Mediatization and Mobile Lives

A Critical Approach

André Jansson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351756389
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach contributes to a complex, situated and critical understanding of what mediatization means and how it works in contemporary life.

The book explores the tension between the extended capabilities offered by media technology and growing media reliance, focusing particularly on mobile middle-class lives. It problematizes how mediatization is culturally legitimized in our times, when connectivity and mobility are increasingly seen as mandatory elements of self-realization.

Supported by extensive fieldwork carried out in contexts of gentrification, elite cosmopolitanism and post-tourism, André Jansson advances a critical, cultural materialist perspective of mediatization as he examines how people are torn between the new opportunities afforded by their mobile lives and the feeling of being trapped by our connected media culture.

Mediatization and Mobile Lives offers an engaging and critical exploration of the interplay between mediatization, individualization and globalization, making it an ideal resource for students and scholars of Media and Communication.

1

INTRODUCING CRITICAL MEDIATIZATION RESEARCH

In June 2014 I interviewed a Finnish man working for the United Nations (UN) in Geneva, Switzerland. I wanted to know more about how the rapid expansion of digital media had affected the working conditions and life environments of people with highly mobile and international careers. At the time of the interview, this man – we can call him Ruben – was in his early sixties and had held various positions within the UN system as well as in other internationally oriented organizations. From the late 1980s his career was marked by intense travelling, which was required for the kind of work he was interested in. During the 1990s he travelled about one hundred days every year and visited sixty countries. But things changed. Today he holds a specialist position and tries to stay put in Geneva as much as possible.

When I started travelling in 1989 it was much more pleasurable. In 1989 we made up a programme via letter-writing or using telex, and then there were always a few meetings that ended up not taking place, and in the evenings I was free, didn’t have any mobile, no laptop. If I was away for two weeks I phoned the office perhaps once a week to ask if everything was ok. But now, you are expected to do the same work while travelling as you would have done if still in the office. That’s a bit strange…

Let us reflect on these words. Ruben says that the everyday saturation of media and communication technologies has made professional travelling less “pleasurable”. What does this mean? We could of course argue that international travelling in the past was a more luxurious activity reserved for individuals occupying status positions, and that such travelling included services as well as “free time” that made life comfortable and interesting beyond the meeting schedules. In times of mediated connectivity, travelling can no longer be an escape. We could also argue that media are now helping professional travellers stay in touch while on the move, enabling them to work and communicate more efficiently and thus having less to catch up on when returning to the physical office. Still, Ruben’s story invites us to consider the possibility that the continuous access to digital workspaces and communication channels leads to information pressures and social expectations that are difficult to cope with. Such developments may involve existential and social costs when individuals feel that their resources are exploited and other areas of life are fragmented or pushed aside. Ruben has in fact given up some of his earlier career ambitions. And he complains that his employer still does not provide him with a smartphone even though he is often expected to be reachable beyond stipulated office hours.

This is just one example of the ambiguous nature of mediatization. I have chosen Ruben’s story because it points both to the general features of mediatization and to the particular approach that I want to advance in this book. On the general level, Ruben’s experiences illustrate what many theorists today have come to describe as mediatization: a historical meta-process of structural transformation pertaining to a variety of social and cultural realms, conditioned by altered forms of mediation. In the introductory chapter to the edited handbook on the Mediatization of Communication Lundby (2014a) concludes that whereas mediation refers to “regular” forms of communication involving some kind of vehicle or medium, mediatization points to the broader “transformative” consequences of such processes. Mediatization is thus to be understood as a structural concept, referring to overarching societal transformations that in themselves contain altered and socially shaped forms of mediation. Along these lines Couldry and Hepp (2013: 197) state that movements of mediatization “reflect how the overall consequences of multiple processes of mediation have changed with the emergence of different kinds of media”. Similarly, Krotz (2014: 137) holds that mediatization is a meta-process comparable with other meta-processes (such as individualization, globalization and commercialization); that is, “a long term development that includes media change and the respective change in culture and society”. Hjarvard (2013: 1), in turn, begins his book on The Mediatization of Culture and Society by stating that “the concept of mediatization has proved useful to the understanding of how the media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other fields or social institutions”.

Behind these formulations (and other attempts to define mediatization) there are still disagreements and controversies regarding the more precise epistemological status of this meta-process. There are, for instance, tensions between “institutionalist” and “social constructivist” strands of mediatization researchers (see Couldry and Hepp, 2013), as well as between those who posit mediatization as a “paradigmatic turn” within media and communication studies (Hepp et al. 2015; see also Lunt and Livingstone, 2016) and those who call for an “open agenda” (Ekström et al., 2016). There are also those who question the validity of the concept altogether (e.g., Deacon and Stanyer, 2014, 2015). Still, the general orientation and justification of the term seems to gravitate around the fact that modernity encompasses social and cultural changes in which more and more areas and forms of practice become saturated with and adapted to media technologies and institutions. The gradual normalization of mediated communication affects leisure time as well as work time, public places as well as private places. It affects politicians, tourists and single parents as well as mobile professionals within the UN system.

So what is it I want to achieve more specifically in this book? Let me state initially that mediatization research, in my view, neither can nor should be envisioned as a “new paradigm”. I believe that mediatization, especially given the complexity of this type of phenomenon, should be analysed from a variety of perspectives and paradigmatic viewpoints (see Ekström et al., 2016). Having said this, I find mediatization a very useful term for addressing and specifying media’s broader significance in culture and society. ¹ My aim is to advance a complex, situated and critical understanding of what mediatization means and how it works under modern life-conditions. While mediatization as such refers to a complex meta-process, on a par with, for instance, individualization and commercialization, it can also be broken down into sub-processes, which in their turn can be operationalized and studied empirically in particular time-space settings in order to illuminate mediatization’s multiple and contextually formed expressions (Krotz, 2014: 148–53). The case of Ruben’s altered experience of work-related mobility is one example.

But Ruben’s story also illuminates what I see as four interconnected weaknesses of contemporary mediatization research. The first weakness springs from the above-mentioned nature of mediatization as a complex and inherently contradictory meta-process; that is, there is still a lack of critical perspectives on the ambiguous consequences of mediatization, especially in relation to everyday life. Ruben’s life biography has evolved in close relation to various media developments in which the uses of technologies have, on the one hand, enabled certain forms of communication at-a-distance, and thus the kind of mobile career that he once strived for, while on the other hand invoking experiences of stress, restraint and intrusion. At a certain point the pressure of mediatization even reached a tipping point so that travelling was no longer associated with pleasure and was thus avoided rather than desired. A key argument of this book (developed below and in Part I) is that mediatization entails a dialectical relationship between liberating forces and increasing socio-technological dependence. This ontological understanding of the basic nature of mediatization, in turn, corresponds to an epistemological approach built around immanent critique. Mediatization research should try, in a more elaborated way than has so far been the case, to unveil the inner tensions, ambiguities and contradictions of a society in which media technologies have become taken-for-granted parts of everyday life (to different degrees in different groups) and in which social autonomy is at risk. This is not to say that mediatization is something inherently negative; just that the concept may assist the social sciences in framing, naming and specifying the social discrepancies that evolve over time in relation to media change.

The second shortcoming concerns the lack of specificity in much mediatization research when it comes to demarcating what are (or are not) to be understood as elements and articulations of mediatization (see also Ekström et al., 2016). Because of its character as a meta-process it is indeed difficult to say exactly where mediatization “begins” and where it “ends”. Mediatization sceptics raise an important point when they argue that the term is too often applied in a very loose manner and ultimately “has no outside” (Deacon and Stanyer, 2015: 657); it may seem as though any kind of media-related change could be subsumed under mediatization. This problem becomes particularly obvious in social-constructivist analyses of mediatized social worlds where it is difficult to set up measurable indicators of how, for example, everyday activities are adapted to media. As mediatization researchers we need to be careful in how and when we attribute the term mediatization, ensuring that we maintain clear definitions of the sub-processes we study and a clear idea of how they relate to mediatization at large.

So what is it in Ruben’s life story that makes it relevant to use as an example of mediatization? It would certainly not be enough to say that the mere fact that his life environment is crowded with media justifies a “mediatization diagnosis”. Instead, what I want to advance in this book is a cultural materialist perspective that draws our attention to the ways in which media become indispensable to people’s lives (see Chapter 2). Following the cultural materialism of Williams (e.g., 1974, 1977), I argue that this happens when media are thoroughly and commonly incorporated as cultural forms and it becomes difficult to imagine a life without them. As we saw in Ruben’s case, it also happens when media technologies, along with certain ways of using them, are turned into normalized parts of the doxa of social fields (see Bourdieu, 1972/1977; 1997/2000), and thus raise the bar as to which modes of activity are available, even thinkable, to social agents and which are not.

Third, and related to the previous point, there has been a tendency in much mediatization research to not fully situate arguments in relation to empirical contexts and not provide convincing evidence of how particular cases and/or sub-processes are related to the overarching framework of mediatization. On the one hand, there is a risk of generating grand theoretical constructs that use a variety of studies as illustrations or examples in a more or less superficial manner (Ekström et al., 2016). On the other hand, there is a risk of drawing general conclusions regarding the long-term dynamics of mediatization based on limited empirical evidence. In this book I want to apply the above-mentioned cultural materialist approach to a set of empirical cases that, because of their social composition, allow for substantial analyses of how mediatization works on a general level as well as in relation to specific social, cultural and economic conditions. The empirical analyses are based on a series of qualitative research projects conducted in Swedish/Scandinavian contexts since 2003 and deal with three thematic areas: privileged expatriate lifestyles (Chapter 5), middle-class-biased cultures of urban exploration (Chapter 6), and urban and provincial gentrification (Chapter 7).

The analyses have three things in common. First, they are demographically linked to what we may broadly classify as the middle classes. The underlying reason for this choice is that the middle classes play a normalizing role in society, not least when it comes to consolidating certain ideals of connectivity and mobility, which in turn reinforce the mediatization process. Accordingly, the analyses of this book rest on the assumption that the middle classes provide a particularly fertile ground for grasping the dialectic of mediatization (see Chapter 4). Second, the analyses deal with various forms of geo-social mobility and spatial appropriation. Again, this is a choice made in order to analyse mediatization processes in contexts where we can expect to find accentuated tensions between individual autonomy and growing media dependence, between lived experience and the dominant ideals of our individualized, mobile culture. As Elliot and Urry (2010: 27-28) argue, “what is at stake in the deployment of communication technologies in mobile lives […] is not simply an increased digitization of social relationships, but a broad and extensive change in how emotions are contained (stored, deposited, retrieved) and thus a restructuring of identity more generally”. Mobile lives are thus seen not just as a social characteristic, but represent what Williams (1977) calls a structure of feeling (see Chapter 2). Third, the analyses of this book pay considerable attention to individual and collective biographies and social trajectories. The reason is that mediatization evolves over time. We cannot draw any substantial conclusions about mediatization unless we compare current social conditions with conditions of the past in some way. One way of doing this is to look into the personal narratives and lived experiences of individuals like Ruben. Such individuals and groups are at the same time the active agents and the reactive elements, sometimes even the victims, of mediatization. In sum, at the empirical level this book provides critical, cultural materialist analyses of how mediatization processes are played out, experienced and culturally legitimized in relation to the social trajectories of mobile fractions of the middle classes.

This brings me to the fourth, and final, shortcoming of mediatization research that I want to address in this book. As stated above, mediatization is commonly understood as a meta-process, similar to globalization and individualization. It is also often stated that these meta-processes overlap and interact in complex ways (e.g., Hepp et al., 2015; Krotz, 2014). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of systematic assessments of how the relationships between these meta-processes are to be conceptualized and turned into empirically accessible areas of study (see Lunt and Livingstone, 2016: 462). The focus on privileged mobile lives is to be seen as a response to this situation. Through analyses of life biographies such as Ruben’s we can develop a critical bottom-up perspective of how mediatization interacts with globalization and individualization processes, and ultimately delineate some of the key characteristics of this phenomenon (Chapter 8). How and why do media become indispensable within the lifestyles of mobile middle-class fractions? How are such mediatization processes interlinked with the quest for social autonomy and recognition and with the construction of privilege, status and power?

In the remainder of this introduction I further describe and contextualize the research problem of the book. This means, first of all, that I motivate and position the theoretical approach, and the book as a whole, in relation to the broader field of mediatization research. Second, I give an overview of previous research that has advanced critical and empirically grounded views of how mediatization processes influence contemporary identities and power relations. Third, I present and discuss the empirical data on which I build my analyses, aiming to further substantiate the value of studying mobile middle-class groups within a mediatization framework. At the end of the chapter I present the structure of the book.

The dialectic of mediatization

In recent debates aro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Critical Mediatization Research
• PART I: A Cultural Materialist Perspective of Mediatization
• PART II: Inside Mobile Lives
• References
• Index