Mediatized Worlds

Culture and Society in a Media Age

A. Hepp, F. Krotz, A. Hepp, F. Krotz

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137300348
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300355
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How does the media influence our everyday lives? In which ways do our social worlds change when they interact with media? And what are the consequences for theorizing media and communication? Starting with questions like these, Mediatized Worlds discusses the transformation of our lives by their increasing mediatization. The chapters cover topics such as rethinking mediatization, mediatized communities, the mediatization of private lives and of organizational contexts, and the future perspective for mediatization research. The empirical studies offer new access to questions of mediatization an access that grounds mediatization in life-world and social-world perspectives.

1

Mediatized Worlds – Understanding Everyday Mediatization

Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz

1. Mediatization: A concept emerges

While mediatization as a concept is nothing new in media and communication research, it has recently emerged as an international term: in 2008, Sonia Livingstone referred to ‘mediatization’ in her address as president of the International Communications Association (ICA) when she reflected the increasing ‘mediation of everything’ and its relation to changing approaches of media and communication research (Livingstone, 2009). Various panels and papers at the recent ICA conferences referred to ‘mediatization’ as a research-guiding concept. And, in 2011/12, the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) set up a working group on mediatization. In addition to this, various special issues relating to the concept have been published over the past few years. For example, a special issue of Communications: European Journal for Communication Research (2010, 35(3)) focused on empirical perspectives on mediatization, an issue of Culture and Religion (2011, 12(2)) on the mediatization of religion debate, an issue of Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication (2013, 3(2)) on mediatization as part of more general ‘media processes’, a thematic issue of MedieKultur on mediatization and cultural change (2013, 29 (54)), and, most recently, an issue of Communication Theory (2013, 23(3)) on conceptualizing mediatization. In addition, Knut Lundby (2009c) edited the book Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences to present international reflections on mediatization across various research fields. And a comprehensive handbook on mediatization is in preparation, again edited by Lundby. Various other books and journal articles have been published with ‘mediatization’ in the title.

So how can we explain this intensifying discussion about mediatization? Fundamentally speaking, Sonia Livingstone is right in relating the growing attention to the concept to the increasing everyday relevance of communication mediated by the media. As she writes about the recent development within media and communication research:

It seems that we have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media comprise one among many influential but independent institutions whose relations with the media can be usefully analyzed to a social analysis in which everything is mediated, the consequence being that all influential institutions in society have themselves been transformed, reconstituted, by contemporary processes of mediation.

(Livingstone, 2009, p. 2)

This said, the concept of mediatization represents such a move. However, while this empirical appraisal explains many aspects of the increasing interest in mediatization research, it is important to bear in mind that the concept itself has a far longer history within social sciences.

‘Mediatization’ as a term can be traced back to the early 20th century, and therefore to the beginning of so-called ‘mass communication research’ (Averbeck-Lietz, 2014). One example is Ernest Manheim (1933) in his post-doctoral thesis The Bearers of Public Opinion (German: ‘Die Träger der öffentlichen Meinung’), which he had to withdraw because of the pressures in Nazi Germany. In this book he writes about the ‘mediatization of direct human relationships’ (German: ‘Mediatisierung menschlicher Unmittelbarbeziehung’, p. 11). He uses this term in order to describe changes of social relations within modernity, changes that are marked by the so-called mass media. Jean Baudrillard (1995, p. 175), in Simulacra and Simulations, described information as mediatized because there is no measure of reality behind its mediation. Within his ‘theory of communicative action’ (German: ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’), Jürgen Habermas (1988a; 1988b) uses the term ‘mediatization’ to describe a sub-process of the colonialization of the lifeworld. However, he does not refer to communication media but to generalized symbolic media like power and money. In his edited volume Medier och kulturer, Ulf Hannerz (1990) characterized the cultural influence of media as such (that is, beyond their contents) on culture as mediatization. John B. Thompson (1995) writes in his book Media and Modernity about the ‘mediazation of culture’, meaning the increasingly irreversible mediation of culture by institutionalized mass media. These examples demonstrate that the term ‘mediatization’ in its different variants is deeply related to social and cultural research as a whole. However, a more detailed substantiation of the concept took place in media and communication studies. This, for example, started as early as 1995 in Germany, where related concepts like ‘mediatized communication’ were used (Krotz, 1995).

Within this discipline, two traditions of mediatization research emerged: an ‘institutionalist tradition’ and a ‘social-constructivist tradition’. While it is not possible here to discuss the traditions in detail (see for this Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Hepp, 2013b), at least a fundamental understanding of them is necessary to grasp the further development of the concept.

In the ‘institutionalist tradition’, media are understood more or less as independent social institutions with their own sets of rules. Mediatization, then, refers to the adaptation of different social fields or systems like politics or religion, for example, to these institutionalized rules. The latter are described as a ‘media logic’ (Altheide and Snow, 1979; Asp, 1990); that is, in the widest sense of the word, institutionalized formats and forms of staging. This ‘media logic’, on the one hand, takes up non-mediatized forms of representation. On the other hand, non-media actors have to accommodate to this ‘media logic’ if they want to be represented in the (mass) media or if they want to act successfully in a media culture and media society. Starting with such a preliminary understanding of ‘media logic’, the concept became differentiated within that tradition, while the link to these original ideas remains (Hjarvard, 2013, pp. 8–40).

The understanding of mediatization from a ‘social-constructivist’ point of view moves the role of various media into the foreground as part of the process of the construction of social and cultural reality. Mediatization, then, refers to the process of a construction of socio-cultural reality by communication (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Knoblauch, 2013; Krotz, 2001) and the status of various media within this process is analyzed (Hepp, 2013a, pp. 54–68). Mediatization describes how certain processes of the construction of reality by communication become manifested in certain media and how, in turn, existing specifics of certain media have a contextualized ‘influence’ on the process of the communicative construction of socio-cultural reality.

Having these different traditions of mediatization research in mind, a shared fundamental understanding of mediatization has developed across them in recent years. Basically, the term ‘mediatization’ does not refer to a single theory but to a more general approach of media and communication research. In this sense, mediatization is a concept used in order to carry out a critical analysis of the interrelation between the change of media and communication, on the one hand, and the change of culture and society on the other. Based on such a fundamental understanding, mediatization refers to something other than mediation (cf. Couldry, 2012, pp. 134–7; Hepp, 2013a, pp. 31–8; Hjarvard, 2013, pp. 19–20): mediation is a concept to describe the process of communication in general, that is, how communication has to be grasped as a process of mediating meaning construction. Mediatization is a category to describe a process of change. In a certain sense we can link both concepts as follows: mediatization reflects how the process of mediation has changed with the emergence of different kinds of media. This said, the concept of mediation describes a very fundamental moment of communication as symbolic interaction. In contrast to this, mediatization is much more specific in analyzing the role of various media in the further process of socio-cultural change. However, it has to be linked to an analysis of communication as symbolic interaction (c.f. Krotz, 2001, pp. 51–2).

At this point, we can see significant similarities to – but also differences from – the medium theory as it was originally introduced by Harold Innis (1950) and Marshall McLuhan (1994) and brought forward by others (cf. for an overview Meyrowitz, 1995). Two similarities are striking. First, both mediatization research and medium theory focus not (only) on media content but also on the role media as such play in altering communication. Joshua Meyrowitz – one of the most prominent present scholars of medium theory – put this as follows: ‘To observe [ … ] potential media effects – whether in the past, present or future – one needs to shift from the content of media to the nature and capacities of each medium itself’ (Meyrowitz, 2009, p. 518). Mediatization research does not argue along the lines of the effect paradigm (not even in an alternative manner, as medium theory does), but it emphasizes in addition the necessity to focus on ‘capabilities’ (Lundby, 2009b, p. 115), ‘moulding forces’ (Hepp, 2013a, pp. 54–5), ‘affordances’ (Hjarvard, 2013, p. 18) and the ‘dissolution of media boundaries’ (Krotz, 2001, pp. 188–9). Second, both medium theory and mediatization research understand their respective approaches as being inclusive across the micro, meso and macro levels. For medium theory, this is explicitly expressed by Meyrowitz (1995; 2009) in his distinction between ‘microlevel’ and ‘macrolevel medium theory’: while the ‘macrolevel medium theory’ is focused on long-term and comprehensive changes across centuries, for example, from ‘modern print culture’ to ‘global electronic culture’, the ‘microlevel medium theory’ is interested in a detailed analysis of the altering of interaction orders by such comprehensive changes. Moreover, mediatization research at the level of certain interactions and/or institutions is interested in more general statements on the change of culture and society. This becomes thickened in the idea of understanding mediatization as a ‘meta-process’ (Krotz, 2009, p. 22). Bearing these two similarities in mind, it is no wonder that both paradigms are in dialogue with each other (cf., for example, Hug and Friesen, 2009 and Schofield Clark in this volume).

This said, a number of differences between medium theory and mediatization research are striking – differences which substantiate the uniqueness of the mediatization approach. In this introduction we can name only the four most important points, while a more comprehensive discussion can be found in other publications (cf. Hepp, 2013a, pp. 11–17; Hjarvard, 2013, p. 12; Krotz, 2014). First, mediatization research is sceptical about the narration of change as introduced by ‘macrolevel medium theory’. This narration of change is based on the idea that each culture and society is dominated by a single medium, which is more or less stable over time. Within mediatization research many examples can be found that demonstrate the shortcomings and under-complexity of this idea. This already refers to the second point, namely the transmedial perspective of mediatization research. Increasingly, the scholars of mediatization research emphasize the necessity to focus (also historically) on the interrelation of various media and not solely on a single medium. This is because the media-related transformation we are confronted with is ‘driven’ by the interaction of these various media in certain contexts. It’s not just the mobile phone that makes the difference for our present everyday lives, but how the mobile phone interacts with social media, e-mail, digital television and so on. Third, within mediatization research the specificity of media is also core, albeit understood as one moment of the ‘double articulation’ (Silverstone and Haddon, 1996) of the media as objects and bearers of meaning. Mediatization research considers both. Fourth, mediatization research is in the trajectory of a ‘non-media-centric’ (Morley, 2009) media and communication research. The idea is not to take media without question as the source of change – there are many contexts in which ‘new’ media come up but are not the sources of change. Mediatization research wants to consider the interrelation between the change of media and communication, on the one hand, and culture and society, on the other. This also implies that the driving forces of change might not be the media at all. In sum, it becomes obvious that mediatization research is something different from medium theory.

In such a general orientation, the term ‘mediatization’ implies quantitative as well as qualitative aspects. With regard to quantitative aspects, mediatization refers to the increasing temporal, spatial and social spread of media communication. That means that over time we have become more and more used to communicating via media in various contexts. With regard to qualitative aspects, mediatization refers to the role of the specificity of certain media within the process of socio-cultural change. This means that it does ‘matter’ which kind of media is used for which kind of communication. Some researchers understand this process of mediatization as a long-term process that has more or less accompanied the whole history of humankind (Hepp, 2013a, pp. 46–54; Krotz, 2009). Seen from such a perspective, human history is, besides other things, a process of intensifying and radicalizing mediatization. In contrast to this, other researchers use the term ‘mediatization’ to describe the process of an increasing social and cultural relevance of the media since the emergence of so-called independent ‘mass media’ (print, cinema, radio, television) (Hjarvard, 2013, pp. 21–3; Strömbäck, 2011).

It is in this general discussion that we also have to locate the volume at hand. It includes articles from authors of both traditions of mediatization research as well as articles that discuss across the lines of these different traditions. As such, it can be understood as an attempt to bring these different traditions of mediatization research closer together. However, this attempt is related to a certain idea – and that is the importance of linking mediatization more closely to an analysis of changing everyday lifeworlds and social worlds. This is the point at which the term ‘mediatized worlds’ comes in, which frames the different chapters of this volume.

2. Mediatized worlds: Everyday mediatization

Within media and communication research, the concept of ‘media worlds’ has a certain tradition. David L. Altheide and Robert P. Snow (1991), for example, relate their understanding of ‘media logic’ to ‘media worlds’ when they use the latter term to describe social worlds marked by a ‘media logic’. Elizabeth Bird (2003) describes the everyday use of (mass) media from an ethnographic perspective as ‘living in a media world’, as she writes in the subtitle of her book. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (2002) characterize the cultural anthropology of the media as analyses of different ‘media worlds’. Leah A. Lievrouw (2001) sees a relation between the establishment of ‘new’ digital media and the pluralization of lifeworlds. David Morley (2001, p. 443) reflects on questions of belonging in the ‘present mediated world’.

However, in a general sense, ‘media worlds’ is no more than a metaphor for the fact that various contexts of present everyday life are marked by media communication. That said, we use the concept of ‘mediatized worlds’ in a much more concrete sense when referring to (1) social phenomenology and (2) symbolic interactionism (see, for the following, Hepp, 2013a, pp. 75–83; Krotz, 2009; Krotz and Hepp, 2013).

1. Within social phenomenology, Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann have described the everyday world as a very special part of the lifeworld of a human being: ‘The everyday life-world is [ … ] that province of reality which the wide-awake and normal adult simply takes for granted’ (Schütz and Luckmann, 1973, vol. 1, p. 3). The everyday lifeworld is accepted without question, not the ‘private world’ of individual(s), but intersubjectively: ‘[T]he fundamental structure of its reality is shared by us’ (p. 4). As such, the everyday world does not only include nature but also the social and cultural world in which a person exists.

Very early on, Benita Luckmann (1970) emphasized the fragmentation of everyday lifeworlds into various ‘small life-worlds’. For her, these are the ‘segments’ (Luckmann, 1970, p. 81) of everyday life that exist as specificity within organizational as well as private contexts: ‘The life round of modern man is not one piece. It does not unfold within one but within a variety of small “worlds” which are often unconnected with one another’ (Luckmann, 1970, p. 587). Empirically, Benita Luckmann refers to ‘worlds’ of different jobs, of social clubs, of political parties, religious communities, subcultures and so on. Therefore, in present (post-)modern societies, we are confronted with a variety of ‘socially constructed part-time-realities’ (Hitzler and Honer, 1984, p. 67) ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Mediatized Worlds – Understanding Everyday Mediatization
• Part I: Rethinking Mediatization
• Part II: Mediatization and New Media
• Part III: Mediatized Communities
• Part IV: Mediatization and Private Life
• Part V: Mediatization in Organizational Contexts
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Author Index
• Subject Index