Modinet was a large research project looking at the impact of changing media on democracy in Denmark. It finished in 2006 but still has a useful web site with lots of publications (some in English). Some seem to have had something of an ongoing concern with aesthetics.
In some ways it provides a good example of how to do this kind of collaborative research in a formal setting (with lots of projects, lots of participants, and lots of publications, although I know it also had lots of funding!).
Projects involved included the internet and democracy, changes to journalism, new publics, the media in everyday life, and an interesting project on new media in public service. These projects are reflecting the much more extensive and focussed integration of new media in public life in Scandinavia. The project publications are full of quite specific investigations of how this is all working in Denmark at the moment – and since there is so much happening in Denmark in the public sphere which none of believe is even possible in many places, this is very interesting material.