Volume 40, Issue 1

This article traces ‘difficult guests’ who violate the tacit rules that guide interactions between talk show hosts and their guests, between news anchors and their interviewees. The goal is to theorize the appearance of such guests on television against the background of four case studies. Using the media events and media scandals concepts as well as more recent work on ‘mediatization’, a new category of remarkable media occurrences is developed. Such ‘media incidents’ capture the resistance to media routines as well as the incorporation of resistance into those very routines. I will illustrate how media incidents make visible, for large audiences, the media’s daily habitual construction of reality. Despite their complex, even ambivalent nature, it is argued that media incidents perform a more critical function for citizens in media-saturated societies than both media events and scandals.

This article provides insight into one form of audience involvement with celebrities: parasocial relationships (PSR). To address several shortcomings in PSR research – focus on TV, confusion between PSI (parasocial interaction) and PSR, use of student samples, neglect of socio-demographic variables – a representative online survey was conducted with 1000 Flemish adults who indicated 382 celebrities as favorites. A new scale reveals that PSR contain two important elements: emotional connections and an analogy with social relationships. Confirming previous research, most favorite celebrities are male, and cultural proximity is especially important for older respondents. In one combined model, respondents’ and celebrities’ (socio-demographic) characteristics are included as potential PSR predictors. This model nuances previous research and reveals that people who are male, older, more lowly-educated, and interested in celebrity news have stronger PSR. Further, stronger PSR are found for local and religious, political, sports, and music celebrities than for film celebrities.

The question how offline media use is related to online media use has been heavily debated in the last decades. If they are functionally equivalent, then advantages like low costs, rapid publication cycles, and easy access to online news could lead to them displacing offline news. Data from a large-scale survey with detailed questions about media use in the Netherlands show that, interestingly, the functions that online and offline media are used for are often the same: Those who use online media to gain a broad overview of the news, for fast updates, or for background information use offline media for the same purpose. There are some differences, though: For many citizens, the need of a broad overview of the news seems to be fulfilled by repertoires consisting of several outlets of different types, while they seem to have favorite specific outlets for news updates or background information, respectively. This suggests that outlets can especially focus on the latter two functions to distinguish themselves.

A large share of the available literature on television and ageing depicts old age as a life stage characterized by losses in which people use television as a substitute for decreased activities. The aim of the present study is to investigate how television viewing is part of both selection and compensation strategies. Based on a qualitative interview study among a diverse sample of older adults ( N = 86, aged 65–92 years), we found three ways in which television viewing is part of selection strategies and three ways in which it is part of compensation strategies. In contrast to the focus on compensation in previous research, we found that selection strategies appear to provide a better characterization of older people’s television viewing than compensation strategies. Moreover, particular television viewing behavior does not automatically signal whether television viewing is part of selection or compensation strategies.

‘Social media’ like Facebook or Twitter have become tremendously popular in recent years. Their popularity provides new opportunities for data collection by state and private companies, which requires a critical and theoretical focus on social media surveillance. The task of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework for defining social media surveillance in the context of contemporary society, identifying its principal characteristics, and understanding its broader societal implications. Social media surveillance is a form of surveillance in which different forms of sociality and individuals different social roles converge, so that surveillance becomes a monitoring of different activities in different social roles with the help of profiles that hold a complex networked multitude of data about humans.