Hallvard Moe

I am interested in how media matter for democracy. In modern democratic societies, it is common to think that the media are key for the people's rule: The idea is that the media constitute the infrastructure for the public sphere, as channels and arenas where information about politics can be disseminated and discussed, and where the citizens can present their problems for the rulers. I am interested in how well this idea works in practice - at different times through history, with different media technologies, and under different regimes. 

In my current research, I study how media matter for democracy from a user perspective. For this purpose, I co-founded the Bergen Media Use Research group at our department, which i head together with Brita Ytre-Arne. In 2022, I was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to launch a new project called "Distributed and prepared. A new theory of citizens’ public connection networks in the age of datafication (PREPARE)".

In my PhD thesis, I studied how media policy in different countries facilitated such a role in the internet era through the regulation of publicly funded broadcasting institutions like the BBC and NRK. A main finding was that media policy, and the regulation of these institutions, did not acknowledge the features that make the web stand out from other media platforms, while at the same time these organisations operated as public service media across platforms. I later studied how such institutions used social media.

Together with colleagues at the University of Oslo and at our department, I have also analyzed media systems in the Nordic region. A key point has been to show what is often referred to as the Nordic welfare state model cannot be understood without concern for the media. 

I have also been interested in how social media like Twitter is used for political debate. With Anders Olof Larsson, I have worked on analyses of Twitter use during election campaigns in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This collaboration also led to contributions to debates on research ethics and methods for internet research. The empirical analysis have among other things confirmed the hunch that attention is unevenly distributed online, and that it pays to have a position offline to get heard online.