Digital media offers an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information with feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news. Though choices seem endless, public attention is limited.
This book explains how audiences take shape in the digital age and how digital media finds the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? The author does this by describing 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 and calls it the marketplace of attention.
The book will be useful for students of management, media studies and professionals alike.
“Scholarly discussion of audiences are a fragmented as the readers and viewers they analyze. Theories of selective exposure, bubbles, preference formation, rational ignorance, uses and gratification, scheduling patterns, and counter-programming all vie for attention. This book skillfully draws these theories and evidence together to answer a simple but vexing questions: how much do we know about how audiences are generated, and what does that imply about the marketplace of ideas?”
—James T. Hamilton,
Hearst Professor of Communication, Stanford University
“An engaging, coolheaded look at the changing media landscape There have been many breathless accounts of how new media might be changing the world, predicting we are on the verge of either utopia or disaster. Webster pulls together hard evidence and frontier research to tell us what actually is happening, cutting through the hyperbole and offering a balanced account of where we have been and where we are going.”
—Matthew Gentzkow,
Richard O. Ryal Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
About the Author
JAMES G. WEBSTER, Professor, School of Communication, Northwestern University, Illinois, USA
Table of Contents:
Preface, 1. The Marketplace of Attention—Digital Media. Attention. The Marketplace. Audiences. In the Balance. 2. Media Users—Ways of Seeing. Media Choice. The User’s Dilemma. The Role of Social Networks. Going Viral. The Structures of Everyday Life. The Puzzle of Preferences. 3. The Media—The Attention Economy. Making Media. Making Audiences. Desperately Seeking Attention. 4. Media Measures—The Rise of Media Measures. Making Measures. Bias in Measurement. Seeking the World through “Big Data’. 5. Audience Formations—Audience Fragmentation. Preference-Driven Loyalties. Structure-Driven Loyalties. Local News and Information. Massively Overlapping Culture. 6. Constructing the Marketplace of Attention—Structuration. The Dimensions of Structure. A Map of Media Structures. The Interaction of Structure and Agency. Structuring Preferences. The Swing Vote. 7. Public Attention in the Marketplace of Ideas—The Marketplace of Ideas. Stories of Hope and Despair. Questioning Our Assumptions. The Shape of Things to Come. Notes. Bibliography. Index
