ABSTRACT

Although the audience as an industrial media product has been scrutinised by scholars for decades, the visual presentation of the audience has been nearly absent from scholarly analysis. This article examines the interfaces that Facebook uses to present its audience to three different user groups (ordinary Facebook members, publishers, and finally advertisers) using a social semiotic analytical framework to analyse visuals, interactive elements and desired user paths. The interface displayed to ordinary users, the Facebook Friends page, uses a visual language with roots in the college yearbook, showing rows of faces with minimal available interactivity. This interface preserves the humanity of the audience, suggesting egalitarian social structures and timeless space outside Facebook’s ordinary flow. The interfaces displayed to institutional users, Page Insights and Audience Insights, for publishers and advertisers respectively, are quite different, characterised by a multiplicity of charts and high interactivity, with a clear path for the user that ends in ‘boosting’ your page or ‘buying’ your audience. The Audience Insights pages for advertisers feature advanced interactive tools which use the conventions of experimental science. These two interfaces do significant rhetorical work, dehumanising and abstracting audiences into data quantities which can be packaged as products, and encouraging publishers to focus on the production of data measuring engagement. Both the promotion of the value of data and the elision of audience work and surveillance, graphically represented in the different interfaces, help platform businesses like Facebook strategically, by increasing the value of their data and by suppressing audience concerns about surveillance.

摘要

尽管观众作为一种工业媒体产品已经被学者们审视了几十年，但观众的视觉呈现几乎没有出现在学术分析中。本文研究了 Facebook 使用社交符号分析框架向三个不同的用户组（普通 Facebook 成员、发布商和最后的广告商）展示其受众的界面，以分析视觉效果、交互元素和所需的用户路径。向普通用户显示的界面，Facebook好友页面，使用源自大学年鉴的视觉语言，以最少的交互性显示成排的面孔。这个界面保留了观众的人性，暗示了 Facebook 普通流程之外的平等社会结构和永恒的空间。分别为发布商和广告商向机构用户显示的界面，Page Insights和Audience Insights是完全不同的，其特点是图表的多样性和高交互性，为用户提供了一条清晰的路径，最终“提升”您的页面或“购买'你的观众。观众洞察广告商页面具有使用实验科学惯例的高级交互工具。这两个界面做了重要的修辞工作，将受众非人性化并抽象为可以打包为产品​​的数据量，并鼓励出版商专注于数据测量参与度的生产。数据价值的提升和观众工作和监控的省略，在不同的界面中以图形方式表示，通过增加数据的价值和抑制观众对监控的担忧，从战略上帮助 Facebook 等平台企业。