Audience Studies Week #10
This weekâs blog is about digital audiences. In the online, interactive, digital media world⌠audiences have power. Sullivan offers up some examples that lead us into 2018, these examples are that the majority of Americans use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WhatsApp. The amount of people that use these apps have been growing for the past couple of years and will continue to grow as time goes on. New apps will also continue to be created and will get just as popular as any of the apps listed. An app that is being used a lot today is the app called Tik Tok. Tik Tok was one of the most used social media apps of 2020, especially by the younger generation. Personally, I think Tik Tok is a great app and I use it often. It brings a whole new concept into the social media world. People post videos of any genre on there and based off what a single person likes, comments, or shares on their own feed, will determine what kind of content shows up for them everyday. For me, I tend to enjoy watching what people like to call, âredneckâ videos. Not all of these videos are necessarily all people who live in the southern United States or live on a farm. But these videos are of people doing somewhat dangerous things on motorized vehicles and funny things while drinking alcohol. These kinds of Tik Tok videos are the most entertaining for me so whenever I like a video like this, the app remembers and will continue to put more of this content on my feed when I am currently using the app. Professor Good gets into the topic of YouTube in the highlight video, explaining it as a coordinating mechanism between individual and collective creativity and meaning production, as well as a mediator between various competing industry oriented discourses and ideologies and as various audience or user oriented ones. YouTube has become a digital age example of prosumers and big data. I am someone who will not necessarily go on YouTube everyday to watch a series a videos, but I do tend to search up specific videos on Google and when I click on the link to watch the video it will automatically bring me to YouTube.  YouTube, along with mostly all social media sites, are ran by user-generated content. Users also create, store, and distribute content. With these social media sites, the product is the content that is being created by the users themselves. People may not think about social media like this often, but after learning about this concept I have no realized that all social media sites are, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just users creating their own content and posting it. All Instagram is, is people that upload pictures for other people to see. I have an Instagram account and I post pictures mostly of me hanging out with friends, participating in sports, and doing fun activities at my cottage. What determines if an account on social media is popular is based on how many followers the account has. Usually, famous people that set up social media account automatically will get thousands or millions of followers right away just because of who they are away from social media. Other people that are extremely popular on social media are social media influencers. These people started on social media as nobody, and then continued to grow and fan base and followers based of the content that they post. For example, one of the biggest Tik Tok stars in the world is a 16-year-old girl named Charli DâAmelio. DâAmelio posts videos on Tik Tok of her dancing and creating or continuing current trends that are circulating around the social media world. DâAmelio has 102.2 million followers on Tik Tok along with 8.1 billion total likes. Those number are unbelievable, and she is one of the most popular social media influencers to ever live. The fan base that she grew is mostly the younger generation of girls and they all idolize her. This is only one example of a popular social media influencer. I myself, do not follow these young Tik Tok stars. I follow influencers that often make videos about sports, motorized vehicles, or country fun. Professor Good mentions in the highlight video that the CEO of Twitter says that transparency will get even more challenging as social media companies shift more of their content moderation decisions from humans to algorithms. Companies need to be able to explain why those decisions are made and had that capacity to overrule them. Lawmakers have been in disagreement over whether Facebook, Twitter, and Google take tough enough actions against misinformation and hate speech. I believe that these companies do not do enough to prevent these actions. I recently watched the film âThe Social Dilemmaâ and actually got taught about this exact issue. Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google) is the reason why this misinformation and hate speech occurs. The social media companies did nothing about this, and it got out of hand extremely quickly. Unfortunately, there are little to no laws about social media accounts allowing this to happen so nothing was done to stop it. Watching âThe Social Dilemmaâ was very informational for me and it opened up my eyes about digital media and how it is affecting the audience.







