Liane Rothenberger, from the Technische Universität, explains how she used the media repertoires to understand the evolution of use of new technologies et media.
In introduction, she insists on the fact that it must target an active audience that are no longer consumers of those technologies but they become producers. She talks about a fusion of behaviours and thus bare the form of production and consumption with the devices and applications, giving us a new idea of use, the prosumption and produsage.
In order to look for something relevant, it is more than necessary to determine the characteristics of such study, gender, class, ethnicity, in order to differentiate to the maximum and compare the results. The first media repertoires were mostly focused on quantity as the aim was to compare the data and regroup people according to their consumption. For Liane Rothenberger, it needed to have another approach based on quality. The quality resides in the well predefined questions on specific practices asked that are relevant to the individual.
Another dimension is to be taken into account, the constant evolution of consuming technology (devices, applications…) and the way people are producing content thanks to it. From a generation to another, patterns won’t be the same and in order to understand the gap or what makes the usage of two groups differ, it’s important to pay attention to all the characteristics quoted above.
As a result, this research requires the researcher to adapt to its audience in order to extract the data in terms of quality and not only in quantity as it may not be representative of a specific pattern of usage that is directly inscribed in a specific sociocultural context. Lina Rothenberger ends on the multiplicity of methods that exist in order to have insight in the data you extract and that there is a paradigm shift to follow as the uses are constantly evolving from an audience to another.