Andy Ruddock - Exploring Media Research: Theories, Practice, and Purpose

Andy Ruddock 2017

First published 2017

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962396

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4739-0253-4

ISBN 978-1-4739-0254-1 (pbk)

Editor: Michael Ainsley

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Printed in the UK

The goal of this book is to make media research popular; not as something that everyone likes, but as an activity that everyone can do. A grandiose objective? Perhaps, except when you consider that most of us have opinions about what media do: they make people want to change their bodies, seek fame and confuse consumption with happiness; theyve turned politics into bad reality television; they make journalists chase ratings, not truth. We spend a lot of time chatting about media influence. The outcome is this: we have been talking about media literacy for some time; now its time to develop media research literacy. Todays audiences dont just consume a lot of media content. They also encounter many commentaries about what that content is doing to the world. Evaluating media research is rapidly becoming a precondition for social participation. Media literacy and media research literacy are, in effect, building blocks for political literacy. If politics is about explaining why the world is as it is, and imagining how it could be different, then it is hard to separate democracy from the media narratives that make social thought possible. Its difficult, for example, to discuss gun control if you dont know about research on the effects of video gaming. And you cant understand that research without appreciating fundamental issues, like the many pitfalls there are in gathering and evaluating evidence about such influences if there are any worth discussing.

Knowing how media do things or in fact, dont has become a basic form of cultural competency. So, too, the ability to communicate complex ideas from media research into the vernacular. The surge in media content about media influence makes the ability to differentiate between reasoned, evidenced-based argument and unsubstantiated commentary an important mechanism in public opinion. This calls for a language that media scholars, media students, media industries and publics can use to speak to each other.

To this end, this book identifies core themes in conceiving and practising media research. Doing this means breaking down a couple of walls: one between theory and method, and the other between teaching and research. Two ideas you should come away with is that it is impossible to do theory and method separately, since (a) you cant theorize media in the absence of evidence about how they work and what they do and (b) you cant deploy research techniques without conceiving why you want to use them in the first place, from a theoretical point of view. In that sense, this book argues that notions of theory and method need to be replaced with a definition of research practice as the ability to deploy conceptually justified techniques for gathering and analysing information. Key, here, is the ability to craft research questions that are equally sensitive to striking a balance between what we want to know with what we can know, given the range of techniques and evidence that we can access.

This brings us to breaking down teaching and research. Reading this book should persuade you that you cant teach or learn about media without doing media research. Its crucial that we all understand this. Contemporary lecture halls are full of international student bodies that bring a diverse range of media experiences into one place. Its foolish not to recognize and capitalize on this. Apart from anything else, we all teachers and students live in a world where most other people think that what we do is a bit silly; many people dont take media research that seriously as a scholarly pursuit. Its up to us, then, to get our story straight on why we do what we do. This means using classrooms as places where we converse about the future of media research, informed by structured inquiries into what we know, what we want to know and what we can know. To get that conversation started, this book explains how the work that we all do professional scholars and students is shaped by the same concerns and procedures of asking, researching and answering research questions. By mapping the relationship between media studies and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the different ways in which media realities can be conceived and the different techniques we can use to make sense of those realities,