Free-range
questions …
| What
are some communication forms (or technologies) that you would define
as new? |
| What
makes them new? |
| What
makes them different from older forms? What key characteristics
contribute to their “newness”? |
What
makes these new, significantly distinct communication forms worthy
of study?
*
What makes them intellectually interesting?
* Or … what interesting
questions can you ask about them? |
|
Some
scholars (including Chaffee and Metzger, whom you'll read at the
very end of the semester) suggest today’s
media are “demassified,” which
raises interesting intellectual questions about them. Among the differences
between old and new media forms:
| |
Old |
New |
| CHANNELS |
Few |
Many |
| AUDIENCE |
Unified |
Diverse |
CONTROL
|
Sender |
User |
| TRANSMISSION |
One-way |
Interactive |
| |
Time-specific |
On demand |
| MOTIVATION |
Arousal |
Fulfill needs |
| LEARNING |
Social modeling |
Experiential |
“The
new media bring challenges to our old models, as well as the occasion
to re-evaluate, extend, and perhaps even supercede them” (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001, p. 378)
|
Morris
and Ogan also see opportunities to rethink traditional mass media theories,
including:
| Uses
and Gratifications: Audience members actively choose to
use particular media (or particular bits of media content) in particular
ways
to fulfill particular needs at particular times. |
| Agenda-Setting: The
media have a powerful role in determining what not so much what
we think, but what we think about. Only a limited number of
items can occupy the media agenda at a given time. |
... and
traditional conceptions of connectedness, including:
| Social
Networks: People
are connected with each other in complex networks, which the online
environment facilitates in ways ripe for exploration. |
| Social
Presence and Media Richness: The
degree to which we are “present” to
one another in a mediated environment relates to the number of
sensory cues the medium allows. (For instance, videoconferencing
provides a “richer” environment than an e-mail listserv.) |
| Interactivity: Perhaps
the most fundamental attribute of many new media forms, interactivity
involves the two-way nature of communication. |
|
Rafaeli
(known best for his conceptualizations about interactivity) offers his
personal list of key aspects of the Internet that make it worth studying:
| Its
multimedia, multifaceted sensory appeal. |
| Its
non-linearity. |
| Its
anti-censorship structure. |
| Its
synchronicity (or lack of it). |
| Its
interactivity. |
Newhagen
adds, as sort of an umbrella category, the Internet’s digital
nature. |
Schneider
and Foot focus on methods, or approaches to research into new media
technologies, rather than theories.
They suggest the Web is simultaneously ephemeral and permanent,
and they urge a "socio-cultural"
approach to studying it that considers both context and discrete forms
and structures.
In particular,
they recommend what they call a "Web sphere analysis" that
enables researchers to study both the actual forms or artifacts of
communication and the relationships among communicators. They
emphasize the "co-productive nature of new media,"
or the fact that online producers and consumers are one and the same. |
The three book intros and initial chapters
offer three different topical and stylistic approaches to studying the
Internet. But some of the overall themes are similar:
Web
Theory offers, in the introduction, two theses for considering
the Web:
*
The loose Web, the idea that the medium contains
countless constituent parts that are interconnected in intricate,
fluid ways.
*
A cultural production thesis, which is like uses
and gratifications in emphasizing an active audience of producers
/ consumers. |
Society
Online, in addition to offering baseline info about how
we use the Internet, proposes an "embedded media"
perspective: It's all about how we use the medium. The authors
emphasize three aspects:
*
Fit, that new media suit our daily routines and existing social habits.
(Other researchers refer to the process of "normalizing" a new media
form.)
*
Status, that (again) we both produce and consume
political, economic and social information.
*
Link, that the medium is a connective device, linking people to one
another as well as connecting different spheres of our lives. |
| On
the Internet is more downbeat about technology and its role in
our lives. In particular, the author challenges the desirability
(or even the possibility) of separating our bodies, or our physical
presence, from our social interactions. |
|