Lab Media Change and Long-Term Transformation Processes

Media emerge, change, and disappear – yet often in ways quite different from what their contemporaries expect. The lab investigates how media communication and its conditions change over long time spans and what these processes mean for society, public spheres, and culture. In doing so, it connects perspectives from communication and media history with the analysis of present and future transformations. At its core are questions that look beyond the horizon of the merely new: How do past media experiences shape the way people navigate current disruptions? What futures become imaginable in times of deep mediatisation – and which alternatives are lost along the way? How do people develop personal orientations toward the credibility of different information sources, and how do these orientations shift in the course of media change?

Research is organised around two pillars: Media change and alternative realities asks how alternative interpretations of reality take shape through media and become socially consequential – between pro-democratic dissent and anti-democratic radicalisation, from social trigger issues to collapse and future imaginaries. Media change and digital gaming explores game cultures as spaces of communication, memory, and transformation, and contributes to building the research focus on Digital Gaming Research at ZeMKI.

Methodologically, the lab primarily works with qualitative-interpretive approaches and historical-comparative methods. The lab also holds responsibility for the collections of the Deutsche Presseforschung (German Press Research) at the University of Bremen.