Audience Construction and Culture Production: Marketing Surveillance in the Digital Age

This study melds “contextualist” and “resource dependence” perspectives from industrial sociology to explore the implications that audience construction by marketing and media firms hold for the core assumptions that are shaping the emerging media system of the twenty-first century. Marketers, media, and the commercial research firms that work with them are constructing contemporary U.S. audiences as frenetic, self-concerned, attention-challenged, and willing to allow advertisers to track them in response to being rewarded or treated as special. This perspective, a response to challenges and opportunities they perceive from new digital interactive technologies, both leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture.