ABSTRACT

As we explore in the previous chapter, audience research caters to business gratifications by producing mounds of data about who is listening, watching, and clicking on and for how long. Via diaries, telephone interviews, shopping-mall intercept questionnaires, people meters, and online tracking devices like “cookies,” industry decision-makers acquire information to define and divide electronic media patrons into a number of demographic and psychographic (life-style) categories. Yet, while we are gathering evermore sophisticated documentation of the who, the counterpart explanation of the why remains much more elusive.