Communication
Research
Communication as an object of study has presented some fundamental questions for those wishing to research it. These questions, as outlined by McQuail (1994) in line with Laswell, are: who communicates to whom? why communicate? how does communication take place? what about? and what are the intended consequences of communication? These questions are fundamentally the same for the various forms of communication outlined briefly above but they do, however, require slightly different emphases from level to level (McQuail, 1994:8). Paul Cobley (1996) also posits a similar set of fundamental questions for communication research. He asserts that research into communication asks the following: ''How are messages created?' 'How are messages transmitted?' 'How are messages constituted?' 'How are messages received?' 'Why is this the case?' 'Is it because of factors outside the message?' 'Or is it because of factors inside the message?''(Cobley, 1996:1).
Each of these questions has been supplemented, or indeed supplanted in some cases, by a concern with issues raised by the idea that communication is not a form of transmission but a study of the contextual production and exchange of meanings. In this case research has been driven by concerns over who may control those meanings as well as centring questions on the extent of corporate media power where media is often conflated with the news media. The concerns have been with media concentration and diversity, the level of bias and influence, and investigations of news as a public resource or an aspect of private property (Tiffen in Cunningham & Turner, 2006:28-42). Research from this perspective has also concerned itself with questions of policy and how the media is regulated at a national and international level. Mediation, representation and questions of power in the social construction of reality have also been looked at as has the shifts in conceptualising audiences from passive through to active, from mass agglomerations to specialist and fragmented. These research concerns have been added to by concerns about technological developments and the convergence and interplay between content providers, telecommunications corporations and media industries.
These are questions and broad issues that have focused areas of research and investigation into this object of study (see Carey 1989, Fiske 1994, Schirato & Yell 1996, McQuail 1994, Cobley 1996, Mohammadi 1997, Mattelart & Mattelart 1998, Thussu 2000, O'Shaugnessy & Stadler 2002, Griffin 2003, Cunningham & Turner 2006).
Research Groups
Communication research at the University of Newcastle is conducted within the following research groups:
Research Projects
Please see the following pages for information about some Communication research projects, including overviews, video, researchers and publications.
Publications
Information about individual publications is available through the above Research Centres and Group links, and in individual staff profiles.
