Audience fragmentation is often taken as evidence of social polarization. Yet the tools we use
to studyfragmentation provide limitedinformation about how people allocatetheir attention
across digital media. We offer a theoretical framework for understanding fragmentation and
advocate for more audience-centric studies. This approach is operationalized by applying
network analysis metrics to Nielsen data on television and Internet use. We find extremely
high levels of audience duplication across 236 media outlets, suggesting overlapping patterns
of public attention rather than isolated groups of audience loyalists.