About: Audience fragmentation

Audience fragmentation describes the extent to which audiences are distributed across media offerings. Traditional outlets, such as broadcast networks, have long feared that technological and regulatory changes would increase competition and erode their audiences. Social scientists have been concerned about the loss of a common cultural forum and rise of extremist media. Hence, many representations of fragmentation have focused on media outlets as the unit of analysis and reported the status of their audiences. But fragmentation can also be conceptualized at the level of individuals and audiences, revealing different features of the phenomenon. Webster and Ksiazek have argued there are three types of fragmentation: media-centric, user-centric, and audience-centric