Media Offering and Media Culture

The Hans Bredow Institute investigates what it is that media offer to their users. Media content is significant, because the media steer our perception. Whether it is local elections or war in distant lands – the media put us ”in the picture“ and in this way they determine perceptual attitudes and our ways of looking at things. That also goes for the stories, through which the media provide for our entertainment. Hence, entertainment offerings are also investigated as to orientations to the everyday world they communicate.

The Institute’s studies relating to offerings are distinguished by observing the qualities of the offerings in conjunction with the institutional contexts that form them and by investigating them as to their significance for users. This approach to research is sensitive to contexts and was realised, for instance, in the study on the radio landscape in Schleswig-Holstein, where analyses of programming were combined with investigations of the general, legal and economic framework and of the way the offerings were used and perceived. It serves to render the significance of media offerings empirically describable and thus open to public debate.

The Institute has for some time devoted particular attention to the area of communication in health matters, an area of research which has been previously underdeveloped in the German-speaking sphere, but which is gaining increasingly in relevance in the light of the upheavals in the health service and of the demographic shifts. On various levels, the Institute is participating in the development of this research area and is planning to establish a „research and transfer centre” for it, in order to coordinate the pertinent activities and to construct stable cooperative relations.

In addition, the Institute’s research is tracking actual trends in the development of offerings; currently the programming-strategies of television as well as the Internet’s aesthetics and the structures of its offerings, occupy the foreground.

For several year now, the Institute has moreover had the opportunity, via support from the public serice broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk NDR (North German Broadcasting), Westdeutscher Rundfunk WDR (West German Broadcasting) and the University of Hamburg, for the „Research Centre for the History of Broadcasting in North Germany”, to extend its research to the historical aspects of media development as well. The NWDR (North West German Broadcasting), the primary subject of the research centre, took a considerable part in shaping the construction of post-war democracy in Germany. The project of delineating its history makes clear how this important „cultural factor” was able to set itself up.

This pronounced historical emphasis has meanwhile been fruitful in a further direction. In cooperation with researchers from Israel, the Institute has developed a concept for a project, which will reconstruct the role witnesses to the holocaust play in commemorating these events.

Researchers: Prof. Dr. Joan Bleicher, Janina Fuge, Prof. Dr. Uwe Hasebrink, Anja Herzog, Christoph Hilgert, Dr. Claudia Lampert (contact person), Mark Lührs, Jutta Popp, Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner

Current projects in this research area

Overview on all projects in this area