Thinking through the Role of the Researcher in Global Media Studies

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 starts with Ben Peters, who begins by noting the work of Paul Lazarsfeld as a pioneer of media research methods. Ben’s work focusses on the critical, historical, and international dimensions of networks, and he notes the importance of sharing datasets to the project of building a field of global network studies.

Ben’s research is on studying the failed Soviet attempts to build a domestic Internet-style network around the same time that the US developed ARPANET – while there was substantial expertise available, where the US succeeded through a collaborative approach, the Soviet Union failed because of strong competition between bureaucrats. Researching this topic encounters a number of obstacles – a particularist/structuralist divide, the positioning of the researcher, and the researcher’s own skills and preoccupations.

Ben has needed to collect data on each country’s network development histories in the US and Russia, for example, but these datasets are far from compatible or comparable (and not necessarily free of inherent bias, of course – the original political intent of the dataset also needs to be considered). Additionally, those datasets may not necessarily reveal the most significant factors – those may emerge only from interviews or other sources.

Also, framing the institutional arrangements of the US and the USSR is complicated, especially when going back some time in the historical research.

Additionally, researchers introduce their own biases and have a distinct presence in the data; the history of anthropology can be divided into two phases, for example: before and after researchers realised that they had an influence on the objects of their research. Similarly, in cybernetics, there is a second-order trend in which the observer became part of the system which they were studying. Global network studies, too, must approach its topic with eyes wide open.

So, doing global media studies requires us to approach the global aspects of this work with exceptional humility; a full and in-depth contextualisation and systematic study of the entire globe is doomed to fail. Rather, there can only be a pragmatist correspondence of and between data drawn from multiple methods – we cannot reach certainty, but only some sense of assurance and comfort that the inferences drawn from the data are as correct as they can be. Additionally, there is an underlying importance of plain language – argument itself is a valid form of research. Thankfully, these principles are being adopted by a growing number of researchers.