📣 Another post featuring one of the NIAA projects sponsored by the Network Institute!

🔍 Today’s spotlight is on “How societal issues permeate people’s lifeworld”, led by Helen Arts and Summer Skillen under the supervision of Tim Groot Kormelink and Kasper Welbers.

In an age of concerns about misinformation, audience fragmentation, and polarization, it has become more urgent than ever to understand how news and media impact the way people perceive the world. While the proliferation of media devices, platforms, and information sources has made it challenging to capture people’s news and information use, paradoxically, the digitalization and platformization of society have simultaneously enabled unprecedented access into people’s practices and experiences.

This project harnesses these developments via state-of-the-art methods in communication science and media/journalism studies. Specifically, it combines data donations with WhatsApp diaries and in-depth interviews to answer the following question: How and under which circumstances do societal issues ‘break through’ the continuous stream of information and resonate with citizens?