The emergence of citizen journalism has prompted the journalism field and scholars to readdress what constitutes journalism and who is a journalist. Citizen journalists have disrupted news-media ecosystems by challenging the veracity and representativeness of information flowing from mainstream news-media newsrooms. However, the controversy related to the desired level of citizen involvement in the news process is a historical debate that began before the citizen-journalism phenomenon. As early as the 1920s, journalist and political commentator Walter Lippman and American philosopher John Dewey debated the role of journalism in democracy, including the extent that the public should participate in the news-gathering and production processes.
This questioning of citizen involvement in news reemerged as an issue with the citizen journalism phenomenon around the late 1990s. People with no news-media organizational ties have taken advantage of the convenience and low cost of social computing technologies by publishing their own stories and content. These people are referred to as citizen journalists. Scholars have assessed the quality and credibility of citizen-journalism content, finding that citizen journalists have performed well on several standards of traditional news-content quality. Levels of quality differ dependent upon citizen journalists’ goals and motivations, such as serving the public interest, increasing self-status, or expressing their creative selves.
As it is an emerging area of study, unarticulated theoretical boundaries of citizen journalism exist. Citizen-journalism publications emphasize community over conflict, advocacy over objectivity, and interpretation over fact-based reporting. In general, citizen journalists have historically acted when existing news-media journalists were not fully meeting their community’s informational needs. Scholars, however, vary in how they label citizen journalists and how they conceptually and empirically define citizen journalism. For example, researchers have shifted their definitional focus on citizen journalists from one of active agents of democratic change to people who create a piece of news content. The mapping of the citizen-journalism literature revealed four types of citizen journalists based on their levels of editorial control and contribution type: (1) participatory, (2) para, (3) news-media watchdog, and (4) community. Taken together, these concepts describe the breadth of citizen-journalist types. For those of us interested in journalism studies, a more targeted approach in the field of citizen journalism can help us build community around scholarship, understand citizen journalists’ contributions to society and practice, and create a more a stable foundation of knowledge concerning people who create and comment on news content.
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Citizen Journalism
Serena Miller
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Flow Experiences and Media
Paula T. Wang, Kylie Woodman, and René Weber
“Flow” originated in the field of positive psychology and describes an optimal psychological state obtained when skilled individuals face challenges that leave them creatively stimulated, attentionally immersed, and flourishing. It was introduced into the communication literature at the turn of the 21st century, when media researchers began to revisit enduring questions surrounding media use, selection, and behavior. At the time, the established uses and gratifications (U&G) framework offered limited explanatory power to address newer questions arising from the emergence of interactive media such as the proliferation of video game consoles and advent of early social media. Flow has since become increasingly adopted within the field of media research as an alternate approach that addresses many of the criticisms of the U&G framework. Flow is characterized by a single key antecedent—that participants engage in an activity that maintains strict balance between task challenge and user skill. Video games in particular offer the ideal vessel for flow because they most easily fulfill the required challenge–skill balance due to their interactive and adaptable nature. Attempts to advance the development of the flow construct have faced challenges stemming from conceptual ambiguity and operational inconsistency, resulting in findings that are difficult to consolidate across studies. Despite these contentions, nascent research has been largely focused on identifying the correlates and predictors used to measure flow across new behavioral, psychophysiological, and neurological avenues. The development of more robust measures of flow will allow researchers to resolve lingering conceptual ambiguities and answer new and emerging questions, such as the length, depth, and stability of flow episodes and the role of flow in promoting problematic gaming behavior and behavioral addictions.
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Gatekeeping and Journalism
Pamela J. Shoemaker
One of the oldest social science theories applied to the study of communication, the gatekeeping approach emphasizes the movement of bits of information through channels, with an emphasis on decision points (gates) and decision-makers (gatekeepers). Forces on both sides of a gate can either help or hinder the information’s passage through a channel. The gatekeeping process shapes and produces various images of reality, not only because some bits of information are selected and others rejected, but because communication agents put information together in different ways. In addition, the timing and repetition of information can affect the prominence of events or topics and can influence the probability of future information diffusion.
Gatekeeping was originally modeled as a series of linear processes within the mass media, but in the late 20th century the flow of information through the mass and social media began to interact. Information is now understood to flow among journalists, among social media users, and among agents of both types of media. All such communication agents are gatekeepers. In addition, we can study these networked interconnections as one level of analysis, with the supra-gatekeepers (such as Facebook or Twitter) adding their own gatekeeping processes over and beyond those of their own clients of the mass media.
In addition to looking at various pairwise relationships between gatekeepers, gatekeeping theory should go beyond to instead consider the entire web of gatekeepers as a whole or system. A system is composed of elements (gatekeepers), interactions (relationships among them), and a goal or function. Multiple functions have been proposed by 20th-century scholars (such as socialization, entertainment, or surveillance) for the mass media, but scholars should now consider the function(s) of the gatekeeping system (mass and social media, as well as supra-gatekeepers) as a whole. Although each type of medium can be analyzed as its own system, such analysis would not facilitate new thinking about the various ways in which these partial systems affect one another and how the whole system functions beyond the simple addition of its parts.
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Global Political Economy, Platforms, and Media Industries
Dal Yong Jin
Critical political economy has emphasized the tensions and power relations between global forces and local forces as well as the political and the economic. Since media ownership has become one of the major elements to widening the existing gaps between a few powerful actors and the majority of underprivileged players, critical political economy focuses on the significant role of ownership in media and communication studies. Critical political economy has also continued to emphasize the structural change in media industries in the broader socio-economic milieu. In the early 21st century, critical political economy has shifted its emphasis toward digital platforms, such as over-the-top service platforms like Netflix, social media platforms like YouTube, and search engines like Google, as these digital platforms supported by artificial intelligence algorithms and big data are primary actors in the global cultural industries. They are not only shifting the milieu surrounding cultural industries but also transforming the entire value chain in cultural production, including the production of popular culture, the circulation of cultural products, and the consumption of cultural content. Critical political economy needs to analyze power relations between platform owners and platform users as well as between a few countries in the Global North that possess these digital platforms and the majority of countries in the Global South that, owing to the lack of capital, manpower, and know-how, cannot advance their own platforms. This implies that critical political economy needs to analyze how global digital platforms as part of Western cultural industries have controlled and manipulated local cultural industries. By discussing the change and continuity in the cultural industries in the digital media–driven media environment, which expedites the concentration of the industry, new international division of labor, and platform imperialism practice, critical political economy will shed light on the existing debates about power relations within the broader society.
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Identification and Parasocial Relationships With Video Game Characters
Arienne Ferchaud
The field of game studies rests on how video game players use their relationships with their avatars to fulfill the goals of the game. From studies on the effects of violence in video games to examinations of serious games for entertainment and/or education, all areas presume a level of connection between player and the avatar they control. This relationship is first defined by the type of play style—that is, the approach the player takes when sitting down to play. Next is the avatar—the graphical representation of the player—that will differ drastically from game to game. Based on these two individuals, one actual the other simulated, a relationship of some sort is built. This relationship can be monadic, meaning the player fully identifies with the avatar to the point that they are the same being. In contrast, it could be dyadic, in which a separation exists between player and avatar more akin to a parasocial relationship (PSR). Further, some scholars have suggested that the relationship between player and avatar exists on a continuum known as player-avatar relationships. Concepts like presence and empathy can be used to predict the strength of the relationship between player and avatar. This bond is incredibly important and can be used to predict both enjoyment of the game and cultivate story-consistent attitudes. Future research should examine more closely the nature of PSRs between avatar and player, as this context is relatively unexplored.
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Video Games as Meaningful or Eudaimonic Experiences
Daniel Possler
Research on meaningful or eudaimonic gaming experiences explores players’ profound responses to video games. It rests on the observation that video games have ‘grown up’ in the 2000s and 2010s. While the medium traditionally aimed at providing fun, modern games increasingly afford meaningful experiences, for example by addressing serious topics (e.g., loss). Drawing on philosophical and psychological well-being research, these meaningful experiences are often termed “eudaimonic.” Beyond this shared categorization, however, no consensual definition of eudaimonic/meaningful gaming experiences has yet been developed. Instead, various competing and partially overlapping conceptualizations exist in the literature, including (a) appreciation, (b) the covariation of meaningfulness, being emotionally moved or challenged, and self-reflection, (c) deep social connectedness, and (d) specific emotional responses (e.g., nostalgia, awe). The formation of eudaimonic/meaningful gaming experiences has mostly been attributed to game characteristics, including (1) game mechanics that allow rare performances or promote reflection by disrupting players’ gameplay expectations; (2) narratives that address emotionally challenging topics, feature moral dilemmas, or facilitate deep social bonds with game characters; (3) multiplayer features that enable cooperative interactions with close co-players; and (4) game aesthetics that facilitate awe or aesthetic contemplation. In contrast, little is known about how player characteristics affect the formation of eudaimonic/meaningful gaming experiences. Similarly, research on the effects of these experiences is sparse. However, initial studies suggest that eudaimonic/meaningful experiences may benefit players beyond gaming by increasing their well-being or promoting pro-social behavior. Additionally, eudaimonic/meaningful gaming experiences appear to have a motivational
appeal, as preliminary studies suggest that seeking such experiences can motivate playing games in general and specific titles in particular. Overall, this burgeoning line of research is still in its infancy but has already provided valuable insights into the quality and formation of eudaimonic/meaningful experiences in interactive media and the attraction and positive effects of video games.
