Lecture by Prof. Göran Bolin

The Lecture by Prof. Göran Bolin (Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden), Member of Academia Europaea, took place during the Summer School on Democracy: Media, Information Literacy, and Populism held on June 17 – 28, 2018 by the Institute of Political Science of the University of Wrocław.

Mediatization, Digital Media Practice, and Banal Civic Engagement

When it comes to the relationship between digital media practices and civic engagement, much research has focused on protest movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street and similar phenomena) and mass civic upheavals against authoritarian regimes (e.g. the Arab Spring). A much less focused set of practices are related to the everyday, mundane, and banal engagement in issues of less dramatic proportions, and with closer affinities to the lifeworld of citizens. In late modern mediatized societies with decreasing voter turnout and party affiliations, there is a strong need to discuss the role of digital media in everyday civic engagement. Drawing on research carried out on the civic practices among citizen media users in Estonia and Bulgaria, the lecture accounted for and theorised some of these practices with a specific focus on their role in the mediatization of civic culture. There was a specific focus on which competencies and literacies are activated in the civic agency.

The lecture was a part of the Summer School, whose programme can be found here.
The lecture was financed by the resources granted to AE by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

Göran Bolin is a professor at the Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. His present research interests are focussed on the relations between media production and consumption, especially in the wake of digitisation and datafication. Bolin has since the early 1990s worked on or headed research projects dedicated to violence in the media, youth and cultural production, entertainment television, the relation between production practices and textual expressions, media consumption, the production of value in cultural industries, mobile phone use, media generations, etc.

His publications include Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets (Ashgate, 2011) and Media Generations: Experience, Identity and Mediatised Social Change (Routledge 2016) and the edited volume Cultural Technologies. The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society (Routledge, 2012).

His most recent project is Nation Branding: The Nation as Community and Commodity in Eastern Europe (Baltic Sea Foundation, 2013-2017). He is a member of Academia Europaea, where he serves on the section committee for the Film, Media and Visual Studies section.