Researching Media and Democracy Researchers: Monitoring Capabilities in Poland

In this article, we look at the conditions of media and democracy discourses in Poland via the lenses of monitoring time-related capabilities. We are interested in how media–societal change in 2000–2020 has influenced the Polish researchers’ responses to deliver applied research and further foster hyper-knowledge sharing between policymakers, media industries, and academia. Through an in-depth investigation of Poland’s media researchers’ publications database (N = 1,000), we aim to examine the crucial interest areas considering the critical cultural junctures in three highly related areas: technology, politics, and society. The critical junctures theory review follows the mapping of changes in related scholarly analyses to uncover three sides of Polish scholarship monitoring capabilities alongside cultural conditions of researchers’ impact on democracy and the media. The overall hypothesis is that examining media and democracy in Poland reflects technological and political change, with the cultural research path dependencies in analyzing broader social context (see, for instance, a young democracy, illiberal turns and social polarization conditions, and so on). This corresponds to related tensions between the Western media’s theories and practices concerning democracy.