One of the pieces of wisdom that I acquired during grad school was that supposedly a good scholar could explain their research agenda, with clarity and precision, in around 200 words. I could have followed this sage wisdom if my research followed a specific, specialized route. I’ve learned over the course of my nearly two decades in the academy that my research agenda was never going to follow a straight line as the nature of my discipline has evolved the entire time I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with this field of study. My first significant publication happened in 2007 in the Broadcast Education Association’s journal “Feedback.” Dr. Joe Misiewicz from Ball State University invited me to write an article for the “Twenty Years from Tenure” section of the journal. I described how I thought iTunes would influence the media industry’s future distribution of content as the digital platform would allow for the “exposure of the avant-garde” (Tilton, 2007, p. 21) that would be the foundation for services like Netflix to create groundbreaking works like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” “You vs. Wild,” or even “Minecraft: Story Mode.” It is with this understanding of my past that I would like to explain my last three years of research.
It is fair to argue that one of the most active themes of my research during this period has the social impact of gaming. One of my most well-received works was my research about the psychological effects of the music from the “Legend of Zelda” video game series. The central thesis of this study was that the music from the series still resonates with fans more than 30 years after the release of the first game of the series is that there are psychological factors in play. Fans have been classically conditioned to enjoy the central musical themes of the series through a concept called “mere-exposure.” There is mostly a recognition memory bias that occurs because the players enjoy playing the game and make a positive connection to the music through repeated exposures and experiences with the game and its characters. I was invited to present multiple times on the subject. Two of the presentations had more than 750 people in the audience at the popular PAX series of conventions. I was also invited (alongside a few of my colleagues) to speak at South-by-Southwest Gaming conference (SxSW Gaming). This series of speaking engagements were in support of the “Psychology of Zelda” book. I am very proud to note the book reached the top-30 in the Applied Psychology category on Amazon’s Bestsellers List for one week and was in the top-100 for about two months. It was nice to see our work find an audience. Beyond that, it was terrific to see Heterick carry a copy of the “Psychology of Zelda.”
Gaming also plays a role in the classroom. My latest research publication dealt with this very issue. “Winning Through Deception: A Pedagogical Case Study on Using Social Deception Games to Teach Small Group Communication Theory” has been an article that went through “Revision Hell” for almost four years. I initially presented this work in 2015 at the National Communication Association Game Studies’ Pre-Conference in Las Vegas. The presentation was based on the research I did when I was at the University of Kentucky. The central thesis of the work was the gaming can be used as a pedagogical tool as long as the mechanics of the game fall in line with either a learning objective of a given course or acts as a reinforcement tool for lessons within the classroom. The argument is that Jeopardy is an ineffective tool in the classroom for review as it is a proxy of using flashcards and essential study guides. I believe that this article is the capstone of a central argument that I’ve been working on for a decade.
Journalism is still part of my research agenda. I have one chapter draft and one book proposal that’s out for review that focuses on journalism. My chapter is an analysis of Anthony Bourdain’s work as a journalist who used food culture to explain what was happening in the world. My interviews with fans of Bourdain allowed me to construct a clearer picture of how Bourdain used his various media platforms to describe the world and the people that lived in it through the framework of culinary culture. The chapter is part of the “Eating Fandom” book, which should be out the summer of 2020.
The book proposal came from a series of discussions I had with a couple of Routledge editors over the past couple of years. I mentioned to those editors that I was disappointed by the lack of good entry-level books that help novice journalists improve the quality of their content on new media platforms. They challenged me to pitch one. “The Journalism Breakdown: Writing Multimedia Journalism Content in an Era of Changing Media Systems & Economic Models” is the by-product of this challenge. The book is a hybrid of my research on the future of news & journalism and the pedagogical components of my various Multimedia Journalism courses. The text should be coming out at the end of 2020/early 2021.
The last point that I feel is important to note with my research agenda is that despite the fact my research agenda has been broad over the past several years (as perhaps because it has been so broad) that my research has found its place. My h-index is three, which is the highest among non-tenured faculty in the Getty College of Arts and Sciences according to Google Scholar. My research (with Kathie Fleck) on the branding of photojournalists on Instagram was awarded “Top Faculty Paper” honors by the Carolina Communication Association in 2018. I feel based on external validation and review that my research agenda and well respected by my peers in the discipline of communication.
