No. 15 - Uwe Hasebrink and Andreas Hepp: How to research cross-media practices Investigating media repertoires and media ensembles

In a time of ‘deep mediatization’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 34-56) – the progressing entanglement of various social domains with media (Livingstone, 2009: 1) –, cross-media approaches to investigating media use are becoming increasingly relevant. In this respect, we have to consider cross-media practices on at least two different levels. The first level refers to the ‘individual’, whose cross-media use can be characterised as a particular ‘media repertoire’ (Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012). The second level refers to ‘social domains’ (communities, organisations etc.) that can be understood as communicative figurations characterised by a particular ‘media ensemble’ (Hepp and Hasebrink, 2014). Typically, cross-media research focuses either on the individual or on the social domain. These perspectives rarely speak to each other. In contrast to such a delineated approach, we propose the interlacement of both perspectives to help clarify the conceptual and empirical relation between media use as individual practice and as part of a figuration. At the level of the individual, media repertoires are composed of media-related communicative practices by means of which individuals relate themselves to the figurations they are involved in. At the level of figurations, media ensembles are characterised by the media-related communicative practices of the actors involved in the particular social domain under analysis. Therefore, both perspectives are necessary if we want to understand cross-media practices in everyday life.

About the authors

Uwe Hasebrink
Uwe Hasebrink, after studying Psychology and German Philology in Hamburg, he subsequently worked for three years at the Institute for Social Psychology at the University of Hamburg. He joined the Hans Bredow Institute in 1986 as a researcher; from 1988 he also acted as the executive manager. In 1998, he was elected to the Institute’s directorate. In 1999, he was Acting Professor of Communications at the College of Music and Theatre in Hanover. In spring 2001, he received a chair in “Empirical Communications Studies” from the University of Hamburg and the Hans Bredow Institute jointly. Since 2009 he is a member of the board of directors of the Research Center for Media and Communication (RCMC), which brings together university and non university media and communication research in Hamburg, and at the same time one of the spokespersons of the Graduate School Media and Communication, which is being supported within the context of the Hamburg Initiative of excellence. Alongside this, he was spokesperson for the specialist group on reception research in the DGPuK from 1998 to 2003, co-publisher of the series “Rezeptionsforschung” (reception research) from 2003 to 2007, and a member of the Management Committee of the International Radio Research Network (IREN) from 2004-2006. He has been a member of the Executive Board of the European Communication held a curatorship at the Academy for Journalism and Communications in Hamburg since 2001. Since 2009 he has been a member of the international board of the “Journal of Children and Media”. His research emphases at the Institute are in the areas of media use and media contents, as well as media politics; in recent years these included primarily: patterns of individual use and media repertoires, the convergence of the media from the user’s perspective, consequences of online media for classical media, media use with children and young people, forms of user interest vis-à-vis the media, as well as European media and European audiences.

Andreas Hepp
Andreas Hepp is Professor for Media and Communication Studies with the special areas Media Culture and Communication Theory at the ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research. Hepp graduated 1995 from the University of Trier with an MA-degree in German Studies and Political Science, focusing on media communication. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a research associate in the interdisciplinary research project “Talking about Television. The Everyday Appropriation of TV“ at the University of Trier (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG). In 1997, he finished his doctoral thesis on everyday appropriation of television, combining various perspectives of Cultural Studies with sociological conversation analysis. After having done some post-doctoral research at the University of Trier, Andreas Hepp was a lecturer at the Interfaculty Institute for Applied Cultural Studies at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in 1999. Between 1999 and 2003, he worked as a research associate at first, and later on as an academic assistant (wissenschaftlicher Assistent) at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the Technical University of Ilmenau. During that time, he was also a research fellow at the Nottingham Trent University, UK, and a visiting researcher at the University of Sunderland, UK. In 2004, he finished his habilitation thesis on media cultures and globalisation. In 2003 and 2004, he was a deputy professor for media sociology and media psychology at the University of Muenster. From 2005 to 2010 he was professor for communications at the faculty for cultural studies, University of Bremen.