Public Connection: Individuals' media repertoires and the re-figuration of publics

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Project C investigates the ways in which individuals connect to the wider public and contribute to the re-figuration of public communication. Individuals' media repertoires and other forms of connecting to publics will be analyzed as 'public connection repertoires'. In our understanding, public connection repertoires include all orientations and practices by means of which an individual refers to some kind of public. The term refers to several 'publics' as social entities that endure beyond individuals' private worlds. For instance, individuals can connect to (or disconnect from) the general public of their home country, the more localized public where they live, a special interest group dedicated to a specific topic, or the fan community of a specific facet of popular culture.The design follows three main objectives: to describe and understand individual public connection repertoires and how they relate to biographical and social contexts; to analyze the consequences these repertoires have for public connection and for the communicative figurations of publics; to examine how current trends in the media environment shape individuals’ public connection repertoires and, through these repertoires, the communicative figurations of publics.The project’s empirical approach combines complementing modules that examine the three research objectives from different perspectives. Through a qualitative panel analysis comprising two waves of media diaries and semi-structured interviews, we will reconstruct in detail, which publics individuals connect themselves to, for what reasons, and through which kinds of communicative practices. Building on this module, we will design a standardized survey that will provide a detailed description and analysis of contemporary public connection repertoires. The third module employs the qualitative methodology of the first and applies it to individuals who are particularly innovative in their methods of connecting to different publics, individuals we refer to as 'pioneer users'; applying our analysis to these users will help us to widen the spectrum of public connection repertoires in the context of deep mediatization. With reference to the objectives of the whole package – that is, to investigate the re-figuration of public communication in an age of deep mediatization –, Project C addresses the question of how individuals, through their public connection repertoires, contribute to the re-figuration of publics. To the other projects of this package proposal, Project C contributes theoretical and empirical evidence on the role established media organizations and different forms of pioneer journalism play in individual users' public connection repertoires (Project A on pioneer journalism) and on how changes in the journalism-audience relationship (Project B on journalism-audience relationships) are reflected in the ways individual users connect to different publics.