5: New Media Audiences
- Page ID
- 115880
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- 5.1: Audiences and Audience Research
- This section discusses the different ways we think about receivers, audiences, and users, and how communication and media scholars might approach thinking about and studying audiences. It is worth breaking these concepts down into separate components to try to understand them. However, these concepts are artificial constructs, and the line between receivers, users, and audiences is becoming increasingly soft and blurred and they may have faded in their usefulness.
- 5.2: Researching Audiences
- Audience studies have been around as long as there has been commercial mass media – producers needed to prove to potential advertisers that their message was received by a certain number (and later on, a certain type) of people. As such, audience research has ties to ideas about consumer culture. But as metrics and other ways of gathering information grew more sophisticated the demographics continued to be refined.