revisiting traditional communication research methods
I raised this question earlier in an email to the group. We need to rethink how we approach the study of the impact of new media on youth. Here are some questions I’ve been pondering and would be interested in what others think: How do digital technologies and emerging interactive platforms challenge our traditional methods for understanding young people’s relationship to media? In a digital media environment characterized by its virtual, immersive, peer-to-peer, user-generated, and increasingly mobile nature, it is no longer a matter of examining the “effect” of media “content” on individual behavior. What are the most promising ways of investigating how youth engage with media and with each other in these new platforms?
I guess that we can understand many of the forms of engagement by looking at the technological offerings on various sites. so the Obama campaign offered lots of social networking and personal expression opportunities.
There is already a large literature on how forms of engagement are changing. Some of this is in our MIT book.
A question for me is what young citizens learn from various experiences, and whether there are ways to distribute the most effective learning experiences more broadly.
Lance Bennett
February 24, 2009 at 3:35 am
I would think that how people learn as well as what they learn, especially in relation to learning via engaging with ‘digital technologies and emerging interactive platforms’, is part of what we could be hoping to explore and provide some data on. Any findings would raise issues such as the one posed by Katherine in February. The ‘effect’ of the new media may not so interesting/important any longer.
Stephen’s response to Katherine’s post suggests that there are new codes or characteristics of civic activity:
“If much of the civic action is now taking place in discreet online spaces, protected from public view by passwords etc, how do we gain a sense of what’s going on?”
But I am not so sure they are any more private or protected from public view, and thus more resistant to research, than has long been the case. I would argue too that elements of civic action, like learning, has always been a very private business, What issue, why act, and what action with whom, like learning despite the public nature of the teacher up-front and class in listening mode – they have both private and public formats. So I’d reckon if you want to know what and how people learn or think/act privately you need to ask them, and use the literature on learning (and civic action vis a vis motivation etc) to analyse their responses, and inter-act with them. Case-study research is slow and expensive, so we can only do small-scale stuff, but the methods do not need to be so different. (As always) the sampling and selection of respondents will be important of course.
But if we are able to get sufficient approp data that address the modes of learning and of civic action, as well as what is learned or what engagement is actioned, then we may be able to generalise on some elements of these. Then we should be able to make useful commentary about how to best ‘distribute the most effective learning experiences more broadly’, as raised by Lance. This outcome has to be the goal I would imagine… why else be bothered?
The Australian C&C National Assessment suggests there is a tight inter-connection between civic activities and civic knowledge and citizenship disposition, and this means we might be able to locate whether engagement between ‘digital technologies and emerging interactive platforms’ which could be characterised as ‘civic’ works in a similar manner to the more conventional civic activities…
I don’t think I am just being optimistic here (I am rarely accused of this, so go for it if you think I am!!)
Certainly theseare the kinds of matters we will need to get some agreed position in in July.
Will be fun, eh?!
Suzanne
smellor
April 20, 2009 at 5:21 am