What are you currently working on?

Having just finished my PhD, I am now part of the ERC funded HYIHY (Social Well-Being from Hybrid Interactions in Hybrid Work) project led by Adrian Meier. We are investigating the impact of hybrid communication (i.e., face-to-face, computer-mediated, and human-AI communication) on social well-being in the workplace, focusing on loneliness and connectedness. 

 

Can you share a project that changed the way you think or work? 

The project that changed the way that I think the most was a paper titled “Possible futures all at once: time frame and time lag in short-term longitudinal media effects research on well-being” published in the Journal of Communication with my wonderful colleagues Alicia Gilbert (also a past Scholar in the Spotlight), Christoph Adrian, and Adrian Meier (2026). This work has a long origin story but it basically started as an existential crisis in that for a lot of our research questions we are not really sure about when we expect effects to happen. This paper is an attempt to approach this question systematically and hopefully makes us think more about time and how processes unfold and change – it certainly made me think about these questions more thoroughly. 

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Klingelhoefer, J., Gilbert, A., Adrian, C., & Meier, A. (2026). Possible futures all at once: Time frame and time lag in short-term longitudinal media effects research on well-being. Journal of Communication, 76(1), 78–91. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf037

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Which piece of work feels closest to your heart, and why?

The piece of my work that feels closest to me tends to usually be a project that is in a quite early phase. After having written and re-written a paper dozens of times, I tend to need to give it a little rest before I can like it again, but the early phases of research feel most exciting to me. Mapping out concepts, being able to field a survey that I have worked on for a long time, or getting the first results are usually the most exciting and this is what I am really enjoying at the moment with the HYIHY project. My past paper I currently like the most is the article titled: Digital disconnection as a self-regulatory strategy against procrastination (Klingelhoefer, Gilbert, & Meier, 2026).

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Klingelhoefer, J., Gilbert, A., & Meier, A. (2026). Digital disconnection as a self-regulatory strategy against procrastination. Scientific Reports, 16(1), 17133. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-46218-1

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What's a question you keep returning to?

The most central to my research has been the question how we can live a good life in this digital world. Therefore, I tend to investigate how we look at technologies, which type of media use positively or negatively affects our well-being, and whether deliberately disconnecting can improve our everyday experiences. I have been looking at this mostly through individual factors, e.g., self-regulation, but I also increasingly include social and systematic factors into these questions.

 

If you had a tagline or motto, what would it be? 

This is a tough one, as I don’t give myself an official motto. But “try things out” maybe summarizes one of my life constants, as I'm always trying to get into new ideas and processes and see if they work for me. 

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If time, money, and logistics weren't a concern, what dream project would you dive into?

One of the most fun things about research for me is to think creatively and make the most out of situations with limited time and money. But if you gave me all the time and money in the world, I would probably do a research project on instant photography and how it shapes our feelings of authenticity, experiences, and memories. 

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What's one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out as a scholar? 

I think I have been incredibly lucky and privileged to have an exclusively excellent PhD experience, so I think I have heard most of the important advice. Whether I listened to this advice is a different question and I think a lot of the mistakes you actually have to make yourself to learn. One of these pieces of advice I am currently thinking about most is saying no to more things – because time is limited. Thus, saying no to things would be great advice but then this is also probably not helpful and I needed to make the experience to truly learn it. And of course with the frequently precarious employment in academia, it is especially difficult to feel like you're missing out. 

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What is a book or paper that shaped the way you think about the world?

It is difficult to choose just one, especially since I probably would have gone with Lise-Marie Nassen’s pick but I’ll choose Minh Hao Nguyen’s work because it has been instrumental to shaping the way I think about my dissertation topic, that is, digital disconnection. Specifically, her paper “Managing social media use in an ‘Always-On’ society” (2021) has been incredibly insightful in seeing in which way individuals target digital technologies by disconnecting and which aspects they struggle with. 

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Nguyen, M. H. (2021). Managing social media use in an “always-on” society: Exploring digital wellbeing strategies that people use to disconnect. Mass Communication and Society, 24(6), 795–817. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2021.1979045

 

Who's someone whose work deserves more attention - and who you want to nominate as the next featured scholar? 

Morgan Quinn Ross is a scholar who consistently impresses me with innovative theoretical approaches and outstanding empirical work with a talent to ask hard questions. He’s also someone who I think is the quintessential mobile scholar, if such a thing exists. I’d like to use this opportunity to get him to share some of his thoughts and inspirations and/or do a rant about the power of self-reports.