Clay Shirky argues that audiences in today’s online age are no longer passive consumers of media content. Evaluate this ‘end of audience’ theory.
Refer to Zoella and the Attitude website to support your answer. [30]
Shirky's theory states that audiences no longer passively consume. Rather, they actively engage with the media. An example of this is Zoella, whose career exists mostly on social media. This allows fans to comment on her posts and videos, engaging with the media. She also has Q&A videos where she answers the fans questions.
Shirky's theory also states that there is no such thing as a passive audience. This, however, is not the case for a big part of Zoella's audience. Going into the comments section of Zoella's videos, most of them are stand alone comments with no replies. This shows that the audience is not interacting with each other, only Zoella. As well as that Zoella rarely interacts with the comments either. Her last video on the Zoella youtube channel has the comments turned off, preventing the audience from interacting with it.
Shirky's theory also relies on the idea of audiences now being very individual, with media attracting a wide range of people. Zoella'a fanbase, however, seems to all be very similar, likely in big part due to her content neither challenging nor going against the expectations of society. Zoella is a middle-class woman who focuses on clothing and makeup in her content. Occasionally she branches out, with videos about airplane anxiety and other similar topics, but these are still within the realm of tame content. Her videos do not challenge the viewer, and so her videos attract a majority of the same types of people.
