Project Details
Projekt
The Mediatization of German Forensics: Activated audience and private entrepreneurs as stakeholders in the forensics market
Applicant
Professor Dr. Jo Reichertz
Subject Area
Empirical Social Research
Term
from 2012 to 2017
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 223244250
As a consequence of the successive mediatization of forensics that has taken place over the past 15 years (described in the first project phase) and the forensics market it has helped to establish, new stakeholders, attracted by the prospect of economic, symbolic and media rewards, are coming to play a relevant and active role in internal security alongside their old counterparts (police, forensic medicine, politics). After the current project phase has primarily considered the importance of the police, forensic medicine and the media, the next will look at the role of the audience activated by the media and of the private entrepreneurs operating on the forensics market. As activators, the media engage the audience of forensic TV formats more deeply in their content (and thereby in market activity) through social media such as Facebook, Social TV or Twitter. This has brought about a gradual qualitative change in the role of the audience and their communicative practice of appropriation, since they now comment, rate, add to and alter media offerings (to some extent during a broadcast) or even create new products and services and share them on the resulting market. Yet it is not just the activated audience that become active stakeholders in this market. There are also various private entrepreneurs who observe, scrutinize and communicatively assess the forensics media market and, recognizing its relevance, develop products and services to offer on it. By examining both groups of stakeholders on the basis of participatory observation, videography, group discussion, artefact analysis and interviews in two waves of research, the intention is to show (a) which forms of communicative practice of appropriation can be found among the two groups, (b) what forms and extent of activity can be observed in the two groups, and (c) what role mediatization processes play for building knowledge systems and the circulation of forensic knowledge among stakeholders in the forensics market. In this way (following examination of the other relevant stakeholder groups in the preceding projects), all the relevant stakeholders in the field and the logic of their actions have been defined. This is a precondition not only in order to further conceptualize the mediatization of the forensics field and market theoretically, but also to formulate statements on the mediatization process in general across various projects in the SPP.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
