From active audience to passive data: Dominant conceptualizations of internet users

Abstract

Within wider approaches to defining audience in communication studies, this article aims to provide critical analysis of the terms which describe new relations that appear between individuals and respective digital communication centres. On the basis of the explicit and implicit understanding of the agency of internet users, we identify several approaches and terms characteristic of them. The first group includes concepts where power is relatively equally distributed among the actors of digital communication, with the terms such are user generated content and citizen journalism at the forefront. Terms convergence culture and produsage belong to the second group, and they see the networked individuals as empowered challengers of the linear communication flows. The third group, defines users as abstract sets of big social data without the individual agency. The fourth group, with the terms such are small acts of engagement, locates user agency in the practices of sense-making and everyday life. The key point of divergence between these approaches is found in the answers they provide to the following questions: who has the power, over what and how it is evaluated in the totality of digital communication.