Building Bridges Between Theory and Practice

Continuing on with my week at AEJMC, I have managed several useful conversations with smart thinkers here (Thanks Seth, Valerie, Meg.) So, I want to expand a bit on my earlier blog post about the need for academia to dive more enthusiastically into "prescriptive" research - and why the times call for it.

Polish-born sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity describes a world in which social, economic, and cultural conditions are in constant flux, in comparison to the relative stability, predictability, and profitability in which (for example) Journalism's institutions evolved and operated for decades.

In this now chaotically dynamic environment, the rules, practices, and strategies that worked under more "solid" conditions must be reexamined and renegotiated lest they become liabilities. That means past assumptions of governance, workflows, audience relationships, and business models must be questioned for the organization to survive.

If "norms" are the solid ground we walk upon and largely take for granted, descriptive research is the work to survey the landscape. And prescriptive research adopts those maps in its hopeful journey to profitability.

But as we move into the third wave of digital disruption - the web, the mobile web, and now the AI web (see slide 22) - the ground has again liquefied. Yesterday's descriptive maps of the landscape are obsolete, and today's prescriptive strategies for revenue and growth have no reliable guide charting the way.

Academia's instinct may be to march with purpose to redraw the maps. However, with the terrain still shifting, maps have a limited shelf life, and normative assumptions remain provisional.

Instead, we need to do all three things at once: describe the needs, behaviors and beliefs of the digital public, hypothesize about objectivity and gatekeeping et al., and build a bridge to help practitioners reach higher ground. (Did I properly murder that metaphor?) Industry can and should meet researchers halfway, but academia can't wait, and we have a responsibility not to.