Transcultural Media Repertoires and Community Perceptions in Europe

This PhD project focuses on the question of how media use and community perceptions are interrelated in changing cultural and media environments. It aims to address and cross-reference current developments in two fields of communication research (transnational and transcultural communication, audience and reception studies).

In the first field, the increasing transnational and transcultural character of media production, content, and use, as well as phenomena such as deterritorialisation make it necessary to reconsider traditional ideas of national audiences and imagined communities. In the second field, our constructions of media audiences are challenged by interpersonal and network media that link communities by “real” – or at least closer – connectivity, whilst the boundaries between producers and audiences are becoming increasingly blurred by new forms of media.

The core questions are: what role do group-allegiances play in the process of media choice? And vice versa: what effect does media use have on the perception of audiences or communities? Applying the concept of media repertoires (stable transmedial patterns of media use) the research question concerns the way mass, network, and interpersonal media, forms of consumption and “produsage”, feelings of belonging to imagined audiences and mediated networks, references to place and space are combined by media users. Hence, the approach begins with the micro level of the individual media user and from there searches for linkages to the macro level of audiences and communities.

An empirical study will compare different groups of media users varying in age, in existing backgrounds in migration and in their country of residence.