S

 New Media

Research Trends in 2012

Brittany Black & Ashley Hebler

Research Questions

RQ1: Do new media researchers favor certain title or keyword terms over others? And, if so, which ones?

RQ2: Have specific new media topics been covered more frequently than others in the published journals during the past six months? If so, which ones?

Theory

Diffusion of Innovations

Literature Review  

‘94-’99: 3.9% of articles published in the five journals analyzed focused on Internet based research.

Tomasello (2001)

’96-’00: Necessary to use existing communication concepts and theories to explain and predict the rapid changes relating to the Internet and that if a new medium emerges.

Kim and Weaver (2001)

’90-’06: Most frequently used words in new media research are (in order, starting with most frequent) “internet,” “computers,” “digital,” “web/www,” and “online”

(Tomasello, et al., 2010).

Method

Content Analysis Bibliometric analysis

New Media & Society Journal

February 2012 to August 2012 No July or April 65 total articles

Results

Results

Discussion

“There is a tendency for researchers to favor generally descriptive keywords...suggests a desire by these authors to attract the attention of the broadest audience possible in order to enhance the principle of survival.” -Tomasello et al. (2010)

Computer does not seem to be favored by researchers anymore, and has now been replaced with terms such as multimedia, new media/ communication.

Broad range of topics

Limitations

Lack of data More time is needed to find trends in data

Duplicate Words May have skewed results.

Future Research

Future studies should take the keywords that emerged from this study and track their use in future research articles to analyze adoption rates by applying the diffusion of innovations s-curve.

Evaluating multiple journals to add more complexity to the study.

Conclusion

There are common terms still being used as well as new terms appearing in research

Then Now• Computer• Virtual

• Multimedia• YouTube