ABSTRACT
Scholars aiming to publish the results of empirical research on media industries usually begin by signing non-disclosure agreements, anonymizing sources, and receiving litigation counseling. One of the recurring and widely acknowledged problems of this type of research is that its qualitative social research methods are of limited use in obtaining access to industries. Applied media work is a vast border or contact zone where exchange happens between various groups, including programmers, archivists, librarians, academic researchers, film-makers, or political activists. Research on digital media and the Internet is dominated by a small set of issues and terms understood to be more or less self-explanatory, such as "participatory culture," "big data," "platform responsibility," or "sharing economy." Applied media studies, in this context, means to engage in creating contact languages or systems of discourse that enable us to organize knowledge in critically productive ways.
