End of Audience Theory

End of Audience Theory

What is the End of Audience Theory:

Audience behavior has changed due to the internet and the ability for audiences to create their own content at home thanks to the lower cost of technology.

This new audience doesn’t just consume media, but also produces it – creating the term "prosumer".

Amateur content made this way has different values to professional media producers, in that it promotes a connection between other amateur producers.

Shirky believes that audiences are no longer passive, as nowadays we are more active audiences who like to interact with media by commenting, liking and even sharing.

The adaptability from technology is one of the main reasons why audiences are now active as we sort of expect to be able to share content, which gives us this expectation to have interaction with media that we come across on a day to day level

Newspaper and magazine circulation is declining, which is because of how audiences don't like to just read a magazine or newspaper but they would rather like to go online and interact. Audiences prefer digital versions of a magazine and/or newspaper because we are more active than passive like a few years ago.

Many news companies have noticed that newspapers aren't getting the news across to people like they used to because everyone would like to react to them which is why the have brought out news on digital devices through the help of Web 2.0. 

Shirky also believed that active audiences like to speak back to the "producers:" of media, this can relate to how audiences don't want to be kept separate from the producers anymore. It used to be producers at the top of the hierarchy and audiences at the bottom while the audiences had to wait for the producers to send out their magazines and other forms of media, but now of things like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook we can actually interact with the people making media whether it be professional producers or normal day to day prosumers. In a way this creates more equality of power and less of a hierarchy that producers used to be represented as more powerful, but because of Technology and the Web 2.0 audiences are becoming more powerful in themselves.

In the ‘old’ media, centralized producers addressed atomized consumers; in the ‘new’ media, every consumer is now a producer. Traditional media producers would ‘filter then publish’; as many ‘new’ media producers are not employees, they ‘publish then filter’.

‘The Audience’ as a mass of people with predictable behavior is gone. Now, behavior is variable across different sites, with some of the audience creating content, some synthesizing content and some consuming content.

The "old" media created a mass audience. However "new" media provides a platform for people to supply value for each other.