What is Your Latest Research About?

So my own work is actually in political communication, but I look a fair amount at the impact of media generally, and new media on the way in which politics from campaigns and elections to citizens' involvement in public life operates. And one of the things I've been looking at most recently is the changing information environment, which I think is relevant to pretty much every aspect of at least American life, and increasingly, life worldwide right now, from politics, to every day personal lives, to marketing, and to the business world. One of the obvious truisms that I think everybody who's interested in this topic knows is that the information environment, the media environment, has changed radically over the last few years. And the way in which people get information, and therefore, the way in which people, whether they are corporations, or politicians, or non-profits, try to reach people has changed dramatically. But I have the luxury as an academic to step back a little bit and say, well, how different is this? And how quick paced has this change been? And in fact, it is incredibly fast compared to other moments of change. But it has some commonalities to it. First point I'd like to make that we've found in the work that we've done-- and I've been doing this work with a colleague, Bruce Williams, at the University of Virginia-- is that the current pace of change is quite dramatic. And again, I'll just give you some examples that will be familiar to people. The major players in the recent 2008 campaign, in terms of media and technology, included everything from Twitter, to Facebook, to YouTube, a little bit of Myspace, and Meetup. In 2004, the most recent election prior to that, half of those organizations would not have been in play. And they are attributed to having a major impact, not the only impact, but a major impact on the Obama victory and his skill and his campaign's skill at using it. Which is a messaging process. A process that is not that different in many ways, for ill or better, than the issues and the messaging approaches that marketers face every day in other walks of life. But if you move the circle out just a little bit further than that, you can see that the changes that we're seeing right now are changes that have roots that go quite a bit deeper than that. You can go back and look at the remote control on a television set, which is in many ways probably the first technological change after television had dominated the scene for getting information out to people, where suddenly, consumers had some control in an easier fashion over what it was they were looking at. And in, let's say, about 25 years ago, maybe one in five homes had a remote control in their home. And within 10 years, that had changed to where it was almost universal in homes. The advent of cable television. 25 years ago, 20 years ago when current students who were just graduated from college were just being born and just growing up, the average television home had 10 stations. And today, the average television home in the United States has well over 100 stations, pushing 150 stations. Today, a third or more of households have digital recording devices, like TiVo, or the devices that are provided by cable. And so the changes that we're seeing today, which are undoubtedly rapid, undoubtedly challenging, and introducing themselves, and being incorporated into the way we communicate at a pace that we've not seen before, really is part of a change that is at least two decades old. And what we're experiencing right now, as anyone who's trying to get a message out to a particular audience, we're experiencing the fruition of what is a much longer period of change. The last general point I want to make-- and then I'll talk a little bit about what this means for the current environment for marketers and for anyone who's trying to get a product, or a candidate, or an idea across to people-- is that we've gone through periods of change, technologically driven change, in the past. And we sometimes forget that the model, whether it's a business model, or a democratic participation model, or a political model more broadly, that we were used to in the latter half of the 20th century is a model that was not in place in the earlier part of the 20th century, nor the 19th century. And every time a new technology, whether it's the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, even when cable television came, which is now considered old media, and when I was starting to do my work, was the new media. Every time that comes in, you see a certain pattern. The first pattern is a lot of writing, and thinking, and speculating that everything's going to be different now. Then usually, there is a moment when people look around and they say, you know, it's not really as different as we thought it was going to be on some fundamental level. But what happens at a third level, and oftentimes much more slowly, is that things actually do fairly radically change. Sometimes so quickly that you notice it. Sometimes at a pace where the changes are gradual. And you look around one day, and the way you are informing yourself or informing others has changed quite dramatically. And so the point of all that as kind of initial thinking about the conditions that we're living in right now, is that these changes need to be understood, and understood at a level that thinks both short-term how to react to them, but also long-term what it means for larger practices in politics, or business, or in everyday life. So if you are a messenger, whether you're marketer again, or whether you're someone trying to get across a political message, or some other kind of idea, or to maintain a certain kind of attitude, or opinion, or behavior, or to change it, the basics of what you need to do haven't changed. You have to know your audience. You have to expose them to the information that you're trying to get to them. You have to hope that they're paying attention and do what you can to get them to pay attention. And then you have to do what you can to have them retain that information in the ultimate hope that you actually keep them believing, or thinking, or doing what you're hoping. Or to change that in some way. But each one of those basic steps has changed pretty dramatically because of the new information. Think about knowing your audience. The new information environment that we have right now allows you to know your audience better than any point in history I think. With all the information that can be gathered through the use of new technology. With the way new technology can be used independently to gather information. With the databases that are much more easily accessible. And yet at the same time, it's more difficult to know your audience, because the audiences are shifting. Your audience usually is associated with a particular medium, and those mediums are shifting in really, really dramatic ways. Similarly, if you think about the idea of exposing-- this is probably the greatest challenge to marketers in the broad meaning of that word. The idea that you want to expose your audience once you know who they are to a particular message, in the current, complicated multi-medium, fragmented audience and world that we live in right now it is extremely difficult. It's very difficult to know what channel is the best channel to reach people in. And you have both greater control over sending that message, because you can know your audience, because you can break it down into the components that you're most interested in. And yet, you lose control over getting that message to your audience, because once your messages is out there, it can morph in a variety of ways that you have very little control over. And you can see that with companies like Toyota right now, which are facing a very real issue. But the ability to control the way in which that issue is discussed, how it's defined, how it's interpreted, is only partially in the hands of Toyota, although they have all these great mechanisms by which to be able to get the information they'd like people to know out to people. A single person who owns a Toyota and who is able to get their message out through a blog, or through other of the many gates that now enter into this massive media environment, means that there are lots of speakers in this kind of environment. And that makes it very difficult to get your message clear. The idea of getting the attention of the audience is obviously quite difficult in the world we live in right now. The remote control, as I mentioned before, made it easy to skip commercials. The world we live in now makes it easier to skip those commercials in such a great variety of ways that getting people to attend to your message, even if it's a message that would be valuable to them, becomes incredibly difficult. And I could go through each of those stages, including things like retaining the information and actually getting people to act on that information. And what I think is most challenging and interesting about the current environment is that the same changes provide new tools for doing each of those steps and new challenges for doing each of those steps. And figuring out how to take advantage of the first and address and deal with the second is the fundamental issue that I think anyone who's trying to educate, inform, or persuade an audience needs to be concerned with today.