Introducing three dimensions of Audience fragmentation

Abstract

Audience fragmentation has become a recurrent theoretical framework in the early 21st Century, used mainly to depict the new complex and dynamic relationships established between media and consumers. However, some academic studies have been published which expand on the meanings and implications of the so-called fragmentation from the perspective of the audience. This paper is based on empirical research undertaken in Colombia among young people (17-24 year-olds) who live in the ten most important urban areas of this country located at the north-west corner of South America. A mixed methodology was used, combining quantitative and qualitative methods with a statistical sample. Conclusions support a theoretical proposal based on what the authors call the three dimensions of audiences' fragmentation-intramedia, intermedia, and transmedia fragmentation-as a way to understand the new relationships established between media content producers and active and participative consumers, beyond the media-centrism paradigm and closer to the revival of encoding/decoding communication process.