In my opinion, the most important research question that this week’s authors addressed is “will these [new media] technologies extend our political capacities or limit democracy – or alternatively, do a little bit of both?” In 2002, Papacharissi attempted to answer this question by reviewing the various potential impacts that scholars anticipated the internet might have on public discourse and, subsequently, democracy.
He poses several important considerations that still need to be addressed by the literature. For example, will the technologies introduced by the internet adapt themselves to the current political culture or will they create a new public sphere? This question is a meaningful one as journalists and advertisers struggle to find ways to make online content (which is very much in demand and can no longer be ignored) profitable. It seems that the more successful they become at doing so, the more the internet adapts to the current political culture. In other words, as the online world becomes more conducive to making money, it becomes more and more absorbed by a mass commercial culture. When this happens, the potential for meaningful political discussion becomes more and more buried beneath the clutter.
Take Facebook for example. Facebook is currently one of the most trafficked web sites in the world and is the most popular social networking site available. It presents ample opportunity for citizens to connect with a diverse population and engage in discourse that may increase political knowledge and engagement. However, as Facebook matures and becomes increasingly profit-oriented, the content becomes more individually tailored to the user’s personal interests. In other words, if a Facebook user is not interested in politics, but rather is interested in celebrity and entertainment news, Facebook will generate advertising content that promotes celebrity oriented products and information content instead of showing politically oriented content. This type of individually tailored content might make it easier for individuals to select out of any content or conversation that could benefit the public sphere. Academics have not (that I know of) sufficiently addressed this increasingly popular form of individualized content. I predict that online content will move more and more towards this end and we need to find a way to study it.
In order to efficiently study topics like the effects of individualized media content, researchers must come up with innovative and inclusive research methods in order to capture the vastness of the Internet. Tomasello, Lee, and Baer summarize the multiple directions that new media research has taken over a 17 year time frame. One of the most important and under-researched areas they identify is the difficulty of applying traditional research methods and theory to new media topics. Types of online content and media processes are so different from traditional media that it’s nearly impossible to take the same, old research methods and apply them to a new media world. It’s time for scholars to get creative and to take a shot at reinventing the wheel, because old practices will not always work and do not always mean the same thing in a new media world.
For example, Strommer-Galley identified a conceptual problem with the term interactivity. As a result of new technology, interactivity does not necessarily mean a social interaction occurring between two people. Sometimes researchers also apply this term to a type of interaction between people and computers. A handful of research is interested in when political actors utilize technology to encourage political interaction amongst people. I studied official Presidential candidate web sites during the 2008 primaries and identified several methods of interactivity (and whether or not they were real or perceived) utilized on the web sites. Reviewers had problems with mine and the other authors’ usages of the concept interactivity because we were not referring to any sort of face to face contact. With Stromer-Galley’s new definitions of interactivity-as-product versus interactivity-as-process, this would have been more clear. Research of new media-related topics may have surpassed a “take-off” phase as it continues to increase in importance and frequency, but there are still many methodological and theoretical innovations that need to be made in order for meaningful research to occur. If we want to answer Papacharissi’s question, for example, this needs to be done.
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