Book Review

By Richard HAWKINS and Isabelle POTTIER

„ Philip M. NAPOLI
Audience Evolution
New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010
by Richard HAWKINS

We live in an era when almost daily some new challenge emerges to what,
for a couple of generations now, communications scholars have referred to
as the media industries. In this very concise, tightly argued and very timely
volume, Philip Napoli makes an important contribution to understanding
these industry dynamics in the current milieu and, indeed, raises many
pertinent questions as to whether the "new media" have much connection to
"media" as they have been understood in the past. In pursuing this point,
and in contrast to a prevailing emphasis upon technology as the driving force
for these changes, the author focuses instead upon audiences and how their
relationships with technology evolve. The focus on the social construction of
audiences, rather than of technology or organizations, offers a refreshingly
different perspective and the author explores it a provocative and scholarly
way.

Napoli is careful to ground his analysis in a long tradition of critical media

studies concerning the media-audience relationship, and does not make the
all too common error of assuming that just because the technological
environment evolves, previous observations and theories about the forces
engaged in that environment somehow become irrelevant. Instead, he
reintroduces and re-interprets the ideas of several leading media scholars of
the 1970s and 1980s in this new context. In particular he draws attention
back to the "audience commodity" debate, instigated by the ideas of Dallas
Smythe, and taken up by Jhally, Liess, Murdock, Livant and many others. It
is striking how these ideas, conceived at a time when television was the
most advanced technology available to most consumers, and which
sounded overly radical and polemical to many scholars of the day, appear in
many ways to fit current developments like a glove. After all, what are You
Tube and Facebook users doing if not directly producing the commodities
that sustain these enterprises? And producing them "in substance"! This is

COMMUNICATIONS & STRATEGIES, 81, 1st Q. 2011, p. 185. www.comstrat.org

186 No. 81, 1st Q. 2011

emblematic of Napoli's central hypothesis that in order to understand how

the media are evolving, you have to look first at how the audience is evolving
as a factor of production.

For this reviewer at least, the key stand-out message in this book concerns
not so much the relationship between audiences and evolving technology,
but the role of measurement, not only in exploring audience characteristics
and dynamics, but in defining and redefining what an audience is to the
complex cluster of business enterprises that constitute "the media" as
conventionally understood. Napoli's basic proposition here is that the goal of
media as a business has changed from, as he puts it, "reaching as many
eyeballs as possible", to understanding and exploiting the qualities of a
multitude of relationships between audiences and media. He then tracks the
practice of audience measurement since early in its inception, noting that
early decisions to focus on measuring audience size were predicated more
on how analysts had come to define "audience" than on the lack of ability to
measure other aspects. When considering the implications of the marriage
between rapidly advancing data techniques and the availability of massive
amounts of virtually nano-level data about everyone and everything, Napoli's
observations and arguments are salutary. Many have commented upon the
now ingrained data fetishism of contemporary practice in management and
policy, and on the problem of over-interpreting the accuracy of any
measurement, especially where hideously complex social relationships and
patterns are concerned. Napoli opens the door to an intriguing possibility
that, at some point, the contemporary media could be strangled by its own
data much as its predecessors appear to have been. Thus, he offers a
challenge to scholars not to become too enamored of the exploding range of
technical possibilities to explore audience behavior, and not to let them inject
the same kinds of data-driven biases into their analysis that bedeviled much
earlier scholarship on media audiences.

Perhaps the one point that this reviewer found somewhat odd, is that
throughout the book, the author anchors discussion of the media-audience
relationship almost exclusively in or around "content". This is effective
insofar as certainly the nature and scope of "content" has changed
dramatically. Arguably, however, the individuals who make up the audience
for content also use the core digital technologies and devices for many
purposes that are not associated necessarily with content consumption in
either the old or the emerging new meanings. A tendency can be seen,
explicitly or by implication, to tag every form of IT usage as content
consumption, which in the end may be too broad to be useful analytically.
We might also consider, for example, that the business models surrounding
most electronic devices involves instigating a level of engagement between
users (audiences?) and the device (e.g. through perpetual learning curves
and cycles of updates and obsolescence) that establishes a powerful,
interactive and lasting relationship over and above the apps or services as
Book Review 187

such. The part of Napoli's argument that was missing for me, or not as well
advanced, concerns the relationship between the content industries and the
equipment, infrastructure and device industries, and specifically where the
borders might lie, or not, between the use of technology and the
consumption of content.

To conclude, this is a book that will appeal not only to scholars in audience
research, media marketing and communication, but also to professionals in
various industry sectors and in the public services. There is a significant
"public interest" dimension to this book in that it illuminates evolving
practices in contemporary media that have implications for the privacy,
security and property rights of individuals. Although the policy issues are
discussed only in a US context, readers in other countries surely will
recognize the essence of the arguments as they pertain in other
jurisdictions. The volume would be an ideal candidate in my view for
selection as a text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in media
analysis and management. The extraordinarily comprehensive and well
balanced bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. As a whole
package, the book provides an invaluable roadmap to further scholarship in
this important and dynamic field.

„ Daniel LE METAYER (Ed.)

Les technologies de l'information au service des droits : opportunités,
défis, limites (Putting Information Technology at the Service of Rights:
Opportunities, Challenges, Limitations)
Publisher: Bruylant (Bruxelles), December 2010, ISBN 978-2-8027-2960-0
Collection Cahiers du Centre de recherche informatique et droit (CRID) no. 25,
Namur (Belgium)
by Isabelle POTTIER

This book, result of a symposium on the PRIAM (*) project, focuses on how
to use information technology in the service of law. Can we develop tools
that can enhance people's rights? Is the use of information technology
raising many questions for lawyers and IT professionals? It also addresses
general questions about law and technology: how can tools actually
strengthen law/rights? How far can they be used? What technical and legal
constraints must be imposed to avoid jeopardizing the safety or legal rights
of individuals? These questions are followed by specific questions on digital
goods, digital rights management and protection of copyright, protection of

(*) PRIAM : PRivacy Issues in AMbient intelligence. Collaborative project funded by INRIA and
involving teams from INRIA (ACES, AMAZONES and LICIT), Faculty of Law, Saint Etienne and
the University of Twente.
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