Why study media ecosystems?

ABSTRACT

Much as ecology emerged from biology as scientists began studying the complex interactions between organisms in their environments, a shift is happening in communication and media studies regarding analysis of social media. The complex relationships between user-generated social media and professionally created news media are best understood as a complex media ecosystem with its own emergent behaviors that only become visible when studied from a perspective broader than considering a single medium in isolation. Some of the key debates regarding social media’s effects in spreading mis- and disinformation can be studied in richer ways by applying quantitative methods that integrate information across multiple types of media using a media ecosystem model. Understanding these characteristics of media ecosystems could help political parties, activists and others who depend on media to advance their messages.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• ecosystem
• methods
• social media
• data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I searched Google Scholar for the terms “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “YouTube”, restricting results to a specific year between 2008 and 2019. I also noted the most cited paper for each year, which shows a pattern similar to the total number of papers, with YouTube underperforming Twitter and Facebook.

2 See Social Science One, https://socialscience.one.

3 Anonymized for review.

4 Anonymized for review.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is co-founder of the Media Cloud research platform, co-founder of citizen media community Global Voices, and directs the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst, which investigates and builds alternative values-based social media systems.