Faces and Charts: User and Advertiser Visualisations of Social Media Audiences

• In Event: The Business of Sharing Personal Communication: Industrial Practices of Social Media

Abstract

Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine and contrast the representations and visualisations of the social media audience that platform providers make available to users on the one hand and advertisers on the other hand. While audiences and audience creation are critically important to media businesses and to the study of media, the visual representation of the audience within this institutional context has rarely been discussed, perhaps because it is considered to be embedded in other institutional contexts, for example in the practice of media planning. Today, however, visualisations of audiences are not limited to professional contexts. The rise of user-generated content within digital media has created a new set of producers who are also audiences and these producer/audiences also have visualisations available to them which potentially serve different functions than those targeted to institutional viewers. Further, the visualisations available today are not just static pictures, but generally have interactive qualities such as the ability to zoom, rotate, select and filter, change perspective, colour, and so on – in other words, they are visual tools for both users within traditional industrial settings and modern audience/producers. In short, as Turow & Draper suggest, the time is now ripe to investigate: “Comparisons of how non-industry user-creators construct themselves, their audiences and their contributions with the ways a firm’s executives construct themselves, their audiences and their contributions can illuminate the extent and nature of tensions coursing through new production-of-culture fields,” (Turow & Draper 2014, p. 654).

Theoretical framework/assumptions.
Audiences and audience measurement are central for the media industry. Scholars argue that audiences are socially constructed and institutionally-supported conceptualisations, rather than any particular set of people (Ang 1991, Ettema & Whitney 1994, Napoli 2012). Certainly, studies of media producers from television entertainment to journalists to blog writers have shown that it has been this “imagined audience” to which producers respond (Gitlin 1994, Brake 2012, Marwick 2011). Ang goes further and argues that measuring the audience is “a prime instance for the objectifying, othering, and controlling kind of knowledge,” (Ang 1991); and on digital media, the study of audience measurement (and indeed, of audience surveillance) is central (cf Turow 2012).
However, much of the discussion of audience-making has often boiled down to the metrics and measurement techniques, and the visual representation of the audience within this institutional context is rarely discussed. Even in recent treatments such as Napoli’s (2010), which discusses the profound transformation of metrics within digital media, important concepts such as “customer engagement,” “sentiment” or “behaviour” are left formless and shapeless, even while these concepts develop in practice as interactive visualisations. The aesthetics and form of these visualisations have practical, commercial, and political implications.
The research questions for the paper are as follows:
• What types of visualisations of people (audiences) do social media platforms make available to their advertisers? To their users?
• What are the observable visual and interactive conventions within these visualisations?
• What are the implications of these different visual and interactive conventions?

Research Methods.
The paper examines the “audience creation” and “audience insight” interfaces of major social media tools including Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), Google (including Google+ and YouTube), Twitter and LinkedIn, and the corresponding audience information available from those platforms to their members (generally called something like “friends” or “my network” or “followers” or “connections”). Kennedy et al. (2016), in their recent study of the graphical conventions in information visualisation, identify elements that contribute to the authority of data visualisations, and which derive from historical and cultural traditions.
Following Kennedy, et al. (2016) the data are analysed using a social semiotic framework which combines historical and semiotic analysis. The analysis is not limited to visual conventions, but draws from human-computer interaction literature to develop the method for interactive conventions as well.

Contribution of the paper to media industries studies.
As platform media, particularly social media, continues to expand, the position of audiences is changing to incorporate a large amount of audience-creators who develop content for a small number of peers; meanwhile advertising on these platforms also may address extremely targeted audiences, and increasing amounts of data are collected and stored to be repurposed for audiencemaking. Visualisations are an increasingly prevalent and potent form through which platform media companies can interact with user-creator-advertisers. This paper adds to the literature of audience-making studies by looking at the visual and interactive modes of audience-making.


References
Brake, D. R. (2012). Who do they think they’re talking to? Framings of the audience by social media users. International journal of communication, 6, 21.

Ettema, J. S., & Whitney, D. C. (1994). Audiencemaking: How the media create the audience. London: Sage.

Ien, A. (1991). Desperately seeking the audience. London: Routledge.

Gitlin, T. (1994). Inside prime time. Univ of California Press.

Kennedy, H. R. L. Hill, G. Aiello & W. Allen (2016). The work that visualisation conventions do, Information, Communication & Society, 19:6, 715-735.

Marwick, A. E. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.

Napoli, P. M. (2010). Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences. New York: Perseus Books.

Napoli, P. M. (2012) Audience economics: Media institutions and the audience marketplace. New York: Columbia University Press.

Turow, J., & Draper, N. (2014). Industry Conceptions of Audience in the Digital Space: A research agenda. Cultural Studies, 28(4), 643-656.

Author

• Elizabeth J. Van Couvering, Karlstad U