Abstract
Speculation on what the digital revolution means for the media marketplace is impossible to avoid – not just for communication scholars, but for anyone who regularly consumes any type of media. Depending on who you ask, the growing digital media landscape might be the death knell for traditional media and shared cultural experience, or the opportunity for individual users to finally be in control of their media environments and to contribute to cultural production. In the highly accessible Marketplace of Attention, James G. Webster takes a more measured and nuanced view of what digital media portends for the future of audiences, media, and measures of media consumption, while offering readers an overview of how these three players interact.
From a reader’s perspective, the book can be divided into three parts: the first half of the book, which reviews existing literature on media users, the media itself, and media measures; a section that analyzes audience data to show how users, media, and measures interact; and the final section, in which Webster introduces his model that describes audience formation and behavior in the digital age.
The first several chapters review literature on the three major players in the construction of audiences: media users, the media itself, and media measures. These chapters give readers a primer on each of these players, while also explaining how their role in audience formation has been affected by the emergence of digital media. Although academics across many social scientific disciplines look at users as rational consumers with clearly defined preferences, Webster describes how most media users are, at best, boundedly rational – their moods and preferences frequently change, they are often poor judges of what media will meet their current needs, and most users obviously lack the time to carefully consider each potential viewing option. The task of choosing which media content to consume is made all the more difficult by the abundance of media in the digital age. Conversely, the task of attracting eyes to content is also made more difficult by this abundance. While many optimists think this increased competition will force producers to offer a wider variety of media offerings, it often leads producers to imitate past successes – a trend that holds true for both mainstream media content and user-generated content.
But even the task of measuring success (i.e. audience exposure) is complicated by our digital media environment. Traditional media measures make use of representative samples whose behavior is extrapolated to larger populations, but these practices do not capture the diverse array of media that audiences can consume in today’s digital world. Therefore, Webster offers overviews of the new kinds of information collected in modern audience measures, explains how online search engines use data aggregation and algorithms to make this information useful for consumers, and describes the kinds of biases inherent in any measurement system.
In the second part of the book, Webster analyzes data to demonstrate how these three players interact to create today’s audiences. Most of the data under analysis are from 2012 and include measures of time spent consuming news, breakdowns of the type of news most citizens consume, and Nielsen measurements of TV network reach and program popularity, among others. In presenting these data, Webster demonstrates that concerns about massively parallel cultures – meaning highly balkanized publics that each consumes their own niche media – are unfounded. Audience data instead support the existence of massively overlapping cultures, in which audiences view many different types of media – some popular and mainstream, some niche, some ideological, some politically centrist.
In the final section of this book, Webster introduces his own model for understanding audience formation in the digital age and speculates what this model might mean for the future of the marketplace of ideas. Drawing on theories of structuration, Webster’s model describes the relationship between audience preferences and media exposure. This relationship ‘is not a one-way street but one of reciprocal influence’ (p. 141), with audience preferences sometimes influencing exposure and exposure sometimes influencing preferences. Ultimately, this give-and-take makes it difficult for the pessimist’s theory – that the abundance of digital media will drive users into highly personalized information silos – to actually come to fruition. Whether users intend to or not, the influence of digital-era tools like social media sharing and recommender systems mean most people are exposed to a wide range of viewpoints and genres.
While this book would undoubtedly be valuable for communication scholars and graduate students, Webster’s approachable tone and care in explaining key concepts and competing schools of thought also make this book appropriate for advanced undergraduates. Both graduate and undergraduate journalism students will find Webster’s discussion of online news audiences, and the preferences and ideologies that drive their consumption, useful and perhaps surprising. (Despite the diversity of online news sources available, today’s news audiences are still highly concentrated among a handful of major, politically centrist news websites.) Furthermore, members of the general public who are interested in today’s rapidly changing media environment will find The Marketplace of Attention an illuminating (and perhaps reassuring) read.