Band 50, Heft 3 - Special Issue: Communications at 50: Past, Present, Future. Jubilee Issue.

Thomas McCoy’s article “Surveillance, privacy and power: Information trumps knowledge” provokes a number of reflections of relevance for contemporary discussions within the field of media and communications. Not only is it an early example of introducing Foucauldian theory, it is also an early attempt at discussing questions related to database surveillance, something that anticipates today’s concept of “surveillance capitalism.” McCoy also highlights the tension between information and knowledge, although his definitions of these concepts remain a bit vague. Lastly, he also takes on the discussion of privacy in relation to database surveillance. Although McCoy could not have predicted the full extent of today’s datafication, his concerns about surveillance anticipate contemporary debates.

In this commentary, we respond to Kirsten Drotner’s foundational article “Media Ethnography: An Other Story?” published in Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research in 1999. Drotner’s text innovatively wove together the scholarly, intellectual, and social conditions that helped establish media ethnography as a key approach to studying everyday media use. Drotner issued a call to action, namely, to develop media ethnography by pursuing dialogue with feminist epistemologies and to attend to unheard voices and silenced experiences. This call has gained new relevance in the contemporary moment. Positivist logics and quantitative methodologies dominate research agendas and thereby risk to undermine interpretive qualitative media research. Continuing paths set out in Drotner’s original essay, this commentary traces the connections between media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and feminist epistemologies that provided the groundwork for the ethnographic turn in media studies. Second, we discuss the transformations media ethnography has undergone in response to the digital turn over the course of the last three decades, reflecting on the challenges and opportunities presented by digitization and datafication. Continuing the dialogue with feminist epistemologies, we offer a critical reflection on digital ethnography, exploring how digital technologies reshape the epistemological concerns and research practices of media ethnographers.

This contribution refers to the article “The ‘Media Use as Social Action’ approach: Theory, methodology, and research evidence so far,” published by Karsten Renckstorf and Fred Wester in 2001. Re-reading an article in media and communications studies that has been published 24 years ago, necessarily confronts us with the deep changes of the media environment and their implications for scholarly discourses. Against the background of these changes, we discuss the media use as social action approach regarding its theoretical perspective, its methodological approach, and the empirical evidence presented in the 2001 publication.

This article analyzes Pietilä’s article “People’s Conceptions of the Mass Media”, originally published in 1976. Given contemporary norms and standards of scholarly journal articles, it would probably have been desk rejected if it had been submitted today. This is not to say that the article lacks merits, and in several aspects, the article is still relevant. Still, the analysis illustrates how the norms and standards of scholarly journal articles have changed during the last decades.

Social network analysis was forged from a need for bottom-up analysis that looked to the specific interactions between individuals rather than a top-down focus on larger abstract social systems. It started via graph theory, progressed through communication and sociology, and now infuses the very platforms we use for modern communication systems. While networks represent a powerful tool, they also have power in their own right as systematising devices. It is not only academics who have learned from networks, but also platform maintainers; Facebook, X, and LinkedIn are all networks of data representing people after all. With advances in modelling and visualisation, we should ask not only what the networks can tell us, but also whether the networks constrain us and our communication. By reviewing Rolf Wigand’s 1977 piece “Some Recent Developments in Organizational Communication: Network Analysis – A Systemic Representation of Communication Relationships,” we can reflect both on the advances in networks in the last 50 years but also the consequences of these advances for political polarisation, misinformation, and governance.

Media stereotypes have been a persistent concern in media and communication studies, especially in the context of mediated images of cultural and national others. This paper discusses Gumpert and Cathart’s seminal 1983 contribution on the topic. Influenced by the field of social psychology, the authors emphasised the embeddedness of media stereotypes in social interaction and interpersonal communication. They also highlighted how the media perpetuate stereotypes by emphasising cultural differences. Evaluating Gumpert and Cathart’s analytical framework more than forty years later, this paper argues that little has changed in terms of media stereotypes, despite advances in technology and diversity in representations.

In 2001 Denis McQuail published an article in Communications in which he reflected on conceptual problems in media “gratifications” research and proposed some ways in which “media use” research could go forward. Two years later (McQuail, 2003), in a response to a debate article by me (Roe, 2003), he wrote an article bearing the same title as the one above in which he broadened the discussion to the overall identity and state of the discipline of communication science at that time. The purpose of this article is to do the same with respect to the current state of the discipline and suggest some possible future directions.

This article contributes to the Jubilee issue of Communications on the occasion of the journal’s 50th birthday. Based on archive material and the publications of Alphons Silbermann in the journal (his editorials, book reviews, essays and articles) the role of the founding editor in establishing a European field of communication research is reflected. This role cannot be underestimated – at least not regarding the German context of the founding of the journal confronting Silbermann with a lot of hostilty from within the field – he answered in both terms, scientifically but also with his typical sarcasm visible in his book reviews.