Research often focuses on how people use television at home. But how do people use television in public? In this project, Uwe Hasebrink and Friedrich Krotz analysed the use of television in public places.
In the past years, the institute contributed through its work to the development and support of a sub-discipline in communication science on media use. More generally, questions within this frame concentrated on the use of television within households. There are no empirical studies of how television is used outside of one’s own four walls. At best, there are some studies reporting on “how much” it is used. The state of knowledge is similar scarce in other countries, there are only a few studies in the US that focused on the use of television as a topic. In order to close this research gap, an explorative and comparative project focusing on observation has been carried out.
Project Description
The objective was to find out where and what kind of locations people use public television devices in a city like Hamburg and what terms of use follow it. In a second step, television use was observed and analysed by its type and to what extent. In a further step, the findings of this analysis were referred to the knowledge existing in communication science about the use of television in households.
Furthermore, this explorative research project is internationally connected: its findings correlated with a project that has been carried out at the same time by Prof. Dr. S. K. Eastman from Indiana University in Indianapolis/USA, the partner university of Universität Hamburg.
One of the innovative aspects of this project is that it takes up the diversification of television. This is not only increasingly used at home or in one’s spare time but also in different contexts, which becomes clear by the emergence of the so-called business-TV. Such developments have to be debated regarding its significance for communication science. The research questions and findings were classed in a comprehensive framework under the title of mediatisation of everyday life, culture and society and were also used in the postdoctoral thesis of F. Krotz.
