This research report focuses on the users of e-government in a social science perspective. Our aim is to study how different social groups, registered at the Swedish Public Employment Service, relate to the internet, the agency and the services offered on its website (www.ams.se).

The field of e-government research is dominated by studies that centre attention on the supply side (videlicet research investigating the entrance of IT in organizations and the implications that new technology have to these), while usercentred research (demand side) is still scarce. Our study, focusing on how citizens relate to the internet in general and e-government in particular, therefore helps to bridge a knowledge gap within the field.

Our survey is based on a questionnaire sent to 2 000 randomly selected persons, all registered at the Swedish Public Employment Service. Of these, 762 job seekers responded, which gives us a frequency rate of 40 percent. The questions asked were related to the job seekers’ usage of and attitudes towards the internet in general and the agency’s webpage in particular, but also to their attitudes to the Swedish Public Employment Service.

The main results show that social factors, particularly education, play a major role for the job seekers’ ability to use the web based services offered by the agency. People with a lower educational level are less inclined to use the agency’s website, and at the same time they experience the site as more complicated to use. We also found a strong link between the relations to the internet (access, usage, experience and attitudes) and the relations to the agency’s website. Those with advantaged internet relations – mostly well educated people, white collars and people living in bigger cities – also use the agency’s website more diligently and tend to have more positive attitudes towards it (and vice versa). Thus, its necessary to talk in terms of digitally well equipped and less well equipped groups.

The unequal relations to the internet in general and the agency’s website in particular not only indicate that e-government is more suitable for the digitally well equipped, but that it in fact exclude those with less digital resources. This new kind of exclusion has great implications for the job seekers’ possibilities to enter the labour market, and to act their role as citizens. If e government also means a reformation of the citizen role – in the sense of increased individual responsibility towards the government - not bridging the digital divide will carry even more exclusion to those that’s already excluded.

In the area of governmental information for and services to citizens digitalization has certainly become a buzzword. Framed within the discourses on e-government or e-governance – or differ­ent mixtures of the two – various analyses have tried to point out, or even anticipate possible consequences of the appropriation of digital technologies, mainly the internet, in governmental services.

On the one hand, these analyses have pointed out a great deal of opportunities connected to the incorporation of the internet into governmental information and services. Policy makers have been quick to point to the increased accessibility as a great opportunity for the citizens; in Sweden this vision of accessibility has even been referred to as ‘24:7-governmental agencies’. Academics, among others, have also suggested that the digitalization of information and services opens up new possibilities for citizen control of governments.

On the other hand, a number of problems have also been identified. For instance, the digitalization of public registers holding personal information has been interpreted as a threat to the citizens’ integrity: Will digitalization bring a new surveillance society? The most frequently debated prob­lem, however, at least within research, has been the fear of digital divides. Will the internet create digital cleavages between different groups of citizens?

So far, however, neither the hopeful nor the dystopian analyses have made enough efforts to critically evaluate their claims. Such evaluations can start from different points of departure, and in this paper the starting point is the citizens as users of governmental information and services through the internet: What patterns of inclusion and exclusion emerge as a governmental agency digitalizes its information and services by making them increasingly internet based?

The paper presents statistical data from a survey of 762 unemployed citizens using the Swedish Public Employment Service, a governmental agency that has come to rely specifically heavy on internet based information and service. The initial analysis of data reveals interesting differences between social groups in terms of both perception and use of the internet – in general – and the resources offered by SPES in particular. For instance, the users’ various degrees of education is a strong, determining factor when it comes to use of internet SPES’ services.

The paper starts from a conceptual elaboration of various notions of e-government and e-gov­ernance. Thereafter, the survey data is described and elaborated on before moving into a discus­sion of the wider significance of the findings: What does data suggest in terms of patterns of in­clusion in and exclusion from a society in which governmental agencies, to an increasing extent, use the internet for their information and services?

This paper presents findings from a review of articles about media literacy interventions, with the purpose to discuss the value of child participation in the design of such interventions. The findings indicate that while numerous studies present evaluations of media literacy interventions, it is rare that the design processes behind these interventions are described. The most popular form of media literacy intervention is a school curriculum aimed towards tweens and teens. We argue for a closer attention to the ways in which media literacy interventions are designed in order for us to better understand when child participation can be beneficial.

This paper presents the findings from a scoping review of articles about media literacy interventions, with the purpose to discuss the value of having children to participate in the design of media literacy interventions.

The findings indicate that while numerous studies present evaluations of media literacy interventions, it is rare that the design processes behind these interventions are thoroughly described. Furthermore, the review shows that even though child participation in the implementation of interventions is put forth as important by several studies, it is rare that participation in the design stage is discussed. Finally, the findings show that child participation in the design of media literacy interventions is not considered as a factor for successful media literacy interventions.

The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for further research on child participation in media literacy interventions. It is argued that we need to pay closer attention to the ways in which media literacy interventions are designed in order for us to better understand what makes them succeed or fail. More specifically, the role of child participation in this respect – not only in terms of listening to their various media-related questions and needs, but also in the sense of actual co-design – must be further examined.

This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th 2021. This outage was an event that that activates questions of experiencing “one world, one network”, as it affected approximately 3 billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection of October 4th 2021 was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life, and point to some correlations between general use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection.

This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021, an event that affected approximately three billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 Swedish university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection caused by the outage was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life. It also points to some correlations between general social media use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection.

This chapter introduces rurality-TV as a genre, and we discuss how public service media, through this genre, contributes to symbolically resolving tensions between the rural and the urban, and we address processes of mobility and urbanisation in the Nordics. Three popular reality-TV programmes depicting rural life are analysed: Bonderøven [loosely translated as The Hillbilly], later known as Frank & Kastaniegaarden (DR), Hjälp vi har köpt en bondgård! [Help we have bought a farm!] (SVT), and Oppfinneren [The Inventor] (NRK). These are approached through three questions: What constitutes public service rurality-TV as a genre in terms of form and content? What values are negotiated in the programmes? How can we understand rurality-TV in the context of public service broadcasting in the media welfare state?

Sweden is regularly highlighted as one of the most egalitarian and wired countries in the world. While this might be correct in the light of international statistical comparisons, there is also another side to the story. Despite years of policy reforms designed in order to counter the emergence and solidification of digital inequalities, this paper shows that economic and cultural forces are still at work structuring people’s internet access and digital media use along the lines of preexisting social divisions.

Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two different research projects, the paper specifically sheds light on the ways in which social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. In particular, Bourdieu’s conceptualization of social classes as defined both intrinsically (by their material conditions of existence) and relationally (by their position in relation to each other) is invoked in order to explore and elucidate two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes difference in young people’s everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning.

In order to illustrate the process of class conditioning, i.e. how certain material conditions of existence both condition and produce certain conditionings in relation to digital media practice, the paper draws mainly on in-depth interviews with parents and children conducted within a still ongoing project on digital media in economically deprived families with children. Class positioning is exemplified and discussed with reference to the findings of a completed qualitative study on the role of social class for young men’s digital media preferences and practices. The results of this study, based on interviews with 34 young men (16-19 years) of different social origin, clearly indicate how such preferences and practices are not only configured relationally in terms of class, but also potentially involved in the reproduction of the existing class structure.The ways in which the dual processes of class conditioning and class positioning are played out in the context of young people’s mediatized everyday life bear witness to the complexities involved in advancing a media policy geared towards general social welfare in the age of digital media. Universal internet penetration is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition for the abolishment of digital inequalities. The findings presented and discussed in this paper rather suggest that the ongoing proliferation of new media technologies and practices creates a rich soil for new forms of class-making.

In this article, I explore how social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two research projects, I complicate the notion of Sweden as a universally wired media welfare state by showing how economic and cultural forces are structuring Internet access and digital media practice along the lines of preexisting social divisions. Invoking Bourdieu's conceptualisation of social classes as defined both intrinsically and relationally, I identify and exemplify two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes a difference in young people's everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning. I conclude the article by arguing that distinguishing between these processes might offer a better understanding of the relationship between class and everyday media practice. The complexities of advancing a welfare-oriented media policy in the age of digital media are also discussed. © 2021 Martin Danielsson, published by Sciendo 2021.

Digital media are widely talked about as a democratising force. As internet access proliferates, it is implied, structural constraints will dissolve and bring greater equality - if not instantly, but gradually as today's youth, the digital generation, come of age and agents of the old, non-digital order pass away. Thus, the alleged boundlessness of digital media is thought of as somehow having unbound young people from the larger social structure of power relations. Drawing on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, the present article examines the significance of social class for the ways in which young Swedish men perceive, interpret and make use of digital media in their everyday lives. The results suggest that class, through the workings of habitus, shapes the young men's approaches to education, leisure and the future, which, in turn, tend to generate divergent readings of digital media. Those who are privileged in terms of cultural and economic capital think and make use of digital media in compliance with the perceived moral order of digital goods and practices as instituted and imposed by the educational system, for example, whereas those disprivileged in this respect, although recognising the dominant scheme of classification and valuation of such goods and practices, tend to use them in ways that are at odds with it, thereby contributing to the workings of symbolic violence, i.e. to their own subordination.

This dissertation explores how social class matters in young men’s everyday relationship to digital media. The aim is to contribute to the existing knowledge about how young people incorporate digital media in their everyday lives by focusing on the structural premises of this process. It also presents an empirically grounded critique of popular ideas about young people as a “digital generation”, about the internet as a socially transformative force, and about class as an increasingly redundant category.

The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with 34 young men (16-19 years) from different class backgrounds, upper secondary schools and study programmes. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, three classes are constructed: the “cultural capital rich”, the “upwardly mobile”, and the “cultural capital poor”.

The analysis shows that class, through the workings of habitus, structures the young men’s relationship to school and future aspirations. This also engenders class-distinctive ways of conceiving leisure and digital media use. Through their class habitus and taste, the young men tend to orient themselves and navigate in different ways in what they perceive as a space of digital goods and practices, endowed with different symbolic value in school and society. The “cultural capital rich” are drawn to-wards practices capable of yielding symbolic profit in the field of education and beyond, whereas the other classes gravitate towards the “illegitimate” digital culture but deal with this different ways.

These findings indicate that there are social and cultural continuities at play within recent technological changes. They also expose the structural differences hidden by sweeping statements about young people as a “digital generation”. Finally, they show that class, contrary to popular beliefs about “the death of class”, still represents a pertinent analytical category.

For most people in Sweden access to the internet can be taken for granted today, much in the same way as access to water and electricity. However, there are still parts of the population, not only among the elderly, for whom internet access might be a scarce resource and therefore also a source of struggle. This paper focuses on one such group, namely economically deprived families with children. More specifically, it presents the rationales and early results of an ongoing media ethnographic study on the various meanings attributed to digital media by the members of such households (both parents and children), focusing especially on the concerns, conflicts and strategies associated with the limitations surrounding their acquisition of digital media devices as well as their internet access and use, within an everyday context of economic deprivation.

Even though previous research on digital divides has convincingly shown them to be irreducible to a generational problem that will disappear by itself over time – for example, class-related variables such as educational level, occupation and income also matter – relatively little is known about their occurrences within the so-called “digital generation”, especially in Sweden. More generally, large-scale surveys have successfully evidenced and mapped the empirical patterns of digital divides among young people, but we still have limited knowledge about the contextually embedded generative mechanisms through which these patterns emerge. Even less attention has been paid to the ways in which young people at the margins of network society, along with their parents, actually experience and deal with their potentially limited internet access in everyday life.

Against this backdrop, this paper deals with the fundamental question of what it feels like raising children and growing up under conditions of scarce economic resources and potentially limited internet access in a highly wired society generally associated with social equality. What does it feel like not being able to give your children equal technological opportunities as their friends (or having to make huge sacrifices in order to secure such opportunities)? How do the potential experiences of feeling different and digitally excluded matter for the children’s well-being? And how are the potential conflicts stemming from the scarcity of (digital) resources affecting family life? Adopting a non-media-centric approach built around Bourdieusian social theory and insights from domestication research, the paper thus sets out to explore not only the meanings and uses of digital media in the particular context of economically deprived families with children in Sweden, but also the subjective and emotional dimensions of economic vulnerability and social class in today’s network society.

In enabling “ordinary people” to participate in the public sphere, new media are often celebrated as a democratizing force. And even if the projected egalitarian world of new media is yet to come, it is frequently believed to be an inevitable effect of the coming of age of the so-called “the digital generation”, who have grown up with these media and so have come to incorporate their democratic potentials.

This hyperbolic optimism about new media rests on a flawed technological determinism. We cannot presume that the possibility of online participation amounts to an actual process of democratization. Being able to make one’s voice heard is not the same as being listened to and acknowledged, nor is it the same as exercising this ability. Nevertheless, much debate and research on young people’s new media use has been implicitly based on this premise. Little attention has been paid to the structures, mechanisms and contexts that enable and constrain online participatory practices among young people.

As part of my ongoing PhD project this paper sets out to identify forms and patterns of online participation and non-participation among 34 Swedish boys (16-19 years) from different class backgrounds. Drawing on qualitative interview data and the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, it also tries to grasp some of the processes engendering these forms and patterns.

Preliminary analyses suggest that the sense of having “the right to speak” (or not) in different matters seems to shape whether, how, and where the boys participate online. This sense is rooted in habitus and as such in their different class backgrounds. The boys privileged in terms of capital tend to participate with greater ease insofar as they feel that their voice matters in most matters, whereas the disprivileged boys seem to feel that their voice matters in a more limited range of matters, most of them generally regarded as trivial.

New media in general and the internet in particular are regularly ascribed with various democratizing potentials. According to politicians, journalists, marketers and even some academics, the proliferation of internet access (via broadband) will bring about a shift in the power relations between media industries and media consumers, between governments and citizens, between professionals and amateurs, etc. Young people are often conceptualized as a driving force in this change, in so far as growing up in this new communication environment is considered enough for making real the potentials of new media. These simplistic ideas draw from technological deterministic assumptions and must be put into question by detailed empirical analyses. Although this has been done to a certain extent, previous research on young people’s consumption of new media has tended to focus on their creative, playful and more or less particular (or peripheral) digital interpretations and interactions. The social structures producing and reproducing themselves through (the lack of) these interactions, on the other hand, have seldom been taken into account. By and large, questions of social power relations such as class, gender and race/ethnicity are missing. Building primarily on the ideas of technology-as-text as elaborated within the context of cultural studies and on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture – including concepts such as habitus, capital (economic, cultural, social, symbolic), social fields, symbolic power, etc. – my PhD project constitutes an attempt to fill this gap. More specifically, it aims at qualitatively examining the ways in which 16-18 years old Swedish boys with different positions in social space conceive, relate to and make use of the internet as a differentiating and potentially enabling technology in their everyday lives. This will be done through a series of case studies. This paper presents and problematizes some initial findings from a pilot study carried out in the autumn of 2009, when twelve young men from four upper secondary schools (preparing either for further education or directly for the working life) in one of Sweden’s largest cities were interviewed individually. An intercultural comparison between boys occupying different positions in social space (i.e. the discernible volume and composition of their families’ accumulated capital) reveal divergent perceptions of the school, further education and one’s future more generally, which also tend to have a bearing on their readings of the internet. The preliminary analyses suggest that, in general, these socially structured readings of the internet are carried out in ways that serve to reproduce existing power relations rather than dissolving them. The boys from families with large cultural capital perceive the internet as a resource for accumulating forms of capital that can be employed in the struggle for positions to which they aspire. For example, they stress its various possibilities for learning. The boys having less cultural capital at their disposal, on the other hand, often articulate a narrower outlook, reducing the new technology to an instrument for immediate amusement or just passing time. Hence, the democratizing potentials of new media seem to be unequally realized. 

For someone leaning towards statistical data analyses and showing little interest in the media as an integral part of people’s everyday life, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has surprisingly much to offer qualitative audience research in an increasingly complex everyday media environment. Drawing on the analytical experiences from a media ethnographic study on digital media practice in the everyday lives of young men (16-19 years) with different class backgrounds, this paper argues that Bourdieusian theory, despite certain limitations, might advance qualitative audience research in the “media manifold” (Couldry, 2012) in at least three important respects: (1) The first merit of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework is that it enables us to conceptualize and analyse the seemingly mundane media practices of everyday life as involved in macrostructural power relations and processes, e.g. social class and social reproduction. How people orientate and navigate themselves among the various possibilities embedded in their everyday media environment is clearly a matter of taste, and taste is neither innocent nor neutral in terms of class. Hence, Bourdieu might prevent us from getting stuck in what David Morley (2009) has called “an endless play of contextual specificity and infinite difference”. (2) The second merit of Bourdieusian theory in the context of qualitative audience research is that it allows us to grasp digital media practice not as an exceptional, almost elevated kind of practice, but as a variety of practices among other cultural practices. This accomplishes an important break with the still quite prevalent media-centrism and techno-romanticism of early new media studies, and thus makes it possible to pose new, perhaps more critical questions about the various roles of digital media in people’s everyday lives. (3) Because Bourdieusian theory allows us to theorize digital media practice as a variety of practices among other cultural practices, i.e. as an inseparable part of entire lifestyles in Bourdieu’s sense of the word – lifestyles through which social power relations (e.g. class) are expressed and reproduced – it also has the merit of supporting critical interrogations of the association commonly made between digital innovation, young people and social change. In other words, it makes it possible to uncover and make sense of the social and cultural continuities at play within recent technological changes, as well as the structural differences concealed by the widespread generational rhetoric of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” (Prensky, 2001).

This paper explores how a social media breakdown is experienced in a highly wired context where social media practice has become mundane to the point of invisibility (Chun, 2016; Deuze, 2012). More specifically, it examines how a group of Swedish university students (n=191) responded to the major Facebook outage on the evening of October 4th 2021, when popular services such as Facebook, Instagram and Messenger stopped working for about six hours. Drawing on empirical data from an online survey conducted in the immediate aftermath of this unusual global event of involuntary disconnection, as well as on theory and research on historical blackouts, digital disconnection and digital wellbeing, the paper brings to light and discusses the affective ambiguities of contemporary digital life. For example, the most frequently used words for describing the experience of the outage were “nice” and “relaxing” but also “stressful” and “boring”. By exploring the emotions involved in the experience of being suddenly and collectively disconnected for hours, this paper makes a valuable contribution not only to previous studies on affect and technological failure where the focus is rather on individual responses to more temporary malfunctions (Paasonen, 2015). It also contributes to the growing field of digital disconnection studies by examining experiences of involuntary disconnection instead of practices of voluntary disconnection and abstention from digital media (Syvertsen, 2020; Syvertsen & Enli, 2020).

The notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism”, a “global imagined community” and an “imagined cosmopolitanism” speak of a cosmopolitan opportunism gaining ground in contemporary media and communication studies. This line of research tends to epistemologically situate human beings exclusively as users or audiences of media. The risk by such a media-centric focus is to confine oneself to the question of “what the media does to people”. By understanding users and audiences of potentially global media as contextualized social agents we engage with the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the media from a different vantage point. Our media sociological perspective insists on accounting for social context, and so we turn to the question of how classified social agents classify the contemporary media landscape as gateways to the wider world. What emerges in our qualitative and quantitative data is a pattern of social reproduction by way of cultural distinction – agents strong on cultural capital is particularly prone to approach the media landscape as an avenue for cosmopolitan socialization. There is thus reason to question the universalizing rhetoric pertaining to notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism”.

The phenomenon of a “mediated cosmopolitanism” has mainly been studied from a perspective that attempts to discern the extent to which various messages of the media succeed or fail in establishing moral solidarity with “the distant other”. This perspective misses two crucial points worthy of pursuing when attempting to understand the relationship between media and cosmopolitanism. Firstly, it still remains rather unclear what sense audiences and users make of the potential globalizing potential of the contemporary media landscape. Secondly, cosmopolitanism cannot solely be conceptualized as a moral obligation across vast distances, but needs also to be understood as a form of capital, as social fields become increasingly transnational. By understanding users and audiences of potentially global media as contextualized social agents we engage with the relationship between cosmopolitanism and the media from a new vantage point. In departing from the media-centric tendencies in the research area, we turn to the question of how classified social agents classify the contemporary media landscape as gateways to the wider world. What emerges in our qualitative and quantitative data is a pattern of social reproduction – agents strong on cultural capital are particularly prone to approach the media landscape as an avenue for the generation of cosmopolitan capital. There is thus reason to question the universalizing rhetoric pertaining to notions of a “mediated cosmopolitanism” and study the ways in which agents’ orientations in the media landscape are part of strategies of social reproduction.

Various media allow people to build transnational networks, learn about the world and meet people from other cultures. In other words, media may allow one to cultivate cosmopolitan capital, defined here as a distinct form of embodied cultural capital. However, far from everyone is identifying this potential. Analyses of a national survey and in-depth interviews, conducted in Sweden, disclose a tendency among those in possession of cultural capital to recognise and exploit cosmopolitan capital in their media practices. Those who are dispossessed of cultural capital are significantly less liable to approach media in this way. Relying on various media practices in order to reshape one’s cultural capital exemplifies what Bourdieu called a reconversion strategy. As social fields undergo globalisation, media offer opportunities for the privileged to remain privileged – to change in order to conserve.

Various media allow people to build transnational networks, learn about the world and meet people from other cultures. In other words, media may allow one to cultivate a cosmopolitan capital. However, far from everyone is recognizing this potential. This study argues that cosmopolitan ‘readings’ of the contemporary media landscape should be understood in relation to cultural capital. Analyses from a national survey and in-depth interviews, conducted in Sweden, disclose a tendency among those in possession of cultural capital to recognize and exploit cosmopolitan capital in their media practices. Those in dispossession of cultural capital are significantly less prone to approach the media in this way. Relying on various media practices in order to exchange one capital for another exemplifies what Bourdieu called reconversion strategies. As social fields become more global, media offer opportunities for those occupying positions of relative (cultural) privilege to remain privileged – to change in order to conserve.

Local free newspapers and magazines have become an integrated part of urban life. They are no longer restricted to large cities and in an age of declining readership in traditional press, these publications are sometimes the only outlet that reaches the general population. This makes them interesting both in terms of media economy (the hyper-local as the only viable business model for print journalism), and in terms of the construction of community. Still, they are often an overlooked phenomenon in media and communication studies.

This paper takes its departure from the project “Healthy Cities”, a movement developed by WHO with the purpose to include health-related issues in the political, economic and social agenda. In this movement, WHO acknowledges media’s role for promoting health images from a local perspective. The paper will contribute to the research field of local media’s role for their audiences in terms of shaping ideas of being part of ”the good life”. From this perspective, media have an important function in individuals’ sense of belonging and well-being.

In recent years, the local media landscape in Sweden has changed. The mainstream journalism has been somewhat reduced, due to financial cutbacks. In the same time, there is a new pattern of free local newspapers and magazines, distributed within communities, and with clear ambitions to promote “the good life” within the geographical range of distribution. Since changes of mainstream media have weakened the traditional concept of media closeness, it is of importance to study the new and innovative media paths to connect individuals within communities (e.g. smaller towns) in order to understand how these work for individuals’ sense of belonging and especially related to issues of health, lifestyles and well-being.

In this paper we would like to take the opportunity to share the outlines for a research project on local free-of-charge media in the Swedish town Halmstad, that is one of the 1400 European town and city members in the “Healthy City” project.

 We present some preliminary findings from four newspapers and magazines that are giving much attention to promote the image of “the good life” through articles about health, lifestyles and well-being.

 The research project is part of an initiative to chart contemporary urban town living through an interdisciplinary research program that uses a community studies approach, where the aim of the present study is to understand the role that the free newspapers (and similar media outlets) play in representing and making sense of notions such as “health”, “lifestyle” and ”well-being” in Halmstad.