Introduction to Media 2.0 theories

1. Media 2.0?
• Mpm107 – New Media Research Methodologies
• How have networks alter how we understand research?

2. Group Activity Part 1
• In groups of 4, discuss what the term "new media research"
means.
• What type of skills and research does it imply?
• Write down your answers.

3. 2007: 2.0 becomes
acknowledged
• David Gauntlett proposed Media Studies 2.0 as a new
framework
• The traditional form of media studies teaching and research
fails to recognize :
• the changing media landscape in which the categories of
'audiences' and 'producers' blur together,
• new research methods and approaches they require.

4. Outline of difference Part 1
Media Studies 1.0 Media studies 2.0
Fetishise 'experts', whose readings of
popular culture are seen as more significant
than those of other audience members (with
corresponding faith in faux-expert non-
procedures such as semiotics);
Focus on the everyday meanings produced
by the diverse array of audience
members, accompanied by an interest in
new qualitative research techniques;
A tendency to celebrate certain key texts
produced by powerful media industries and
celebrated by well-known critics;
An interest in the massive 'long tail' of
independent media projects such as those
found on YouTube and many other
websites, mobile devices, and other forms of
DIY media;
The optional extra of giving attention to
famous 'avant garde' works produced by
artists recognized in the traditional
sense, and which are seen as especially
'challenging';
Attempt to embrace the truly international
dimensions of Media Studies – including a
recognition not only of the processes of
globalization, but also of the diverse
perspectives on media and society being
worked on around the world;

5. Outline of difference Part 2
Media Studies 1.0 Media Studies 2.0
A belief that students should be taught how
to 'read' the media in an appropriate
'critical' style;
The belief that students should be taught
how to 'read' the media is replaced by the
recognition that media audiences in general
are already extremely capable interpreters
of media content, with a critical eye and an
understanding of contemporary media
techniques, thanks in large part to the large
amount of coverage of this in popular media
itself
Vague recognition of the internet and new
digital media, as an 'add on' to the
traditional media (to be dealt with in one
self-contained segment tacked on to a Media
Studies teaching module, book or degree);
The view of the internet and new digital
media as an 'optional extra' is
correspondingly replaced with recognition
that they have fundamentally changed the
ways in which we engage with all media;

6. Outline of difference Part 3
Media Studies 1.0 Media Studies 2.0
A preference for conventional research
methods where most people are treated
as non-expert audience 'receivers', or, if
they are part of the formal media
industries, as expert 'producers'.
New methods which recognize and
make use of people's own creativity,
and brush aside the outmoded notions
of 'receiver' audiences and elite
'producers';
Conventional concerns with power and
politics are reworked in recognition of
these points, so that the notion of
super-powerful media industries
invading the minds of a relatively passive
population is compelled to recognize
and address the context of more
widespread creation and participation.

7. Media Studies 2.0 in practice
• Participatory media making: in 1995 Gauntlett handed children video cameras to make films
about their responses to the environment, instead of just interviewing them (Gauntlett,
1997), and has continued through various projects, culminating most recently in the book
Creative Explorations:
• New approaches to identities and audiences (2007), which describes – amongst other things –
my study in which people were invited to build metaphorical models of their identities in
Lego.

8. Other instances of Media
Studies 2.0
• The title of the journal Participations (launched 2003), an 'audience
studies' journal that manages to avoid calling them 'audiences' – in
its main title at least, although the subtitle 'Journal of Audience and
Reception Studies' offers a perhaps inevitable translation into the
language we are trying to get away from; The forthcoming
conference Transforming Audiences, which seeks to undermine its
own title by questioning the traditional approach to people who
'produce' media and people who 'use' media; Joke Hermes's book
Reading Women's Magazines (1995), one of the first texts to
demonstrate that Media Studies tended to over-emphasise its own
consumption models; Studies by Sonia Livingstone and by David
Buckingham, in the past few years, which have rejected passive
models of media consumption;
• More active participation, such as Campaigns Wikia, based on the
idea that 'If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then
participatory media will bring us participatory politics'; William
Merrin's blog, as mentioned above.

9. What does this mean to you?
• In groups of three, discuss whether this model is important to
new media?
• How does Gaunlett’s Media Studies 2.0 framework apply to
research?
• Why and how?