Revisiting 'mass communication' and the 'work' of the audience in the new media environment
Philip M. Napoli
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 505
DOI: 10.1177/0163443710361658
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Abstract
'Mass communication' has been an embattled term. As the media environment has evolved, arguments have persisted that it has outlived its usefulness; that it fails to capture the dynamics of the contemporary media system. Though diminished, the term has endured. Technological changes now taking place compel further re-examination of the term and its continued relevance in communications scholarship. However, there have been few efforts to reassess mass communication as a concept in light of the changes that new media technologies such as the internet have imposed upon the media environment (for exceptions, see Chaffee and Metzger, 2001; Lorimer, 2002). And no such reassessments have been conducted recently enough to fully consider the implications of recent developments such as the rise of Web 2.0 platforms and user-generated content.
In an effort to address this gap, this article revisits the concept of mass communication, paying particular attention to the role that the audience plays in the process of mass communication, given, as Mosco and Kaye (2000: 33) note, 'the term audience has over time become embedded within the literature of mass communication studies'. As this article illustrates, a contemporary approach to mass communication can be articulated around a more robust conceptualization of the idea of the 'mass', in which the term refers both to the senders and receivers of information. Such a formulation of the concept of mass communication, and the role of the audience within it, better reflects the contemporary dynamics of interactive media and user-generated content.
Such an approach highlights the changing nature of media audiences (Napoli, in press). While scholars have devoted substantial attention to the ways new media recast the notion of the audience (Cover, 2006; Livingstone, 1999, 2003), one set of propositions about media audiences that has not been thoroughly reassessed involves the 'work' of the audience (Jhally and Livant, 1986; Smythe, 1977). Like the concept of mass communication, this notion of 'watching as working' (Jhally and Livant, 1986) has been on the wane over the past two decades. However, today's reconfigured dynamics of mass communication compel us to revisit the relevance and utility of this notion of the 'work' of the audience.
Conclusion
As Morris and Ogan (1996: 42) noted in an early assessment of the internet: Ά new communication technology ... allows scholars to rethink, rather than abandon, definitions and categories.' In engaging in such an effort, this analysis has focused on why the concept of mass communication can effectively reflect the communication dynamics of the new media environment. However, it is also important to address the question of why it should continue to be used; otherwise, this analysis is primarily a semantic exercise. Maintaining the use of the term 'mass communication' in the new media environment is, in many ways, a corrective to the narrow approaches to the term that, as this article has illustrated, to an extent misrepresented and over-simplified what the term actually meant throughout its history, and the nature of the academic field that emerged around it. Maintenance of the term reflects the continued relevance and analytical utility of associated theoretical approaches such as uses and gratifications and agenda-setting (regarding the latter, for instance, we are only just beginning to understand the complex inter-media agenda-setting effects taking place between the mainstream media, the 'blogosphere' and the public). The concept of mass communication has never been the poor fit for the communications dynamics of the new media environment that many of the term's more recent critics have asserted.
In many ways, the field is at an historical moment today that is not unlike that nearly 50 years ago, when the absence of evidence of powerful attitudinal media effects was seen by some as signifying the death of the field (Beniger, 1987). However, mass communication was always about more than narrowly defined media effects, as Lasswell's original framework makes very clear. Thus it was a mistake to define the field of mass communication purely in terms of its ability to document significant, empirically measurable effects on attitudes and opinions. So too is it a mistake - in terms of mischaracterizing the field's history and in terms of mischaracterizing the historical meaning of the term - to define the field of mass communication purely in terms of the analysis of the mass production and one-way dissemination of messages by institutional communicators to audiences. In this regard, then, reasserting a more robust, well-rounded - and historically grounded - conceptualization of the term and its associated field highlights the relevance of both to today's media environment.
NOTES (ed. GGA)
'Mass communication' has been an embattled term. As the media environment has evolved, arguments have persisted that it has outlived its usefulness; that it fails to capture the dynamics of the contemporary media system.
In an effort to address this gap, this article revisits the concept of mass communication, paying particular attention to the role that the audience plays in the process of mass communication, given, as Mosco and Kaye (2000: 33) note, 'the term audience has over time become embedded within the literature of mass communication studies'.
The rise and decline of mass communication
A key argument here is that the term 'mass communication' is inherently flexible enough to satisfactorily account for the dynamics of the contemporary media environment.
In 1953, sociologist Eliot Freidson outlined what he perceived as the predominant definition of mass communication, which included four distinguishing features of the mass audience: (1) it is heterogeneous in composition; (2) it is composed of individuals who do not know each other; (3) the members of the mass are spatially separated; and (4) the mass has no definite leadership and a very loose organization (1953: 313).
An oft-cited definition by Wright (1960) emphasized the following three elements of mass communication: (a) content is directed toward large, heterogeneous, anonymous audiences; (b) content is transmitted publicly, and often reaches audiences simultaneously; and (c) the communicator tends to be, or operate within, a complex organization that may involve great expense.
Early on, the concept also was strongly associated with the broader theoretical notion of the 'mass society' (e.g. Wirth, 1948), which tended to emphasize audiences as an aggregate of somewhat passive, atomized individuals highly susceptible to mass mediated messages (see Beniger, 1987; Peters, 1996).
By the 1970s, scholars began to question the applicability of such formulations of the concept of mass communication to the dynamics of a changing media environment, in which a greater proportion of the media system was composed of outlets serving relatively narrow segments of the audience (e.g. Maisel, 1973). In a 1977 article in the Journal of Communication, Robert Escarpit described the notion of the 'mass' as 'rapidly dissolving to be replaced by the puzzling yet far more workable image of an intricate network of communication channels' (1977: 47)
This impetus behind the decline of mass communication as an orienting term accelerated in the late 1980s and picked up increased momentum in the 1990s (Throw, 1990). During this time, the evolving media environment, with its ability to facilitate the targeting of small, homogeneous audience segments due to increased media fragmentation (particularly the growth of cable, the VCR and, later, the internet), and its ability to facilitate more interactive forms of communication, increasingly became one in which perceived traditional notions of mass communication, involving the one-to-many dissemination of content to a large, heterogeneous audience who simultaneously received the content, represented an increasingly rare form of communication (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001; Neuman, 1991).
Some scholars have sought to defend mass communication from decline by offering reinterpretations that better position the term to capture contemporary communications dynamics (e.g. Budd and Ruben, 1988).
Philip M. Napoli
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 505
DOI: 10.1177/0163443710361658
Abstract
'Mass communication' has been an embattled term. As the media environment has evolved, arguments have persisted that it has outlived its usefulness; that it fails to capture the dynamics of the contemporary media system. Though diminished, the term has endured. Technological changes now taking place compel further re-examination of the term and its continued relevance in communications scholarship. However, there have been few efforts to reassess mass communication as a concept in light of the changes that new media technologies such as the internet have imposed upon the media environment (for exceptions, see Chaffee and Metzger, 2001; Lorimer, 2002). And no such reassessments have been conducted recently enough to fully consider the implications of recent developments such as the rise of Web 2.0 platforms and user-generated content.
In an effort to address this gap, this article revisits the concept of mass communication, paying particular attention to the role that the audience plays in the process of mass communication, given, as Mosco and Kaye (2000: 33) note, 'the term audience has over time become embedded within the literature of mass communication studies'. As this article illustrates, a contemporary approach to mass communication can be articulated around a more robust conceptualization of the idea of the 'mass', in which the term refers both to the senders and receivers of information. Such a formulation of the concept of mass communication, and the role of the audience within it, better reflects the contemporary dynamics of interactive media and user-generated content.
Such an approach highlights the changing nature of media audiences (Napoli, in press). While scholars have devoted substantial attention to the ways new media recast the notion of the audience (Cover, 2006; Livingstone, 1999, 2003), one set of propositions about media audiences that has not been thoroughly reassessed involves the 'work' of the audience (Jhally and Livant, 1986; Smythe, 1977). Like the concept of mass communication, this notion of 'watching as working' (Jhally and Livant, 1986) has been on the wane over the past two decades. However, today's reconfigured dynamics of mass communication compel us to revisit the relevance and utility of this notion of the 'work' of the audience.
Conclusion
As Morris and Ogan (1996: 42) noted in an early assessment of the internet: Ά new communication technology ... allows scholars to rethink, rather than abandon, definitions and categories.' In engaging in such an effort, this analysis has focused on why the concept of mass communication can effectively reflect the communication dynamics of the new media environment. However, it is also important to address the question of why it should continue to be used; otherwise, this analysis is primarily a semantic exercise. Maintaining the use of the term 'mass communication' in the new media environment is, in many ways, a corrective to the narrow approaches to the term that, as this article has illustrated, to an extent misrepresented and over-simplified what the term actually meant throughout its history, and the nature of the academic field that emerged around it. Maintenance of the term reflects the continued relevance and analytical utility of associated theoretical approaches such as uses and gratifications and agenda-setting (regarding the latter, for instance, we are only just beginning to understand the complex inter-media agenda-setting effects taking place between the mainstream media, the 'blogosphere' and the public). The concept of mass communication has never been the poor fit for the communications dynamics of the new media environment that many of the term's more recent critics have asserted.
In many ways, the field is at an historical moment today that is not unlike that nearly 50 years ago, when the absence of evidence of powerful attitudinal media effects was seen by some as signifying the death of the field (Beniger, 1987). However, mass communication was always about more than narrowly defined media effects, as Lasswell's original framework makes very clear. Thus it was a mistake to define the field of mass communication purely in terms of its ability to document significant, empirically measurable effects on attitudes and opinions. So too is it a mistake - in terms of mischaracterizing the field's history and in terms of mischaracterizing the historical meaning of the term - to define the field of mass communication purely in terms of the analysis of the mass production and one-way dissemination of messages by institutional communicators to audiences. In this regard, then, reasserting a more robust, well-rounded - and historically grounded - conceptualization of the term and its associated field highlights the relevance of both to today's media environment.
NOTES (ed. GGA)
'Mass communication' has been an embattled term. As the media environment has evolved, arguments have persisted that it has outlived its usefulness; that it fails to capture the dynamics of the contemporary media system.
In an effort to address this gap, this article revisits the concept of mass communication, paying particular attention to the role that the audience plays in the process of mass communication, given, as Mosco and Kaye (2000: 33) note, 'the term audience has over time become embedded within the literature of mass communication studies'.
The rise and decline of mass communication
A key argument here is that the term 'mass communication' is inherently flexible enough to satisfactorily account for the dynamics of the contemporary media environment.
In 1953, sociologist Eliot Freidson outlined what he perceived as the predominant definition of mass communication, which included four distinguishing features of the mass audience: (1) it is heterogeneous in composition; (2) it is composed of individuals who do not know each other; (3) the members of the mass are spatially separated; and (4) the mass has no definite leadership and a very loose organization (1953: 313).
An oft-cited definition by Wright (1960) emphasized the following three elements of mass communication: (a) content is directed toward large, heterogeneous, anonymous audiences; (b) content is transmitted publicly, and often reaches audiences simultaneously; and (c) the communicator tends to be, or operate within, a complex organization that may involve great expense.
Early on, the concept also was strongly associated with the broader theoretical notion of the 'mass society' (e.g. Wirth, 1948), which tended to emphasize audiences as an aggregate of somewhat passive, atomized individuals highly susceptible to mass mediated messages (see Beniger, 1987; Peters, 1996).
By the 1970s, scholars began to question the applicability of such formulations of the concept of mass communication to the dynamics of a changing media environment, in which a greater proportion of the media system was composed of outlets serving relatively narrow segments of the audience (e.g. Maisel, 1973). In a 1977 article in the Journal of Communication, Robert Escarpit described the notion of the 'mass' as 'rapidly dissolving to be replaced by the puzzling yet far more workable image of an intricate network of communication channels' (1977: 47)
This impetus behind the decline of mass communication as an orienting term accelerated in the late 1980s and picked up increased momentum in the 1990s (Throw, 1990). During this time, the evolving media environment, with its ability to facilitate the targeting of small, homogeneous audience segments due to increased media fragmentation (particularly the growth of cable, the VCR and, later, the internet), and its ability to facilitate more interactive forms of communication, increasingly became one in which perceived traditional notions of mass communication, involving the one-to-many dissemination of content to a large, heterogeneous audience who simultaneously received the content, represented an increasingly rare form of communication (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001; Neuman, 1991).
Some scholars have sought to defend mass communication from decline by offering reinterpretations that better position the term to capture contemporary communications dynamics (e.g. Budd and Ruben, 1988).
Turow (1990, 1992) proposed an approach in the early 1990s that stripped away many of the term's (perceived) traditional definitional elements and focused instead exclusively on the industrialized production and distribution of content.
Obviously though, Turow's effort fails to maintain the term's relevance in the face of the ways that the dynamics of mediated communication have changed since the pre-internet days of 1992, in which the diminished prominence of the institutional communicator and the rise of the individual as mass communicator are defining characteristics.
Reconceptualizing mass communication
The concept of mass communication can effectively account for the dramatic changes taking place within the contemporary media environment when the term 'mass' is conceptualized a bit more inclusively, to account not just for the receivers of content, or for the nature of the production process, but for the senders of content as well.
The communication dynamics reflected in Web 2.0 (see Mabillot, 2007) applications such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter increasingly foreground an approach to mass communication in which the individual audience member operates on nearly equal footing with traditional institutional communicators. The new media environment is one in which the tools of participation in public discourse and creative activity are much more widely distributed (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Benkler, 2006; Kendall, 2008). Mass communication is now a much more egalitarian process, in which the masses can now communicate to the masses (Fonio et al., 2007).
The one-to-many dynamic at the core of the meaning of 'mass communication' persists here -there simply are many, many more instances of it. This proliferation of the one-to-many capacity represents the communication dynamic that was largely absent from previous incarnations of our media system, in which the capacity to mass communicate was confined to a select few.
Terms such as 'prosumers' and 'produsage' have been coined to capture the ways in which the media audience is evolving, and the ways in which content production and distribution are migrating beyond the traditional industrial paradigm (Bruns, 2007; Deuze, 2003).
What is surprising about many user-generated content discussions is that the focus is often misguidedly on the revolutionary or disruptive aspects of users' abilities to produce content. Even the term user-generated content reflects this misplaced emphasis. This is not the aspect of contemporary developments that is new or of the greatest significance. Users' capacity to generate content has been around for some time, due to the long-established availability of technologies such as home video cameras, PCs, typewriters and home recording equipment.
What is different today is the ability of users to distribute content, to use the web to circulate their user-generated content (as well as, to media companies' dismay, traditional media content) to an unprecedented extent.
As fragmented as the media environment may be, it is still possible for homemade videos produced by individuals sitting at their computers to be watched by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide via YouTube, or for a song produced by an unsigned band to attract a similarly large listenership via online distribution.
Clearly, the intention here is to reach as large an audience as possible -not to target narrow niches. In the contemporary media environment, the masses often seek to reach the masses.
The diminishing importance of institutional communicators
The traditional institutional communicator has no status of exclusivity within the mass communication concept.
That being said, it is important to recognize that many of the de-institutionalized forms of mass communication that are now taking place still involve traditional institutional communicators - only in more ancillary roles as content aggregators, navigation services or platform providers (e.g. Google, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook). These forms of integrated activity between the institutional communicator and the individual user are, in fact, central to the emerging significance of the 'work' of the audience.
The new mass audience and its work
This redefinition strikes directly at the notion of the 'mass audience' that has long been a central element of the concept of mass communication (see e.g. Neuman, 1991; Webster and Phalen, 1997).
One important outgrowth of this proposed re-orientation is the way it resurrects a line of thinking about the mass audience that has been largely dormant in recent years. Specifically, when we consider an approach to mass communication that incorporates the mass audience not only as receivers of messages but also as senders, and when we also look at how the place of the audience as mass communicators is now being integrated into our media system, we are confronted with the issue of the 'work' that the audience engages in in the new media environment.
According to Smythe (1977: 6), the work that audiences engaged in was to 'learn to buy particular "brands" of consumer goods, and to spend their income accordingly. In short, they work to create the demand for advertised goods.'
However, just as contemporary developments in the media environment have invited a reconsideration of the concept of mass communication, so too do they invite reconsideration of this corollary notion of the work of the mass audience.
Again, the key driver here is the way that the new media environment empowers the audience to serve as both receivers and senders of mass communication.
Specifically, the notion of the work of the audience, which may have been a bit more tenuous when the work being monetized was isolated to media consumption, becomes more concrete in an environment in which the creative work of the audience is an increasingly important source of economic value for media organizations.
This brings us back to Web 2.0 applications and the ways they help the masses to mass communicate. Here, the concern is not just with the fact that such communication is taking place, but also with the fact that the communication itself often becomes a revenue generator for media organizations. The dynamic under consideration here is well-expressed by Cohen:
Web 2.0 has altered the terrain of the media business, notably by adjusting consumers' roles in the production process. Business models based on the notion of the consumer as producer have allowed Web 2.0 applications to capitalize on time spent participating in communicative activity and information sharing. In mass media models, the role of consumers has been just that, to consume, or to watch and read the product. Web 2.0 consumers, however, have become producers who fulfill a critical role. (2008: 7)
The advertising revenues that sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace generate are derived substantially from audience attention captured with content produced by members of the user/audience community.
This brings us back to Web 2.0 applications and the ways they help the masses to mass communicate. Here, the concern is not just with the fact that such communication is taking place, but also with the fact that the communication itself often becomes a revenue generator for media organizations. The dynamic under consideration here is well-expressed by Cohen:
Web 2.0 has altered the terrain of the media business, notably by adjusting consumers' roles in the production process. Business models based on the notion of the consumer as producer have allowed Web 2.0 applications to capitalize on time spent participating in communicative activity and information sharing. In mass media models, the role of consumers has been just that, to consume, or to watch and read the product. Web 2.0 consumers, however, have become producers who fulfill a critical role. (2008: 7)
The advertising revenues that sites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace generate are derived substantially from audience attention captured with content produced by members of the user/audience community.
Aggregating or providing a common platform for user-generated content, and then selling advertising on these platforms, represents the core business model of most Web 2.0 applications.
User-generated content such as comments, ratings and reviews has also become an important source of added value for organizations involved in the production or distribution of traditional institutionally produced content. Examples along these lines include the user ratings/comments on sites such as Netflix or Amazon, and the increasing extent to which newspapers' websites incorporate reader feedback and comments into their presentation of traditional journalism.
The work of the contemporary media audience can be taken one step further.
The work of the contemporary media audience can be taken one step further.
- Increasingly, not only are audiences contributing content that can be monetized by content providers,
- but it is also increasingly the case that audiences engage in the work of the advertisers and marketers who traditionally support these content providers.
Audiences today assist with the marketing of products in a variety of ways, ranging from producing commercials to engaging in online word-of-mouth endorsements, to integrating brand messages into their own communication platforms (e.g. their MySpace or Facebook pages) (Cheong and Morrison, 2008; Deuze, 2007; Spurgeon, 2008).
What is different today, of course, is that producers of content now have access to potential audiences that was largely missing in previous generations. Another distinguishing characteristic of the activities of today's audience is their demonstrated willingness to allow others (typically media organizations) to capture the revenue generated by their aggregated efforts.
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