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SAMRISK-2-Samfunnssikkerhet og risiko

Media Use in Crisis Situations: Resolving Information Paradoxes, Comparing Climate Change and COVID-19 (MUCS)

Alternative title: Mediebruk i krisesituasjoner: Informasjonsparadokser, klimaendringer og koronapandemien

Awarded: NOK 10.5 mill.

MUCS studies media use in crisis situations such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the turbulent world situation. We analyze how people in Norway encounter these issues in their everyday media use. The objective of the project is to understand what media use means to the communication of crises in digital societies. Why have we accepted drastic measures to fight the pandemic, while similar climate action is difficult to accomplish? There is extensive media coverage warning of a climate crisis, but we do not know enough about how this information is interpreted. The pandemic was perceived differently in terms of speed, proximity and impact on our lives. By comparing these cases, we learn more about information in different crisis situations, and build resilience in the face of future and unknown risks. Since the start of the project, war and an energy crisis has broken out in Europe, and the news cover a landscape of evolving crisis situations that affect each other. In the past year, we have studied how Norwegian media users respond to this situation. We recruited a panel of 30 people of varied backgrounds, and conducted in-depth interviews in the fall of 2022. These interviews revealed that climate is perceived differently than other crises: Climate is viewed as difficult and complex, less as a news topic and less prominent in daily news use. We followed up with a qualitative questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with the same informants in the Spring of 2023, finding considerable engagement with specific news stories pertaining to climate and energy, but difficulty in engaging with journalism on climate as an existential threat to humanity. We have discussed these findings in workshops with climate journalists, who are an important stakeholder group collaborate with, to increase the impact of our findings. We also have results originating from pilot studies. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews on news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have analyzed how and why people monitored infection rates, and what these metrics meant to interpretations of the pandemic as a societal phenomenon and everyday challenge. Regarding climate change, we focused on the meanings of social media as a debate arena, analyzing interviews with Norwegians engaged in climate issues about their media use. MUCS has an interdisciplinary approach and project team. The project is a collaboration between media studies (Brita Ytre-Arne, Hallvard Moe, Hilde Sakariassen, Solveig Høegh-Khron, University of Bergen), human geography (Håvard Haarstad, Ida Sekanina, CET, UiB) and journalism studies (Jannie Møller Hartley, Roskilde University).

MUCS studies media use amongst Norwegian citizens in relation to two complex societal crisis situations: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Through innovative qualitative methods and an interdisciplinary approach, the project resolves paradoxes in the communication of crisis in digital societies. In a digital media environment with abundant information, the media is essential to how people encounter crisis situations, even those that are also experienced personally through changing everyday circumstances. Social media, journalism and smartphones are all part of crisis communication, but rarely studied from a cross-media perspective rooted in citizens’ everyday lives. Media are also key to how experts and governing bodies communicate to citizens, and societal risk management depends on communication to maintain trust and mobilize for desired action. However, our understanding of societal crisis communication is riddled with paradoxes, as seen in the contrast between the drastic measures against COVID-19 versus the lack of large-scale climate action. In spite of extensive media coverage warning of a climate crisis, we do not know how this information is received and interpreted in everyday contexts, or why such different perceptions and actions arise in the communication of crisis situations. This project resolves information paradoxes by conducting qualitative ethnographic research and stakeholder collaboration on how people encounter climate change and COVID-19 across media and in local communities in Norway, analyzing information in context, and considering challenges in the digitalization of media use, including digital misinformation and infection tracing apps. With an interdisciplinary approach and project team, MUCS combines media use studies, journalism, human geography and political psychology to develop a novel, citizen-focused perspective on media use in crisis situations, applied to solve persistent paradoxes and produce actionable knowledge.

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SAMRISK-2-Samfunnssikkerhet og risiko