October, 2011 Volume 21, Issue 3 Newsletter Welcome Roundtable: Flow of Political Information Data Sources Announcements Archives Social Media	Roundtable The Flow of Political Information in the Digital Age: What's Better and What's Worse?
	New Media -- New Research Paradigm? W. Russell Neuman For the last several centuries humankind has been witnessing the introduction of an astonishing variety of new communication technologies. The progression is a familiar one - the steam-driven cylindrical printing technologies that made the penny press possible, telephony, broadcast radio and television, multichannel cable and satellite television and ultimately the increasingly broadband web (Neuman 2010). At each historical stage some pundit points to latest development, the international undersea cables or the high powered satellites and proclaims that this technology will change everything-- political communication and ultimately humankind will be transformed. We have heard these proclamations many times and become appropriately skeptical. I will, nonetheless, try to make the case here that the most recent developments really do have the capacity to be transformative. I'm not highlighting a change in human nature, of course, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual audience member and the mediated world around them. It is a shift from push to pull. In all the traditional media, bandwidth was highly constrained. There was room for only so many words in the newspaper and in the 22 1/2 minutes of nightly network television news (not counting the commercials). The journalists set the agenda and defined what qualifies to enter the public sphere. Audience members could selective scan, attend and ignore, but they would be largely restricted to the agenda and vocabulary that had been put before them. There was the occasional vetted letter to the editor or guest editorial, but mass participation was dramatically limited by bandwidth constraints. As each new medium arrived it supplemented rather than supplanted its predecessors and typically exhibited similar space limitations. The web is different. Each node on the web can as easily speak as listen. Instead of a series of headlines the citizen online confronts an unadorned search box into which virtually any imaginable query might be typed. Instead of a dozen or a hundred channels, the search engines monitor and make logically accessible tens of billions web pages. (An accurate estimate of how many billion is a matter of some controversy.) And, as the business pages remind us daily, the online media are quickly supplanting rather than supplementing the older media. Media push as been replaced by audience pull. My argument is that a shift of this magnitude requires some refinements to the traditional paradigm of communication research. It is not a return of a new era of minimal effects as Bennett and Iyengar (2008) and before them Chaffee and Metzger (2001) and Clarke and Kline (1974) have posited. Obsessing over effect size is a distraction. Selective attention and routinized inattention to political events and issues are longstanding characteristics of the mass citizenry of most modern democracies. Sometimes the effect of a political message is large, sometimes small. What has changed is the newly digital mechanics of selective attention. In the traditional research paradigm we use self-reports of media exposure and self-reports of attitudes or attitude change to estimate media effects. Unfortunately, individuals are notoriously bad at estimating their media behavior and misestimates of exposure may be correlated with dependent variables generating serious errors. Alternatively we assess random assignment to messages in short term experiments of 30 or perhaps 60 minutes in length. Given exposure over the years to tens of thousands of political messages, what changes in response to the 10,001st message in a brief experiment is a tiny fragment of the over time dynamics of real world political communication. The typical communication effect in the real world probably has the properties of a reinforcing spiral as increased interest leads to increased exposure over time (or just the reverse, Slater 2007) rather than taking the form of an instantaneous exposure to X causing an increase in Y. Fortunately, the new media environment provides researchers a variety of new means to assess selective exposure in searching and linking behavior as citizens monitor the political environment electronically over time. The dynamics of polarization, avoidance of contrary views, seeking reinforcement, and the salience of identity politics, to list but a few topics can be studied in vivo. As with surveys and experiments, very careful efforts are required to protect the privacy and anonymity of research subjects, a matter of particular import when personal behaviors and political beliefs are involved. Communication researchers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but some outmoded methodologies. A digital world beckons not just its citizens but those would hope to understand the dynamics of citizenship in a fast changing world. Bennett, W. Lance and Shanto Iyengar (2008). "A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication." Journal of Communication 58(4): 707-731. Chaffee, Steven H. and Miriam J. Metzger (2001). "The End of Mass Communication." Mass Communications and Society 4: 365-379. Clarke, Peter and F. Gerald Kline (1974). "Media Effects Reconsidered." Communication Research 1(2): 224-240. Neuman, W. Russell, Ed. (2010). Media, Technology, and Society: Theories of Media Evolution. Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press. Slater, Michael D. (2007). "Reinforcing Spirals: The Mutual Influence of Media Selectivity and Media Effects and Their Impact on Individual Behavior and Social Identity." Communication Theory 17(3): 281-303.