LEI_F_01 Media Use Strategies and Skills. Wege zur Teilhabe zur digitalen Gesellschaft?
Objectives/ Research Questions
The subproject LEI_F_01: ‘Media Use Strategies and Skills. Wege zur Teilhabe zur digitalen Gesellschaft?’ examines the connection between social cohesion and (partially) public communication of populist groups and young people. Public communication is transformed by social online media. One can observe a fragmentation of society (= fragmentation) in which hierarchical patterns of interpretation are established (= stratification). Of central interest are firstly the political, economic, media-legal and media-technical conditions of online platforms, which are currently contributing to the fragmentation and stratification of society, but whose potential lies in deliberative participation and thus also in strengthening social cohesion. Secondly, specific media practices and strategies of populist groups and their dialogic follow-up communication on platforms are to be reconstructed. In this way, it will be possible to gain an understanding of communication strategies that undermine democracy and their significance for the identity formation of young people. Thirdly, in the sense of the transfer idea, it is also about the development of possibilities for action on various levels, which aim to contain or prevent fragmentation and stratification.
Thematic reference to social cohesion
The subproject contributes to research on the sources and threats to social cohesion by addressing the intersection between the thematic fields of populism and social cohesion and (digital) public spheres. In the common heuristics of the FGZ, the subproject contributes to the elucidation of political myths and other forms of collectively effective narrative whose conditions of communication it investigates. Populism is a political narrative whose communicative framework conditions, target group-specific practices and strategies, as well as patterns of use and media-critical competencies to be built up, are the focus of research.
The methodological approach of the subproject is thus an empirical-analytical one. Social cohesion forms the dependent variable, while media-critical competencies intervene the independent variable populism.
The project focuses on the cohort of 12- to 19-year-olds. The use of the Internet - whether for communication, entertainment or information purposes - is omnipresent in the everyday life of young people today: 91 % of 12 to 19-year-olds are online every day, mostly with their smartphone. In the JIM Study 2018, one in five young people stated that they frequently come into contact with hate on the Internet, 17% occasionally encounter hate messages, and 28% at least rarely (see Medienpädagogischer Forschungsverbund Südwest 2018). Young people encounter corresponding comments or postings on the social media platforms Instagram and YouTube and in individual cases also on Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter as well as in online games and comment areas of news offerings. If we look at the complaints about incitement of the people and right-wing extremist content on the Internet in this context, this number has increased almost eightfold from 2014 to 2015. The data on young people's media usage and the observed increase in the spread of hatred, incitement and discrimination on the Internet make it clear that the central challenge of digitization is no longer to enable them to use digital media, but rather to enable young people to participate constructively and critically in the Internet and in society. The aim of the research project is to contribute to this. The question is which specific, media-critical competencies are needed by young users in the digital age in order to participate constructively in society and to recognize and avoid destructive forms of use.
