Das neue Medien-Menü: Fernsehen und WWW als funktionale Alternativen?

As new media technologies develop and become established, the supply of media services expands. Along with this development, the question arises of how this affects traditional media. As other new media have, the Internet, too, has triggered debates about the future of the «old» media. This paper discusses whether the proliferation of the World Wide Web can have effects on television use. To do this, both relevant theoretical approaches and the state of empirical research are introduced and discussed. Present research results do not consider the systematic difference between cognitive schemata concerning media use as they are reproduced in face-to-face interviews on the one hand, and actual media use on the other. An innovative research concept is developed that takes this critique into account and differentiates between gratification expectations and situational gratifications sought and obtained. As regards gratification expectations, television is superior to the World Wide Web. It is more powerful on all gratification dimensions. Considering actual use, though, the World Wide Web has already outstripped television on some of the dimensions. It is used more often to satisfy specific needs. Thus, cognitive schemata of media use lag behind the actual changes in every day life.     

Werte und Normen als Sollensvorstellungen in der KommunikationswissenschaftValues and norms as ought-statements in communication studies

Values and norms as research topics are central theoretical and empirical constructs in communication studies and are also used to substantiate research questions or to interpret results. Despite the relevance of values and norms, a respective debate within the discipline has been neglected so far. It is a challenge to discuss the values and norms of our discipline and to initiate an exchange of the societal relevance of one’s own research. The network “Values and norms as research objects and guiding principles in communication research”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), makes a contribution to this by systematically analyzing values and norms in communication studies and by critically reflecting them. Therefore, the paper proposes to operationalize values and norms as “ought-statements”. Ought-statements either describe a situational state that is explicitly evaluated or address a desirable state. Three elements of an ought-statement are identified, which are coded in a multistage content analysis. The operationalization of norms and values as ought-statements allows not only to examine already known values and norms, but also to assess all possible values and norms, to assess the change of values and norms more validly in long-term studies, and to assess those constructs that are labeled as norms or values by the researchers themselves.     

Twitter als Wahlkampfmedium

The change of individual political communication is a crucial element in the debate about the mediatization of politics. More and more politicians as well as citizens make use of digital platforms to exchange their views on political issues and to inform themselves. This raises the question to what extent politicians offer options for digital interaction and thus encourage first-hand communication. This paper examines the use of the microblogging service Twitter by politicians during selected federal state election campaigns in Germany in 2011. The analysis focused on elements that facilitate participation and was conducted by using the ??functional operator-model??. Data analysis shows that politicians use twitter in either a ??personal-interactive?? or ??topic-informative?? style. Regarding deliberative structures of twitter communication, however, there is still much to gain??both on the part of the politicians and of the citizens.     

Propaganda als ideologische Kommunikation

In view of the many military and warlike conflicts, the term »propaganda« is often used in both press coverage and in scientific analysis. It is widely ambiguous though what exactly is meant by propaganda, and to what extent it can be distinguished from similar forms of communication, such as public relations and advertising. Reviewing previous approaches concerning propaganda and using the totalitarism approach, this article argues that propaganda can only be defined as a process of communication that puts forward extensive claims which are to be enforced by the use of an ideological system. In contrast, public relations and advertising merely put forward particular resp. singular claims which are to be bolstered by the use of images and positive pictures. With regard to propaganda, the structural links between the political and the public system are so tight that the autonomy of the public system is partly or completely annihilated. As a communication process tied to the formation of power, propaganda works with the symbolically generalized communication medium of power and, owing to its ideological foundation, also with the medium of truth.     

Statistenrolle als Migrant zu vergeben

Studies regarding the media portrayal of migrants differentiate between the actor roles of active speakers and passive objects. Furthermore, the single indicators applied in many studies cannot capture the interconnectedness of public debates on migrants. By understanding the debate as a symbolic network of media-imparted interactions, this study analyses the discursively important role of the addressee. United in the concept of the active-passive-balance of public representation, the network-analytic indicators show to what extent the media are representing migrants adequately or whether they over-/underrepresent them in specific roles. The gathered relational data of a claims analysis of press articles from June 1999 and 2009 portray changes of migrants?? actor roles. A high legitimation of migrants as addressees substantiates indications of positive discrimination in the sense of ??goodwill coverage??. Structurally the media-imparted interactions, esp. the level of conflict in the debate, point towards existing partitioning tendencies in the social collectives?? discourse.