Digital Media, Generation, and Communicative Power

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Corsten
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246436524

The proposed research project is based on a multi-dimensional framework of hypotheses. It is assumed that (a) digital formats of distributing and treating information include chances of communicative power, and that (b) to take these chances will depend on the perception and the evaluation of potential users regarding different options between digital formats and analogue media. Furthermore it is expected (c) that the distinction in choosing digital or analogue media is influenced (besides classical social differences like educational status, gender, or milieu) by generational belonging. Following (d) Mannheim in the presumption, that the formative phase of generational development will take place in the adolescence of a birth cohort, also media perception, media evaluation, and media usage of a generation should be developed in this life period. In one thesis: According to different socio-historical and collective biographical starting conditions in acquiring communicative power generations determine themselves collectively via media usage. Therefore, it should be reconstructed and examined, if, and if so, how different social chances in acquiring communicative power accrue from heterogeneous historical and technical starting conditions of specific generations. For this purpose, data will be gathered and analysed in three dimensions: a) the ethnographic observation of media usage (digital and analogue) of members of different generations, b) die collection of data concerning the historical frameworks and the social structuring of the life course, and c) the socio-genetic reconstruction of the process in which generations develop a collective understanding of their own via media-based communication in the public sphere and in their life practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants