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End of audience theory


  • Clay Shirky argues that audiences in today’s online age are no longer passive consumers of media content.  How far is this true of online audiences ?

  • An active audience engages, interprets and responds to a media text in different ways and is capable of challenging the ideas encoded in it.  
  • A passive audience is more likely to accept the messages encoded in a media text without challenge and are therefore more likely to be directly affected by the messages.
Prosumer= someone who both consumes and produces media

what is the theory?
  • For the first time young audiences are watching less TV due to the fast, interactive media that they have become exposed to
  • The most important part of networking is our access to each other- social media allows us to be connected to each other
  • Social media allows us to not only share media but create it, the lack of quality in a lot of posts allows us to make it quickly and share it quickly as well, the fact that it is only popular for a short amount of time doesn't matter as the product took such a short amount of time to make
  • Shirky identifies this through the phrase "you can play this game too"
  • If you buy the means of consumption you also own the means of production
  • We have balanced the skill of sharing and consuming and connecting with one another 
  • Media has become a cheap and globally available took for online sharing 
 the idea that internet and digital technologies have had a profound effect on the relations between media and individuals 
Audience behaviour 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 – they both deeply care about the products they make and can help them work together.When they work together in this way, audiences can make more content than producers – Wikipedia is a good example of this. In the ‘old’ media, centralised producers addressed atomised 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 behaviour is gone. Now, behaviour is variable across different sites, with some of the audience creating content, some synthesising content and some consuming content. The ‘old’ media created a mass audience. The ‘new’ media provide a platform for people to provide value for each other.
These amateur producers have different motivations to those of professionals – they value autonomy, competence, membership and generosity. User-generated content creates emotional connection between people who care about something. This can generate a cognitive surplus – for example, Wikipedia can aggregate people’s free time and talent to produce value that no traditional medium could match.

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