In this article, we develop the concept of small acts of engagement (SAOE) in a networked media environment as a conceptual framework to study specific audience practices and as an agenda for research on these practices. We define SAOE, such as liking, sharing, and commenting, as productive audience practices that require little investment and are intentionally more casual than the structural and laborious practices examined as types of produsage and convergence culture. We further elaborate on the interpretive and productive aspects of SAOE, which allow us to reconnect the notions of a participatory culture and a culture of everyday agency. Our central argument is that audience studies’ perspective allows viewing SAOE as practices of everyday audience agency, which, on an aggregate level, have the potential to become powerful acts of resistance.

This chapter develops a set of findings around audiences' small-scale acts of engagement with media texts. We identify and discuss three distinct emanations of these small acts: 1) one click engagement, 2) commenting and debating and 3) small stories. In contrasting them with more structural productive practices, we further conceptualise them in relation to two main dimensions: effort and intentionality. Lastly, we suggest to develop a conceptualisation of the influence which we have labelled interruption. Content flow can be challenged if not transformed due to the volume of these acts, which is realised by the producing audiences as well as by mainstream media. Profound changes in the way information is produced and distributed are fuelled by small acts of engagement rather than by more laborious practices.

In this article introducing the theme of the special issue we argue that studies of new media practices might benefit from especially Pierre Bourdieu’s research on cultural production. We introduce some of the literature, which deals with the use of digital media, and which have taken steps to develop field theory in this context. Secondly, we present the four thematic articles in this issue and the articles outside the theme, which includes two translations of classic texts within communication and media research. This introduction article concludes by encouraging media scholars to embark on more studies within a field theory framework, as the ability of the comprehensive theoretical work and the ideas of a reflexive sociology is able to trigger the good questions, more than it claims to offer a complete and self-sufficient sociology of media and inherent here also new media.

This study examines the media coverage of the #metoo movement in neighbouring countries Denmark and Sweden. A comparative content analysis shows differences in genres, sources and themes across the two samples. Further, the analysis shows that the coverage predominantly positioned #metoo within an individual action frame portraying sexual assault as a personal rather than societal problem in both countries. However, the individual action frame and a delegitimising frame focused on critique of #metoo were more prevalent in the Danish coverage. A framing analysis revealed four different news frames in the coverage: #metoo as (1) an online campaign connecting networked individuals, (2) part of a broader and long-standing social movement for gender justice, (3) an unnecessary campaign fuelled by cultures of political correctness and, finally, (4) a witch hunt and “kangaroo court”. Finally, we discuss and relate these findings to the political and cultural contexts of the two countries and their different historical trajectories for the institutionalisation of feminism and implementation of gender equality policies.

In this article, I analyse digital distinction mechanisms in young people’s cross media engagement with news. Using a combination of open online diaries and qualitative interviews with young Danes aged 15 to 18 who differ in social background and education, and with Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework, the article investigates how cultural capital (CC) operates in specific tastes and distastes for news genres, platforms and providers. The article argues that distinction mechanism not only works on the level of news providers and news genres but also on the level of engagement practices—the ways in which people enact and describe their own news engagement practices. Among those rich in CC, physical, analogue objects in the form of newspapers and physical conversations about news are seen as ‘better’ that digital ones, resulting in a feeling of guilt when they mostly engage with news on social media. Secondly, young people with lower CC discard legacy news, which they see as elitist and irrelevant. Thirdly, those rich in CC are media and news genre savvy in the sense that it makes them able to critically evaluate the news they engage with across platforms and sites.