Constructing the Audience Constructing the News

Each new medium (from print to television) has introduced a series of ratings technologies which, predominantly, quantifies the audience as passive commodity, i.e., as a number which is “delivered” by the broadcasters and “bought” by the advertisers. New electronic media demand a representation of audience that breaks with the traditional audience-as-commodity representation. Contemporary television technologies, e.g., the remote control channel changer, make it impossible for one to realistically conceptualize an audience as passive. An audience member can now jump from channel to channel, from soap to sport broadcast quickly and easily. This contemporary activity of channel “zapping” will be the ancestor of far more powerful text and video manipulation tactics that audiences of future electronic media will employ. Future electronic media will allow users to search for or filter out particular kinds of stories, scenes, words and phrases and then, if they so desire, to reassemble these bits of media together into new presentations which may bear only a passing resemblance to the contexts in which the bits were originally embedded. In this presentation I introduce a new way of thinking about audiences which assumes neither that audience members are passive nor that audiences are a commodity. I call this conceptualization audience-as-social-network. My focus, for this presentation, is on news audiences. § This paper appears in the Proceedings of WRITE’94, Vancouver, Canada, June 1994.