Eumeplat

EUROPEAN MEDIA PLATFORMS
Assessing Negative and Positive Externalities for European Culture.

EUROPEAN MEDIA PLATFORMS
Assessing Negative and Positive Externalities for European Culture
The EUMEPLAT project aims at analysing the role of digital platforms in promoting or dismantling European identity. In modern history, such a European dimension has almost always been marginal, and each country thrives, if anything, on national forms - e.g. news, comedy, popular music - and global ones, such as the big American blockbusters. In turn, the most widely used digital platforms are almost exclusively US-owned, posing a new and urgent problem, both at the level of consumer practices and community regulation of the market.

The multidisciplinary research undertaken by the EUMEPLAT consortium questions to what extent the recent transformation of the media market - so-called platformisation - has confirmed these trends, or opened up new opportunities for a common market. For this purpose, we will analyse the production and consumption trends that in the different areas - press, broadcasting, cinema, video platforms, social media - define different geo-cultural patterns: the national one; the regional one; the global one, usually dominated by American services; and finally the properly European one.

Among the research trails, we can list:

  • a detailed understanding of the transformation of European media markets, over the past three decades;
  • an analysis of European regulation of the sector;
  • the achievement of an operational definition of Europeanization;
  • the collection of best practices in the circulation of cultural content between European countries;
  • the status of public opinion in ten European countries, as it emerges from discussion on social media;
  • the analysis of the representation of critical issues - such as gender and immigration - in ten European countries.

Among the most relevant findings in terms of knowledge advancement, and in line with the H2020 call Evolving media landscape and Europeanisation, are:

  • bridging the knowledge gap on the European media system, through a synchronic and diachronic analysis;
  • define the semantic map of the Europeanization process, considering it from both the top-down perspective of institutions and the bottom-up perspective of social action;
  • provide an up-to-date data base available for further research;
  • provide policy-makers with the knowledge base needed to deal with the complexity of the global platform system, with a specific focus on fake news prevention;
  • identify current trends and possible scenarios for years to come.