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Below is an idea for a content analysis I started kicking around about 2 years ago. It is based around the idea is that local media creates and reinforces community, so why don’t newspapers become cognizant of it and start designing their websites around this principle. If they do they will create all kinds of positives. First, it has been shown that newspapers can create increased civic participation and social capital in a community. It then stands to reason that if a newspaper explicitly tries to increase civic participation and social capital they will be able to do it more effectively. The more people care about their community the more likely they are to read news about their community. Hence this is a reinforcing spiral. Community reinforcing media creates people who care more about the community. People who care more about the community use more local news media.

But how do we do this. I think there are three important concepts that we need to think about. First, the reader/user must be engaged in the content. Once they are engaged in the content feelings of connection to the community and the news organization must be cultivated. News source must also provide the mobilizing information to allow people to get involved in the community. This is my modest idea.

Read more…

Uncategorized Community, journalism, research

This afternoon I will be presenting the latest incarnation of my work on perceived network connection to the Communication, Opinion, and Political Studies Group at The Ohio State University. The biggest change to the presentation from my last talk on this topic is a update and slight modification of the model. The definition that I am trying out tomorrow is more precise than the definitions I have used in the past. The model is in the graphic below and then you can go to the “Connection Research” tab to see the full presentation.

The full presentation can be found here.

Uncategorized PNC, research

Current research I am working on:

Content analysis of political discussion on Twitter
Myself, Adam Maksl and person to be named later
Design process

Content analysis of political videos on YouTube leading up to the 2008 presidential election
Ivan Dylko, Kristen Landerville, Myself and Micheal Beam
Data collection

Issue publics/Lifestyle politics: The effects of blackness on political participation
Troy Elias and myself
Design process

The Facebook Effect: Social media and the 2008 election
Erik Nisbet and myself
Data analysis

Perceived Network Connection: A second measurement paper
Myself
Design process

Debate Viewing, News Frames, and Opinion Expression
Ray Pingree, Myself and Megan Hill
Data Analysis

Uncategorized research

So Troy Elias and I are meeting tomorrow to discuss our reserach on how blackness can act as a moderating force in understanding levels of political participation in black church goers. Basically what we are saying is for some people blackness is the most important issue in their life. For these people all political decisions go through the filter of blackness. For other people race is an important issue, but other issues trump it. A great example of this idea are the Log Cabin Rebuplicans. The Log Cabin Republican are a group of gay republicans. For them (and this is greatly over simplified for demonstative purposes) homosexuality is not the issue they found to be most important when deciding what party to join. We are trying to create a measure to understand which people use blackness as their key issue and which view blackness as an issue of importance, but not their defining issue.

Here are some questions I have come up with:

- HBCU’s should recieve increased funding from the U.S. government or all university’s should get equal funding.
- I would prefer donating to the United Negro College Fund than a general scholarship fund.
- Affirmative action
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums
- No child left behind

I think these are going to be set-up as comparisons (e.g. do this or do this) on a scale.

Or they could be something like this:

Mandatory minimums…

a) should be overturned, because they are racist and proportionally affect more blacks.
b) should be overturned, because they constrain judicial power.
c) should be overturned, because they stress punishment over rehabilitation.
d) should be kept as they are.

Hmmm…well I think this has been a productive round of writing out my thoughts and hopefully I am ready for tomorrow’s meeting.

Uncategorized blackness, Elias, research

Another project I am working on as a co-author looks at how lifestyle politics affect political participation. More specifically, we are looking at how people can use a single issue to shape all their political thought. The issue we are going to be looking at is race issues in the black community. For some people, race issues will define the individual’s whole being, while in others race issues are important but are not the basis of all their political thought. To quantify this, we are going to present the individual’s with a number of scenarios and then ask them how much they would agree with or support the proposition. These propositions need to speak to black culture and should be politically based. Lance suggested something about supporting the funding of HBCU. So far I have thought of another couple:

- Affirmative action scenario
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums

We are also trying to come up with a couple questions that do not speak to black culture at all.

Uncategorized blackness, Elias, research, single issue

I am co-authoring a paper with a professor here at OSU and for now I am just writing some notes on the general role of new media in the 2008 presidential election and how these new roles could affect communication research.

1) YouTube and other online video sharing – Unlike three television channel media system of the 1950’s, YouTube allows the user to have a seemingly endless amount of choice in their media experience. The rise of this type of media creates a number of important areas of future communication research.

a) Will online video add to theories of media fragmentation put forth by scholars, such as Sunstein (2002)? Communication researchers must begin to understand how individuals use these new media to gain information. Are they using it just to reinforce there own views or are they using it to gain new information about different/opposing views?

b) What is the environment of the online video? It is widely speculated that YouTube is driving by bitterly partisan videos, which deal with topics of a superficial nature. Like the USENET before it, content analyzes should be performed to extend this past simple speculation.

2) Datamining, content specialization, and targeting – Unexamined in most research on Internet and politics is a formal discussion of message targeting. More easily than with any media before it, the Internet allows the message creator to gather, store and access vast amounts of information about the reader/user. This information can be used to target messages for the specific user. The most famous example of this being the suggestion engine on Amazon.com. There is no reason this type of targeting couldn’t be apply to the political realm.

In the 2008 election, nearly all the candidate’s websites encouraged the user to give up personal information (e.g., e-mail and zip code). Some of the campaign’s use of this information might be benign or even helpful for the user (e.g., sending an e-mail when there is a local campaign event), but it could be much more. The candidates could use the information to reshape their whole website to highlight the issues important to the user and hide the issues unimportant to the user. This presents a number of ethical questions, which need to be examined, and presents a number of communication research issues and oppurtunities.

a) The ability to create many different specialized, database driven sites creates a huge problem for any type of systematic content analysis.

b) The effects of targeting on political outcomes in the online realm need to be understood better.

3) Social media – With the rise of Web 2.0, there has also been an increase in the ability to socialize on the Internet. This online socialization creates an interesting problem for communication research. Basically, we don’t know where to place these new communication technologies on the scale from intrapersonal to mass communication. For example, YouTube as mention above presents a number of problems for comm research, but then by adding the social element it gets even more muddy. For example, YouTube allows people to post response videos. If the user watches a video and then a response video are they watching two instances of mass communication or are they witnessing deliberation between two individuals. Social media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, etc) were used extensively throughout the 2008 election.

One way to understand their effects on political outcomes is to understand what kind of communication is occurring. Another way is to isolate an important variable which could mediate the effects of the media usage on political outcomes. One such variable could be connection or emotional attachment to the issue group, candidate, or online environment being examined. By isolating connection and examining how it varies in relation to media usage we can indirectly understand the effects of those media without having to limit our analysis to only the mass comm or interpersonal comm aspects of the media.

So that is what I am thinking for now. These are only idea starters and should not be assumed to be anything more than that. If anyone has any other thoughts or ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

Uncategorized 2008 election, election, holbert, presidential, research