Communication and Audience in the Age of New Media: Exploring Psychosocial Interfaces for Effectiveness

Abstract

In all communication situations, the audience remains the cardinal component of the communicating process. For efficiency, the communicator must seek to embrace the psychological and sociological embodiments of the audience. This is to engender completeness of the communication process, leading to an intended feedback. Fortunately and conversely, the emergence and intrusion of new media, has ultimately altered structures of the conventional media audiences. In the new media age, there are changing faces of communication audiences. This research was investigated to access, the size, location, exposure, perception of print media contents as well as their feedbacks within the psychological and sociological frames of these changing audiences in this emerging new media age. Based on the above realism, this research uses explanatory mixed method to study the reading audiences of Nigerian print media in Enugu State, which was researched as the population of study. Following the specific articulated research objectives, hypothetical statement was framed as a way of testing statistical significance of collected research data, and tested with chi-square statistical tool. Evidence from research data indicates that with the intrusion of communication technology that is advancing, the number of reading audiences in the age of the new media is increasing geometrically. This is premised on the fact that most readers do not buy newspapers, but read the online editions. The researchers concluded that mass communication audiences have been altered in terms of their sizes, location, access and exposure patterns as well as perception, as communication contents are being migrated to the new media environment. Accordingly, the researchers recommended, among other things that as the new media have created an immediate feedback mechanism for the changing media audience, all conventionally mass media structures are strongly enjoined to migrate fully into the new media environment, so as to take care of emerging and diversifying audiences.

Keywords: Communication, Audience, Age, New Media, Psychosocial, Effectiveness