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Interest in news avoidance has recently grown both inside and outside academia. In this introduction to a special issue on the topic, we present a systematic review of existing studies (N = 116) and discuss what we (don't) know about this phenomenon. Our review illustrates that news avoidance has been examined through qualitative, mixed, but most often quantitative studies, conducted primarily in Western countries, although with important exceptions. We highlight how existing literature portrays news avoidance as a multidimensional phenomenon—encompassing behavioral and expressive components—affected by factors at the levels of the (missing) audiences, the news content, and the broader structural context. In terms of blind spots, we know relatively much about causes for news avoidance and some of its consequences, but less about counterstrategies. Also, while much of our knowledge is centered around audiences, we know little about the roles of other actors, such as the news media, journalists, and intermediaries. We end by discussing what the research field can learn by studying news avoidance, highlighting the value of understanding how audiences relate to journalism through a diverse set of methodological approaches. We also stress the need to carefully consider normative assumptions when positioning news avoidance as a problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper discusses people's news experiences before, during and after societal crisis situations, contributing with a sequential typology outlining the three phases ritual check-in, shocked immersion and regained stability. Theoretically, we draw on classical contributions to media studies and sociology, particularly the concepts of ritual communication and ontological security. Empirically, we build on qualitative interview studies with news audiences in Norway, spanning 5 years and different crisis cases including political turmoil, the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. We underline the significance of emotional distancing to regain stability, and identify crises lacking start- and endpoints as particularly difficult to navigate. These insights should instigate further debate about our understanding of news audiences in a tumultuous world, particularly relevant to scholarship on news use and avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward questions of what citizens need and want from journalism in a global crisis. In this article, we analyse one particular aspect of pandemic news experiences: Preoccupation with monitoring metrics for COVID-19 infection cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, widely disseminated through journalistic news outlets. We ask why close monitoring of such metrics appeared meaningful to news users, and what these experiences can tell us about the role of journalism in the pandemic information environment. Our analysis draws on qualitative research conducted in Norway in 2020, finding users particularly devoted to monitoring metrics, both in early lockdown and during the second wave of COVID-19. To contextualize our findings, we draw on scholarship on emotional responses to data in the everyday, and on the social role of journalism. We argue that monitoring of infection rates is an expression of trust in the media as a provider of factual information, also expressed by those who are cynical towards other aspects of journalism, and we conceptualise this monitoring practice as a coping strategy to deal with the pandemic as an unknown and uncontrollable threat, involving difficult emotions of uncertainty and fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how people use social media to make sense of climate change, exploring climate issues as part of everyday communication in media-saturated societies. Building on prominent themes in the environmental communication literature on social media, such as mobilisation and polarisation, we respond to calls for more qualitative and interpretative analysis. Our study therefore asks how people use social media in everyday life to make sense of climate issues, and it expands on previous findings in the field through a qualitative typology of everyday social media use. The empirical data stems from in-depth interviews with Norwegians who are engaged in climate issues, with informants ranging from activists to declared sceptics, although we find widespread ambivalence across group positions. Our findings contribute to disentangling contradictory findings in the field through a discussion of how climate change is part of everyday communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how knowledge workers experience and reflect upon intrusions from digital media in the pursuit of focused work. As a multitude of digital media technologies have become integral to working life, scholars have observed a connectivity paradox in which these technologies are experienced as both helpful and hindering, as integral to but also intruding upon focus and concentration. To understand this important and widespread ambivalence in digital society, we analyze qualitative interviews with knowledge workers in a range of professions. With a theoretical framework drawing on domestication theory, sociology of work and critiques of digital modernity, we highlight how workers negotiate spatial, temporal, and technological conditions, and the conflicted norms that are activated in the process. Our findings indicate that negotiations about digital media technologies come to represent psychological, cultural and social dilemmas that go beyond the individual worker, but are nevertheless experienced as individual cross-pressures to be managed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, scholarly interest in "digital disconnection" and related concepts has grown in media and communication studies, and in related disciplines. The idea of digital disconnection explicitly references digitalization as a key societal development, creating conditions of intensified and embedded media involvement across social life. The notion of digital disconnection thereby represents a critical response to mediated conditions that characterize our societies and permeate our everyday lives. In this special issue, we take stock of the contributions, challenges, and promises of digital disconnection research. We showcase how digital disconnection scholarship intersects with other developments in media and communication research, and is part of debates and empirical analysis in related disciplines from tourism studies to psychology. We argue that one of the key strengths of the emergent work is the variety of social domains and conceptual debates that are included and explored in digital disconnection research. On the other hand, we also point to the need for further methodological development, conceptual consolidation, and empirical diversity, particularly in the face of global inequalities and ongoing crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates sense-making processes of news audiences when faced with destabilizing global events. The destabilizing event is Trump's 2016 election win, which we study from the perspective of audiences far removed: in the Nordic region. Asking how we can understand shifts in the balance between the informational and ritual aspects of news over time, we study how journalism matters when ordinary practices are suddenly uprooted, and in the gradual return to everyday life. Based on the analysis of extensive qualitative material, we formulate three successive phases of Norwegian news audiences' reactions to the election: annoying circus far away, world-shattering shock and regained stability. We underline not only shared experiences but also nuances which we link to differences in media use routines, levels of interests in news as well as resources for the sense-making of politics. Our findings contribute to the scrutiny of news use in everyday life and at times of political upheaval, and add an audience perspective to research on Trump and the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a conceptualization of audience agency in the face of datafication. We consider how people, as audiences and users of media and technologies, face transforming communicative conditions, and how these conditions challenge the power potentials of audiences in processes of communication—that is, their communicative agency. To develop our conceptualization, we unpack the concept of audiences' communicative agency by examining its foundations in communication scholarship, in reception theory and sociology, arguing that agency is understood as interpretative and relational, and applied to make important normative assessments. We further draw on emerging scholarship on encounters with data in the everyday to discuss how audience agency is now challenged by datafication, arguing that communicative agency is increasingly prospective in a datafied age. Thereby, we provide a theoretical conceptualization for further analysis of audiences in transforming communicative conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how people balance between conflicting needs for information and disconnection in an extraordinary situation. We analyze empirical data from a qualitative questionnaire study of Norwegian media users conducted in March–April 2020, a period of early pandemic lockdown. The acute lockdown context accentuated intensified monitoring of constantly updated news streams, and perceptions of news use as immersive and emotionally draining, as captured in the notion of "doomscrolling". To cope with feelings of being scared or overwhelmed, even the most connected citizens deliberately and intermittingly avoided news. Discussing these findings in light of the debate on news avoidance in journalism studies, we argue for the relevance of understanding news avoidance as a situational strategy. We conclude that the concept of news avoidance remains relevant to qualitatively understand a human experience of wanting to avoid news in particular contexts. Our analysis further outlines interconnections between different practices of pandemic news use, including a research-based conceptualization of doomscrolling as a phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the framework of "folk theories" to analyze how people perceive algorithms in the media. Taking algorithms as a prime case to investigate how people respond to datafication in everyday media use, we ask how people perceive positive and negative consequences of algorithms. To answer our question, we conduct qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended answers from a 2019 representative survey among Norwegians, identifying five folk theories: algorithms are confining, practical, reductive, intangible, and exploitative. We situate our analysis in relation to different application of folk theory approaches, and discuss our findings in light of emerging work on perceptions of algorithms and critiques of datafication, including the concept digital resignation. We conclude that rather than resignation, digital irritation emerges as a central emotional response, with a small but significant potential to inspire future political action against datafication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense of other activities, resulting in a temporal conflict experienced by users. Responsibilization points to how users take individual responsibility for managing such conflicting flows, and to how this practice is difficult and conflict-ridden. We conclude that while individual time management is often framed as the solution to temporal conflicts, such attempts at regulating smartphone use appear inadequate. Our conceptualization of temporal ambivalence offers a more nuanced understanding of why this is the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how changing life situations affect media use, conceptualized as a question of how biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection. To answer this question, the analysis draws on qualitative data from a comprehensive study of media use in Norway, with in-depth interviews and media diaries. The theoretical approach joins domestication and media repertoire theory with research on public connection, considering the ubiquity of digital media in contemporary society. Findings indicate that smartphone use is key to people's reorientations in periods of change, and that intimate and emotional responses to mobile media warrant closer attention. The article contributes to debates on the transformation of media repertoires, a question of growing concern within research on cross-media use, and to long-standing interests in the role of media in everyday life and as central to public connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and following a transformative decade, which overlapped with the pervasion of social media, proliferation of connected gadgets, and growing interest in and concern about big data. The agenda we formulate includes substantial and intellectual priorities concerning intrusive technologies, critical data literacies, labour, co-option, and resistance, and argues for the need for research on these matters, in the interest of audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limited, shifting, and partial figurations of societal information that citizens are able to obtain through their use of journalistic and social media, and thereby challenges normative ideals. How do monitorial ideals function when the citizens are only occasionally on guard? By zooming in on three key gaps between even a less demanding ideal and actual practices in news use, we underline the need to further reconceptualize our expectations of citizens’ news use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We write this article presenting frameworks and findings from an international network on audience research, as we stand 75 years from Herta Herzog’s classic investigation of radio listeners, published in Lazarsfeld and Stanton’s 1944 war edition of Radio Research. The article aims to contribute to and advance a rich strand of self-reflexive stock-taking and sorting of future research priorities within the transforming field of audience analysis, by drawing on the collective efforts of CEDAR – Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research – a 14-country network (2015–2018) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom, which conducted a foresight analysis exercise on developing current trends and future scenarios for audiences and audience research in the year 2030. First, we wish to present the blueprint of what we did and how we did it – by discussing the questions, contexts and frameworks for our project. We hope this is useful for anyone considering a foresight analysis task, an approach we present as an innovative and rigorous tool for assessing and understanding the future of a field. Second, we present findings from our analysis of pivotal transformations in the field and the future scenarios we constructed for audiences, as media technologies rapidly change with the arrival of the Internet of Things and changes on many levels occur in audience practices. These findings not only make sense of a transformative decade that we have just lived through but they present possibilities for the future, outlining areas for individual and collective intellectual commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates the meanings of social media use for long-term patients, focusing on a group of Norwegian bloggers diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). This severe illness can confine patients to their homes for long periods of time, drastically reducing possibilities to participate on most social arenas and leaving Internet use as a rare opportunity for connection with the outside world. A qualitative analysis of interviews with ME bloggers investigates the meanings of social media use in this particular situation. Drawing on perspectives from research on patients' Internet use, this phenomenon is analysed as management of identity narratives in the face of illness. However, the article further argues that the concept of participation provides a relevant supplementary perspective that highlights the societal and political relevance of these practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses developments in Norwegian magazine journalism in the last decade, focusing on the broad and varied spectrum of magazines targeting women. The analysis is based on multiple methods and data sources, aiming to connect the production and reception of magazine journalism to the texts of magazines. This article will identify and discuss five key trends: fragmentation, digitalization, Nordic inspiration, redefinition of the political and beautification. The trends are discussed in light of public sphere theory and selected orientations in Nordic journalism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines 'the therapeutic culture' in contemporary women's magazines. A qualitative content analysis of the leading Norwegian women's magazines KK and Tara reveals how psychological experts, self-help advice, and the presentation of the self reflects a therapeutic ethos which has become a norm for women, offering a manageable way of dealing with individual self-realization. Leading theorists on the modern self argue that therapeutic discourses permeate the cultures of the Western world, and our analysis suggests that therapeutic discourses have succeeded in becoming recognized as cultural resources of selfhood in the local context we examine-Norway. The ideal of the empowered woman who is responsible enough to take care of her self stands at the forefront in these magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between women’s magazines and the public sphere, arguing that women’s magazines can be positioned as having a marginal or an important role in the public domain — depending on how the functions of popular media in democracy are understood. Women’s magazines are generally not associated with the forms of journalism which bring citizens information of crucial democratic importance. Nevertheless, research on women’s magazines emphasizes their political relevance as purveyors of ideology about class, family structures and women’s role in society. In addition to this implicit political dimension, women’s magazines also include journalism which deals explicitly with political issues. Because of this, women’s magazines constitute an interesting case for fundamental debates about the categories of private and public. Drawing on feminist contributions to public sphere theory and using Norway as an empirical case, this article offers a broad exploration of the role of women’s magazines in the public sphere. The empirical data include interviews with readers and editors as well as analysis of texts and media policy debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections between magazine reading as a social practice, investigated through a qualitative questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with magazine readers, and magazines as texts with certain characteristics, investigated through reader-guided textual analysis. The aim of this approach is to gain a more profound understanding of the relationship between practices of reading and textual features. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author explores the phenomenological differences between reading women's magazines in print and reading similar material on traditional web sites. She discusses the concept of media experiences as a potential substitute for the more well-known concepts media use or media consumption. She addresses an argument on the different dimensions regarding the place of the media in people's lives. She also provides examples of such dimensions.