Review of Norwegian audience research

Transcription

1 Lars Nyre and Tanja Storsul. August 27, Review of Norwegian audience research In this introduction we interpret audience research as empirically grounded analyses of people s experiences, emotions, opinions and attitudes towards modern, hi-tech media. We present some characteristics of Norwegian audience research in three parts: 1) national characteristics, 2) the dominant research paradigm, 3) selected qualitative topics. National characteristics Norway is a homogenous welfare state with 4,8 million inhabitants, located to the north of Denmark and west of Sweden. The country is mountainous and cut through by fjords, lakes and valleys, which traditionally has made transportation and communication difficult, even in the central Oslo area. People make their living from fish, oil and gas from the Atlantic, hydroelectric industry, agriculture, turism, craft trades, factories hospitals, universities and other public institutions, etc. The Norwegian people have seen a remarkable increase in wealth, freedom and security after World War II, partly enabled by the lucrative tax income from oil production in the North Sea after 1970 (Halvorsen and Stjernø 2008), but also by a strong political system with high trustworthiness among the citizens. The Norwegian society is set apart from mainland Europe, and this has led to great visions of the different country. In 1972 and 1994 there were general referendums about EU-membership, and the Norwegians voted no in both cases. Local democracy has been in place since the early 19 th century. The value of equality has always been strong, and Norway is quite homogenous when it comes to income, living conditions and health of its citizens. This is mainly the result of a systematic welfare policy since This homogeneity influences the patterns of media consumption, and the divides in media use are smaller in Norway than in many other countries. This has two particularly interesting consequences: strong local newspapers, and strong digital media. Television is the medium with the widest reach in Norway as in many other countries, but nevertheless 65% of the population read local and national newspapers on a daily basis, and this makes Norway one of the most newspaper-consuming countries in the world. New media has a wide reach in the Norwegian population.73 % of the people use the Internet daily. 82 % of them have access to the Internet via broadband at home, and 97 % have a mobile phone (SSB 2010: - 1 -

2 Mediebarometer 2009). This has made industrial actors talk about Norway as a media laboratory that can be used as a test-ground for new products and services. It has also trigged a number of studies of use and users of new media products and services in Norway. The dominant paradigm Norway does not have a long history of research on media audiences. For decades after 1933 the NRK saw little value in asking audiences what they thought and wanted, since their remit was to inform and educate them according to their own expertise. The USA, on the other hand, saw commercial and academic effects studies from the 1930s and interview studies from the 1940s. Norway did not register or analyse the country s audience behaviour until the 1970s. A study from 1972 is a milestone in the Norwegian tradition, namely Anita Werner s study of how children in the Arctic county of Finnmark experienced the introduction of television (Werner 1972). From the 1990s onward, audience research has become an important part of media studies in Norway. There are two main approaches to audience research in Norway. The dominant one is qualitative studies focusing on thick descriptions with interviews and focus groups. We will refer to a range of individual studies below. The theoretical approach builds on the critical tradition of British cultural studies, especially by its attention to popular taste and culture in film, television, computer games and so on (Gripsrud 2002). Furthermore, the Norwegian milieu of qualitative studies has a leaning towards German humanism, where people are studied as complex individuals who interact reflexively with their culture (Gentikow 2005), and not as an anonymous mass that can be studied in a positivist manner. Hans Skjervheim was a major Norwegian ideologue of this social and humanistic movement (Skjervheim 1974; Skjervheim 1995). The second tradition is American effects studies based on questionnaires and various types of use-registration, for example set-top boxes. This approach has become more important since the 1990s, due to the introduction of market driven media and the ensuing use-value of ratings and opinion polls (Waldahl 1999). Regular analyses of statistical data have been made for several decades (Høst 1979; Høst 1987; Høst 1998). The Central statistics bureau publishes yearly reports of media consumption; see for example (Vaage 1997) (Vaage 2009). There are monthly and weekly statistical surveys of media use and opinions, typically conducted by government bodies like SSB and private market research agencies like TNS Gallup. A university-sponsored database contains a large body of such audience data, see 2

3 In this review we will not deal with the latter tradition, but we can expand on it in the future if the COST Action wants. Selected qualitative topics Children. As in other countries, Norwegian qualitative research has been concerned with the role media play in young people s lives, and how children and young people use the media. There are broad studies of how children live with media (Werner 1986) (Selmer-Olsen 1990), (Tønnessen 2000; Tønnessen 2007), (Hake 1996), (Tingstad 2006) (Hagen and Wold 2009), Kaare, Brantzæg og Heim 2008) the influence of media violence in television ((Bjørnebekk and Bjørnebekk 2006) computer games (Karlsen 2000), (Karlsen 2010); sociological analyses of children s everyday life with media (Gullestad 1996; Hagen 2003) (Haldar and Frønes 1998), safety on the Internet (Staksrud og Livingstone 2009), globalization (Vettenranta 2010), and computer use (Hagen 2003). Minorities. Studies have been made of the experience of Norwegian media among Turkish immigrants (Kigilcim 1991) and Iranian immigrants (Alghasi 2009). ethnographic studies of how ethnic minority youth use online media for self-expression (Mainsah 2009). Television. In the 1990s there were several historical projects including the audience experience of film and televison. (Skretting and Gripsrud 1994), and of the rececption of the quite un-norwegian TV series Dynasty in the Norwegian public sphere. Quite recently an analysis has been made of the reception of digital television from 2006, in a large interview study Gentikow Qualitative studies of the NRK has been made (Hake and Norsk rikskringkasting 2006), (Hake 1998). Dating programs on Norwegian television (Hagen, Syvertsen et al. 2001), the role of audiences in the TV-strategies during election campaigns (Aalberg and Jenssen 2007). A study of opinions about participating in broadcast programs (Bøe 2006), and a comparative study of the same issue in Norway and Ireland in (Nyre and O Neill forthcoming). As far as we know, there are no qualitiative studies of radio listening in Norway. Internet. With the development of the internet and personal digital media, media habits have changed dramatically since the 1990s. Audiences are empowered by highly effective feedback technologies like , chat rooms, social media, etc. Studies focus on how users are becoming more influential not only as consumers, but also as producers of media content for various platforms. Media use is considered as participation in local government (Brandtzæg and Lüders 2008) (Mortensen 2003; Enli and Skogerbø 2008), children (Gansmo 2004), (Svoen 2008), maintaining a semi-public profile in social media (Storsul et al 2008), 3

4 playing computer games (Karlsen 2010), and playing multiuser adventure and fantasy games (Mortensen 2003), (Mortensen 2009), downloading popular music (Nag 2010), and creating a complex representation of themselves (Lüders 2007), (Brandtzæg and Lüders 2009), (Lundby 2008). Mobile phones. A number of studies have followed the diffusion of mobile phones. These include quantitative studies of mobile phone use among young people (Skog 2006), studied user dynamics in groups and among individuals (Ling and Yttri 2003; Ling 2004) and the use of sms and mms correspondence (Prøitz 2007). Magazines. Among the analogue media, there is an interesting PhD-project about the attractions of women s magazines among Norwegian women Brita Ytre Arne (2009; forthcoming). Conclusion There is a rich literature about Norwegian audience behaviour from the 1990s and onward, but the lack of a longer-lasting research history seriously limits the researcher s insight into changes in behaviour over time. It becomes really difficult to compare the market-driven media environment of the present time with the more ideological and slow-moving environments of the past. Even though radio was an important medium thirty years ago there are no studies of its use at that time that could be compared to radio use today, or with the use of other media. This flaw can only be remedied by historical research on relevant aspects of Norwegian media behaviour, in addition to the follow-up of the present. Literature Alghasi, S. (2009). Iranians in Norway : media consumption and identity making. [Oslo], Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences Unipub. Bjørnebekk, G. and R. T. Bjørnebekk (2006). Barne- og ungdomsvold, Abstrakt. Brandtzæg, P. B. and M. Lüders (2008). ecitizen2.0. : the ordinary citizen as a supplier of public-sector information. Trondheim, SINTEF ICT. Brandtzæg, P. B. and M. Lüders (2009). Privat 2.0: person og forbrukervern i den nye medievirkeligheten. Trondheim, SINTEF IKT. Bøe, T. (2006). Hva synes publikum om å delta i medier? En kvalitativ analyse. Master thesis at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. University of Bergen. 4

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