printAudience of the Digital Media Space:
Sociological Conceptualization
Kolomiets V. P.
Dr. Sci. (Sociol.), Prof., Head of Sociology of Mass Communication Department of the Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia vikkolomiets@yandex.ru
Kolomiets V. P. Audience of the Digital Media Space: Sociological Conceptualization. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2025. No 10. P. 15-30
The article plunges into the intricate world of sociological research of the audience, reflections on the state and status of this area, as it passes the moment when traditional media and their audience still exist and are active, but digital communication practices, datafication break the established ideas about the audience, challenge researchers, questioning its existence. The author defends the existence of the audience in the modern media space, reveals its diversity, a certain epistemology, which contains both established traditional ideas about the media audience and innovative models of its recording and interpretation. Along with this, the author takes the “audience” as a concept beyond communication practices and uses it to analyze social processes associated with the mediatization of modern society, filling the “sociology of the audience” with new content. Sociology of the audience, with the help of sociological knowledge, offers explanations of how people encounter the media, how they use them and how this affects them.
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