Media Repertoires Research Articles

Older adults experiencing and balancing the ambivalences of digitalisation in everyday life: Media repertoires as resources in domesticating emerging technologies

Abstract Older adults have been found to conceive digital technologies as both helpful and problematic in their everyday lives. Based on a qualitative analysis of diaries and interviews with 40 older Finnish adults, this study identifies efforts they engage in to balance this ambivalence. I approach such balancing practices through the theoretical lens of domestication: the process of integrating technologies into everyday life. By combining the concept of media repertoire with the domestication approach, the findings illustrate how ageing individuals take advantage of their media repertoires in the process of making digitalised societies liveable. In order to include ageing individuals in societies that increasingly demand engagement with emerging technologies, then, means that services should be designed in ways that allow them to be integrated into older adults’ media repertoires that have been being formed for decades.

Social media users’ concerns regarding algorithmic news personalisation

The paper asks if social media users are concerned regarding algorithmic news personalisation and how their concerns connect with other factors. We took the influential concepts of echo chambers and filter bubbles as a starting point to explore three dimensions of concern about news personalisation: missing important information, missing opposite opinions and jeopardizing privacy because of personalised news. The survey among social media news users (N=1481) shows that concern exists, but more than a third of users do not have an evident attitude regarding news personalisation. Additionally, the concern is connected with knowledge about the algorithmic selection process, the importance of social networks in users? media repertoire and, to a small extent, negative attitude towards the selection principle. The findings contribute to our understanding of users? perspectives on news personalisation which is particulary relevant considering the increasing use of personalised news and the fact that it is individual citizens? responsibility to be accurately and comprehensively informed in a media environment where the news content is fragmented.

Between cat content and Yeswecan!cer: Digital media repertoires for disease management of young cancer patients

Between cat content and Yeswecan!cer: Digital media repertoires for disease management of young cancer patients

Neither friend, nor device

With smart speakers diffusing into society, artificial intelligence is moving from the imaginative reservoirs of dystopian storytelling into vernacular living. How do users perceive communication with it? Are Alexa and Siri considered simple devices, sentient assistants, or even artificial friends? Based on nine qualitative interviews with former smart speaker users in Germany, this study analyzes smart speaker use and related personal epistemologies within a media repertoire perspective. By presenting six interrelated action-guiding principles explaining smart speaker use and people’s ambivalent sensemaking, we argue that smart speakers appear neither as friends nor as mere neutral devices to their users. The identified principles explain the peripheral role of smart speakers within media repertoires as handy but suspicious gimmicks. For future smart speaker adoption, whether smart assistants are interpreted as simple-minded, exploitative gimmicks or relevant, reliable, and trustworthy companions will be crucial.

The concept of power and its representation in television seriality. The case of «House of Cards»

To study how power is configured, this article analyzes the first and second seasons of the TV Series House of Cards. The behavior patterns of the main character, Frank Underwood, were tracked to analyze his foundations, the means used, the scope and the type of power he wields. The theoretical approaches of Dahl (1957) and French and Bertram (1959) were used for constructing a group of categories that served as a guide in the search for index units. Therefore, the methodology is based on units (Barthes, 1970) identified within the dialogues, the iconic composition, and the actions of the character. The results obtained reveal that in the first season argumentation as a means to exercise power predominates, and manipulation predominates in the second season. Also, the media repertoire is much broader in the first season when the main character builds the scenarios to achieve his goals. These findings contribute to the construction of a broader understanding of power and its exercise.

The problem of domestic violence against women in the Russian media space: the main repertoire of the Russian media

The article examines the repertoire of Russian media covering the problem of domestic violence against women, as well as the crisis of the Russian family. It was revealed that in the repertoire of the Russian media there are mainly publications that are aimed at highlighting activities related to the adoption of a law on domestic violence. Among other important issues are the following topics: the identification and replication of individual cases of violence that caused a wide public outcry; promotion of research results and opinions of non-profit organization experts who dealing with the problem of domestic violence; articles about measures to bring Russian legislation in line with the requirements of an international convention. The author comes to the conclusion that the information space is filled with mostly negative publications that form an opinion about the serious problems of intra-family communication and the crisis of the Russian family on the example of facts related to the issue of domestic violence against women. At the same time, little attention is paid to highlighting the facts of positive intra-family communication and fulfilling the goals specified in the family development policy on the promotion and reproduction in the media of family interaction practices that are aimed at the formation and development of strong Russian families. According to the author, the Russian media space needs more active coverage of positive practices of interaction within the family in order to fix them in the minds of Russians. It will turn out to be a more effective mechanism for the formation of healthy family relationships than rooting the idea of the family as a problematic and crisis social unit.

Formiranje medijske pismenosti mladih na presečišču družine, šole in vrstniških skupin

We present an overview of media literacy definitions and related concepts and strive to consolidate them to create a comprehensive media literacy definition. Selected insights are then offered into the formation of media literacy, which we acquired as part of qualitative research into young people’s media repertoires. First, we summarise a brief history of literacy and its social function, allowing us to understand the phenomenon and role of new literacies. We next outline existing definitions of media literacy, which we critically position in the context of their origin. We continue by briefly presenting educational policies and media literacy and conclude with insights into the contexts of youth media literacy, focusing on their media experiences and incentives within families, education, and among peers.

Exploring changing news repertoires: Towards a typology

The past few decades of journalism studies have been characterized by a focus on change, from the transforming digital media ecology, to shifting usage patterns, transitioning business models, and other pressing developments. However, specifying such changes in relation to news audiences and engagement is challenging. This article aims to unfold the complexity of consumption to specify different processes of changing news use. Employing an abductive approach that augments existing literature with a study on the processes and catalysts of transformation, we develop a heuristic framework to explicate changing news repertoires. The framework establishes where change takes place, explores what qualities change has, examines what dynamic factors drive change, and ultimately elaborates a more precise vocabulary to identify different change processes. Further specifying and modeling the exploration and elaboration phases, the article details how deliberateness, permanence, and scale vary the intensity and direction of change, before developing a typology that systematizes different analytical characteristics of how news media become part of ( emergence), exist within ( maintenance), and are removed from ( disappearance) an individual’s media repertoire. The article provides a detailed, systematic, and innovative approach to analyze news use, providing scholars with a comprehensive, actionable framework for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research to better understand what, exactly, repertoire change “is”. In terms of applicability, the theoretical perspective developed alerts us to the fact that changing news use is often conceptualized by audiences in association with non-journalistic, contextual considerations, which are key to whether or not the potential for changing news use is actualized.

A Media Repertoires Approach to Selective Exposure: News Consumption and Political Polarization in Eastern Europe

In recent years, links between selective news exposure and political polarisation have attracted considerable attention among communication scholars. However, while the existence of selective exposure has been documented in both offline and online environments, the evidence of its extent and its impact on political polarisation is far from unanimous. To address these questions, and also to bridge methodological and geographical gaps in existing research, this paper adopts a media repertoires approach to investigate selective news exposure and polarisation in four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Serbia. Using a combination of population surveys, expert surveys and qualitative interviews, the data for the study were collected between November 2019 and May 2020. We identify five types of news repertoires based on their relative openness to counter-attitudinal sources, and show that selective news repertoires are present in 29% of the entire sample. Our findings also reveal significant cross-country differences, with the more selective news repertoires more prominent in countries characterised by higher levels of polarisation. Furthermore, while the selection of news sources is in line with people's electoral (and to a lesser extent ideological) preferences, our findings show that exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can also be strongly correlated with political and ideological leanings. Our qualitative data suggest that this is because exposure to counter-attitudinal sources can reinforce attitudes, and potentially contribute to polarisation. Qualitative data also highlight the influence of environmental factors (e.g., family), and suggest that selective news consumption is associated with normatively different conceptions of media trust.

Social media repertoires: Social structure and platform use

We analyze how the size and composition of social media repertoires is associated with key sociodemographic variables: age, gender, socioeconomic status, education, and occupation. Specifically, we ask what is the association between these variables and: (a) social media use as a whole, (b) the number of platforms people include in their social media repertoires, (c) the platforms included in such repertoires, and (d) the most prevalent repertoires? To answer these questions, we analyze data from an in-person survey (N = 700) about use of media and communication technologies conducted in 2016 in Argentina by a polling firm. Our findings indicate that: (a) the odds of using social media are higher among younger people, women, those with higher socioeconomic and educational levels, and those employed; (b) whereas an increase in age is associated with a decrease in the size of the repertoire, higher educational attainment is associated with an increase in the number of platforms included in the repertoire; (c) age, gender, education, and occupation are significantly associated with the inclusion of different platforms in the repertoire; and (d) some of these variables are significant for the uptake of different repertoires, but not others. We interpret these findings drawing upon scholarship about digital inequalities and social media repertoires, and we assess and reflect on their implications for research on the digital divide.

Children’s Books and Childhood Reading in Eighteenth‑ and Nineteenth‑Century Denmark

This article sets out to demonstrate the potential of memoirs and autobiographies as sources to study children’s use of books and other media in Denmark between around 1750 and 1850. Research on historical children’s reading cultures in the Nordic countries has been limited, and knowledge of children’s own experiences of reading, including how, when, where, what and with whom they read, is scarce. Despite the fact that most autobiographical writings were put on paper late in the authors’ lives, and even though most were composed by privileged or exceptional individuals, these sources can open up aspects of children’s book and media history which are otherwise largely inaccessible. Inspired by media scholars Hepp and Hasebrink’s concepts of media repertoires and media ensembles, we point to the importance of studying individual children’s selections of media (“repertoires”) in relation to those available in specific social contexts (“ensembles”). The article looks at six memoirs, representing boys and girls, urban and rural settings, and rich and poor families. We consider how these ego‑documents may tell unexpected stories about children’s media repertoires in practice and about the social life of children’s books and reading.

Modeli generacijskih odnosa - od istorijskih sukoba do digitalnog kompleksa

The paper examines generational relations and their potential for social change or further development of consumerist society. First, some hopes of critical theorists are described with a focus on usefulness of generational conflict for social dynamics, but also more negative possibilities related to the deterioration of society and the failure of the project of modernity are examined. Three retrospective models are presented and their possible application in the case of digital phenomena. Ancient Socratic model already perceives the distancing between generations, the problem of knowledge formation and agressive rhetoric among citizens. This is presented in small case studies of knowledge production on Wikipedia and Twitter as a contested political terrain. Liberal Lockean model amplifies the importance of generational conflict for further liberalization of societies, but its theory also has comodifying and exploitative aspects, that are exemplified in family media repertoires, unpaid users' labour on platforms and commercially driven data processing. Romantic Rousseaun model adds nature-friendly and artistic romanticized aspects to intergenerational relations. The analysis shows that its potential for emancipatory language games and environmentalist activism are suppressed within a market oriented framework of digital realm. The final conslusion is that, while critical thinkers expected the conflict of generations would have emancipatory potential, the generational divide serves business and political interests instead.

Youth media repertoires: Age ranges, context factors and privacy management

The overall aim of the study is to trace the interaction between the composition of the media repertoire and the everyday world of adolescents, also looking at privacy management in the course of acquiring digital communication media as part of the media repertoire. In order to do justice to this complexity, young people were not considered as a uniform demographic group, but were divided into three stages. Through this differentiation, a recursive process is to be worked out that makes it possible to also include contextual influencing factors such as peer group, family environment etc. and to expand previous findings on the media repertoire of young people. As a result of this approach, a multi-stage development process was elaborated as well as the privacy management of digital communication media of young people.

Tuning Out the News. A Cross-Media Perspective on News Avoidance Practices of Young News Users in Flanders During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed “coronablocking”: the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of how and why young news users avoid the news. To explore these questions, we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Belgian news users under the age of 35. We propose that news avoidance practices are fluid, as news avoidance was often preceded by moments of increased news consumption, and inherently connected to the specific spatiotemporal context of users and enacted within their broader media repertoire. In our analysis, we discuss the user-identified characteristics which lead users to a ‘tipping point’, at which point they avoided the news to varying degrees by reconfiguring their media repertoire. Three types of reconfigurations are identified: tuning out news content, regulating the flow of information, and controlling the tone of voice, all of which underline users’ agency in shaping their repertoires to avoid the news.

Birds of a Feather Flock Together Online: Digital Inequality in Social Media Repertoires

Communication has long been concerned with people’s media repertoires, yet little of this approach has extended to the combination of social media platforms that people use. Despite their considerable popularity, research has found that people do not select into the use of social network sites (SNSs) randomly, which has implications for both whose voices are represented on them and where messaging can reach diverse people. While prior work has considered self-selection into one SNS, in this article we ask: how are different SNSs linked by user base? Using national survey data about 1,512 US adults’ social media uses, we build networks between SNSs that connect SNS pairs by user base. We examine patterns by subgroups of users along the lines of age, gender, education, and Internet skills finding considerable variation in SNS associations by these variables. This has implications for big data analyses that depend on data from particular social media platforms. It also offers helpful lessons for how to reach different population segments when trying to communicate to diverse audiences.

Older People’s Media Repertoires, Digital Competences and Media Literacies: A Case Study from Italy

Digital media are part of everyday life and have an intergenerational appeal, entering older people’s agendas, practices, and habits. Many people aged over 60 years lack adequate digital competences and media literacies to support learning, well-being, and participation in society, thus imposing a need to discuss older people’s willingness, opportunities, and abilities to use digital media. This study explored older people’s media use and repertoires, digital competences, and media literacies to promote media literacy education across all ages. The article discusses the data from 24 interviews with older people aged 65 to 98 years in Italy to answer the following research questions: What kinds of media repertoires emerge? What kinds of competences and media literacies can be described? What kinds of support and training do older people get and wish to receive? The analysis of the data produced four specific profiles concerning media repertoires: analogic, accidental, digital-instrumental, and hybridised users. Media literacy is still a critical framework, but the interviewees were open to opportunities to improve their competences. The use of digital media has received a strong boost due to the pandemic, as digital media have been the only way to get in touch with others and carry out their daily routine.

Trading spaces: How and why older adults disconnect from and switch between digital media

Studies on disconnection from social media and related technologies tend to focus on the user’s disconnection from one specific technology, and consequently provide an incomplete view. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 57 older adults ages 59+, we find that replacement is more common than complete disconnection, which suggests that research should consider people’s larger digital media repertoire rather than focus on a single technology. Motivations for disconnection include social influences, lack of interest, convenience, time availability and overuse, privacy concerns, and technical barriers. We find that older adults’ motivations for disconnection often mirror those of younger users reported in the literature, but some motivations are unique to older adults. Further, some disconnection motivations of younger users reported in the literature were not found in the responses of our sample of older adults. Overall, our study offers a nuanced view on experiences of ICT disconnection in the age of digital media ubiquity.

밀레니얼 세대의 동영상 미디어 레퍼토리 유형 분석: TV 채널과 OTT 서비스 이용을 중심으로

OTT 서비스의 등장으로 동영상 미디어 이용자가 선택할 수 있는 플랫폼과 콘텐츠는 더욱 다양해졌다. 능동적 미디어 이용자들은 자신의 필요나 선호에 따라 플랫폼을 선택하고, 여러 플랫폼을 조합하여 이용하는 등 다양한 방식으로 동영상 미디어를 소비한다. 본 연구는 TV 채널 및 OTT 서비스 이용량을 중심으로 동영상 미디어 이용자의 이용 패턴을 파악하고자 했다. 동영상 미디어 이용자를 대상으로 설문조사를 실시하여 TV, 유료 OTT 서비스, 무료 OTT 서비스에 대한 미디어 이용량을 조사하였다. 총 155명을 대상으로 수집한 데이터를 활용해 동영상미디어 레퍼토리 유형을 분류하고 유형별 특성을 살펴보았다. K-평균 군집분석 결과, 동영상 미디어 이용자를 유튜브 중심 군집, 유튜브 프리미엄 중심 군집, TV 중심 군집, 넷플릭스 중심 군집으로 구분할 수 있었다. 나아가 이용자의 인구통계학적 특성과 주 시청 장르에 따라 레퍼토리 유형이 달라지는지 검증하였다. 동영상 미디어 레퍼토리 유형과 성별 간에 유의미한 차이가 있는 것으로 나타났고, 동영상 미디어 레퍼토리 유형에 따라 선호 콘텐츠 장르에 차이가 있었으며, 장르별 이용량에 있어서는 게임과 요리/먹방 콘텐츠에 유의미한 차이가 나타났다.

“I just want to be the friendly face of national socialism”: The turn to civility in the cultural expressions of neo-Nazism in Sweden

Abstract This article is based on a case study of the media narratives of the neo-Nazi organisation Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) and situates this particular actor within the broader landscape of violent extremism in Sweden today. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis informed by narrative inquiry, I examine various cultural expressions of neo-Nazi ideology in NRM's extensive repertoire of online media. Theoretically, I turn to cultural perspectives on violent extremism to bring to centre stage the role of popular culture and entertainment in the construction of a meaningful narrative of community and belonging built around neo-Nazism in Sweden today. The analysis explores the convergence between different genres, styles, and content into new cultural expressions of national socialism which bleed into mainstream Internet culture and political discourse in new ways. In the online universe of NRM, the extreme blends with the mainstream, the mundane and ordinary with the spectacular and provocative, and the serious with the silly. In this manner, the analysis lays bare the strategies through which NRM seeks to soften, trivialise, and normalise neo-Nazi discourse using the power and appeal of culture and entertainment.

Media as the great emancipators? Exploring relations between media repertoires and cultural participation in Flanders

Media convergence has afforded users an increasing amount of options regarding the media they consume, available at the click of a button. This has led some to clamor about the potential for media to bridge previously existing inequalities and decrease social stratification not just in media use, but in other realms of society as well. Skeptics have argued that while the convergence of media has given users more options in their own media repertoire, social stratification persists. Moreover, if media do increase a user’s possibilities to participate in other realms of society, the persisting stratification of media use risks enacting a Matthew effect whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Using data from the Flemish participation survey, this article seeks to contribute to this discussion by exploring Flemish media use by constructing media repertoires using latent class analysis and exploring their sociodemographic profiles. Following this analysis, we compare the cultural participation patterns of the six Flemish media repertoires using negative binomial regression analysis. We find that social stratification of media use persists in Flanders, with broad and ‘highbrow’ repertoires predominantly restricted to higher status groups. Moreover, we find a structural homology between the structure of media repertoires and cultural participation, whereby broad repertoires exhibit a similar openness to cultural practices, and repertoires tailored to highbrow media exhibit a similar preference for highbrow cultural activities. As a result, we find that social stratification persists in media use and cultural participation but argues that media repertoires offer a potential entrypoint.