StoryNet

The goal of researchers in StoryNet is to explore the content, experience, and usage of narratives in the media, and to investigate the mechanisms and conditions through which fictional and factual stories influence the audience's beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. Understanding how narrative experience and effects work is prerequisite to making pro-social use of stories in the context of Health Communication, Journalism and Education; it is also crucial for understanding the commercial success of films, books and narrative computer games, and may help explain or predict the success of new narrative products. StoryNet brings together scholars from media effects, media reception, psychology, philosophy, health communication and journalism in order to develop new approaches to analyzing narrative experience and effects. The network organizes regular workshops attended by scholars from different disciplines dealing with narratives. Workshops are concerned with fictional, persuasive and journalistic media stories, and, in interdisciplinary collaboration, address aspects such as:

(1) systematic measures of narrative content,

(2) effective story elements,

(3) the exploration of the nature of narrative experience and the development of adequate measures,

(4) the mechanisms of narrative influence,

(5) the selection of stories, and

(6) the individual, social, and cultural context of media stories in everyday life.