Between Old Broadcast Media and New Networked Media

Abstract

Past tensions between content and materiality have prevented communication researchers from forming a deeper conceptualization of the role played by the material character of communication technologies in shaping social arrangements and cultural forms of expression. Drawing on the findings of a comparative research project on European audiences, we examine the interrelation between material facets of media technologies and the practices they afford on the audience side. Relations between "old" mass media, such as television, and "new" networked and individualized media, such as the Internet, are discussed, focusing on the transitions between different media technologies and the processes of substitution or supplementation occurring in these transitions.