A theoretical article detailing more of my thoughts on the role of technology in producing various political effects just came out

This article touches on the issues of technological determinism and social constructivism I blogged about here and here. It also describes a model for conceptualizing the role of technology specifically in the context of political communication research.

Our YouTube study mentioned by The Atlantic

A recent New Media & Society study I've done with Michael Beam, Kristen Landreville, and Nick Geidner has been mentioned in The Atlantic. I feel like addressing such complex topics as "How Social Media Shape Elections" cannot be done in a thorough enough manner in a long research article, not even in a thick book -- much less in a short popular press story. But, I guess it is nice to see reporters reference peer-reviewed research, as opposed to relying on pundits, politicians, or new media evangelists when discussing social media implications...

More thoughts on technological determinism v. social constructivism debate

As I've mentioned earlier, I strongly believe both perspectives aren’t mutually exclusive (i.e., if one believes tech determinism offers valuable insights, one needs not reject social constructivism, and vice versa), and both have unique strengths for understanding the nature, history, and transformation of societies and technologies. Below, I clarify some terminology and offer a rationale for an integrated approach.

Technological determinism perspective treats technology as an independent agent in history, where technology develops according to certain inevitable and internal-to-technology logic, and where such developments have caused profound social transformations throughout history (Bimber, 1990). According to this perspective, the dynamic of technological development is more important than human intervention in producing social and cultural changes. Technological determinism still enjoys support. For example, Ceruzzi (2005) argued that Moore’s Law is a clear example of how computer processor evolved according to its own internal logic, and how its evolution profoundly impacted numerous facets of our lives. Heilbroner (1994) argued that technology is an important causal agent influencing socioeconomic order, but acknowledged that society could shape technology, also.

Technological determinism has been criticized as too simplistic (Grant, Hall, Wailes, & Wright, 2006; Williams & Edge, 1996), and such critique encouraged the development of the social constructivism perspective (Pinch & Bijker, 1987). Although, social constructivism perspective is a bit more conceptually ambiguous (compared to technological determinism), its main argument is that there is no internal technology development logic; instead, there are series of choices technology designers take to shape the technology (Williams & Edge, 1996). These choices are flexible and susceptible to influence from technology users, from broader cultural norms, from economic factors, from interactions of various important actors, and so forth (Fulk, 1993; Pinch & Bijker, 1987). These social and psychological factors, rather than technology itself, should be viewed as playing a significantly more important role in evolution of societies and technology; and, therefore, these factors should be the focus of research into the nature and history of technology and societies. The influence or impact of technology itself (when technology is examined separately from social and psychological factors) is not an important topic for investigation (Williams & Edge, 1996).

This unwillingness of social constructivists to examine the effects of technology has been criticized (Winner, 1986, 1993). Similarly, it appears problematic to treat technology as being always the major causal agent (Grant, Hall, Wailes, & Wright, 2006; Williams & Edge, 1996). It appears more appropriate to view technology as one of several equally important groups of variables in the complex process that culminates in some effect. Such approach is positioned between the extreme technological determinism and extreme social constructivism because technology’s role is viewed as important, but limited. How important technology is in a particular context (e.g., when examining some specific technology or some specific effect) compared to other factors (e.g., social, psychological) should be treated as an empirical question, rather than an assumption. Such integration of social determinism and social constructivism recognizes that technological and human factors are essential pieces of the bigger puzzle (i.e., understanding particular effects, changes, transformations) that need to be examined with equal care.

Above is not an attempt to conclusively resolve the grand debate - simply a theoretical/empirical philosophy that makes sense for my research.

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Bimber, B. (1990). Karl Marx and the three faces of technological determinism. Social Studies of Science, 20, 333-351.
Ceruzzi, P. E. (2005). Moore’s Law and technological determinism: Reflections on the history of technology. Technology and Culture, 46(3), 584-593.
Fulk, J. (1993). Social construction of communication technology. The Academy of Management Journal, 36(5), 921-950.
Grant, D., Hall, R., Wailes, N., & Wright, C. (2006). The false promise of technological determinism: The case of enterprise resource planning system. New Technology, Work and Employment, 21(1), 2-15.
Heilbroner, R. L. (1994). Do machines make history? In M. R. Smith & L. Marx (Eds.), Does technology drive history? The dilemma of technological determinism (pp. 53-66). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Pinch, T. J., & Bijker, W. E. (1987).  The social construction of facts and artifacts: Or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems (pp. 17-50). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Williams, R., & Edge, D. (1996). The social shaping of technology. Research Policy, 25, 865-899.
Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Winner, L. (1993). Upon opening the black box and finding it empty: Social constructivism and the philosophy of technology. Science, Technology, and Human Values, 18(3), 362-378.

Examining political influence of elites v. nonelites on YouTube

Just heard that New Media & Society has accepted a paper I co-authored with Michael Beam, Kristen Landreville, and Nick Geidner. I blogged about this research here.

In this project, we explored several claims about the democratizing potential of the Internet and extended gatekeeping theory into user-generated content (UGC) domain. A quantitative content analysis of the most popular YouTube political news videos during the 2008 presidential election was conducted to investigate the degree to which nonelites were able to partake in mainstream public discourse. We found that elites dominated first and second filters (news sourcing and news production) in the flow of online news, while nonelites dominated the third filter (news distribution). These results suggest that an update to the traditional gatekeeping model is needed to reflect the realities of today’s user-driven communication environment.

Here's an abstract.

Technological determinism v. social constructivism: A false dichotomy in individual-level communication-effects research?

In my new project (that builds upon my dissertation and Communication Theory paper), I will be experimentally testing how usage of various UGC affordances (e.g., manipulability, customizability) interacts with non-technological factors (e.g., types of users, types of uses) in producing effects on important political outcomes (e.g., political participation, political knowledge, depth of political information processing).

I am attempting to identify the appropriate role of ICTs in the individual-level communication-effects research, especially in context of political communication. More broadly, this project deals with technology as a causal agent, and with how technology interacts with social, psychological, and other factors to produce various important effects. Which puts this research right in the middle of the dispute between proponents of technological determinism and social constructivism. I find this dispute to be more political (e.g., "our perspective is better, and it should dominate the study of ICTs") than intellectual (e.g., "here are reasons why our perspective is objectively superior than yours for achieving these specific goals"). My reading of the literature on this dispute suggests that both camps are wrong in not acknowledging the following: (1) Both, technological and non-technological factors, matter; (2) Both produce important main and interactive effects, as well as direct and indirect effects; (3) Both matter to larger or smaller extent in different contexts (in other words, comparative effect sizes of tech v. non-tech factors differ across contexts).

Another criticism of technological determinism and social constructivism, is as follows: Technology determinists claim that technology is the most important causal factor that is driving history, whereas social constructivists say technology is much less important causal factor than human, cultural, social, economic, and other factors. Neither claim is falsifiable, from the perspective of social-scientific empirical research. Social constructivists and tech determinists are using historical analysis or case studies to talk about technology’s “effects” and about comparative “effect sizes”!! To prove causality and determine effect sizes one needs experiments, as any introductory-level methods textbook informs us.

In this project, I'll try to deal with some of these conceptual/methodological issues and offer a way to move beyond the unproductive tech determinism v. social constructivism debate.

Update: Just received a small grant from New Mexico State University to get going on this project. This is the most conceptually interesting and theoretically/practically important project I've ever tackled - really enjoy working on it and excited to see where it ends up.

Paper accepted by Communication Theory

Just learned that the paper I wrote with Michael McCluskey on user-generated content was accepted by Communication Theory (I blogged about it here). In the paper we discuss how today's communication environment poses serious challenges to theory building in communication-effects domain. We make a case for a philosophical and methodological adjustment to how communication effects research should be carried out. We suggest that Eveland's (2003) Mix-of-Attributes approach appears quite useful and is quickly gaining traction the more diverse today's media become and the more quickly they evolve. We use political user-generated content (as a hypothetical independent variable) and political participation (as a hypothetica dependent variable) to illustrate the merits of our theoretical and methodological arguments. We also touch upon several notions related to the more general role of ICTs in a producing individual-level and societal-level effects (e.g., technological determinism, social constructivism).

Here's paper's abstract.

Job news

Just a quick update: I will be joining Department of Communication Studies at New Mexico State University as an assistant professor this Fall, where I will continue researching UGC, political communication, and media effects, and will teach a variety of communication courses. I'm excited to make New Mexico my next home!

Now with the job search over, time to get that little dissertation thing wrapped up...

“What Are Journalists For?” An interesting book by Jay Rosen I highly recommend to everyone!

Just a quick note that I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in topics like UGC, social media, participatory journalism, web 2.0, and so forth. This book provides interesting insights into the origins of the afore-mentioned phenomena, by focusing very directly on the “audience” of journalistic organizations. This book is largely a historic account of some experiments in public journalism done 15 years ago – which may not sound terribly exciting to folks studying journalism today. But, what’s most impressive about this volume is that it was published in 2001, which means it was written about 1998-9, and many of the insights are largely confirmed by the latest trends in today’s communication/journalism environment. It is exceedingly rare to find any scholarly work on journalism/communication that stands the test of time so well in today’s insanely turbulent, quickly-evolving, and seemingly unpredictable communication world.

Some of Jay’s insights:

1. Audience is overall pretty intelligent, and has little regard for fluff stories, for sensationalism, horse-race journalism, and such. It might be attracted to this stuff in the short term, but in the long run, it only alienates the largely thoughtful and perceptive public.

2. Journalism should be concerned (at least in its heart) with building a community and facilitating a “thick” democracy, rather than just reporting the facts. This attracts thoughtful and perceptive public to such journalistic product, because this type of public also cares about these noble/lofty goals.

3. There is a lot of wisdom existing in the “audience”. Tapping this wisdom is possible and essential for news organizations.

I wouldn't say I agree with everything Jay says. But, this book is thoughtful, enjoyable to read, and has largely been validated by what happened to journalism recently. This volume is pretty close to the works by Gans, Sigal, Tuchman and other prominent sociologists of news, in terms of its intellectual vigor.

Methodological paper on political participation indexes in political communication research

Just had a paper accepted for publication by the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, in which I demonstrate the benefits of an approach for studying political participation and communication that’s somewhat different from the one conventionally used in political communication and political science. Basically, I suggest not to aggregate political participation items into a single “index” whenever we try to delineate precise effects of different media and communication behaviors on political participation. If we do aggregate, often we won’t be able to find many nuanced theoretically interesting effects.

Here's a summary.

Pew documents growth in UGC popularity and pervasiveness

Pew recently reported some interesting findings showing clearly that UGC is here to stay. Some of the most noteworthy results are: 57% of Internet users in the USA use social-network sites; 25% have commented on a news story or a blog post; 17% have posted thoughts or links to news story on social network sites; 11% have tagged online content, and 9% have contributed article, picture, or video to a website.

Some more results, and I'm quoting from p. 44 of the report:

"Some 37% of internet users have actively contributed to the creation, commentary, or dissemination of news. We arrived at that figure by adding up the number of internet users who said they did any of the following activities:

• 25% of internet users have commented on an online news story or blog item about news that they read

• 17% of internet users have posted links and thoughts about news on a social networking site like Facebook. That translates into 30% of social network site users.

• 11% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online

• 9% of internet users have contributed their own article, opinion piece, picture, or video to an online news site

• 3% of internet users have used Twitter to post or re-Tweet a link to a news story or blog. That amounts to 18% of Twitter users."