Conversations about local media and their role in community integration
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Merja Mahrt
Abstract
For decades, scholars have been interested in the relationship between community integration and local media use. Some have argued that the use of the local media furthers integration. Others have seen integration into a community as a prerequisite for attention to the media. In this study, a survey explored whether a relationship between the two dimensions actually exists and whether personal conversations about media topics could link both phenomena. The results show that social integration is not only related to media use, but also to conversations specifically about media content. Thus, the media's contribution to community integration could be an indirect one, by facilitating conversations and by helping integrate individuals socially through conversational topics.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Interactivity: A review of the concept and a framework for analysis
- Gender portrayals in food commercials at different times of the day: A content analytic study
- Web surveying academics in six European countries
- Measuring the complexity of viewers' television news interpretation: Integration
- Conversations about local media and their role in community integration
- The digital divide in Flanders: Disappearance or persistence?
- Book reviews
- Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Making sense: A reconstruction of people's understandings of the European constitutional referendum in the Netherlands
- Interactivity: A review of the concept and a framework for analysis
- Gender portrayals in food commercials at different times of the day: A content analytic study
- Web surveying academics in six European countries
- Measuring the complexity of viewers' television news interpretation: Integration
- Conversations about local media and their role in community integration
- The digital divide in Flanders: Disappearance or persistence?
- Book reviews
- Contributors
