‘Audience Evolution’: A Review

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences by Philip Napoli seeks to understand the socially constructed audience and how audiences over time change as a result of evolving technology. Napoli provides an analytical perspective on the implications of sociocultural patterns within the media world. 

Napoli offers a framework, which he states comprises the transformational process that media has played on audiences over time. Whether in business or in the home the way media is relayed to the general public has dynamically shifted the conventional paradigm, according to Napoli. There are certain drivers, as he calls them that push the evolution of the audience forward. These drivers make a difference in how media has played a pivotal role in exposing audiences to certain content. Napoli compares the traditional approach versus the contemporary methodology of media and their understanding of audience consumption. Napoli is providing a reasonable basis for why what used to be the norm regarding commercial media has altered significantly due to a more interactive audience and companies understanding how audiences rely on a variety of media in today's cultural marketplace.

As a result of the ever-changing media environment, companies can analyze massive amounts of data to determine the most effective ways of reaching audiences through several different mediums. There is no finite offering, Napoli, describes how media organizations can demonstrate their forms of communications to audiences. More concrete insight can be gleaned from a broad array of data as a result of the changes in audience preferences and consumption patterns over time.

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences provides an in-depth perspective on how commercial media industries operate navigating the reader in understanding how and why audiences have evolved as a result of technology continuously changing within the realm of film, radio, television and print media and the transformational implications of how these changes have drastically affected the way media is packaged to them. Napoli tries to reason as to why commercial media industries initially encountered several forms of resistance from their stakeholders as a result of the shift in audience autonomy. Ascertaining reasons regarding this shift is a core part of Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences and gives a superior understanding of the characteristics that factor into media content and how it shapes communication decisions. 

Napoli writes, “media content - which we can define broadly in terms of the full range of news, information, and entertainment media available to audiences is a product with a distinctive capacity for cultural and political influence.  Wide-Ranging literature has developed around the issue of media effects, and this literature has at various times demonstrated significant effects in areas ranging from political attitudes and beliefs to cultural values to perceptions of social problems and even other social groups. By outlining the profound nature of influence that media has on audiences, the reader can identify clearer and make the bridge between cultures, media and why the two go hand in hand as a result of the expansion of the communication industry. 

Readers of Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences will find that Napoli's ideas are constructed from the eventual forces of transformation that come as a result of changing dynamics within the media sector. Those looking to examine ways in which mass communication audiences are evolving and the repercussions of this evolution with specific analysis and well-documented research through the viewpoints of several media theorists, will find his discussion an agreeable one that is largely based on cultural, economic and technological conditions within society. From his discussion on audience autonomy to a chapter on the market information regime and its interconnectedness with interests, preferences, and tastes within audiences, Napoli’s viewpoints are solidly well-written and delivered in a critical, yet engaging manner that makes for an interesting read.