Media Effects in an Era of Rapid Technological Transformation: A Case of User-Generated Content and Political Participation

In this article, we argue that recent technological developments have made Eveland's (2003) mix-of-attributes (MOAs) framework particularly useful for theorizing about effects of today's digital media. We use an example of political user-generated content (UGC) to illustrate the framework's usefulness. We focus on 5 core attributes of UGC, which are important for understanding its nature and effects: search efficiency, customization, manipulability, cost reduction, and community orientation. This study advances communication theory by (a) illustrating how MOA approach can be applied to explicate an online media form through its attributes; (b) elaborating on the frequently studied, but never thoroughly examined, phenomenon of political UGC; and (c) explicating 5 novel technological attributes useful for examining effects of UGC and other media.