WP8 (HF)/ WP3 (NF) Forschungsfeld Medienwandel

This lecture series is about how and why certain features of the media landscape have changed, and others haven’t, and why some of them have changed very slowly. Computers and the internet have left the media landscape much altered. The world is not what it was, but neither is it novel all the way to its extremities. The lectures focus on various contemporary cases of media change, concerning how media content is produced, paid-for, distributed, and regulated; and how that content is consumed—and that consumption measured. The cases cover everything from AI to audience measurement, personalization to pornography. The cases are examined through two lenses. Firstly, a lifecycle model of media evolution that looks at how media—new and old—co-evolve through adaptation, competition, and cooperation. And secondly, Professor Thurman’s own Six Rs framework—Revolution, Resistance, Rapidity, Regulation, Reversals, and Remediation—which conceptualises media change as a non-linear and sometimes slow process that is driven by much more than technology and is incessantly incorporating the past.