Professor Ran Wei is an influential and productive scholar in the fields of media effects, communication technology and society, and mobile communication. In this dialogue, he was invited to share his research experience on media effects and information communication technology in the past 30 years. Professor Wei characterized himself as a "transitional scholar" who bridges conventional and new media studies. He started with sharing how his journey in the field of media effects expanded to new media studies, including mobile communication and virtual reality. In response to the criticisms of media effects research in the digital era, he suggested that social scientific researches should go beyond personal and interpersonal levels to adopt the institutional approach to investigate the media effects under different social contexts and cultures. Professor Wei also emphasized the value and pitfalls of the emerging computational methods in current media effects studies. In particular, he introduced how to combine traditional and big data methods in his ongoing collaborative project on Covid-19 mis/disinformation. Finally, he offered some suggestions for submitting papers for publications in international journals and for forging academic collaboration.