The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures -- from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media. Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated -- that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere.

About the Author :
Coming soon... Timothy Andrés Pabon is an English- and Spanish-speaking voice-over artist who has worked extensively in advertising and audiobook narration. He has had acting roles on House of Cards and has also been a costar on HBO's acclaimed series The Wire opposite country music legend Steve Earl. As a stage actor, he has worked off-Broadway at the June Havoc Theatre, and his regional credits include Center Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre, Arena Stage, the Hippodrome, Olney Theatre, Rep Stage, and GALA Hispanic Theatre.

Review :
Webster makes important theoretical contributions in this book that will inform a wealth of testable hypotheses about audience choice and the influence of messages in a fragmented, segmented, media environment...Webster at once offers an exciting characterization of a dynamic marketplace of attention as well as a careful check on theorists and empiricists making broad claims about the dire consequences of media choice or micro-targeting." -- "International Journal of Press/Politics" "The Marketplace of Attention is a worthy addition to cross-disciplinary shelves. It's lucid, accessible and thoughtful--and in our fast-moving media market, who can ask for more than that?" -- "Times Higher Education (London)" "Webster provides an astute explanation of how the transformation from a media world with limited choice to one of bountiful supply is affecting audiences, media, and society...This is an important book for understanding media audiences and behavior." -- "Robert G. Picard, director of research, Reuters Institute, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford"