文章基本信息

标题：Political communication research: New media, new challenges, and new opportunities
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作者：Rasmus Kleis Nielsen ; Information Technologies, Roskilde University. Research Fellow. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
期刊名称：MedieKultur : Journal of Media and Communication Research
电子版ISSN：1901-9726
出版年度：2014
卷号：30
期号：56
页码：18
语种：English
出版社：Sammenslutningen af Medieforskere i Danmark (SMID)
摘要：The rise of new media and the broader set of social changes they are part of present political communication research with new challenges and new opportunities at a time when many think the field is at an intellectual impasse (e.g., Bennett & Iyengar, 2008). In this article, I argue that parts of the field’s problems are rooted in the way in which political communication research has developed since the 1960s. In this period, the field has moved from being interdisciplinary and mixed-methods to being more homogenous and narrowly focused, based primarily on ideas developed in social psychology, certain strands of political science, and the effects-tradition of mass communication research. This dominant paradigm has contributed much to our understanding of some aspects of political communication. But it is struggling to make sense of many others, including questions concerning people’s experience of political communication processes and questions concerning the symbolic, institutional, and technological nature of these processes—especially during a time of often rapid change. To overcome this problem, I argue that the field of political communication research should re-engage with the rest of media and communication studies and embrace a broader and more diverse agenda. I discuss audience research and journalism studies as examples of adjacent fields that use a more diverse range of theoretical and methodological tools that might help political communication research engage with new media and the new challenges and new opportunities for research that they represent.
关键词：political communication; new media; digital politics; theory; method