Frontiers in New Media Research

Francis L.F. Lee, Louis Leung, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Donna S.C. Chu, Francis L.F. Lee, Louis Leung, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Donna S.C. Chu, Francis L. F. Lee, Louis Leung, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Donna S. C. Chu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138115804
• eBook ISBN: 9781136286841
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume puts together the works of a group of distinguished scholars and active researchers in the field of media and communication studies to reflect upon the past, present, and future of new media research. The chapters examine the implications of new media technologies on everyday life, existing social institutions, and the society at large at various levels of analysis. Macro-level analyses of changing techno-social formation – such as discussions of the rise of surveillance society and the "fifth estate" – are combined with studies on concrete and specific new media phenomena, such as the rise of Pro-Am collaboration and "fan labor" online. In the process, prominent concepts in the field of new media studies, such as social capital, displacement, and convergence, are critically examined, while new theoretical perspectives are proposed and explicated. Reflecting the inter-disciplinary nature of the field of new media studies and communication research in general, the chapters interrogate into the problematic through a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The book should offer students and researchers who are interested in the social impact of new media both critical reviews of the existing literature and inspirations for developing new research questions.

1 Introduction

Challenges for New Media Research

Francis L. F. Lee, Louis Leung, Jack L. Qiu, and Donna S. C. Chu

Research on new media has long been an important component of media studies. The beginning of media research in the U.S. and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s was arguably largely driven by concerns about the presumed influence of the new media (radio and film) during that era. The panic caused by CBS's Invasion from Mars—that legendary story known by every undergraduate student of communication studies these days—had to be understood not only against the social and political contexts of the 1930s, but also in relation to the relative novelty of radio broadcasting at the time. In other words, a large part of the earliest communication research was arguably “new media research” without being labeled as such.

Similarly, when television started to replace radio as the key piece of furniture in the living rooms of European and American households in the 1950s and 1960s, researchers who switched to studying television did not explicitly claim that they were doing “new media studies.” The notion of “new media” did not become widespread until the mid-1990s, when the Internet was emerging.

In the library catalogue of the university where the current authors are teaching, a keyword search using “new media” for books published between 1971 and 1980 would produce a list of only five volumes. The list lengthens to 13 between 1981 and 1990, including such works as Everett Rogers' Communication Technology: The New Media in Society and Ronald Rice et al.'s The New Media: Communication, Research, and Technology. However, the number of books derived from the same keyword search jumps to 158 for the five years between 1996 and 2000, and it grows further to 260 between 2006 and 2010.

INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE

There could have been many different factors leading to the rise of the notion of “new media research.” One possible reason is that, by the mid-1990s, a sense had already been developed among researchers and within the society at large that communication and media technologies were developing at such a pace that new technologies were likely to keep appearing one after another. Besides, the popularization of the Internet was also accompanied by recognition of the trend toward convergence. On the one hand, early conceptions of technological convergence might not have materialized. As Jenkins (2006) points out, while talk about technological convergence in the 1990s often assumed a development toward having all communication functions played by a singular “magic box,” the reality is that the “boxes” just keep piling up in people's homes. On the other hand, media and communication technologies have been developing in such a way that the various new and old media are no longer completely distinctive objects. Nowadays, people watch television and read newspapers through the Internet, which in turn is often accessed through mobile phones. Convergence poses the fundamental question of how any singular medium can be delimited and defined.

Putting it more generally, the rise of the Internet contributes to the dissolution of the object-technology-institution correspondence in the media arena. The latter type of correspondence is what marks the most important media in the era of mass communication—print, radio, and television. The technology of radio transmission, for example, can be used for many different purposes, and indeed it is. Nevertheless, for common people, radio consumption has long been overwhelmingly referred to as the use of specific technological objects (e.g., radio sets) to gain access to the information and entertainment content provided by large-scale institutions specializing in the production of such content. The same applies to television. And for both radio and television, technological developments over the years may have led to adjustments in programming and scheduling practices, content, and marketing strategies. In the case of television, for instance, the development of new technologies in the 1980s—cable, satellite transmission, video recording, and the remote control—facilitated the proliferation of channels, the emergence of new program genres, and increased audience power and control. However, this did not challenge the fundamental linkage between the technological objects, the basic transmission technology, and the fact that specialized, large-scale institutions are responsible for content production.

In contrast, the Internet is a technology that has sustained different types of communication organized and conducted by a large variety of individuals and institutions. From the beginning of its popularization, the Internet has provided emails, chat rooms, websites, i.e., channels for both mass and interpersonal communication, with content produced by both professionals and the users themselves. In other words, the Internet is not only a medium but also a mix of media, and behind Internet communication is not a specific type of institutional arrangement, but a large variety of institutional and non-institutional actors. Despite continual and admittedly valid warnings from critical scholars about the continual dominance of political economic power in the new media arena (especially in terms of access to audience) (e.g., Baker, 2007), it remains an important point that civic associations, marginal groups, and common citizens do contribute substantially to the content and information available online.

Defining the object of one's study is one of the most basic challenges facing new media research, and these are important considerations for us to make sense of what “new media” could be referring to these days. One possible way to describe the contemporary mediascape is to recognize that the Internet is no longer a new medium. Rather, it has become a platform upon which various new media appear. If we count the appearance of the ARPANET as the birthday of the Internet, the technology is actually already more than 40 years old. For a number of years, scholars have already been discussing the arrival of “digital natives,” young people who have not personally experienced a world without the Internet and mobile phones (McKinney and Banwart, 2011; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008). In this regard, the Internet is hardly “new” anymore; the new media are the more specific sites and “apps” in the era of mobile technologies and Web 2.0—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, and so on. Understood in this way, new media researchers may simply change their object of study from “the Internet” to the specific new media that have emerged more recently.

However, there is also an important sense in which the Internet should be taken holistically as a medium with certain characteristics. From many users' perspectives, the Internet can be just one whole thing that can be accessed via a computer or mobile phone. Once an individual is online, the movement from one platform to another can be seamless and effortless, e.g., most news websites allow users to forward an article they are reading to their friends via email through a single click, and many of the linked materials people share through Facebook are from YouTube or other websites. Therefore, the boundaries separating a website such as YouTube from other sites are much more porous than the boundaries separating one traditional medium (e.g., newspapers) from another (e.g., television). As a result, efforts to make sense of the general characteristics of the Internet (and other new media), as well as the implications of such characteristics, remain crucial. For instance, in a provocative and seminal article, Bennett and Iyengar (2008) have argued that the new media environment has facilitated a heightened degree of audience selectivity. Consequentially, contemporary societies are likely to enter a “new era of minimal media effects.” Similarly, John Hartley, in one of the chapters in this volume, argues that the Internet and other new media have ushered in an era in which the logic of probability, rather than the logic of essence, would serve as the basis of our knowledge and modes of knowing.

RETHINKING THE NOVELTY OF NEW MEDIA RESEARCH

Certainly, efforts to make sense of the general characteristics of the Internet and other new media should be conducted by keeping in mind the malleability of new media phenomena. When the Internet is considered holistically, it remains important to pay attention to the continual evolution of its constituent components. The new media on the Internet are “emerging” instead of “emerged,” as new innovations and technological breakthroughs continue to appear (e.g., YouTube's plan to facilitate live broadcast), common people's practices continue to shift and change (e.g., people start changing the way they use Facebook due to recognition of the potential problems brought to their personal and professional lives by sharing information and maintaining social connections through the site), and established institutions continue to try to find the best way to appropriate the technological affordances of the Internet (e.g., continual experimentation with forms of digital storytelling by news websites).

Arguably, this continual evolution of the Internet and its components is what makes the Internet still a “new medium:” Even if the technology and its popularity are not new, its current shape nonetheless is. In another chapter of this volume, José van Dijck analyzes the interpretive flexibility of Twitter. Her analysis begins with the argument that when many new media technologies (and non-media technologies, too) first come into existence there is a period of time in which different actors and organizations interpret the functionalities of the technologies in various ways. Such “interpretive efforts” drive the development of the new technologies until people settle down into a commonly accepted definition of the major functions of the new technologies. While van Dijck's analysis focuses on Twitter, and similar analysis can also be applied to Facebook, YouTube, and other new media phenomena, we may also argue that the Internet itself has experienced a prolonged period of interpretive flexibility since the 1990s, and there is no end in sight yet. It is plausible that new phenomena and functionalities will continue to emerge, thus continually altering the mix of online content and practices and reshaping the geography of cyberspace.

One major reason why the interpretive flexibility of the Internet is prolonged is that common people play an important role in the Internet's development. In the cases of radio and television, the “final” configuration of the institutional arrangement for broadcasting was the result of a process largely controlled by the elites (McChesney, 1999). The interpretive struggle, if there has been any, was waged mainly among major media corporations and government bureaucracies. In comparison, while policy-makers and major corporations undoubtedly played an important role in shaping the development of the Internet, individual new media entrepreneurs were also crucial in the development of some of the most exciting new media phenomena. The development of new media in the contemporary world often involves a bottom-up process through which common people's usage and behavior shape the meaning of the new medium. YouTube's original slogan “Broadcast Yourself” quickly became obsolete when common people began utilizing the service for purposes ranging from sharing clips of old, favorite programs to providing social and political critiques, such as through what the Chinese nowadays call “e-gao” (online spoofs) (Meng, 2011). Without romanticizing the role of the user, it is undeniable that, compared to their historical roles in shaping the institutions of newspapers and television, the “common people” nowadays have an undeniably bigger role to play in defining new media on the Internet.

The significance of what users do with new media should remind us about our struggle with new concepts and vocabulary to describe the role of people. New words such as prosumers and produsers—the latter discussed in one of the chapters of this volume—were invented to capture the point that people are no longer just receivers of information and content in the new media era. Rather, a lot of the new media content is “user-generated.” Nevertheless, it is questionable whether any one of these new terminologies can encompass the role of people in the new media world. The concept of prosumer, for instance, is premised on the dichotomy between production and consumption, and this dichotomy is arguably a simplification of the communication process even in the era of mass communication. It leaves out questions of distribution, packaging, and other fundamental politico-economic issues of power. In fact, as van Dijck (2009) and many others have pointed out, even in the era of Web 2.0, the percentage of Internet users who would actually produce original content is small. More importantly, many people are neither producers nor passive consumers of content. Rather, they play the role of distributors—through sharing a link with friends, pasting an article from a website onto a web forum, etc., and many also play the role of commentators— through adding comments under a YouTube video, or simply through “liking” something they see on social networking sites. What we need is probably not so much a single word that can capture the role of “the people” in the new media world, but a conceptual scheme that can differentiate the various roles played by users.

It should be noted that the issues discussed here are not only the concerns of “new media researchers,” as analysis of “new media” has become pervasive in various subfields of communication studies. Researchers interested in interpersonal relationships and communication nowadays can hardly ignore the roles played by social networking sites. Journalism scholars must ponder the implications of new media technologies on not only journalism's form or content, but also the very survival of a model of journalism based on production of news by paid professionals. Many of the most exciting and meaningful popular culture phenomena are also inseparable from new media. Even the study of seemingly more conventional popular cultural objects, such as television dramas and popular music, cannot ignore what people do with such objects through the Internet and mobile phones. It is difficult for researchers not to question how new media may impinge on the phenomena that they have been examining.

The pervasiveness of concerns regarding new media is the result of the deepening of new media's embeddedness in social lives and institutions. In the early 2000s, sociologists Barry Wellman and Carolyn Haythornthwaite (2002) compiled a volume of essays focusing on how the Internet has become embedded in people's everyday lives. While the earliest research on Internet users in the mid-1990s often focused on the small group of computer wizards, by the late 1990s attention had already begun to turn to “common usage” by “common users.” Much of what people do with and on the Internet has become part of their daily routines, serving mundane purposes. The Internet often reinforces or at most adjusts, rather than radically alters, existing patterns of behavior and relationships. Ten years later, the Internet and mobile phones have become even more fully embedded in people's lives. The digital natives, in particular, may find it difficult to understand how life without the Internet and mobile technologies is possible.

At the same time, new media technologies have become more deeply embedded in the operations of various social and political institutions. Take journalism as an example; around the turn of the new century, “online journalism” was still largely restricted to news organizations putting their daily news reports onto their websites. News organizations did engage in various experiments on how a sustainable journalism on the Internet could be developed, but without much success (Boczkowski, 2004). However, since around 2005, using the Internet in the news production process and the incorporation of online content into news products has become fully routinized for many mainstream news organizations around the world.

Of course, in the case of journalism, the necessity of scholars investigating new media technologies is fundamentally due to the threat posed by new media technologies on journalism's very survival. The failure to develop a sustainable business model in the online arena, together with the changing news consumption habits of the younger generation, new developments such as online citizen journalism, and the appearance of news aggregators, have posed serious challenges to the sustainability of the conventional model of commercial-cum-professional journalism. In the U.S., since 2008 as such technological and social developments met with the economic crisis, many news organizations have been laying off staff or simply closing down. This gets us back to the question of the relationship between media technologies, user practices, and institutions. The overarching question is how journalism as a social practice can be (re-)organized (see McChesney and Pickard, 2011).

Similar questions of “redefinition” can now be raised against not only newspapers, but also other media and institutions. In any case, the fact that questions concerning new media are now more prominent and central to various subfields in communication research means that it has become more and more difficult to identify a core research agenda for all research related to new media. One may even raise the question of whether new media research remains a distinctive field at all, and if so, how its research priorities should be defined.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This book is produced against the background described above. We do not claim to be presenting a comprehensive research agenda for new media studies. Nonetheless, the 15 substantive chapters included in this book do constitute a set of writings that address many of the most important issues and cutting-edge problematic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Challenges for New Media Research
• PART I Techno-Social Formations
• PART II Recurring Issues
• PART III Emerging Media
• Contributors
• Index