The document discusses how digital media has fragmented film audiences. It explains that convergent media allows consumers to become more active users who produce their own content. This erodes the boundaries between producers and audiences. Producers now aim to trigger audience engagement across multiple media platforms rather than keep large, unified audiences. Digital media has improved the audience experience by allowing more choice and participation.

1. Audience
• Audience is a huge area of Media Studies with many variants
and competing approaches, so it is important to be precise about
our focus which is on the relationship between audience and
institution.
• For this part of your course you are concerned with audience
theory, as you will be exploring the ways that audiences are
created/constructed for different films.
• You will need to analyse the complex nature of new media
audiences and how digital media distribution and consumption
has allowed consumers to become far more active users of
media.
• This is more difficult than simply saying 'the film industry targets
‘16-24 year olds’.
• The new media erodes the boundary between producer and
audience:

2. Conventional research methods are replaced - or at least
supplemented - by new methods which recognise and make
use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded
notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers'.
David Gauntlett (2007)
Digital media has changed the relationship
between us and them.

3. Audience Fragmentation
• This phrase is used to describe the ways the idea of
audience is in the digital era is changing.
• Convergent media has brought about this
fragmentation.
• This means that the potential audience group for
any particular film has been ‘broken up’.
• There’s less point in the UK distributors of Quantum
of Solace paying for an expensive TV ad during
Coronation Street if they know that fewer members
of their target audience will be watching.

4. User generated content…
Social networking…
Rolling news…
Instant messenging…
Film piracy…
What different kinds of entertainment have arrived since the 1970s to fragment film
audiences?

5. Audience Fragmentation
• On the other hand, Csigo (2007) sees this
trend as a ‘duality’ working in two ways.
• Convergence leads to the traditional mass
audience fragmenting into smaller niche
audiences but also ‘falling together’ in
other ways by becoming more intimate
members of smaller group.
• In other words there are less big-
budget, blockbusters now, and more films
aimed at promoting a ‘cult’ audience.

6. How do producers and distributors use converging media to create ‘cult’ audiences?

7. Audience Fragmentation
• In this new climate the film industry is desperately
trying to provide 360-degree branding for their films -
to surround us with them across all the various
converged media forms that we come into contact
with.
• Csigo suggests that media institutions like the film
industry are no longer interested in keeping the
audience together, but in ‘triggering engagement’.
• Converging media can lead to both control by the film
industry - as the various film companies get bigger and
bigger and control more and more of the industry but
also resistance by the consumers, who now get to
produce their own films and upload them onto
YouTube.

8. Audience Fragmentation
• For the film industry this imposes huge changes.
• The media world changes from a value chain where
films are made and distributed to audiences - to a
social network - a complex system where
producers and audiences are mixed up – think
about how the music industry colonised MySpace or
how big companies have populated the Internet.
• Another way of describing this is the shift from
'push media' (where producers push films at us and
we receive and consume them passively) to 'pull
media' (whereby we decide what we want to do with
the media and access it in ways that suit us).

9. The new media world in comparison to the
old media world is…
... richer, more diverse and immeasurably more complex because of the
number of producers, the quantity of the interactions between them and
their products, the speed with which people in this space can communicate
with one another and the pace of development made possible by
ubiquitous networking.
Reuters (2007)
Q. Explain, using specific examples, how the
expansion of digital media has been an improvement
for audiences…

10. During the 1990s, the shift to digital transmission of all forms of
data has increased at an accelerated pace. This shift to computer
language has already redefined the music industry and will
overtake film, radio, and television production and distribution. In
the future virtually all forms of data and information will be
produced and stored in interchangeable digital bits.
Herman and McChesney (1997)
Digital media will change the relationship
between us and everything else.

11. Corporate Intrusion into
Cyberspace
• If it seems strange that the big corporations are keen to either
take over or form partnerships with websites that threaten them
by distributing material for free, then consider this.
• UK only internet advertising generates around £2 billion a year -
more than 50 % of the money made from TV ads.
• This figure has increased greatly since 2007. Why?
• More UK homes are now equipped with broadband. This results
in an increase in time spent online compared to other media
(such as TV) and this has in turn created a huge increase in
money invested in online adverts - a fairly simple equation.
• Currently, Google alone 'clean up' around 45% of all the revenue
from online ads in the UK.
• About £1 billion per year.