Klaus Bruhn Jensen

• Professor (Full) at University of Copenhagen

Global Internet use is circumscribed by local political and economic institutions and inscribed in distinctive cultural practices. This article presents a comparative study of Internet use in China, the United States, and five European countries. The empirical findings suggest a convergence of cultures, specifically regarding interpersonal communic...

This Special Section takes stock of a shift toward an integrated and global digital media environment with a set of articles comparing and contrasting the social uses of the Internet in China, Europe, and the United States. Departing from James Lull’s typology of the social uses of television, the articles address both general media use patterns an...

In recent years, large-scale analysis of log data from digital devices - often termed ""big data analysis"" (Lazer, Kennedy, King, & Vespignani, 2014) - have taken hold in the field of internet research. Through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and commercial measurement, scholars have been able to analyze social media users (Freelon 2014)...

Audience research interprets a lived reality that has already been interpreted by the recipients of media, and which may be reinterpreted through the intervention of research. This article explores the interplay between changing media environments and changing conceptions of audiences. In the digital media environment, audiences are active users of...

Communication research engages in double hermeneutics, interpreting a social reality that has already been interpreted by individuals and institutions in and through communication, and feeding its reinterpretations back to society. This article stakes stock of the field as an instance of what Aristotle had referred to as productive sciences, a prac...

Climate change raises the stakes of human communication to the existential level of the species and the planet. This article presents an empirical study of how users make sense of climate change as they traverse the contemporary digital media environment. Departing from a baseline survey and drawing on the tradition of reception analysis, focus gro...

Social media have been associated with the coming of many-to-many forms of communication, but they also depend on many-to-one communication: bit trails or metadata that the users of digital media leave behind and which serve to structure future communications. Departing from a communicative rather than a technical understanding of metadata, this ar...

This entry describes and discusses the concept of culture as it relates to media and communication. Following an account of general definitions and conceptions of culture, the entry provides an overview of research about the different cultural contexts in which communication occurs at various levels of social organization: local, national, intercul...

Metamedium refers to the digital computer as a technological platform on which a variety of different media can be reproduced and recombined. As such, computers have reopened discussions of what constitutes a medium in the first place—as a material, discursive, as well as institutional, entity. This entry traces the origins of the concept of a meta...

Two-step flows of communication join mass communication and interpersonal communication. Formulated in early studies that began to consolidate the field of media and communication research, the two-step flow model served to identify the complexity of the effects of mass media on individuals, groups, and societies—and of communication as a general s...

Digital media have been defined as meta-media that integrate new as well as old media on a single technological platform. As such, digital media enable new forms of meta-communication about the conditions under which communication is accomplished. The resulting meta-data bear witness to who was present, when, where and doing what, and these metadat...

The medical record is being redefined not only by medical practice but also by other practices. One example is the introduction of medical records as reliable or trustworthy components of public welfare. The paper reports on an ethnographic study of ICT in public welfare. The issue of ethics in relation to ICT becomes pertinent when medical documen...

Intermediality refers to the interconnectedness of modern media of communication. First, the term denotes communication through several discourses at once, including through combinations of different sensory modalities of interaction, for instance music and moving images. Second, intermediality represents the combination of separate material vehicl...

All media are social, in the sense that they establish and maintain relations between and among humans as individuals and collectives, increasingly across space and time. No medium is more social than any other medium. But each medium is social in distinctive ways. So-called social media are distinguished by their potential for many-to-many communi...

This article places the 2013 European audience survey in the wider historical context of the ongoing societal appropriation of digital media. To better understand longitudinal changes in the patterns of media use, the article compares the technological, industrial, and cultural factors that, together, shape the observable patterns of media use. Bec...

This article provides an overview of findings from a European study of media-use patterns in nine countries and presents a typology of European media audiences. The first section offers a brief review of previous research on audiences' uses of new and old media, individually and in combination, specifying the analytical perspective of the comparati...

Contemporary media constitute an increasingly global, digital environment of communication, but audiences remain geographically and culturally situated. Research documenting and comparing audience practices around the world has been limited beyond commercial and cultural statistics not only because of the sheer cost of the necessary empirical infra...

Moving beyond prevalent technological notions of meta-data, this essay conceptualizes meta-data as the outcome of diverse social practices from the perspective of communication theory. First, I revisit cybernetics and consider the relevance of the concept of meta-communication for the study of the digital media environment. While the bit trails tha...

Departing from H. Blumer's (1954) distinction between definitive and sensitizing concepts, this article suggests that the mediatization literature has overemphasized definitive approaches to conceptualizing media change. Analyzing 2 representative instances, and comparing them with 3 sensitizing approaches, the article argues that future research s...

Interrogating the terminology of “mobile” communication, this article notes that media and communicative practices have been mobile for millennia. What’s mobile about cell phones and other current mobile media is a new range of contexts in which personally meaningful and socially consequential interactions become possible. Mobile media should be st...

As analytical categories, genres have traditionally occupied a middle ground – between media as technologies and institutions, on the one hand, and discourses as material and modal forms of expression and interaction, on the other. With digitalization, the very concept of genre is in doubt: is the world wide web, Facebook, or the writing on its wal...

Twenty-five years ago, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch proposed a model for studying television as a cultural forum, as the most common reference point for public issues and concerns, particularly in American society. Over the last decade, the internet has emerged as a new communicative infrastructure and cultural forum on a global scale. Revisiting...

IntroductionMedia of Three DegreesAfter the Great DividesMethodologies versus MethodsAvailability, Accessibility, and PerformativityRemediated Methods The Double Hermeneutics of the InternetConclusion References

Es significativo que resulte todavía escasa la investigación sobre el sonido entendido como forma de comunicación, como modalidad de experiencia y como recurso para la expresión cultural y la interacción social. Y ello a pesar del papel central que el sonido tiene en la mayoría de las prácticas comunicativas y mediáticas, incluyendo la interacción...

The development of digital media presents a unique opportunity to reconsider what communication is, and what individuals, groups, and societies might hope to accomplish through new as well as old media. At a time when digital media still provoke both utopian and dystopian views of their likely consequences, Klaus Bruhn Jensen places these 'new' med...

Primeiramente, este artigo traça o perfil da comunicação como um «campo de estudos de suporte prático» na cultura e sociedade contemporâneas. Em seguida traça as origens dos conceitos-chave da teoria da comunicação nas «tradições intelectuais» desde a Grécia clássica, passando por fontes modernas de «disciplinas científicas humanísticas e sociais»,...

Lyden har ikke noget videnskabeligt hjem – i modsætning til f.eks. faste og levende billeder, der traditionelt er blevet studeret af henholdsvis kunsthistorien og filmvidenskaben. Denne artikel giver en oversigt over de mange, meget forskellige slags forskning om lyd. Formålet er at stimulere og kvalificere mere medieforskning om lyd. Hovedvægten l...

During the last decade, many studies have reconsidered the definition of media, frequently emphasizing how new Digital media may be reproducing or reformulating old analogue media. Through a critical examination of two key contributions Bolter and Grusin (1999) on remediation and Manovich (2001) on the language of new media this article suggests th...

Sound remains significantly underresearched as a form of communication, as a modality of experience, and as a resource for cultural expression and social action. This article provides an overview of the several disciplinary and interdisciplinary sources of contemporary sound studies. As a point of departure, the article identifies and contextualize...

Interactivity remains a central and yet notoriously difficult notion in studies of computer- mediated communication. Compared to most previous research, which has taken theoreti- cal and deductive routes, this article explores interactivity empirically and inductively with particular reference to collaboration within organizations. The study relied...

This book is concerned with the role of news media in an increasingly globalized society. It tries to unravel how news as an institution and a genre is both affected by globalization and itself an agent of globalization. A recurrent theme in all of the articles is the impact of globalization on information supply, public debate, and the exercise of...

“Medieforskningen har gjort sin historiske pligt”, siger Klaus Bruhn Jensen i sin vurdering af medievidenskabens hidtidige rolle. Den har konsolideret sig som forskningsfelt. Medieforskere bidrager naturligt til den debat om medierne, der løbende foregår i samfundet. Og medieforskningen har været en vigtig faktor i en generelt ændret opfattelse...

One of the main developments within media and communication studies during the last two decades has come from reception analysis which employs qualitative methodologies to examine the audience's experience and uses of media, among other things, as they relate to the political institutions of modern societies. This article builds on a recently compl...

Planteamiento para el estudio de los medios de comunicación y de su papel en la producción social de sentido, cuyo autor reúne la tradición de la investigación semiótica sobre el contenido, imagen y discurso mediáticos y la investigación comunicativa sobre la audiencia como un participante activo en la interpretación de los mensajes mediatizados. P...

Computers are developing into a powerful medium integrating film, pictures, text and sound, and the use of computers for communication and information is rapidly expanding. The Computer as Medium brings insights from art, literature and theatre to bear on computers and discusses the communicative and organizational nature of computer networks withi...

This article presents a comparative analysis of the main research traditions examining the nexus between media and audiences namely research into effects, uses and rewards, literary criticism, cultural studies and reception analysis. The authors first present short histories of each tradition's roots in the humanities and/or social sciences and the...

This chapter offers an outline of a social semiotics of mass communication and defines meaning simultaneously as a social and as a discursive phenomenon. The argument draws its concepts of signs, discursive differences, and interpretive communities from the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce in order to move beyond the essentialisti...

Repr Bibliogr. na s. 232-259

This article presents a qualitative methodology for studying audience assessment of the mass media's service to the public. The methodology emphasizes the audience‐public's articulation of evaluations that may point to specific reforms and relevant courses of social action. An empirical study of older and younger television viewers suggests that su...

This article presents a comparative analysis of the main research traditions examining the nexus between media and audiences: effects research, uses and gratifications research, literary criticism, cultural studies and reception analysis. First presenting short histories of each tradition's roots in the humanities and/or social sciences, the author...

Taking from critical theory the concepts of economic and repressive surplus, the term meaning surplus is presented in order to characterise reception of massive communication. This article exemplifies the impact of meaning production by different social classes, with special reference to the audience. While recent analyses of reception have emphasi...

This article reports a qualitative study of the reception of Danish television news. A linguistic discourse analysis was made of a news programme and of the transcripts of in-depth interviews concerning each news story. The findings suggest that viewers may reconstruct the news through reference to a small number of highly generalized `super-themes...

De nyere receptionsanalyser, der benytter sig af empiriske analyseformer såsom dybdeinterviews og observation, er i takt med deres udbredelse blevet genstand for kritisk ud fra både et politisk og et videnskabeligt perspektiv. Kritikken er (ifølge Klaus Bruhn Jensen) "indtil nu mest blevet fremført i den faglige debat i mundtlig form, men som udg...

Recent research about the mass communication audience suggests that a combination of textual and social science approaches to reception should be adopted. This essay analyzes earlier work in the area and describes a theoretical and methodological framework for further empirical studies. Special attention is given to the explanatory value of qualita...

Brug og oplevelser af TV-nyheder: Bidrag til en empirisk receptionsmodel

Sound remains significantly underresearched as a form of communication, as a modality of experience, and as a resource for cultural expression and social action. This article pro- vides an overview of the several disciplinary and interdisciplinary sources of contem- porary sound studies. As a point of departure, the article identifies and contextua...

p.85-106.