Introduction Social Media Audience - Class 6 PDF Download

Introduction

Interestingly the journey of the web traversed along the fast highway since the 1990s as it grew from web 1.0 to web 2.0 and lately to web 3.0. In a nutshell, while web 1.0 was all about the presence over the web, web 2.0 is about participation, collaboration, sharing, and open network. Web 3.0, growing out of this democratic nature of the web, is about semantically connecting every sign made online, with a growing threat of capitalist take-over of the Internet. In this fascinating background of political, philosophical, ethical, social, cultural, economic, and technological dynamics, the social media audience comes to the center of deliberations and the center of the action. Social media is the culmination of the democratization of the Internet; it is a robust platform of public opinion that the world has never witnessed before.
The audience is the primary benefactor as well as the beneficiary of this segment, making the web for the people and by the people. In this regard, social media audience becomes an essential element to explore and understand as part of any digital media course. In this Unit, we shall discuss the concept of audience, its nature, and evolution with particular emphasis on social media along with exploring a few audience theories, social media marketing strategies, and exciting case studies.

Learning Outcomes

After reading this Unit, you will be able to: 

• outline the evolution of media audiences and its changing nature; 
• infer the validity of the term ‘audience’ in the case of social media; 
• distinguish social media audience from other media audiences; 
• relate prominent audience theories with social media audiences; and 
• apply tools and strategies, particularly for social media marketing.

Audience - The Term and Concept

• Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism of New York University, in 2006 wrote in his Press Think blog post titled The People Formerly Known as the audience, “The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.”
• Rosen with this blog post raised the issue of the growing invalidity of the term audiences and the need to identify more relevant terms in the changing situation. There is a long tradition of placing the audience in a lower stratum of hierarchy as gullible fools who lack knowledge and understanding. For Plato or Socrates, as can be found in Gorgias of Plato, the orator should carry the responsibility to enlighten these ignorant audiences or the so-called hoi polloi. However, for Aristotle, the demographics, emotional state, and character type of the audience members are essential elements to define an audience.
• As he explained in Rhetoric, the audiences can be passive spectators or engaged publics, or judgmental individuals. In India as well, Bharata’s Natya Shastra considers audiences more like judges than as critics. Quite similar to the Western concepts Bharata’s Natya Shastra acknowledged the incapability of audiences to grasp superior messages. However, Ras or emotional states are invoked among audiences through the Patra or the message mediators - the more profound the invocation, the more successful is the message.
• More towards the current understanding of the term audiences, Shaun Moore in his book Interpreting Media Audiences wrote, “There is no stable entity which we can isolate and identify as the media audience, no single object that is unproblematic ‘there’ for us to observe and analyze.” The audience has been defined by categories of people, by the medium chosen, by type of messages, and by the time as in era or as in preferred moments of exposure.
• As James Hay wrote in The Audience and Its Landscape that living in a mediated world amidst the continuous flow of messages, the audience becomes the audience about a particular social or cultural site. Thus the concept of audience though is highly context and text-specific, but they have always been the receivers in the traditional perspective of the term. For the term audience, there have been many other alternatives used over the decades. There are readers for newspapers and magazines; there are listeners for radio and music, and there are viewers for television and cinema. 
• The term audience encompasses all these types. In place of the audience, the word public has also been used by many, particularly concerning media marketing and public opinion development. The term mass, in the mass audience, also has been used to convey a particular type of audience that grew out of mass society. Further going more towards the latter half of the twentieth century, the term consumers has been used in place of the audience as global conglomerates of media corporate houses rose to power-producing and selling their products in the form of news, cinema, soap operas, songs, etc. 
• However, lately, after the rise of social media and the Internet, the role of the audience as a receiver has been changed. From their role as consumers against the producers of the media content, they became the producer of the content themselves. With the democratization of new media, the earlier audiences now became the message sender as well as the receiver - they became the producer as well as the consumer of the content. 
• Thus in the age of social media, the term audience is to be replaced with the term prosumer, as coined by Alvin Toffler. Furthermore, even for those who were not producing any content, they ceased to be an audience anymore; they became the user of the content which is much more an active role than merely being the audience. Further, with the growing population of social media and the engaged role of people in it, these users of the Internet became the netizens of the virtual world. 
• It became almost like living in a parallel nation with the rights and responsibilities of citizens in it. Moreover, more recently going against the corporate trend of the consumer-producer role of audiences, the term producer, as coined by Axel Bruns, has become more popular which acknowledges the role of producing content and the role of using that content rather than only consuming it. Thus it has taken a step against considering news, cinema, and other media content as products to be consumed, from a political-economic perspective.