PD Dr. Jan-Hinrik Schmidt has been Senior Postdoc Digital Interactive Media and Political Communication at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research │ Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) since November 2007. His current work focuses on the developments of "Web 2.0" and "social media". He is particularly interested in the changes of information circulation and opinion formation, the transformation of science communication as well as the practices and structures regulating digital communication.
He studied sociology at the Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg and West Virginia University Morgantown, USA. Since 2000, he has worked in various positions at the University of Bamberg, including at the research centre "Neue Kommunikationsmedien [New Communication Media]", the Chair of Sociology II (Prof. Dr. R. Münch) and the State Institute for Family Research. After completing his doctorate on the institutionalisation of local online offerings (2004), he was a DAAD scholarship holder at the Danube University Krems, Austria, and a guest researcher at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (Prof. Dr. B. Batinic). From 2005 to 2007, he worked on a DFG funded postdoctoral project on "Praktiken des onlinegestützten Networking [Practices of Online Based Networking]" at the research centre "Neue Kommunikationsmedien" in Bamberg.
In June 2020, he habilitated at Universität Hamburg. He wrote his habilitation on "Practices and Social Order of the Social Web".
