Suchergebnisse

This thematic issue of Media and Communication features articles that address the workings of democracy as understood through the lens of media history. The intersection of democracy and media history brings together two impossibly expansive terms, so expansive that the articles herein cannot provide any meaningful closure to the questions that even a cursory consideration of media history and democracy would provoke. Instead of closure, what these authors develop is a demonstration of the value of media history to our understandings of democracy. Historical methods of inquiry are necessary components for any meaningful understanding of media or democracy, and the authors gathered here work from a multi-hued palette of historiographical approaches. One finds in this issue a careful attention to how issues related to media history and democracy can be investigated through consideration of intellectual history, the history of political debates, journalism history, and the history of media organizations and institutions. These articles make a strong case for the continued relevance of media history to understanding the democracy and the media.

■ This article presents and discusses the methodological issues arising in a project on the advent, diffusion and integration of Finnish television over its 50-year history. The study uses oral history, in the form of written reminiscences, to explore the changing role of television in the life of Finns. This social historical study combines methods of ethnographic television audience studies and oral history studies. This kind of approach is rarely used in media ethnography. It raises questions around themes such as the importance of context, the nature of narratives and coding methods. This article also summarizes how the project's data and methodology have served to produce a third generation media history study. ■

Der Beitrag präsentiert und erläutert die methodischen Aspekte eines Projekts, das sich mit dem Beginn, der Ausbreitung und der Integration des finnischen Fernsehens im Laufe seiner 50jährigen Geschichte befasst. Die Untersuchung setzt bei der Untersuchung der sich wandelnden Rolle des Fernsehens im Leben der Finnen auf Oral History in Form von schriftlichen Erinnerungen. Diese sozialgeschichtliche Studie kombiniert Methoden der ethnographischen Zuschauerforschung und der Zeitzeugenforschung. Dieser Ansatz wurde bislang nur selten in der Medienethnographie verfolgt. Er wirft Fragen auf zu Themen wie der Bedeutung von Kontexten, dem Wesen von Narrativen und zu Kodierungsmethoden. Der Bericht fasst zusammen, wie die Daten und das methodische Vorgehen des Projekts dazu geführt haben, eine dritte Generation medienhistorischer Forschung hervorzubringen. (UNübers.) (UN)

Editors of academic journals make general statements about criteria for accepting submissions, but more specific advice is often needed. What are the standards for history manuscripts in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, especially now that its documentation style is being changed to American Psychological Association (APA)? The journal's history articles are useful examples of how to set substantial purposes and present perceptive interpretations. As they contribute to knowledge, such studies can stimulate thought about human experience and possibilities.

The paper discusses some concepts, trends, and deficits in recent media history, and it makes a plea for a history of communication to implement media into a broader conception of social history. Therefore, we employ a wider notion of mediatization which is used in media and communication studies, and re-formulate it for historical research. On the basis of that notion, we introduce the theoretical concept of 'communicative figurations' which an interdisciplinary research group in Bremen and Hamburg developed to ask how changing media environments and ensembles interrelate with societal and political transformations. In transferring it in research on imagined communities in times of analogue media, the paper presents some early insights into an on-going project and pursues questions about the communicative construction of collectivities.