Ruben Vandenplas

Despite being central to the media repertoire approach, operationalizations of interrelations of media repertoire components often remain limited to proportions of use, or the personal relevance of repertoire components. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of these interrelations by focusing specifically on one particular operationalization: the (in)compatibility of parts of the repertoire. Recent discussions in newspaper headlines indicate how Flemish reality TV-show Temptation Island might function as one such component, deemed incompatible with the repertoire of higher-educated young viewers. By drawing upon Lahire’s theory of dissonance, and exploring the appropriation of Temptation Island within repertoires through a moral economy of media use, the paper explores how young viewers under thirty-five make sense of “dissonant components” within their repertoire, and alleviate the tensions that their presence can create by adopting strategies that establish distance from the text or by hiding parts of the repertoire in certain social contexts.

The coronavirus pandemic sent tremors throughout the news landscape. While the onset of the pandemic appeared to significantly increase news hunger, soon after, studies reported an uptick in what they termed “coronablocking”: the conscious avoidance of coronavirus related news. Younger age groups in particular appeared more likely to engage in coronablocking. This article seeks to contribute to extant research by providing a textured account of how and why young news users avoid the news. To explore these questions, we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with Belgian news users under the age of 35. We propose that news avoidance practices are fluid, as news avoidance was often preceded by moments of increased news consumption, and inherently connected to the specific spatiotemporal context of users and enacted within their broader media repertoire. In our analysis, we discuss the user-identified characteristics which lead users to a ‘tipping point’, at which point they avoided the news to varying degrees by reconfiguring their media repertoire. Three types of reconfigurations are identified: tuning out news content, regulating the flow of information, and controlling the tone of voice, all of which underline users’ agency in shaping their repertoires to avoid the news.

News media act as a window to the world. This window is now believed to be shrinking due to developments in digital media such as algorithmic personalization which restricts people to echo chambers in turn affecting citizens’ views on society. It is an example of the moral panics surrounding digital media and obfuscating underlying social dynamics at play. This article seeks to address this issue by looking at news use through the lens of news repertoires. Building on a representative survey of Dutch-speaking Belgian citizens, we identify four archetypical news repertoires (Limited – Panoramic – Traditional – Casual) and investigate how these relate to civic attitudes including civic (dis-) engagement, individualism, and ethnocentrism. In line with previous research, our study shows that age and socio-economic status significantly predict the constellation of one’s news repertoire. Furthermore, variances in news repertoires translate into small but significant differences in views on society, particularly between the media-rich Panoramic and media-poor Limited news repertoires regarding ethnocentrism. Finally, we discuss how in order to appease moral media panics, it is not only necessary to substantiate debates on media power with empirical insights on news use, but also to imagine news audiences in a more nuanced way.

Media convergence has afforded users an increasing amount of options regarding the media they consume, available at the click of a button. This has led some to clamor about the potential for media to bridge previously existing inequalities and decrease social stratification not just in media use, but in other realms of society as well. Skeptics have argued that while the convergence of media has given users more options in their own media repertoire, social stratification persists. Moreover, if media do increase a user’s possibilities to participate in other realms of society, the persisting stratification of media use risks enacting a Matthew effect whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Using data from the Flemish participation survey, this article seeks to contribute to this discussion by exploring Flemish media use by constructing media repertoires using latent class analysis and exploring their sociodemographic profiles. Following this analysis, we compare the cultural participation patterns of the six Flemish media repertoires using negative binomial regression analysis. We find that social stratification of media use persists in Flanders, with broad and ‘highbrow’ repertoires predominantly restricted to higher status groups. Moreover, we find a structural homology between the structure of media repertoires and cultural participation, whereby broad repertoires exhibit a similar openness to cultural practices, and repertoires tailored to highbrow media exhibit a similar preference for highbrow cultural activities. As a result, we find that social stratification persists in media use and cultural participation but argues that media repertoires offer a potential entrypoint.