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The global reach of online platforms and services as well as the globally synchronized flows of audiovisual content might suggest that the global media market is now fully integrated. This book argues contrariwise that the global digital market is far from united and that national borders, center-periphery hierarchies and differences in scale still matter, and perhaps they matter even more than in the analog broadcast era.

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Why and on what bases do people choose content and share it in an online environment? At the centre of Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture lie in the transforming links between active, participative audiences, media content and media corporations. However, the ‘textually motivated’ desire to participate in the circulation of and control over texts is just one among other key motives for the dissemination and recirculation of content. Ethnography-based research conducted at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic suggests that when exploring participation in textuality, performative self-exposure and self-presentation must be taken into account as well as the context of audiences’ everyday life. Thus, I propose to approach participation as based not only on a ‘will to text’ but also on a dialectical relationship between a ‘will to self-performance’ and a ‘will to conformity’. These three factors then impact on the social curation of content – a reflexive process in which members of the audience construct texts for consumption and recirculation.

Existing research indicates that people with populist attitudes express lower trust in media, especially in Public Service Media. It is assumed that these people are alienated because of their values: populist ideology stems from anti-pluralism whereas Public Service Media promotes pluralism. This study tests this assumption by comparing the predictors of trust in Public Service Media between the populist party sympathizers and the sympathizers of other political parties in the Czech Republic. Two main expectations were included as predictors for trust in Public Service Media, specifically that media should conform to one's worldview (i.e., the cohesive dimension of trust in media) and that media should adhere to the normative standards of journalism (i.e., the normative dimension of trust in media). Using multigroup structural equation modeling, the study analyzes data from a 2019–2020 representative survey of the adult Czech population ( N  =  3,251). The results suggest that, for the populist party sympathizers, trust in Public Service Media links only to their expectation that media should conform to their worldview, while the sympathizers of other political parties expect normative standards to be maintained. This is interpreted and discussed as support for the assumption that this value-based mismatch links to the populist audience members' lower trust in Public Service Media.