While at SMIT we study media in the broadest sense, this unit has a particular affinity with journalism, public service media and participatory culture. These are media forms through which media users traditionally enact (parts of) their citizenship. For years, emerging digital media have been believed to contribute to a participatory culture. More recently, the democratising potential of online platforms has been challenged with the rise of clicktivism, clickbait, disinformation and polarisation campaigns, conspiracy theories, etc., all phenomena that pressurise the public role of (news) media. At the same time, citizens use media in ever more original ways to put societal issues on the agenda. It is the tension between the beneficial and detrimental role that media play in society that is at the core of the unit’s research activities.
Methdologies, approaches and goals
NUSE aims to produce knowledge on media practices by nurturing an open exchange between people across perspectives and areas of expertise to understand dynamics in the media and information landscape as to critically but constructively reflect on their relationship to societal challenges.
Along the work of authors like Roger Silverstone and Nick Couldry, we consider the double articulation of media as our starting point: media should be understood as an articulation of a technological device and a conveyor of cultural messages. Our focus on media practices reveals a concern for what people are doing in relation to media in the contexts in which they act. In first instance, this includes the practices of people using media across traditional divides of production and consumption, even if we are open to insights from approaches that look at media as text, media as the outcome of political-economical power dynamics or media affordances.
Our knowledge production is further informed by a dialogue with experts from non-academic backgrounds with in-the-field or hands-on experience. This includes media professionals, societal stakeholders, but also members of the audience.
By gaining a deeper knowledge into media practices, we want to contribute to a better understanding of the media and information landscape. We take a fundamental audience perspective here, as formulated for example in the notion of small acts of engagement or the audience turn in journalism: a focus on media practices as a counterweight to techno-deterministic assessments of evolutions in media.
A beter understanding of the role of media users in shaping technology must allow us to critically reflect on the power of technological players and on the role media can play in tackling current societal challenges like the provision of valuable information, the countering of disinformation and extreme polarization and the emancipation of media users as citizens, publics and producers of culture.
Key research areas
Currently, our research focusses on three core topics.
- Media- and news repertoires. We seek to understand media use as a cross-media practices and find the notion of media repertoires a helpful lens in doing so. Through both qualitative and quantitative empirical studies, we seek to furhter both the concept as a theoretical base and the methodology to gain more granular and layered data into media and news use.
- Disinformation, polarising narratives and coping strategies. We seek to understand how online interactions add to processes of polarisation and disinformation spreading. To this end, we seek to combine digital methods such as online text analysis and audience tracking to identify patterns with ethnographic data collection to explain those patters.
- Media innovation and collaboration. We seek to understand how innovation processes manifest themselves in newsrooms, and the role that collaboration between various stakeholders plays in the process. We use real-life case studies and newsroom ethnography to get profound insights into factors shaping the proces.