Cross-WG project "Audiences across media: A comparative baseline study"

Project coordinated by Klaus Bruhn Jensen (kbj @ hum.ku.dk).

Background:

The COST Action ‘Transforming audiences, transforming societies’ has presented a unique opportunity to undertake comparative research about media use in different European countries. A key premise of the Action is that fundamental changes are currently witnessed globally in the communicative practices of audiences – communication that occurs one-to-one, one-to-many, as well as many-to-many across a whole range of media. Accordingly, a Task Force was created to undertake an empirical comparative study of European media audiences.
The project addresses a modified version of Lasswell’s (1948) classic questions: Who communicates with whom, to what extent, through what media, in which flows and networks? A monitoring of these questions holds significant potential for theory development, commercial innovation, and policy considerations – and for tracking developments across countries, cultures, and time. With such baseline information, research will be better equipped to answer additional questions regarding media and their communications: with what consequences and implications?