Journalismus und Medienwandel in Osteuropa

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Mediennutzung und Umweltbewusstsein: Dependenz- und Priming-Effekte

In a comparative perspective, the article is concerned with the contribution of media use to EU citizens’ levels of environmental knowledge and awareness. Mass media are the most important source for environmental information, and media use contributes considerably to the amount of information people hold on environmental issues. In addition, media use bears upon the perception of the burden to the environment, the worry about the state of the environment in one’s own country, and the worries about the environment in general. The explanatory power of media use is largest for those judgments that relate to the parts of the environment that cannot be directly experienced. Besides this result, which is in accordance to the dependency theory of media effects, the analysis corroborates a priming effect: The media affect judgments on the environmental burden one has to suffer and on the state of the environment even if these judgments can be based on one’s own perception. EU citizens, however, complain much less about the burden on their own environment than they worry about the state of the environment in general. This gap also, as is demonstrated, can be traced back, at least in part, to an influence of the media. Results for single EU countries partly differ from these general results, most likely due to differences in how much environmental issues are politicized in the media and how intensely they are covered.     

Aufmerksamkeit und Geld, schenken und zahlen

In recent years economic influences seem to have grown stronger in the media system. This general impression, however, is not supported by general systems theory. Analytically it is possible to distinguish a market trading attention from a market trading money. The interplay of both markets shows a different kind of interdependence between the media system and the economic system. The eminent importance of the market of attention and the far-reaching consequences for media economics are revealed. The latter is a promising area which should incorporate traditional mass media as well as new communication technologies such as the internet.     

E-Learning in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft

Using electronic media as teaching and learning tools is no longer a novelty; the fast development and diffusion of §new media”, such as CD-ROM and theWorldWideWeb, have given the use of these media a big boost in recent years. Thus, a number of electronic learning projects have been developed in the field of communication and media studies, of which, however, no general overview was available so far. This article provides such an overview, allows for classification and evaluation of these projects, and thus represents a prerequisite for the future success of such projects. A survey by the authors among communication and media studies departments in German-speaking countries accounted for 14 electronic learning projects that showed fairly diverse emphases with respect to their contents, concepts, didactics, technology, and organisation. In a case study on the Leipzig-based §Distance Learning Propädeutikum" (DLP), the article explores the advantages of electronic learning systems and discusses the challenges in the development and application of such systems. This section also draws on the results of a project-specific evaluation. Both the survey and the case study show that rather than substituting courses or cutting costs on instructors, the main advantage of electronic learning systems lies in their ability to make teaching and learning processes more independent of temporal and spatial constraints.     

Issues Management in Wirtschaft und Politik

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Empathie und Medienempathie

Empathy is the capacity and tendency of a person to recognize, understand, and be sensitive to other people’s emotions. The roots of this construct go back to the psychology of emotions and personality psychology. Communication science frequently makes use of it to describe the experiences and emotions during media reception. However, the question can be asked whether empathy and media empathy are two different constructs requiring different measuring instruments. To begin with, this question will be discussed theoretically with important arguments being presented both in favor of and against the thesis of congruent constructs. Subsequently, a measuring instrument for media empathy will be introduced which is constructed following precisely the tried-and-tested operationalization of empathy. It was employed in two studies, and their findings will be compared with one another. The results display both similarities and marked differences, especially with regard to reception variables. Since communication science uses media empathy to explain the effects of reception, different references to reception variables represent a particularly apt argument for the broad independence of the construct and thus for a separate measuring instrument. The present measuring instrument, developed in the context of a pilot study, will be suggested as a provisionally valid operationalization.     

Medienforschung und Anthropologie

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Medien und Integration

Although attention to the relationship between social integration and media has increased over the years, a gap remains in terms of quantitative content analysis on this topic. This applies particularly to the content of foreign-language media, probably due in part to the difficult operationalization of the concept of ??integration??. The paper outlines an action theory-based framework for the identification and empirical analysis of integration-related media content. The ??integrative function?? of the media can be understood as the dissemination of matching definitions of stereotyped situations to support individuals in successfully coordinating their actions. Of particular importance are four processes that grant access to societal resources: (1) Culturation, (2) Placement, (3) Interaction, and (4) Identification. These processes represent a logical point of reference for an empirical operationalization and analysis of integration-relevant media content (conceived as meta-messages). To test this framework, a focus study of Turkish-language media was conducted. The results provide evidence that the concept allows a broader perspective and detailed analysis of media content concerning integration and the processes involved. Overall however, integration-related content only plays a marginal role in Turkish-language media, at least in times of routine coverage.     

Medienwirtschaft und Gesellschaft

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Pierre Bourdieu und die Journalismusforschung in Frankreich

Ohne Zusammenfassung Dr. Stefanie Averbeck ist wissenschaftliche Assistentin am Lehrstuhl für Historische und Systematische Kommunikationswissenschaft der Universit?t Leipzig.     

Digitale Perspektiven in der Kommunikations- und Mediengeschichte

In the discussion about the future of communication and media science in digital times, this article focuses on the position and perspective of communication and media history. The challenges, problems and potentials associated with digitization are illustrated using the example of historical press research. Within the media ensemble of classical mass communication, the periodic press in particular benefits from the retrospective digitization of historical media and their digital edition in databases and portals. For historical press research, digitized newspapers and digital newspaper portals represent an originally new, because increasingly digital research situation: Digital newspaper portals as a novel, originally digital world for newspapers not only facilitate the path to newspapers and their contents, they also open them up as digital resources machine-readable and thus open up completely new paths for research—not least supported by digital methods.The main objective of this article is to discuss the epistemological-methodological problems and the practical operationalization of digitally framed or supported research processes in historical press research and to present concrete perspectives of knowledge and research strategies for practice. With this aim in mind, the paper discusses three points:(1.) Methodological and practical consequences of historical press research in digital research environments. With the digitization of newspapers and their digital reproduction in newspaper portals, their source character shifts essentially in three dimensions: They are edited and indexed digitally and their complete content is made accessible through optical character recognition. This makes previously unimportant technical aspects such as data formats, portal interfaces, search algorithms and programming interfaces very relevant for the methodology of historical press research. A primary methodological effect of the digital reorganization of newspapers in data and portals is the reversal of the usual reading practice: from “top down” to “bottom up”. With the help of “keyword searching”, newspapers can now be searched comprehensively and transversely to the order of the newspaper original. Nevertheless, there is a warning against an all too naïve and uncritical usage of digitized newspapers and newspaper portals. In practice, some problems and risks are crucial for the conception of historical newspaper research in digital research environments: Besides a hardly standardized and in large parts “wild”, because often uncoordinated and selective digitization of newspapers, the newspaper portals are different in their conception as well as characterized by different content, technical, legal and entrepreneurial conditions.(2.) Historical newspapers as digital sources in practice. The methodological and technical framework are fundamental and far-reaching for the further practical use of newspapers as digital sources in research. In each research step, it must be considered that digitized newspapers are genuinely new and, depending on the quality and depth of digitization, very complex sources with information gains and losses compared to the originals. Newspapers are not simply digitized, they are digitally constructed and differ in this construction from each other. In this respect, historical press researchers are increasingly becoming “users”. However simple and uncomplicated newspaper portals may be in practice, one must incorporate the implicit functions (hidden in algorithms, data and code) and the limits of these knowledge engines and their “correct” use into the research process. Combining and mediating classical hermeneutic methods with search technologies is an essential moment in the practical handling of digitized newspapers.(3.) Historical press research and digital methods. In the light of the new research situation which is emerging with digitized newspapers and newspaper portals, it is obvious that historical press research should increasingly open up to the possibilities of digital methods. In the digital method discussion of historical press research, one concept in particular forms a central point of reference: Franco Moretti’s concept of “Distant Reading”. Basically, “Distant Reading”—and this is what makes this perspective so interesting for historical press research in dealing with the considerable metadata and full text volumes of digitized newspapers—is about the quantitative-automatic indexing of large text corpora using methods and techniques of “Text Mining”. Digital text methods are thus seriously changing the way we look at texts and the research practice with texts such as newspapers: In parts, they automate and accelerate reading processes, produce “new” text extracts by the computer, generate new interpretation contexts between individual text, corpus and condensate, and thus set new orientation points for “close reading”. Computers and digital text methods thus do not relieve researchers of interpretation. Rather, they constantly challenge them to interpret in a continuous interplay in order to give meaning to the text patterns discovered by machines.In spite of all these advantages, digital methods have so far only been used sporadically in historical press research. For this reason, finally a digital workflow for research processes in historical press research will be presented, which illustrates and summarizes essential challenges, problems, solutions and potentials of digitally framed or supported research in press history.     

Thomas Gruber und Gero Himmelsbach Honorarprofessoren in Bamberg

Ohne Zusammenfassung