Malleability in Mediated Ideals


Project MIMIc: A project to understand the role of media in boys’ and girls’ lives anno 2020-2025

“Do young people mimic the lifestyles they encounter on their social media feed and in entertainment fiction?” is at the core of the research conducted by the MIMIc team in Belgium, France and Slovenia across 3000 adolescents. The project seeks to learn how young people enrich their lives with the affordances offered by the rich digital media landscape in which they grow up. Moreover, we aim to obtain a better understanding of how youth think and feel about being online all the time, constantly exposed to an unlimited stream of information on how their peers organize their lives on social media, in popular television shows and or in movies. To build this knowledge, project MIMIc takes up a multi-method design, meaning that we will: (1) look at the social media profiles of youth and the celebrities and influencers popular among youth, (2) follow a group of youngsters aged 12 to 18 over the course of 1 year to see how they grow-up in a mediated world and (3) monitor young people through daily surveys to better understand what their day-to-day interactions with social media and popular TV show entail. READ more about the research in the parents and participants’ section.

Meet the Group


Team

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Laura Vandenbosch

Assistant professor at the School for Mass Communication Research

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Kaitlin Fitzgerald

Post-doctoral researcher

International collaborators

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Bojana Lobe

Digital media and children (U of Ljubljana, SI)

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Caroline Giraudeau

Developmental and aging psychology (U of Tours, FR)

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Kristina Rakinić

PhD student

Partners


Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium School for Mass Communication Research (SMCR).
Université de Tours, France Department of Psychology.
Univerza v Ljubljani, Slovenia Faculty of Social Sciences.


This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 852317)