Now that’s becoming the exception, and for many, an uncomfortable one. In the past, one could turn the media off-put it down, go offline. Essentially, we arrive at Turkle’s “alone together” state. With cell phones and social devices, we are connected to screens and virtually to friends worldwide, but we may forfeit an authentic connection to the world. In other words, in a car we don’t use our feet-we hit the road and our limbs go into limbo. The renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1968, 73) saw the potential for this more than 40 years ago when he observed that augmentation leads to amputation. In her book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle (2011) points out that at this time of maximum social connection, we may be experiencing fewer genuine connections than ever before. Like Narcissus, we are drawn to ourselves online and to the siren of ever-more social connections. In the run-up to the final episode of the American television drama Breaking Bad, the series was drawing up to 100,000 tweets a day, a clear indication that the audience was as interested in what it had to say as what the producers were creating.Īll this connected conversation is changing audiences as well. The head programmer for Fox Television Network similarly has a readout that gives an in-depth analysis of audience behavior, interest, and sentiment. Writers for the blog website Gawker watch real-time web consumption statistics on all of their posts-and they instantly learn how to craft content to best command an audience. This social data layer reveals so much about our behavior that it programs programmers as much as they program us. And like anyone suddenly thrust in the spotlight, we’ve been learning a lot, and fast. The audience, once passive, is now cast in a more central and influential role than ever before. Today the very act of consuming media creates an entirely new form of it: the social data layer that tells the story of what we like, what we watch, who and what we pay attention to, and our location when doing so. In just one generation the Internet changed the way we make and experience nearly all of media.
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