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Part 1 Research Principles: Motivation, Causation, Ethics and Generalizability
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Introduction: Communicating Media Research
On media education and media research
The goal of this book is to make media research ‘popular’; not as something that everyone likes, but as an activity that everyone can do. A grandiose objective? Perhaps, except when you consider that most of us have opinions about what media do: they make people want to change their bodies, seek fame and confuse consumption with happiness; they’ve turned politics into bad reality television; they make journalists chase ratings, not truth. We spend a lot of time chatting about media influence. The outcome is this: we have been talking about media literacy for some time; now it’s time to develop media research literacy. Today’s audiences don’t just consume a lot of media content. They also encounter many commentaries about what that content is doing to the world. Evaluating media research is rapidly becoming a precondition for social participation. Media literacy and media research literacy are, in effect, building blocks for political literacy. If politics is about explaining why the world is as it is, and imagining how it could be different, then it is hard to separate democracy from the media narratives that make social thought possible. It’s difficult, for example, to discuss gun control if you don’t know about research on the effects of video gaming. And you can’t understand that research without appreciating fundamental issues, like the many pitfalls there are in gathering and evaluating evidence about such influences – if there are any worth discussing.
Knowing how media do things – or in fact, don’t – has become a basic form of cultural competency. So, too, the ability to communicate complex ideas from media research into the vernacular. The surge in media content about media influence makes the ability to differentiate between reasoned, evidenced-based argument and unsubstantiated commentary an important mechanism in public opinion. This calls for a language that media scholars, media students, media industries and publics can use to speak to each other.
To this end, this book identifies core themes in conceiving and practising media research. Doing this means breaking down a couple of walls: one between theory and method, and the other between teaching and research. Two ideas you should come away with is that it is impossible to do ‘theory’ and ‘method’ separately, since (a) you can’t theorize media in the absence of evidence about how they work and what they do and (b) you can’t deploy research techniques without conceiving why you want to use them in the first place, from a theoretical point of view. In that sense, this book argues that notions of theory and method need to be replaced with a definition of research practice as the ability to deploy conceptually justified techniques for gathering and analysing information. Key, here, is the ability to craft research questions that are equally sensitive to striking a balance between what we want to know with what we can know, given the range of techniques and evidence that we can access.
This brings us to breaking down teaching and research. Reading this book should persuade you that you can’t teach or learn about media without doing media research. It’s crucial that we all understand this. Contemporary lecture halls are full of international student bodies that bring a diverse range of media experiences into one place. It’s foolish not to recognize and capitalize on this. Apart from anything else, we all – teachers and students – live in a world where most other people think that what we do is a bit silly; many people don’t take media research that seriously as a scholarly pursuit. It’s up to us, then, to get our story straight on why we do what we do. This means using classrooms as places where we converse about the future of media research, informed by structured inquiries into what we know, what we want to know and what we can know. To get that conversation started, this book explains how the work that we all do – professional scholars and students – is shaped by the same concerns and procedures of asking, researching and answering research questions. By mapping the relationship between media studies and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the different ways in which media realities can be conceived and the different techniques we can use to make sense of those realities, Exploring Media Research creates a research language that is at once structured, detailed and accessible.
We know this language is needed because of increasing media attention to the topic of media influence as something that touches everyone, from the most experienced scholar to the everyday media punter. We need to be able to communicate across this spectrum. One way to do this is to break the practice of media research into a series of component parts. This process, briefly, involves scrutinizing issues of causation, the ethical principles of media studies, questions of generalizability, different ways in which media actively make reality, and the various ‘entry’ points where media researchers – from the most to the least experienced – can observe these processes in action (looking at media people, media markets, media content, media events, media audiences and media regulation). This introduction explains the method of the book.
The project is inspired by what I see as a new public hunger for knowledge about what media do. This appetite is evidenced by the increased attention that journalists and broadcasters pay to media researchers. It’s fairly easy to introduce media research into media discourse. A useful trick, in this endeavour, is to understand a formula for connecting public interest with academic insight. But this is more than a gimmick; it also sensitizes us to basic steps in research practice. In the next section, I explain how engaging with the media on matters of media influence offers useful insights into how to go about media research directed at any audience: publics, teachers and professional peers.
Taking media research to the media
Over the first 15 years of my academic career, I appeared in the media precisely once. I was asked to comment on an apparent wave of 1970s nostalgia that gripped New Zealand in the mid-1990s. Since 2012, I’ve popped up on television, radio and in the press dozens of times. I’ve fielded questions about social media, and television interviews about Twitter’s impact on the Olympics and War in the Middle East spring to mind. Journalists often ask whether social media are destroying their profession. The allure of fictional serial killers, the part media play in rampage murders, the effects of gaming on gamers, the provenance of celebrity politics and the perennial appeal of boybands are all on my commentary CV. As is Justin Bieber.
I’m sure this ‘fame’ mostly reflects space-filling needs, but I’m surer still about other things. There are many opportunities to take academic media studies into the public domain. These work best when you have a structured plan for engaging interest, and thinking about how to structure these brief encounters teaches me much about how to go about my day job. The outcome of these reflections has been the development of a model for doing and communicating research, based on an ability to connect often complicated conceptual and methodological issues to media events that become sources of public fascination.
When asked to speak for a few minutes about media events in the public eye, this is my routine. The story usually begins with the premise that media are causing a problem. I generally counter with academic reasons for thinking that this ‘problem’, if it exists at all, is different in kind from those envisaged in public discussions. Take boybands. Whenever I’m asked about girls who go crazy for One Direction, or whoever it is, the story usually begins from the premise that these fans are funny, stupid, endangered, or most likely all three. I counter that their ‘mania’ makes perfect sense as an expression of how they understand their place in the world. And importantly, I point out a long history of evidence supporting this argument.
But whatever the topic, the script always goes something like this: I offer that, from a scholarly view, the event in question is really about the many ways that media use has become a central feature of public life. I drop in one, maybe two key thinkers whose work encourages us to look at things in a different way, suggest a different set of questions that we might ask instead, and then I’m done. This, I think, is a practice that structures media research that communicates with public interests, at a time when it’s vital for our discipline to do that. Let me give a longer example of how everything works.
Case study: Rampage killings and changing media landscapes
I speak or write about media violence a lot. Rampage murders have become a particular topic of interest. I think that’s because these outrages visualize the porous line between social life and media with bestial clarity. Opinions flow freely in the aftermath of such murders. Meaningful contributions to public debates on these tragedies demands effectively communicating the many things they mean.
Take the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward. Parker and Ward were gunned down while presenting a tourism segment for Virginia’s WDBJ7 TV’s breakfast show. Shocked studio anchors broadcast on, having seen their own friends butchered. Rampage gun murders are sadly familiar media events, so much so that there’s an obscene banality to many of them. But here, a line had been crossed; media workers were targeted so that crimes couldn’t be edited according to the usual ethical rules. What did it all mean?
I’ve written and spoken about many rampage killings. But something here was different. The thirst for media theory was palpable. Appearing on Australia’s ABC, I was asked what happens when news is the news. What does it mean to live in a world where the medium that we use to understand reality becomes the reality that we are trying to understand? My interviewer, Beverly McConnell, thought that news felt different now, and a new set of ideas was needed to make sense of it.
My answers reflected the research process that this book will outline. The murders caused reflection on what news is, what it does, and how its changing form affects journalism practice. Here was an event calling for an expanded understanding of what news is. Information, entertainment, yet another form of media violence – whatever one wanted to focus on, news was manifestly part of the world; the presence of news, and an understanding of its genres and functions, had become part of a criminal act. Local live-feed ‘soft’ news had been targeted to maximize the horrific impact of an abomination. It was impossible to discuss the crime without recourse to conceiving ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in situations where media practices are deeply implicated in making social reality. We could ask whether the event might provoke ‘copycat’ events, and that’s not a silly or unimportant question. Yet at the same time, the level of shock, among journalists and audiences alike, suggested something else. We could look at what this story did to some people, or instead assess why violence is such a familiar form of expression that gets people especially interested in the media’s social role. I dropped in the name of a Hungarian scholar called George Gerbner. You’ll be reading much more about him. But Gerbner’s elegantly simple point –that the causes and consequences of media violence are economic and political in nature – was a quick way to move the discussion from the question of whether the news may inadvertently brutalize its audience to deeper considerations about the basic role of media in social life; the idea, for example, that the only kind of action that counts for anything at all is one that happens in what Nick Couldry (2004) has called the ‘media centre’.
The anatomy of a research question
Let’s break that conversation into its component parts. It began with a striking and puzzling event. To do justice to the incident, the first step was to acknowledge that media are reality, in that they orchestrate society. This is a complicated idea that juggles competing claims about causation: What kinds of effects are we interested in, and where should we look for their presence? In Virginia’s shadow, there were sound reasons to think that the most traumatized audience comprised journalists, and that might significantly affect how they did their jobs – so questions about whether the story might provoke copycats didn’t cover all of the bases. Once you’ve accepted that single events reflect numerous impact themes, one way to unlock them is to search for a particular author or body of media research that lends a significant or novel insight into some of the forces at play: Gerbner in this case.
That’s about as far as things go with writing and talking to the media, but these steps are the foundation for another kind of ‘accessible’ media research: work that copes with the resource limitations endemic in empirical studies of how media operate in certain settings, by finding ways to test concepts in relation to original case studies. Media encounters have presented me with case studies that test different ideas about media realities. A sense for a good research topic is much like the sense for a good news story; it helps to be able to recognize public events that can be used to introduce media studies perspectives into public discourse. But this isn’t just about having an eye for a good topic; it’s also recognizing researchable ones. Time and money limit all media researchers. One way to cope is by investigating evidence that is relatively easy to get. Ubiquitous media make evidence just as abundant, as long as we know what to look for, how to look, and how to use observations. This mean being alert to instances of media influence at work, and understanding where our evidence addresses established scholarly concerns. There are several steps to making this happen.
The first is to appreciate media research as a humanities discipline. Why are media things that we care about? How do they touch personal experience? What does it mean to say that media ‘do’ things in society? Who is research supposed to benefit, and how does this affect research practice? What are the complications in demonstrating media influence at work? How can you address broad trends in media culture by studying specific instances of media in action? These are the background issues at play in any project, and are explained in the first part of the book.
Next, we must appreciate that media make three types of reality: the kind made by media stories, the kind made by media users, and the kind made by the interplay between media and interpersonal communication. These reality effects underscore the complexity of media influence, especially since they coexist. Part 2 explains these ideas.
Having set out how to conceive media influence, Part 3 puts analysis into action, showing how to gather and analyse evidence from seven research settings. We can, I suggest, see media reality processes working by looking at:
- Media people
- Media markets (by which I mean centres of media distribution that forge relationships between different stakeholders in media industries)
- Media content (which isn’t just films, TV programmes, games, etc.)
- Media events
- Media data (the evidence that emerges about how culture works, through interactions between media users and Big Data technologies)
- Media regulations
- Media audiences.
The goal is to rearrange the industry/text/audience orthodoxy into something that is perhaps more sensitive to the needs of the resource-challenged researcher.
Part 3 focuses on accessible methods. Specifically, it demonstrates how to address ‘big’ questions about media influence by choosing ‘small’, coherent data sets that can be explored through qualitative data assessment (QDA) techniqu...
