Contemporary Media Environment Research Articles

Talk vs chat-based radio: A case for distinction

Abstract This article considers the differences between talk radio and chat-based radio as specific genres of radio programming in an attempt to address the very broad use of the term ‘talk/talkback’ radio in radio research. Chat-based programming is a term devised by Tolson in relation to television, but this article argues that the definition as applied to television is relevant to radio, particularly in a contemporary media environment where media boundaries are increasingly blurred. It examines the key concepts that define ‘chat-based’ programming as they apply to radio, which are an orientation to personal topics, the use of humour, and potential for transgression. The format is increasingly popular, particularly on commercial radio. This article investigates three key questions: (1) Is there a difference between chat-based and talk radio programming?; (2) Why does genre matter in radio studies?; and (3) What are the implications for defining an alternative genre of talk? It argues that talk radio and chat-based radio are distinct formats, but that chat-based programming can and does incorporate issue-based ‘segments’ to engage listeners. In arguing for the distinction, this article lays some foundations and raises questions for consideration in future analyses of radio talk.

Connected viewing: uma visão geral

A range of mobile technologies, multiple screens, and user engagement are arising in connected formats of media usage. Connected viewing is a term that refers to these varieties of platforms for content distribution and multiple viewing practices that are being developed, or have evolved, within the convergent digital landscape, and generates many disruptions in the viewing consumption. This paper presents the book anthology edited by Holt and Sanson, Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Age, with subjects on how connected viewing is affecting the contemporary media environment such as business models of production, infrastructure, distribution, user engagement

Gendering the European Digital Agenda: The Challenge of Gender Mainstreaming Twenty Years after the Beijing World Conference on Women

AbstractThe goals set out in the 1995 Platform for Action of the Beijing World Conference on Women—to achieve gender equality in and through the media—interrogate today's digital policies: To what extent have internationally agreed-upon norms of gender equality and gender mainstreaming been recognized and implemented? To what extent has the knowledge produced by feminist scholarship informed media policy developments? What kind of new knowledge, and analytical frameworks, may contribute to unmask gender-unequal power relations in contemporary media environments? The article addresses these questions with a focus on European discourses and institutional practices for the Digital Agenda.

Gendering the European Digital Agenda: The Challenge of Gender Mainstreaming Twenty Years after the Beijing World Conference on Women

AbstractThe goals set out in the 1995 Platform for Action of the Beijing World Conference on Women—to achieve gender equality in and through the media—interrogate today's digital policies: To what extent have internationally agreed-upon norms of gender equality and gender mainstreaming been recognized and implemented? To what extent has the knowledge produced by feminist scholarship informed media policy developments? What kind of new knowledge, and analytical frameworks, may contribute to unmask gender-unequal power relations in contemporary media environments? The article addresses these questions with a focus on European discourses and institutional practices for the Digital Agenda.

What We Talk About When Talk About “Media Independence”

Media independence is a contested concept that carries different meanings in different contexts. As a normative ideal, independence can be discussed on many levels, and media organisations, journalists, researchers and regulators often invoke the term in contradictory ways. In contemporary European media policy, the conceptual contestation over the meaning of independence has been further reheated by commercial media’s attempts to reframe the distinction between commercial and public service media as a choice between “independent” and “state” media. The digital transformations and the emergence of new media actors and platforms also challenge the meaning and relevance of different conceptions of media independence and dependence. In this article, we discuss the changing uses of the notion of independence in current media policy discourse, including controversies between public service and commercial media, but also other settings where the notion is invoked. We then develop a more fine-tuned understanding of the different dimensions that media independence contains in a contemporary media environment. Finally, we discuss how the relational nature of independence makes it problematic to employ as a normative principle in media policy.

Strategic impact documentary: Contexts of production and social intervention

The past decade has seen the emergence of a new kind of documentary making that marries documentary storytelling and the principles of strategic communication. Strategic impact documentary is a transmedia practice that aims to achieve specific social change by aligning documentary production with online and offline communications practices. The contemporary media environment is one in which a wide range of organizations work to achieve their political and social goals through the media. This article highlights key characteristics of an emerging form of professional documentary production, drawing attention to formal development and changing contexts of production and the implications of this for our understanding of the link between documentary and social change.

Reconceptualizing CSR in the Media Industry as Relational Accountability

In this paper, we reconceptualize CSR in the media industries by combining empirical data with theoretical perspectives emerging from the communication studies and business ethics literature. We develop a new conception of what corporate responsibility in media organizations may mean in real terms by bringing Bardoel and d’Haenens’ (European Journal of Communication 19 165--194 2004) discussion of the different dimensions of media accountability into conversation with the empirical results from three international focus group studies, conducted in France, the USA and South Africa. To enable a critical perspective on our findings, we perform a philosophical analysis of its implications for professional, public, market, and political accountability in the media, drawing on the insights of Paul Virilio. We come to the conclusion that though some serious challenges to media accountability exist, the battle for responsible media industries is not lost. In fact, the speed characterizing the contemporary media environment may hold some promise for fostering the kind of relational accountability that could underpin a new understanding of CSR in the media.

Moving convergence culture towards cultural intermediation: social media and cultural inclusion

Raymond Williams noted culture is specific to each society, where ‘the making of a society is the finding of common meanings and direction’. Cultural studies provide a foundation for an array of emerging research areas that seek to explore those meanings and directions, such as convergence culture. Recent humanities scholarship has called for researchers to move beyond the marvel of convergence culture, with its potential for increased social inclusion and cultural diversity, to a more nuanced understanding of networked participation. This paper uses empirical research data gathered from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to argue that embedded cultural industries research can contribute, through the cultural intermediation framework, to cultural studies and the political, economic, and practice-based strengths of the creative industries. It also argues that in a contemporary institutional social media environment, cultural intermediation is a useful framework to understand convergent media practices.

“I Did It All Online:” Transgender identity and the management of everyday life

ABSTRACT Informed by ethnographic work with transgender individuals and communities in the Midwest and San Francisco, this article explores the relationship between technology and transgender identity. It examines the possibilities for self-recognition that transgender audiences had before the era of the internet. Then, through a case study of a transgender person, it engages in a close analysis of what it means to transition gender in online environments. Drawing from Heidegger's (1962. Being and time. New York: Harper Perennial) phenomenology of technology, I argue that technology has become increasingly “ready-to-hand”—available, participatory, and taken-for-granted—for transgender individuals. In particular, the internet has created virtual “counterpublics” (Warner, 2002. Publics and counterpublics. Brooklyn: Zone Books) that furnish feelings of belonging and ideological affiliation, as well as “care structures” (Scannell, 2014. Television and the meaning of live: An enquiry into the human situation. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), architectures of organized care and concern, that facilitate transgender identity work and everyday survival. For transgender individuals, who live in a world created without them in mind, the affordances of online counterpublics and care structures help them manage the trials and complexities of everyday life. At the same time, contemporary digital media environments introduce new risks and liabilities for transgender individuals.

Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques

Accidental, Assisted, Automated: An Emerging Repertoire of Infant Mobile Media Techniques

Examining the Third-Person Perception on News Consumers’ Intention to Pay

Examining the psycho-economics of paying intent using the third-person effect framework, this study examines the extent to which self–other asymmetry factors into news consumers’ intentions to pay for multiplatform news products. Findings from a web-based panel survey of 767 U.S. internet users suggest people consistently perceive others as more likely to pay for news across three news platforms (print, web, and app) and that the perceived difference in how much more likely others would pay for news than oneself widens from print to web and to app editions. Such findings reveal the economic nature of news as multiplatform products in the eyes of news consumers from a novel perspective and offer a theoretical understanding of the psychology behind consumers’ paying intent for multiplatform news products in the contemporary media environment.

Internet literacy and digital natives’ civic engagement: Internet skill literacy or Internet information literacy?

ABSTRACTThis study aims to show the role of Internet literacy in empowering digital natives’ civic engagement. Using a survey of 10th graders, we analyzed the effects of digital media use and Internet literacy on adolescents’ political and social interest, participation, and efficacy, controlling for their home and school environments. In doing so, we try to highlight the following points. First, we emphasize that there are two separate dimensions of Internet literacy: Internet skill literacy and Internet information literacy. Second, we adopt a broader concept of civic engagement reflecting the changing youth practices observed in the contemporary media environment. The study empirically found that Internet information literacy, not Internet skill literacy, is intricately related to adolescents’ civic engagement. It was also shown that adolescents’ Internet use contributed only to new and alternative forms of participation. Overall, the findings show that an adolescent who can critically understand and effectively evaluate online information is more likely to become an active civic participant than one who lacks such skills. The study concludes with a few policy suggestions.

The Chicago School and Ecology

The Chicago School’s use of ecological metaphors has much to offer scholars interested in the complexities of the contemporary media environment. This article considers how the use of ecological metaphors enabled the Chicago School to build an empirical approach to the study of human forms of organization and traces how the use of ecological metaphors has evolved in subsequent scholarship on media and communication. It examines the interest of media ecology scholars in the environment created by technologies, and discusses how proponents of actor network theory have expanded the view of networked actors to encompass technologies, objects, and human agents. The article subsequently traces a more recent proliferation of ecological metaphors as a way of understanding globalized and networked media practices. This approach, in turn, enables the reconfiguration of questions around the relationship between media, democracy, and citizenship. This article suggests that the use of ecological approaches enables scholars to pay attention to the complexities of networked interactions in communities that are geographically bounded but globally connected. This, in turn, points the continued importance of grounded, nitty-gritty empirical work tracing the variety of communicative practices within particular communities, and the ways in which these practices are shaped by relationships between a variety of actors within and beyond these communities.

Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

Digital Narrating for Contentious Politics: Social Media Content Curation at Movement Protests

Community Information Needs: A Theory and Methodological Framework

In the mass media age, mass communication researchers interested in civic engagement and participation focused primarily on media and media use. However, given the upending of traditional media institutions and the rise of social media and other digital communication technologies that are giving rise to new sources of information, the contemporary media environment calls for a focus on information received from media (and non-media sources), and whether that information meets communities’ information needs. This article unifies different theoretical traditions into a definition of community information needs and a model of community information needs, information seeking and processing, and civic engagement, which can begin to guide theoretically grounded need assessments. The community information seeking and processing model proposed also requires a fresh look at methodological traditions; community-based participatory (CBPR) research is suggested as a possible framework to follow. The CBPR framework capitalizes on the unique scholarly and professional strengths of the mass communication discipline not only to assess information needs but also to help fulfill those needs and study the community-level effects of a robust information environment.

Creation of football slash fan fiction

Although sports fandom and fan fiction are often thought of as different worlds, in the contemporary media environment, this is not the case. Sport is a popular source text for fan fiction, and high-level European football, one of the world's most watched sports, has long had an online fan fiction presence. In a study of the LiveJournal community Footballslash over the 2011–12 European football season, I investigate what makes football a suitable source text for fan fiction, especially slash fan fiction; what fan fiction authors are doing with football; and what this suggests about how football and fan fiction are used in the present day. I present a new understanding of football as a media text to be transformed as well as provide an in-depth look into how this type of real person slash is developed and thought of by its practitioners. In doing so, I show what happens when fandoms and fan practices converge in the 21st century.

People with disability and new disaster communications: access and the social media mash-up

This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.

The form and function of quoting in digital media

In this article, we discuss the function of quoting and information sharing in social media services and argue that certain aspects of quoting point to similarities with oral culture, where the social functions of sharing complement the aim to inform or disseminate information. We approach the issue by first providing a brief historical account of content sharing practices from the early days of the Internet to the contemporary social media environment, in which content sharing is both prevalent and facilitated by platform architecture. We then conduct an exploratory quantitative content analysis of three Twitter hashtags relating to different topics, and link their structural variation to the different content sharing practices prevalent in them. We conclude by arguing that the social use of quotation in social media discourse can be a predictor of community structure, but that the degree to which this is the case differs locally.

Mediatized opinion leaders: New patterns of opinion leadership in new media environments?

The study analyzes which forms opinion leadership takes in contemporary media environments where communication channels have increased and started to permeate interpersonal interaction. Some scholars assume that opinion leadership becomes more important under these conditions, as more media are available to enact it, and that more orientation is needed. Others argue that opinion leadership loses its importance as online media target audiences directly without interaction from opinion leaders. This study demonstrates that opinion leadership still exists in contemporary media environments. Using a cluster analysis of German online survey data, three clusters were identified that resemble communicative roles from earlier studies: Opinion Leaders, Followers, and Inactives. An additional fourth cluster, Mediatized Opinion Leaders, was also found. Individuals in this cluster exhibit the strongest and most diverse use of media and communication channels both for informing themselves and for communicating with followers.

Agents of Media Innovations: Actors, Actants, and Audiences

In the contemporary media environment, media managers have been forced to reassess everything from editorial workflows to business models to technological platforms. Amid such challenges, legacy news media are encouraged to innovate. Contemporary scholarly literature on media innovation typically adopts a relatively narrow approach when defining and studying the agents involved in shaping media innovations. Ultimately, many studies focus on individual parts of the organization rather than the complete system. There is thus a need to theorize and conceptualize the agents of media innovations in order to understand and improve activities of media innovations. This article presents the AMI approach (Agents of Media Innovations) as a holistic theoretical construct for understanding the agents of media innovation activities. It conceptualizes this approach through a systematic discussion of four interlinked factors: actors, actants, audiences, and activities. These are used to compose and outline what we call the 4A Matrix, encompassing seven distinct and typological ways in which actors, actants and audiences might intersect in the activities of media innovation. In mapping this interplay, the 4A Matrix serves as a heuristic for the scholarly study of media innovations, as well as a conceptual tool for envisioning, at a practical level, how media managers might act strategically.