Cross-platform audience behavior in an abundant media environment: An integrated approach to understanding fragmentation, polarization, and media publics through network analysis

The contemporary media environment is characterized by a wealth of content that is increasingly available across a variety of platforms. It is possible that these circumstances facilitate exposure to diverse content, a pattern commonly known as audience fragmentation. Alternatively, it is also possible that this environment empowers audiences to select a more limited array of media and avoid other types, a phenomenon often called audience polarization. Moreover, audience members rely on a regular subset of media content, a media repertoire, to manage their attention in this complex system.;This dissertation applies network analysis to cross-platform data from Nielsen's TV/Internet Convergence Panel to explore diversity in patterns of media use. I investigate the macro-level patterns of audience behavior that emerge from micro-level tendencies like selective exposure and a reliance on media repertoires. These individual-level patterns emerge in the aggregate as fragmentation, polarization, and media publics, the latter being representative of audience segments characterized by similar patterns of media consumption.;Network analysis of behavioral data for multiple media contributes to a more complete understanding of these phenomena. While past research takes a media-centric approach to fragmentation, analyzing the audience of each media outlet in isolation, network analysis takes an audience-centric approach accounting for the overlap among these audiences. Regarding polarization, past research focuses on the use or non-use of various types of content (e.g., news, partisan media). This study goes beyond this traditional understanding to analyze whether users/non-users of a certain content type share other mediated experiences.;The results indicate rather diverse patterns of media use, finding evidence of audience fragmentation, a limited degree of audience polarization, especially for online news and linguistically defined content, but not for partisan news, and varied user-defined media publics, some of which suggest new and hybrid media genres as well as preferences for both mass and niche content. This study has implications for the role of media use in idealistic notions of social and political systems. Moreover, the novel approach of applying network analysis to the study of audience behavior and the general insights into cross-platform media use offer methodological and practical contributions.