Resources

Media richness

The idea of ‘media richness’ comes from the field of communication studies, where it is used to refer to the ability for media to represent the information that is transmitted over it. Face-to-face communication is regarded as ‘rich’ because receivers of communication have access not just to the words spoken, but also the speaker’s tone of voice, his or her gestures, facial expression, posture, and even information that come from things like the kind of clothes he or she is wearing. Text-based communication is considered ‘lean’ because many of the cues we use in face-to-face communication are not available to us. From the point of view of discourse analysis, we can think of media richness as a function of the different modes a particular medium is able to represent. When looked at this way, the idea of media richness can actually be more complicated than it seems. For example, we might think of a handwritten letter as a particularly ‘lean’ medium because when we read it we cannot see the writer’s face or hear his or her voice. But there are other modes in the letter that are not usually available in face-to face communication, and these modes can actually be very expressive (such as handwriting, drawings, the way the words are arranged on the page, the texture or smell of the paper that is used). Furthermore, just because a medium is ‘rich’ does not mean that it is ‘better’. Sometimes people prefer ‘lean’ media (such as text messages) because they do not have to worry about communicating with and controlling lots of different modes such as their facial expressions. In other words, lean media usually have lower ‘transaction costs’. And just because a medium is ‘lean’ doesn’t mean that people can’t be very expressive when they use it. Media scholar Joseph Walther, in fact, noted that sometimes when using ‘lean’ media, people are more willing to express their emotions and reveal secrets, a phenomenon he called ‘hyperpersonal communication’.

Audience segregation and audience segmentation

Audience segregation and audience segmentation are two separate but related ideas. Audience segregation is the ability to present different performances (and so different versions of the ‘self’) to different people because we are able to separate our audiences in a way that one audience is not able to see the same performance as the other. The idea comes from Goffman’s famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he compares social interaction to theatre performances. Theatres have technological affordances (such as curtains) which allow actors to act one way for the audience in the seats and another way with their fellow actors offstage. Media such as telephones, chat programs and social media sites also have affordances that help us to separate out different audiences, and to ‘draw a curtain’ over some of our communications so that certain people don’t have access to them.

Audience segmentation is an idea from marketing. It refers to the way marketers divide audiences into sub-groups, each with particular characteristics (such as age, gender, interest or experience). In the era in which print and broadcast media were dominant, advertisers segmented audiences based on the kinds of content or media they thought different people would use. They advertised products for ‘housewives’ (back in the 1950’s when this term was still used) during soap operas, products for kids during cartoons, and products for men during sports programs. This kind of segmentation, of course, helped to perpetuate stereotypes because it conditioned women, men and kids to like certain kinds of products. In the internet age, advertisers are still conditioning us, but in different ways. Now advertisements are targeted to smaller and more specific segments of the population, and even to individuals based on their particular web browsing habits. The internet has also helped advertisers to segregate audiences better, so often people are unaware of the kinds of advertisements and other content that people who are different from them (demographically or ideologically) are exposed to. This is especially dangerous when it comes to political advertising on social media because, not only do people disagree with those with different political views, but they have trouble understanding why those people have those views because they have not been exposed to the same kind of content than they are.  

Citizen journalism

Citizen journalism is the collection, analysis and dissemination of news by people who are not professional journalists. While it has always been possible for ordinary people to gather and disseminate news by word of mouth, or to report things that they find out to journalists to be published or broadcast, the idea of citizen journalism really didn’t take off until the invention of the internet, which allowed people to publish content themselves.

There are two main kinds of technologies that have contributed to citizen journalism. The first are the cameras that are embedded into almost all mobile phones sold nowadays. When everyone has a camera, it becomes easy for people to document the things they see and produce ‘eyewitness’ accounts for others. The second technology is social media, which allow people to disseminate the content that they collect to a wide audience. On social media sites, other people, apart from the person who has posted the original content, also play a part in producing the news at they share, comment on and sometimes alter what was originally posted.

Among the most famous examples of citizen journalism are those that have documented  police brutality, especially against minorities. In the United States, cell-phone videos of police involved shootings and other violence has made the systematic racism against African Americans more visible.

At the same time, there are drawbacks to citizen journalism. Since citizen generated content is not subject to the same kind of journalistic standards and editorial review processes of mainstream journalism, the potential for the spread of ‘fake news’ increases. People also often use their newfound potential to record the behaviour of others as an excuse to engage in public shaming. Ordinary individuals ‘behaving badly’ in public is not necessarily newsworthy, but on social media, videos of such incidents can attract an enormous amount of attention. While sometimes these videos serve the purpose of sparking useful public debates about, for example, racism or public responsibility, they can also often have a negative impact on the lives and reputations of those who have been videoed disproportionate to the seriousness of their alleged transgressions.