New Media Research

Introduction

• The Internet is unique among Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) specifically because the Internet of 2002 has important differences from the Internet of 2005, or 2009, or 2012.

20022012

Social Science Research in the Time of the Internet

• Standard research practices not well suited to pace of new medium. Why?

• Question driven• New techniques

Four Essays

• Changes to “blogosphere”• Politics – before and after YouTube• Data everywhere

• Wayback Machine and lobster traps• Valuable metrics and rise of spammers• Public vs. Proprietary

• Embracing transparency and kludginess

Methodological challenges in measuring online news content

• Content analysis – Norwegian Broadcast Co.

• “does not try to categorize content through the words of the stories, but through the structured markup and URL structure of the website.”

Then Now• Newspapers• Hand-coded

• Online News Sites• Automated

through text filters.

Online Content Analysis

1. Operationalize research questions or hypotheses

2. Design the coding scheme

3. Define the sample

4. Write the selectors – much like scraping

5. Run a pilot study

6. Start the coding process

7. Review the codebook continuously

8. Perform coding spell-check

9. Establish inter-coder agreement

‘New media’ research publication trends and outlets in communication, 1990–2006

• Mediamorphosis and Diffusion of Innovation

• Method – extended lit review

• Shift in journal focus

Results

Phasingout?

Interactivity

Kiousis – explication

Operational and theoretical definition

Common questions in theoretical discussions

Principal domains of Interactivity definitions

1. Technological properties

2. Communication context

3. User perceptions

Tentative definition of Interactivity

Operational definition (cont.)

Downes and McMillan

• Based on concepts/themes found in the literature, 10 “elite” individuals who were involved with emerging communication technologies were asked to provide their insights about interactivity in computer-mediated environments

p. 161

What did they find?

• Three major categories of findings:• Impacts• Messages• Participants

Microscope and Moving Target

19 published and unpublished studies identified that applied content analysis techniques to the web were analyzed to determine if stable research techniques could be applied to a dynamic environment

Key themes found

• Diversity found at web sites (in content, funding sources, communication models)

• Commercialization of the web

• Many developers were not found to be using the web to its full potential (as a multimedia interactive environment)

Internet Culture

What is the culture of the Internet?

Inventing the Medium, 2011

• Written from humanist perspective

• Design of digital objects is a cultural practice

• Understand context and connotations of design choices

• Digital medium with its own affordances

• Designing the unfamiliar – immature medium, inventing new building blocks while designing; too many building blocks better suited to legacy media; users can’t tell us how to resolve new design issues

• Intuitive/transparent;interface design/interaction design; user/interactor; content/information; interactivity/agency;

Inventing the Medium

• Artifact, environment, application, device, system

• Expand scope of shared attention

• Media is an elaboration of a baby’s pointing

• Writing expands amount of info that can be accessed without need for memory – can augment human powers for good or evil

• Computer has brought on cultural change of the magnitude of writing, printing press

• By participating, we are widening the circle of shared attention, expanding human cognition and enlarging human culture

Inventing the Medium

• Inscription, transmission, representation

• Remediation

• Four affordances• Encyclopedic – can contain and transmit more information

in humanly accessible form than all previous media combined

• Spatial – virtual space that is also navigable to the interactor

• Procedural – represent and execute conditional behaviors

• Participatory – designer must script both sides so that the

interactions are meaningful (think Siri)

Life on the Screen, 1997

• “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

• “Through experiences with computers, people come to a certain understanding of postmodernism and to recognize its ability to usefully capture certain aspects of their own experience, both online and off.”

• “The computer culture’s center of gravity has shifted decisively to people who do not think of themselves as programmers.”

• “The computer… enables us to contemplate mental life that exists apart from bodies.”

• “We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substitution representations of reality for the real.”

• Culture of calculation to simulation

• MUD examples

Convergence Culture, 2008

• Media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence

• Participatory culture and Bert Is Evil: the meme folds into itself, as art imitates life imitates art…

• The idea of putting media in the tubes is nothing new. However, the codecs, compression, and bandwidth needed to make such a concept both possible and profitable didn’t come around until the last decade.

• “Industry leaders were acknowledging the importance of the role that ordinary consumers can play not just in accepting convergence, but actually in driving the process. If the media industry in recent years has seemed at war with its consumers, in that it is trying to force consumers back into old relationships and into obedience to well-established norms, companies hoped to use this New Orleans event to justify their decisions to consumers and stockholders alike.”

Convergence Culture

• Ithiel de Sola Pool: “[T]he one-to-one relationship that used to exist between a medium and its use is eroding.”

• Examples – Spoiling Survivor, American Idol, Harry Potter fiction

Smart Mobs, 2003

• Kids with smartphones have now proven themselves to be a potent force for change.

• Decentralized messaging services like Twitter were vital in the Arab Spring revolts.

• Early discussion of smartphones, potential for journalism.

• “Professor [Vicente] Rafael sees the SMS-linked crowd that assembled in Manilla [to throw out Filipino President Estrada after the suspicious termination of his impeachment trial] as the manifestation of a phenomenon that was enabled by a technical infrastructure but is best understood as a social instrument.”

• The Battle of Seattle (the WTO protests in 1999) operated under similar circumstances.

• Wearable devices

Smart Mobs

• “Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists—ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side—use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the Information Age… What all have in common is that they operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly—anywhere, any time… They know how to swarm and disperse, penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. The tactics they use range from battles of ideas to acts of sabotage—and many tactics involve the Internet.”

Virtual Community, 1998

• Example of The Well.

• 3 essential places in people's lives : the place we live, the place we work, and the place we gather for conviviality.

• “Many people are alarmed by the very idea of a virtual community, fearing that it is another step in the wrong direction, substituting more technological ersatz for yet another natural resource or human freedom. These critics often voice their sadness at what people have been reduced to doing in a civilization that worships technology, decrying the circumstances that lead some people into such pathetically disconnected lives that they prefer to find their companions on the other side of a computer screen. There is a seed of truth in this fear, for virtual communities require more than words on a screen at some point if they intend to be other than ersatz.”

Virtual Community, 1998

• “Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public places where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall. Or perhaps cyberspace is precisely the wrong place to look for the rebirth of community, offering not a tool for conviviality but a life-denying simulacrum of real passion and true commitment to one another. In either case, we need to find out soon.”

• Because we cannot see one another in cyberspace, gender, age, national origin, and physical appearance are not apparent unless a person wants to make such characteristics public. People whose physical handicaps make it difficult to form new friendships find that virtual communities treat them as they always wanted to be treated--as thinkers and transmitters of ideas and feeling beings, not carnal vessels with a certain appearance and way of walking and talking (or not walking and not talking).

Internet Galaxy, 2001

Castells’ four castes of Internet Culture:Techno-meritocratic elites

Hacker

Virtual communitarian

Entrepreneur

These are in no way mutually exclusive; the particular mixture of each mindset informs the hegemony of any given community.

An Open Letter to Wired Magazine

• Analogous to being in an abusive relationship

• Most of the time they’re great, until they make you feel bad about yourself

An Open Letter to Wired Magazine

• Cover was published 2010• 1996: the last time a woman was featured

on the cover because of her accomplishments in the tech industry

• 1994: the only other time there was a tech-accomplished woman on the cover

A Woman’s Place

Article in the The New Yorker

Published in 2011

About the progress Sheryl has made for women in the tech industry; also acknowledges that she may be somewhat of an exception and that there is still a lot of progress to be made

A Woman’s Place

Graduated first in the economics department at Harvard

Worked as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at World Bank; McKinsey & Company; chief of staff for Summers when he worked Deputy Treasury Secretary and Treasury Secretary for Clinton; Google

Currently working as the chief operating officer of Facebook – made them profitable

A Woman’s Place

• Professor Lawrence Summers became her mentor – provided her with many opportunities that aren’t typically available to women

• Has supported developing powerful women throughout her career

• Co-founded Women in Economics and Government at Harvard

• Believed that women were the ones holding themselves back

A Woman’s Place

Sandberg’s Solutions:“Sit at the table” – 57% of men negotiate their

salaries; only 7% of women do likewise

Make sure partner at home is a real partner - women do two-thirds of the housework and three-fourths of the child care

“Don’t leave before you leave” – when women start thinking about having children, they don’t raise their hands anymore, start leaning back

Tech Executives See Paths for Women, Especially Geeks

Article in The Wall Street Journal from 2011

Interview about opportunities for women in tech

Talks with three female executives from Google,

Susan Wojcicki, Jen Fitzpatrick and Marissa Mayer all joined Google in 1999

Tech Executives See Paths for Women, Especially Geeks

Women in tech on the decline? Women held 25% of computing-related

occupations in 2009, down from 30% in 2000

Computer information systems degrees for women held at 18% since the 2007-2008 school year, which is down from 28% in 2001-2002

16% of women in tech aspire to be in top management versus 26% of men

Tech Executives See Paths for Women, Especially Geeks

Will social media change the trend?Marissa Mayer: “Now we have Google, Facebook,

Twitter and others touching the lives of girls in middle school and you have people saying, ‘Well, gosh, how do you build that?’”

Uninspiring interviewWSJ asked: “Do tech companies in Silicon Valley do

a good job of helping women re-enter the work force and have good maternity-leave policies?”

Didn’t really answer this question; skirted the issue Weak questions and answers were to blame

Tech-savvy women seek support in classroom and newsroom

Article written in 2005

Women in technology on the decline in early 2000s2005: Only 11% of top earners at high-tech

companies in the Fortune 500 were women; seven women in the role of chief executive

2002: 26% of IT professionals were women; down from 33% in 1990

Tech-savvy women seek support in classroom and newsroom

Impediments for WomenCurriculum was focused more toward men who

were already interested in and knowledgeable of computer science; there has been a shift to make classes more appealing to women

Women were more into blogging before men; then became a man’s game and shifted the power

Powerful blogs are linked to each other creating an elite class that is difficult to enter

Changing in recent years with fashion blogs

Tech-savvy women seek support in classroom and newsroom

Impediments for WomenWomen enjoy technology with a purpose; men just like

technologySocial media is helping cultivate that interest for

women

Technology used to only be taught in computer science classes

Need to offer courses that teach higher level skillsThere has been a shift in going to “where the girls

are” has created a new generation of tech-savvy women who use it to get ahead in their careers

Provide role models in the classroomDifficult to get professors who can teach both high-

level technology and communications