New Media, the New Zimbabwe

The 'Oxford English Dictionary' definition for an audience as "an assembly of listeners" appears to be an insufficient description in relation to new media. Nowadays audiences influence, and even sometimes dictate the types of content they are going to consumer. The controls of audiences are apparent across various media platforms such as television and internet websites.

With the proliferation of advertising, television programmes are now produced with the main intention of catering to specific audience demographics. These demographics are solely based on the possibilities for an increase in revenue via advertising. For the most part, creative expression in television programmes have now gone. An example of the lack in creativity in television programmes is the amount of adaptations from the "Twilight" film series. Adaptations such as "True Blood" and "The Vampire Diaries" have become vehicles for advertising to similar audiences from the "Twilight" film series. Therefore audiences, to an extent, now dictate the content produced and presented to them because of the importance of advertising. If the television programmes do not appeal to different mass audiences types then advertising decreases and consequently the series is cancelled.

Similarly the internet is a media platform for audience dictation. This is because of the openness of the internet amalgamated with the anonymity of the internet. These two factors allow audiences to democratically voice their opinions. "YouTube" is a website where audiences control what is considered to be good-quality content and what is not. The quality of a video is instantly shown, simply by the amounts of audience views it has, with the actual physical size of the writing indicating the amount of views, being larger than any other information on the page of the video except for the title. Comments also have a significant contribution to the success of a video on "Youtube". I experienced this personally when uploading some of my own remixes of well known songs onto "Youtube". Within twenty minutes I had my first comment, a positive one. However six minutes later I received a comment so negative and brutal, that I was tempted to take down my small collection of videos. The open forum presented combined with the anonymous pseudo names that users hide behind allow audiences to possess a power they never had with previous media platforms.