The Mediated Construction of Reality

Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745681313, 9780745681306
• eBook ISBN: 9780745686530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media.

Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other social and media theorists, they ask: what are the implications of digital media?s profound involvement in those processes? Is the result a social world that is stable and liveable, or one that is increasingly unstable and unliveable?

1
Introduction

Suppose the social to be mediated – what? This question (with apologies to Nietzsche)¹ has hovered over social theory, and everyday accounts of the social and public world, since the late nineteenth century. When not ignored, the question has received myths or slogans for answers: the few serious answers have tended to be based on a reading of social infrastructures at least a quarter of a century old. This is a book of social theory that tries to do better than that.

So, how do we rethink the character of the social world (including ‘sociality’, ‘socialization’, ‘social order’, ‘society’), starting out from the principle that the social is constructed from, and through, technologically mediated processes and infrastructures of communication, that is, through what we have come to call ‘media’? Since our ‘reality’ as human beings who must live together is constructed through social processes, what are the consequences for that reality if the social itself is already ‘mediated’; that is, shaped and formed through media? These questions generate our book’s title: the mediated construction of reality.

The basic terms of these questions need some discussion. ‘The social’? This term has been attacked in recent decades from many directions. Quite apart from neoliberal attacks on the ‘social’ – Margaret Thatcher’s notorious slogan ‘there is no such thing as society’ – the importance of the social as an object of theoretical enquiry has increasingly been displaced by other priorities in the social sciences. So, for example, the philosopher and sociologist of science, Bruno Latour, has sought to deconstruct, or at least reassemble, ‘the social’ as a sociologist’s fiction, that generally obscures from us the actual material arrangements by which various entities, human and non-human, are connected for various purposes and on various scales.² Latour’s key target was the sociology of Emile Durkheim. Durkheim³ argued in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that society is a fact constructed out of the acts and imaginings of human beings; a ‘fact’ just as much as the ‘facts’ of natural science. Durkheim’s reference point for this notion of society was primarily the emotional and cognitive reality of the face-to-face gathering. Durkheim did not live to consider how the notion of society must change when it is presented to us, in part, through technological processes of mediation that, in turn, are necessarily outcomes of economic and political forces: clearly this is an omission that needs correction. In addition, other writers have seen a problem in Durkheim’s emphasis on the work that representations of the social do in reproducing its reality, looking elsewhere for forms of connection, friction and resonance that bypass ‘meaning’ altogether (Thrift, 2008). Still others want to shift our focus away from human interactions to the ‘posthuman’ from which perspective ‘the social’ can seem quaintly parochial (Hayles, 1999). At the very least, the term ‘social’ needs some repair work – if, that is, the project of social theory is to be renewed.

What of ‘media’? Serious reflection on how media institutions represent – perhaps distort – the social already requires us to put certain versions of ‘the social’ or ‘society’ within scare quotes. The problem multiplies in the digital era when the most promising source of new economic value appears to be what are called ‘social media’ platforms. The very term ‘media’ masks huge changes. In the mid to late twentieth century, debate about media’s implications for the values and realities on which social life was based focused on television and film,⁴ that is, the consequences of particular news frames or exemplary images. Only radio in the age of mass media plausibly involved a continuous form of social shaping, although Tarde’s (1901) suggestive work on the continuous influence of how news circulates through newspapers already pointed in this direction.⁵ But the expansion of internet access via the World Wide Web from the 1990s and its move to smart mobile devices from the 2000s profoundly changed the questions that social theory needed to answer about media and media theory about the social. Particularly with the introduction of social media networks from the mid 2000s, ‘media’ now are much more than specific channels of centralized content: they comprise platforms which, for many humans, literally are the spaces where, through communication, they enact the social. If the basic building-blocks of social life are potentially themselves now shaped by ‘media’ – that is, the contents and infrastructure derived from institutionally sustained technologies of communication – then social theory must rethink the implications of ‘media’ for its basic term, ‘the social’. ‘The digital revolution’ as it is often called – but it involves much more than digitalization and the internet – must, as Anthony Giddens (2015) has argued, be answered by a major transformation in sociological thinking too. That transformation in sociological thought and its reorientation towards these key changes in media and social infrastructures is the principal focus of this book.

For that reason – that is, our double focus on the mutual transformations of media and the social world together – we will give less emphasis to specific media texts, representations and imaginative forms than we might do in a book focused exclusively on media themselves. For the same reason, when we discuss ‘reality’ in this book, we refer not to specific media representations or enactments of reality (for example ‘reality TV’), but to the achieved sense of a social world to which media practices, on the largest scale, contribute. In this, starting out from the detailed scholarship of media and communications studies, we hope to make a substantive contribution both to media and social theory. Indeed our point is that social theory is no longer viable, unless it has been, in part, transformed by media theory.

Yet, once we have acknowledged the complexity of the institutional ‘figurations’ we now call ‘media’ (we will come back to the term ‘figurations’) and deconstructed the various representations of the social that different power blocs make, some might be tempted to abandon the term ‘social’ entirely. But that would be a huge mistake. For the term ‘social’ is one we cannot do without if we are to grasp the complexities that interest us. The term ‘social’ points to a basic feature of human life: what historian and social theorist William Sewell calls ‘the various mediations that place people into “social” relations with one another’.⁶ Indeed the word ‘social’ signifies something fundamental that even recent detractors of the social would not deny: the basis of our human life-in-common in relations of interdependence. These always include relations of communication: as Axel Honneth says, ‘the process of social construction can [. . .] only be analysed as a communicative process’ (Honneth, 1995, p. 58). The fundamentally mediated nature of the social – our necessarily mediated interdependence as human beings – is therefore based not in some internal mental reality, but rather on the material processes (objects, linkages, infrastructures, platforms) through which communication, and the construction of meaning, take place. Those material processes of mediation constitute much of the stuff of the social. As a result, Sewell argues, the social is always double in character: both form of meaning and built environment.⁷ Yet this inherent complexity of the social is lost if we abandon the term ‘social’ and go off to analyse either meanings or technologies of connection in isolation. Meanwhile, the infrastructures of the ‘media’ that help constitute the social get ever more complex.

Our argument involves new conceptual and historical work. For example, in Part I of this book, we introduce the reading of communications history on which our conceptual framework is based, and adapt the term ‘mediatization’ as shorthand for all the transformations of communicative and social processes, and the social and practical forms built from them, which follow from our increasing reliance on technologically and institutionally based processes of mediation. Quite clearly such transformations are complex, meaning that ‘mediatization’ is not just one type of thing, one ‘logic’ of doing things; indeed it is best understood as not a ‘thing’ or ‘logic’ at all, but as the variety of ways in which possible orderings of the social by media are further transformed and stabilized through continuous feedback loops.

Particularly important as a mid-range concept for grasping those more complex transformations is the term ‘figuration’, which we borrow from the late work of Norbert Elias in the 1970s and 1980s. We find it encouraging for the long-term project of social theory that concepts developed decades ago have their full analytical power only today. Now we can appreciate their openness to processes that, on a larger scale, are gaining in importance today, when the ‘stuff’ of the social is being transformed by data-based processes, largely automated and on vast scales, something that could not possibly have been anticipated when those concepts were developed. Much about today’s infrastructures of social interaction seems alien to most earlier versions of social theory, as discussed further later in our argument. Yet this growing interdependence of sociality on system – the growing ‘institutionalization’ of both self and collectivity (as reflected in the book’s third part) – is at root hardly contrary to the vision of social life that Georg Simme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Constructing the Social World
• Part II Dimensions of the Social World
• Part III Agency in the Social World
• 11 Conclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement