For our major paper, it is clear we are going to have to do some more quantitative research in the form of interviews.
One of the readings this week, “Weerakkody, N “Research Interviewing” in Research Methods for Media and Communication” focused on explaining the purpose and methods behind undertaking qualitative research.
It is highlighted that there are three types of research interviews:
- Structured
- Semi-Structured
- Unstructured
The type of research interview conducted correlates to the “interview protocol or interview guide prepared by the researcher.” Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages that make them all suitable for different situations.
Structured interviews are ones where specific questions are asked to the respondents. These questions are not open to being changed, nor can other questions be added in during the interview. This method has the great advantage of allowing comparable results to be gathered. It’s main problem is that it forces the researcher to ‘prompt’ the respondent, getting the information previously determined as relevant and disallowing new possibly valuable information to surface.
Semi-Structured interviews are somewhat a middle ground between Structured and Unstructured, so I shall first skip ahead and describe the Unstructured interview.
The unstructured interview essentially is where the interviewer asks the respondent to participate in the studied activity and asks questions as they come to him/her as the respondent participates. This allows for “each respondent’s unique characteristics and circumstances …[to be] … taken into account.”
The Semi-Structured interview is one where the interview comes with a set of open questions, but has the freedom to ask more or change question as the interview progresses. The advantage of running a semi-structured interview is that “qualitative data … for comparisons between respondents” can be obtained while still allowing the researcher to “calculate the frequency of occurrence of specific opinions and themes between and within respondents.”
There are advantages and disadvantages to conducting research interviews. One of the key advantages, and relevant to our research, is the ability to gain valuable information from people who are very busy, or don’t feel inclined to fill out surveys or diaries. The reading also points out that interviews are valuable for gaining sensitive information, however I do not feel that is completely relevant in our studies.
A key disadvantage, as I touched on before, is interviewer bias. Loaded or leading questions are almost intrinsic with any question, however questions that are combined with ‘negative non-verbal cues” can prompt respondents to give contaminated responses.
It is also a known phenomenon that interviewees try to make themselves sound good. This is known as “the social desirability effect”.
Qualitative Research interviews are forming the majority of my secondary research for my major paper. I’m doing this primarily because of my subjects inability to fill out a diary consistently. I will be adopting a semi-structured approach in future interviews, previous ones have employed an unstructured approach.
I just want to say thanks to Scotty for this semester! I know we have one more blog posting, but that this week marked the end of the lectures. Thanks again!
The phenomenon that distinguishes life from inanimate objects is semiosis. This can be define simply as the instinctive capacity for all living organisms to produce and understand signs.
(Thomas Albert Sebeok (Signs: an introduction to semiotics)
The readings on semiotics, the study of semiosis, to me have been some of the most interesting we have undertaken in the whole of this course.
The two articles I am going to focus on are “Reading War” by Annabelle Lukin and “Signs and Meaning” by Tony Schirato and Susan Yell.
Yell’s and Schirato’s key aim is to emphasis the significance of relationships between signifiers to create meaning. The point being to illustrate that meaning is completely derivative of the context of the entity receiving the message.
To accurately interpret this idea I have paraphrased a number of their most important points below.
Every sign has an equal amount of meanings as it has contexts.
A sign is made up of a Signifer, the Signified. The signifier (i.e cat) evokes the signified (furry animal with four legs).
The signified is itself another signifer. In the above example, ‘Cat’ is interpreted as ‘furry animal with four legs’ which then can be interpreted as ‘allergic reactions.’ While not everyone may think of allergic reactions when thinking of fur, others might. This is where context comes into play. A single sentence’s meaning is dependent on the relational meanings between each word that makes up the sentence. One person might read “Look, there is a Cat!” in a positive light, in that the Cat is a cute pleasurable animal and that their is a form of excitement in the sentence. However another person my interpret the exact same sentence negatively, deeming that it is a statement of alarm and disgust as the cat is dirty and will cause sneezing.
The article highlights this idea in its deconstruction of a news story regarding European settlement/invasion of Australia. It explores that the activated meanings of a word (signifier) can be controlled by the manipulation of relational words and contexts. It’s deconstruction is quite complex and can be more simply explained by looking at the second article “Reading War”.
In this article, Annabelle Lukin uses the analogy of a child spilling milk at breakfast to show how the meaning of ‘facts’ can be changed through the clause used.
We can see in this diagram that by using different ’voices’, active or passive, different meanings and relationships from each of the words are formed. “The Milk was spilt” removed the agent (the person speaking) from the subject. Contextually the clause has changed and therefore blame is not signified within the sentence.
It is noted that these decisions are often not deliberate, they are unconscious manipulations of, in this case, grammatical structure, to in turn manipulate the derived meaning.
Schirato and Yell expand on ideas of both Volosinov and Saussure, highlighting the lack of reality in Saussure’s ‘perfect’ explanation and presenting Volosinov’s more applicable concepts. Volosinov turns Saussure’s theory upside down and argues that if all meaning is purely relational, if the meaning of something is always based on what it is not (as Saussure proposed) then it would be unable to be representative of any reality.
Volosinov points out that “Words are always filled with content and meaning drawn from behavior and ideology.” I would argue that this is key to finding the ‘real’ basis of meanings. If we were to find something we had never found before, it would not be meaningless. We would first define it by what it is not, as in Saussures definition, but it would also have current inferred meaning from what is signified by its context. Therefore I believe it would have an inferred meaning. Looking at Volosinovs quote again, it would have ‘content’ irrespective of what it is.
I’ll leave you with that for now, I hope it makes some kind of sense. If you have any comments or critisizums, lay down a comment!!
Extensively extended... photo by ubersurgeon (flickr)
Nick Couldry is certainly a very insightful fellow. He has the gifted ability of being able to write in a way that leaves you thinking ‘why did nobody else think of that?’ Now admittedly he references many works by other scholars, but he definitely has a way with words and such a broad understanding media that his works shine above most others.
In “The Extended Audience,” Couldry expands on the ideas of Abercrombie and Longhurst about the role and subsequent definition of the Audience is in “new media.” His key argument is that the Abercrombie and Longhurst definition of the Audience as a ‘diffused audience’ fails to account for the role of power in new media and the inferred meaning of an audience less prevalent.
I feel that his definition of an ‘extended audience’ encompasses modern audiences whom consume a greater spectrum of media and where the values of consumption transcend traditional barriers and amalgamate themselves with those of the producer.
“We need to understand audiences relationship with a new spectrum of media outlets…not just more media, but an interlocking of old and new.”
Communication is the core of media. That is it’s purpose is to mediate communication, to provide us with a method of encoding, mobilizing and decoding flows of information. The excerpt from Abercrombie and Longhurst presents a table that compares their definitions of Simple Audiences, Mass Audiences and their ‘Diffused Audiences’. Looking at this representation we can infer that the three definitions of audience seem to lead into each other with the key factor of change being the breakdown of communicative barriers. The private become public, the local becomes global and the ‘distance’ between the audience and the consumer becomes closer. Our ability to communicate has been vastly expanded by technological advancements and rather than spreading consumers thinly over a range of media, we are more deeply interlocked with all types of communication. It is this that Couldry sees as the extension, rather than diffusion, of the audience, we are audiences (and producers) in places that we once were not.
It seems to me that the very definition of a ‘diffused’ audience as proposed by Abercrombie and Longhurst is more accurately linked to the term ‘extended’.
“…the contemporary ‘diffused audience’ that is almost permanently connected to one electronic medium or another, across almost every activity of social and private life…”
If we are so vastly connected so often, does this not intrinsically mean out role as an audience has been extended rather than diffused?
It will be a short post today, but I will come back and do some more posts throughout the week, no doubt, because today is my birthday!
In this day and age, I believe most people have an understanding of what a network essentially is. I believe a network to be a collection of interconnected nodes. These nodes can be connected to multipul other nodes with no specific pattern. Through some path all nodes are connected to all other nodes. Castells talks of networks as the processers of flows.”Flows are streams of information between nodes circulating throiugh the channels of connection between nodes.”
The point I think he tries to make in the article ‘informationalism and the network society’ is that networking is not a new thing. We have always had networks of friends and collegues and assosiates through whom we transfer information or flows. The differance that we see now is the ability of microelectronic technology to break down some ‘material limits’ of old networks and begin to have effect on our experiance of time and of place. This dramatic change in our ablility to communicate instantly and over vast distances has changed our culture and our behavior.
A key term that Castells presents is Informationalism. He uses it to refocus our ideas on what it means to be in an “information age.” He says that rather than use being in an age of informations, as we have always been, we are in an age ”characterized by the power embedded in information technology.” In this, he means that we are not characterized by information as such but by our ability to communicate that information.
Modern technology allows us to communicate instantaneously and ‘virtually.’ We no longer have biological time or physical space as factors to consider when communicating or processing information. This is evident in the globalization of the world. The flows that we process manifest themselves in spaces that are networked. As Castells says, “the space of the network society is made up the articulation between three elements.” The Activity, The Material, The Content.
When broken down like this we can see that the flow itself can is first spatially manifested within the ACTIVITY that initiates it, then it is replicated through the physical MATERIAL needed to ‘instantly’ transfer the IDEAS across to the next node where it again forms a new ACTIVITY. A super simple example might be if I was to send a birthday invitation via text message to a friend. The activity is my thinking of the message and the act of typing it and sending it, then it materially is broadcast and received by the handsets and is in turn replicated into the activity of my friend receiving it. The culmination of this makes up the ‘flow’. The instantaneous nature of this type of microelectronic based communication is such a stark contrast to the letter or paper invitation I would have had to send in an older culture.
It is here I realize that as Castells again states “the new culture is not made of content, but of process” and that we are “not in the information or knowledge society. At least, no more than we have been in other historical periods.”
20 years old today.
New connections... photo by thinkpanama
As you might have noticed if your read a couple of my previous articles (see this article about print media and this one on convergence), I have been suggesting, talking and thinking about the way advertisements have had to change to a care-structure based structure. A structure based on ideas explored by, among others, Henry Jenkins and Virginia Nightingale. The general idea is one where marketing processes are focusing on turning customers unfulfilled desires and care into returns on investment. I was drawn to an article in todays Sydney Morning Herald Business, Marketing and Media section. The article, “Ad campaigns can become more than simple transactions,” by Julian Lee exemplifies Jenkins and Nightingales arguments with some current real world examples. It really is an interesting shift from traditional competition to direct marketing.
It is also interesting to read the marketers perspective on this type of advertising. Now while this article is not reporting on the same exact issue, I feel it is very relevant to the thinking behind companies like Optus, as discussed in the SMH article. “The New Advertising Metrics” by Eric Picard, talks about “social targeting [or as] others have repurposed the older term earned media.” From what I understand, the idea behind this approach to marketing is to advertise to people based on their connections to other potential customers. Make one person care enough and they will do the sharing for you.
I leave you with that for now, but have a look at the two stories above and let me know what your thoughts are!
An old scene? photo by Lucas de Vries
Vast challenges seem to face the corporations and structures behind the once all powerful ‘old media’ in the face of the new media landscape. These challenges are forcing fundamental changes within business structures and directions of both old and new media companies.
The Australian Press Council(APC) publishes a yearly report entitled “The State of News Print Media in Australia.” The 2008 edition of this report, highlights the trends of news print media throughout the year. The trends of 2008 clearly illustrate that the consumer is progressively adopting media formats that are based on the of convergent nature Media 2.0. The use of ’Media 2.0′ term has been increasingly employed to help explain the way media concepts relate and intertwine with the concept of Web 2.0 as explored Tim O’Reilys ‘What is web 2.0′ (2005); as an inter-operable and collaborative webiverse.
The APC’s 2008 report stress that “prophecies of the imminent end of newspapers from the doomsayers have not been accurate for Australia.” This is an interesting statement when combined with some of the trends highlighted in their first chapter.
The report states that sales of traditional broadsheets “is generally holding steady” but also states that “there have been continuing sharp increases in the number of readers accessing newspapers via the internet. ” This is interesting as initially I would have expected that these two statements were contradictory. It is when we look at one other trends highlighted in the report that a picture begins to form. The APC reports that there has been “convergence of media platform.” If we look at convergence as the intertwining of different technologies as I discuss here, then these seemingly contradictions begin to make sense.
Fairfax’s broadsheet newspaper ‘The Sydney Morning Herald‘ (SMH) is the longest published newspaper in Australia. It provides traditionally high standards of journalism along with a variety of interest, lifestyle and real estate articles. The online version of SMH encompasses a relatively web 1.0 structure. It is by vast majority still a website where one comes to consume. The articles on the online version of SMH include both articles found in the print edition and some that are unique to the internet. APC reports that readership of the SMH print edition has maintained just about level but readership of the online version has skyrocketed, in line with general print media trends.
What does this mean for the Fairfax CEO David Kirk? Well, according to him “he sees the future of his newspapers as not necessarily being first with the news, but delivering it best.” Murdoch seems to also agree with the general result of a convergent media landscape arguing that technology(digitization) is ”destroying the business models we have relied on for decades.”
I’m not going to completely regurgitate(any more-so) what has been said already in this part of the report, but I am going to present you with a few of the challenges, opportunities and possible directions that I think apply to organisations like Fairfax media.
Challenges
- Less profit from a possible mono-media structure. i.e moving the huge variety of physical press online could possible create a unfriendly domain for advertisers, demographically indirect.
- Job losses due to an increase in consumer created content and a need for professional journalists to encompass all aspects of article construction (writing, photographing, editing)
- Hundreds of new news sources from blogs, new web based news organisations and individual startups could singularly or collaboratively generate greater richness and reach for consumers. Less restrictions upon, and therefore more, competition.
- Death of broadcast advertising could shatter profits. Marketing is now far more focused on direct marketing and the development of very strong personal ties with consumers. The broadsheet advertising or generic web banners are no longer a very viable advertising route, due to the increasing level of savvy consumers .
Opportunities
- Fairfax Media could embrace it’s ‘real world’ wealth and reach to create far richer news experiences. Historic ties with radio, television and other companies give it the possible ability to transcend the restrictions of the internet and encompass consumers everywhere.
- Vast array of ‘free-lance’ journalists in the form of individual bloggers and websites. Vast sums of wages could be saved if articles were sourced on a purely freelance basis.
- Current level of respect and recognition place it at the forefront of consumers minds when they think of reliable news.
Possible Directions
- A seamless integration between the broadsheet, the internet and mobile devices. Links within the paper provide the digital video, audio and social counterparts to the story.
- News Reality Augmentation. Replace the broadsheet completely with ‘location aware’ news. Your mobile device or laptop knows where you are, whether via internet connection, gps or camera and provides you with news and details that are relevant.
- Articles can be aggregated from a variety of news sources and blogs, where authors are paid based on the popularity of their work. Authors are then driven to become increasingly relevant to what the consumer wants, improving the popularity and connection of the ‘news media’ with the consumer.
- Generate income from subscription based services rather than advertising. Combining two of the above models (Augmentation and popularity based payment), users will know they are going to receive quality and relevant material that they desire. Consumers already pay for the newspaper so the transition may well be easy, transferring peoples current newspaper subscriptions directly to the new service. As the content is all online, printing costs would plummet if not completely disappear. Subscription income would become revenue.
These are simply some of my own ideas, and perhaps desires, for the future of news media. I will confess that I have little to no evidence to the claims of profitability of the above models, but in my mind common sense seems to suggest that they are viable options. I encourage you to read the APC report that was citied above as it really is an interesting document. I look forward to it’s next edition. As usual, your thoughts are appreciated.
“the second and more radical form occur when technology allows for the richness/reach curve to be displaced, allowing new players to offer greater reach and greater richness simultaneously. This poses a far more direct threat to the established intermediary’s business model. It threatens not just a re-segmentation of the business but a total transformation.”
) to create a richer and more accessible experience. The ability of media to transcend place or the broadcasting schedule has given it greater reach.
Nicole preparing for a nights work.
Nicole stands in front of me, carefully preparing her body, for another night at work in what is regarded by most as a lucrative and often distasteful industry. Despite the apparent intimacy of the situation and her erotic dress, Nicole’s casual self-confidence and comfort leads to a strangely insouciant conversation. She senses my obvious discomfort, laughs and says “I could take a marker and draw dollar signs on my body for how much everything costs. Right now, [my body] is just like your pen or laptop that you use for work.”
The adult entertainment industry is more and more becoming an acceptable part of society, but there is a obvious veil between those who consume and those within, a veil that is not stripped off throughout the night. Nicole is not her real name and outside of the strip clubs and private venues she works in, she appears to be just like any other backpacker in Sydney.
Her past is not what you would imagine, with no story of abuse or neglect to be told. Raised in an affluent family from Baltimore, USA, she was privately educated the United Kingdom and graduated university with a Bachelor degree in Religious Studies.
Her education in religion prompted me to ask her how she justifies her line of work, she replied as she slipped on a pair of fishnet stockings,“I am not conservative religious-wise, I have values and to me, in the sex industry, if its not hurting one, its fine.”
She talks lightly of her career, stating that she had “stumbled across it” while in Australia. “I had always thought about doing it in the UK, but the clubs there were quite seedy and the girls didn’t do too well…I figured I’m here to try new things and thought it would be fun.”
Initially Nicole gained employment working as a topless waitress but saw an pseudo advertisement for “promotional” work online.
The advertisement was for a massage parlour, a job she took up for a couple of months. “You give a full body massage and then a hand-job at the end, a ‘rub-and-tug’. I can call it one hundred names,” she laughs.
She began stripping in clubs in Brisbane, but moved back to Sydney. Now working for a private agency she works a variety of jobs including strip teases, fantasy poker, jelly wrestling, and topless waitressing.
Stigma would suggest these are all risky jobs for a young women, but Nicole quickly shrugs this off “If your weak I think you get preyed on. You have to be headstrong…People definitely put pressure on me to do more. I get asked for sex at least once a night.”
Nicole pauses after she dons a red feather boa, confirming herself in the mirror. She then turns to me and states, reinforcing her peculiar character, “to survive in this industry, you have to be clear about who you are. You have to be able to draw a line between yourself and the fantasy that you are presenting to your clients.”
Everyday we use media technologies to fuel our thirst for information. We can use new media to find just about any piece of information we need, quickly and efficiently.
As new technologies become available, delivery/reception solutions are formed and in turn domesticated to fit ‘the moral economy of our domestic environment.’ I understand the ‘domestic environment’ as being the world in which we comfortably live our everyday lives, from the house we live in, to the transport we take to work, to work itself. The way in which we set-up our computers and online services is a prime example of our habit of domestication. Formulating and manipulating the logic of the technologies available (from applications, bookmarks, mailing lists, RSS to the social networks we join) so that they works with our everyday life and our logical systems; so that they align with our ‘moral economy’.
While the core technologies are still primarily developed out of the common man’s realm, it is not the dedicated ‘inventers’ or corporations that domesticate these technologies or determine how they are to be used. The common consumer now has the competency to adapt technologies for their own use. Creating online communities, building our own blogging websites, creating our own news feeds and even video channels. We have the tools to build a customised, cultured and personal media delivery and reception system. Born from our consumption, our desires to consume faster and more efficiently encourage us to creatively develop new means to communicate, create and consume media.
The media itself has also reached a point where the consumer is also an intrinsic media producer. It is here that I want to push away from the term ‘consumer’ to describe us, the ‘human media junkie’. I say this because in our modern media landscape, our production is almost at par with our consumption. We create and view content with equal vigour. While its a little impersonal, I propose that, for the time being, we use the term ‘node’, as it promotes an idea of both giving and receiving. A single part that makes up a bigger system, equally as important as those around it. Watching a Youtube video for example is not simple ingestion like watching TV, as for a large number of us, leaving a comment on the page is as much a part of the Youtube experience as is watching the actual film. If we look it at it quantitatively this is a 1:1 transaction of consumption versus production.
It is this exchange between ‘nodes’ in a network that I feel forms the basis for ‘New Media’. It is interesting to think that each of us are parts of a living breathing information source that is spread all over the world. Each of us is a big brother-like ear and eye constantly feeding the ‘beast’ data from our everyday lives. Looking through the most popular of New Media technologies, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Blogs, Twitter, news and RSS aggregating applications, you will be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t allow an open 1:1 exchange of information. This is starkly contrasted to Old Media such as news papers and static websites, where all information is mediated by either a publisher or webmaster. One could argue that by using the node allegory I have merely describe the network of The Web, but I feel that this is a network unto itself. Transcending the Internet through television, humanity, radio and physical press; it is a new network which I like to describe as the (forgive me if you pick up on the the pun), Human-node Information Network (HIN). A network of mutual information exchange that is instant, global and cultural. It is a conversation, it is a press release it is the aggregation of what everyone is doing (Facebook, Twitter), what they are thinking (Blogger, Wordpress) and what they are seeing (Flickr, Youtube). It is the open community of our everyday lives, our social interaction; the foundation of our modern morals and culture. It can be found at work, at home and in the streets. The HIN is an invisible fabric that blankets us and joins us as a societal whole, one move prompts another; all connected in learning, teaching and evolving.
Thoughts?
I have been trying to visualize a thought for a little while now, abstract sketches and patterns trying to explain what I’m thinking. Forgive me if this blog seems to be little more than my thoughts blurted out in no particular order or to no exactly defined point.
Some recent developments in government policy throughout the globe among other things have got me wondering where the ‘control’ of the internet lies. Where the authority, if their is any, is truly held. We know that the internet is linear rather than hierarchical like old media. If I think of a group of children in a playground with no supervision, I imagine that for some time there would be chaos but eventually some sort of hegemonic child or group would form and there would be a degree of control. In an environment that seems to be immune to having a hegemonic figure, what makes it work rather than fall apart?
What do I mean? Perhaps look at the comments on many Youtube videos. You will see people placing, subjectively, disruptive and anarchical comments within other peoples coherent discussions. On Youtube, users have the ability to mark comments as ‘spam’ but these are not spam. They are people, purposly placing, ‘disruptive’ viewpoints. They are at a certain level, destroying the coherence that makes the internet ‘work’.
The internet is a world where anyone can create just about anything, with equal right and power. A poor man in his one bedroom western Sydney apartment can reach the exact same audience as a multimillion dollar business. The amount of issues raised here are immense. Does one man deserve or should he have the right to have an equal say against a ‘power’. Surely the ‘power’ has built itself into a position where it has far more expertise on a particular subject. This man could say things that are fundamentally wrong and there is no control to say that he is wrong or right, except for the collective opinions of others.
Personally I accept this as both the flaw and the beauty of the internet and I will state right here that I am 110% against government based internet censorship. It is exactly this that makes me want to have an understanding of what exactly does keep the internet under control. What is it that makes it such a organized resource despite it’s apparent flaw of being so unorganized.
The ideas of collective intelligence come to play. Wikipedia is a great example of collective intelligence in the real world and I have read somewhere (I will try to come back and cite this) that a study concluded that articles on Wikipedia were generally more accurate than those in traditional encyclopedias. I realize that this is not only a very subjective statement to make but also a very subjective study, but it could be a start in highlighting the ‘structure’ of the internet.
I will continue to build on this as time permits. Your input is welcomed!
I have come across a couple of interesting articles that explore what I have been thinking about. I think the second one might raise some interesting issues regarding the governments current direction of internet policy.
Anarchy and the Internet, by Gordon Graham
Internet and Democracy, by Joanne Jacobs
Warning: unserialize() expects parameter 1 to be string, array given in /home1/tomdavey/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/xhanch-my-twitter/xhanch_my_twitter.function.php on line 351