Project Details
Projekt
The communicative construction of communitization within mediatized worlds: Horizons and challenges of middle agers' mediatized community building in media generational comparison
Applicant
Professor Dr. Andreas Hepp
Subject Area
Communication Sciences
Term
from 2010 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 181901618
Within audience research, middle agers (31 to 59 years) are understood as normal cases. Therefore, studies about the specificities of this age group are rare, especially concerning the mediatization of community building. However, this is an age with typical phases of the life course (for example professional career and re-orientation; marriage and partner change; birth and leave of children etc.), which go hand in hand with partly fundamental changes of media appropriation and (mediatized) communitization. Against this background, it is the aim of this research project to investigate the mediatized community building of middle agers. As a basis for this, their transmedial communication networks and mediatized horizons of communitization are reconstructed in a typifying way. This makes it possible to describe the challenges of a mediatized communitization for middle agers. This is especially the communicative demarcation (communicative securing of communities in contrast to other responsibilities), the communicative mobility (media based organisation of communitization in contrast to an everyday (working) mobility), communicative participation (a media based engagement within the communities) and communicative compensation (interception of community losses by media use). Such characteristics of a mediatization of communitization in middle age are compared with research results of other age groups, that is young people (16-30 years) and the elderly (above 60 years). Such an approach makes it possible to reconstruct different media generations and their moulding by typical experiences of mediatization. In particular, it becomes possible to describe the changes of (mediatized) communitization that relate to the latest mediatization wave of digitalisation and the related changes of communicative construction. The methodological basis of this research is a qualitative network analysis that operates with a triangulation of interviews, drawings of network maps, digital media diaries and a material documentation. As an outcome of this research the project offers on the one hand a concluding assessment of communitization change within mediatized worlds. On the other hand a comprehensive theory of the communicative construction of reality under the conditions of mediatization will be developed, integrating the empirical results of this project, other projects within the priority programme Mediatized Worlds, and further international research. This will be documented within an English monograph in co-authorship. Research area: Network
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
