This Week in Audience: The Latest Fronts On Understanding Who’s Paying Attention

Is social media communication, marketing, art, or all three?… The perils of market research when it drives your art… The latest front on artists’ war on cell phone use… How NPR discovered a ton of information about its listeners… How the internet is changing our perceptions of the world.

1. Marketing, Communicating, Art… And/Or Social Media? Social media powers the audiences around art these days. And it’s certainly a way of getting the word out. But there are dangers too. “The relationship between art and social media is a tricky one. The former is about pushing boundaries; the latter, enforcing them — in the case of Instagram, in a literal square.”
2. You Want To Know How You’re Doing, So Ask… (But It’s Not Quite So Simple): Museums are using focus groups to plan their marketing and programming. Yet “some feel that the use of focus groups to develop exhibitions – a practice pioneered by science and history museums – encourages institutions to act more like for-profit businesses than mission-driven entities.”
3. Artists’ War On Cell Phones – We’re Going To Confiscate Them: Some artists -  including Dave Chappelle, the Lumineers and Louis C.K.  – are getting hard ass on trying to keep cell phones from disrupting their shows. So they’re making audience members lock their phones away in pouches. “Because people still feel they still have their baby in their arm, it’s a little bit clunky but it’s better than telling them to leave their phones in their cars or forbidding it.” But really – is that going to make a difference? “This is about artists setting the terms of engagement for a performance. Which is their right. We probably don’t think of it that way, in part because the Internet and smartphone technology has fundamentally altered the dynamic between artist and audience. Not just in terms of copyright abuses, which remain a huge problem, but also in terms of attention abuses. Which are more insidious, more accepted as part of the new digital lifestyle, and thus harder to control.”
4. How NPR Found Out How Their Listeners Listen: It’s an app – NPR One – and it liberates public radio content from broadcast (we decide when you listen) to an on-demand experience. Better than just asking users how they want to use NPR, NPR can observe, and the results are segmentation gold: “The largest age group listening to NPR One is 25- to 34-year-olds, according to NPR, with 40 percent of listeners under 35. More than a third of users who answered NPR surveys said they never or only occasionally listen to broadcast radio.”
5. Yes The Internet Is Wondrous, But Here’s What’s New… “Speed and expansiveness, to start. On expanse: The population of our ether – users of cell tech and wifi – is now just about coextensive with the population of the earth. This is fathomless by most minds. And speed: The illusion of near-absolute compression of time and space on the Internet is an illusion so beguiling we are virtually powerless to refuse it as real, except for short periods and with great mental or spiritual focus.”

Image: Pixabay