Disciplinary Mapping: Digital Cultures

Disciplinary Mapping: Digital Cultures
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Disciplinary Mapping: Digital Cultures
Part A: Digital Cultures Discipline
The field of digital cultures focuses on the interaction between new media technologies and several facets of contemporary society, including culture, politics, business, and everyday living. As the world of technology keeps evolving, digital cultures discipline seeks to explore the link between new media technologies and cultural practices related to knowledge, communication, and information. In essence, the field aims to generate an understanding of the design, regulation, circulation, and consumption of technology. Drawing on other disciplines such as media studies, history, sociology, and cultural studies, the discipline equips one with knowledge about changes that accompany new media technologies.
Research is a major part of the discipline as it helps discover how the interaction between media technologies and society occurs. The field of digital cultures discipline adopts several approaches to research, including content analysis, archival research, depth interviews, and surveys (Lule, 2013). Content analysis encompasses the analysis of different media forms to understand not only the people who consume them but also their creators. This approach to research is inexpensive and easy because researchers only need access to media to be analyzed (Lule, 2013). Archival research is employed by researchers when reviewing older media such as newspapers, television programs, films, and radio programs (Lule, 2013). Depth interviews allow researchers in the field to ask study participants direct questions related to their experiences and perceptions. Through surveys, researchers in the field of digital cultures gain an understanding of media consumption patterns and the relationship between media consumption and lifestyle.
While there are several theoretical frameworks in the field of digital cultures, I think the one that tends to prevail is uses and gratification theory because it gives the consumer an active role. Uses and gratification theory has it that consumers utilize media to meet specific desires or needs (Lule, 2013). This fulfillment of needs results in ultimate gratification (Whiting & Williams, 2013). For example, in the research by Whiting and Williams (2013), the authors employed the uses and gratification theory to understand consumers’ use of social media. The theory is thus integral in the discipline because it facilitates an understanding of how and why people use different forms of media.
Researchers in the field tend to prefer survey methodology to conduct research. In this case, researchers utilize standardized interviews or questionnaires to systematically collect data about participants and their behaviors, preferences, and thoughts (Pelz, n.d.). As informed by Pelz (n.d.), surveys can be employed for explanatory, exploratory, and descriptive research, and they are integral in measuring unobservable data like the preferences of people. Therefore, the data researchers use in the field can be qualitative or quantitive. In the field of digital cultures, surveys are integral in unde...