Challenges when researching digital audiences : mapping audience research of software designs, interfaces and platforms

Based on an extensive literature review, this contribution explores current and future challenges for media and communication scholars when enquiring people’s engagements with digital media. Structuring the existing literature around four themes (affordances, the political economy of digital audiences, self-representation and identity, domestication and (problematic) uses of ICT), an overview of the current state of the field is provided. As such, three challenges are defined: exploring the diversity of digital audiences that now engage with digital media, allowing more room for the semiotics and contexts in which people experience digital media, and moving beyond the functionalistic uses of the concept ‘affordances’.

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