New postdoctoral project at MUCS

Hilde Sakariassen has started as a postdoctor at the MUCS project. She will study the experiences of inexperiences users of digital technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic. She is especially interested in elderly people’s experiences with digital technologies and how they see digital technologies as a part of their everyday media use. You can read more about the project here. 

Hilde Sakariassen recently defended her doctoral thesis, “Social network sites as arenas for public discourse: perception, participation and experience”, where she studied how social media are experienced as public arenas, and how users experience their own and other’s participation in these arenas. Her research interests are in audience studies and experiences of media use. 

In her project Sakariassen will use ethnographic methods to gain a deeper understanding of the perspectives and experiences of people who stand on the sidelines of the digital development of the society. 

“The pandemic came with an abrupt and seemingly simple message of social distancing, which meant that social life and mundane everyday activities became increasingly digital. Daily tasks became increasingly digital as the physical alternatives disappeared. How did the non-users or weak users of digital technologies experience this change, and how did they experience the stages of closing down the society?”