Europe in a changing world - EUMEPLAT

EUMEPLAT / European Media Platforms

Introduction

Eumeplat (European media platforms: Assessing positive and negative externalities for European culture) is a H2020 Transformations project with media and communication studies scholars from twelve universities coming from ten countries (including Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden). The coordinator is Prof. Andrea Miconi from the Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM (Milan, Italy). The project runs for 36 months between 2021 and 2024.

Project description

The EUMEPLAT project aims at analyzing the role of media platforms in fostering or dismantling European identity. The assumption we will draw on is that European dimension has rarely been dominant in media history. In most cases – i.e., movie – market shares are mainly divided among national productions and importations from the most influential country. In broadcasting both regional and national patterns emerge, with properly European exchanges being the exception more than the rule. Web platforms are usually owned by US companies, with a new threat appearing in our media landscape. We will focus on the “platformization” process, as the rise of new closed Web architectures, so as to inquire its positive and negative externalities, functional and dis-functional consequences. Positive externalities are beneficial to society at large, in a way that explains the overall ambition of the project. Detecting the insurgence of negative effects is a fundamental duty for scholars and policy-makers, as externalities of both kinds tend to reinforce themselves, giving rise to positive loop feedbacks and critical vicious circles. Negative externalities include misinformation, toxic debate, exclusion of independent voices; positive externalities encompass European co-productions, or practices able to bring people out of the information bubble. For this purpose, we will run a multidisciplinary analysis of platformization in three fields: news, video sharing, media representations, with the final goal to offer a theoretical synthesis. The research question is whether or not new platforms – YouTube, Netflix, NewsFeed - are making European culture more European, based on indicators related to production, consumption and representation. Patterns will be detected by comparing national, regional and European and level. Advanced methods will be applied for data analysis, so as to provide guidelines for decision-makers (i.e., fake news prevention; best practices in co-productions).

Objectives

These are the objectives of EUMEPLAT:

  • Objective 1: furnish detailed knowledge about the evolution of European media landscape;
  • Objective 2: come up with an operational definition of “Europeanisation” and provide policy-makers with guidelines for addressing it as a strategic priority;
  • Objective 3: identify best-practices in cross-European cultural circulation;
  • Objective 4: analyze the representation of sensitive issues in ten countries;
  • Objective 5: suggest counter-measures for tackling negative externalities of platformization, with an emphasis on anti-European fake news;
  • Objective 6: by drawing on all tendencies detected, coming out with an indication of the problems to be prioritized in the future agenda.

Role of Ghent University

The Center for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) of Ghent University is involved as a partner in all work packages, and it has the lead in Task 1.3 (on patterns in movie production, distribution and consumption) and Task 4.3 (on representation of gender in ten countries).

Website

to be announced

Contact

Prof. Daniel Biltereyst [Prof. Sofie Van Bauwel; Dr. Sander De Ridder]
Department Communication Sciences
Phone number: +32 9 264 68 64