Jonathon Hutchinson

An introduction to digital media research methods: how to research and the implications of new media data

ABSTRACT Digital methods have previously been described as ‘a term that seeks to capture a recent development in Internet-related research, summarized as approaches to the web as data set’. Using this as a starting point, this paper positions digital media methods as a methodological approach that incorporates internet-based data, while also including other communicative and social media platforms such as Instagram, Vine, Twitter, giffy, Periscope, and Facebook amongst others. Digital media methods also extends to database research, data generated by sensors, drones and autonomous automobiles. Contemporary research engaging digital media methods is built upon the ‘computational turn’ where ‘computational approaches is increasingly reflected across a number of disciplines, including the arts, humanities and social sciences, which use technologies to shift the critical ground of their concepts and theories’. As media and communication scholars, our ‘research is increasingly being mediated through digital technology… affecting both the epistemologies and ontologies that underlie a research program’. This paper highlights three significant points of departure for digital media methods in the media and communication discipline: the increasing need for typologies and ontologies in social media research; the significance of mapping public issues; and the difficulties researchers face as text-based communication shifts to visually oriented platforms.

The ethnographer as community manager: Language translation and user negotiation

This article investigates the ethnographic methodological question of how the researcher observes objectively while being part of the problem they are observing. It uses a case study of ABC Pool to argue a cooperative approach that combines the role of the ethnographer with that of a community manager who assists in constructing a true representation of the researched environment. By using reflexivity as a research tool, the ethnographer engages in a process to self-check their personal presumptions and prejudices, and to strengthen the constructed representation of the researched environment. This article also suggests combining management and expertise research from the social sciences with ethnography, to understand and engage with the research field participants more intimately – which, ultimately, assists in gathering and analysing richer qualitative data.

From fringe to formalisation: An experiment in fostering interactive public service media

The role assumed by institutions that directly develop and support online communities has emerged as a crucial factor in the development of self-governance models for online communities engaging in collaborative practices. Commonly, online communities reject top-down governance models in favour of a meritocracy that positions users in authoritative positions because of their online performance. Scholarly research into online communities suggests that their governance models are horizontal, even where the community platforms are being developed or supported by commercial institutions. Questions of authority and power emerge when institutional, top-down governance models intersect with online community meritocracy in day-to-day communicative activities and while engaging in creative production. This article examines an experiment in fostering interactive public service media by users of the now-defunct ABC Pool through the case study of Ariadne. It tracks how early user-driven ideas for creativity were aligned with the interests of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation through a process of community self-governance alongside cultural intermediation.

Alternative Forms of Participation in Media Organizations

In this chapter, the book will redirect its focus on the participation and co-creation that has been enabled through new media practices and social media platforms. However, participation exists and has done so in organizations in many forms historically. From early forms of talkback radio and letters to the editor, scholars have explored the passive and active role of media and audiences as they participate in the production of content in various forms through hands-on participation and towards more soft forms of enacting media content through the lived-in experience. Regardless of the format of participation, audiences have been engaged in vernacular creativity for some time as a form of cultural intermediation. This final case study draws on empirical data from the ABC’s Double J, a recently launched digital radio service that is targeted at 25–45 year olds, and has been launched as an alternative to the very successful Triple J radio network that is aimed at 16–24-year-old listeners. During 2015, Double J, as part of its J Files programme that showcases artists, undertook a participatory project that chose fans of an international rock act, The Black Keys, to curate and produce an episode of the J Files. This case study provides a clear example of how expertise in different areas is brought together and exchanged between stakeholders to produce a programme that is extremely niche and tailored in regards to content, whilst marketable to the broad Double J audience. This demonstrates much of the cultural intermediation framework that will have been described in this book so far, whilst featuring another variation of co-creation within media organizations. This case study highlights that the knowledge and expertise exchange between the co-creative stakeholders is key to any form of participation within media organizations that seek to bolster interest from their audience. Further engaging with the market agent aspect of cultural intermediation, the Double J example demonstrates co-creative management is crucial to ensure cultural production aligns with market factors and audience trends.

Public Service Media

If we want to understand cultural intermediation within media organizations, we should look at the case of PSM as a leading innovative organization that has a history of engaging large groups of individuals to co-create cultural goods. PSM requires a particular kind of media organization in that it is unique to the country in which it resides. They are neither state media operations nor are they a commercial media organization: They are often a combination of commercial, subscription and government-funded operations that are arranged around facilitating national culture and providing an array of public services. PSM is guided by a particular set of values, often referred to as its PSM remit, which is built upon the traditional values of the BBC, often referenced as the founding model of public service broadcasting. Termed ‘Reithian values’ after the first Director General of the BBC, Sir John Reith, these PSM values include concepts such as the application of core principles of universality of availability and appeal, provision for minorities, education of the public, distance from vested interests, quality programming standards, programme maker independence and fostering of national culture and the public sphere (Cunningham in Hidden innovation: Policy, industry and the creative sector, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 2013). Through these values, PSM organizations located in all regions of the globe are positioned to produce, procure and distribute a particular kind of media for its citizens. This chapter explores the formation of public service broadcasting, the semantic shift towards public service media’s use of technologies to engage in new production and distribution of public services, and locates public service media within co-creation. In doing so, this chapter looks at several co-creative projects facilitated through PSM organizations around the globe including the BBC’s Connected Studio, the CBC’s Your News project and NPR’s StoryCorp. In doing so, this chapter explores audience participation in media organizations from a global and comparative perspective, highlighting how audiences, producers and organizations are approaching co-creation in different geographic locations through cultural intermediation.

The future of digital archive collections: Augmenting public service media geo-locative archives

During 2011, the now defunct ABC Pool (abc.net.au/pool) project developed an experiment that sought to combine emerging augmented reality (AR) technology with the archival collection of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The MyBurb project attempted to alter experiences of Australian suburbs by augmenting ABC archives in contemporary suburban environments to explore the blur between physical and digital spaces with its citizens. Mobile media, specifically geo-locative AR applications such as Layar are “one of the most widely used mobile AR applications” (Liao & Humphreys, 2014, p. 2) and challenge the sociological implications of hybrid spaces as “[m]obile interfaces … allow users to be constantly connected to the Internet while walking through urban spaces” (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 261). The project was successfully implemented, but was rarely utilized by the audience it sought to engage, revealing a division between aspects of the ABC’s remit and engaging its audience through mobile technology and environmental hybridity. This observation supports the cultural production gap Hesmondhalgh (2007) identified between the production and consumption of cultural goods, which I argue could be facilitated through technological intermediation as part of the broader concept of cultural intermediation (Hutchinson, 2013; Maguire & Matthews, 2010; Negus, 2002). How then could cultural intermediation facilitate the collaborative production of cultural goods to include the affordances of geo-locative media while avoiding the disconnection between the MyBurb project and its stakeholders? The data presented within this paper represents 3 years of research at ABC Pool where I was embedded as the community manager/researcher in residence.

Moving convergence culture towards cultural intermediation: social media and cultural inclusion

Raymond Williams noted culture is specific to each society, where ‘the making of a society is the finding of common meanings and direction’. Cultural studies provide a foundation for an array of emerging research areas that seek to explore those meanings and directions, such as convergence culture. Recent humanities scholarship has called for researchers to move beyond the marvel of convergence culture, with its potential for increased social inclusion and cultural diversity, to a more nuanced understanding of networked participation. This paper uses empirical research data gathered from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to argue that embedded cultural industries research can contribute, through the cultural intermediation framework, to cultural studies and the political, economic, and practice-based strengths of the creative industries. It also argues that in a contemporary institutional social media environment, cultural intermediation is a useful framework to understand convergent media practices.

Public service media and social TV: Bridging or expanding gaps in participation?

The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – specifically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the #7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with #7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process.

Institutional Cultural Intermediation

Within media organizations, cultural intermediaries are the conduits between the organizational, management and production stakeholders, and the audiences wishing to participate in the co-production of cultural artefacts. They are translators of tastes, languages, norms, rules and regulatory frameworks between the organizational and audience stakeholder groups. Cultural intermediaries have historically been perceived as one of three substructures. First, cultural intermediaries have been observed as the construction of new facilitating roles between production and consumption of cultural goods (Bourdieu in A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge, London, 1984). Second, they are conceived as the taste agents that promote a relationship between creativity and economy (Smith Macguire and Miller 2014). Third, cultural intermediaries can be conceived as both new cultural production facilitators and economic taste agents within the cultural industries. In the context of this book, cultural intermediation takes on the role of the third substructure by both representing emerging new roles within media organizations that engage the increasingly blurred lines between cultural productions, while also incorporating the significance of the marketplace within cultural production. Further, and within public service media, cultural goods production facilitates a particular role within society insofar as content performs specific normative functions, for example, to educate, innovate and entertain. In this context, this chapter makes a case for the importance of cultural intermediation and how it is applied within the public service media sector engaging in co-creative cultural production, primarily through the efforts of online communities. This chapter then explores how online communities tend to employ heterarchy models of governance, where lead users influence the community norms and collaborative efforts. Heterarchy governance models indicate the rejection of top-down hierarchies, presenting a tension in how these spaces are governed: Is it by the hosting organization or the participants? Contradictorily, institutions operate through hierarchies as indicated through levels of management, which are in place to provide a clear focus for the organization’s goals while also facilitating the management of multiple individuals to mitigate concerns surrounding group complexity. The praxis of heterarchies and hierarchies indicates the necessity for cultural intermediation to not only manage the difference between polities, but to also ensure the interests of the stakeholders are calibrated and that information and knowledge are suitably exchanged to collaboratively produce cultural artefacts. Cultural intermediation provides the backdrop for exploring co-creation within the media organization setting, particularly when exploring participation across non-organizational platforms as the basis for the following four case studies. In doing so, this chapter also looks at the role new media technologies, specifically social media, play in the production methodology and ecology of institutional arrangements.

Can Social TV Use Cultural Intermediation to Facilitate Participation

This chapter predominately looks at user participation beyond access, and towards inclusive facilitation: a role suitable for cultural intermediation. The global screen industries have been experimenting with user participation for several years, based on broad cultural goals, which has also ignited broader media debates. The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities whilst fostering national culture and the public sphere. The remit of PSM and its impact on national and cultural policy, as scholars argue, is the reason for the significance of this burgeoning field, where PSM are positioned as cultural facilitating institutions: they provide the cultural voice of geographical region for both its citizens and as an exported cultural product. PSM’s role as a cultural institution is crucial within the field of comedy television. Social media platforms and projects, specifically ‘social TV’, have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However, this chapter argues that instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may, in fact, reconstruct participation barriers within the co-creative production processes. This chapter documents the ABC co-creation between Twitter users and the #7DaysLater television programme, which is a narrative-based comedy programme that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly programme. The chapter argues why the ABC should engage in social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with #7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process. This chapter describes how cultural intermediation is the process of public service media organizations engaging digital influencers across social media to support authentic participation amongst a broader group of citizens.