Investigating Media Use across Borders and Cultures

Bremen.
The final session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ pre-conference for ECREA 2010 today starts with Hanna Domeyer, who was briefly my office mate at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg when I visited there a couple of years ago. Her interest is in how media users relate to one another across borders and cultures. Such intercultural communication is to be seen as a special mode of social interaction that may happen anywhere and at any time. So, the research challenge is less in finding new research methods, but in developing a specific research perspective on such forms of interaction.

Media use across cultures is made possible by the increasing range of media options available to us. These options can be combined in a wide range of ways. Research into this is often limited to a predefined segment of the media, or a specific form of transnational or transcultural relations. Responses to these limitations include a focus on the entirety of the media forms that a particular person uses, and/or by examining a variety of transnational or transcultural relations.

In order to do so, it is useful to look at the individual’s social act of relating to reference groups, through social interaction via the media. This builds on the notion of relational media repertoires: examining the entirety of meaningful acts of relating through specific media forms, their interrelations, and their specific functions. From this, it is possible to identify the different individual components utilised.

Relevant categories in examining media communication could be the imagination required, the possible interaction structures, the level of (inter)activity, and the degree of mediatisation. As transnational and transcultural relations are performed in the process, the specific media references, the degree of spatial attachment, the potential for border crossing, and the necessary language configuration can be assessed.

The potential of this approach is that it opens up a new perspective on media use across borders and cultures, while also including subjectivity and thus pinpointing specific acts. Additionally, this approach is systematic and transferrable – it can be transferred to different cultural contexts and media users, and can help to integrate separate branches of research.