SNAPlab

My name is Jan and I promised to write this blog as a popularisation output of my research project. For the next two years, I will be conducting research at Royal Holloway, University of London on how the behaviour of film and TV series viewers changes under the influence of short videos on social media – typically TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.

Ironically, I deliberately unsubscribed from social media in the autumn of 2018. I occasionally install one to familiarise myself with how it works, but as soon as I realise I’m spending more time on it than is healthy, I uninstall the app and delete my account. Now I finally have a sensible reason to spend all my time on social media.

The research project ‘Shortform Narratives, Audiences and Perception’, with the acronym SNAP (hence the blog title), was written for the European Commission’s MSCA PF call. Eventually, funding was secured from the Operational Programme Johannes Amos Comenius under the identifier 02_22_010 MSCA Fellowships CZ.

The supervisor is Adam Ganz. The project was made possible thanks to the kind support of people from the Department of Media Arts, the Department of Psychology and Storyfutures, who I will be introducing here in the coming weeks.

I have started several blogs in the past, but none have lasted more than a few months. Thanks to the commitment of the project, I now have the confidence that SNAPlab will last at least two years.