Media Mindsets

Tim Magaw, a junior news major in Kent State’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, considers himself technologically savvy. As editor of the summer 2007 Daily Kent Stater, he assisted with the newspaper’s Web site. He regularly perused various other media sites to gather information he needed to do his job, and, of course, for fun.

Those uses of technology for work and recreation are just some of the ways he takes advantage of the Internet. A few experiences in the last year have left Magaw, a journalist-in-training, reflecting on just how much technology has infiltrated his college experience.

“I remember at one point, walking on campus, looking around me to find that every single person had white ear buds in their ears,” he says. “And in our residence halls everyone has their iTunes playing and is sharing music with one another.”

In the classroom, Magaw says that sometimes students think that if they cannot find information online, it must not exist. Students take their laptops wherever there is wireless access on campus, are on their cell phones all the time, and are iPod-crazy and addicted to the Internet.

“In my dorm sometimes all I can hear is the annoying beep of the instant messenger bubbles popping up,” he says.

Technology is creating a much less than traditional residence hall experience.

“I didn’t know anyone in my dorm last year. I did meet people from the Honors College because people in the group had the idea of starting an Honors College Live Journal community, so I met a bunch of people through that,” he says. “The first week of class, we went to a barbeque to meet each other, and a group of kids sat together because they had already met online. They had friends the first weekend they were at school.”

For today’s college students who grew up with Internet access, using technology to consume and gather information becomes second nature. Students expect a buffet of options when deciding how they want to satisfy their curiosity or need for news.

Believe it or not, Magaw says, students on campus do read the paper version of the Daily Kent Stater because “it is lying around classrooms and is available on campus.”

“But I read 70 percent of my news online, including the Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times. At home, I might have CNN on my television in the background, but I like reading news more than watching it. If there is a story that looks appealing, but it is only available in video form, I won’t watch it. I don’t have the time to sit and watch it load,” he says.

The future of news

“Age plays a factor with the use of technology, but it certainly doesn’t explain all of it,” says Dr. Stan Wearden, director of the School of Communication Studies. “There are people my age walking around with iPods, and there are young people who are still into buying turntables.”

Wearden and several colleagues within the College of Communication and Information have created Media Mindsets, a think tank of sorts, as an interdisciplinary research group focusing on questions of future directions of media and the mindsets of users.

In its beginning stages, the scholars took an interest in young people’s use of the media, but then their pursuit broadened, says Wearden.

“We wanted to explore questions like ‘Can we pair up media user personality and lifestyle traits with media selections?’ ‘What needs drive people to make their media selections?’” he says.

While the term “media” encompasses the traditional venues — radio, print and television — the current landscape is continually changing, leaving consumers and media outlets alike wondering what will develop in the next year, or even in the next month.

Today, media consumers have a bevy of choices when it comes to receiving their daily doses of news or entertainment. They can read the newspaper, browse the Internet, download and listen to a podcast or watch a video online. Different from any previous time in history, though, is the consumers’ ability and interest in having their own voices heard — whether by posting personal videos to YouTube or by blogging about a hot news topic.

Now more than ever, consumers have the power to capture and respond to news in a manner that has owners of media outlets scratching their heads, wondering how to satisfy their audience.

Statistics show that newspaper readership, advertising rates and evening news watching are declining, but use of the online environment is increasing, which leaves media with the task of serving audiences with a Web presence, says Dr. James L. Gaudino, dean of the College of Communication and Information.

“It was clear that somebody needed to work on how the traditional media can make the transition to new channels, but they are having a hard time doing this, so we decided to help them. That is what the academy is for, by and large — helping society adjust to change,” says Gaudino.

The College of Communication and Information (CCI) has a unique vantage point for this sort of undertaking: It houses the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the School of Communication Studies and the School of Visual Communication and Design. Together, the schools take an audience perspective as mass communicators, in one form or another, while the School of Library and Information Science, also housed in CCI, has always taken a user perspective, as aggregators of knowledge.

“It’s not every day that mass communicators and information-seeking experts have the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder,” says Gaudino.

When it comes to information science and the various studies of communication, we tend to think of them as very different fields, he explains. Within the college, however, we see the studies as being within the same field, but with different perspectives.

“Mass communication has always looked at communication’s effect on society and its effect on audiences, while information science has looked at information-seeking behaviors. Trying to merge these two perspectives is what Media Mindsets really comes down to,” says Gaudino.

The modern media model

After several Media Mindsets gatherings, the group decided it needed a model from which to base its research.

Previous models and ways of thinking about relationships between message “senders” and “receivers,” which dominated past research, posed some problems, says Wearden. The models were linear, looking solely at the relationship from media to consumer and consumer to media, which fails to account for any interactivity or simultaneity.

“In terms of today’s media, consumers are more simultaneously interactive,” he says. “People text-message, use their laptops and watch television, all at the same time. People multitask media in a way that they didn’t do as much before, and they especially multitask at their computer. They can read news on the CNN Web site, check their e-mail and work on a project, all while NPR is playing through their speakers.”

The Information Exchange Model, developed by Wearden and Dr. Paul Haridakis, professor of communication studies and Media Mindsets member, places emphasis on the consumer or the audience, and looks at consumer needs and motivations, social and psychological dispositions, and, overall, increased choice and greater relative power for the “user.”

In terms of users, another group objective was to look at who does what with media and why.

“Now it is so much easier to produce messages for the media that you see it all the time. Every time there is a story, the media ask consumers to send their videos and photos of the event. We’re not just consuming information anymore; we’re also producing and disseminating information,” Wearden says.

Consumers are also producing their own information by blogging and using social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Still, some media users aren’t creating as much information as their counterparts, says Wearden. “Media Mindsets wants to know what the difference is between people who use the media both for receiving and producing information and those who are more passive users — people who receive information online but who don’t produce information.”

Currently, Media Mindsets is working to generate some sort of metric for tying in personality, like psychological traits, to consumers’ media selection decisions. The group hopes to trademark and then market the model to the media, Wearden says.

“We could tell the media who their users are and how to reach the users they are not currently reaching, because we will know why people use different forms of media based on our research,” he says.

The findings will allow Kent State to provide traditional media with specific information about their audience via a profile that describes whether the consumer is utilizing newspaper and television, looking online for information or viewing multiple channels simultaneously.