Media Generations. The communicative Construction of Community in mediatized Worlds

• Duration: 2014 – 2018
• Project lead: Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp

Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp (ZeMKI-Lab “Mediatization and Globalization”)

Research network/cooperation: SPP 1505 “Mediatized Worlds”

Funding institution: DFG

With advancing mediatization and in particular the mediatization push of digitalization, more and more diverse possibilities are emerging to create and experience communitization through media. After the focus of research in the first two phases of the “Mediatized Worlds” priority programme had already been on young (16 to 30 years) and older people (after retirement, from 60 years), the main focus in the third funding phase was now on people in the middle age group between 31 and 59 years. The aim of the project was to investigate the everyday communicative networking practices of these middle-aged people with regard to which (new) mediatized community horizons emerge through the appropriation of (also digital) media. On this basis, the media-related challenges faced by middle-aged people with regard to communitization processes were examined. The focus was on their communicative demarcation, their communicative mobility and their communicative participation.

On the one hand, the process perspective results from the fact that different experiences are made in relation to certain phases of life. On the other hand, the media-generational self-positioning is characterized by a continuous “doing”. Three points are of particular importance in this definition: Firstly, media-relatedness means that our statements refer exclusively to the media experiences characteristic of a generation and not to its experiential space as a whole. Secondly, the media-generational specificity implies that different media generations are not to be equated with homogeneous modes of appropriation. Rather, they stand for overall constellations of appropriation practices that exhibit typical patterns of change over the course of a person’s biography. Thirdly and finally, generational media positioning stands for the existence of a collectively shared perspective on one’s own media generation. This means that the members of one media generation position themselves in relation to other media generations. Against the background of formative media environments in childhood and adolescence as well as different biographical phases at the onset of the digitalization push, we can distinguish at least three media generations: the “digital media generation”, the “secondary digital media generation” and the “mass media generation”.
Our data shows that the role of media in community building varies in each case. Younger people use a greater variety of media for their communicative networking than older people. In contrast, older people show greater differences in the composition of their community-relevant media repertoires. These range from traditional (television, newspaper, radio and landline telephone) to comprehensive digital media repertoires. Overall, our results show that mediatization does not simply result in a one-dimensional transformation of community life. For example, members of the digital media generation also use ‘new media’ to network within traditional community horizons. The mediatization push of digitalization thus has a fundamental impact on the way community life is communicatively produced across all media generations. However, the mediatized community horizons themselves remain surprisingly stable.