imjingjing

Media companies have historically been relatively unconcerned about and even disdainful of individuals in their audiences. Publishers produced newspaper in ways and at times that was convenient for themselves. Television channels offered programs on a take-it-when-offered basis—Too bad if you visited your mother and didn’t see it. Journalists and public service broadcasters conceived the public as an unkempt mass that need to be educated and led to think correctly and do the right things. Audiences were things to aggregated and sold as commodities, so media executives pretended audiences were a unified, stable group in sales pitches and that advertisers were purchasing the same group of people hour after hour, day after day, week after week. The reality is that audiences have always been individuals that changed constantly, but media companies needed to pretend otherwise in order to aggregate them and portray them as a unified group for sales pitches. A TV channel would tout itself as ...