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The Nano Level of Media Use: Situational Influences on (Mobile) Media Use

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How We Use the Media

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed tremendous change in our media ecologies, with one big trend among those changes being the rise of mobile media. Using these devices is not tied to any given location but they can be carried along with their users, enabling media use in nearly each and every context and situation in our everyday lives. Hence, the situational context of media use has become of theoretically unlimited variability, raising the interest in studying its influences on media use. But of course, context of media use had been studied already before the rise of mobile media. This chapter therefore sets out to first introduce situational dimensions already integrated in the study of traditional mass media use. Based on this we review current attempts to integrate situational characteristics into the study of mobile media use as well as methodological approaches to capture situational aspects of media use.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Veronika Karnowski

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  1. Veronika Karnowski
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Correspondence to Veronika Karnowski .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Benjamin Krämer

  2. Institute of Communication and Media Studies, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany

    Felix Frey

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Karnowski, V. (2020). The Nano Level of Media Use: Situational Influences on (Mobile) Media Use. In: Krämer, B., Frey, F. (eds) How We Use the Media . Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41313-2_8

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