Vermessungen der Mediengesellschaft im 20. Jahrhundert

Der Markt der politischen Meinungen. Meinungsforschung und ihre Öffentlichkeiten in transnationaler Perspektive, 1930–1950

Dieser Artikel analysiert die wirtschaftliche und mediale Dynamik, die der Einführung und schnellen Verbreitung der repräsentativen Meinungsforschung zwischen 1930 und 1950 zugrunde lag. Der Artikel bringt dabei verschiedene Forschungsansätze der letzten Jahre zusammen. Er verbindet den Prozess der Medialisierung mit den Kategorien von „Aufmerksamkeit“ und „Vertrauen“ um aufzuzeigen, wie Zeitgenossen zunächst mit dieser neuen Wissenstechnik vertraut wurden, und warum sie der neuartigen Darstellung von „öffentlicher Meinung“ Glauben schenkten. Dabei betont er insbesondere die transnationale Situierung des Einführungsprozesses, die in der bestehenden Literatur bislang nur am Rande behandelt wird. Tatsächlich ist die schnelle Verbreitung der repräsentativen Meinungsforschung nicht nur eine gemeinsame Erfahrung von Demokratien seit den dreißiger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts, sondern ein genuin transnationaler Prozess, der auf dem Austausch von Ideen, Praktiken und Personal beruht und der beeinflusst wurde von Beobachtungen der Entwicklungen in anderen Ländern.

Statistics of love, or: Dr. Kinsey asks the women. Surveys and media marketing in transnational perspective With a view to British and West German sex surveys in the tradition of Alfred C. Kinsey’s survey-based reports, the article explores how surveys were produced and how survey data was communicated in the popular press in the late 1940s and 1950s. It analyses the transnational career of representative surveys à la Kinsey as a knowledge transfer that complied with the rules of media society, being not so much driven by academic concerns, but by the print media and their interest in communicable and marketable knowledge. Following up the extensive media coverage of Kinsey’s work, popular newspapers in Britain as well as in West Germany commissioned the first nation-wide sex surveys and published their outcomes. Striving to attract the attention of their readers, they employed the surveys as marketing devises, thereby emphasising both the originality and scientific objectivity of their own reporting.

Audience Research, TV-viewers and the discourse on the West German Society of the 1970s as a participative democracy

Audience research in West Germany in the 1970s was massively influenced by a transfer of research methods and techniques from Britain and the US, leading to manifold transnational ties between institutions in the field of media research. The systematic study of TV-audiences, of their composition as well as their actual behaviour, was no exception from this rule. This paper investigates the function that this kind of data had for the West German society of the 1970s and argues that the knowledge produced – for example in the so-called time budget studies – was not just gaining significance as it adapted established research methods. Neither did the knowledge about the West German TV-viewer become a reference for professional debates alone. Instead, the statistics about audiences turned into a matrix for performative and discoursive negotiations of the West German society as a democratic and participatory community.

Attention for Europe. Eurobarometer, Empirical Social Research and the European Commission, 1958–1979 Public opinion polling became one of the most important political instruments during the second half of the twentieth century. After its formation in 1960, the new press and information office of the European Commission (later Direction General X) soon became aware of the importance of surveys. Its members tried to develop an information service that mimicked the formation of public opinion on the national level, but failed to achieve this goal – due to structural constraints, political restrictions and a restricted focus on the own European institutions. The actors of the press and information service embraced the idea of a united Europe which had yet to be brought about with the help of political integration. Thus, polls were needed as an instrument to build a common public, as polling results would prove – it was hoped – that a united Europe was commonly wished for. The Eurobarometer was at the heart of this development when it finally became established in 1974. It came about as an element of the broader idea to build a common public sphere in Europe with the help of political discussions, as it was developed by members of a Europeanized epistemic community concerned with empirical social research. Much later, it spilled over into the general public – but paradoxically, as a negative discourse on a unified Europe that was decidedly not supported by all Europeans.

The „economy of attention” as a heuristic concept of a cultural-history oriented media history In the light of confusing amounts of available data, the question as to how attention is gained has become an important topic that should be situated in twentieth-century modernity, as an aspect of acceleration. The struggle for attention is a competitive one, since attention always constitutes one of various realizable possibilities. That is especially true for the mass media. In order to attract an audience, they had to explore the preferences of their consumers more and more accurately. Hence, a whole industry for measuring attention evolved whose new polling techniques generated specific constructions of the social, thereby structuring the imagination of social realities in media society. But while pointing to the various practices engendering trust between the media selling their products and their consumers, “attention economy” as an analytical concept blends out the influence of media actors. In their theoretical reflections, Georg Franck and others simply ignore individual agency.

Starting off with the amazing experience of a woman doctor of German origin who had been born, educated and socialized in Russia the article discusses and compares higher education of women in tsarist Russia and imperial Germany. In both countries women aspired to be admitted to university, but for decades had to be content with special institutions (which did not confer academic degrees) in Russia and with the status of auditors in Germany. By discussing the particular features of female higher education and the final success of admission as regular students on an equal basis in German universities and as teaching staff in Russian ones (though women were not allowed to study there!), the article aims at raising our awareness of the complexity of different contexts. In addition to concepts of gender roles, the specific features of the educational systems and the demand for academically trained staff have to be taken into account. Only by clarifying how these (sometimes conflicting) forces were reconciled will we be able to understand the complicated processes of female admission in different countries.