Measurement evolution

In a time of transformation such as ours, I think establishing a valid and reliable measurement is important. Terms of Internet that we learned from Dr. Chyi's ppt made me thinking.

Hits > Page Views > Minutes > Click > Leads > Visits... How fast it has changed! Let's compare them with pre-Internet measurement of TV audience rating like Neilsen. How about comparing with print circulation of ABC in pre-broadcast era? I think what has changed most is transparency. And, the power of media over audiences.

ABC is based on self report of media. Majors manipulated it actually. Neilson rating is survey. It is more objective but a little expensive to get the full data. Now everything is logged to the server automatically. Everyone has the access to it.

So, we have to admit the Internet is more democratic. But conclusively, shouldn't we have a measurement that can guage all the platforms? A yardstick that can be used to the Internet, broadcast or print? A measurement that can last at least a decade or so? Establishing concept for this measurement, testing it, predicting the effect will be a challenging task for a Journalism scholar. The task may be something that needs collaboration of old and new, tech-savvy and tech-avert scholars.

Is new media study more laggard than new media industry?

The reading this week is here.
Survey: New media, The Economist (2006)
Gauntlett, D. (2004). Web studies: What’s new. web.studies, 2nd edition

Last week, or the week before that, we just learned that news industry has fallen behind other industries in regard to new technology adoption. Media studies 2.0 seems to imply that media study is even slower than media industry. But why?

1. The intrinsic characteristic of media study.
As you know, I have engineering background. The major difference I found between the research in engineering and journalism is that the research of engineering always leads the innovation of new technology, while social science is to study what has already happened. (Of course I might be wrong with my limited experience in both areas.) I don't think Journalism is a special case, because my friend majors in sociology commented in the same way, too. If we can do any brand new research to lead the industry, then we won't be scholars. We'll be launching our own media. So I'm not surprised by the fact that media studies are kind of old, I thought that's how social science research works. (And that's a good news for me, because I have techniques to conduct research with new study method.)


2. Demographic of scholars.

No offense, but most of the scholars in university are either experienced journalists or experienced scholars. For experienced journalists, the definition of "new media" was "TV" when they were in the industry. How can they learn how news organizations now function after they left so many years? And for pure scholars, they spent so many years on writing paper/books/journals, they probably have never been a journalists in their life. I think there are just too few young scholars who know new media and research. (Iris, you're an outlier, so you're not under my discussion.) I don't really expect to learn anything about new media from old faculty, seriously. I mean, I think we will all agree that new media is something still changing in a crazy speed. If we wait till someone organizes the material and teach us, the information will be out of date by that time. And this is exactly what my advisor in EE taught me. He said, if you can find a book about your research topic, then your topic is too out of date. I think this is universal for all the researches.


3. Some personal complaints- you may ignore this part :P

About the email Iris shared with us on Tuesday, I actually feel the same way. When I was in Taiwan, I took a communication program. To get the certificate I need to take 20 credits, and almost every course I took has a final project of making a video or website. Seriously, I was so tired of new media at that time. Because it's like every professor knows new media is important but he doesn't know how to teach. So they put some premiere/Dreamweaver/Frontpage project to make themselves feel happier. "Oh! We have new media in this course!" I didn't learn anything about how to report using new media from them. In some sense I think that's the case that article trying to say. But I think as long as we can teach students how to use new technology to "report" with traditional journalistic value, that will be the industry and students need. (I basically think UT is working on this direction?)