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"James G. Webster"
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The marketplace of attention : how audiences take shape in a digital age
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age.
Book
The Marketplace of Attention
Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? InThe Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures -- from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media. Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated -- that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.
eBook
The Myth of Partisan Selective Exposure: A Portrait of the Online Political News Audience
Many assume that in a digital environment with a wide range of ideologically tinged news outlets, partisan selective exposure to like-minded speech is pervasive and a primary cause of political polarization. Yet, partisan selective exposure research tends to stem from experimental or self-reported data, which limits the applicability of their findings in a high-choice media environment. We explore observed online audience behavior data to present a portrait of the actual online political news audience. We find that this audience frequently navigates to news sites from Facebook, and that it congregates among a few popular, well-known political news sites. We also find that political news sites comprise ideologically diverse audiences, and that they share audiences with nearly all smaller, more ideologically extreme outlets. Our results call into question the strength of the so-called red/blue divide in actual web use.
Journal Article
USER INFORMATION REGIMES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA SHAPE PATTERNS OF CONSUMPTION
[...] it describes the essential characteristics of the digital media marketplace. [...] it presents a theoretical model of the marketplace that integrates work in sociology, economics, communication, and network analysis. [...] it identifies emerging patterns of media consumption, describing how user information contributes to audience fragmentation and polarization and how these systems might affect the future of the marketplace.
Journal Article
THE MARKETPLACE OF ATTENTION
Digital media offer people countless choices. They can spend their time with hundreds of television networks, thousands of expensively produced films and TV shows, and a seemingly endless supply of websites, videos, and tweets. Some of these offerings are intended for large audiences; others are more narrowly directed to friends and followers. But almost without exception, their creators want attention. With it, they hope to amuse, build social capital, make money, or change the course of human events. Without it, their efforts are of little consequence. Media need an audience before they can achieve a purpose. And to find that
Book Chapter
MEDIA USERS
Media users power the attention economy. Their decisions about what to read or watch or share, taken as a whole, create the audiences that sustain media and give them meaning. So our study of the marketplace of attention begins with them. The importance of figuring out what makes media users tick has been evident to researchers for a long time, which means there’s a lot of material for us to digest. In this chapter we’ll hear from economists, marketing researchers, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, social network analysts, and people in communication and cultural studies. Each discipline has its own way
Book Chapter
MEDIA MEASURES
Each of us uses just a tiny portion of the media available to us. Our actions typically reflect a blend of habits and preferences, but our appetites vary and our knowledge of the offerings is far from perfect. So getting exactly what we want, when we want it, can be difficult. In the aggregate, the choices we make create something of value to the media—public attention. As a result, the media do all they can to create and sustain that attention, including everything from heavy-handed campaigns designed to enforce exposure to more subtle attempts at currying our favor. Users
Book Chapter
CONSTRUCTING THE MARKETPLACE OF ATTENTION
The first chapters of this book provided the pieces of a puzzle we have yet to solve. They described the predispositions of media users, the strategies and constraints of media providers, and the role of media measures—all of which influence public attention. But these strains of argument and evidence rarely come together in one complete picture of how audiences take shape. Rather, we confront a variety of theories about how people and systems are supposed to behave. The audience formations we just reviewed offer a rough empirical test of how well those theories work. Unfortunately, our expectations of audience
Book Chapter
AUDIENCE FORMATIONS
We’ve waded through a lot of material that suggests how audiences ought to behave. Users, the media, and the measures on which they both depend all play a role in how public attention takes shape. But there’s no consensus on what kind of audience formations will emerge from that combination of factors. Perhaps users, empowered with on-demand media platforms, will demonstrate clear-cut loyalties that effectively narrow their diet of media to a few favored offerings. But it could also be that the variable nature of our preferences leads to equally varied patterns of consumption. Perhaps digital media will encourage endless
Book Chapter