Elin Franzén disputerade i etnologi vid Stockholms universitet i november 2021 med doktorsavhandlingen Radio: Vardagsliv tillsammans med ett massmedium.

På Stockholms universitets hemsida kan man läsa följande om avhandlingen:

”Under snart hundra år har radiomediet varit närvarande i människors vardag i Sverige. I det avseendet är radio att betrakta som en självklar företeelse i samhället. Men hur går det till när detta medium tar plats hos den enskilda individen? Vad är radio för något som upplevt fenomen betraktat?

In English:

Radio : Everyday life with a mass medium

Abstract from diva:

”This thesis examines the radio medium as a phenomenon of experience. The perspective relates to phenomenological philosophy, dealing with human knowledge as an ongoing intentional relationship with the world: to experience is to grasp things such as they appear to the subjective consciousness. Radio is accordingly understood as a phenomenon that is given meaning through the individual user’s encounters with the medium in its constitutive forms.

The research is based on a qualitative material of approximately 200 questionnaire responses and interviews with 17 persons, describing the presence of the medium in the current lives of the participants as well as through their lifetime, which, from a phenomenological viewpoint, makes radio appear both in terms of a present phenomenon and objects of recollection. The experiences that were documented in the late 2010s thus span almost the entire history of the radio medium in Sweden.

The everyday embeddedness of radio is analyzed by focusing on three constitutive aspects that have emerged in the empirical data: technical equipment, mediated content, and temporal structures. By breaking down the phenomenon into these aspects, the thesis presents a detailed description of the ways in which radio is integrated into and constitutes everyday contexts.

Encounters with technical equipment, mediated content, and temporal structures are analytically described in terms of biographical orientations toward shifting media environments throughout the history of the medium. How radio has been present in life shapes experiences of radio in the present. Likewise, today’s media use defines how radio appears as a phenomenon of the past. Throughout the thesis, participants navigate radio environments in the shape of smartphones, transistor radios, vacuum tube receivers, linear flows of broadcasting, and on demand-structures. Radio is shown to be one of many interlaced components in the complex making of the everyday.”