Understanding media use in an age of big data

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.