Media Audiences: how social media has changed the ways we consume media

A few weeks ago, a friend and I went to see Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a film with a run time spanning three hours and thirty-four minutes. Despite an intermission at 100 minutes in, my body and mind still felt as if it didn’t have enough time to reset. As a young child the cinema was my favourite experience – the enchanting atmosphere and ability to collectively watch a film with a group of strangers creating media consumption meaningful. Although we both recognised that we enjoyed the film, it’s length meant that I continuously got distracted and fidgety, and my friend even fell asleep three quarters through. When I was younger, my parents would joke that I turned into a statue whilst viewing films at the cinema, the atmosphere would have a complete and utter hold on me.

Recognising this experience is important when understanding the agency we have as audience members. This experience can neither be labelled as positive or negative, but more of a mix. Whilst enjoying the film, my body fought the ability to concentrate and entirely take in the story and messaging, even with it split into two sittings. This is not a direct critique of the pacing of the film, but rather the pacing in relation to my own ability to consume long-form media.

As explored in this week’s lecture, TikTok has had a radical impact on the way people consume media, particularly regarding attention. Dubey (2023) explored this concept through research into the evident relationship between the rising consumption of short-form videos, particularly on TikTok and Instagram, and the declining attention spans of the current population, leading to a decrease in audiences engaging with long form content. Studies have found that “the average attention span has decreased significantly over the past decade” from 12 seconds in 2000, to 8 seconds in 2018 (Dubey 2023, p. 5). The subsequent impact of this on content producers and marketers, suggests that audiences do have significant influence over the creation of video content. This is evident when considering the dramatic shift of social media influencers going from long YouTube videos to shorter videos on TikTok over the better part of the last decade.

This shift of cinema being an immersive experience with limited distractions to becoming a place where I struggle to concentrate, raises the question of how this relates to the idea of being an active versus passive audience member. Studying the transition from passive to active involves “the shift from thinking about media audiences in terms of their receptions and consumption of specific media to thinking about those audiences in terms of what they do with the media” (Turnbull 2014, p. 67). The common conception of adolescents being one of the groups of people most “at risk” of media “corruption” suggests that we are more likely to become passive.

Recognising that this constant consumption of short-form content significantly impacts the attention spans of adolescents, suggests that we are inadvertent examples of the historical assumptions of media audiences as passive. These popular social media platforms have easily and subconsciously influenced the way I choose to consume movies and television shows. However, my ability to discuss this demonstrates the level of awareness I have as an audience member and conscious consumer of media, therefore allowing me to become an active audience member.

References

Dubey, A 2023, ‘Analysing content consumption with respect to trends in attention span’,

Master’s thesis, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, India.

Turnbull, S 2014, ‘Imagining the audience’, in S Cunningham & S Turnbull (eds), The Media

and Communications in Australia, 4th edn, Routledge, London, pp. 59-72