future media landscape

Ten years from now, what would the media landscape look like? How would you consume media at that time?

People will have really pointy, sharp fingers. I'd feel much more comfortable reading digital books than now. 

algorithmic audiences

This week’s reading on Anderson talks about the relatively novel concept called, algorithmic audiences. By analyzing three different journalism-audience relationships—the public journalism, Indymedia, and demand media—the author tries to correlate to different images of democracy and sociological implications. Algorithmic journalism is reducible to quantification and the visualization of an aggregative audience. Because the domain of this research is quite new, it’s more of speculation rather than empiricism. The way algorithmic journalism works is based on INTERNAL BIAS, which goes back to the last week’s reading: democratic journalism provides what the public needs, not what the public wants. If algorithmic journalism sees audiences as non-participatory, simply guided by their internal bias without critical thinking, content with what the media has to offer, and unconcerned with eliminating bad information, how is it different from the way capitalism operates? Yes, journalism is a unique business model, but the very nature of journalism is to create the civil society. It should be careful not to simply follow the systems of capitalism and advertising.

Ethics

Facebook conducted a study, which manipulated users’ emotional state. More negative News Feeds led to more negative status messages, as more positive News Feeds led to positive statuses. Not to mention their mal use of the tools, it seriously challenges ethical issues. Even though some might refer this study as original, ethically, it’s an open question. Morality comes before any legality. We make regulations/laws out of ethical reasons. Somewhat contrary to their findings, there have been studies indicating the more users see other people being happy, the more they feel depressed and less happy.

 

The Facebook has always been manipulating users’ News Feeds. It uses an algorithm to determine what to display and hide, and it rarely discloses any detailed information about how the algorithm works. This is why I don’t use Facebook.
Tandoc and Thomas’ article on “The ethics of web analytics” was a good transition after reading articles about how deceptive the Facebook is. However, whether the Facebook can be considered as journalism still remains.

term paper

As some of you'd already know, my research area revolves around transnational media culture in the era of globalization. For this term paper, I'll look at Western fans' reading and decoding of K-pop by conducting online ethnography and emplying several thoretical concepts from globalization paradigm. I'll look at how this contraflow of media culture challenges hegemony drvien by Western imperialism, and how it relates to racial/ethnic/gender identity.
While doing online ethnographic work, I found this funny video on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/sYgYNNBFBjU

Readings for 10/19/15

I really enjoyed reading this week's articles. Whereas Dr. Chyi’s study indicates that digital news is not replacing newspapers yet, Lee and Leung’s study indicates that the Internet is displacing all traditional media (i.e. newspapers, television, radio, and magazines) rather than supplementing them. According to Lee and Leung’s study, Internet users for news/information and entertainment do not spend more time with functionally similar traditional media for the same purpose. Their findings reject the “more-more” hypothesis as suggested by the user-centric approach. The Internet is shown to have an overall displacement effect, and not a single instance of a “more-more” situation occurred in the use of traditional media among Internet users. The ‘‘more-less’’ scenario is seen across all traditional media.
In contrary to Lee and Leung’s study, Yuan’s study supported the user-centric model. She looked at the old and new media for the news audience from the repertoire-oriented approach, hoping to provide more fluid and dynamic analysis than the dichotomous distinction between the substitutive and supplementary relationships. Her focus on media repertoire was particularly interesting as I see it personally applying to me: for example, setting favorites on my Internet. I think the repertoire-oriented approach will greatly depend on how much effort I have to put into when using new channels. Her study only focused on news. I wonder if it would be the same for other media content, such as entertainment.

Some might argue that whether or not new media replace or supplement old media would depend on multiple factors, given they provide similar functions. However, how can different media serve the same needs and functions? As Marshall McLuhan once said, “Medium is the message,” different media platforms provide distinct senses and require audiences' physiology to function differently. Although the media content might be the same, audiences change their attitude when interacting with different media platforms.
The amount of using the Internet will vary in each society depending on how developed and fast the Internet is. For example, Korea is the most wired country in the world according to the world statistics. Basically, there’s free high speed wi-fi wherever you go including subways. Because of this, there are many online-related burgeoning industries (and big conglomerates of course) coming up with innovative ways of delivering content via unprecedented media platforms. For example, there’s a new form of media called “web drama,” which is relatively very short (about 10 minutes per each episode) compared to the traditional drama shown on an old medium, television. This is increasingly getting popular in the K-drama industry mainly because about 99% of all young Korean people have a smartphone with web streaming capabilities.

Interactive nature of social networking site (SNS)

I found Winter et al.’s study quite interesting. As the authors stated, the design of Facebook and similar SNS put a large emphasis on user reactions, fostering a convergence of and high interaction between mass and interpersonal communication. Then, does this mean that we are having a larger number of opinion leaders than the past since more people have more access and means to post and share their opinions online? Would opinion leaders be discouraged if their opinions posted online are severely opposed by other users’ comments or low numbers of likes (negative peer reactions)? Can we still set the same standard of opinion leaders? Revisiting the theoretical concept of opinion leaders, which date back to the study by Katz and his colleagues, in a new media sphere would be interesting to study.

Is data the new oil in the information era?

The article by Anderson extols Google’s analytical tools and how successful they have been in making profits for the company. I find this approach of big data/Petabytes analysis, such as Netflix’s Cinematch, quite useful for audience research. But wouldn’t it polarize the audience? We can argue indefinitely whether this mathematical/defying-traditional-scientific-method approach is right or wrong because it’s an epistemological matter.
Google’s founding philosophy is that they don’t care about human beings and their causal relationships, cultures, contexts, behaviors, motivations, etc.; all they care about is correlation. If the statistics of incoming links say this page is better than that page, then that’s good enough. This might be useful for commercial business people or economists. The epistemological problem here is that studying about social science, human being and communication doesn’t work like that.
Attempting to know about human beings and their driving motivations, cultures and contexts matter because of the importance of accuracy and outliers. For example, Google translator is anything but useful. Google translator uses an enormous amount of data and textual references to translate one language to another. But if two languages are radically different in terms of grammar, structure and nuances, it gets so inaccurate to an extent that it’s just not useful at all. Also, sometimes it’s the outlier that really matters in the realms of society and communication.
The article contends that we don’t need to know why people do what they do as long as they do it. It seems to criticize traditional inductive scientific reasoning, but it neglects to mention the probability of deductive reasoning. I’m not sure whether the author is equating statistical algorithms to interpretations of qualitative researchers when they analyze their corpus of research data.

Social media marketing and engagement

Not coming from advertising or marketing background, Funk’s article was particularly hard for me to comprehend. However, one of his remarks I found interesting is how “Facebook has been criticized and has publicly criticized itself for being late to the mobile game.” In East Asia where it’s known for having well-developed computer game industry, I think linking social media apps to ad-serving mobile games happens quite frequently. For instance, Kakao Talk is equivalent to a combination of Facebook and WhatsApp in Korea. Kakao Talk often invites its users on social network sphere to download mobile games and compete with other Kakato Talk users in order to make users more engaged, promote certain ads and make profit.

Also, providing users super cute emoji (or stickers) worth only a couple of dollars is another way to make some profit. There’s another highly used social media/messenger app in East Asia called LINE. One interesting fact about LINE is that although it’s from Korea, it’s mainly used by Japanese and Taiwanese because Korean market was already predominated by Kakao Talk. Once critical mass is exclusively formed and clustered in a certain social media, it’s extremely difficult for other companies to enter the domain.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau provides three groups of core engagement metrics that can be comparably defined across the industry: Cognition, Emotion and Behavior. As for the “pre-engagement” phase, I wonder whether unconsciousness could possibly be measured.

Research topic & comments on the reading

 

Cultural discount revisited: K-pop and Western audiences

   With the advent of globalization in 1990s and with the development of information and communications technology, transnational media cultural flow has never been as dynamic as nowadays. These dramatic shifts have posed the legitimacy about the supremacy of American media cultures and the continuing plausibility of Western-centric cultural domination across the world (Iwabuchi, 2010). It requires us to look at the realm of transnational media culture from a new perspective; since for decades an uncritical application of theories has been derived from Euro-American experiences to the non-Western contexts and processes under the study of media and cultural globalization.

   East Asia is one of the key regions in which these alternative cultural expressions flourish. Scholars have examined the dynamics of the production, circulation and consumption of media cultures in East Asia in the realm of globalization. In the midst of this phenomenon, the rise of South Korea’s popular culture and the spread of its highly favored media content across the globe (known as Korean Wave) provide an interesting case study to delve into.

   Since the early 2000s, K-pop and its videos have been well recognized by global fans through their skillfully hybridized form. K-pop artists create a new transnational Asian identity across borders in the 21^st century on the global stage (Ryoo, 2009). As the Korean rapper Psy’s viral music video Gangnam Style has shown, the popularity of K-pop now goes beyond nation-state boundaries, circulated on the Internet space without borders (Kim, 2011). K-pop is a dance-driven performance that often emphasizes performers’ physical attractiveness and virtuosity. It is a visual consumption that sells overall images and performances, not necessarily lyrics per se (Leung, 2012).

   Previous studies on K-pop were largely applied to K-pop fandom and fans’ identity formation in the Asia-pacific region. These studies, however, fail to examine the significance of Western fandom as the phenomenon of Korean Wave starts to reach the West; one good evidence is that the Billboard now provides K-pop section on its own (www.billboard.com). Close readings of Western audiences’ reactions and comments on K-pop videos allows us to interrogate whether cultural imperialism, which has been symbolized as a one-way flow of cultural products from Western countries to developing countries (Jin, 2007) is still a reliable theory in today’s globalization era.  

   This study, therefore, attempts to examine media culture from a reversed perspective and challenge Hoskins and Mirus’ theoretical concept of cultural discount. By conducting close readings of self-filmed reaction to K-pop music videos and analyzing online users’ comments on YouTube, this study aims to explore what it means to consume K-pop for Western audiences, and why and how their consumptions and interpretations of K-pop matter in international context.

   The reading of K-pop video texts is mediated by audiences’ incorporation into active oral cultures (Fiske, 1987) by active discussion and interaction among other viewers to create meanings (Katz & Liebes, 1984). Through self-filming K-pop reaction videos, fans—as ardent audiences—express their emotions and thoughts. Through interacting with others via comments on YouTube, fans—as active audience—share and practice a pleasurable aspect of democracy. Western audiences, as active audiences, take active role in interpreting and enjoying transnational media content on their own term, and connect with others in online environment. The fans not only enjoy K-pop videos, but they also support each other and build close rapport with other fans via comments. How and why do fans self-film their reactions to videos? Why do these fans enthusiastically communicate with each other, leaving informing and supporting comments on one another’s posts? What does Western audiences’ attachment to K-pop music and videos mean in the domain of globalization? This study attempts to answer these questions.

   To explore this phenomenon, this study employs an interdisciplinary methodological approach, combining theories from media studies and cultural studies, in addition to thick descriptions of each video and comment. This study also employs online ethnography; from September 2015 to December 2015, I’ll regularly visit the YouTube pages where the videos are uploaded. I’ll observe fans’ comments and examine the ways in which they interact and communicate with the posters in online communities.

   In this article, K-pop fans refer to Western audiences. Fans’ linguistic and geographical associations inform the definition. In other words, this research identifies western K-pop fans as audiences who (1) use English as one of the languages they are most comfortable speaking and (2) likely live in countries in the West, or in a society under the influence of western culture. I’ll collect data and information about the fans by looking at each individual’s page and comment they had made. This includes fans’ visual confirmation, physical traits, profiles, pictures, names (or ID) and languages they use.

   By looking at the transnational media culture of K-pop, this article challenges Hoskins and Mirus’s theoretical concept of cultural discount and revisits Straubhaar’s theory of cultural proximity. This study suggests that although theoretical concept of cultural discount (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988) vividly exists among Western audiences for their consumptions and interpretations of K-pop, it faces serious challenges in explaining the K-pop phenomenon among Western audiences.

Theoretical background

Cultural hybridity (Kraidy), cultural proximity (Straubhaar), cultural discount (Hoskins & Mirus).

Methods

Online ethnography: textual analysis and thick description.

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   This week’s reading on “Capturing ‘human bandwidth’: A multidimensional model for measuring attention on web sites” by Zheng, Chyi and Kaufhold provides a new model for measuring users’ attention on the Internet. The article briefly mentions about the notion of “information surplus,” which I find fascinating; “because information has lost its scarcity on the Web, excessive information is available even at the price of zero, resulting in a media environment characterized by ‘information surplus’ (Chyi, 2009).” When there was no internet but only television and radio, scholars used the term “cognitive surplus (Shirky, 2010)” to refer to the leisured time people had in the beginning of industrialization. During that period, people had relatively more free time and attention surplus, thanks to all sorts of developments. They turned to (now-traditional) media to deal with their cognitive surplus.
   Now, with the Internet and new media, audiences are facing information surplus from cognitive surplus. Many media/advertising-related industries try hard to get audience’s attention in any way possible. For instance, I think the way news media write the headline has been drastically changed over time as a way to grab audience’s attention. In Korea, this happens a lot especially in the realm of online news sites. When online users click a news headline for its appealing and catchy words and find out the content of the news is not even relevant to the headline, Koreans use the term “be caught by a journalist.”

Exercise 5

Based on this week's readings, I found Zillman’s description of arousal and excitement as a result of audiovisual experience particularly interesting. Basically, if people get more aroused, they will have stronger drive to continue the media use. This is especially relevant to explaining the appeal of entertainment and soft news. Media involvement may also be indicated by such signs as “talking back” to the TV. There is one theory that well explains this phenomenon: Parasocial relationship (Horton & Wohl, 1956).  Audience members develop their one-sided relationships with the media being consumed. Parasocial relationship is described as an illusionary experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show host, celebrities, characters) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. It can be developed to the point where media audiences begin to view the mediated others as “real friends.” I think it would be interesting to link Zillman’s notion of arousal to Horton and Wohl’s notion of parasocial relationship to see the dynamics of audiences.

In terms of audience participation, I find even defining the notion of participation problematic. Would you consider the process of audience interpreting media texts on their own terms participation?

McQuail says that there is an increasing trend for media content to be produced deliberately for international audience. This applies largely to films, pop music and TV dramas. Although this is indeed true, there’s another face of transnational media culture: Buying a format from one country and create a remake version (e.g. American horror films originally from Asia, American Idol, Korean variety TV show Running Man, etc.). I think targeting directly at international audience is risky; you have to be skillful enough to hybridize different cultural elements (e.g., the East vs. the West). Otherwise, you will be just pursuing/portraying universal values.

When explaining about an audience for a foreign product, McQuail mentions Hoskins’ and Mirus’ work on “cultural discount.” It mainly focuses on the linguistic aspect as an obstacle of media cultural product flow across the borders. Hoskins and Mirus addressed that American people dislike (or are unfamiliar with) to watch a program or movie with subtitles, so it is hard for other cultural products to permeate into America. I think this is by doubt true since English has become a lingua franca, which some scholars refer to is as a cultural imperialism.

The true extent of international audience formation is largely unknown. However, one tangible space to see at least some of the actual international audience would be a concert hall or a fan meeting.

Hoskins, C., & Mirus, R. (1988). Reasons for the US dominance of the international trade in television programs. Media, Culture and Society, 10, 499-515.

Comments on the readings

Based on the Lee (2013)’s article, news consumption in the contemporary media environment is not driven by the mutual exclusivity of news motivations. This is quite true if you think about, for example, Facebook; people use it both for social and information purposes.
It would also be interesting to see how the four motivations (information, entertainment, opinion and social) influence information processes; some motivation-triggered information might be retained in a brain storage longer than others or quicker to recall.  
Differences of motivation-driven news consumption may in turn influence civic engagement and other democratic practices, which are all positive outcomes. This might be true especially when examining the sample as a whole, the US adult news audiences were most driven to consume news for information purposes, and least driven to consume news for opinions: No hard cores. But what about negative outcomes? Will there be any negative outcomes caused by a certain motivation-driven news consumption? If so, what would it be?
There is another interesting journal article (Kim, J. (2014). Scan and click: The uses and gratifications of social recommendation systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 33, 184-191) that links uses and gratifications theory to the use of social media’s social recommendation systems (SRS. e.g. “like” on Facebook). Based on this article, expression-seeking is the highest motivation for users to use the SRS, and that the more one spends on social media, the more he/she is likely to express opinions via SRS rather than read opinions; it naturally creates the influential, in other words, opinion leaders.

McQuail: chapter 1, 8, and 9

This week’s readings on chapter 1, 8, and 9 from Denis McQuail’s book called “Audience Analysis” provides fundamental yet interesting insights of audience in both old and new media culture: From what audience used to mean in old media as a set of spectators to newer meanings as active, interactive, and borderless people.

When he talks about the privatization of media experience (p. 6), I thought of it as true indeed especially when it comes to the practice of television viewing. For instance, the location of a television at home is almost always at the center of a living room. Television viewing has been a family ritual in some way; it’s been customary, not only in American household but in many other countries, to watch TV together after dinner. However, with the invention of mobile communications (e.g. smartphones), people now watch TV in a more privatized environment, such as on their way to school or work. Although there might be a less of physical accompaniment of television viewing, there seems to be an increasing sense of virtual accompaniment of viewing (e.g. watching online streaming content where instant messages from other online users pop up on the screen, such as AfreecaTV).

When explaining the characteristics of “mass,” he refers to the mass as lacking “any organization, stable structure, rules, or leadership (p. 7).” However, I find this highly arguable nowadays. For instance, the 2008 US beef protest in South Korea was first elicited by the fans of K-pop idol boy band TVXQ (Shirky, 2010).

McQuail argues that audiences form according to factors that cut across residential patterns and have more to do with tastes and lifestyles (p. 133). However, he seems to have ignored a crucial factor when analyzing audience: Social capital. Only those with rich social capital in high socio-economic status are able to move flexibly between exclusionist highbrowed culture and lowbrowed culture, becoming inclusionist omnivore (Peterson & Kern, 1996). When talking about internationalization (by the way, I think internationalization is not the same as globalization), he said “the nation-state is in relative decline as transnational cooperation on many things becomes more important than sovereignty for its own sake (p. 130).” However, this is not always the case if you look at the ways in which Chinese government strictly regulates and censors the immense influx and popularity of Korean pop cultural content to protect their own sovereignty. On page 140, he said that “audiences do not find it hard to distinguish between imported and domestic products and read them differently.” This can be indeed true, but if you think about imported television formats (e.g. American Idols, MTV, etc.), it’s not that crystal clear. When TV producers/writers are importing and exporting TV formats, broad yet so subtle to recognize social, cultural, economic, and political ideologies are inevitably embedded in the format itself, such as westernized notion of capitalism. Some scholars have opposed the view of McQuail on national definitions of cultural content as no longer exclusive or uniquely important (p. 141) in the world of globalization. Some of the theories supporting those scholars’ arguments are cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) and hybridity (Kraidy, 2002). It would be interesting to read some of their work in light of audience studies.

Studies on audience can be done with dichotomized approach: Looking at it from the perspective of either technological determinism or social determinism. But as we may agree upon reading this book, the realm of audience is much more dynamic and complex. However people define or make use of the term audience, as a socialist Shiach (1989) once said, I hope it gets liberated from the dominant status groups (e.g. multinational conglomerates)’ way of sustaining their power.

 

References:

Kraidy, M. (2002). Hybridity in cultural globalization. Communication Theory, 12(3), 316-339.

Peterson, R., & Kern, R. (1996). Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review, 61(5), 900-907.

Shiach, M. (1989). Discourse on popular culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus. New York: Penguin Group.

Straubhaar, J. (1991). Beyond media imperialism: Asymmetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 8(1), 39-59.

Managing my own audiences

To me, “my audiences” mean the people, subjects, participants and/or respondents of my study as my research interests revolve around transnational media culture and audience reception studies in international settings. I was, at first, amazed at the ways in which Western audiences consume and understand (and/or misunderstand) K-pop (Korean pop music) videos on YouTube. This eventually led me to delve into exploring and analyzing Western audiences’ interpretation of K-pop videos.

I’m still in the very beginning stage of this research project, but I found some K-pop video reaction clips on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekJ-ldOD0TQ.
Most of the Western audiences do not understand why some scenes of the music videos are filmed in certain ways. This is mainly because they don’t understand the language, hence the lyrics, and because they relatively don’t share cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) than Korea’s neighboring countries. I consider some of the main reasons behind this lack of contextual understanding as the inability of understanding the language of the lyrics and not being familiar with the culture. In fact, scenes where these audiences consider “weird” or “what’s that” kind of reactions are filmed in ways that match with the lyrics.
One example can be found at 2:34 of the above link when a white guy thinks the female singer is singing “I got a boy on my chin” when actually she’s saying “I got a boy mutjin (meaning handsome or cool).”

As of 2011 (far before Psy’s “Gangnam Style” came out), K-pop videos already surpassed a collective of over 1 billion views on YouTube. However, Western audiences’ misunderstanding and misinterpreting of K-pop videos can be found in many YouTube reaction clips. For example, two British girls are in a complete shock mainly because they don’t understand the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtfEXglUvw0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XQfKT-qXT4. Three American audiences are completely puzzled at some of the scenes because they don’t know that, in fact, those scenes are actually based on the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5_l7d2CkG8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcGj6S_G-uQ

Some scholars declare the end of the Information Society and the emergent of the Dream Society of icon and aesthetic experience. Whereas letters (alphabets) were a main medium for the former one, images (photos, visual content) are the main medium in the latter one (Dator & Seo, 2004). What they both have in common, however, is that both mediums are media cultural texts. I’m curious to see in the era of the so-called globalization filled with the hybridity of transnational media culture, how informed audiences can be when it comes to consuming and interpreting foreign media content.

References:

Dator, J & Seo, Y. (2004). Korea as the wave of a future: The emerging dream society of icon and aesthetic experience. Journal of Future Studies, 9, 31-44.

 

Audience problems

Exercise: Identify some “audience problems” from the State of News Media or other industry reports/

Among all ranges of audience groups, I’d like to specifically delve into the Millennials, also known as the Digital Natives. Although the world relentlessly shouts the end of newspaper era, in fact, people are consuming more news than ever with unprecedented privileges of having access to various news platforms (Poindexter, 2012). The way Millennials consume news, however, differs from the audiences of older generations. With their mobile devices at hands and shorter attention span, their news consumption is more customized and instant, seeking news that only interests them; hence, news comes to them. What’s problematic with the way Millennials consume news is that they are accustomed to reading short stories or only headlines to get the gist of the stories; therefore, lacking a full contemplation of news. They accept news stories at face value because they are reluctant to engage in a deep critical thinking in today’s fast-paced society. Studies (e.g. Pew Research Center, 2010) show that Millennials have higher educational level, but I wonder whether they are better at distinguishing legitimate news sources and getting various news stories to broaden their perspectives of the world than audiences of other generations.