Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences

When Bob Garfield outlined his “Chaos Scenario” in 2005, he argued that the existing media model was collapsing and that the consumer was gaining more control in the media marketplace (Garfield, 2005). At the time, digital video recorder (DVR) technology was still relatively new, the most up-to-date cellular phone was Motorola's ROKR with the capacity for 100 songs to be played using Apple's iTunes software and the idea of social networking was in the early stages—MySpace was just about a year older than Facebook and Twitter did not exist. Smartphones can now be used to program a DVR, make a phone call, watch a movie, listen to thousands of songs, capture video, send a text message, surf the Internet and post…