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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.

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 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.

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]

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.

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]

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 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 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]