The Journal that I’ve chosen is calling Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, impact factor is 3.11. Publications mainly cover topic of media, communication, and focus on modern digital media technologies and their impact on society.
I’ve selected the research paper “The Rise of Twitter in the Political Campaign: Searching for Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects in the Presidential Primary” by Bethany A. Conway, Kate Kenski and Di Wang. The aim of the research is to study reciprocal relationship between traditional media and twitter, show agenda-building effect of Twitter, and emphasize influence of social media on media output. Theoretical base of the investigation are agenda-setting theory, (McCombs & Shaw,1972), research of social media influence by Mayer & Cornfield, 2008, Shoemaker & Reese, 1996, McCombs, 2004, Denham, 2010. The research is based on data acquired from largest US newspapers articles and twits by candidates from Republican and Democratic parties during 2012 Presidential campaign. Particularly mentions of top-7 issues such as economy, budget, energy, employment, taxes, healthcare and foreign policies were gathered and analyzed.
Data was analyzed by using QDA Miner a computer-assisted qualitative coding program that coded and analyzed issues frequency within Twitter and newspapers. Mentions were summed to form newspaper index and Twitter index appropriately. The relationships between traditional media and twitter were defined by measuring correlation that was discovered by content analysis.
The research results showed that frequency of top-7 issues mentions in traditional media is higher than in Twitter that contradicts the research by Neuman et al., 2014 that found out Twitter mentions more numerous. Besides, the results showed that existence of correlation between all analyzed resources.
Authors made a conclusion that Twitter plays role as traditional media and is adopted to political podium to share information and grow audience. The relationship between traditional media and twitter are symbiotic. The difference between traditional media and Twitter is that newspapers and journals have leading position in covering top-7 issues while twitter is used for covering unobtrusive issues as well as agenda building that form the media agenda.
The research emphasized importance of new media in political campaign and its role in agenda-building process. In my opinion, the characteristics and specificity of target audience of different members of political parties should be taking into consideration. For instance, healthcare questions and tax questions are important for youth, young families, and entrepreneurs. In order to drive attention of this segment of target audience it’s more effectively to use Twitter, but if this segment is not the main of target audience of particular candidates number of issues mentions in twitter would be less than in traditional media, but this fact doesn’t allow to jump to simple conclusion that Twitter is used just for unobtrusive issues. This moment need further exploration.
1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.
Gregor Shilrey defines 5 types of theory depending on goals that information is addressed to:
- theory for analyzing,
- theory for explaining,
- theory for predicting,
- theory for explaining and predicting,
- theory for design and action.
So I can say that theory is structured and systematized information that has kind of goal mentioned above. Besides, the aim of theory is to explain behavior of particular system in order to predict the status of the system in every particular moment in future.
2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?
I think that in the selected paper was used theory of predicting as the author wanted to prove the agenda-building role of Twitter in presidential campaign.
3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?
I think that benefit of theory of predicting is opportunity to predict the behavior of object of investigation in future. The limitations is lack of explanation. For example, in particular article the author shows the results that prove his prediction but nature and reason of getting that results are not explained.
1. Briefly explain to a first year university student what theory is, and what theory is not.
Gregor Shilrey defines 5 types of theory depending on goals that information is addressed to:
- theory for analyzing,
- theory for explaining,
- theory for predicting,
- theory for explaining and predicting,
- theory for design and action.
So I can say that theory is structured and systematized information that has kind of goal mentioned above. Besides, the aim of theory is to explain behavior of particular system in order to predict the status of the system in every particular moment in future.
2. Describe the major theory or theories that are used in your selected paper. Which theory type (see Table 2 in Gregor) can the theory or theories be characterized as?
I think that in the selected paper was used theory of predicting as the author wanted to prove the agenda-building role of Twitter in presidential campaign.
3. Which are the benefits and limitations of using the selected theory or theories?
I think that benefit of theory of predicting is opportunity to predict the behavior of object of investigation in future. The limitations is lack of explanation. For example, in particular article the author shows the results that prove his prediction but nature and reason of getting that results are not explained.
No comments:
Post a Comment