The project

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The project

About the project

The project is supported by a grant from the Danish Research Council for The Humanities (Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation).

The project

Last Updated (Saturday, 03 January 2009 14:30)

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This project addresses how the use of the internet and mobile media changes the overall media matrix and the borderlines between private and public spheres, between political and cultural affairs, between the local, the national, and the transnational public, and between corporations, markets, and civic society. The aim of the project is to provide new insights on significant changes in the relations between public media spaces, and between private and public media spaces.

The project covers the following six subthemes:

•    Political Opinion Building on the Internet – What it means & Where it takes place?
•    Analyses of Examples of Political and Cultural Communication Online.
•    Moblogs – MMS, Mobile Communities, and Media Geography.
•    DR (national Public Service Channel) from Broadcast to Podcast. Digitalization and Differentiation of the Radio format.
•    Web and Migration Histories – Digitalization of Cultural Experiences.
•    Media satiation: Food, Taste and Lifestyle in Digital and Print Media.

Each subtheme is treated as a specific project, focusing on specific borders. The projects share a set of overall themes and hypotheses. A survey of the use of the internet and mobile media in Denmark, covering all the themes, is being conducted in 2008-2009.

The internet is often described as a supplement to existing media (Schultz 2004), allowing a broader public to participate in the political and cultural public forums (Dahlgren 2001). According to Born (2006), the internet might also support ‘politics for complex cultural dialogue’.

We take our point of departure in the more far-reaching assumption that the internet initiates a reconfiguration of the overall media system, via the interconnected development of new forms of cultural, social, and political citizenship.

The notion of Mediatization is used to describe the role of Media in the highly centralized public sphere of the late 20th century (Thompson 1995, Schulz 2004). In this project, we introduce the notion of ‘extended mediatization’, referring to the adaptation of digital media (primarily the internet and mobile media) in the overall matrix of media. The notion of ‘extended mediatization’ refers to a broad-spectrum extension of private and public media-spaces, as digital media 1) lowers the threshold to access in mediated public space 2) is seamlessly integrated into everyday life, 3) offers the individual a scale of options, ranging from the nearby social universe to the transnational reach, although limited by linguistic and cultural constraints, 4) gives free access to a complex set of public forums for individuals, institutions, and corporations, 5) provides a 24 hour a day open space, allowing the option of choosing between or combining synchronous and asynchronous communication, and 6) allows for a variety of new cross-media relations between old digitized media and ‘newborn’ digital media. (Finnemann 2006b).

It is our assumption that the extended mediatization provided by the integration of digital media creates opportunities, not only for the blurring of borders, but for both changing the positions of, and the mechanisms for drawing borders, with the formation of new, porous, grey zones or interfaces (blurring), in which the drawing of borders becomes the result of situated negotiations, involving norms and practices from formerly more clearly and more stably separate spheres.

The notion of a public sphere is debated. In this project, we are concerned with a set of internal end external borders to the public sphere, and of mediated public spaces. ‘External interfaces’, are understood to be the interfaces to private spaces (whether intimate or private enterprises) to the social space for – mediated – everyday life, to the market, the local, and the transnational. Internal borders and interfaces are understood to be a) the interfaces between the political and cultural forums, between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media (old media being both analogue media and digitized media, new media being born-digital media) and b) the interfaces between genres and functional differences between, for instance, news, opinion building, political action (e.g. election campaigns), and access to critical analysis/judgements and background information.

The relations between the cultural and political public will be analysed from the perspective of ‘cultural citizenship’, as developed in the analysis of the use and functions of popular culture products. It is assumed that these products form a basis for individual and social negotiations of identity, which are often emotionally based, rather than based in rational judgements.

If the cultural public space is a scene for opinion building, cultural products and practices (e.g. lifestyle and consumption) become a matter of politics. Culturalization of politics is one result, but is also combined with changes in the political sphere, in which rational discourse is increasingly taken care of by a growing number of expert systems, which also address a broad range of life themes (way-of-life, lifestyle, taste).

In the project, these themes are condensed into the following four hypotheses:
1)    Public opinion today is articulated as a specialized political and normative sphere, and via identity work based on emotion and judgements of taste, related to lifestyle, culture, and entertainment.
2)    A number of formerly stable, media-based borders are now brought into the agenda for ongoing (user generated) negotiations, accompanied by a series of new coexistences: between individualization and globalization, between heterogeneous media cultures and changing media networks, between the logics of old and new media, between commercial and civic activities, and between individualization and specialization.
3)    The outcome of these negotiations is never given beforehand; the results can be both the maintenance of existing borders, and their modification or suspension.
4)    Extended mediatization creates opportunities for new patterns of communication between individuals and groups, as well as between the individual and the ‘greater’ public. The monopoly of old media as media for the public is now modified, as their gate-keeping function can always be bypassed by all sorts of actors. Formerly, access to the public media was based on relatively few editorial criteria (journalistic and political criteria of quality, right-left, public service). On the internet, the editorial standards are dependent on the users’ choices, drawn from a much broader range of editorial principles. This includes the old criteria, as well as a range of self-editing, collective editing, and moderated editing practices, based on a variety of standards.

Methods

We are using well-established methods to study media systems, production, aesthetics, content, and use, and are also experimenting with new methods (e.g. net-ethnography, websphere analysis) in cooperation with the various subprojects.
Internationally, we are oriented towards the growing interest in studying cultural citizenship, new media, and new forms of social, political, and cultural participation (Stevenson 2003, Hermes 2005, van Zoonen 2005, Couldry 2006). For the Nordic model of the information society, see Castells & Himanen, 2002, and Telos 72, 2007. For cultural diversity in adaptation of new media ‘internet histories’, see Goggin (ed.), 2004, and Vogt, 2007.
In order to reveal behaviour and opinions not otherwise accessible, we are doing a survey of approximately 1500 representative internet users, between the ages of 16 and 70.The survey investigates the interaction and convergence among various media platforms in the daily lives of the users. Among the objectives is to identify where people acquire news and information within various fields, from traditional political news, to consumer-related information, and lifestyle-related and other cultural topics. In short, the aim is to identify and categorize the media “menues” of people, and to cast light on the intensified interplay between politics, lifestyle topics, entertainment, and consumer culture, within the minds and practices of people. The survey will be performed by Epinion Capacent. Planning and co-ordination of joint survey: Jakob Linaa Jensen.