Media 2.0?• Mpm107 – New Media Research Methodologies

• How have networks alter how we understand research?

Group Activity Part 1• In groups of 4, discuss what the term "new media research"

means.

• What type of skills and research does it imply?

• Write down your answers.

2007: 2.0 becomes acknowledged• David Gauntlett proposed Media Studies 2.0 as a new

framework

• The traditional form of media studies teaching and research fails to recognize :• the changing media landscape in which the categories of

'audiences' and 'producers' blur together, • new research methods and approaches they require.

Outline of difference Part 1Media Studies 1.0 Media studies 2.0

Fetishise 'experts', whose readings of popular culture are seen as more significant than those of other audience members (with corresponding faith in faux-expert non-procedures such as semiotics);

Focus on the everyday meanings produced by the diverse array of audience members, accompanied by an interest in new qualitative research techniques;

A tendency to celebrate certain key texts produced by powerful media industries and celebrated by well-known critics;

An interest in the massive 'long tail' of independent media projects such as those found on YouTube and many other websites, mobile devices, and other forms of DIY media;

The optional extra of giving attention to famous 'avant garde' works produced by artists recognized in the traditional sense, and which are seen as especially 'challenging';

Attempt to embrace the truly international dimensions of Media Studies – including a recognition not only of the processes of globalization, but also of the diverse perspectives on media and society being worked on around the world;

Outline of difference Part 2Media Studies 1.0 Media Studies 2.0

A belief that students should be taught how to 'read' the media in an appropriate 'critical' style;

The belief that students should be taught how to 'read' the media is replaced by the recognition that media audiences in general are already extremely capable interpreters of media content, with a critical eye and an understanding of contemporary media techniques, thanks in large part to the large amount of coverage of this in popular media itself

Vague recognition of the internet and new digital media, as an 'add on' to the traditional media (to be dealt with in one self-contained segment tacked on to a Media Studies teaching module, book or degree);

The view of the internet and new digital media as an 'optional extra' is correspondingly replaced with recognition that they have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all media;

Outline of difference Part 3Media Studies 1.0 Media Studies 2.0

A preference for conventional research methods where most people are treated as non-expert audience 'receivers', or, if they are part of the formal media industries, as expert 'producers'.

New methods which recognize and make use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers';

Conventional concerns with power and politics are reworked in recognition of these points, so that the notion of super-powerful media industries invading the minds of a relatively passive population is compelled to recognize and address the context of more widespread creation and participation.

Media Studies 2.0 in practice• Participatory media making: in 1995 Gauntlett handed children video cameras to make films

about their responses to the environment, instead of just interviewing them (Gauntlett, 1997), and has continued through various projects, culminating most recently in the book Creative Explorations: 

• New approaches to identities and audiences (2007), which describes – amongst other things – my study in which people were invited to build metaphorical models of their identities in Lego.

Other instances of Media Studies 2.0• The title of the journal Participations (launched 2003), an 'audience

studies' journal that manages to avoid calling them 'audiences' – in its main title at least, although the subtitle 'Journal of Audience and Reception Studies' offers a perhaps inevitable translation into the language we are trying to get away from; The forthcoming conference Transforming Audiences, which seeks to undermine its own title by questioning the traditional approach to people who 'produce' media and people who 'use' media; Joke Hermes's book Reading Women's Magazines (1995), one of the first texts to demonstrate that Media Studies tended to over-emphasise its own consumption models; Studies by Sonia Livingstone and by David Buckingham, in the past few years, which have rejected passive models of media consumption;

• More active participation, such as Campaigns Wikia, based on the idea that 'If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics'; William Merrin's blog, as mentioned above.

What does this mean to you?• In groups of three, discuss whether this model is important to

new media? • How does Gaunlett’s Media Studies 2.0 framework apply to

research?• Why and how?