Servicenavigation

Project Details

Back

Projekt Print View

Formats and Practices of Media Studies in the Age of Digital and Social Networks: An Ethnographic and Netnographic Study

Subject Area Theatre and Media Studies
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441413969
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

The ethnographic project identified and examined media used by media scholars in their daily professional lives. Based on interviews with scholars from the field of media studies, it developed an awareness of the issues surrounding their professional media usage. In doing so, it found a wide range of examples of how digital media shape and transform scholarly culture – from a decidedly humanities perspective that is underrepresented in science and technology studies. The result: Digital media play a key role in research, teaching, publication, networking and academic (self-)administration. They enable or hinder smooth workflows, they consolidate existing power relations or may help to challenge them – in times of social tension, they also create new vulnerabilities when, for example, they provide entry points for new attacks on scholars. Drawing on thirty extensive problem-centered interviews (50-90 min. long) and case studies (focusing e.g. on reviews, reading lists, video conferences, and research data publications), the project provided a survey of relevant fields of conflict and venues of media transformation in the humanities. While the open access movement continued to gain ground structurally and culturally, digital data collections, lists and repositories challenged established canon and affiliation effects in the discipline. However, the willingness of actors to publish data remained limited despite strong infrastructural support. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic during the project period intensified the experience of digitization effects in a sense of time lapse: research and teaching suddenly took place exclusively in a virtual environment, supported by established digital infrastructures and media practices. Observing media and their usage made visible new strains on the already precarious conditions of academic work in the humanities: In many cases, those surveyed for the project had to make their own financial investments to implement functional media solutions for teaching, data management and research, and/or they ended up using free solutions that implied legal ambiguity that caused unease. The digital media examined in the project manifested dependencies on proprietary providers that quickly achieved market dominance but provided functional solutions with less data consciousness or responsibility. The increased blurring of boundaries in the new media-based teaching and learning worlds and the fact that the scholars' lives and work spheres had already been precariously blurred before, was generally reinforced by media in this regard. In this respect, the project provided a documentation of media studies work culture from the years 2021-2024, including insights into the particular precarity from the first years of the pandemic up unto the first effects and impacts of new large language models of artificial intelligence.

Publications

 
 

Additional Information

© 2026 DFG Disclaimer / Copyright / Privacy Policy

Textvergrößerung und Kontrastanpassung