Understanding media use in an age of big data

在当前的大数据时代，媒体内容、平台、设备和应用程序正以极快的速度激增。在这种背景下，媒体的使用正在经历着快速的变化，理解人们如何使用媒体和参与媒体内容的方法也在发生着变化。受众以新颖的方式寻找媒体内容，他们在不同的平台上追随自己喜欢的媒体，并在此过程中产生有关个人媒体使用模式和行为的数据。这些副产品数据与其他有关媒体使用的数据一起存在，这些数据是通过调查、焦点小组和访谈等传统方法收集的。如何将这些数据整合在一起，对现在和未来的跨平台媒体使用产生新颖而有力的理解，这对媒体公司和媒体研究人员来说都是一个挑战，尤其是因为数据和相关方法有局限性，并引发了与隐私和道德有关的问题。

In our current big data age, media content, platforms, devices and apps are proliferating at great speed. In this context, media use is undergoing rapid change, and so too are methods for understanding how people use media and engage with media content. Audiences find media content in novel ways, and they follow their preferred media across diverse platforms, producing data about their individual media use patterns and behaviours as they do so. These by-product data exist alongside other data about media use, gathered via conventional methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews. How to bring these data together to produce novel and robust understanding of cross-platform media use now and in the future is a challenge for media companies and for media researchers alike, not least because the data and related methods have limitations and raise issues relating to privacy and ethics.