Just learned that the paper I wrote with Michael McCluskey on user-generated content was accepted by Communication Theory (I blogged about it here). In the paper we discuss how today's communication environment poses serious challenges to theory building in communication-effects domain. We make a case for a philosophical and methodological adjustment to how communication effects research should be carried out. We suggest that Eveland's (2003) Mix-of-Attributes approach appears quite useful and is quickly gaining traction the more diverse today's media become and the more quickly they evolve. We use political user-generated content (as a hypothetical independent variable) and political participation (as a hypothetica dependent variable) to illustrate the merits of our theoretical and methodological arguments. We also touch upon several notions related to the more general role of ICTs in a producing individual-level and societal-level effects (e.g., technological determinism, social constructivism).
Here's paper's abstract.
Here's paper's abstract.
