Digital Media Audiences and Generations – Theories, Trends and Challenges

Abstract

The digital age has brought several changes in the understanding of the former mass media and the way of distributing different media contents, but also in the ways of media audience involvement in mass communication processes. Due to the large amount of information and the channels through which it is disseminated and the increasingly fragmented media audiences, the influence of the media on contemporary democratic societies has changed significantly compared to the influence of the mass media in the 20th century. Differences in media representations of social reality, the dispersion of their authors, the number of publications and their reach, as well as the conditioned interpretations of media audiences, have led to the so-called post-truth media constructions of reality, also one of the key features of the 21st century. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of theories about media audiences and generations that have been developed within the communication sciences. They specifically focus on the contemporary trends that have affected the disappearance of the mass audience due to its intense fragmentation as a result of the technology change, and at the end of the paper, they highlight the social changes that arise as a result of the aforementioned processes.