Whereas media reliance is one of the classical concepts in media and communication studies, this article argues that deep mediatization imposes a renewed relevance of the term, as well as a need to develop a more nuanced framework for studying its social implications. Traditionally, media reliance was used to explain how people develop a citizen identity. Today, while connective media, datafication and AI have transformed what it means to be reliant on media, the very concept is marginalized and theoretically under-developed. Against this backdrop, the article starts out from an overview of how media reliance, and related terms, have been utilized in media research and then develops an analytical framework that accounts for different social modes and realms of media reliance. The matrix is implemented to crystallize blind spots in the research field and to highlight new types of questions that different research strands could address in times of pervasive connectivity.

Escalating smartphone reliance is a debated issue, especially when it comes to the digital wellbeing of young people. Hence, this article addresses smartphone use as a morally contested activity among young adults. We first analyse the existence of moral dissonance pertaining to one’s own smartphone use – whether one uses the device according to internalised norms or not. Second, we explore moral distancing – to what extent morally problematic smartphone use is ascribed to others rather than to oneself. Combining survey results with focus-group interviews from Sweden, the study shows that moral distancing is less pronounced among young adults than in the overall population. It also shows that young people’s capacity to domesticate digital media in a morally congruent way plays into the social reproduction of gender and class. While the smartphone is socially normalised, young adults, especially women, report a great deal of moral reflexivity and distress in relation to the device.

In news research, news relevance was for long synonymous with how journalists constructed it. But recently, scholars have questioned the assumption that journalists’ preferences correspond with their audiences’. Several studies have approached news relevance from the audience point of view, showing audiences’ news relevance is constructed as an everyday practice, through assessments of topics and brands, and at the backdrop of users’ earlier experiences. News relevance from the audience perspective however still remains undertheorized and builds on traditional understandings of news journalism. This article aims to contribute to this debate with (1) a matrix of four types of news relevance, constructed from an analysis of how young Swedish adults construct news relevance in the contemporary digital media landscape, (2) the identification of three dimensions that distinguish different kinds of news relevance from each other, and (3) a theoretical definition of news relevance from the audience’s perspective grounded in phenomenological theory and empirical analysis. This papers hence provides a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of the ways news, understood as something broader than news journalism, is considered relevant by young audiences.

When studying media audiences, comparisons between countries, cultures or specific geographical regions are often valued for providing rich data, offering scholars the benefit of a wider perspective. An international comparative outlook can help understand how different media systems interrelate with cultural and social contexts, as well as show how global media technologies are used and made meaningful in local settings. However, it also comes with a multitude of challenges, which can be particularly palpable using qualitative methods, resulting partly from the often relatively small-scale samples at hand, and partly from the demand to understand complex sense-making processes and nuances in audiences’ expressions and interpretations. This chapter discusses some of the methodological complications that can arise when embarking on cross-cultural audience research, especially highlighting how researchers may need to adapt in times of crisis or unforeseen events. It draws on a qualitative research project on news consumption among young people in three different countries, Sweden, Estonia and Russia, which—based on interviews, focus groups and elements of ethnographic observation—examined how young adults (aged 18–26) conceptualise and use news in their highly digitised everyday lives. During the course of the research, two major socio-political crises, Covid-19 and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, contributed to the project taking a different route than originally planned, and the chapter emphasises the necessity of flexibility and reflexivity in audience research, as well as attempting to challenge more rigid ideas of how to compare media audiences across geographies and cultures.

This comprehensive collection introduces and contextualizes media studies’ most influential texts and thinkers, from early 20th century mass communication to the first stages of digital culture in the 21st century. The volume brings together influential theories about media, mediation and communication, as well as the relationships between media, culture and society. Each chapter presents a close reading of a classic text, written by a contemporary media studies scholar. Each contributor presents a summary of this text, relates it to the traditions of ideas in media studies and highlights its contemporary relevance. The text explores the core theoretical traditions of media studies: in particular, cultural studies, mass communication research, medium theory and critical theory, helping students gain a better understanding of how media studies has developed under shifting historical conditions and giving them the tools to analyse their contemporary situation. This is essential reading for students of media and communication and adjacent fields such as journalism studies, sociology and cultural studies.

One of the editors of this book was once a participant in a seminar with a famous French sociologist. The professor gave advice about projects and research ideas to the researchers and doctoral students that were participating. Then, someone asked the question of how best to understand one’s contemporaries and contemporary society. Perhaps the person asking the question had expected an answer about innovative research methods or about which social phenomena could say the most about the times we live in. But the sociologist had other advice. He said: stop following the noise of the news, turn off your feeds, and use the time you earn to re-read sociology’s classic texts. There was silence in the room. Would the way to understand the society of the 21st century go via texts written at the end of the 19th century, by people like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel?.

Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (RTR) is a book that was published at the University of Pennsylvania, United States, in 1984 and soon after republished as a second edition (1987). RTR combines a text analysis with a reception study and an ethnographic study of mass-produced romance literature. The book revolves around a circle of female romance readers in a small American town and the bookseller who merchandises, recommends, and discusses the literature with the readers. The books themselves are also discussed as texts. Radway conducts narrative analyses and a psychoanalytic interpretation of the texts, uses questionnaires, and interviews readers, producers, and distributors. The book is considered a classic within Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Comparative Literature.

News today is a genre "in flux". New kinds of news producers and novel means of distributing, sharing and using news align with alternative ways of understanding what news is. Based on an extensive ethnography of news practices and perceptions among a broad range of young adults in Sweden, this book discusses how the rapid digitisation of news has shaped young people’s understanding of it, as well as how news is made relevant, trusted and used in the temporalities and spatialities of everyday life. This cutting-edge volume analyses the blurring boundaries between news and social media, facts and stories, highlighting how new media categories such as influencers and memes can take on the status of news for young audiences and shape their understanding of themselves and the world.