新媒體傳播研究及知識增量

As new media studies have become popular among communication scholars, most of the studies failed to go beyond description of the characteristics. As a subfield of communication research, new media studies should discover and verify new knowledge about the communication processes and human behaviors. This paper proposes to adopt “knowledge increment” as the criteria to evaluate the contributions of new media studies. The paper discusses knowledge increment as a key requirement of scientific research, the importance of formulating research questions in research projects, and the deductive and inductive approaches in producing knowledge increment in empirical research, and illustrates to what extent explorative, descriptive and explanatory research contributes to knowledge increment. Based on an analysis of the problems in current new media studies, this paper suggests making knowledge increment the premise and the goal of new media studies. New media studies need to integrate theory and empirical observations to answer important questions that will contribute knowledge to the field.