D: All Things Digital Conferences
It was simply the best word I could find to describe the normal condition the mass audience is when the media are “mass.” I had to use an unfamiliar word because I was trying to point out something weird that had come to seem normal, which is that the mass audience is connected up to Big Media but cut off–disconnected, atomized–from one another. Only with the rise of the web, and social media, can we see how odd this really is.
— Media Critic Jay Rosen on his 2009 essay “Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press.”