My research focuses on the place of new media technologies in our political and cultural landscape. In particular, I seek to answer the following two interrelated questions:

• How do political and economic forces shape the development, distribution, and uses of new media technologies?

• What communication strategies do policy actors use in their attempts to shape the regulation of new media technologies?

I began investigating these questions from within a critical cultural perspective, focusing on the discourse about and creative cultural uses of new media technologies. This sparked an interest in the debate over the regulation of new media, especially copyright law and internet policy. In studying the politics of new media regulation, I have also begun to explore the communication strategies of policy actors, including the creative political uses of new media technologies. During this topical evolution, I have also shifted research strategies, and I now generally work within a social scientific paradigm.

My earliest scholarly work examines the electronic music DJ and the surrounding culture at the turn of the 21st century. In part, this work illustrates how the evolving discourse surrounding one set of media technologies—in particular, turntables and mixers—has reshaped their economic and cultural meaning over time. In other work, I explore Grateful Dead fans’ evolving use of new media technologies to challenge the centralized model of musical reproduction and distribution.

Interest in media technology and the discourse of authorship and ownership led me to study copyright law, the legal embodiment of the notion of authorship and a key component in centralized cultural distribution. The most important topic in copyright policymaking today is the debate over digital rights management (DRM). In an attempt to reign in unsanctioned uses of digital media, copyright holders have deployed DRM tools such as encryption and watermarking to limit, track, or penalize undesirable behavior by end users, sparking a technological and legal arms race. The outcome will help shape our media environment for decades to come.

This interest in DRM has informed much of my recent work. In an article recently accepted by Communication Law and Policy, I explore the metaphor of property in the debate over copyright law in general and DRM in particular. In another project, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. and I produced the most comprehensive study to date of the triennial rulemaking in which the US Copyright Office determines exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on circumventing most DRM.

My dissertation examines the political communication about DRM in the US copyright policy subsystem over the last 20 years. The study deploys three methods: a content analysis of policy actors’ offline and online communication regarding copyright policy, a webgraph analysis of the issue space online, and semi-structured interviews with policy actors. For recent debates, I compare offline forums, such as congressional hearings and print news, with the interlinked community of advocacy groups’ websites. I also interview policy actors about their communication strategies. This research helps explain how different kinds of advocates view and use the internet. Preliminary evidence suggests the online picture is markedly different from that presented offline.

In addition to investigating copyright policymaking, my dissertation engages the methodological challenges of studying online communication. As both a sampling method and a data generation tool in its own right, I use web graph analysis to study the copyright issue network online. Using the Issue Crawler software developed by Richard Rogers, and building on the theoretical and methodological work of fellow Annenberg Ph.D. student Kenneth N. Farrall, I have helped develop the combination of web graph analysis and content analysis. This led to a joint presentation with Farrall as part of the preconference, “Machine Politics/Politics of the Machine,” at this year’s annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

Web graphs show the members and relationships that make up an online issue space, and they also serve as a fine purposive sampling tool for online content analysis. To facilitate the study of specific debates, I also use site-specific Google searches. Building on methods for minimizing and measuring search term sampling error, I have developed a method for testing Google search terms, using ratios and logistic regression to estimate the term’s ability to recall relevant documents and place them at the top of the search results. I plan to explore these methods in further detail and submit the results for publication in the near future. The internet may never hold still while we study it, but I hope to help improve the methods for studying online communication.

Using similar a similar research strategy for my next major research project, I plan to study the politics of internet governance, especially issues such as interconnection, last-mile competition, universal service, and network neutrality. My article on network neutrality jumps into the fray of the policy debate, but the debate itself is part of a broader political fight that is ripe for empirical analysis. At this very preliminary stage, this debate also appears to feature a dichotomy between those who regularly speak in Congress and those who dominate the online space. I view this project as an excellent candidate for external research funding.

I remain a bottomless well of curiosity about the social, political, and economic place of new media technologies, and I am happy to contribute on a broad array of projects within and outside those areas described here. At the core of my research trajectory, though, I intend to spend much of my early career investigating the political dynamics that shape the regulation of new media technologies, as well as policy actors’ use of these same technologies in their quest for strategic advantage.