The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age

JAMES G. WEBSTER

Structuring a Marketplace of Attention

At the conference “The Hyperlinked Society” at the Annenberg School for Communication, Eric Picard of Microsoft asserted that with the exception of maintaining personal networks, people blogged for one of two reasons: fame or fortune. It seems to me that those motives propel most media makers, old and new. And the recipe for achieving either objective begins with attracting people's attention. Patterns of attention, in turn, establish the boundaries within which the economic and social consequences of the new media environment are realized. This essay invites the reader to think about the hyperlinked environment as a marketplace of attention. I begin with a brief description of market conditions, outline a theoretical framework for thinking about the marketplace, and then use that framework to explore two socially consequential patterns of public attention: fragmentation and polarization. The former addresses the overall dispersion of cultural consumption. The latter addresses the tendency of people to retreat into comfortable “enclaves” of information and entertainment. Finally, I'll suggest questions and concerns about a hyper-linked society that I believe deserve our attention.

Market Conditions

The hyperlinked environment can be thought of as a virtual marketplace in which the purveyors of content compete with one another for the attention of the public. Three realities set the conditions for the marketplace. I take these to be axiomatic.

Convergence. A popular term that means different things to different people,¹ convergence here describes the move toward fully integrated media delivery systems. While the conference focused on media that have emerged in the hyperlinked environment, like blogs, social networking sites, and other forms of user-generated content (e.g., Wikipedia, YouTube), all content is increasingly being distributed on the same high-speed networks. Traditional media, including newspapers, radio, television, and movies, are moving into the hyperlinked space. Consumers, in turn, function in an environment where they can move fluidly among what were once discrete media outlets. In the long term, it makes sense to think about a common media environment where all manner of content is readily available to consumers.

Abundance. The sheer volume of content is vast and increasing at an explosive rate. Exact numbers are hard to come by, in part because they change so quickly. At this writing, Technorati is tracking some sixty million blogs, MySpace has over one hundred million accounts, and the number of podcasts and video clips in circulation seem without end. A great many of their authors undoubtedly seek public attention. Once the delivery of more traditional broadcast content becomes ubiquitous, it will add perhaps one hundred million hours a year of new programming to the mix.² All this will be in addition to whatever repositories of movies, music, and news are available on demand. Media are, if nothing else, abundant.

Scarcity. While the supply of content seems endless, the supply of human attention to consume that content is not. There are a limited number of Internet users in the world and a limited number of waking hours. The problem of too much content and too little time is not new. In the early 1970s, Herbert Simon famously noted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”³ Obviously, the problem is more acute today and getting worse.

As a result, public attention is spread thin. A relatively small handful of items will achieve widespread notice, but most will not. Those that do will have the potential to produce the fame and/or fortune that their authors desire. Richard Lanham recently wrote: “Assume that, in an information economy, the real scarce commodity will always be human attention and that attracting that attention will be the necessary precondition of social change. And the real source of wealth.”⁴ What is less understood is how public attention actually takes shape in the new media environment. The following sections outline a theoretical framework for structuring the marketplace of attention and the patterns of consumption that emerge as a result.

Toward a Theory of the Marketplace

Adopting a marketplace metaphor may suggest that the operative theory is grounded exclusively in the rational choice model of neoclassical economics. I have in mind a somewhat more flexible framework borrowed from sociology, drawing especially on Giddens's theory of structuration.⁵ While structuration has been adapted to explain the use of information technology within organizations,⁶ it hasn't been used for a more wide-ranging consideration of media consumption. The principle components of this framework are agents, structures, and the interaction between them that is characterized either as “duality of structure”⁷ or “dualism.”⁸ These provide the conceptual tools needed to imagine a marketplace of attention.

Agents. In this context, agents are the people who consume media. Their use of media is purposeful and done at a time and place of their choosing, though in practice, it is often embedded in the routines of day-to-day life. Media consumption is rational in the sense that it satisfies various needs and preferences. Agents know a good deal about the media environments within which they operate, reflect on how best to use those environments, and can be expected to give a reasoned account of their choices. It doesn't follow, however, that they know all there is to know about the environment or the causes and consequences of their own behaviors. In fact, they are complicit in many unintended consequences of which they are probably ignorant.

The marketplace has far too many offerings for any one person to be perfectly aware of his or her options. It is for this reason that actions can deviate from the rational, utility-maximizing viewer behavior assumed by traditional economic models of program choice.⁹ Rather, agents operate with “bounded rationality.”¹⁰ In part, they deal with the impossibility of knowing everything by using habits and routines. Television viewers confine themselves to idiosyncratic “channel repertoires.”¹¹ These are manageable subsets of ten to fifteen familiar channels. Repertoires tend to level off even as the total number of available channels skyrockets. The hyperlinked analog is bookmarks that guide users to previously helpful or interesting sites. Invoking these time-saving habits minimizes “search costs,” but they may cause people to miss content or services that might better gratify their needs and desires. In Simon's term, consumers “satisfice” rather than maximize.¹² The world of hyperlinking, of course, offers users more powerful tools for finding content, which I address below as an example of duality of structure.

Structures. Structures—or, in some bodies of literature, “institutions”—cover a multitude of macrolevel constructs, including social conventions, language, legal systems, and organizations. Giddens described these as “rules and resources.”¹³ They can be internalized by an agent or stand apart as external constraints. Either way, they are more durable than agents to the extent that they exist before and after individual actors appear on the scene. I see structures primarily as the resources that people use to enact their media preferences. This includes the technologies that power the hyperlinked environment, as well as the organizations and producers that animate those systems with content and services. For the most part, governments and media industries provide the necessary structures. Of course, they have their own motives for doing so and attempt to manage patterns of attention toward those ends.

The case of user-generated content, so often the topic of conversation at the conference, presents an interesting wrinkle in the neat division between agents and structures. While “distributed construction” is hardly new,¹⁴ the hyperlinked environment enables it as never before. Benkler has argued that we are witnessing the dawn of a “networked information economy,” in which decentralized peer production will shift the balance of power away from established media industries.¹⁵ An important motivation for this form of production is what he calls the “Joe Einstein” phenomenon, in which people “give away information for free in return for status, benefits to reputation,” and so on.¹⁶ Surely, contributors to this volume will recognize the syndrome. It's hard to know what sort of equilibrium will eventually emerge between industrialized and consumer-generated production. But for the purposes of this discussion, the question seems moot.

Whether the producer seeks fame or fortune, the operative strategy is to attract attention by catering to people's preferences and/or to direct attention by exploiting the structures of the environment. To do this, purveyors constantly monitor the marketplace, judging failures and successes and otherwise looking for opportunities to gain advantage. Suffering from their own form of bounded rationality, they can only respond to what they “see.” The sophistication of their surveillance depends largely on the size and sophistication of the institutions. Typically, the actions of agents are most salient when they are aggregated to form markets, or publics, or audiences. These are what Ettema and Whitney have referred to as “institutionally effective audiences.”¹⁷ It is this manifestation of agency that most effectively fuels the duality of structure.

Duality of Structure. There is a tendency in many quarters of academe to attribute social behavior almost entirely to purposeful, reasoning agents or, conversely, to macrolevel social structures. This schism is also evident in the literature on media consumption.¹⁸ Duality of structure suggests that the two are mutually constituted;¹⁹ that is, people use structures as vehicles to exercise their agency and, in doing so, reproduce those very structures. This notion can be adapted to explain how the marketplace of attention actually takes shape. In the short term, the structure of the marketplace is relatively “hard” and may limit or direct attention. In the long term, however, it is heavily dependent on the choices of individual media consumers for its very architecture.

The hyperlinked environment is particularly well suited to accomplish this reciprocal act of creation, because of its ability to easily aggregate and make visible the behaviors of many discrete individuals. It creates institutionally effective audiences with a vengeance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the operation of search and recommendation systems, both of which are indispensable tools with which agents address their problems of bounded rationality.

Using a search system is an exercise in finding what you're looking for. The idea of consulting a guide to find content is nothing new, as the fortune that endowed our hosts at the Annenberg School will attest. What is new is the way in which modern search engines construct the guide. While algorithms vary, the basic strategy is to sort items in terms of their popularity. Google, for example, ranks Web sites that possess the requisite search terms according to the number and importance of their inbound links.²⁰ Hence, the linking architecture of the Internet, which is itself the product of thousands of more or less independent decision makers, provides the principle guide for navigating hyperlinked space.

Recommendation systems alert us to things we aren't affirmatively looking for. Here again, the basic function is nothing new. Advertising is an old, if transparently self-serving, variation on this genre. The outbound links on Web sites, which are the input for search engines, constitute a decentralized network of recommendations. The tagging, bookmarking, and rating features of social networking programs serve similar functions. The most elaborate recommendation systems, based on collaborative filtering software, aggregate the behaviors of large numbers of anonymous individuals to divine what a person “like you” might prefer. Those of us who use Amazon.com to buy obscure academic books are all too familiar with the seductive power of those systems.

Search and recommendation systems, as well as many other collaborative features of the hyperlinked environment, share a number of note-worthy characteristics. The most elaborate systems are built by amassing people's preferences and behaviors. No one opinion leader or vested interest is able to dictate the output of these systems; hence they have a compelling air of objectivity. In effect, we trust the “wisdom of crowds.”²¹ It is unlikely that individuals in the crowd fully understand how their actions produce a given output, if they are aware of having made any contribution at all. Yet they create, perpetuate, and/or modify structures that direct the attention of others. This duality of structure is an essential and increasingly pervasive dynamic of the marketplace. But what patterns of attention does the marketplace actually produce?

Fragmentation

Certainly, from the perspective of old media, the most consequential and widely noted feature of the new media environment is fragmentation, the tendency of audiences to be widely distributed over the many outlets or items of content competing for their attention. Its conceptual opposite is audience concentration. In the days of old media, public attention was inevitably concentrated on the few stations or newspapers available in local market areas. Since the 1970s, the increased penetration and capacities of cable and satellite systems have caused steady “erosion” in the size of broadcast television audiences.²² The Internet added even more capacity and global reach, seemingly overnight. With huge national and international markets available, media makers could sustain themselves with niche offerings. The expansive structure of the new environment, populated by institutions desperately seeking attention, provided the necessary conditions for fragmentation.

Setting aside the economic woes it causes old media, the trend toward ever greater fragmentation (and the consequent demise of “lowest common denominator” programming) has generally been greeted with approval. While the cultural landscape has undoubtedly changed (for reasons I develop shortly), the demise of mass appeal content is, in the words of Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated.” In his popular book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson notes, “The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.”²³ Consumers, empowered by “infinite choice”²⁴ and equipped with the tools of search and recommendation, can find whatever suits their preferences, no matter how obscure. For Anderson, this shift manifests itself in a migration from “hits,” which have concentrated attention on the “short head” of a distribution, to niches, which inhabit the increasingly long tail of consumption. Other pundits, noting how the new environment enables various forms of consumer-generated expression, have adopted a similarly celebratory tone.²⁵ All of these developments apparently lead to greater diversity of choice in the media environment and, so it would seem, promote a more perfect cultural democracy.

Even if we take these trends at face value, they are not without their worries. Elihu Katz, wistfully recalling the days when one broadcast network served the entire State of Israel, has suggested that the proliferation of new media runs the risk of denying societies a common forum with which to promote national identity and a shared sense of purpose. He has warned:

Throughout the Western world, the newspaper was the first medium of national integration. It was followed by radio. When television came, it displaced radio as the medium of national integration, and radio became the medium of segmentation. Now, following radio again, television has become a medium of segmentation, pushed by both technology and society. Unlike the moment when television assumed radio's role as the medium of national integration, there is nothing in sight to replace television, not even media events or the Internet.²⁶

Indeed, it's plausible that fragmentation will make it harder for issues to reach the “threshold of public attention” necessary for agenda setting.²⁷ Even more troubling is the prospect of the common public sphere breaking into many tiny “sphericules”²⁸ that fail to interact with one another. The possibility that people will effectively retreat into comfortable little enclaves of like-minded news and entertainment is a topic I address below as the polarization of attention.

Before accepting fragmentation as a fait accompli, however, I think it's worth considering a number of countervailing forces that pull public attention in the opposite direction. While it's fascinating to contemplate the cultural and business implications of long tails, what is even more noteworthy is the persistence of the short head in the distribution. Despite the availability of infinite choice, a relative handful of outlets continue to dominate public attention. Ironically, as we look across media that offer consumers progressively more options, audiences become more, not less, concentrated. Using various measures, researchers consistently find that the most abundant media produce the most concentrated markets. Radio and television, it turns out, are more egalitarian media than the World Wide Web.²⁹

The persistence of short heads undoubtedly has much to do with the operation of “power laws,” which accounts for the success that physicists have had modeling the architecture of the Web.³⁰ Such models need not make assumptions about the quality of offerings to produce an expectation of short heads. But quality and social desirability do enter into the allocation of public attention. One possibility is that the most popular items are, in fact, worthy of that attention. A number of arguments I note shortly suggest just that. Rather than moving consumption in the direction of obscure niches, many new technologies let people spend even more time with what's popular. Early indications on DVR usage, for example, suggest that people typically record top-rated TV programs.³¹ As panelist Jack Wakshlag noted, people use TiVos as “hit machines.” Similarly, many of the most frequently viewed clips on YouTube are the professionally produced work of networks and marketers.³² In a world of limited attention, such media use necessarily displaces watching less popular fare. Another irony of moving to an on-demand media environment, then, is that good old-fashioned linear media may have enforced a measure of exposure to things that weren't hits. Even Anderson noted how the move from CDs to iTunes has allowed listeners, “with the help of personalized recommendations,” to cherry-pick the “best individual songs” from albums and skip the “crap” in between.³³ The best, it would seem, are the most recommended. And the most recommended will inevitably be the most popular.

An accounting of fragmentation is usually made by measuring the attention paid to relatively discrete outlets or items of content. Such numbers are often readily available in the form of audience ratings or paid attendance. Another phenomenon, less easily documented, may further mitigate the fragmentation of public attention. Suppose the many nodes across which attention was distributed offered essentially the same thing. There are a number of reasons why the environment might move in that direction. Several observers have noted that consumer-generated production makes liberal use of the most popular (often copyrighted) output of culture industries.³⁴ If new outlets are simply repurposing existing content and if petty producers are simply playing with the culture's most salient themes and products, fragmentation may be more apparent than real. Phil Napoli, another contributor to this volume, noted at the conference, “I could put ten more water faucets at different places in my home, but ultimately that water is still coming from the same reservoir.”

More specific mechanisms seem to be at work in the world of news and opinion. Recent studies in the production of online newspapers suggest that the Internet, coupled with competitive journalistic practices, actually contributes to the homogenization of news content. It appears that journalists use the online environment to continuously monitor their competition. Not wanting to be scooped and relying heavily on commonly available wire services and electronic media, newspapers increasingly replicate the same stories.³⁵ One can imagine a similar dynamic operating in the blogosphere. In fact, Benkler's analysis of how meritorious news and opinion percolate to the A-list blogs seems to be a related phenomenon. For him, this is the mechanism that overcomes the “Babel objection” about the democratizing effects of the Internet.³⁶ It does suggest, however, that public attention is not as fragmented as it might at first seem.

Polarization

What is sometimes harder to see is the extent to which attention is being polarized. Unlike our view of fragmentation, which comes in the form of a snapshot showing the distribution of attendance across sources, polarization requires a consideration of which media people consume over time. Fragmentation provides evidence that public attention is, in the aggregate, spread across many more sources than was the case a decade ago. This is what Napoli has called “horizontal exposure diversity.”³⁷ It does not follow, however, that each individual's diet of media content is also more diverse. It might be that people avail themselves of the abundance by sampling a little bit of everything. That would be evidence of a “vertical diversity” of exposure and would, by most accounts, be a socially desirable pattern.³⁸ Alternatively, it could be that people use the environment to binge on a few favorites. Either pattern could lie beneath the veneer of fragmentation.³⁹ The latter, however, has potentially chilling social implications, since it suggests that people withdraw into various “cocoons.”⁴⁰ Two factors will determine the outcome: the psychological predispositions of agents and the structures of the environment.

There is certainly reason to believe that rational, utility-maximizing consumers will selectively choose media materials that conform to their preferences. Traditional economic models of program choice assumed fixed preferences that were systematically related to viewer-defined program types.⁴¹ While it seems likely that preferences are, in the long term, cultivated by the environment, people do have relatively stable likes and dislikes. These operate along many dimensions, including (1) an appetite for specific program genres, perhaps as broadly defined as information versus entertainment;⁴² (2) the utility of information;⁴³ (3) language or cultural proximity;⁴⁴ (4) conservative versus liberal political ideologies;⁴⁵ and (5) various manifestations of fandom.⁴⁶ In short, much of what we know about the psychology of media choice suggests that people will consume relatively restricted diets to suit their tastes. With virtually every type of content available in limitless supply, it remains to be seen when or if people become sated.

The media environment does more than simply offer an abundance of choice, however. It structures and filters what is available and, in so doing, privileges some things over others. While search and recommendation systems are apparently objective aggregations of many independent decisions, they may exacerbate the tendency of people to retreat into comfortable enclaves of like-minded speech. Cass Sunstein, among others, fears that these filtering technologies encourage people to seek out what is agreeable and to avoid anything that challenges their predispositions. Over the long haul, he writes, this is likely to promote “group polarization.”⁴⁷ But even if one assumes that search engines simply do our bidding, not all structural features of the hyperlinked environment are so benign. The media institutions that, in large part, create the environment will attempt to manage and concentrate our attention with all the means at their disposal. Joseph Turow asks:

Who will create opportunities for various social groups to talk across divisions and share experiences when major marketing and media firms solidify social division by separating people into data-driven niches with news and entertainment aimed primarily at reinforcing their sense of selves?⁴⁸

Of course, not all writers have concluded that countless niches are a bad thing. With his characteristic enthusiasm for infinite choice, Anderson has imagined a “massively parallel culture” formed into “millions of microcultures” or “tribal eddies.”⁴⁹ Good or bad, it's worth developing a better understanding of how, if at all, public attention is being polarized.

As best I can tell, the jury is still out. The clearest evidence so far is that the new marketplace allows a substantial segment of the population to avoid news and information altogether. Increasingly, we are becoming a nation of people who do or do not know about world events. While the old world of linear media succeeded in enforcing almost universal exposure to TV news, the new world of choice does not. Markus Prior has argued convincingly that changes in the structure of television have enabled differential patterns of news viewing, which effectively polarize the public into those with and those without political knowledge.⁵⁰ While a case can be made that people who avoid hard news are “rationally ignorant,”⁵¹ I find Prior's results a troubling prospect for democracy. What is less clear, though, is the extent to which consumers of news and information limit their diets largely to one ideological point of view. Iyengar and Morin's study of online news readership⁵² and Adamic and Glance's analysis of the linking structures among political blogs⁵³ suggest systematic “blue/red” biases in people's patterns of consumption across time. Conversely, Hargittai, Gallo and Kane's study of political blogs⁵⁴ and a Pew study of Internet use⁵⁵ emphasize the tendencies of people to reference and/or know opposing points of view. Prior himself has noted that viewers of the Fox News Channel see other sources of TV news, which suggests a vertical diversity of exposure consistent with broader findings on TV viewing.⁵⁶

Questions about the Marketplace

The shape of public attention is important because it suggests how the marketplace of ideas will operate in an age of on-demand digital media. Two questions are, to me, particularly salient. The first is whether our society's cultural center will hold in the wake of all these changes. This is and should be subject to ongoing empirical investigation. The second normative question addresses the wisdom of the data-aggregating systems that increasingly define the character of the nonlinear media environment.

Will the Center Hold? In his zeal for the long tail, Anderson has asserted that “infinite choice equals ultimate fragmentation.”⁵⁷ It's hard to imagine a common culture—let alone a vibrant democracy—whose patterns of attention are evenly spread across an infinite number of choices. Nor do I think that's likely to happen. I suspect the forces that concentrate attention, as already outlined, will save us from flying off in every conceivable direction. That said, it's clear that many more things are competing for our attention. These inevitably come at the expense of the older forms of media that once commanded center stage. They were sometimes derided as offering only the lowest common denominator, but by their very commercial nature, they steered a course through the heart of culture. And for all practical purposes, attendance was mandatory.

Now attendance is up to us. A veneer of fragmentation does not mandate social polarization if individual media consumers do the work necessary to “connect the dots.” They might spend time moving from the obscure to the popular or simply from niche to niche and still manage to construct a fully featured marketplace of ideas. But the very concept of a niche suggests a degree of stickiness. Every niche maker, commercial or not, wants repeat customers. Most would be happy if those customers settled exclusively on what they had to offer. Many will, undoubtedly, do what they can to make that happen. If customers are happy with their niches, they'll stay put. It's only rational.

For all those reasons, public attention is likely to be reorganized along dimensions of taste and structure. For now, we should do our best to monitor the social and cultural divisions that emerge. That will be a daunting task for two reasons. First, a complete view of how people navigate the marketplace will require following them across time and across media. The world of media research is still largely balkanized by medium.⁵⁸ Today, it's virtually impossible to know with any precision what a person reads, watches on television, hears on the radio, and consumes on the Internet. Yet all those sources are competing for attention and, in turn, shape that person's environment. As media converge on a common distribution system, it will become easier to paint a complete picture of consumption. Second, assessing exposure alone will not fully answer the question. We must also have a nuanced understanding of the content that's being consumed (e.g., how links are referenced, how issues are framed) and what sense people make of those representations. Only then will we see what fault lines are forming within the culture.

Are Crowds Wise or Stupid? While hyperlinking is, on one level, about technology, the hyperlinked spaces that we use are given life by ordinary human beings. Sometimes it is the work of individual agents, but often it happens through the instant and ever-changing aggregation of choices made by others. This is true of the most powerful tools we use to navigate the environment, and it goes to the heart of what many commentators find so revolutionary about the technology.⁵⁹ It is hard to imagine an arena of human activity that is more heavily dependent on the wisdom or stupidity of crowds. And it is on this point that many social commentators strike me as a bit schizophrenic.

The phrase “wisdom of crowds” was popularized by James Surowiecki.⁶⁰ In his eponymous best seller, Surowiecki argued that averaging input from many ordinary, diverse, and independent decision makers often produces better results than the judgments of experts. A marketplace offers one example of such a mechanism. Anderson frequently repeats the “wisdom of crowds” mantra, pointing to any number of apparently successful collaborative endeavors, from Wikipedia to various forms of recommendation.⁶¹ Benkler and many others also put stock in the ability of the blogosphere to sort though and collaboratively produce the most accurate news or meritorious ideas.⁶²

When I first read the conditions that Surowiecki suggested will unleash the wisdom of crowds, I was reminded of Blumer's classic definition of a “mass” in social theory and of its adaptation to audiences.⁶³ A mass audience is a heterogeneous collection of many anonymous, independent decision makers.⁶⁴ The wisdom of such crowds is routinely measured in audience ratings. Recently, the top-rated program on TV was Dancing with the Stars. I suspect you could find similarly reassuring gems if you checked the most viewed clips on YouTube. Anderson tries to finesse such uninspiring measures of public taste by insisting that “what matters is the rankings within a genre (or subgenre), not across genres.”⁶⁵ Apparently, it's only when we dig deeply into our niches that crowds become wise. To me, this reads like an invitation to cultural polarization. If we want to encourage sampling the best across genres, why is it that crowds should no longer be our guide? At what point do they become stupid? At the very least, we need to develop a more discriminating stance on the wisdom of crowds.

But, like it or not, crowds increasingly shape our world. The actions of agents are instantly aggregated and made available for all to see. These, in turn, affect the structures and offerings of the media environment. Online newspapers are discovering that it's “soft news” (e.g., stories about celebrities, sex, and animals) that attracts readers' attention. A recent piece in the American Journalism Review warned print journalists, “Television news veterans predict papers will face huge challenges maintaining their editorial independence while seeking to grab the attention of Web readers.”⁶⁶ In matters of taste, no empirical test will tell us whether the decisions of crowds are wise or not. More realistically, it will be for each of us to judge whether the results of the process offer a path to enlightenment or the road to perdition.

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NOTES

1. H. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

2. P. Lyman and H. R. Varian, “How Much Information?” http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info-2003 (accessed September 14, 2006).

3. H. A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. M. Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 41.

4. R. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 46.

5. A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

6. G. DeSanctis and M. S. Poole, “Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory,” Organization Science 5, no. 2 (1994): 121–47; W. J. Orlikowski, “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Organization Science 3, no. 3 (1992): 398–427.

7. Giddens, Constitution of Society.

8. N. Mouzelis, “The Subjectivist-Objectivist Divide: Against Transcendence,” Sociology 34, no. 4 (2000): 741–62.

9. E.g., B. M. Owen and S. S. Wildman, Video Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

10. H. A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organizations (New York: Free Press, 1997).

11. K. A. Neuendorf, D. J. Atkin, and L. W. Jeffres, “Reconceptualizing Channel Repertoire in the Urban Cable Environment,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45, no. 3 (2001): 464–82; E. J. Yuan and J. G. Webster, “Channel Repertoires: Using Peoplemeter Data in Beijing,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 50, no. 3 (2006): 524–36.

12. Simon, Administrative Behavior.

13. Giddens, Constitution of Society.

14. P. J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

15. Y. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2006).

16. Ibid., 43.

17. J. S. Ettema and D. C. Whitney, “The Money Arrow: An Introduction to Audiencemaking,” in Audiencemaking: How the Media Create the Audience (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), 5.

18. J. G. Webster, “The Role of Structure in Media Choice” (forthcoming); J. G. Webster and P. F. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997).

19. Giddens, Constitution of Society.

20. J. Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005).

21. J. Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

22. J. G. Webster, “Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization in a Multichannel World,” Journal of Communication 55, no. 2 (2005): 366–82.

23. C. Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 5.

24. Ibid., 12.

25. E.g., Benkler, Wealth of Networks; Jenkins, Convergence Culture.

26. E. Katz, “And Deliver Us from Segmentation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546, no. 1 (1996): 33.

27. W. R. Neuman, “The Threshold of Public Attention,” Public Opinion Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1990): 159–76.

28. T. Gitlin, “Public Sphere or Public Sphericules?” in Media, Ritual, and Identity, ed. T. Liebes and J. Curran (London: Routledge, 1998), 175–202.

29. E.g., M. Hindman, “A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep: Measuring Media Diversity Online and Offline,” and J. G. Webster, “Diversity of Exposure,” in Media Diversity and Localism: Meaning and Metrics, ed. P. Napoli (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006), 327–47, 309–25; J. Yim, “Audience Concentration in the Media: Cross-Media Comparisons and the Introduction of the Uncertainty Measure,” Communication Monographs 70, no. 2 (2003): 114–28.

30. E.g., A.-L. Barabási, “The Physics of the Web,” Physics World, July 2001, http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/14/7/9 (accessed July 10, 2006); B. A. Huber-man, The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

31. F. Aherns, “Fears over TiVo on Pause,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2006, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/homeentertainment/la-ettivo29aug29,1,7984227.story?coll=la-entnews-homeent (accessed September 27, 2006).

32. W. Friedman, “CBS Scores Viewers with YouTube Alliance,” Media Post, November 27, 2006, http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=51543&Nid=25374&p=263743 (accessed November 27, 2006).

33. Anderson, Long Tail, 22.

34. Benkler, Wealth of Networks; Jenkins, Convergence Culture; L. Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin, 2004).

35. P. J. Boczkowski and M. de Santos, “When More Media Equals Less News: Patterns of Content Homogenization in Argentina's Leading Print and Online Newspapers,” Political Communication 24, no. 2 (April 2007): 167–80.

36. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 233.

37. P. M. Napoli, “Deconstructing the Diversity Principle,” Journal of Communication 49, no. 4 (1999): 7–34.

38. Webster, “Diversity of Exposure,” 309–25.

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56. Webster, “Diversity of Exposure,” 309–25.

57. Anderson, Long Tail, 181.

58. J. G. Webster, P. F. Phalen, and L. W. Lichty, Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research, 3rd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006).

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62. Benkler, Wealth of Networks.

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