Reconstruction of the 'Media' Concept as Human and Contents Network

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K13071
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Sociology
• Research Institution: Kyushu University
• Principal Investigator: SUGIYAMA Akashi 九州大学, 比較社会文化研究院, 准教授 (60222056)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: メディア / ネットワーク / コンテンツ / 情報 / コミックマーケット / ネトウヨ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Mass media have mediated people and produced audience groups. For example, radio produced radio listeners. We could see such groups as sociological unit to be analyzed because the members of them were rather intensively and exclusively mediated by a particular media. But, after the emergence of internet, we can see the same contents in traditional media and internet in various forms. Now, audience are not a particular media's audience but a particular content's audience. If there should be groups like media audience, people are not bound together because of media but their preference to contents. It may be needed to reconstruct the concept of 'audience' to fit such new social situation where the relation of contents organize people as certain social entities and in return people in such form produce new contents and their relations. In this research project, three social research were carried out to examine the newly defined concept of audience as human and contents network.

Free Research Field

社会学