James G. Webster

After two years as an audience analyst at Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), he went to Indiana University Bloomington where he earned his Ph.D.

[4] He directed over a dozen doctoral dissertations, and in 2014 received the School’s Clarence Simon Award for outstanding teaching and mentoring.

Webster’s empirical work typically uses secondary analyses of large datasets to document law-like regularities in audience behavior.

For example, The Long Tail, a popular book written by Chris Anderson, argued that hit-driven culture would devolve into niches and become “massively parallel.

[10] He argued that the persistence of popular offerings and high levels of duplication were producing a “massively overlapping culture.”[12] Two of Webster’s students published an analysis of global internet use suggesting that the Great Firewall was not responsible for isolating Chinese web users.

By the early twentieth-first century the widespread use of digital media, which seemed to empower people, rejuvenated the idea that individual preferences drove audience behavior.

[17] The fullest expression of his theory of audience behavior is in The Marketplace of Attention,[18] which won the 2015 Robert G. Picard Book Award.