Course

: Mass Communication Research Methods

Effective Period : September 2015

INTRODUCTION: THE STATE OF

CONVERGANCE IN MEDIA AND
COMMUNICATION RESEARCH
Session 1

Acknowledgement
These slides have been adapted from:
Klaus Bruhn Jensen. 2nd Edition, 2012. A Hand
Book of Media And Communication Research,
Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies.
Routledge, New York. ISBN: 978-0-415-60965-4
(hbk)

Learning Objectives

LO1: Students are able to understand the interplay

between old and new media, including the
illustration of relevance range of methodologies (old
and new) to a media environment in historical
transition
LO2: Students are able to indentify the difference
communication research, between mass and
interpersonal communication, also between online
and offline interaction.

A. Introductory: Fields And Faculties (History Of

Media And Communication Research)
About 50 years ago, an interdisciplinary field of research
began to take shape in response to the greatly increased
role, not least, of print and broadcast mass
communication in society
The new field, tried to draw on concepts and methods
from both the humanities and the social sciences and, to
a degree, natural sciences.
With the rise of new, digital media in recent decades
the internet and mobile media and the ongoing
digitalization of the old, the field is more central to
political, economic, and cultural developments than ever
before

 Media and communication research has remained a site

of divides and, occasionally, conflicts among the faculties
Media:
Are vehicles of information: they make representations of
and insight into realty available, as articulated in text,
image, and sound
Are channels of communication: they make information
accessible to communicators, to each other
Are means of action: communication is performative, as it
unfolds, and as it ends
This introductory chapter presents a framework for the
rest of lecturing, with three main elements, that are (1)
media of three degrees, (2) information, communication,
and action, and (3) institutions-to-think-with

B.

Three Main Elements

1. Media of Three Degrees

a. Determination In The First Instance
. The media of communication occupy a middle ground between
material and immaterial reality
. Some media and communication research, in recent decades, has
shied away from issues of determination, perhaps partly to
distance itself from early and still popular of strong and direct
effects, partly under the influence of under an underspecified
constructionism across the social and human sciences
. Technologies have unforeseen, even unforeseeable consequences
. The material conditions of communication are, evidently, outside
the control of any individual human being
. The extensions of human capacities into diverse technologies are
collective accomplishments that circumscribe and embed the
individual as second nature, as elaborated by the tradition of
medium theory

b. The distinguish between media of three different degrees

i.
Bodies and tools the first degree
. In the perspective of the history and theory of communication,
human beings can be understood as media
. The human body is a versatile material platform, hosting speech,
song, dance, drama, painting, and creative arts generally
. In itself, the human body is a necessary and sufficient material
condition of communication; our bodies become productive and
receptive media of communication through socialization and
acculturation
. We encounter other people as audiovisual media and in
multimodal communication
. Rather in scribal culture, communication remains an expression
and an event that is primarily enacted in local contexts by
embodied individuals
. However, embodied individual is and written texts were
superseded by a second degree of media

ii. Technologies the second degree

. This lesson take media of the second degree to include the various analog
technologies from printed books and newspapers to film, radio and
television all of which took shape as one-to-many media institutions and
practices of communication
. The common features of media institutions and practices of communication
were,
1. One-to-one reproduction, storage, and presentation of a particular
content
2. Media of the second degree radically extended the potential for
dissemination of and access to information across space and time,
irrespective of the presence and number of participants
. Sound became constitutive of the central mass media of the twentieth
century: radio, film (from 1929), and television
. From 1960s, the transistor radio made music, news, and other genres
accessible on the move
. In the case of broadcast audiences, the new reception studies from 1980s
documented how audiences, in addition to actively interpreting media
content, collectively engage media as part of their communicative practices in
context

iii. Meta-Technologies the third degree

. The digital computer reproduces and combines all previous media of
representation and interaction on a single material platform of hardware and
software
. Kay and Golberg (1999[1977]), accordingly, described computers as metamedia
. As means of expression, digital media join text, image, and sound in some
new and many old genres, as inherited from mass media as well as face-toface interaction: narrative, debates, games, etc.
. At the same time, mobile telephones on other portable devices are becoming
equally important access points to internet, and already account for much of
the diffusion of the internet in some parts of the world, notably South-East
Asia and Japan
. Digital technologies in general, and the internet in particular, invite research
to refocus studies from media to communication, and to clarify the
relationship between the two categories
1. Material medium may support several different communicative practices; some
communicative practices travel well between media
2. And certain familiar practices come back in style when new platforms become available,
as illustrated by writing via text messaging (SMS)

2. Information, Communication, And Action

a. Information into meaning
. In a sense, the whole of meaning is more than the sum of
information; the more analytical question has been how to
define and parse the elements of communication
. Some accounts of interpretive communication (Fish, 1979), have
suggested that text are essentially empty and open to individual
and situated projections of meanings
. The other two ideal types of meaning are representative of the
two mainstreams of the current field of media and
communication research, namely, quantitative variants of social
science and qualitative forms of humanistic scholarship

b. Communication between transmission and ritual

. The foundational question of the field has been: who / says
what / in which channel / to whom / with what effect?
. The question might have been: who share what with whom, in
which processes of interaction?
. The root sense of communication is to share, and to make
common
i. The Transmission
. According to Carey, the US mainstream of social-scientific
media studies had taken as its premise a transmission model
emphasizing the transfer of information from senders to
receivers within a centralized system of mass communication

The pivotal role of information and communication, and of

related research activities, in an emerging social
infrastructure that depended on new means of regulating
itself through intensified surveillance and registration: the
control society
Impact of media on individuals, their attitude and behaviors,
was placed high on the research agenda
The transmission model seemed to be that the media are
mechanisms which are somehow separate from society

ii. The Ritual

. Careys ritual model, in contrast, suggested that media
necessarily have effects: communication is a sharing of
meaning and a condition of community
. John Dewey: Society exists not only by transmission, by
communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in
transmission, in communication (Carey, 1989b[1975]: 13f)
. Communication should be considered a constitutive
ingredient of, and a mediating factor between human agency
and social structure: a symbolic process whereby reality is
produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed

c.

Performativity and interactivity

i. Action
. Compared to transmission and ritual, or information and
meaning, categories of human and social action have been
less control to theory development in the field of media and
communication research
. Action has, most commonly, been understood as input to
(editorial decision and legislative frameworks condition what
is communicated) or output from a process of
communication (communication feeds discursive and
physical behaviors)

In order to relate media and communication to the rest of

culture and society, it is useful to specify three aspects of the
general relationship between communication and action:
1. All human actions can be considered communication in
their own right
2. All communication is as a form of action; it occurs in a
context and for a purpose
3. Communication anticipates action. Communication is a
self-reflective, recursive form of action: it addresses
action that communicate and communication that enact

ii.

Interactivity

. The idea of interactivity derives from the sociological concept

of interaction between subjects face-to-face, but also
indirectly at various levels of the social structure
. As imported into media and communication research, the
terminology has been ambiguous: the field has aimed to
account with media and for their interaction with each other
through media

iii. Institutions-to-think-with
. Contemporary media constitute institution-to-think-with,
highly differentiated and widely distributed material and
modal infrastructures that enable reflection and
interaction across space and time
. Cultures and societies program their media, which, in
turn, program them