated content or eWom are preferred over traditional advertising because they are information thought to be from a more credible source. Just like traditional advertisements, user generated content is often viewed as entertaining but seen as an uncommercial act without other hidden motives which makes it more trustworthy and accepted. Credibility and recall are related yet the recall of user generated content has yet to be studied. Therefore, this area would be interesting to explore.

This would be important to marketers in the profession because one of their aims in their marketing efforts is brand/ad recall. Another strategy to improve recall would be important to them and they could explore a new context that has not been studied before. This is also important to academics because it is an unexplored area in the field with potentially great implications for the world of advertisers and marketers who are trying to increase recall. Academic research that can be applied practically is valuable so scholars would be intersected in studying this topic. Finally, the society at large would be surprised to see how much user generated content they are unknowingly consuming each day through medium like social media and their recall of the ads seen.

Do disguised advertisements in social media decrease ad avoidance (fatigue)?

Many advertisements on social media are not as apparent and in-your-face as they used to be. In fact, they are disguised to look like entertainment pieces. Disguise advertising "are those that individuals may not perceive as being sponsored because the source of the message is unclear, or because they are presented as editorial material, rather than advertisements" (Nebenzhal & Jaffe, 1998). Social media has provided a platform where it is easy for marketers to implement this strategy. By doing so, marketers could combat a common phenomenon of ad avoidance online.

Nebenzhal, Israel D., and Eugene D. Jaffe. "Ethical Dimensioins of Advertising Executions." Journal of Business Ethics 17.7 (1998): 805-815.

Attention on web sites

From our two readings this week, two things jumped out.

First, that from what Pew was focusing on, they seem to want to add either a new level of audience attention or an entirely different slice by looking at whether the user is desktop or mobile- they certainly spent a lot of time on that information.

Second, the popularity of the Huffington Post shot up from the "Human Bandwidth" study where it was on the low end of the spectrum to being fourth overall in the Pew findings at 100 million unique visitors. The TV sites listed in the study such as CNN, NBC and CBS retained high rankings, growing from 20 million to 101, 101 and 84 million respectively.

I like the idea of collective metrics as a way to not only gain a deeper understanding of the audience but to also create strategic plans for growth and advertising.

Measuring Audience Attention on Websites

Media organizations often emphasize how popular their websites are, as they attract many unique visitors. However, this is only part of the picture. As Zheng, Chyi & Kaufhold (2012) showed, audience attention on the web has different dimensions, including visibility (audience share), popularity (unique visitors), loyalty (visits per person), depth (pages per visit), and stickiness (time per page). Pew's fact sheet on the top 50 online news entities in 2015 allows us to examine two of the five dimensions: popularity and stickiness. According to the current ranking, these are the five websites that attracted the highest number of unique users: 1) Yahoo-ABC News Network, 2) CNN Network, 3) NBC News Digital, 4) Huffingtonpost.com, 5) CBS News. However, if we rank the 50 online news entities based on the average minutes per visit, these are the top five websites: 1) Fox News Digital Network, 2) NBC News Digital, 3 + 4) The New York Times Brand and CBS News, 5) Yahoo-ABC News Network. Two entities that appear on the second list are not included in the first list. While the number of visits per person is not mentioned in the fact sheet, Zheng et al. found that in June 2008 weather sites and news portals scored the highest on loyalty. Also, magazine sites performed well in terms of depth, as they received  a high number of page views within one visit. I am interested in examining the different dimensions of audience attention in different sections of a given website. For example, the sport section may attract more visitors, but users could spend more time in the news section, and the entertainment section would score the highest on loyalty. On other websites it may be different. I am also curious to see social networking sites' performance on the five dimensions of audience attention.    

Human Bandwidth and Audience Factsheet (KV)

I really enjoyed reading this paper by Zheng, Cyi, Kaufhold as it shows the multitude of ways of understanding audiences. I found it really interesting that people spent more time on average on weather sites than news sites and opinion sites. If you consider the vast amount of content on a news site versus a weather site, this is a pretty remarkable statistic. Put another way, the weather has literally one job, whereas the news sites are giving you loads of information, but the news websites are still not as sticky as the weather sites. I'm also not surprised weather sites won on loyalty, as people tend to check the weather on a daily basis or even sometimes multiple times a day. However, is loyalty the right word here? When I think of the word loyal, I think of something or someone I would do anything for, but in the case of the weather web sites, perhaps I'm going there b/c of habit on a daily basis.


After looking through the audience factsheet what stood out to me was that in the fine print, desktop data is made up of web browsing and video, and mobile is broken up in to websites and apps. When thinking about how much time people spend on these news sites, I don't simply want to know if people are using mobile or desktop, but I want to know what they are doing while they are there. Are they watching videos? reading stories? commenting? I think this data would give us a better sense of the multi dimensionality and bandwidth of the audience.

Potential topics

I have a few ideas for my audience topic, but definitely need to further develop them. I'm having trouble figuring out just how to frame things.


Photographers in print vs instagram

I'd like to look at photo selection on what's printed versus what the photojournalist posts to their personal account. I follow a few music and sports photographers on instagram and got to thinking about it recently. Do they post the same photos that were published or do they try and offer a different look for their personal social audience? Some of it might be motivated by contractual obligations to the organization they shoot for but there also might be other factors at play like knowing what type of photo will get the most likes.

Comments Section

I'm interested in the gutter that can be the comments section, on a news story or even on a Facebook post on an official news Page. Mainly in whatever the gratification one gets from making a post versus the actual impact of the comment. Or possibly comparing comments on a story versus on the story as it was posted to Facebook. This might be interesting for the sites that killed story comments but still have an active Facebook presence. Did their Facebook comments increase? Decrease? Does it even matter?

The most comments we ever had in a single month was July of 2014, when we had some 68,000 comments. That sounds like a lot. But we also had 12 million unique visitors that month. When you start to look at it that way, even if every comment was created by an individual commenter — which is not the way it works; surely several of those commenters commented hundreds of times — 68,000 commenters would still be dramatically less than one percent of our total readership. http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/09/what-happened-after-7-news-sites-got-rid-of-reader-comments/

https://xkcd.com/1385/

Snapchat Discover

Snapchat has rolled out a channel service that lets media publish daily stories for all to watch. Comedy Central recently started a Snapchat-exclusive "show" even. I'm curious what the adoption and viewership rate is. Are Snapchat users watching this content? Some of it is able to be interacted with and re-posted but it still seems like a limited audience. Is this just advertisers going to where the users are or is the Snapchat Discover platform a viable addition to how we create/consume media? Further, the "live" stories allow users to contribute content to themed stories such as an event, city or university. Some of the live stories now include inserted ads but they can be skipped just as easily as the snaps themselves. A recent story included information showing how quickly users were passing over the ads, which makes me question the effectiveness:

Emoji in news

After recently becoming enthralled with the Emoji Tracker, i became curious about the adoption of them. Photos, videos, hashtags and emoji are four major ways to add more than basic text to a tweet. In my basic and limited searching, it appears that news organizations on twitter are using the first three but haven't really adopted emoji yet. Why? I can think of a few reasons. I'd like to dive into that a little further perhaps.

Audience measurement for the Web; Google Analytics

Zheng, Chyi and Kaufhold (2012) discuss a multidimensional model for measuring attention on websites. They discuss that attention is a measurement that is valued on the internet (vs. exposure) which is something I agree with completely.  Attention and engagement often precede actions such as attitudes and purchase intentions which are important in advertising.

Web attention is described by a five dimensional model. I especially like popularity and believe it is a significant measure that attributes to a website's "success." Even if a site has all of the other four dimensions, without popularity, there is less chance of the 4 dimensions playing a meaningful role. However, if a site has one dimension, popularity, it increases the likelihood of all of the other four dimensions. With many unique visitors, visitors could gain loyalty, stickiness, depth, and of course visibility. These sites could be websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc. However, if there is a lot of stickiness with high loyalty, deep depth amongst a small number of unique visitors, it would mean the website has failed to cater to the public and only serves a niche. These kinds of websites could be personal blogs, family bands, etc.

Also, I found the loyalty to weather channels interesting. Upon reflection, weather channels may have outnumbered television shows, etc. not due to loyalty but because it addresses our daily needs. It is a channel that does not fulfill our need for entertainment or specific gratifications but rather serves to fulfil our daily routine. It's a habitual behavior to check the weather every morning or before one goes outside. It may be a different kind of loyalty than the loyalty we develop toward television shows (fandom, entertainment, etc.). This highlights how difficult it is to analyze audiences' web behavior online.

Research Ideas

I have two research ideas related to online behavior:

1) Examining the characteristics of the most retweeted versus the most replied messages posted by journalists on Twitter – As Webster (2014) suggested, behavioral data may help understand what is commanding public attention. While various studies examined what types of content generate more public attention than others, my recent work (Tenenboim & Cohen, 2015) showed that different types of content on news websites are often associated with different expressions of interest – consumption versus discussion. Drawing on this study, I am interested in examining  the types of content that are associated with different participatory mechanisms on Twitter. This may allow us to better understand the role of these mechanisms and their potential contribution to a deliberative democracy.

2) Examining if / how design features of user comments sections affect the level of (in)civility - While user comments sections were typically designed as a long list of statements that users could merely read and add comments to it, leading news websites now offer users opportunities to rate comments, to indicate that they like a given comment, and to respond directly to it. According to Manosevitch (2014), such design features “matter for the potential of online spaces to facilitate effective public deliberation” (p. 1). I am interested in exploring the relationships between different features of user comments sections, and communication that conveys "an

unnecessarily disrespectful tone toward the discussion forum, its participants, or its topics" (Coe, Kenski & Rains, 2014, p. 660) and is manifested in these sections.

References

 Coe, K., Kenski, K. & Rains, S. A. (2014). Online and uncivil: Patterns and determinants of   incivility in newspaper website comments. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 658-679    

 ,Manosevitch, I. (2014). The design of online deliberation: Implications for practice

theory and democratic citizenship. Journal of Public Deliberation, 10(1): 1-4.

Tenenboim, O & Cohen A. A. (2015). What prompts users to click and comment:

A longitudinal study of online news. Journalism, 16(2), 198-217. doi:10.1177/1464884913513996 

Webster, J. G. (2014). The marketplace of attention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Research topic & comments on the reading

 

Cultural discount revisited: K-pop and Western audiences

   With the advent of globalization in 1990s and with the development of information and communications technology, transnational media cultural flow has never been as dynamic as nowadays. These dramatic shifts have posed the legitimacy about the supremacy of American media cultures and the continuing plausibility of Western-centric cultural domination across the world (Iwabuchi, 2010). It requires us to look at the realm of transnational media culture from a new perspective; since for decades an uncritical application of theories has been derived from Euro-American experiences to the non-Western contexts and processes under the study of media and cultural globalization.

   East Asia is one of the key regions in which these alternative cultural expressions flourish. Scholars have examined the dynamics of the production, circulation and consumption of media cultures in East Asia in the realm of globalization. In the midst of this phenomenon, the rise of South Korea’s popular culture and the spread of its highly favored media content across the globe (known as Korean Wave) provide an interesting case study to delve into.

   Since the early 2000s, K-pop and its videos have been well recognized by global fans through their skillfully hybridized form. K-pop artists create a new transnational Asian identity across borders in the 21^st century on the global stage (Ryoo, 2009). As the Korean rapper Psy’s viral music video Gangnam Style has shown, the popularity of K-pop now goes beyond nation-state boundaries, circulated on the Internet space without borders (Kim, 2011). K-pop is a dance-driven performance that often emphasizes performers’ physical attractiveness and virtuosity. It is a visual consumption that sells overall images and performances, not necessarily lyrics per se (Leung, 2012).

   Previous studies on K-pop were largely applied to K-pop fandom and fans’ identity formation in the Asia-pacific region. These studies, however, fail to examine the significance of Western fandom as the phenomenon of Korean Wave starts to reach the West; one good evidence is that the Billboard now provides K-pop section on its own (www.billboard.com). Close readings of Western audiences’ reactions and comments on K-pop videos allows us to interrogate whether cultural imperialism, which has been symbolized as a one-way flow of cultural products from Western countries to developing countries (Jin, 2007) is still a reliable theory in today’s globalization era.  

   This study, therefore, attempts to examine media culture from a reversed perspective and challenge Hoskins and Mirus’ theoretical concept of cultural discount. By conducting close readings of self-filmed reaction to K-pop music videos and analyzing online users’ comments on YouTube, this study aims to explore what it means to consume K-pop for Western audiences, and why and how their consumptions and interpretations of K-pop matter in international context.

   The reading of K-pop video texts is mediated by audiences’ incorporation into active oral cultures (Fiske, 1987) by active discussion and interaction among other viewers to create meanings (Katz & Liebes, 1984). Through self-filming K-pop reaction videos, fans—as ardent audiences—express their emotions and thoughts. Through interacting with others via comments on YouTube, fans—as active audience—share and practice a pleasurable aspect of democracy. Western audiences, as active audiences, take active role in interpreting and enjoying transnational media content on their own term, and connect with others in online environment. The fans not only enjoy K-pop videos, but they also support each other and build close rapport with other fans via comments. How and why do fans self-film their reactions to videos? Why do these fans enthusiastically communicate with each other, leaving informing and supporting comments on one another’s posts? What does Western audiences’ attachment to K-pop music and videos mean in the domain of globalization? This study attempts to answer these questions.

   To explore this phenomenon, this study employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach, combining theories from media studies and cultural studies, in addition to thick descriptions of each video and comment. This study also employs online ethnography; from September 2015 to December 2015, I’ll regularly visit the YouTube pages where the videos are uploaded. I’ll observe fans’ comments and examine the ways in which they interact and communicate with the posters in online communities.

   In this article, K-pop fans refer to Western audiences. Fans’ linguistic and geographical associations inform the definition. In other words, this research identifies western K-pop fans as audiences who (1) use English as one of the languages they are most comfortable speaking and (2) likely live in countries in the West, or in a society under the influence of western culture. I’ll collect data and information about the fans by looking at each individual’s page and comment they had made. This includes fans’ visual confirmation, physical traits, profiles, pictures, names (or ID) and languages they use.

   By looking at the transnational media culture of K-pop, this article challenges Hoskins and Mirus’s theoretical concept of cultural discount and revisits Straubhaar’s theory of cultural proximity. This study suggests that although theoretical concept of cultural discount (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988) vividly exists among Western audiences for their consumptions and interpretations of K-pop, it faces serious challenges in explaining the K-pop phenomenon among Western audiences.

Theoretical background

Cultural hybridity (Kraidy), cultural proximity (Straubhaar), cultural discount (Hoskins & Mirus).

Methods

Online ethnography: textual analysis and thick description.

=============================================================

   This week’s reading on “Capturing ‘human bandwidth’: A multidimensional model for measuring attention on web sites” by Zheng, Chyi and Kaufhold provides a new model for measuring users’ attention on the Internet. The article briefly mentions about the notion of “information surplus,” which I find fascinating; “because information has lost its scarcity on the Web, excessive information is available even at the price of zero, resulting in a media environment characterized by ‘information surplus’ (Chyi, 2009).” When there was no internet but only television and radio, scholars used the term “cognitive surplus (Shirky, 2010)” to refer to the leisured time people had in the beginning of industrialization. During that period, people had relatively more free time and attention surplus, thanks to all sorts of developments. They turned to (now-traditional) media to deal with their cognitive surplus.
   Now, with the Internet and new media, audiences are facing information surplus from cognitive surplus. Many media/advertising-related industries try hard to get audience’s attention in any way possible. For instance, I think the way news media write the headline has been drastically changed over time as a way to grab audience’s attention. In Korea, this happens a lot especially in the realm of online news sites. When online users click a news headline for its appealing and catchy words and find out the content of the news is not even relevant to the headline, Koreans use the term “be caught by a journalist.”

Research Ideas (KV)

1.) As a filmmaker who has largely made films with dSLR cameras, I've had to rely on blogs/forums/tutorials to learn how to use these cameras to make film. The companies that make these cameras (Panasonic, Canon) don't have the best tutorial series and often don't have any "How to" videos for their products, therefore audiences have taken on the role of teachers, opinion leaders, and reviewers of the projects. Here's a link to a video by Dave Dugdale who has become an influential voice in this space. I think it would be interesting to do a study that analyzes the discourse within each of these videos along with the corresponding comments of each video to understand how this very niche part of the film community creates knowledge. 

2.) Have you ever been really excited to watch a video that your friends recommended to you, but when you click the video link, a 30 second ad plays first? Usually when this happens I stop watching the video completely and go view something else. I would like to see how pre-roll ads, especially related to news video, impact audiences' decision-making when trying to watch a video. Does this dissuade them? Does it matter what type of video it is? Does it matter what type of ad it is?

Exercise 5

Based on this week's readings, I found Zillman’s description of arousal and excitement as a result of audiovisual experience particularly interesting. Basically, if people get more aroused, they will have stronger drive to continue the media use. This is especially relevant to explaining the appeal of entertainment and soft news. Media involvement may also be indicated by such signs as “talking back” to the TV. There is one theory that well explains this phenomenon: Parasocial relationship (Horton & Wohl, 1956).  Audience members develop their one-sided relationships with the media being consumed. Parasocial relationship is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show host, celebrities, characters) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. It can be developed to the point where media audiences begin to view the mediated others as “real friends.” I think it would be interesting to link Zillman’s notion of arousal to Horton and Wohl’s notion of parasocial relationship to see the dynamics of audiences.

In terms of audience participation, I find even defining the notion of participation problematic. Would you consider the process of audience interpreting media texts on their own terms participation?

McQuail says that there is an increasing trend for media content to be produced deliberately for international audience. This applies largely to films, pop music and TV dramas. Although this is indeed true, there’s another face of transnational media culture: Buying a format from one country and create a remake version (e.g. American horror films originally from Asia, American Idol, Korean variety TV show Running Man, etc.). I think targeting directly at international audience is risky; you have to be skillful enough to hybridize different cultural elements (e.g., the East vs. the West). Otherwise, you will be just pursuing/portraying universal values.

When explaining about an audience for a foreign product, McQuail mentions Hoskins’ and Mirus’ work on “cultural discount.” It mainly focuses on the linguistic aspect as an obstacle of media cultural product flow across the borders. Hoskins and Mirus addressed that American people dislike (or are unfamiliar with) to watch a program or movie with subtitles, so it is hard for other cultural products to permeate into America. I think this is by doubt true since English has become a lingua franca, which some scholars refer to is as a cultural imperialism.

The true extent of international audience formation is largely unknown. However, one tangible space to see at least some of the actual international audience would be a concert hall or a fan meeting.

Hoskins, C., & Mirus, R. (1988). Reasons for the US dominance of the international trade in television programs. Media, Culture and Society, 10, 499-515.

User Information Regimes

Reading both McQuail (1997) and Webster (2014) provides a comprehensive picture of audience measurement challenges across time. When McQuail wrote his book, he asserted that "only a small fragment of the total of actual audience behavior can ever be measured, and the rest is extrapolation, estimate or guesswork" (p. 49). However, as a result of technological developments, it is now possible to know more about the actual audience behavior and to get information that is disaggregated at the story level, unlike tools such as circulation statistics and surveys, which provide aggregate and indirect information. This information could be helpful in understanding what is commanding public attention, but as Webster pointed out, "all media measures are biased… it means they can never offer a completely objective picture of reality. Bias is inherent in the process of collecting and reducing data" (p. 86). Also, these measures "don't stand apart from the reality they purport to measure; they reshape it" (p. 93). We should remember this when we rely on what Webster calls "user information regimes." We should also think how we can study the effects of these regimes.

Week 4 Reflections (KV)

Webster offers a comprehensive assessment of where media measures are in terms of their sophistication, effectiveness, and shortcomings. I was particularly interested in the section about Big Data.

We're producing so many footprints with each of our social media accounts every second. Though we may not be audiences of a particular product, singer/songwriter, filmmaker, it's relatively easy for them to look up who might be a potential audience for them and target those individuals or groups with seamless advertising.

Here's a simple example. I wanted to know more about an Instagram user, so I wrote a really simple Python script to download the latest 20 Instagram postings she made. This is what it looks like before I clean it up.

Now after I clean it up and put it in to a dataframe (csv file), I can convert the data in to something more manageable.

I'm able to see the location she posted from, how many people are liking and engaging with her posts, the created time, and also see what type of content she's creating. 

I think what's most fascinating about the Big Data explosion, is how much power it puts in the hands of anyone with even the most basic code skills. 

(If anyone wants to collaborate on a project in which we can collect data this way and do analysis on the information, I'm happy to chat) 

Data and metrics are trendy now

Conference:
http://inma.org/modules/event/2015DataInsightsChicago/

New book:
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/book/

Post 5: Audience Measurement Overview

Webster's chapters include perspectives from the field of advertising which makes it interesting to read. He also discusses recent modern platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, making the readings applicable and relate-able to audience measurement today.

Amongst the many audience measurement tools that exist on social media, some give head-counts, some shows trends, while others rank. I have recently encountered data mining technology that I would consider as audience measurement. Data mining collects users' conversation being generated around a phenomenon, news, etc. Instead of offering a simple number of click-through, a ranking of the most popular events or trends, it gives the researcher a collection of all the things that have been said around an event from a certain period. For example, if there is an earthquake, people will tweet about it. Because so many people are tweeting about it, audience measurement tools mentioned in the book will tell you that a trendy topic that is being discussed right now on social media is about the earthquake. However, data mining can help you see every conversation that has been made under that topic. I think this is more helpful than rankings and head-counts when one is trying to understand the audience. 

Also, the topic of personalized recommendation and data collection brings the issue of privacy. Previously users, especially older generations, showed strong dislike for personalized recommendation due to the invasion of privacy. It seems that such strong feelings toward it has been somewhat mollified as time as gone by. Free data collection has become a norm but people are not aware that their information is being collected let alone being provided willingly by themselves. For example, Facebook's algorithm called "edge-rank" which goes into your newsfeed, sees all of your friends, ties, etc. to make a personalized recommendation should give people the option to opt out. 

Response to Webster Ch. 4 and McQuail Ch. 4

The contrast between the two chapters was very interesting, as McQuail explained audience measurement in a time when social media was young and Webster came in to apply those principals to the modern day. I loved when McQuail said in his conclusion that (emphasis added) "With all the developments of research technique, there can never be more than a very approximate estimate of who was (or is being) reached, where, and under what circumstances and in what state of mind," because I actively disagreed but then after reading Webster's thoughts found myself aligning closer with the statement. Initially, I thought that with all the resources for data collection we have today of COURSE we can get more than an approximate estimate of our audience.

Webster made me think more about overgeneralization of data and audience information, especially when you look at how interactive things are today. Popularity and Personalization Bias are the two things that made me rethink my initial argument. When Webster wrote how "predications about social activity can affect the thing they are predicting" (p. 93) I realized just how complex new media audience measurement can be. I used to be a fan of the "most read" lists on news web sites but now see how they can loop through audience herding. Should news sites take those features off to encourage users to find their own news of interest? Personalization Bias seems like just a modern but veiled version of the celebrity endorser, and makes me question the metrics used to show us what is trending.

These chapters have got me thinking a lot more about how deep audience measurement really goes and how less organic it can be versus what i thought it was. Audience fragmentation, overgeneralization and popularity/personalization bias all have me leaning much closer to agreeing that we won't likely be able to obtain more than the approximate audience estimate that McQuail described.

Week 3 Reflections (Thursday, KV)

A recurring thread in this week's reading is that in this media environment, people have boundless choice in content, how to access that content, how to interact with content and share the content with others. I was most struck with Webster's section, "The Structures of Everyday Life."

During the golden era of television, audiences were conditioned to click the remote in the evening time to watch their favorite news programs, dramas, and sitcoms. However, in this era, we are always cued to be audiences and the news, television, movies, video games can always keep our attention. These cues come from tweets, Facebook posts, online newsletters, and alerts so that we always have the latest information. The content providers can engage us as audiences virtually all times of the day we are not sleeping. Considering we have high quality phones, laptops, and tablets on us at all times, anywhere we are (w/ cell and wireless connection) is a theater for us to engage in content. Regardless if we are viewing a tweet sent out from Better Call Saul's account or actually watching the show, our minds are constantly being sent messages about how to be a good audience.

Reflecting this with Lee's piece, I wonder how much our motivations are impacted by the fact that we are constantly bombarded with micro-messages throughout our days by content providers?

Audience Motivations and the Use of Social Media

I think that Lee (2013) made an important contribution to the uses and gratifications theory, as she showed that different types of people have different types of news motivations, and the latter can predict the consumption of different news genres. Put differently, she offered useful answers to the questions: who is using what type of news, and why? I was somewhat surprised that information motivations did not strongly predict the use of Twitter and that compared with Facebook it was consistently used more among those with entertainment, opinion and social motivations. Has this possibly changed since the study was conducted? A recent study by Pew (2015) suggested that "the proportion of users who say they follow breaking news on Twitter… is nearly twice as high as those who say they do so on Facebook (59% vs. 31%) – lending support, perhaps, to the view that Twitter’s great strength is providing as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events". The study also suggested that on both Twitter and Facebook, more users are getting news than in the past.As Webster (2014) pointed out, various theoretical approaches assume that people have preexisting preferences that they bring to the media and this drives their choices. However, these approaches "allow very little room for the possibility that our encounters with media have other causes and that those encounters might actually shape our preferences, reversing the traditional direction of causation" (p. 14). I am wondering if and how our encounters with social media have shaped our preferences. 

Comments on the readings

Based on the Lee (2013)’s article, news consumption in the contemporary media environment is not driven by the mutual exclusivity of news motivations. This is quite true if you think about, for example, Facebook; people use it both for social and information purposes.
It would also be interesting to see how the four motivations (information, entertainment, opinion and social) influence information processes; some motivation-triggered information might be retained in a brain storage longer than others or quicker to recall.  
Differences of motivation-driven news consumption may in turn influence civic engagement and other democratic practices, which are all positive outcomes. This might be true especially when examining the sample as a whole, the US adult news audiences were most driven to consume news for information purposes, and least driven to consume news for opinions: No hard cores. But what about negative outcomes? Will there be any negative outcomes caused by a certain motivation-driven news consumption? If so, what would it be?
There is another interesting journal article (Kim, J. (2014). Scan and click: The uses and gratifications of social recommendation systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 184-191) that links uses and gratifications theory to the use of social media’s social recommendation systems (SRS. e.g. “like” on Facebook). Based on this article, expression-seeking is the highest motivation for users to use the SRS, and that the more one spends on social media, the more he/she is likely to express opinions via SRS rather than read opinions; it naturally creates the influential, in other words, opinion leaders.

Response to Webster Ch. 2 and Lee Literature Review

These two writings further explored the fragmentation of the New Media audience and the ways in which they make media decisions in a saturated market of available content.

I was particularly taken with the Webster's discussion of the genre choice (p. 29) and how the audience can easier define what it doesn't like by genre than by what it does like. In so many new media networks, I feel like we are given genre tests after signing up to decide what types of content we are presented with. For example, Netflix gives us movie/TV genres and then starts to curate recommendations based on those choices. Apple Music, a newer service, presents the user with genres and artists and asks to choose what the user likes and doesn't like. In both, a dynamic choice of genre then begins to curate content. However, if Webster argues that genre choice is only best for dislikes, it seems this method may be less effective in defining what content to show a user. Both Netflix and Apple Music appear to approach a solution by also including other categories like specific artists and movie titles. Netflix once offered a million dollar prize in a contest to develop a better way of making recommendations. Lee's literature review indicated this may be a harder task than it appears due to how frequently our preferences vary, based on information, entertainment, opinion and social motivations.

Another aspect of the readings that jumped out was the idea of opinion leaders/elite influentials and how they translate to new media. The statistic Webster provided stated that opinion leaders represent just .05% of total Twitter users but command 50% of attention (p. 41). In making a piece of information go viral, it appeared that one goal is to catch the eye of an opinion leader in hopes of capturing that 50% attention of other users. In addition, I noted how much the first law of geography ("everything is related to everything else but near things are more related than distant things (p. 46)) still applies even when we have access to the entire world online. The quote from Mark Zuckerberg was especially interesting, as one would think Facebook would be where you could really see what is going on in the world, but "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." (p. 46)

Post 4: Theoretical approaches to audience research

In studying the "kings" who have seized control of the marketplace, the audience have the power to make meaning,  to choose, to share and to affect industry practice. Recent technology has allowed audiences to become "prosumers" who can become active creators and sharers of content.

As mentioned by Webster in Ch.2, psychologists and political scientists assume selective exposure, uses and gratification, or social identity to be the underlying reason behind our media choice. I am very familiar with this school of thought but the idea of a rational choice from a conventional economics stand point is new to me. As Webster mentions, I do not think audiences are capable of making a rational choice in media. It is easier to know oneself and one's needs versus an entire range of media options and the one that may best serve you. Although it seems that theories from psychology serve media better, it seems that these ideas are actually varying terms to describe the same concept of people wanting to find what is most needed for themselves whether it be gratification, need, preference, etc. For example, the term "cultural omnivore" serves to show how people satisfy their needs. Instead of being restricted to certain genres solely due to social class, as was mentioned in class on Tuesday, people are choosing to gain much cultural capital and the line between the highbrow and lowbrow is becoming blurred. It seems this serves both utility and fulfills psychological satisfaction.

Furthermore, I completely agree with both recognition and endorsement heuristics. I study celebrity endorsement and past research has proven that people favor faces and options they recognize. They will commit to a brand or try a product with recommendations, especially celebrity endorsements. While it is true that world-of-mouth tactics are powerful, I believe celebrities' influence are just as strong, especially for younger generations who have grown up in the "lowbrow" culture. Also, celebrities are looked up to as opinion leaders and have thousands and millions of social ties with their fans. They can effectively spread novel information whether each of the ties are strong or weak. As Webster mentions, elite opinion leaders like celebrities "constitute only 0.05 percent of Twitter users, but attract about half of all the attention" on Twitter. Whereas the use of celebrities on traditional mediums have come under the spotlight for its questionable effectiveness, social media has created a social bond between the fans and the "real" person behind the manicured public version of the celebrities and have reignited the spark. 

Another aspect is the contagion of content. This is another area of research that I am interested in exploring. As is mentioned, the answers for why things go viral are still being researched but I do agree that not only elites but ordinary people can trigger social contagions. There is truly "a weak correlation between a person's popularity and his or her ability to actually influence other." While it is unknown and unclear why this is the case, I would speculate that unlike traditional media which hosts public figures, social media is for ordinary people and their interaction with one another. In this platform, any account user could become a one-time celebrity. I believe this is why social media has been received with so much attention. It brings a public profile to private individuals. 

Is The Term Audience Still Relevant?

As McQuail (1997) acknowledged, the audience concept is in many ways outdated and its traditional role in communication models has been called into question. However, while suggesting that new terms may need to be developed "for some genuinely new kinds of communication participant groups, perhaps differentiated according to types of new media use" (p. 149), the scholar was in favor of keeping the old concept audience and addressing its different dimensions. These include, for example, the degree of activity or passivity, the degree of interactivity and interchangeability, and the simultaneity of contact with sources.

These dimensions seem useful and can lead to new terms. A team of journalism scholars

who focused on websites affiliated with leading newspapers in ten countries suggested that users were "active recipients" (Hermida, 2011). These users discussed the news and sometimes contributed eyewitness accounts and audio-visual materials, but they had relatively little impact on the selection and processing of news.  Nevertheless, users of social media can be more than active recipients. For example, Papacharissi (2014) showed how journalists and users, including elite and non-elite actors, co-curated and co-created flows of information on Twitter. Professional journalists still have an important role in communication models, but maybe we should talk less about their interactions with the audience and more about an ecosystem where there are different types of actors and interactions.

References

Hermida, A. (2011). Fluid spaces, fluid journalism: The role of the "active recipient" in participatory journalism. In J.B. Singer, A. Hermida, D. Domingo et al. (eds.). Participatory journalism: Guarding open gates on online newspapers. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Week 3 Reading Reflections (KV)

Overall, I think McQuail offers a solid history of audiences and audience research. Below are my thoughts regarding the Week 3 readings.

1.) I agree with Jina that the current media climate is probably closest to Core-Periphery model. However, I would adjust the model to have arrows pointing outwards and inwards. Though there are plenty of avenues that take us away from mainstream content intended for the masses there are plenty of pipelines that bring us back to mainstream content such as social media, advertising, text messages, and news alerts. For instance if there is a massive earthquake in Portland, even if I am cut off from the  mainstream television diet, I will invariably be connected back to the mainstream through my social media feed, text messages from friends, etc.

I also agree that it is impossible (or at least virtually impossible) to get to the breakout model. Though audiences have more choice and the ability to transcend both spatial and temporal boundaries while consuming/interacting with media, we still use tools made by mass media organizations. For example the software on our mobile phones are made by Google, Apple, and Microsoft, three of the largest media corporations who want to lead us back to content in hopes of A.) making money, B.) learning more about us to make more money in the future, C.) ensuring we share content w/ our friends, so money can be made yet again.


2.) On page 132 (Chapter 8), McQuail states, " An additional and paradoxical consequence of oversupply is that it increases the need on the part of audiences for the gatekeeping services that

were traditionally  supplied by the old media by way of their selecting, editing,packaging, and marketing activities."

I think this is a really interesting/important point because in a sense McQuail is stating that media organizations are off loading certain labor costs to consumers. Every time we rate something on Netflix or Amazon, create Wikis for products/services we're essentially providing media companies two services: 1.) we're offering them free labor to get something done they didn't do themselves, 2.) We're giving them free audience data through our hard work. 

McQuail: chapter 1, 8, and 9

This week’s readings on chapter 1, 8, and 9 from Denis McQuail’s book called “Audience Analysis” provides fundamental yet interesting insights of audience in both old and new media culture: From what audience used to mean in old media as a set of spectators to newer meanings as active, interactive, and borderless people.

When he talks about the privatization of media experience (p. 6), I thought of it as true indeed especially when it comes to the practice of television viewing. For instance, the location of a television at home is almost always at the center of a living room. Television viewing has been a family ritual in some way; it’s been customary, not only in American household but in many other countries, to watch TV together after dinner. However, with the invention of mobile communications (e.g. smartphones), people now watch TV in a more privatized environment, such as on their way to school or work. Although there might be a less of physical accompaniment of television viewing, there seems to be an increasing sense of virtual accompaniment of viewing (e.g. watching online streaming content where instant messages from other online users pop up on the screen, such as AfreecaTV).

When explaining the characteristics of “mass,” he refers to the mass as lacking “any organization, stable structure, rules, or leadership (p. 7).” However, I find this highly arguable nowadays. For instance, the 2008 US beef protest in South Korea was first elicited by the fans of K-pop idol boy band TVXQ (Shirky, 2010).

McQuail argues that audiences form according to factors that cut across residential patterns and have more to do with tastes and lifestyles (p. 133). However, he seems to have ignored a crucial factor when analyzing audience: Social capital. Only those with rich social capital in high socio-economic status are able to move flexibly between exclusionist highbrowed culture and lowbrowed culture, becoming inclusionist omnivore (Peterson & Kern, 1996). When talking about internationalization (by the way, I think internationalization is not the same as globalization), he said “the nation-state is in relative decline as transnational cooperation on many things becomes more important than sovereignty for its own sake (p. 130).” However, this is not always the case if you look at the ways in which Chinese government strictly regulates and censors the immense influx and popularity of Korean pop cultural content to protect their own sovereignty. On page 140, he said that “audiences do not find it hard to distinguish between imported and domestic products and read them differently.” This can be indeed true, but if you think about imported television formats (e.g. American Idols, MTV, etc.), it’s not that crystal clear. When TV producers/writers are importing and exporting TV formats, broad yet so subtle to recognize social, cultural, economic, and political ideologies are inevitably embedded in the format itself, such as westernized notion of capitalism. Some scholars have opposed the view of McQuail on national definitions of cultural content as no longer exclusive or uniquely important (p. 141) in the world of globalization. Some of the theories supporting those scholars’ arguments are cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) and hybridity (Kraidy, 2002). It would be interesting to read some of their work in light of audience studies.

Studies on audience can be done with dichotomized approach: Looking at it from the perspective of either technological determinism or social determinism. But as we may agree upon reading this book, the realm of audience is much more dynamic and complex. However people define or make use of the term audience, as a socialist Shiach (1989) once said, I hope it gets liberated from the dominant status groups (e.g. multinational conglomerates)’ way of sustaining their power.

 

References:

Kraidy, M. (2002). Hybridity in cultural globalization. Communication Theory, 12(3), 316-339.

Peterson, R., & Kern, R. (1996). Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review, 61(5), 900-907.

Shiach, M. (1989). Discourse on popular culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus. New York: Penguin Group.

Straubhaar, J. (1991). Beyond media imperialism: Asymmetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 8(1), 39-59.

Post 3: Defining audience; history of audience research; death of the mass audience

Post 3: Defining audience; history of audience research; death of the mass audience

 First, it is interesting to see how the term "audience" has evolved throughout history. I have been so focused on audiences as consumers and as audiences online that it was refreshing to read about audiences in Greco-Roman times and onwards of books, magazines, newspapers, radio, cinema and television. As McQuail explains in Ch. 1, the meaning of audience has evolved over time due to technological advancements. Whereas audiences were considered to be passive listeners, now:

"The typical audience role can cease to be that of passive listeners, consumers, receiver, or target. Instead it will encompass any of the following: seeker; consultant; browser, respondent; interlocutor; or conversationalist."

This is certainly revolutionary considering how the term first originated to describe attendees at a live performance. McQuail also mentions that due to overload, a higher level of media exposure which leads to a lower quality of attention, and fragmentation, a process where audience's attention is spread out amongst multiple media sources, audiences are no longer collective. All choices are seen as individualizing with a decreased chance of shared experiences or a sense of common belonging. However, I argue that due to the advancement in technology, audiences are sharing more experiences and expressing more common interest than ever before.  According to Google Now Indexes, there are 620 Million Facebook Groups among the 1.19 Billion active Facebook users. Platforms like Instagram and Twitter serve to collect people who share the same ideas or hashtags, and helps people who "follow" the same page to gather to share common ideas. Social media has the unique position of helping audiences become more individualized as an audiences through personalization and complete control of one's account. However, it also has the underlying purpose of having each account interact with one another for both social and commercial purposes. People gather to form groups according to their interests, such as a facebook group for class or an interest group for food-lovers, which is a sharing of ideas and a sense of common belonging. 

Furthermore, contrary to what McQuail stated, audiences are not "more dependent on, and more vulnerable to, powerful media suppliers than before," nor do they "have no more power than consumers in any other market." Audiences are now more powerful than ever and have advertisers at their fingertip especially due to information overload and audience fragmentation. Audiences have grown smart with banner blindness, devices that filter advertisements, spam boxes, caller ID, etc. so they have becoming increasingly difficult to reach. For advertisers who have to influence attitudes and purchasing decisions, audiences can never be without power. Advertisers have adapted accordingly to changes in technology and have shifted their ad dollars to social media and viral campaigns. Therefore, the end of a mass audience does not seem likely.

Finally, in Ch. 8, McQuail offers an interesting model for four stages of audience fragmentation:

I believe we have just recently reached the Core-Periphery Model and believe the Breakup Model will never happen. Although the emergence of new television channels and networks have started to occur, theses networks still serve a mainstream purpose in one way or another. We will never escape the "core" as mainstreaming will exist as long as cultures, of any kind, are shared. Therefore, unless the world comes to a point where audiences have absolutely nothing to share with one another, audiences will hover somewhere between the Pluralism and Core-Perifry Model.  

As was the purpose of these three chapters, I liked the reviewing of the term audience and seeing the new variables that have been added to the tradition term. It is evident that the term will continue to evolve with time and hope to gain a full understanding of what audiences today mean.