Redefining Media and its Role in the World Today

Most academics become adept at juggling a range of interests and responsibilities, and Professor LI Xigen has certainly done that.

As head of CityU’s Department of Media and Communication (COM), he has a full load of administrative duties, besides teaching courses that cover everything from television news reporting and production to international communication and quantitative research methods.

He somehow finds time to conduct research with wideranging implications in areas such as online communication behaviour, media effects in the digital age, and social influence on media content.

As confirmation of the merit and importance of such work, he received a General Research Fund (GRF) in 2014 from the Research Grants Council for a continuing project investigating media exposure and protective behaviour during a public health emergency.

“Whether in teaching, administration or research, there are always new trends and developments to consider,” Li says. “For example, in the department we are looking closely at the area of digitisation and are trying to ramp up our programmes. Some started many years ago, so we have to keep adapting to reflect developments in new media and changing industry needs.”

One priority is to introduce new streams in the undergraduate programmes, so that students acquire more specialised skills and the very latest techniques. This will ensure they have good career options on graduation and are in high demand. There is also a focus on giving students foresight and adaptability, so they can spot and make the most of new opportunities as they occur.

“Big data, especially media data analytics, is becoming more important in our field, and in society in general, where almost everything now has a digital trace,” Li says. “With this, we can learn more about people’s behaviour and how they do all kinds of things. Therefore, students need to understand how to collect and analyse data effectively and see where its use can help.”

Where necessary, courses and electives are being redesigned and updated to put greater emphasis on mobile communications and visual media and less on television. This broadens the scope of programmes and opens the door to future jobs with government, in the commercial sector, and with other organisations where the full range of reporting, news writing, video production, and social media skills are increasingly sought after.

“There are technologies and skills now that did not exist three years ago,” Li says. “We are even thinking of a course in game studies. It might sound quite different, but it is new media and closely connected to our field and, with digital games, people are communicating with each other.”

Another priority for Li is to boost postgraduate research output. In this respect, the department is already ranked top in Hong Kong in the field of communication and media studies. However, the aim is to stretch the lead.

“We have a number of highly productive faculty members who as editors of academic journals and speakers at conferences are helping us win a worldwide reputation,” Li says. “With financial support and other assistance, they can continue to achieve excellence in research and reach their goals.”

His own project under the GRF grant is nearing completion. It considers the importance of the media’s role in disseminating accurate news at the time of a public health emergency and the effect it has on people. Two related articles have been published and a further two are under review.

In another current project, he and his team of Master’s students and department colleagues are exploring how the acquisition and processing of health enhancement advice from the media can influence behavioural beliefs and intentions. This applies more particularly to non-emergency situations such as vaccination campaigns and non-transferable diseases.

“We do research in Hong Kong and collect information from other parts of the world, depending on the subject,” Li says. “For instance, regarding the US-China trade dispute, we recently completed a survey to see how people in the two countries relate to the news coverage and how their cultural background and international experience affect the way they react to the issues.”

When teaching quantitative research methods, the key thing is showing how to develop one’s own ideas, be innovative, and advance knowledge and theory beyond what other scholars have previously achieved. There is also instruction on conducting surveys, setting up experiments to test a specific communication format or method, and interpreting feedback and viewpoints.

“I also talk about how to study messages by content analysis on a social media platform,” Li says. “It is important because so many people now rely on that as their main source of news and information.”

Li started out by studying journalism at Fudan University in the late 1970s. He then worked for a Shanghai TV station for some six years, mainly covering suburban stories about people developing new businesses. He wrote the scripts, helped with filming, and occasionally appeared on screen, but that required special permission because at the time the authorities did not want TV reporters to become too famous.

Keen for a new challenge, he decided to do an Master of Arts at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, which involved training to be a news reporter for the People’s Daily. However, on graduating in 1989, he opted instead to return to Shanghai, working there as a bureau chief for Science and Technology Daily which, despite its title, carried a lot of general interest stories.

After four years, he’d had enough, so he entered the PhD programme at Fudan before realising 12 months in that it made better sense to pursue further studies in the US. “To be a competent journalist, you need to accumulate knowledge,” he says. “But I wanted to study more and conduct some decent research even if I wasn’t sure about becoming an academic later on.”

Having previously spent a year as a research fellow at Columbia University in New York, studying the role of science and technology in China’s societal development, he was admitted straight into a PhD programme at Michigan State University in East Lansing, but faced an uphill struggle.

“It was very difficult at the beginning. I had to start from zero because, in this context, anything I had studied in China was not really relevant. But I gradually felt more comfortable. In the first year, I was asking classmates about everything; in the second year they were asking me.”

His thesis examined the media coverage of US-China relations in major newspapers in the decade from 1986 to 1996 and, with that completed, he taught over the course of the next nine years at Louisiana State University, Arkansas State University and Southern Illinois University before arriving at CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences in 2008.

“Overall, the thing I enjoy most is training students,” Li says. “For example, if MA students want to continue on to the PhD programme and pursue their own projects, you see them becoming steadily more proficient in their research and very knowledgeable in their subject. That is very satisfying, and we have even had some MA students publishing their work in highly regarded academic journals before going on to senior positions in the news media or commercial sector.”

Witnessing the department flourishes over the decade, Li says at a ceremony celebrating the 10th anniversary of COM, “We have grown from a newly established department in 2008 to an academic unit well blended to the world scholarly community.” Li took the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions from all faculty members, who have been striving hard to set the trends in teaching and research. “We look forward to another decade of success of the department.”