About us

The ZMI was founded in 2001. Besides Professor Henning Lobin, the political scientist Professor Claus Leggewie was co-founder and acted as Executive Director until 2007. The current Executive Director is Professor Katrin Lehnen. Following Sabine Heymann, Dr. Jutta Hergenhan has been the Secretary General since June 2017.

The Term of Interactivity

At the time of its founding, the concentration of ZMI’s research activities, especially on new media and the phenomenon of interactivity, was something completely new. To quote from ZMI’s mission statement:
"Interactivity is not a simple media phenomenon which denotes a transition period from the electronic old media to the digital new media and then vanishes after a slowdown of technological development. Instead, the findings of the various contributions suggest that the emergence of interactive communication spaces indeed constitutes a qualitative leap of media evolution. The increasing aggregation of formerly separated, perhaps adjacent »media formats« to evermore complex structured »media environments« does not remain without consequences for a disposition of societal communication."

The distinctive feature of the separation of ”real” and “communicative” bodies corresponds to this image: there are not only new media environments, but also populations of players who are located therein and are engaged in some kind of change. Within this structure, the contact area between space and body, called the interface, is of particular importance. Apparently, these contact thresholds between human being, medium, and machine significantly regulate the perception of “interactivity” and therefore, in a second step, also regulate the possibilities and boundaries for a reconfiguration of societal communication. The term “Interactivity” cannot be unraveled and defined by considering only the developing multiplicity of media forms, contents, and structures. Much more important are the non-medial, i.e., social repercussion of an interactive cooperation between space, body, and interface.

The Beginning

In 1998, lecturers coming from different faculties of the University of Giessen, who shared a common interest in communication and media-science issues in their various forms, met for the first time. Their idea to bring these concepts together was inspired by day-to-day life at the university. JLU’s Board of Directors, with Profesoor Stefan Hormuth as President at the time, willingly welcomed and supported their initiative. After almost three years of planning, the ZMI was founded on April 1, 2001. Work on the first research projects began in May 2001. At that time, there were about fifty ZMI members, all of whom had one thing in common: an interest in all questions arising from the application and use of media and, in particular, from digital, computer-mediated communication. Questions of individual, societal, economic, juridical, political, and artistic composition, as well as the impact of the media, were addressed, always from the perspective of interactivity. In addition, the ZMI initiated and coordinated activities in the areas of teaching, further education, and science transfer. From the very beginning, the ZMI's partners included university and non-university research and educational institutions, political and administrative institutions, as well as media and other companies. In the spring of 2005, the ZMI drew up a policy paper, "The ZMI on the Move", in which new objectives and methods were defined. It manifested itself the following year with new goals. In this second phase, its aim was no longer just a cautious concentration of all media-related teaching and research activities at JLU, with regional and national transmission as well as internal and external service activities, but also then, a permanent establishment of advanced fundamental research on the general topic of "Interactivity", with interregional cooperation and international transmission. Interactive platforms, which were initially developed as a model for the ZMI, were only continued if they were related to this central topic and/or if they provided empirical data in edited form.

Research Interests Today

Since two large research groups began their work in 2008, two topics have determined the ZMI’s research interests: the impact of mediatization on communicative cultural techniques such as reading and writing in the project, "Cultural Techniques and Their Mediatization", and the effects of digitization on scholarly communication: "Interactive Science – Internal Scholarly Communication via Digital Media". Since 2012, the research focus has shifted to the projects "GeoBib" and "News to Use". For the project "GeoBib", an online bibliography of early German and Polish Holocaust and concentration camp literature (1933-1949) was compiled. The project "News to Use" from 2016  investigated whether and to what extent the reading of daily newspaper columns educates the group of young people participating in vocational training. In 2016, the research focus "Literacy and Education in the Media Society" was established as a longer-term theme for individual and collaborative research at JLU. The research focus is the impact of media technology on educational concepts and the practices related to writing and literacy.