Posted: April 1st, 2015

Assignment #2 – Annotated Bibliography Assignment;

Assignment #2 – Annotated Bibliography Assignment;

This course is an examination of theories and research related to what is commonly referred to as the ‘Information Society.’ The objectives of this course are to look at the origins of the information society and the information industries, the micro and macro economics of information as a commodity, new forms of participation and community online, issues of informational privacy, security, intellectual property, activism, and the economic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of new media technologies.
While each week we cover individual units on information industries, participation, regulation, privacy, IP, politics, and emerging technologies, the challenge for scholars is not just to understand each of these issues, but to understand how these developments and issues are intertwined.
Wu writes about how the shape of information industries affects laws, innovation, and content. Curran writes about how the development of the internet affects what types of participation is possible and how it gave rise to advertising content. Ito writes about how emerging technologies shape our cultural experience with space and one another, Jenkins and Varnelis argue that online participation has started changing the media industry and our broader social and cultural experience. Lessig writes about how the internet has change laws, as well as how legal can be applied to regulate the internet through code. Later this semester we’ll read about Turow and Andrejevic’s argument about how the rise of the industry and the internet has allowed people to be tracked and surveilled, Boyle’s argument about how the internet challenges intellectual property law, Pariser and Gillespie’s argument about how the role that algorithms play in managing our information environment, Beyer’s argument about how the anonymity/distributedness of the internet gave rise to challenges like Wikileaks and 4Chan, Papacharissi and Morozov’s arguments about how the internet affects political movements and dissent, and finally Liao’s argument about how augmented reality technologies may be the new technology that extends and revisits all of these questions.
Your final paper research paper will require you to conduct an academic literature review tying together multiple threads, and understanding how these various authors are talking about issues that have direct implications for one another. Essentially, you have to make an argument for how one central concept of the information society might affect another. For example, you could analyze how tracking and surveillance could affect participation, identity, and politics. You could analyze how algorithms might affect our identity and social/cultural experience. You could analyze how legal/regulatory changes could affect remix culture, online participation, innovation, and harmful content/behaviors on the internet. You could analyze how augmented reality technologies change our understanding and relationship to space. These are just some of the examples that you could write about, you make a decision.
Before you can do that, you will need to do a literature review about the key issues that you are focusing on. Think about these as if you were preparing for a debate, and first you had to outline and explain the problem, issues, and discussions that were taking place. This assignment is a prerequisite to being able to write your paper.

Task One – Identifying Your Research Area (15 points total)
1.    Write down in a paragraph what units you are combining and what concepts you are exploring, how you think they are interrelated, and why you are interested in this issue (5 points).

2.    Identify the authors that we’ve read/will read who have tackled those particular concepts in that unit, and explain in detail what they have said about those concepts (10 points),

Task Two – Doing a Literature Search (5 points)
Each of the authors we read in any given unit is just the tip of the iceberg. Dozens if not hundreds of other authors are engaged in research and attempting to explore the same topic, some of whom are in direct conversation with one another. This step is to identify articles that are going to help you explore that concept further and identify the key perspectives and people who are engaged in that debate.
This task asks you to conduct a series of searches that will successfully identify a reasonable number of recent primary research articles published in a peer reviewed communication journal, from the following databases:

a)    Communication Abstracts;
b)    Communication and Mass Media Complete;
c)    PsycInfo; and
d)    Sage Publications

3. Doing a database search: Conduct at least three different searches in each database, combining key terms related to your topic of interest (e.g. internet advertising and surveillance), You may need to try several different search combinations for each database in order to find a relevant article to begin with; once you find search terms for a particular database that identifies at least one article, enter this term in the first line of the table below.

Then try two other search terms that come from keywords in the first set of results, or are synonyms for the concept you think may be relevant, so that you end up with a reasonable number of articles (between 10-250, less than that is probably too specific, more is probably too broad and too many to go through) – fill out the keywords on the chart on the next page (5 points).

Database    Search Term(s)    # of Articles
Communication Abstracts    1)
2)
3)
Communication and Mass Media Complete    1)
2)
3)
PsycInfo    1)
2)
3)
Sage Publications    1)
2)
3)

<Insert at least one screenshot of one of your searches>

Task 3: Annotated Bibliography (75 points)

Within your searches, you will start finding articles that approach the issue from multiple different perspectives and using a variety of different methods and theories. Select total of 4 articles to read carefully (averages out to 1 article per week), and answer the following questions about each. Your articles should be split evenly amongst the two units/concepts you are analyzing

Unit 1 – Article 1:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:

1.    What theories did these authors draw upon? Explain the theory and what their research questions were.
2.    What were their primary findings or argument?
3.    How does this article engage with the arguments/concepts in our readings?
4.    How will this article help you understand your research area?

Unit 1 – Article 2:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:

1.    What theories did these authors draw upon? Explain the theory and what their research questions were.
2.    What were their primary findings or argument?
3.    How does this article engage with the arguments/concepts in our readings?
4.    How will this article help you understand your research area?

Unit 2 – Article 1:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:

1.    What theories did these authors draw upon? Explain the theory and what their research questions were.
2.    What were their primary findings or argument?
3.    How does this article engage with the arguments/concepts in our readings?
4.    How will this article help you understand your research area?

Unit 2 – Article 2:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:

1.    What theories did these authors draw upon? Explain the theory and what their research questions were.
2.    What were their primary findings or argument?
3.    How does this article engage with the arguments/concepts in our readings?
4.    How will this article help you understand your research area?

Example of what an annotated bibliography looks like:

Unit/Concept: Fan Relationships with Media, Article 1
Cohen, J. (1997). Parasocial relations and romantic attraction: Gender and dating status differences.     Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 41(4), 516-529.

This empirical study attempts to connect TV viewers’ “models of attachment” with parasocial relations (PSR) established with favorite television characters. More specifically, Cohen is interested in further defining the relationship between PSR and one’s “real world” social attachments, i.e., a romantic relationship with a significant other.

1. Theories and RQ: Models of Attachment
Drawing on the cognitive psychology literature, Cohen suggests that such “models of attachment” are “cognitive representations of self and others that evolve out of experiences with attachment figures and are concerned with the regulation and the fulfillment of attachment needs” (p. 517, quoting Hazan, Collins, & Clark, 1996, p. 39). In other words, our formative experiences with parents and other adult figures create expectations for our future needs, and lead us to seek out particular types of adult relationships.

Research Questions and Hypothesis: Cohen is interested in how gender differences affect how we form para-social relationships with fictional media characters. Cohen lays out the following hypotheses (quoted from the text):
H1: The correlations between the dimensions of a subject’s attachment models and the intensity of their PSR will be stronger for dating subjects than for single subjects.
H2: Among dating men, attachment anxiety will be positively associated with the intensity of PSR.
H3: Among dating women, attachment security (depending on one’s partner and comfort with intimacy) will be positively associated with intensity of PSR.

2. Key Findings: Given the differences found in this study, Cohen suggests that more attention should be paid to the study of gender in PSR. For instance, though this study did not measure it directly (and thus cannot make related claims), it is possible that TV takes on different meanings (as well as distinct uses?) for men and women. Cohen suggests that his findings lend credence to a “notion of a socio-cognitive similarity between interpersonal and symbolic relationships” (p. 526), identifying particular factors (i.e., attachment schema, gender, relationship status) that matter in determining the interplay between interpersonal and symbolic (i.e., PSR) relationships. Thus, Cohen concludes that attachment theory (as well as social cognition and social psychological theories more generally) is a useful lens with which to understand media studies, and should be further expanded.
3. How it is related to our readings – The Cohen reading offers one explanation for why people engage in certain types of participation online related to media fan groups, which Jenkins and Ito describe as changing the role of online communities as well as the media industry itself. The Cohen particular piece found that single men and women are more likely to develop symbolic relationships with fictional characters, which begin to explain how media can encourage participation and provides an explanation for why queer-baiting as a deliberate strategy to attract audiences and participation is effective.
4. How it will help you understand your research area – will vary depending on your question