This week’s reading is mainly about the problem of methodology in a post-broadcast era. The first problem it mentions is volume. These days broadcast products and messages are everywhere, we can easily have access to these media output. Especially due to the internet, not only companies but also individuals can create and convey information to the public easily. As the passage mentions, ‘In March 2010 the Facebook website was claiming over 400m active users with more than 60 million status updates being posted every day; 3bn photos uploaded every month; more than 5 billion pieces of content shared each week, and more than 3.5m events being created every month’, we can see how massive the amount of the media output is. This situation will make the media study more difficult. Researchers have to read all the information and then distinguish and select the useful ones. It certainly takes them much of time, which may also lead to economic losses.

Another problem is access. Although through the internet researchers are able to study those accessible media, they have no access to those private media like individual’s texts, IMs, PMs, social-networking messages, comments updates and photos. Only study public media is not comprehensive, but researchers can not examine individual’s media without permission. Even though they are allow to study some of them, we still need to question is this representative. This is another big problem researchers come across when they are studying media.