Each year the prevalence of digitized information becomes more entrenched, not least with the amount of activity on social media. Yet, new media studies pose a number of challenges to international relations scholarship, which are only beginning to be addressed. With some exceptions IR scholars who conduct this research tend to rely on traditional qualitative methods and have been hesitant to embrace interdisciplinary collaboration-especially with those disciplines outside of the social sciences-as well as methodological pluralism across interpretive and quantitative approaches within the social sciences. This tendency shows a general lack of understanding of what new/social media might mean, not only as a source of and tool for generating information but also as a structural factor in how we conduct IR research and practice international relations. In this way, social media can provoke IR scholars to ask questions about their own discipline. This article aims to address these challenges and to provide suggestions on how to bring structural aspects of new media into IR research. In particular, it incorporates ideas centered on the shifting media ecology as fundamental to examining these structural challenges in terms of practicing international relations and in the visual turn in IR.

中文翻译：

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不断变化的媒体生态中的 IR 景观：新媒体 IR 文献的现状1

每年数字化信息的流行都变得更加根深蒂固，尤其是社交媒体上的活动量。然而，新媒体研究对国际关系学术提出了许多挑战，这些挑战才刚刚开始得到解决。除了一些例外，进行这项研究的 IR 学者倾向于依赖传统的定性方法，并且对接受跨学科合作（尤其是与社会科学以外的学科的合作）以及社会科学中跨解释性和定量方法的方法论多元化犹豫不决。这种趋势表明人们普遍缺乏对新媒体/社交媒体可能意味着什么的理解，不仅作为产生信息的来源和工具，而且作为我们进行国际关系研究和实践国际关系的结构性因素。通过这种方式，社交媒体可以激发 IR 学者提出有关他们自己学科的问题。本文旨在应对这些挑战，并就如何将新媒体的结构方面引入 IR 研究提供建议。特别是，它融合了以不断变化的媒体生态为中心的思想，作为研究国际关系实践和 IR 视觉转向方面的这些结构性挑战的基础。