Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies

Abstract

If any one issue has occupied the field of media and communication research, it is that of effects: what do media do to people and, in Elihu Katz’s (1959) supplementary formulation, what do people do with media? Throughout the first half-century of its existence, the field has debated the nature of ‘effects’ and the appropriate methodologies for studying them. In a Nordic perspective, the rise of reception analysis from the 1980s onwards marked the beginning, both a resurgence of qualitative audience studies and of debates concerning their relationship with quantitative research – as contrasts or complements, in administrative and/or critical work (Lazarsfeld, 1941). With the emergence of digital media and the ongoing digitalization of the media environment as such, audience research faces fundamental challenges, including the definition of its very object of analysis – ‘audiences.’ Are we an audience when reading a Twitter feed or commenting on a YouTube video? While it is easy to exaggerate the implications of ‘user-driven’ communication and ‘social’ media, new flows of one-toone, one-to-many, and many-to-many communication across different media types and social contexts call for a reassessment of classic concepts and models (Jensen, 2010). A new European research network – Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies – takes up some of the resulting challenges through a range of activities during the period 2010-2014, involving thirty European countries. The network is a so called COST Action – a research initiative in the context of the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union (FP7). Here, funding is available for workshops, conferences, shortterm exchanges, etc., but not for research projects as such. Instead, Actions serve as a framework in which to collaborate on the development of new projects, and to apply for funding from additional sources. The present Action can be summarized, first, in terms of the tasks to be accomplished and, second, with reference to the four working groups that have been established.