Research approach

It's becoming apparent that spending the last ... years very practically engaged in my education isn't the best preparation to a lot of research. Whilst at university anyway, I have grown familiar to a strong vocational emphasis on learning.

Fully intending to follow a praxis model of working I am left wondering how that works when studying social media.

Keys to understanding my research model

Firstly, let me elaborate on the emphasis on this project. After first-hand experience in web-design and marketing I wanted to find deeper context to this (now uniformly fashioned) sector of the creative industries. A possible venture could have been to apply for internships and creative apprenticeships in, lets say, a theatres marketing department, giving me a practical experience of the protocols and infrastructure they use. I could possibly scrutinise a wide variety of approaches to marketing, how media is created to generate interest and attention and evaluate each approach. However, that would form my understanding of the surface of the issue. I have experience of successes and failures when working on the festival, and subsequently feel the need to probe deeper into the theory and context of these operations.

I am also confronted with an additional dilemma. I realised that a successful way of encouraging audience involvement and generating interest was through our website. Previously the festival was heavily reliant on flyering, posters and word of mouth. There were email lists and facebook groups, but this area was in need of updating. I endeavoured to utilise social media as much as possible, believing it was a cheap way of attracting attention to our project. I encouraged every member of the team to blog, opening up our process. I cross-linked to other blogs and companies hoping to situate ourselves into the wider e-culture community. This seemed like a successful way of bringing the festival to a wider audience and although it is difficult to tell if that strategy worked, it was a worthy venture.

But blogging and social networking sites only provide a glimpse of the whole picture of social media right now. Charged with the promises of Web 2.0, I am in search of contextualising the rapid adoption of social medias.

For this research to be the grounding of a practical experiment, I am taking a wide and inclusive approach to modes of research and stimulus. This will include:

• Traditional bookish research and referencing
• Industrial media, i.e: Newspaper, journal, Radio, Television program
• Social media, i.e: Blog, vlog, podcast, forum
• Documentary and Video footage
• Wikipedia
• Other online resources

In using a combination approach to research I hope to give my research a praxis emphasis, both learning about the context of social media and my experience with it.

What is social media?

For the purposes of this project it is also important to attempt to identify what social media is (even a hard task for Wikipedia). For this I will be looking at several fields:

• The history of the internet, from it's birth to right now
• Social studies that correspond to mass use of the internet
• The rise of mass-media
• Globalisation
• Open-source movement
• Economics, specifically market and non-market motivations
• Mindset 2.0

I will be combining this research with references of artists who have explored this field with particular focus on net-artists, intermedia artists and interdisciplinary artists.