Traditional outlets, such as broadcast networks, have long feared that technological and regulatory changes would increase competition and erode their audiences.
Webster and Ksiazek have argued there are three types of fragmentation: media-centric, user-centric, and audience-centric [2] The diffusion of audiences across outlets has been most pronounced in electronic media.
Initially, a limited number of broadcast channels, in both commercial and state-owned systems, dominated public attention.
A long tail representation takes data from a point in time (e.g., a month, season or year) and arranges the offerings by audience size from largest to smallest.
It is fragmentation conceptualized at the micro-level and behaviors can range from people who consume a wide variety of offerings to those whose media use is concentrated on a small number of outlets.
[9] ComScore, an internet measurement company, has reported that in the U.S. the use of mobile apps is concentrated in the top 10, and all but two of these are owned by Google and Facebook.
[10] Such data suggest that even with essentially infinite choice, individuals use a small number of "go-to" outlets on a day-to-day basis.
The earliest work focused on television channel repertoires and reported results consistent with measurement services.
[13][14][15] These studies suggest the users cope with abundance by limiting their consumption to a relatively small number of preferred outlets.
[16][17] User-centric studies can help us understand how individuals make use of multiple media offerings, but they do not easily scale-up to address larger questions of how the public allocates its attention in the aggregate.
Chris Anderson popularized the notion that fragmentation would diminish the prevalence of hits as cultural consumption migrated out on the long tail towards more specialized offerings.
Empirical studies of media use, however, suggest that consumption remains highly concentrated on hits, despite the availability of alternatives.
[27] Ideological polarization in news consumption has been widely expected as people are better able to selectively expose themselves to agreeable points of view.