Brita Ytre-Arne
Biographic Data
| ID | 3472074 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brita Ytre-Arne |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brita |
| FAMILY NAME | Ytre-Arne |
| SIGNATURE | YTRE-ARNE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bergen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4452-6007 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
How people make sense of climate issues in the news
This paper asks how people make sense of climate issues in the news. As part of a study in Norway, with repeated interviews and open-ended questionnaires, we invited people to share their thoughts on three real and recent news stories. The examples were related to climate change on local, national and global scales, with varying levels of conflict and different narrative frameworks and visual components. We find that news articles with different …
Climate Change Is an Intangible News Topic: A Qualitative Analysis of Audience Perceptions
In this article we examine how news audiences perceive the issue of climate change, arguing that it appears intangible compared to other major news topics people routinely encounter in everyday media use. Our study contributes to existing research on climate journalism by prioritizing an audience perspective, combining scholarship on temporalities in climate journalism with environmental social science perspectives on climate as a difficult issue…
Introduction: What We (Don’t) Know About News Avoidance
Interest in news avoidance has recently grown both inside and outside academia. In this introduction to a special issue on the topic, we present a systematic review of existing studies (N = 116) and discuss what we (don’t) know about this phenomenon. Our review illustrates that news avoidance has been examined through qualitative, mixed, but most often quantitative studies, conducted primarily in Western countries, although with important excepti…
Ritual check-in, shocked immersion, regained stability: A sequential typology of news experiences in crisis situations
This short paper discusses people’s news experiences before, during and after societal crisis situations, contributing with a sequential typology outlining the three phases ritual check-in, shocked immersion and regained stability. Theoretically, we draw on classical contributions to media studies and sociology, particularly the concepts of ritual communication and ontological security. Empirically, we build on qualitative interview studies with …
Transferred expectations of human presence: Folk theories among older adults who are inexperienced users of online services
This study analyses the expectations of older adults who are inexperienced users of online media and services, examining their sense-making processes when using the internet for informational and practical purposes. Research on older users often focuses on access and abilities, but this study instead explores older adults’ expectations of what it means to interact online. We apply a ‘folk theory’ framework to illuminate underlying perceptions tha…
Monitoring the infection rate: Explaining the meaning of metrics in pandemic news experiences
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward questions of what citizens need and want from journalism in a global crisis. In this article, we analyse one particular aspect of pandemic news experiences: Preoccupation with monitoring metrics for COVID-19 infection cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, widely disseminated through journalistic news outlets. We ask why close monitoring of such metrics appeared meaningful to news users, and what these expe…
The Democratic Significance of Everyday News Use: Using Diaries to Understand Public Connection over Time and beyond Journalism
This article argues that journalism scholars should strive to understand the democratic significance of everyday news use, and that such an interest requires us to tackle some methodological and conceptual challenges. We utilize the concept of public connection as a starting point for prioritizing aspects of everyday news use that are most relevant to democracy. Based on a review of existing methods—surveys, interviews and digital trace data—we p…
Intrusive media and knowledge work: How knowledge workers negotiate digital media norms in the pursuit of focused work
This article analyses how knowledge workers experience and reflect upon intrusions from digital media in the pursuit of focused work. As a multitude of digital media technologies have become integral to working life, scholars have observed a connectivity paradox in which these technologies are experienced as both helpful and hindering, as integral to but also intruding upon focus and concentration. To understand this important and widespread ambi…
Advancing digital disconnection research: Introduction to the special issue
Over the past decade, scholarly interest in “digital disconnection” and related concepts has grown in media and communication studies, and in related disciplines. The idea of digital disconnection explicitly references digitalization as a key societal development, creating conditions of intensified and embedded media involvement across social life. The notion of digital disconnection thereby represents a critical response to mediated conditions t…
Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown
This paper analyzes news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how people balance between conflicting needs for information and disconnection in an extraordinary situation. We analyze empirical data from a qualitative questionnaire study of Norwegian media users conducted in March–April 2020, a period of early pandemic lockdown. The acute lockdown context accentuated intensified monitoring of constantly updated news streams, and perceptions of…
Folk theories of algorithms: Understanding digital irritation
This article draws on the framework of “folk theories” to analyze how people perceive algorithms in the media. Taking algorithms as a prime case to investigate how people respond to datafication in everyday media use, we ask how people perceive positive and negative consequences of algorithms. To answer our question, we conduct qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended answers from a 2019 representative survey among Norwegians, identifying five…
Temporal ambivalences in smartphone use: Conflicting flows, conflicting responsibilities
This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense…
Audiences’ Communicative Agency in a Datafied Age: Interpretative, Relational and Increasingly Prospective
This article develops a conceptualization of audience agency in the face of datafication. We consider how people, as audiences and users of media and technologies, face transforming communicative conditions, and how these conditions challenge the power potentials of audiences in processes of communication—that is, their communicative agency. To develop our conceptualization, we unpack the concept of audiences’ communicative agency by examining it…
Media use in changing everyday life: How biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection
This article analyses how changing life situations affect media use, conceptualized as a question of how biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection. To answer this question, the analysis draws on qualitative data from a comprehensive study of media use in Norway, with in-depth interviews and media diaries. The theoretical approach joins domestication and media repertoire theory with research on public connec…
Between ritual and information: Three phases of Norwegian news audiences’ sense-making of the election of Donald Trump
This article investigates sense-making processes of news audiences when faced with destabilizing global events. The destabilizing event is Trump’s 2016 election win, which we study from the perspective of audiences far removed: in the Nordic region. Asking how we can understand shifts in the balance between the informational and ritual aspects of news over time, we study how journalism matters when ordinary practices are suddenly uprooted, and in…
Designing a Foresight Analysis Exercise on Audiences and Emerging Technologies: Cedar’s Analytical-Intuitive Balance
In the Interest of Audiences: An Agenda
Everyday Lives of Audiences in a Future Europe: Tracing Emerging Issues from Scenarios to Experiences in 2030
A New Crossroads for Audiences and Audience Research: Frameworks for a Foresight Exercise
Approximately Informed, Occasionally Monitorial? Reconsidering Normative Citizen Ideals
This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limi…
An Agenda in the Interest of Audiences: Facing the Challenges of Intrusive Media Technologies
This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and fol…
The Future of Audiences
Critical, agentic and trans-media: Frameworks and findings from a foresight analysis exercise on audiences
We write this article presenting frameworks and findings from an international network on audience research, as we stand 75 years from Herta Herzog's classic investigation of radio listeners, published in Lazarsfeld and Stanton's 1944 war edition of Radio Research. The article aims to contribute to and advance a rich strand of self-reflexive stock-taking and sorting of future research priorities within the transforming field of audience analysis,…
Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation
Changing Magazine Journalism: Key Trends in Norwegian Women’s Magazines
This article analyses developments in Norwegian magazine journalism in the last decade, focusing on the broad and varied spectrum of magazines targeting women. The analysis is based on multiple methods and data sources, aiming to connect the production and reception of magazine journalism to the texts of magazines. This article will identify and discuss five key trends: fragmentation, digitalization, Nordic inspiration, redefinition of the politi…
Folk theories of algorithms: Understanding digital irritation
This article draws on the framework of “folk theories” to analyze how people perceive algorithms in the media. Taking algorithms as a prime case to investigate how people respond to datafication in everyday media use, we ask how people perceive positive and negative consequences of algorithms. To answer our question, we conduct qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended answers from a 2019 representative survey among Norwegians, identifying five…
Temporal ambivalences in smartphone use: Conflicting flows, conflicting responsibilities
This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense…
Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown
This paper analyzes news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how people balance between conflicting needs for information and disconnection in an extraordinary situation. We analyze empirical data from a qualitative questionnaire study of Norwegian media users conducted in March–April 2020, a period of early pandemic lockdown. The acute lockdown context accentuated intensified monitoring of constantly updated news streams, and perceptions of…
Audiences’ Communicative Agency in a Datafied Age: Interpretative, Relational and Increasingly Prospective
This article develops a conceptualization of audience agency in the face of datafication. We consider how people, as audiences and users of media and technologies, face transforming communicative conditions, and how these conditions challenge the power potentials of audiences in processes of communication—that is, their communicative agency. To develop our conceptualization, we unpack the concept of audiences’ communicative agency by examining it…
The Future of Audiences
An Agenda in the Interest of Audiences: Facing the Challenges of Intrusive Media Technologies
This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and fol…
Women’s magazines and the public sphere
This article explores the relationship between women’s magazines and the public sphere, arguing that women’s magazines can be positioned as having a marginal or an important role in the public domain — depending on how the functions of popular media in democracy are understood. Women’s magazines are generally not associated with the forms of journalism which bring citizens information of crucial democratic importance. Nevertheless, research on wo…
Approximately Informed, Occasionally Monitorial? Reconsidering Normative Citizen Ideals
This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limi…
Introduction: What We (Don’t) Know About News Avoidance
Interest in news avoidance has recently grown both inside and outside academia. In this introduction to a special issue on the topic, we present a systematic review of existing studies (N = 116) and discuss what we (don’t) know about this phenomenon. Our review illustrates that news avoidance has been examined through qualitative, mixed, but most often quantitative studies, conducted primarily in Western countries, although with important excepti…
Me at My Best: Therapeutic Ideals in Norwegian Women's Magazines
This article examines "the therapeutic culture" in contemporary women's magazines. A qualitative content analysis of the leading Norwegian women's magazines KK and Tara reveals how psychological experts, self-help advice, and the presentation of the self reflects a therapeutic ethos which has become a norm for women, offering a manageable way of dealing with individual self-realization. Leading theorists on the modern self argue that therapeutic …
Between ritual and information: Three phases of Norwegian news audiences’ sense-making of the election of Donald Trump
This article investigates sense-making processes of news audiences when faced with destabilizing global events. The destabilizing event is Trump’s 2016 election win, which we study from the perspective of audiences far removed: in the Nordic region. Asking how we can understand shifts in the balance between the informational and ritual aspects of news over time, we study how journalism matters when ordinary practices are suddenly uprooted, and in…
Women’s magazines and their readers: The relationship between textual features and practices of reading
Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections…
I want to hold it in my hands’: Readers’ experiences of the phenomenological differences between women’s magazines online and in print
Changing Magazine Journalism: Key Trends in Norwegian Women’s Magazines
This article analyses developments in Norwegian magazine journalism in the last decade, focusing on the broad and varied spectrum of magazines targeting women. The analysis is based on multiple methods and data sources, aiming to connect the production and reception of magazine journalism to the texts of magazines. This article will identify and discuss five key trends: fragmentation, digitalization, Nordic inspiration, redefinition of the politi…
Critical, agentic and trans-media: Frameworks and findings from a foresight analysis exercise on audiences
We write this article presenting frameworks and findings from an international network on audience research, as we stand 75 years from Herta Herzog's classic investigation of radio listeners, published in Lazarsfeld and Stanton's 1944 war edition of Radio Research. The article aims to contribute to and advance a rich strand of self-reflexive stock-taking and sorting of future research priorities within the transforming field of audience analysis,…
Ritual check-in, shocked immersion, regained stability: A sequential typology of news experiences in crisis situations
This short paper discusses people’s news experiences before, during and after societal crisis situations, contributing with a sequential typology outlining the three phases ritual check-in, shocked immersion and regained stability. Theoretically, we draw on classical contributions to media studies and sociology, particularly the concepts of ritual communication and ontological security. Empirically, we build on qualitative interview studies with …
Monitoring the infection rate: Explaining the meaning of metrics in pandemic news experiences
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought forward questions of what citizens need and want from journalism in a global crisis. In this article, we analyse one particular aspect of pandemic news experiences: Preoccupation with monitoring metrics for COVID-19 infection cases, hospitalisations, and deaths, widely disseminated through journalistic news outlets. We ask why close monitoring of such metrics appeared meaningful to news users, and what these expe…
Positioning the self: Identity and women's magazine reading
This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking abou…
How people make sense of climate issues in the news
This paper asks how people make sense of climate issues in the news. As part of a study in Norway, with repeated interviews and open-ended questionnaires, we invited people to share their thoughts on three real and recent news stories. The examples were related to climate change on local, national and global scales, with varying levels of conflict and different narrative frameworks and visual components. We find that news articles with different …
Climate Change Is an Intangible News Topic: A Qualitative Analysis of Audience Perceptions
In this article we examine how news audiences perceive the issue of climate change, arguing that it appears intangible compared to other major news topics people routinely encounter in everyday media use. Our study contributes to existing research on climate journalism by prioritizing an audience perspective, combining scholarship on temporalities in climate journalism with environmental social science perspectives on climate as a difficult issue…
Transferred expectations of human presence: Folk theories among older adults who are inexperienced users of online services
This study analyses the expectations of older adults who are inexperienced users of online media and services, examining their sense-making processes when using the internet for informational and practical purposes. Research on older users often focuses on access and abilities, but this study instead explores older adults’ expectations of what it means to interact online. We apply a ‘folk theory’ framework to illuminate underlying perceptions tha…
Media use in changing everyday life: How biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection
This article analyses how changing life situations affect media use, conceptualized as a question of how biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection. To answer this question, the analysis draws on qualitative data from a comprehensive study of media use in Norway, with in-depth interviews and media diaries. The theoretical approach joins domestication and media repertoire theory with research on public connec…
Et eget rom? Lesernes erfaringer med kvinneblader
Women’s magazines and their readers: The relationship between textual features and practices of reading
Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections…
I want to hold it in my hands’: Readers’ experiences of the phenomenological differences between women’s magazines online and in print
Women’s magazines and the public sphere
This article explores the relationship between women’s magazines and the public sphere, arguing that women’s magazines can be positioned as having a marginal or an important role in the public domain — depending on how the functions of popular media in democracy are understood. Women’s magazines are generally not associated with the forms of journalism which bring citizens information of crucial democratic importance. Nevertheless, research on wo…
Positioning the self: Identity and women's magazine reading
This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking abou…
Me at My Best: Therapeutic Ideals in Norwegian Women's Magazines
This article examines "the therapeutic culture" in contemporary women's magazines. A qualitative content analysis of the leading Norwegian women's magazines KK and Tara reveals how psychological experts, self-help advice, and the presentation of the self reflects a therapeutic ethos which has become a norm for women, offering a manageable way of dealing with individual self-realization. Leading theorists on the modern self argue that therapeutic …
Changing Magazine Journalism: Key Trends in Norwegian Women’s Magazines
This article analyses developments in Norwegian magazine journalism in the last decade, focusing on the broad and varied spectrum of magazines targeting women. The analysis is based on multiple methods and data sources, aiming to connect the production and reception of magazine journalism to the texts of magazines. This article will identify and discuss five key trends: fragmentation, digitalization, Nordic inspiration, redefinition of the politi…
Gendered Citizenship and the Politics of Representation
Critical, agentic and trans-media: Frameworks and findings from a foresight analysis exercise on audiences
We write this article presenting frameworks and findings from an international network on audience research, as we stand 75 years from Herta Herzog's classic investigation of radio listeners, published in Lazarsfeld and Stanton's 1944 war edition of Radio Research. The article aims to contribute to and advance a rich strand of self-reflexive stock-taking and sorting of future research priorities within the transforming field of audience analysis,…
Designing a Foresight Analysis Exercise on Audiences and Emerging Technologies: Cedar’s Analytical-Intuitive Balance
In the Interest of Audiences: An Agenda
Everyday Lives of Audiences in a Future Europe: Tracing Emerging Issues from Scenarios to Experiences in 2030
A New Crossroads for Audiences and Audience Research: Frameworks for a Foresight Exercise
Approximately Informed, Occasionally Monitorial? Reconsidering Normative Citizen Ideals
This article identifies gaps between normative ideals and realistic accounts of news use in democracy today. Starting from the widespread but unrealistic ideal of the informed citizen, and its more realistic development through notions of the monitorial citizen, we analyze comprehensive qualitative data on news users’ experiences. We describe these news users as approximately informed, occasionally monitorial. This description emphasizes the limi…
An Agenda in the Interest of Audiences: Facing the Challenges of Intrusive Media Technologies
This article formulates a five-point agenda for audience research, drawing on implications arising out of a systematic foresight analysis exercise on the field of audience research, conducted between 2014 and 2017, by the research network Consortium on Emerging Directions in Audience Research (CEDAR). We formulate this agenda in the context of the rapid datafication of society, amid emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, and fol…
The Future of Audiences
Media use in changing everyday life: How biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection
This article analyses how changing life situations affect media use, conceptualized as a question of how biographical disruption could destabilize media repertoires and public connection. To answer this question, the analysis draws on qualitative data from a comprehensive study of media use in Norway, with in-depth interviews and media diaries. The theoretical approach joins domestication and media repertoire theory with research on public connec…
Between ritual and information: Three phases of Norwegian news audiences’ sense-making of the election of Donald Trump
This article investigates sense-making processes of news audiences when faced with destabilizing global events. The destabilizing event is Trump’s 2016 election win, which we study from the perspective of audiences far removed: in the Nordic region. Asking how we can understand shifts in the balance between the informational and ritual aspects of news over time, we study how journalism matters when ordinary practices are suddenly uprooted, and in…
Temporal ambivalences in smartphone use: Conflicting flows, conflicting responsibilities
This article explores implications of the central position of the smartphone in an age of constant connectivity. Based on a qualitative study of 50 informants, we ask how users experience and handle temporal ambivalences in everyday smartphone use, drawing on the concepts flow and responsibilization to conceptualize central dimensions of such ambivalences. The notion of conflicting flows illuminates how brief checking cycles expand at the expense…
Audiences’ Communicative Agency in a Datafied Age: Interpretative, Relational and Increasingly Prospective
This article develops a conceptualization of audience agency in the face of datafication. We consider how people, as audiences and users of media and technologies, face transforming communicative conditions, and how these conditions challenge the power potentials of audiences in processes of communication—that is, their communicative agency. To develop our conceptualization, we unpack the concept of audiences’ communicative agency by examining it…
Advancing digital disconnection research: Introduction to the special issue
Over the past decade, scholarly interest in “digital disconnection” and related concepts has grown in media and communication studies, and in related disciplines. The idea of digital disconnection explicitly references digitalization as a key societal development, creating conditions of intensified and embedded media involvement across social life. The notion of digital disconnection thereby represents a critical response to mediated conditions t…
Doomscrolling, Monitoring and Avoiding: News Use in Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown
This paper analyzes news use during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how people balance between conflicting needs for information and disconnection in an extraordinary situation. We analyze empirical data from a qualitative questionnaire study of Norwegian media users conducted in March–April 2020, a period of early pandemic lockdown. The acute lockdown context accentuated intensified monitoring of constantly updated news streams, and perceptions of…
Folk theories of algorithms: Understanding digital irritation
This article draws on the framework of “folk theories” to analyze how people perceive algorithms in the media. Taking algorithms as a prime case to investigate how people respond to datafication in everyday media use, we ask how people perceive positive and negative consequences of algorithms. To answer our question, we conduct qualitative thematic analysis of open-ended answers from a 2019 representative survey among Norwegians, identifying five…
The Democratic Significance of Everyday News Use: Using Diaries to Understand Public Connection over Time and beyond Journalism
This article argues that journalism scholars should strive to understand the democratic significance of everyday news use, and that such an interest requires us to tackle some methodological and conceptual challenges. We utilize the concept of public connection as a starting point for prioritizing aspects of everyday news use that are most relevant to democracy. Based on a review of existing methods—surveys, interviews and digital trace data—we p…
Intrusive media and knowledge work: How knowledge workers negotiate digital media norms in the pursuit of focused work
This article analyses how knowledge workers experience and reflect upon intrusions from digital media in the pursuit of focused work. As a multitude of digital media technologies have become integral to working life, scholars have observed a connectivity paradox in which these technologies are experienced as both helpful and hindering, as integral to but also intruding upon focus and concentration. To understand this important and widespread ambi…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · Media Studies and Communication (21 works) · Media studies (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (11 works) · Social science (11 works)