Research @ ERMeCC
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Researchers and PhD students associated with ERMeCC conduct research at the crossroads of media and culture, communication technology, and social change. The emerging digital and globalized world provides a focus for our research, which considers a variety of media and cultural forms, ranging from the printed to the digital, from popular to high arts, from multinational to local producers, and from mainstream to alternative media and cultures. We seek to advance interdisciplinary, empirical work based upon scholarship in various social science disciplines and we are committed to the development of comparative and multi-method approaches to research.
Both the "old" and the "new" media are capable of reaching large numbers of people in diverse social settings. Consequently, media can be powerful agents of social change, which may serve as catalysts for or brakes on social renewal and reform. The media and cultural industries also represent an increasingly significant business sector, which has undergone a true metamorphosis in recent decades, due to several, interrelated, technological, economic, social, cultural, and political developments.
Our work addresses transformations in media and culture as well as their transformational power in society. We seek to elucidate current developments and changes in the media and cultural industries, as well as the changing ways in which individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions use media and culture to express their identities and ideas and to advance their positions. We study these transformations in relation to a range of wider societal forces and developments, notably the rise of the internet and other new communication technologies, the shifting relations between the global, the national and the local, increased social diversity and individualization.
