Sunday, August 31, 2008
On Joshua Atkinson’s “Towards a Model of Interactivity in Alternative Media..."
Atkinsons’ investigation (in the latest issue of Mass Communication and Society) of the interactions between social networks, local media producers, and global media outlets is worthy, but suffers from several outdated perspectives. Part of the issue is that papers from 2004 are only now being published in leading journals. The paper appropriately considers three types of “interactivity” – user-to-system, user-to-user, and user-to-document. However, it primarily examined print media, mostly ignoring the rich modes of online communication that have given alternative media groups agency, and primarily examines in-person feedback. For instance, one of Atkinson’s primary findings was:
That global media producers interact with local producers (and audiences) over email is not exactly a shock in 2008, as it’s the most popular one-to-one communication medium. The model Atkinson produced is worthy as a starting point, but does not address the sheer variety of channels audiences use to engage with the media and local producers. Truly multi-level and interactive relationships are being developed through asynchronous and synchronous media, including blogs, instant messenger, Twitter, SNSs, polls, message boards, and so on.
These present a serious theoretical and methodological challenge for researchers. They include direct (one-to-one) modes of communication, as well as entirely new ones (many-to-many). There should be some investigation of public-facing channels versus private ones. E-mail, even if it serves as a venue for comments about content and for encouragement, as Atkinson suggests, is hardly news: this is what letters to the editor have traditionally done.
Another finding was that there was little impact of the individual in impacting global media outlets. This brings to mind media system dependency, which I applied in my thesis (in a way that I am now convinced wasn’t entirely appropriate, but that’s another story). Implicit in all the agenda setting and gate keeping discussion is power. Global media outlets have the majority of power, and individuals have little. The Internet has fundamentally changed the discourse occurring in online mass communication. Manuel Castells' concept of "mass self-communication" is, to me, more coherent and encompassing.
“The global producers revealed that they received content-oriented interactions from audiences via e-mail, which corresponded with data collected from the local producers who claimed to interact with global producers via e-mail” (p. 227).
That global media producers interact with local producers (and audiences) over email is not exactly a shock in 2008, as it’s the most popular one-to-one communication medium. The model Atkinson produced is worthy as a starting point, but does not address the sheer variety of channels audiences use to engage with the media and local producers. Truly multi-level and interactive relationships are being developed through asynchronous and synchronous media, including blogs, instant messenger, Twitter, SNSs, polls, message boards, and so on.
These present a serious theoretical and methodological challenge for researchers. They include direct (one-to-one) modes of communication, as well as entirely new ones (many-to-many). There should be some investigation of public-facing channels versus private ones. E-mail, even if it serves as a venue for comments about content and for encouragement, as Atkinson suggests, is hardly news: this is what letters to the editor have traditionally done.
Another finding was that there was little impact of the individual in impacting global media outlets. This brings to mind media system dependency, which I applied in my thesis (in a way that I am now convinced wasn’t entirely appropriate, but that’s another story). Implicit in all the agenda setting and gate keeping discussion is power. Global media outlets have the majority of power, and individuals have little. The Internet has fundamentally changed the discourse occurring in online mass communication. Manuel Castells' concept of "mass self-communication" is, to me, more coherent and encompassing.
Labels: alternative media, internet, mass media, media, new media, SNS
