ABSTRACT
Written by two communication scholars who came of age learning about the achievements of television audience studies and began their working lives at the birth of social media, this chapter offers reflection on their intellectual inheritance and heritage. Now engaged with various research addressing the social and ethical challenges posed by processes of datafication and disinformation, they discuss how key concepts in audience studies remain of urgent relevance. Focusing on the dialectically related concepts of divergence and responsibility, this chapter emphasizes how these keywords productively direct their scholarly energy to interrogate the opaque risks and vulnerabilities in contemporary technological transformations while accounting for diverse audiences’ variable literacies to exert influence, read deceptive content, and demand recognition in mediated environments.
