Media Fragmentation

Media fragmentation refers to the splintering of audiences and information outlets in the network society's choice-rich environment. While media outlets once had clear, often geographically defined audiences, they now compete for readers and viewers who are actively engaged in the selection of the information they receive. The increased [Page 553]choice and competition result from the development and mass adoption of the Internet and digital mobile devices.

The network society's choice-rich media environment not only enables fragmentation, but it encourages specialization. The network dynamic forces audience members to be selective. Audience members and users choose from a core set of information sources. The Pew Research Center has found more than three quarters of online readers get their information from five or fewer news sites. When provided with a diversity of information-source choices, audiences tend to choose media that reinforce their preexisting beliefs and values. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called this selectivity dynamic “The Daily Me.” Fragmentation creates homogenous communities where members mainly communicate only with one another.

The choice-rich environment makes audiences less likely to change their attitudes in response to news information stimuli because fragmentation limits audience members’ chances of hearing opposing viewpoints. Cass R. Sunstein (2007) argued that a civil society requires that people encounter ideas they do not prefer to consider. He wrote, “the implication is that groups of like-minded people, engaged in discussion with one another, will end up thinking the same thing that they thought before—but in a more extreme form” (p. 60).

Michael Kent and Maureen Taylor have found organizations, and public relations practitioners in specific, can reach and interact with their publics in new ways because of these changes. Political information, for example, does not have to pass through the gates of legacy media such as The Washington Post or ABC News. Instead, audiences can choose to get news from aggregators, such as Yahoo; political groups, such as http://MoveOn.org; or blogs, such as ThinkProgress or Hot Air. John Dimmick, Angela Powers, Sam Mwangi, and Elizabeth Stoycheff (2011) wrote that the limitless number of information channels on the Internet provide “news services that are narrowly targeted in ways not possible in the era of three TV networks and monopoly newspapers.”