Networked Media Collectivities. The Use of Media for the Communicative Construction of Collectivities Among Adolescents

Abstract

People use media to communicate and thereby create and maintain social relations in two ways. First, media provide technological means to bypass time and space and enable otherwise unconnected individuals to interact. Second, media provide topics for communication. To capture these communicative constructed relations and the emerging social patterns, we propose the theoretical concept of networked media collectivities. In order to analyze these networked media collectivities and their relevance in mediatization research, we follow a social network analytic approach. We identify the relative importance of various media and the structures of media-related communication networks among adolescents. By comparing these networks with the friendship networks among the adolescents, we are able to assess the relevance of media for creating and maintaining social ties. Our results show that correlations between media use, media-related interpersonal communication and friendship are strong and highly significant. This supports the assumption that networked media collectivities are likely to be a resource of social capital. Since the causal effect may also be in the opposite direction (from friendship to interpersonal communication to media use), this suggests at the same time that social patterns need to be taken into account when studying processes of individual media use.