James G. Webster (born 1951) is a professor and audience researcher at Northwestern University. [1] Webster's publications have documented patterns of audience behavior, sometimes challenging widely held misconceptions. He has also made foundational contributions to audience theory and the methods of audience analysis.
He earned a B.A. from Trinity College (Connecticut). After two years as an audience analyst at Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), he went to Indiana University Bloomington where he earned his Ph.D. There, he studied with Keith Mielke, who would later become Senior Vice President of Research at CTW, [2] Jack Wakshlag, who would later become Chief Research Officer [3] at Turner Broadcasting, and Dolf Zillmann, a pioneer in media psychology. He joined the faculty at Northwestern University in 1986. Webster served as the Senior Associate Dean of the Northwestern University School of Communication for 15 years. During that time, he was instrumental in creating the University’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in Media, Technology and Society. [4] He directed over a dozen doctoral dissertations, and in 2014 received the School’s Clarence Simon Award for outstanding teaching and mentoring. In 2015 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Scholarship Award [5] from the Broadcast Education Association. In 2020, he was designated Professor Emeritus at Northwestern. The following year, he was named a Fellow of the International Communication Association. [6]
Webster’s publications have been widely cited. [7] His books appear in Chinese, Korean and Indian editions. He has lectured at universities around the world including the London School of Economics, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Zurich, and the Communication University of China. His work includes empirical studies of audience behavior, interventions in audience theory, and novel approaches to analyzing data.
Webster’s empirical work typically uses secondary analyses of large datasets to document law-like regularities in audience behavior. Early studies identified the determinants of television audience flow. His 1997 book, The Mass Audience, describes patterns of audience behavior based on analyses of television ratings data. [8] Webster has also produced widely cited research on audience fragmentation which has demonstrated that “beneath the veneer” of fragmentation, audiences move readily among popular and unpopular offerings. [9] [10]
Webster’s findings have often challenged commonly held beliefs. For example, The Long Tail, a popular book written by Chris Anderson, argued that hit-driven culture would devolve into niches and become “massively parallel." [11] Webster has found that cultural consumption remains concentrated on a relatively small number of mainstream outlets, with much audience duplication among all outlets. [10] He argued that the persistence of popular offerings and high levels of duplication were producing a “massively overlapping culture.” [12] Two of Webster’s students published an analysis of global internet use suggesting that the Great Firewall was not responsible for isolating Chinese web users. [13] In 2015, the International Communication Association, named it the best article of the year. In collaboration with those same colleagues, Webster adapted the concept of flow to digital media, to argue that unseen architectures of choice “nudge” the flow of attention on the internet. [14]
Media researchers commonly believe that audience behavior is best explained by micro-level factors such as individual preferences. In a 1983 article, “A theory of television program choice,” [15] Webster claimed that preferences were expressed within the structure of available program options and that these structures were important determinants of audience behavior. By the early twentieth-first century the widespread use of digital media, which seemed to empower people, rejuvenated the idea that individual preferences drove audience behavior. In “The duality of media,” Webster adapted structuration theory to argue that macro-level structural factors were still critical in shaping patterns of public attention to digital media. [16] In 2012, the "duality" article won the Denis McQuail Award for best article advancing communication theory. [17] The fullest expression of his theory of audience behavior is in The Marketplace of Attention, [18] which won the 2015 Robert G. Picard Book Award. [19]
Webster has also written extensively about measurement and the analysis of audience data. Ratings Analysis, first published in 1991, is in its fourth edition and is a standard text on audience measurement and analytics. [20] Starting in 2010, Webster and his students began using social network analysis to study audience behavior. [21] Their approach, which uses data on audience duplication to build “audience networks", has been adopted by others to study news consumption and international audience formation. [22] [23] [24]
Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media Studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences, and communication studies.
Agenda setting describes the "ability to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda". The theory suggests that the media has the ability to shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence. Nations judged to be endowed with more political power receive higher media exposure. The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc. The primary causal mechanism is a straightforward one: audiences perceive an issue as being more important the more media attention it receives. For instance, news consumers will believe that immigration is a significant issue at that time, even if they don't have strong opinions, if there is consistent journalistic coverage of the topic over a few months. The evolution of agenda-setting and laissez-faire components of communication research encouraged a fast pace growth and expansion of these perspectives. Agenda-setting has phases that need to be in a specific order in order for it to succeed.
Cultivation theory is a sociological and communications framework to examine the lasting effects of media, primarily television. The central hypothesis of cultivation analysis is that people who spend more time watching television are more likely to perceive the real world in a way as more commonly depicted in television messages as compared to those who watch less television, but are otherwise comparable in major demographic features.
Uses and gratifications theory (UGT) is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs. UGT is an audience-centered approach to understanding mass communication. Diverging from other media effect theories that question "what does media do to people?", UGT instead focuses on "what do people do with media?" It postulates that media is a highly available product and that audiences are the consumers of the product.
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
Mass communication is the process of imparting and exchanging information through mass media to large population segments. It utilizes various forms of media as technology has made the dissemination of information more efficient. Primary examples of platforms utilized and examined include journalism and advertising. Mass communication, unlike interpersonal communication and organizational communication, focuses on particular resources transmitting information to numerous receivers. The study of mass communication is chiefly concerned with how the content and information that is being mass communicated persuades or affects the behavior, attitude, opinion, or emotion of people receiving the information.
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.
Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media, most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
Mean world syndrome is a proposed cognitive bias wherein people may perceive the world to be more dangerous than it actually is. This is due to long-term moderate to heavy exposure to violence-related content in mass media.
Media psychology is the branch and specialty field in psychology that focuses on the interaction of human behavior with media and technology. Media psychology is not limited to mass media or media content; it includes all forms of mediated communication and media technology-related behaviors, such as the use, design, impact, and sharing behaviors. This branch is a relatively new field of study because of advancement in technology. It uses various methods of critical analysis and investigation to develop a working model of a user's perception of media experience. These methods are used for society as a whole and on an individual basis. Media psychologists are able to perform activities that include consulting, design, and production in various media like television, video games, films, and news broadcasting. Media psychologists are not considered to be those who are featured in media, rather than those who research, work or contribute to the field.
Social polarization is the segregation within a society that emerges when factors such as income inequality, real-estate fluctuations and economic displacement result in the differentiation of social groups from high-income to low-income. It is a state and/or a tendency denoting the growth of groups at the extremities of the social hierarchy and the parallel shrinking of groups around its middle.
Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly used digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones, callbacks, and on-hold mobile ring tones. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing can manifest in thought or interpersonal communication. Frames in thought consist of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality. Frames in communication consist of the communication of frames between different actors. Framing is a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans. Framing is an integral part of conveying and processing data daily. Successful framing techniques can be used to reduce the ambiguity of intangible topics by contextualizing the information in such a way that recipients can connect to what they already know.
Active Audience Theory argues that media audiences do not just receive information passively but are actively involved, often unconsciously, in making sense of the message within their personal and social contexts. Decoding of a media message may therefore be influenced by such things as family background, beliefs, values, culture, interests, education and experiences. Decoding of a message means how well a person is able to effectively receive and understand a message. Active Audience Theory is particularly associated with mass-media usage and is a branch of Stuart Hall's Encoding and Decoding Model.
Gerald Samuel Lesser was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. Lesser was one of the chief advisers to the Children's Television Workshop in the development and content of the educational programming included in the children's television program Sesame Street. At Harvard, he was chair of the university's Human Development Program for 20 years, which focused on cross-cultural studies of child rearing, and studied the effects of media on young children. In 1974, he wrote Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street, which chronicled how Sesame Street was developed and put on the air. Lesser developed many of the research methods the CTW used throughout its history and for other TV shows. In 1968, before the debut of Sesame Street, he led a series of content seminars, an important part of the "CTW Model", which incorporated educational pedagogy and research into TV scripts and was used to develop other educational programs and organizations all over the world. He died in 2010, at the age of eighty-four, and was survived by his wife, a daughter, a son, and a grandchild.
In 1969, the children's television show Sesame Street premiered on the National Educational Television network in the United States. Unlike earlier children's programming, the show's producers used research and over 1,000 studies and experiments to create the show and test its impact on its young viewers' learning. By the end of the program's first season, Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the organization founded to oversee Sesame Street production, had developed what came to be called "the CTW model": a system of planning, production, and evaluation that combined the expertise of researchers and early childhood educators with that of the program's writers, producers, and directors.
Joseph B. Walther is the Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society and the Director of the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on social and interpersonal dynamics of computer-mediated communication, in groups, personal relationships, organizational and educational settings. He is noted for creating social information processing theory in 1992 and the hyperpersonal model in 1996.
Multi-communicating is the act of managing many conversations at one time. The term was coined by Reinsch, Turner, and Tinsley (2008), who proposed that simultaneous conversations can be conducted using an ever-increasing array of media, including face-to-face, phone, and email tools for communication. This practice allows individuals to utilize two or more technologies to interact with each other.
Audience flow describes how people move through media offerings in a temporal sequence. Stable patterns of audience flow were first identified in the early twentieth century when radio broadcasters noticed the tendency of audiences to stay tuned to one program after another. By the 1950s, television audiences were demonstrating similar patterns of flow. Not long thereafter, social scientists began to quantify patterns of television audience flow and its determinants. Audience flow continues to characterize linear media consumption. Newer forms of nonlinear media evidence analogous patterns of “attention flow.”
Audience fragmentation describes the extent to which audiences are distributed across media offerings. Traditional outlets, such as broadcast networks, have long feared that technological and regulatory changes would increase competition and erode their audiences. Social scientists have been concerned about the loss of a common cultural forum and rise of extremist media. Hence, many representations of fragmentation have focused on media outlets as the unit of analysis and reported the status of their audiences. But fragmentation can also be conceptualized at the level of individuals and audiences, revealing different features of the phenomenon. Webster and Ksiazek have argued there are three types of fragmentation: media-centric, user-centric, and audience-centric
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