How does the New York Times cover the virtual reality and virtual community in the past five years?
I searched the New York Times database, seeing 100 articles since January 2003 (5 years ago) sorted under virtual reality and virtual community in different categories of coverage: technology, education, art, business, politics, etc. If searched from January 2006 (a year ago), 41 articles popped up.
“What had been a specialist's beat (new technology and cyberspace) is now becoming a universal territory,” said Hiawatha Bray, the Boston Globe journalist in MIT’s Media in Transition panel in 1998. I believe that virtual reality is as well. As virtual reality has been applied to different aspect of society, the new technology beats are not limited in technology pages. In first part of the paper, it would be a small scale of literature reviews. I plan to review the concept of virtual reality and virtual community. I am also going to look at what’s the transformation in journalism in cyberspace beats, and in the contexts of online environment.
Second, I am going to analyze the contents and themes of the New York Times articles, category by category, and making a macro generalization (summary) of it. By choosing some articles in different categories to analyze in details, I try to look for social aspect indications in print media’s coverage of virtual reality and virtual community. I will look for the New York Times’ ideology in reporting virtual community and how do they connect the virtual community to politics, business, and art. How do they think of the impact of virtual community/ reality in its applications? I am making sense of the relationships between media’s representations of virtual community and the popular cyber culture which now applied in different categories.
Reference: (Not complete)
The New York Times
Thorburn, D.& Jenkins, H. (Eds.). (2003). Democracy and New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Kirsner, S. (1998). Covering cyberspace: an endangered beat? in Editor & Publisher, Vol. 131, Issue 40, p.30
1 則留言:
This sounds like a good start. Just to be clear, will you be turning this in as a lit review or a mini-study? Given that you'll be doing a content analysis of articles, I'm assuming it's a mini-study, in which case, you'll need to make sure the write up talks about the methodology - why you chose the articles you did, what methods you used to analyze them, etc.
For the analysis, do you see the categories as emerging from your review, or are you going to create categories ahead of time and analyze the articles based on that?
One other question: what do you mean by virtual reality? Virtual reality generally refers to immersive virtual environments, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality That's fine, I just wanted to clarify, since we haven't discussed virtual reality in class. Or did you mean virtual worlds, like Second Life?
張貼留言