Knut Lundby (Ed.

)
Mediatization of Communication
Handbooks of
Communication Science

Edited by
Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley

Volume 21
Mediatization of
Communication

Edited by
Knut Lundby

DE GRUYTER
MOUTON
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Preface to Handbooks of Communication
Science series
This volume is part of the series Handbooks of Communication Science, published
from 2012 onwards by de Gruyter Mouton. When our generation of scholars was
in their undergraduate years, and one happened to be studying communication,
a series like this one was hard to imagine. There was, in fact, such a dearth of
basic and reference literature that trying to make one’s way in communication
studies as our generation did would be unimaginable to today’s undergraduates
in the field. In truth, there was simply nothing much to turn to when you needed
to cast a first glance at the key objects in the field of communication. The situation
in the United States was slightly different; nevertheless, it is only within the last
generation that the basic literature has really proliferated there.
What one did when looking for an overview or just a quick reference was to
turn to social science books in general, or to the handbooks or textbooks from the
neighbouring disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, linguis-
tics, and probably other fields. That situation has changed dramatically. There
are more textbooks available on some subjects than even the most industrious
undergraduate can read. The representative key multi-volume International Ency-
clopedia of Communication has now been available for some years. Overviews of
subfields of communication exist in abundance. There is no longer a dearth for
the curious undergraduate, who might nevertheless overlook the abundance of
printed material and Google whatever he or she wants to know, to find a suitable
Wikipedia entry within seconds.
‘Overview literature’ in an academic discipline serves to draw a balance. There
has been a demand and a necessity to draw that balance in the field of communi-
cation and it is an indicator of the maturing of the discipline. Our project of a
multi-volume series of Handbooks of Communication Science is a part of this com-
ing-of-age movement of the field. It is certainly one of the largest endeavours of
its kind within communication sciences, with almost two dozen volumes already
planned. But it is also unique in its combination of several things.
The series is a major publishing venture which aims to offer a portrait of the
current state of the art in the study of communication. But it seeks to do more
than just assemble our knowledge of communication structures and processes; it
seeks to integrate this knowledge. It does so by offering comprehensive articles in
all the volumes instead of small entries in the style of an encyclopedia. An exten-
sive index in each Handbook in the series, serves the encyclopedic task of find
relevant specific pieces of information. There are already several handbooks in
sub-disciplines of communication sciences such as political communication, meth-
odology, organisational communication – but none so far has tried to comprehen-
sively cover the discipline as a whole.
vi Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series

For all that it is maturing, communication as a discipline is still young and

one of its benefits is that it derives its theories and methods from a great variety
of work in other, and often older, disciplines. One consequence of this is that there
is a variety of approaches and traditions in the field. For the Handbooks in this
series, this has created two necessities: commitment to a pluralism of approaches,
and a commitment to honour the scholarly traditions of current work and its intel-
lectual roots in the knowledge in earlier times.
There is really no single object of communication sciences. However, if one
were to posit one possible object it might be the human communicative act – often
conceived as “someone communicates something to someone else.” This is the
departure point for much study of communication and, in consonance with such
study, it is also the departure point for this series of Handbooks. As such, the series
does not attempt to adopt the untenable position of understanding communication
sciences as the study of everything that can be conceived as communicating.
Rather, while acknowledging that the study of communication must be multi-
faceted or fragmented, it also recognizes two very general approaches to communi-
cation which can be distinguished as: a) the semiotic or linguistic approach associ-
ated particularly with the humanities and developed especially where the
Romance languages have been dominant and b) a quantitative approach associ-
ated with the hard and the social sciences and developed, especially, within an
Anglo-German tradition. Although the relationship between these two approaches
and between theory and research has not always been straightforward, the series
does not privilege one above the other. In being committed to a plurality of
approaches it assumes that different camps have something to tell each other. In
this way, the Handbooks aspire to be relevant for all approaches to communication.
The specific designation “communication science” for the Handbooks should be
taken to indicate this commitment to plurality; like “the study of communication”,
it merely designates the disciplined, methodologically informed, institutionalized
study of (human) communication.
On an operational level, the serieiis aims at meeting the needs of undergradu-
ates, postgraduates, academics and researchers across the area of communication
studies. Integrating knowledge of communication structures and processes, it is
dedicated to cultural and epistemological diversity, covering work originating from
around the globe and applying very different scholarly approaches. To this end,
the series is divided into 6 sections: “Theories and Models of Communication”,
“Messages, Codes and Channels”, “Mode of Address, Communicative Situations
and Contexts”, “Methodologies”, “Application areas” and “Futures”. As readers
will see, the first four sections are fixed; yet it is in the nature of our field that the
“Application areas” will expand. It is inevitable that the futures for the field prom-
ise to be intriguing with their proximity to the key concerns of human existence
on this planet (and even beyond), with the continuing prospect in communication
sciences that that future is increasingly susceptible of prediction.
 Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series vii

Note: administration on this series has been funded by the Università della
Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano. Thanks go to the president of the univer-
sity, Professor Piero Martinoli, as well as to the administration director, Albino
Zgraggen.

Peter J. Schulz, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano

Paul Cobley, London Metropolitan University
Acknowledgements
The series editors of the Handbooks of Communication Science, Peter J. Schulz and
Paul Cobley, have supported me with enthusiasm throughout the process with this
volume. So has the editor at De Gruyter Mouton, Barbara Karlson. Thanks for all
the encouragement!
Anna G. Larsen gave perfect research assistance during the editorial work on
the chapters and the index. Liz Nichols deserves a big hand for her accurate and
reliable copy editing of all the manuscripts. Production editor Wolfgang Kon-
witschny at De Gruyter and the typesetters worked fast to get this volume through.
Thanks also go to the many colleagues who have inspired my work on mediati-
zation through a whole decade. I am also grateful to my Department of Media and
Communication at the University of Oslo for economic and collegial support on
this handbook project.
It has been a pleasure to work with the many contributors to this volume.
Several chapter authors have offered comments on a draft of the introduction for
which I am thankful. Substantial suggestions from the following were particularly
helpful, in alphabetic order: Kent Asp, Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz, Bryna Bogoch,
Niels Ole Finnemann, Andreas Hepp, Stig Hjarvard, and Sonia Livingstone. Still,
the responsibility for any weaknesses and errors in the introduction rests with me.
While this volume was in production Eliseo Verón passed away. I sadly regret
this loss to the international community of mediatization scholars.

Oslo, June 2014

Knut Lundby
Contents
Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series v

Acknowledgements ix

I. Introduction

Knut Lundby
1 Mediatization of Communication 3

II. Global changes

Karin Knorr Cetina

2 Scopic media and global coordination: the mediatization of face-to-face
encounters 39

Risto Kunelius
3 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization
research 63

Wanning Sun
4 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics: political legitimacy, public
diplomacy and the new art of propaganda 87

III. The long history

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz
5 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity”: sociological classics and
their perspectives on mediated and mediatized societies 109

Friedrich Krotz
6 Mediatization as a mover in modernity: social and cultural change in the
context of media change 131

Eliseo Verón
7 Mediatization theory: a semio-anthropological perspective 163
xii Contents

IV. Media in society

Göran Bolin
8 Institution, technology, world: relationships between the media, culture,
and society 175

Stig Hjarvard
9 Mediatization and cultural and social change: an institutional
perspective 199

Nick Couldry
10 Mediatization and the future of field theory 227

V. Movement and interaction

Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

11 Human interaction and communicative figurations. The transformation of
mediatized cultures and societies 249

André Jansson
12 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 273

Niels Ole Finnemann

13 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 297

Mirca Madianou
14 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic
approach 323

VI. Power, law and politics

Kent Asp
15 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 349

Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

16 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping
politics 375

Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

17 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 405
 Contents xiii

Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

18 Mediatization of corporations 423

Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

19 Law in the age of media logic 443

VII. Art and the popular

Jürgen Wilke
20 Art: multiplied mediatization 465

Johan Fornäs
21 Mediatization of popular culture 483

Philip Auslander
22 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st
century 505

Kirsten Frandsen
23 Mediatization of sports 525

VIII. Faith and knowledge

Mia Lövheim
24 Mediatization and religion 547

Mike S. Schäfer
25 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media: what we know about the
mediatization of science 571

Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

26 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 595

IX. To be or not to be

Charles M. Ess
27 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds?
Perspectives from medium theory and philosophy 617
xiv Contents

Maren Hartmann
28 Home is where the heart is? Ontological security and the mediatization of
homelessness 641

Andrew Hoskins
29 The mediatization of memory 661

Johanna Sumiala
30 Mediatization of public death 681

X. Critical afterthought

Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

31 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication
research? 703

Biographical sketches 725

Index 735
I. Introduction
Knut Lundby
1 Mediatization of Communication
Abstract: This handbook displays the range of approaches and applications of
mediatization theory in media and communication studies within the social scien-
ces and humanities. The handbook invites dynamic encounters between scholars
with different approaches to mediatization, in order to give the reader a good
overview of the state of research. Contemporary mediatization research is an ambi-
tious attempt to grasp and understand the role of media and communication as
part of the transforming processes of culture and society.

Keywords: mediatization, mediation, media, communication, transformation,

change, definitions, theory, research, contention

1 The content of the handbook

“Mediatization” has become a much-used concept to characterize changes in prac-
tices, cultures, and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting trans-
formations of these societies themselves. The topic of this volume, then, is hugely
important if one wants to understand contemporary processes of social, cultural,
and political changes.
Admittedly, mediatization is an awkward term, but one that has gained terrain
in academic discourse through the second decade of the third millennium (Lundby
2009a). It is a matter of communication – how changes occur when communica-
tion patterns are transformed due to new communication tools and technologies,
or in short: the “media”.
This, of course, concerns scholars of media and communication. However, this
handbook should also be of interest to other students in the humanities and social
sciences trying to grasp the transformations of our cultural and social environ-
ment. It may be the large scale issues, such as how mediatization meets climate
change or contributes to globalization. It may be on the intermediate level of
changes in institutions, (sub)cultures, and public spheres that are infused by the
workings of the media. Or it may be in daily interactions that are transformed
through the expanding role of “social media” and mobile networking.
The aim of this introduction is to point out some patterns in the picture of
contemporary mediatization research, as a map or guide to the coming chapters.
This overview is no more than a skeleton; the flesh on these bones is provided
throughout the following 30 chapters. References in this introduction are mainly to
the chapters to come and are otherwise limited to what is needed for this overview
argument. The wealth of literature on – or building up to – mediatization is to be
found in the reference sections in the chapters that make up the rest of this book.
4 Knut Lundby

1.1 What is covered

The chapters are organized in ten sections of which this Introduction is the first.
Second, come contributions on Global changes where mediatization plays a crucial
part in ongoing transformations. This section underlines the view that mediatiza-
tion is part of large, global processes.
The third section deals with The long history of mediatization and of mediatiza-
tion research. Mediatization may be understood to follow the “social construction
of everyday life, society and culture as a whole” by any medium in human commu-
nication (Krotz 2009: 24; Couldry 2012: 136–137). This takes the history of mediati-
zation way back, at least to the invention of printing and even writing, depending
on the definition of “media” that is applied. Mediatization intensifies with modern-
ity, as technical media become more and more prominent in communication pro-
cesses in society. Some scholars even restrict the phenomenon of mediatization to
societies of high modernity, from the very last half of the 20th century (Hjarvard
2013: 5–7).
Media in society, or rather social theory about understanding mediatization, is
dealt with in the fourth section of the book, which compares several theoretical
approaches to the transformation of culture and society with mediatization.
How people practice their moves between their offline world and their online
or otherwise mediated forms of communication is further explored in the fifth
section, on Movement and interaction.
Section VI, on Power, law, and politics, takes the reader to classic areas of
mediatization research. Mediatization was developed as a term to grasp the power
of a media-saturated environment, instead of asking for the effect of particular
media such as radio or television. This section updates and extends the arguments
on “political logic” versus “media logic” and includes a comparison with “legal
logic” as well.
Multiplication technologies – and in particular the multimodality involved in
digital media combining and mixing text, sound, graphics, and visuals – open
new avenues for Art and the popular. Popular culture as well as classic visual art
and sports are covered in Section VII.
The eighth section concerns Faith and knowledge, although without inviting a
rationalist tension between faith and reason. This features chapters on the mediati-
zation of religion, science, and education.
Moral and ontological challenges for individuals in mediatized societies are
dealt with in Section IX, entitled To be or not to be.
Since mediatization is such an all-encompassing process, or complex of proc-
esses, there are many facets to this phenomenon. Other areas of communication
science may take another grip on processes that here are dealt with as part of
mediatization. Although this handbook covers mediatization in communication
broadly, not every aspect could be treated even within a 600-page volume. Just to
take two examples: this volume could have had a chapter on gender; however,
 Mediatization of Communication 5

this is a cross-chapter aspect that applies to most areas of mediatization. Another

example: mediatization of war and conflict could have been treated more in depth,
although there is some coverage of war by Andrew Hoskins in Chapter 29.

1.2 Mapping the field

To get a grip on such a broad field is challenging. In the material presented in
this volume I identify some key issues of contention among the researchers as well
as different approaches to, or perspectives on, the processes of mediatization. The
issues of contention are related to Time, Technology, and Theory. The different
accounts of mediatization are Cultural, Material, and Institutional. These are my
terms or categories. Other contributors to this handbook use somewhat different
labels on a similar tri-polar distinction. Göran Bolin identifies (in Chapter 8 this
volume) three “strands of mediatization” or three attempts among mediatization
researchers to get hold on the relationships between media, culture, and society:
First, the institutional perspective; second, the technological perspective, and
finally, a perspective on “media as world”. The “mediatized worlds” are life-worlds
that rely on communication media. In the concluding “afterthought” to all preced-
ing chapters in this volume Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt distinguish between
three “ideal typical accounts of mediatization”, namely “the longue durée of cul-
tural evolution; the institutional forces of high modernity in recent centuries; and
the socio-technological transformations of recent decades”. Such categories are
certainly ideal types. I leave it to the reader to sort out nuances between my catego-
ries compared to Bolin’s, Livingstone and Lunt’s distinctions. In Figure 1 I map,
for the sake of overview, the two dimensions with the terms on research that I
apply.
The ideal-typical combinations of perspectives and issues of contention that
occur in Figure 1 will be dealt with throughout the introduction. The figure serves
as a map for the tour to come.

Issue of contention Perspective

Cultural Material Institutional

Time Basic practices back to Several historical epochs Media-saturated in

origin of human history or recent digital decades high/late modernity

Technology Media as tools in Characteristics of Media logic in

communication various media institutions

Theory Social-constructivist, Medium theory, theories Structuration,

symbolic-interactionist of materiality and space new institutionalism

Fig. 1: Perspectives and issues of contention in mediatization research

6 Knut Lundby

2 Mediatization versus mediation

The difference or possible overlap between the concepts of “mediation” and “medi-
atization” has, for a long time, created lively debates. There are two aspects of
this discussion: First, what is the distinction between ongoing mediated communi-
cation and its possible transformative consequences? Second, which term is best
suited to capture the transformative character of communication with media in
social change?

2.1 Which term to use when referring to the transformations?

In The Media and Modernity (1995) John B. Thompson introduces the term “media-
zation of culture” (without the t and the i) to denote the “systematic cultural
transformation” beginning to take hold with symbolic production and circulation
made possible by printing technology from the late 15th century on (Thompson
1995: 46). The difference between his “mediazation” and the present “mediatiza-
tion” is insignificant. However, most British scholars of media and communication
resisted the term mediatization, “a clumsy neologism in English” to be avoided
for the preference of “mediation” (Livingstone 2009: 6–7). Roger Silverstone saw
“mediation as a transformative process” (2002: 761). He applied the term mediation
to “understand how processes of communication change the social and cultural
environment that support them as well as the relationships that participants, both
individual and institutional, have to that environment and to each other” (Silver-
stone 2005: 189). His use of “mediation”, then, is quite close to the use of “mediati-
zation” in this volume.
Silverstone had a great impact on fellow British researchers (for example Coul-
dry 2008). However, in time, many of them have come to favour the term “mediati-
zation”. Sonia Livingstone, concluding this volume with Peter Lunt, suggests “that
mediatization research might usefully re-interpret the many existing findings of
mediation research by re-locating and integrating them within a historical frame”.
Nick Couldry (2012: 134) also accepts that “mediatization” has emerged as the
more distinctive term than the general “mediation”, which could have several
meanings. Couldry’s condition for adopting the term mediatization is that it is
connected with the structural shift and the social construction of the social world
that follows the “increasing involvement of media in all spheres of life”, thus
acknowledging “media as an irreducible dimension of all social processes” (Coul-
dry 2012: 137 emphasis in original).
However, there are still other voices, such as among anthropologists of religion
with Birgit Meyer (2013) as a vocal representative, who prefer to understand social
and cultural transformations involving the media by reference to the concept of
mediation.
 Mediatization of Communication 7

In this volume the form “mediatization” is applied throughout, although some

British English users may have preferred to write it as “mediatisation” with an “s”.

2.2 The regular and the transformative

The first distinction, then, is between regular communication and transformative
communication. One may argue that all communication is mediated. The linguistic
anthropologist Asif Agha holds that “mediation” is the main concept: “Social life
has a mediated character whenever persons are linked to each other through
speech and other perceivable signs in participatory frameworks of communication
activity” (Agha 2011: 163). There are always “material vehicles” working as “con-
ductors” in communication, the pioneer sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin (1947: 51–
52) would say. Meanings cannot be transmitted directly from mind to mind. The
physical aspects of the voice and body language in spoken face-to-face communi-
cation, or of the pen and written letters in handwriting over distance, are necessary
material vehicles in communication. Limiting the “vehicles” to technical media
does not change things much: this is regular, ongoing communication.
Defining media as forms of technology makes technology-supported communi-
cation into “mediated communication”. The particular medium impacts the out-
come of the communication as it formats the content. Radio sets other require-
ments than television, for example. Hence, radio formats the same event in another
way than television. Similarly, printed newspapers are formatted differently from
online news. The intervention of the medium “can affect both the message and
the relationship between sender and recipient” (Hjarvard 2013: 19). This is also
well known from Stuart Hall’s distinction between encoding and decoding (1973)
which points to different intentions and interpretations between the parties in a
communication but which also depend on the requirements of the actual medium.
The distinction, then, seems fairly obvious (Couldry and Hepp 2013: 197).
“Mediation” is here understood as regular mediated communication, which may
be shaped in a process of “remediation” as each act of mediation “depends on
other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and
replacing each other” (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 55). Still, this is what’s inherent in
all mediated communication. “Mediatization”, on the other hand, grasps long-
term cultural and social change following ongoing mediated communication. As
Hjarvard (2014: 125) puts it: “By mediation, we usually understand the use of a
medium for communication and interaction. … Meanwhile, the study of mediatiza-
tion considers the long-term structural transformations of media’s role in contem-
porary culture and society.” Mediated communication turns into a process of medi-
atization when the ongoing mediations mould long-term changes in the social,
cultural, or political environment. Mediatization is change. As long-term processes
of sociocultural change are deep or lasting, they may rather be characterized as
transformations rather than simply as “changes”.
8 Knut Lundby

Following this distinction there is no contradiction between “mediation” and

“mediatization”. The two concepts rather complement each other (Hepp 2013: 38).
Agha (2011: 163) finds mediatization “a very special case of mediation”. He links
mediatization in particular to commodification. This volume explores a broader
spectrum of transformations, such as globalization and individualization. How-
ever, Agha is right that today “familiar institutions in any large-scale society (e.g.
schooling, the law, electoral politics, the mass media) all presuppose a variety of
mediatized practices as conditions on their possibility. … social processes in any
complex society derive their complexity from practices oriented to forms of mediat-
ization” (Agha 2011: 163). And within the regular processes of mediated communi-
cation the framing of content in media production (Entman 1993, 2009) as well
as the audience transformations (Carpentier, Schrøder and Hallet 2014) lead into
mediatization.

3 Not just about “the media”

Mediatization is not just about “the media”, defined here as technologies or tools
in communication. Over time, communication patterns may change the social and
cultural context where these processes take place. The concept mediatization cap-
tures sociocultural transformations related to such media-based communication.
The media, then, act as agents of cultural and social change. The core of mediatiza-
tion is the social and cultural transformations, not technical media as such. Any
deterministic take on mediatization has to be rejected.
However, mediatization is just one contemporary process of major change. The
challenge is to grasp how mediatization transforms societies as one of the mould-
ing forces of our times, alongside and maybe intertwined with transformations like
globalization, commercialization, and individualization.

3.1 Technology and sociocultural process

The transforming moment when the technical medium in question does its work
to format and twist an ongoing communication is usually a step in a longer process
of mediation. Mediatization may encompass parts of the longer process or stand
out as turning points in this process. It may start with the cultural or social condi-
tions that trigger the transforming communication with its media use, and ends
with the identifiable changes or consequences in that sociocultural environment.
Clearly, other factors, not only the media, are in operation.
The anthropologist Charles L. Briggs (2013) offers an illuminating example. In
2008 a story from Venezuela circulated globally in traditional and social media
that “38 Warao Indians died from rabies transmitted by vampire bats”. This was
 Mediatization of Communication 9

what Briggs (2011) terms a “mediatized object” produced by a journalist on the New
York Times (7 August 2008). However, this mediatized turn was just one element
in a long chain of communication. It started with the rumours circulating in the
country about the many deaths in the Indian community. After the deaths had
continued for a year and neither physicians nor epidemiologists could diagnose
the disease, local indigenous leaders formed their own investigatory team and
called upon Briggs and his wife, a public health physician, to participate. They
knew the community and their language from former visits. The evidence the team
compiled pointed strongly to rabies transmitted by vampire bats (Desmodus rotun-
dus) as the cause. From the beginning, the indigenous members of the team
focused on pre-mediatizing their work – for instance, by asking Briggs to photo-
graph grieving parents and patients – so that they could present themselves as
credible voices on medical issues, countering the denigratory way in which they,
until then, had generally been portrayed in the Venezuelan media. The mediatized
turn of the report in the New York Times, followed by Associated Press and news
providers on paper and the web around the world, transformed the case as far as
the explanation and dignity of the Warao community were concerned. Reports of
“vampire bats” may have caught the eyes of the other media people. But, also,
the idea of indigenous people back in the jungle producing scientific evidence
about an epidemic had an element of surprise, a new spin that attracted reporters.
This process of mediation and mediatization did not just happen by chance,
but was initiated by the agency of the indigenous leaders, the foreign scientists,
and the international media that brought and circulated the story. Processes of
mediation and mediatization depend on active agency as well as on the structures
within where it takes place. The general mediatization of the media industry and
other institutions in society, as will be explicated throughout this volume, is part
of the structure and creates conditions for mediation as well as for further mediati-
zation. This case encompasses the whole communication process from the talk
about the first deaths to the transformed image of the Indian community. There
are particular mediatizing moments that may produce certain mediatized objects
that could be identified. However, mediatization is always embedded in larger
sociocultural processes.
A pioneer in thinking beyond “the media” in such processes is the Latin Ameri-
can communication scholar Jesús Martín-Barbero. He stresses the importance of
agency, in particular in communication rising against hegemony and oppression.
The English version (1993) of his book, De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunica-
ción, cultura y hegemonia from 1987 switches the title and subtitle of the original.
Martín-Barbero turns the focus From the Media to Mediations. Rather than the
technology in operation he is concerned with the mediations of which the technol-
ogy is a part. These mediations, following the book title, work within the frames
of Communication, Culture and Hegemony. Martín-Barbero’s concept of mediation
involves people and social movements acting with media in communication. His
10 Knut Lundby

concept of mediation “entails looking at how culture is negotiated and becomes

an object of transactions in a variety of contexts” (Schlesinger 1993: xiii). There
may be mediated communication that does not change the contexts within which
it works. However, mediations may as well, through negotiations and transactions,
change hegemonic conditions. Martín-Barbero’s understanding of mediation
entails sociocultural transformations that we, in this volume, understand as proc-
esses of mediatization. In a later work (2003) he connects his concept of mediation
to transformations due to the place of media in culture. He regards “public opin-
ion” as the “transformational sphere” executed in and by the media. Aesthetic
taste is another sphere he finds “crucial to transformations through the media”
(Martín-Barbero 2003: 88).

3.2 Perspectives on mediatization

As a phenomenon or set of processes of change involving most corners of culture
and society, a range of scholarly approaches could be applied to untangle mediati-
zation. My own take is a sociological perspective on media and communication.
However, the field of media and communication studies is in itself multidisciplin-
ary, drawing upon various scientific traditions from the humanities and social
sciences, as well as research on the workings and uses of information and commu-
nication technologies and other media technologies.

3.2.1 Cultural perspective

Martín-Barbero (1993) takes a cultural approach to mediatization, which is one of

the three perspectives I identify in Figure 1. Of course, there are many variations
to an overall cultural perspective, given the breadth of cultural studies. In their
editorial introduction to the special issue of Communication Theory on “Conceptu-
alizing Mediatization”, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2013) point to a “social-
constructivist” approach as the one of two main traditions of mediatization
research. I regard this social-constructivist take as a theoretical approach under a
general cultural perspective on mediatization (cf. Hepp 2009, 2012, 2013). The
social-constructivist approach refers to theories on the social construction of real-
ity as developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967). “Mediatization”
then captures “both how the communicative construction of reality is manifested
within certain media processes and how, in turn, specific features of certain
media” play into “the overall process whereby sociocultural reality is constructed
in and through communication”, Couldry and Hepp (2013: 196) explain.
 Mediatization of Communication 11

3.2.2 Institutional perspective

The other main direction in mediatization research pointed out by Couldry and
Hepp (2013) is the “institutionalist” tradition. Stig Hjarvard (2013, 2014 and this
volume) is the main proponent of the institutional approach. It looks for the trans-
formations of institutions, like politics and religion, scrutinizing when they adhere
to the formats of media for their function and practices in society and culture. In
this tradition, the media gain power and position and themselves develop into
semi-institutions. This perspective draws upon theories of structuration and insti-
tutions as developed by Anthony Giddens (1984) with his thinking about the dual-
ity between structure and agency. This perspective also draws on “new institution-
alism” theories that stress the changes of institutions due to certain institutional
logics (Hjarvard this volume).

3.2.3 Material perspective

Some of the contributors to this volume neither fit easily under a cultural perspec-
tive nor under an institutional one. Finnemann (this volume) clearly opposes the
cultural as well as the institutional perspective in his defence for what I term a
material perspective. It is characterized by a focus on the material properties of
the media in processes of mediatization. This perspective underlines that media
are always materialized. The material aspect may be related to the particular com-
munication technologies at stake. As such, this perspective comes close to
“medium theory” (cf. 6.3 below). However, there is also a material aspect to the
notions of space that are inherent in mediatization as well as in the media “tex-
tures” through which cultural practices and everyday life materialize, as pointed
to by André Jansson (2009, 2013 and this volume). The material approach will
consider the transforming influence of digitization, either by concentrating on the
recent digital decades or by comparing this recent epoch to former historical
epochs, each with their dominant media materiality.

3.2.4 Tensions and nuances

Although Couldry and Hepp observe that the cultural and the institutional per-
spectives in recent years have come closer to each other through a joint focus on
changing patterns of interaction (2013: 196), it will be visible throughout this vol-
ume that there are tensions between the different approaches to the study of medi-
atization.
There are nuances and more specific theoretical approaches within each of
the three ideal types – the cultural, the material, and the institutional. The reader
12 Knut Lundby

will see, for example, a claimed phenomenological approach (in Andreas Hepp
and Uwe Hasebrink’s chapter), and an ethnographic take (in Mirca Madianou’s
contribution). Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory is the point of departure for two chap-
ters (Nick Couldry’s as well as Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingaard’s). Several contrib-
utors refer to political science and political communication (Kent Asp, and also
Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser are among them, where Asp leans towards the
material aspect and Strömbäck and Esser to the institutional side). In the book
there are also chapters written from semiotic (Eliseo Verón) and virtue ethics
(Charles M. Ess) positions. And there is more to find, although there is a predomi-
nance of sociologically influenced media and communication perspectives.

4 Defining mediatization
Mediatization research explores the transforming potential of mediated communi-
cation upon culture and society. As approaches to the study of these changes
differ, so do definitions of mediatization. Even the term that is applied varies: John
B. Thompson (1995) did it without the “t” and “i” as noted above. In German and
Scandinavian languages there are alternative wordings that to some extent cover
different conceptions. This will be unravelled below.

4.1 To conceptualize mediatization

Klaus Bruhn Jensen (2013), in a discussion of how “mediatization” is conceptual-
ized, challenges the forms of definitions that mediatization scholars apply. He
looks to Herbert Blumer’s distinction (1954) between “definitive” and “sensitizing”
concepts. A definitive concept refers to what is common to a class of phenomena
by the aid of a clear definition. A sensitizing concept, by contrast, “gives the user
a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances”
(Blumer 1954: 7). Jensen observes attempts at “a media-centric” as well as a “soci-
ety-centric” definitive concept of mediatization. He points to Stig Hjarvard’s work
(2013) as an example of the former, and to Nick Couldry (2012) as a case in point
of the latter. Jensen holds that a sensitizing conceptualization, in both cases, could
have played more openly with the role of the media and consequent mediatization.
Jensen thinks that mediatization research should be more concerned with new
digital media and processes of digitization, with which both Hjarvard (2014) as
well as Couldry (2012) actually engage. By his criticism, Jensen positions himself
with a material perspective in opposition to the cultural perspective supported by
Couldry and the institutional take championed by Hjarvard.
Mediatization research should subject itself to a “second-order investigation”
of specific studies performed in media and communication research as well as in
 Mediatization of Communication 13

other disciplines on media texts, practices, influences, institutions, and flows

Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt propose in their concluding “afterthought” to
this volume. Mediatization research should tag or collate what is useful to under-
stand the dynamics of mediatization. Although mediatization research has raised
a variety of questions, the record suggests, Jensen (2013) argues, that answers are
more likely to follow from sensitizing than from definitive conceptualizations in
future research. Second-order investigations over a range of communication practi-
ces may be a better way to sensitize mediatization research than a concentration
on digitalization. I think that Jensen takes Blumer to support his position more
than Blumer (1954) actually advises. A cultural or institutional perspective may for
other research purposes be as valid and useful as the material perspective Jensen
advances.

4.2 Brief history of mediatization research

The research on mediatization of communication mainly originates in Northern
Europe, in Germany and Scandinavia. The German sociologist Ernest Manheim
was the first, in 1933, to apply “mediatization” (“Mediatisierung”) as a scientific,
analytical term. He used it to describe communication processes via the printed
press, as a general change in communication (Averbeck-Lietz this volume). This
could be regarded as the beginning of modern mediatization research in the mean-
ing it is understood in this volume. However, the bulk of specific German mediati-
zation research comes first several decades later, towards the very end of the 20th
century.
In German research there is a long and complex debate between scholars of
“Mediatisierung” and of “Medialisierung”. The distinctions are unpacked here by
Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz (Chapter 5) and commented by Mike S. Schäfer (Chapter
25, note 2). However, not all see the real difference between the two terms (e.g.
Krotz 2008).
Among historians there was an early meaning of “Mediatisierung” from the
German Laws of Mediatization in the early 19th century. Independent cities of the
former Roman Empire were considered “mediatized” when annexed by Napoleon.
Sonia Livingstone (2009: 6) observes the parallel to modern media systems: “today,
the media not only get between any and all participants in society but also, cru-
cially, annex a sizeable part of their power by mediatizing – subordinating – the
previously powerful authorities of government, education, the church, the family
and so forth.”
This strikes at the core of mediatization as a term in media and communication
studies, in particular as defined by Stig Hjarvard (in this volume), as “structural
transformations of the relationship between media and other social spheres.” Hjar-
vard, himself one of the leading thinkers in contemporary Scandinavian research
on mediatization, trace the Scandinavian history of mediatization research back
14 Knut Lundby

to the very end of the 1970s, with Kent Asp’s work on mediatization of politics
from 1986 as a landmark (Asp 1986, 1990; Asp and Esaiasson 1996; Hjarvard 2013:
8–9). The Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz applied mediatization in cultural
studies in 1990, Johan Fornäs followed in 1995.
The American scholars David L. Altheide and Robert P. Snow came out as early
as the first Scandinavians with their book on Media Logic (1979), although not
using the term mediatization at that point. However, U. S. researchers have not
come back to mediatization research until recently (for example Hoover 2009;
Rothenbuhler 2009; Clark 2014), following up on the European works, including
British media and communication scholars turning from the concept of mediation
to mediatization (cf. 2.1 above).
Eliseo Verón (this volume) testifies to a Latin-American as well as a French
branch of mediatization research from the mid 1980s, adding to Martín-Barbero’s
book in Spanish from 1987 and Jean Baudrillard’s use of the term in his postmod-
ern theorizing in French as early as the beginning of the 1970s (Bolin’s chapter
this volume; Averbeck-Lietz 2011).
The Italian media scholar Gianpietro Mazzoleni joined forces with his German
colleague Winfried Schulz. They came out with a pioneer article on mediatization
of politics in 1999 and later contributed to other key texts on mediatization in
general (Schulz 2004; Mazzoleni 2008).
This incomplete overview of the history of the field should be enough to con-
clude that mediatization research is a new research effort, with the present, strong
wave coming in well after the turn into this millennium. Although some scholars
(like Krotz 2001, 2009, this volume) argue that mediatization processes go back to
the early stages of the history of human communication, it is the contemporary
media-saturated environment that has triggered the expanding research efforts.

4.3 The span of definitions

The contributors to this handbook employ different definitions of mediatization.
They have been invited to do so. Thus, the reader may find some repetition among
the chapters as the individual author argues his or her way into the material. This
section offers a map of the variations of the definitions that the authors employ,
with reference to Time, Technology, and Theory as the dimensions or issues of
contention briefly laid out in 1.2 above (to be expanded upon in section 6). Defini-
tions may refer to more than one of these three categories but are here presented
with the dimension that seems the most decisive. Not all contributors could easily
be identified with one of the three perspectives on mediatization. However, when
it comes to their definitions of mediatization it is possible for most of them to see
how they take their offspring in one of the three dimensions, Time, Technology,
or Theory – although they may from their definitions move onwards across more
dimensions.
 Mediatization of Communication 15

4.3.1 Definitions based in Time

Friedrich Krotz is a prominent representative of those who define mediatization

through the time dimension. He understands mediatization as a long-term histori-
cal process that has taken place since the beginning of human communication:
“It is assumed that media exist and have been developed since the beginning of
human communication, which means the birth of humankind. Media then are
constructed by communication and social action of the people by using technology
for communication, and communication is transformed and modified by media”
(Krotz this volume). Eliseo Verón follows suit, defining mediatization from the
human capability of semiosis (Verón this volume). Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz applies
a historical dimension in her definition (this volume). She expresses sympathy
with Krotz’ take on mediatization but focuses on modern media from printing
onwards
Stig Hjarvard, as noted in 1.1, goes towards the other end of the historical line,
restricting mediatization to fully media-saturated societies from the end of the 20th
century. However, this is not an explicit part of his definition of mediatization.
There are in this volume authors who see mediatization as a long-term histori-
cal process while defining it in terms of the technological dimension (Finnemann,
Fornäs, Schäfer, Ess) or from the theoretical perspective (Hepp and Hasebrink,
Strömbeck and Esser, as well as Lövheim). Maren Hartmann is among the latter
group of authors, primarily theorizing about domestication in relation to mediati-
zation, yet with reference to Krotz’ definition of mediatization as an all-encompass-
ing concept (Hartmann this volume). Johanna Sumiala builds on Krotz’ definition,
trying to understand the mediatization of public death, yet combining it with the
theoretical perspective on media logics (Sumiala this volume).
In their concluding “afterthought” to all the preceding chapters, Sonia Living-
stone and Peter Lunt argue within a time perspective with the history of media
and the history of mediation. Comparing the various definitions in this handbook,
they find the institutional perspective with its contemporary historical location to
make the strongest case for a theory of mediatization. But for further theoretical
and empirical work, the long human evolution perspective and the radical perspec-
tive on digitization could be mutually compatible with the institutional perspec-
tive, Livingstone and Lunt conclude.

4.3.2 Definitions based in Technology

The definitions that primarily go along the Technology dimension revolve around
the claims of radical transformations following digitization and the accompanying
networked communication. Niels Ole Finnemann takes the most challenging posi-
tion, arguing that digital media make a new “matrix” – constellation of media –
16 Knut Lundby

in media history and the history of human communication. In order to include

digital media with its radical characteristics, the concept of mediatization has to
be used as a metaconcept, he holds. He sees digitization as a set of particular
modes of mediatization (Finnemann this volume).
Johan Fornäs also starts from an understanding of mediatization as a historical
process, “whereby communication media become in some respect more ‘impor-
tant’ in expanding areas of life and society”. Technological shifts are significant to
this historical process. To him, in contrast to Finnemann, “digital mediatization”
is just another step in the history, following “graphic mediatization”, “print medi-
atization”, and “audiovisual mediatization.” Fornäs identifies problems in the con-
cept of mediatization with popular culture as a testing ground: if there is mediati-
zation, when, where, and how does it appear, and what practices and spheres does
it affect? Mediatization of popular culture is “when media are increasingly entan-
gled in the popular aesthetic”, making mediatization “almost synonymous with
popularization”. The institutional technologies of culture are the keys to mediatiza-
tion, Fornäs holds (this volume).
Kent Asp, the pioneer in Scandinavian research on mediatization, contrasts
the “age of the Internet” with the “age of television”. He considers the adaptation
of the technology by actors outside of the media to be the causal mechanism in
the process of mediatization. Asp considers the mediatization of political institu-
tions to have peaked on the systems level, while the mediatization of the life-
world – with digital media – “has only just begun” (Asp this volume).
The lifeworld is where Charles Ess enters the discussion. He considers the
relation between selfhood and mediatization with the shifts of technology. He
observes a new shift from individual to relational selfhood with the new digital,
networked communication (Ess this volume). Andrew Hoskins is concerned with
the “hyperconnectivity” provided by digital networks and databases, by which he
defines mediatization. It is this hyperconnectivity that drives the mediatization of
memory, which is his topic in the handbook. The hyperconnectivity invites a sec-
ond phase of mediatization, beyond the broadcast era. This second phase “requires
a shift in how we approach and formulate the very relationship we have with
media” (Hoskins this volume). Karin Knorr Cetina takes this into the new face-to-
face social situations that emerge with the global coordination through networked
screens, as found in the financial markets. She terms them “synthetic situations”,
that are part of “scopic mediatization” (Knorr Cetina this volume).
Science develops technology and various media technologies are used in sci-
ence. Mike S. Schäfer (in this volume) lays out the mediatization of science. He
stresses the importance of new, networked mediated communication in today’s
science. “Digital literacy” has become necessary for the scientist. Schäfer is the
only contributor in this volume who touches explicitly on the literacy demands on
individuals that follow digitization. Ess in his chapter does so indirectly by con-
trasting the new “relational self” to the “literacy-print” that the “individual self”
leans on.
 Mediatization of Communication 17

4.3.3 Definitions based in Theory

The majority of contributors to this handbook define mediatization primarily

within the Theory dimension. This fact may seem to confirm that mediatization
research is in a state of theoretical grounding rather than empirical applications.
The leaning towards theory may well be the case, but this goes for definitions
based in Time and Technology as well. Many of the authors listed here as dealing
with definitions based on Theory are among the contributors with the most con-
crete studies of mediatization. They include mediatization of politics (Strömbäck
and Esser, 2014 and this volume), of Chinese state strategies in particular (Sun),
of public bureaucracy (Thorbjørnsrud, Figenschou and Ihlen), of corporations
(Ihlen and Pallas), of the legal sphere (Bogoch & Peleg), of sports (Frandsen), of
performance in popular culture (Auslander), and in the public display of death
(Sumiala). What they have in common is a theoretical platform understanding
“media logic” as a driving force in mediatization.
Strömbäck and Esser restrict their analysis to the mediatization of politics
which they define in line with the general understanding of mediatization in this
volume, as “a long-term process through which the importance of the media and
their spill-over effects on political processes, institutions, organizations, and actors
has increased.” The operating dynamic is the relation between “political logic”
and “media logic” (Strömbäck and Esser this volume).
Hjarvard has a similar understanding of “media logic” as the “modi operandi”
in mediatization processes in general. Various institutions that are mediatized
meet the media with their own “logic”. Hjarvard understands “logics”, with media
and in other settings as “the particular rules and resources that govern a particular
domain” (Hjarvard this volume).
The conceptualization of mediatization through “media logic” also lays theo-
retical foundations for critical contributions, as when Hjarvard’s take is criticized
in the chapter on mediatization and religion (Lövheim this volume), in the essay
on mediatization of art (Wilke this volume), and in critical comparison with alter-
native approaches in the research on mediatization (Bolin this volume).
The media logic strand is developed within an institutional perspective.
Theory-based definitions of mediatization within a cultural perspective may vary.
Rawolle and Lingard (this volume) build their chapter on mediatization and educa-
tion with reference to a “logic” in the cultural domain, namely the concept “logic
of practice” taken from Bourdieu’s sociology. Kunelius centres it on mutual interac-
tion between social actors (this volume). Couldry focuses the role of media in
communication as a basic practice of how people construct the social and cultural
world (this volume). Couldry refers to Krotz’s understanding of mediatization (cf.
4.3.1), which is also the base for the chapter connecting the theory of domestica-
tion with the theory of mediatization (Hartmann this volume). Hepp and Hasebrink
(in this volume) understand mediatization with symbolic interaction in the interre-
18 Knut Lundby

lation between the changes in media and communication on the one hand and
change in culture and society on the other. The same social-constructivist
approach is behind the chapter on mediatized migration; however, in that case in
a “hybrid” combination with the tradition of media anthropology (Madianou this
volume).
Authors that see mediatization primarily in a material perspective, rather
define this process in terms of technological characteristics than in terms of par-
ticular theories. Jansson is an exception, grounding his approach to mediatization
in spatial theory with emphasis on production of the material “textures” that relate
people to space (cf. 3.2.3 above).

4.3.4 Other definitions

There are definitions with other takes on mediatization, however, still recognizable
within one of the three perspectives on mediatization identified in this chapter. I
will mention two: one with systems theory, the other with a concept of humanity,
both championed by authors in this handbook.
First, as art works are often critical of accepted media logic, another definition
is needed, Wilke (this volume) argues. He finds the definition by Michael Meyen
to be most relevant for his analysis of the mediatization of art as it includes reac-
tions by the arts towards other expressions in society and culture. According to
Meyen, mediatization (or in his terminology “medialization”) comprises “reactions
in other societal subsystems, which either relate to the structural changes in the
media system or to the general increase in importance of public communication
conveyed by the media” (2009: 23, translated by Wilke this volume). Hartmann
(this volume) mentions Meyen’s take on mediatization briefly as an alternative
definition. Schäfer (note 2, his chapter) offers the context to Meyen’s system
approach within the German debate (cf. 4.2 above). However, Meyen is well placed
within an institutional perspective, regarding mediatization as the adaption of
media logic.
The other alternative definition to be mentioned relates to the cultural as well
as to the material perspective on mediatization: Lynn Schofield Clark refers to
actor-network theory (Latour 1993) and extends the horizon of those interacting
in mediated communication onto the large canvas of humanity. She understands
mediatization as “… the process by which collective uses of communication media
extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of
narratives, contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world,
and give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world” (Clark
2011: 170). Lövheim (this volume) refers to this definition as she finds it opens
avenues for agency and social change in a constructive way.
 Mediatization of Communication 19

4.3.5 The common denominator

The common denominator in the span of definitions laid out above, seems best to
be formulated by Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz: “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” (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 3; emphasis in original). A similar formulation
is found in the special issue of Communication Theory on conceptualizing mediati-
zation (Couldry and Hepp 2013: 197).
This is formulated within a cultural perspective but encompasses three compo-
nents that are acknowledged among scholars across the range of perspectives.
First, mediatization is a long-term process. Second, mediatization implies transfor-
mations of practices and institutions. Third, these transformations take place in
interplay between changes in communication media and the societal, political, and
cultural context, which also includes the transformation of communication media.
These elements, across perspectives, are noted by Hepp, Hjarvard, and Lundby in
the special issue of Communications on empirical perspectives on mediatization:
”In general, the concept of mediatization tries to capture long-term interrelation
processes between media change on the one hand and social and cultural change
on the other. As institutionalized and technological means of communication,
media have become integral to very different contexts of human life” (2010: 223).

5 Researching mediatization
How can mediatization be researched? How can empirical studies be performed?
Which methodologies can be applied? How can mediatization be operationalized?
Although most of the chapters in this handbook have a theoretical aim, they also
offer a range of examples of subject-matter research. They can be presented
according to the areas they cover or with the modes of mediatization that range
across institutions or fields. Further, examples of methodologies and operationali-
zation from empirical studies in the chapters are illuminated, before a discussion
of levels of analysis in mediatization research: from the “everyday” of the lifeworld
to the structural changes of the global system. Finally, how is it possible to
research “mediatized objects” or “mediatized moments” compared to mediatiza-
tion as a long-term process? This section will not offer solutions to all these chal-
lenges but point to chapters in this handbook where the reader may find examples
of how and where mediatization researchers try to tackle them.

5.1 Mediatized areas

The mediatized areas could be “institutions” that structure certain tasks or func-
tions in society (cf. Hjarvard this volume) or “fields” in Bourdieu’s sense (cf. Coul-
20 Knut Lundby

dry this volume). Needless to say, not all areas in culture and society could be
included in such a handbook. However, a range of areas is covered. The most
extensive studies in the research on mediatization are on politics, covered here by
Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser (Chapter 16). A detailed study within the area
of politics is the chapter on public bureaucracies by Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine
Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen (Chapter 17), followed by a chapter on mediati-
zation within the private sector, on corporations, by Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas
(Chapter 18). Mediatization of the courts and legal procedures is the topic of Bryna
Bogoch and Anat Peleg’s chapter on law and the legal system (Chapter 19).
Other delimited areas that are discussed in this volume include religion (by
Mia Lövheim in Chapter 24), science (by Mike S. Schäfer in Chapter 25), education
(Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard in Chapter 26), and the home (by Maren Hart-
mann, through a discussion of the inverted – homelessness – in Chapter 28). Sports
and art (treated by Kirsten Frandsen and Jürgen Wilke in Chapters 23 and 20
respectively) are defined areas. However, popular culture (approached by Johan
Fornäs in Chapter 21) is as much a mode of mediatization as an area. Although
there are particular institutions disseminating popular culture, popular cultural
practices and attitudes are diffused throughout society – not the least by the
media.

5.2 Modes of mediatization

A “mode” of mediatization ranges across various areas, institutions, or fields. The
modes are parameters within which the transformations could be analysed. They
may derive from characteristics of the media environment, point to mechanisms
of change, or refer to aspects like gender or power in the processes of mediatiza-
tion. They may also depend on technological affordances, as with digitization.
Chapters where such modes are foregrounded are Karin Knorr Cetina’s analysis
of the global co-ordination in financial markets through networked “scopic” media
(Chapter 2) and Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink’s treatment of translocal inter-
action and “communicative figurations” (Chapter 11). Kent Asp rethinks the ques-
tion of media power (Chapter 15) while André Jansson looks into relations to space
and materiality (Chapter 12). This mode very much depends on the developments
of networked and digital media. Niels Ole Finnemann concludes in his contribu-
tion to the handbook on digitization (Chapter 13) that so far, “it seems that digitiza-
tion should be seen as a particular mode of mediatization or rather a set of particu-
lar modes of mediatization” (his emphases). The hyperconnectivity of digital
networks has added to the mediatization of memory (analysed by Andrew Hoskins
in Chapter 29). The semiotic take on mediatization as a “mediatic phenomenon”
by Eliseo Verón (Chapter 7) may also be regarded a mode.
Popular culture offers, as argued above, a mode of mediatization. And so do
performances in popular culture, as analysed by Philip Auslander in Chapter 22.
 Mediatization of Communication 21

Sometimes news stories on public death get as much media attention as perform-
ances by well-known stars. Such coverage of public, often spectacular, death is
also a mode of mediatization across the areas or institutions where they may take
place. Johanna Sumiala writes about this aspect of mediatization in the last regular
chapter in the handbook (Chapter 30).

5.3 Methodologies
Not many of the contributors are specific on which methodologies they apply in
their research on mediatization. This, again, depends on the general theoretical
perspective in this volume.
In general, since mediatization of practices and institutions runs deep and
wide in cultures and societies, a variety of methodologies and concrete methods
from the humanities and social sciences may be applied in mediatization research.
Regardless of which of these main traditions of human sciences scholars relate to,
all methodologies on mediatization must be able to handle change. Research on
contemporary mediatization also has to handle networked communication with
digital media.
One example is Mirca Madianou, writing (in Chapter 14) on migration as a
mediatized phenomenon. She applies an ethnographic approach suited to capture
the uses of new communication technologies between Filipino migrant workers
and their families back home. This “multi-sited ethnography of long-distance com-
munication” makes it possible to grasp the complexity of practices with new media
technologies in migration and the transformation of the phenomenon of migration
that follows.
It is easier to discuss mediatization in general than to make an operationaliza-
tion that works in actual, empirical research. It seems easiest, or at least most
common, with news processes where one has an idea of “media logic” (cf. 6.3)
operating.
An example in this volume is the entry on mediatization of public bureaucra-
cies by Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen (Chapter
17). They show “how rule-based public organizations adapt to and adopt the logic
of the news media”. The researchers suggest the following elements in their opera-
tionalization: “The importance of (1) The news rhythm and (2) news formats, but
also (3) how and why being in the media is valued by civil servants, and (4) how
this leads to a reallocation of resources and responsibilities within the organiza-
tion.”
Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser (in Chapter 16) confirm their model with
four dimensions for analyses of the mediatization of politics. The first dimension
refers to how important media are as a source of information compared to interper-
sonal communication. The second dimension regards the degree to which media
operate with autonomy in relation to political institutions. The third dimension
22 Knut Lundby

refers to the dominance of media logic versus political logic in media practices
and media content. The fourth dimension refers to whether the political practices
in political organizations and among political actors are guided by political logic
or media logic. This model gives rise to an operationalization of mediatization in
concrete studies.

5.4 Level of analysis

Mediatization can be analysed on micro, meso, or macro levels, and also has to
move across these levels (as Hepp and Hasebrink, for example, do in the research
on “communicative figurations”, see Chapter 11 in this volume). Micro studies may
look at particular practices of mediatization as performed and experienced by indi-
vidual actors or small groups and how this may transform their life and work.
Meso level analyses focus on institutions and study how they are involved in and
transformed by mediatization. Macro level analyses aim at the larger or more gen-
eral transformations of culture and society. Of course, there are connections
between the levels. For example, individuals have to adapt to mediatized environ-
ments within institutions and the larger setting, and the other way round: individ-
uals act, contribute, and change such mediatized environments. As put by Fried-
rich Krotz (in Chapter 6): on the macro level mediatization research looks for “the
changes in the overall areas like democracy, economy, culture, and society”; on
the meso level for “changing organizations and institutions, relational nets and
enterprises”, and on the micro level mediatization research asks questions of the
“changing communication and interaction in everyday life and the personal envir-
onments” of people.

5.5 Moments in long-term processes

Finally, how can one research the “mediatized moments” with “mediatized
objects” that occur within mediatization as a long-term process of transformation?
Risto Kunelius offers an explication of relations between the bits and pieces
and the whole package in his discussion of climate change challenges (in Chapter
3). The mediatization of ongoing climate change is a long-term process with many
mediatized moments and objects. Those moments occur with reports and pieces
of media coverage and discussions about melting ice and rising carbon dioxide
levels, and other climate issues. To be mediatized, these moments have to trans-
form common attitudes and conceptions, or to be skewed in one direction or
another. The mediatized objects in such a process are the various articles, news
reports, or other media output that indicate a direction of transformation. Kunelius
argues for a “de-centered perspective on mediatization”. By this he refers to “the
saturating ‘presence’ of the media” that shapes the mutual interaction of social
 Mediatization of Communication 23

actors, and influences the problem constructions that bring them to act or not to
act. This is about mediatized objects in mediatized moments and how these
elements make pieces in the chain of mediatization that eventually influences the
transformation of our environment.
Another example from the contributions to this handbook is Mirca Madianou’s
study (in Chapter 14) of how Filipino migrant workers, through the moments of
mediated communication with their families back home, in the objects of their
emails, SMSs or Skype exchanges and its contents, happen to transform the phe-
nomenon of migration.
In general, in order to claim that there is a process of mediatization one should
have several observations of moments and objects along the way that demonstrate
the transformation of the sociocultural practice or institution under study. Bogoch
and Peleg (in Chapter 19), for example, interviewed retired and currently serving
legal professionals (judges, lawyers) as well as journalists to get their views of
changes over time. In addition, they looked at changes in the coverage of trials
over time. However, one may not always have such before-and-after data. To
hypothesize a process of mediatization should still be possible if the moments or
objects under study indicate a transforming direction or tendency.

6 The issues of contention

There are several issues of contention in mediatization research. To simplify, for
the sake of overview, I have clustered them under the headings of Time, Technol-
ogy, and Theory, as indicated with Figure 1 above. In each of these three dimen-
sions mediatization could be seen from above as a collective process transforming
societies. However, mediatization could also be observed from below, changing the
lives of individuals in their immediate environments. The discussion that follows
concentrates on the “above” perspective, i.e. on overall processes of mediatization
and not their individual moments or objects.

6.1 Time: when did mediatization begin?

When did mediatization emerge? Seen from above, this is the discussion over His-
tory. This process is, as noted, at the one end understood as concomitant with the
human history of media as tools in communication, and at the other end as a
phenomenon inherent in media-rich late or high modern societies (the two terms
“late” and “high” are in this volume used interchangeably to denote the contempo-
rary advanced phase of modernity).
24 Knut Lundby

The tension over Time in mediatization research has its roots in different defi-
nitions of this process of transformation. The outcome is a totally different concep-
tion of the history of mediatization. One camp regards mediatization as an inherent
part of human communication while the other camp regards mediatization to be
an aspect of late or high modern societies. Friedrich Krotz is the lead voice in the
first camp, Stig Hjarvard in the other. They both advance their arguments in this
volume.
To Krotz, the media throughout history have become more and more “relevant
for the social construction of everyday life, society and culture as a whole” (2009:
24). Communication is “transformed and modified by media” (Chapter 6, this vol-
ume). By mediatization as a “meta process” Krotz does not mean “meta” in the
sense of “above”, as his comparison with globalization, individualization, and
commercialization may invite one to think. Mediatization is a meta process in the
sense of a “basic” process or practice, from below, in the human construction of
the social reality in which we live. The concept of “meta process” also implies that
it is a “complex process of processes”. With the expanding social and cultural
complexity throughout history, more sophisticated media are developed to handle
the challenges of life and society through which communication is transformed.
Hjarvard is more specific in his historic location of mediatization as a phenom-
enon: “It is primarily a development that has accelerated particularly in the last
years of the twentieth century in modern, highly industrialized societies” (Hjarvard
2013: 18; emphasis in original). By situating mediatization in recent history he also
locates mediatization in space: “Modern, highly industrialized societies” are not
evenly distributed in the world. His label connects mediatization primarily to
(Northern) Europe, North America, Australia, and to emerging economies in Asia.
In Chapter 9 (this volume) Hjarvard explains how mediatization within time/space
parameters emerges and expands. At the core is institutional differentiation and
transformation. “Over the past hundred years, the media have become differenti-
ated from other social practices and have become a separate institution in society.”
In this institutional perspective, Hjarvard argues that “mediatization should be
understood as a process of late modernity in which the media are not only subject
to key transformations of modern society but are themselves agents of moderniza-
tion.”
Other handbook authors who think of mediatization as a cultural process fol-
lowing throughout human history are Verón, Couldry, Hepp and Hasebrink, as
well as Hartmann. Those thinking of mediatization as an institutional process in
late modernity include Frandsen, Lövheim and, indirectly, the authors that con-
sider “media logic” to be the main mechanism in mediatization. Wilke looks at
historical aspects of the mediatization of art (Chapter 20).
Contributors that employ a material perspective on mediatization either think
in terms of several epochs in a long historical development (like Finnemann) or
focus directly on the implications of the recent digital, mobile, and networked
environment (like Jansson).
 Mediatization of Communication 25

They are all concerned with the history of modernity. Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz
tries to understand mediatization in the “first modernity” described by classical
sociologists in their accounts of modernization (in Chapter 5). Mediatization in
reflexive “second modernity” (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Lash 2005) is consid-
ered by Göran Bolin (in Chapter 8) to emphasize the technological aspect. In con-
trast, when Friedrich Krotz (in Chapter 6) terms mediatization “a mover in modern-
ity”, he stresses the social construction of reality that takes place with media in
communication, as explained above. With mediatization in “late modernity” or
“high modernity” we are back to Stig Hjarvard, focusing the institutional changes
in this recent phase of modernity. Actually, here Krotz and Hjarvard meet. Krotz
also (2009: 24) observes the institutionalization of media as part of the long histori-
cal process of mediatization.

6.2 Technology: what does digitization imply?

Media technology constitutes the second issue of contention in mediatization
research. What are the consequences of new, digital networked media compared
to the mass media or “legacy media”? The latter are becoming increasingly digi-
tized. The distinction is rather between the distributed, user-directed “new” media
and the centralized, producer-directed “old” media. The issues of contention cen-
tre on transformations with Digitization (or digitalization, if one prefers to use a
few more letters). Is mediatization basically a process within the mass or “legacy”
media, in particular television, or is mediatization rather to be seen in full flower
only with contemporary digitization in networked media?
Winfried Schulz gave a reference point for this debate with his 2004 article
“Reconstructing Mediatization as an Analytical Concept” – approaching the digital
challenges, it could have been added. Several contributors to this handbook refer
to his article (Krotz; Averbeck-Lietz; Bogoch and Peleg; Schäfer; and Sumiala).
Schulz notes that the concept of mediatization captures changes associated with
the development of communication media in four ways: first, as extension of the
capacities of natural human communication; second, in substitution of social activ-
ities and social institutions that assume media form; third, in the amalgamation
of mediated and non-mediated activities; and finally, accommodation, that commu-
nication media induce social change through their mere existence. While the
mediatization concept had been particularly focusing on mass communication,
this could at that time he wrote, seem to change due to digitization (2004: 92).
The crucial question posed by Schulz is “whether the advent of new media might
bring an end to mediatization”. He sees several possible answers. The new media
may actually bring with them an end to mediatization, as there will be no more
limits to capacity and hence no constraints forcing selection and change. The
opposite view implies that the new media give rise to new modes of mediatization
due to new forms of dependency, as the new technologies demand new competen-
26 Knut Lundby

ces and establish new constraints and divides. An answer in-between observes
that the convergence of conventional and multimedia technologies “make old and
new media increasingly similar”. After all, the “new” media may not be that new.
The mediatization effects of the old media tend to spill over into the new media.
The “legacy” mass media still play a crucial role in people’s mediatized worlds.
But ten years after Schulz published his article there is no doubt that mediatization
and mediatization theory is “live and kicking” with the new, digital networked
media (cf. Asp in Chapter 15 and 4.3.2 above). The contention is rather over how
digitization shapes or moulds mediatization. André Jansson discusses (in Chapter
12) how “new media forms, understood as both technics and properties, amalga-
mate with pre-existing socio-material patterns in increasingly flexible and open-
ended ways”.
In the realm of popular performance culture, Philip Auslander observes (in
Chapter 22) that the flow of television is no longer central to mediatized culture,
“as the televisual has clearly yielded sway to the digital in all its forms”. He dem-
onstrates the implications of this transition for pop music artists “navigating this
new cultural terrain”, having to accommodate to the transforming demands of
participatory, expressive digital networked media. Johan Fornäs discusses popular
culture against a broader background of technology changes in the historical pro-
cess of mediatization (Chapter 21). He contrasts “digital mediatization” with three
preceding phases, namely “graphic mediatization”, “print mediatization”, and
“audiovisual mediatization”. In the digital phase Fornäs finds that it may be mis-
leading to continue to talk about “popular culture” as something separate, how-
ever, not because of digitization. Popular culture has become common culture due
to changes in class structures and taste preferences. This has occurred at the same
time as the breakthrough for digitization. To Fornäs, digital mediatization implies
“a sudden introduction of media into a previously immediate mode of experience
and interaction”. Digital technologies invite contemporary expressions of popular
culture. At the other end, the digital “living archive” available on the Internet
makes the past available, Andrew Hoskins explains (in Chapter 29 on the mediati-
zation of memory).
The recent tension over digitization in mediatization research seems to be the
following: Does “digital mediatization” imply something radically new, or is it best
understood as a continuation of former phases of mediatization? While Förnäs
takes an intermediate position, thinking in terms of phases following onto each
other, Asp and Jansson tend to stress the latter, while Auslander and Hoskins tend
towards the radical understanding. This is even more strongly worded by Niels
Ole Finnemann. He regards digital media in a new “matrix” compared to former
technology phases. In Chapter 13 he argues that if digital media are to be included,
“the concept of mediatization has to be revised and new parameters must be inte-
grated in the concept of media”. However, he admits that that the concept of
mediatization is still relevant to the study of digital media.
 Mediatization of Communication 27

6.3 Theory: how can one understand mediatization?

Which theoretical approach is best suited to grasp the transformations inherent in
mediatization? The contested issue among scholars is over which Driving forces
(or “Antriebskräfte” as Max Weber would say) are behind the processes of mediati-
zation.
Recent mediatization research shares an ambition to theorize this process of
transformation, and also to bring the evolving understanding of mediatization into
general social theory. It is, for the time being, more a matter of understanding
mediatization than explaining this complex (meta) process. This research is still
young. Among the contributors to this volume Friedrich Krotz (in Chapter 6), Stig
Hjarvard (in Chapter 9), Nick Couldry (in Chapter 10), as well as Andreas Hepp
and Uwe Hasebrink (in Chapter 11) seem to have the most explicit ambitions to
contribute to general social theory. Others have a more limited, although impor-
tant, aim with their theory work, for example Kent Asp who (in Chapter 15) aims
to rethink the question of media power.
Among scholars with a cultural perspective on mediatization, social-construc-
tivist or symbolic-interactionist theories are prominent in the efforts to understand
the ongoing transformations (Couldry and Hepp 2013; Hepp and Hasebrink this
volume). Thus the emphasis is on symbolic processes and the social construction
of reality. This approach may be weaker on institutional aspects, which is the
main focus of the institutional perspective. Stig Hjarvard, a main proponent of this
perspective, refers to structuration theory and new institutionalism, as noted in
3.2.2 above. This take implies a general awareness of institutional logics as the
rules and resources that govern a particular domain. A particular institution works
according to a specific logic. The media operates according to media logic. Hjar-
vard considers media logic as a particular instance of institutional logics (Hjarvard,
this volume). Media logic is regarded a key mechanism in mediatization processes.
However, media logic may not in itself be the driving force of mediatization. In
the institutional perspective, it may rather be the tension or interaction between
the expanding media and other institutions with their different logics that drive
social and cultural change. Bogoch and Peleg, for example (this volume) use the
concept of media logic versus legal logic, discuss the discrepancies between the
two, and why these make the mediatization of the legal field so special.
“Media logic” has primarily been contrasted to “political logic” as the term
has most frequently been applied to mediatization within the political domain.
The authors in the handbook section on “Power, law, and politics” all build their
theoretical take on the concept of media logic. The most elaborate may be the
contribution by Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser (this volume) drawing upon
many years of research on the mediatization of politics. They see media logic as
a “logic of appropriateness” shaped by the combined forces of professionalism,
commercialism, and media technology (cf. also Esser 2013).
28 Knut Lundby

“Media logic” is, additionally, a theoretical lead in chapters covering other

domains, as diverse as Sun on political developments in China (Chapter 4) and
Wilke on art (Chapter 20). However, the mediatization of art often includes criti-
cism of conventional media logic.
The concept of media logic was introduced by David Altheide and Robert Snow
(1979). They point to the “format” that guides how the media industry presents
media content. Electronic media, primarily television, is what they have in mind.
The “format” is the set of, often unstated, rules. The elements of media format are
the “grammar” of the medium and the norms that are used to define content
(Altheide and Snow 1979: 22–23). The media logic functions as a form through
which events and ideas are interpreted and acted upon in the media production
process as well as by the audience. Viewers and listeners develop a “media con-
sciousness” in which they “subtly” understand and apply the logic of the media
(Altheide and Snow 1979: 24).
Kent Asp (1990) connected the idea of media logic with the concept of mediati-
zation (although, at the time, he called it “medialization” with an ‘l’). Media logic
is seen as a “catch-all term” for the practices and norms that shape mediatization,
such as the media dramaturgy that producers apply to attract attention, the media
format, the media routines, and the media rationales. The latter is explained as
the strategies and the modus operandi that are followed.
Stig Hjarvard “recognize that the media have a particular modus operandi and
characteristics (‘specificities of the media’) that come to influence other institu-
tions and culture and society in general as they become dependent on the resour-
ces that the media both control and make available to them”. He distances himself
from the criticism (from Couldry 2008, 2012; Lundby 2009b, Hepp 2012) that the
term media logic suggests a universal, linear or singular rationality behind all the
media. Rather, the term is to be understood as a “conceptual shorthand” (Hjarvard
2013: 17).
A new reading of the media logic concept comes from scholars of digital net-
worked media based on characteristics of these new media compared to the mass
media. José van Dijck and Thomas Poell (2013) suggest “social media logic” while
Ulrike Klinger and Jakob Svensson (2014) propose a concept of “network media
logic”. Interestingly, both pairs of new media scholars go back to Altheide and
Snow’s original conception of “media logic” to anchor their arguments.
The material perspective on mediatization leads to an encounter with “medium
theory”. Main scholars in the development of medium theory are Harold Innis,
Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz (Crowley 2013; Meyrowitz 1994). Göran
Bolin (in Chapter 8, this volume) also regards the postmodern theoretician, Jean
Baudrillard, as belonging with the medium theorists. The famous expression by
Marshall McLuhan that “the medium is the message” (1964) gives a key to this
approach. Medium theorists focus on the characteristics and effects of each
medium or of each type of medium, while mediatization theory – to put it briefly –
 Mediatization of Communication 29

looks at transformations in a communication environment or media system as a

whole (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 4–5). Still, there are similarities and bridges between
medium theory and mediatization theory (Friesen and Hug 2009; Clark 2014). For
example, David Crowley (2013: 323) observes the introduction of haptics – touch-
screens – in digital communication. This has affinities with the ideas on evolving
media in human communication presented by Friedrich Krotz and Eliseo Verón (in
this volume).
Three of the contributions (Chapters 6, 11, and 27) try to situate mediatization
theory in relation to medium theory. Niels Ole Finnemann regards medium theory
as a platform to find the “new trajectories of mediatization” that he aims at with
his chapter on digitization (Chapter 13). Medium theory brings him to search for
the specificities of digital media to delimit the digital “matrix”. This is what Fried-
rich Krotz criticizes when he “revisits” medium theory (in Chapter 6). He considers
Finnemann (based on an article from 2011) to have taken over the misleading idea
from medium theory that human history can be segmented into phases according
to the dominant medium of each phase. The inspiration Krotz finds in medium
theory is the will “to ask for the role of media and media change for culture and
society”. This, to Krotz, defines the core question of both theories.

6.4 The individual in a mediatized setting

If one turns to study mediatization from below one see the individual acting in a
mediatized setting. Charles Ess (in Chapter 27) looks at medium theory with refer-
ence to our conceptions of who we are as humans. He offers a reminder that
medium theorists correlate the phases of primary communication technologies
(orality, literacy-print, secondary orality) with relational versus more individual
emphases on selfhood and identity. Ess focuses on moral and ethical challenges,
among them issues to do with privacy. The questions he discusses with regard to
selfhood, moral agency, and the good life for individuals in mediatized worlds are
related to overall socio-political development, either in a democratic-egalitarian or
in a hierarchical and non-democratic direction.
Several chapters take a similar perspective from below, and they all relate the
challenges in mediatization to individuals, with issues on a societal level. Among
them are Maren Hartmann, asking (in Chapter 28) about the ontological security
of persons under mediatization, and Johanna Sumiala (in Chapter 30) discussing
mediatization of public death.
The contentious issues on Time, Technology, and Theory may – seen from
below – be identified with other keywords than those I have applied from above.
Issues of Time appear from above in a different understanding of History. When
individuals try to find their place in the collective stream of history, individual
questions of Identity are raised. Mediatization triggers transformations of social
patterns and cultural horizons that influence the reflexive identity work people in
30 Knut Lundby

late modernity have to engage in. To handle Technology in mediatization, these

days in particular the challenges of Digitization, individuals are challenged on
the Literacy that is required to comprehend and contribute to the technological
developments. Legacy media required the skills of print and text, extended into
competence of visual mass media. New digital networked media invite radical
multimodality where text and visuals are mixed with sound and graphics in end-
less combinations of bits and bytes. This demands digital competence. Digital liter-
acy is necessary in the uses and interpretations of digital texts, as well as for taking
part in production of user generated content. Over Theory issues, the societal and
cultural Driving Forces of mediatization have their aspect from below in Agency by
individual actors. Such agency is exerted in adaption to media logic and media
environments, as well as in reflexive interpretation of the possible room to act in
and against the media.
The relation between media changes and changes of “everyday life and iden-
tity” belong to the “core topic of mediatization”, Krotz states (in Chapter 6). Several
chapters in the handbook apply the concept of the “everyday”. Maren Hartmann
(in Chapter 28) links the theoretical frameworks on mediatization and domestica-
tion. However, she rather works with the concrete concepts of “home” and peo-
ple’s feeling of “ontological security” than “the fairly abstract notion of the every-
day”. André Jansson (in Chapter 12) keeps the concept of the “everyday” looking
at how media technologies and related artefacts have become “indispensible to
people in their everyday lives”. As such, he addresses the material aspects of
everyday life with its repertoire of communication tools. Andrew Hoskins (in Chap-
ter 29) stresses the new networks: “how everyday life is increasingly embedded in
and penetrated by connectivity”.
In a report on contemporary research on mediatization of culture and everyday
life, Anne Kaun, following Pink (2012), regards identity formation, daily practices
and perception of place/space as the aspects of everyday life to observe. Mediatiza-
tion of identity is covered in studies of migration, gender/body/sexuality, and on
morality. Mediatization of practices emerges in research on media practices, play,
and learning. Mediatization of place/space occurs in studies of mobility and con-
nectivity (Kaun and Fast 2014).
If the tensions from “above” relate to the “system”, the issues of mediatization
seen from “below” relate to the “lifeworld”, to apply the distinction developed by
Habermas (1987). However, the levels of analysis interact. Everyday practices are
“colonized” by the system, to continue with Habermas (1987). This comes through
strongly in Karin Knorr Cetina’s analysis (in Chapter 2) of how mediatization plays
out in the global coordination of the financial system. Face-to-face situations
between actors in the market are enacted worldwide through a huge network of
screen-based electronic media. The technologies involved “‘present’ and make
available to participants what lies spatially and temporally beyond their reach”,
hence transforming the face-to-face situation into a “synthetic situation”, Knorr
Cetina argues.
 Mediatization of Communication 31

7 Critique on mediatization research

There are, of course, critical voices raised against the concept of mediatization
beyond the clumsy term itself. Don Slater in a recent critique (2013) attacks the
media-centrism he finds inherent in mediation and mediatization theories. He is
concerned with communication in cultures around the world where technical
media does not play a significant role, and says: “It is hard to see how terms that
emerge from the West’s sense of its own problematic modernity, and which rest
on differentiating its mediatization from the face-to-faceness of the rest, can help
articulate communications in other places” (Slater 2013: 56). He thinks the mediati-
zation discourse “smacks of western academics treating their local social problems
as if they were universal” (Slater 2013: 46).
He may partly be right in this critique, particularly as mediatization research
emerged in North European settings. However, mediatization theory is found rele-
vant in more and more parts of the world, not the least in emerging economies
such as Brazil (for example Martino 2013) and other parts of Latin America (Aver-
beck-Lietz 2013), and in respect of development in China (Sun in this volume).
Mirca Madianou draws on research in the Philippines (Chapter 14). Karin Knorr
Cetina’s study, just mentioned above, also counters Slater’s argument. These
global networks affect the lives of people in all corners of the world. Some studies
based on simple media logic may turn out media-centric. However, the pioneer of
media logic theory, David Altheide (2013), brings “the media” into a wider “ecology
of communication” similar to the “communicative ecology” Slater (2013: 50) advo-
cates. Mediatization studies, in general, turn to the wider patterns of transforma-
tions in culture and society, where “media” obviously play a role.
In their critical “afterthought” to the chapters preceding theirs in this volume
Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt (in Chapter 31) evaluate mediatization as an
emerging paradigm for media and communication research. They find that, today,
the concept has earned its place in the wider conceptual field of media and com-
munication studies. They outline the dimensions of this emerging paradigm they
see, but they miss questions of critique among mediatization scholars, developed
in partnership with those experiencing various fields being mediatized.
Mediatization is not a normative concept, as stated by Hjarvard (2013: 18).
However, there are normative issues to raise, as contributors to this volume do.
Risto Kunelius questions the mediatization of climate change (Chapter 3). Other
examples: Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud and her colleagues discuss normative consequen-
ces of their finding that career bureaucrats in their daily work both anticipate and
adopt media logic (Chapter 17); Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg discuss the tension
between the normative commitment of legal actors to judicial independence, and
to ignoring public opinion and the pressures to mediatization at all stages of the
legal process (Chapter 19); Charles Ess raises questions about selfhood and moral
agency in mediatized worlds (Chapter 27). While “mediatization” is a non-norma-
32 Knut Lundby

tive concept there may be a range of normative issues involved with mediatization
processes. This research must be prepared to answer the question: to what extent
are “media” changing the lives of people for better or worse? What are the moral
and ethical consequences of “mediatization”?

8 Guide to handbook readers

I have outlined three perspectives on mediatization of communication: A Cultural
perspective focusing transformations in the symbolic environment in and outside
of the media; a Material perspective concerned with the technological media char-
acteristics as key to changes; and an Institutional perspective that studies how the
media and various institutions in society change according to different institu-
tional logics. These are ideal types, as researchers may apply more than one per-
spective in their work. The naming of each perspective points to the focus in actual
mediatization research. For example, studies with a cultural perspective may also
consider specificities of the media that are involved in communication but it is
rather the symbolic aspects of the interaction that are in focus and not the media
specificities as such, as within the material perspective. Similarly, the institutional
perspective is concerned with specificities of the media but the pattern of institu-
tional interactions is the focus. All three perspectives have strengths and weak-
nesses, and there are links between them, as will be displayed throughout this
volume.
The contributors to this handbook may agree that mediatization implies long
processes of structural change that take place in the interrelation between develop-
ments of the mediated communication in society and changes in the social, politi-
cal, and cultural context, transforming practices as well as institutions. However,
they dispute over certain aspects of mediatization. For the sake of overview I have
presented the issues of contention, as I see them, under the headings of Time,
Technology, and Theory. The matrix where the three perspectives meet the types
of debated issues has already been presented in Figure 1 in 1.2 above, with key-
words on the various positions taken in this field. The scaffold in Figure 1 has
been expanded throughout the introduction. Hopefully, this serves as a guide to
the tour that awaits the reader in the following chapters.

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II. Global changes
Karin Knorr Cetina
2 Scopic media and global coordination: the
mediatization of face-to-face encounters
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the mediatization of the face-to-face situation
and the need for an updated understanding of one of the most basic units of
sociality, the social situation. Scopic mediatization is a particular type of mediati-
zation involving screen-based electronic media. The technologies involved differ,
but in all cases they “present” and make available to participants what lies spa-
tially and temporally beyond their reach. The inclusion of screen-based technolo-
gies transforms the face-to-face situation into a synthetic situation; I argue that the
face-to-face domain no longer has the structural importance it once had. Synthetic
situations differ from the traditional social situation in various ways. The chapter
specifically addresses the temporal consequences and the informational ontology
that ensues. It points out that scopic media imply an attentional regime and atten-
tional integration – concepts that put into question the belief that information and
communication technologies necessarily lead to networked domains and network
forms of integration. The chapter also discusses how scopic media can convey and
manage trust which is often associated with personal knowledge and presence,
and how they enhance the fatefulness of social situations. It offers the example of
global financial markets and other examples to illustrate this type of mediatization.

Keywords: scopic media, scopic mediatization, face-to-face situation, synthetic

situation, response presence, information, trust, fatefulness

Imagine the trading floor of a large investment bank in one of the world’s global
cities. You may see between 200 (Zurich) and 800 (New York) traders engaged
in stock, bond, and currency trading involving various trading techniques and
instruments. Up to 20 % of the traders may deal in foreign exchange at desks
grouped together on the floors. Assume you are interested in this market; with an
average daily turnover of approximately 5.3 trillion US dollars when it was last
measured (BIS 2013), it is the world’s largest and most liquid market, growing 41
percent between 2007 and 2010 and 35 % between 2010 and 2013. The FOREX
market is also the world’s most global market; trades are inherently cross-border
transactions involving the exchange of currencies from different countries. The
market spans the three major time zones, with trading centers in London, New
York, and Tokyo and a few other global cities such as Zurich and Singapore. The
traders and trading firms in inter-bank currency markets are not brokers who medi-
ate deals but rather market makers. They take their own “positions” in the market
by trying to gain from price differences while also offering trades to other market
40 Karin Knorr Cetina

participants, thereby sustaining and bringing liquidity to the market. Foreign

exchange deals through these channels start in the order of several hundred thou-
sand dollars per transaction, going up to a hundred million dollars and more. The
deals are made by investors, speculators, financial managers, central bankers, and
others who want to profit from expected currency moves, or who need currencies
to help them enter or exit transnational investments (e.g. in mergers and acquisi-
tions). In doing deals, all traders on the floors have a range of technology at their
disposal; most conspicuously, six or more computer screens that display the mar-
ket and are used to conduct trading. When traders arrive in the morning they strap
themselves to their seats (figuratively speaking) and bring up their screens – and
from then on their eyes are glued to these screens, their visual attention captured
even when they talk or shout to each other; their bodies and the screen melting
together, while they immerse themselves completely in the world and action of
trading. The global market composes itself in these produced-and-analyzed dis-
plays to which traders are attached (see figure 1).1
How can we conceptualize the assemblage of hardware, software, and infor-
mation feeds that traders work with? And why is it important for social scientists
to do so? In the following, I introduce two concepts to help answer these ques-
tions: that of “scopic media” and that of the “synthetic situation”. The notion of
scopic media is designed to capture a particular type of mediatization that we
experience today in areas such as financial markets. The concept of synthetic
situations responds to the phenomenon that this type of mediatization extends to
the most basic unit of human interaction, the social situation. The notion also
brings into view what I will call “synthetic agents”, the algorithms and software
robots that increasingly fulfill human functions and are counterparties in on-
screen interactions. A third element of my argument emphasizes the global reach
of domains such as the one described. The basic intuition that motivates me is
that genuinely global forms, by which I mean fields of practice that stretch across
all time zones, need not imply further expansions of institutional complexity. In
fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex institutional structures.
But they require something else: that we rethink social science concepts with
which we have addressed fields of human interaction in the past, and include in
them the sort of media-technologies illustrated before. Financial markets depend
on these technologies; without them it would not be possible for financial markets

1 The study is based on ethnographic research conducted since 1997 on the trading floor of one
major global investment bank in Zurich, New York, and London, and in several others, for example
private and second tier banks. Unlike other financial markets, the foreign exchange market is not
primarily organized in centralized exchanges but organized through inter-dealer transactions in a
global banking network of institutions; it is what is called an “over the counter” market. Over the
counter transactions are made on the trading floors of, among others, major investment banks. For
a description of this research, see Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002. See also Bruegger 1999 for an
extensive description of currency trading in all its aspects.
 Scopic media and global coordination 41

Fig. 1: I am greatly indebted to Stephan Jaeger, Global Head of Foreign Exchange, Bank Julius
Baer, Zurich, for the use of the trading floor picture presented here. Many thanks to Urs
Bruegger, my collaborator and colleague, for taking the picture.

to have such global reach, financial turnover, or the same effect on our lives. Are
these markets then a good illustration of the rise of a network society (Castells
1996), in which coordination and organization emerge from the networks of rela-
tionships that communication and information technologies enable? The network
has been a fertile metaphor in the last few decades, inspiring a large body of work
that has enriched and transformed our understandings of institutions such as the
firm, the family, and even the state. Yet the network idiom is also too obviously
right, too casually applied, and too taken for granted when information technolo-
gies are involved.
The argument I propose challenges the presuppositions of networks. It seeks
to develop concepts that take their lead from what these technologies afford in
practice, rather than from what they involve on an infrastructural level – underwa-
ter and satellite connections. The shift I am asking you to make is to think not in
terms of infrastructural connections but to imagine instead the screenworld that
traders and others in high tech environments confront. This mental move away
from the piping of global society and toward what we are “facing” when we are
in it, as actors and participants, is what this chapter advances. What we need to
consider is how electronic infrastructures are realized in practice – and this
42 Karin Knorr Cetina

requires us to take into account the assemblage of screens, and the screen projec-
tions, with which we are engaging in places such as trading floors. This argument
identifies the teletechnological surface and attributes of electronically mediated
spheres as highly relevant to how a global social form becomes culturally fash-
ioned and integrated. It also identifies monitoring and observation – an audience’s
visual attention and the spatial and temporal structures that sustain it – as impor-
tant components of this type of coordination. The notion of information technol-
ogy, as we tend to understand it, invokes the image of pipes through which some-
thing flows in ways that are quite exclusive – we can’t see what is flowing unless
we are at the receiving end of the pipe. This notion doesn’t conjure the vivid
imagery, sensorial aspects, and dramaturgical effectiveness of screens, and the
fatefulness of their content for those who watch. The notion of “media”, in con-
trast, even when it is used in the traditional sense of television or film, allows for
such connotations; it captures the screenworld well. This chapter is interested in
the specific type of “mediatization” (Krotz 2001; Jäckel 2005; Lundby 2009; Rusch
2009: 33) the presence of screens implies. It seeks to develop ways of documenting
and analyzing the presence of screen technologies in relation to the global and
social situational dimensions screens suggest.

1 What are scopic media?

Consider a network. It is an arrangement of nodes tied together by relationships
that serve as conduits of communication, resources, and other coordinating instan-
ces. Cooperation, strategic alliances, exchange, emotional bonds, kinship ties, per-
sonal relations, and forms of accounting and narration can flow through the ties.
Networks give rise to a particular form of relational sociality and they may be the
venue for “arms-length” business relationships and other ties. Now consider a
scope. The term derives from the Greek scopein, ‘to see’; when it is combined with
a qualifying notion it means an instrument for seeing or observing, as in “peri-
scope”. Thus a scope is a reflexive mechanism of observation and projection. Like
an array of crystals acting as lenses that collect light and focus it on one point, a
scoping mechanism collects and focuses activities, interests, and events on one
surface, from whence the result may then be projected again in different direc-
tions. When such a mechanism is in place, participants become orientated to this
projected reality and their actions are responses to it. The system acts as a center-
ing and mediating device through which things pass and from which they flow
forward. An ordinary observer who monitors events is an instrument for seeing.
When such an ordinary observer constructs a textual or visual rendering of the
observed phenomena and televises it to an audience, the audience may start to
react to the features of the reflected, represented reality rather than to the embod-
ied, pre-reflexive occurrences. This furnishes a different type of coordination than
 Scopic media and global coordination 43

that obtained through networks. Networks are pre-reflexive in character – they are
embedded in territorial space and they do not suggest the existence of reflexive
mechanisms of projection that aggregate, contextualize, and augment the rela-
tional activities within new frameworks of understanding. Scopic coordination is
flat (not based on hierarchy), like that achieved through networks, but it is also
based on comprehensive summaries of things – the reflected and projected reality
on screen. In the case of traders I am discussing, this reality is projected to every-
one connected to the system simultaneously; the screen content instantly places
those observing it (as all professional traders must be) into an identical world.
There is no need to call a contact and draw on one’s network of relationships to
learn where the market is and what is happening. The answers to these questions
are delivered to everyone at the same time; and they are continuously updated,
within fractions of seconds.
Here is a summary of some of the characteristics of scopic media:
– First, scopic media visually present and project events, phenomena, and actors
that would otherwise be separated by distance and would not be visible from
a single standpoint. By allowing otherwise remote things to be visually per-
ceived together, scopic media expand and augment local situations (i.e., situa-
tions in which participants are physically present in a single location). As an
example, for about thirty years the militaries of the US, England, Germany,
and elsewhere have been attempting to develop wearable helmet displays
(imagine a more specialized and sophisticated version of Google Glass) which
would allow soldiers to transcend their physically constrained fields of vision.
The soldiers would be able to see maps and mission data on their displays,
and receive visual signals of danger lurking in their surroundings which they
would not ordinarily be able to see with their naked eye or know about without
technological enhancement. In this case, the scopic media aims to create an
informational environment that will reduce the vulnerability of soldiers in the
field.
– Scopic media “temporalize” situations, in the sense that they present content
in a sequential, streaming fashion. This stimulates the need to watch the
media content frequently, if not continuously. In some areas, as in financial
markets, a regime of attention emerges – the necessity of watching the market
on screen continuously and in synchronicity with events and with other
observing actors. The financial screens display the succession of political and
other events, and the liquidity and transactions within a market. This content
streams at all times, with the speed of the flow mirroring the speed of the
unfolding events.
– Scopic media lead to shifting boundaries between a situation or system and
its environment, and between micro and macro scales. They mix up levels, so
to speak, and bring different orders of phenomena together. Thus local situa-
tions (as measured by participants’ physical togetherness in a common space)
can at the same time be global, when non-present others and territorially dis-
44 Karin Knorr Cetina

tant events become imported into the situation through screens that project
them. Think of videoconferencing and the telepresence effect it generates with
some fidelity of sight and sound. Another example is the widespread use of
scopic media in medicine. For example, instead of the large open incisions of
traditional general surgery, laparoscopic techniques may be used based on
high definition, 3D visualizations of body parts and processes of dissecting
and suturing within the body. This “dissolution” of the boundaries between
the micro and the macro and the far away and near is another characteristic
of scopic media.
– When scopic systems are systematically used they may have “world-making”
effects that lead to the creation of parallel realities that participants orientate
themselves towards or become fully absorbed in (Goodman 1978; Knorr Cetina
2005). Al Qaeda members, for example, used video and audio tapes, and par-
ticular television channels that presented identical, sensory rich records of
leaders’ speeches along with gory images of casualties, attacks, and symboli-
cally laden calls to arms and support. One assumes that for those who had
become Al Qaeda members and who regularly drew on such scoped presenta-
tions, the sequence of visual broadcasts began to constitute something of a
referential world – a thick context that situates individual activities, emotional
commitments, and interpretive frameworks. This world co-existed with that of
work activities and student life in countries such as Germany and the US in
which Al Qaeda operated.
– Some scopic media expand local situations not only geographically, and by
bringing together the micro and the macro, but also by allowing for the expan-
sion of agency through algorithms that take over and fulfill human functions,
acting as our “tools” and robots. Algorithms have long been part of electronic
information and communication technologies, performing tasks like sorting,
checking databases, or calculating. In fact, if we consider the Turing machine
as a theoretical computing machine that performs calculations, then the com-
puter itself is an algorithm in its core. Algorithms are simply sets of instruc-
tions for accomplishing a task; when you write a program to filter light in a
certain way so as to create specific photographic effects, you have created an
algorithm. Such algorithms have been used since the onset of digitalization.
But in recent years, algorithms have learned to “learn” and make decisions
that are not preprogrammed, and humans have learned to take better advan-
tage of them by enhancing their speed, creating interfaces (e.g. trading plat-
forms), and adapting data formats. For example, algorithms can now “read”
and interpret market data and trade autonomously, on the basis of information
provided in specific market situations. As a consequence, in stock trading for
instance, algorithmic trading accounts for 50 % and more of the trading vol-
ume. What this means is that algorithms are now functionally equivalent and
operationally superior parties in trading interactions – they can act with super-
 Scopic media and global coordination 45

human speed, easily outperforming trading that is based on “human touch.”

Algorithms may also be outperformed, but my point here is not about who
wins trading games, but that these games must now be played strategically
in ways that take into account the presence and capabilities of algorithmic
agents.
– On a theoretical level, scopic media are interesting because they transform the
face-to-face situation – which is so foundational for how we conceive of the
emergence of sociality and effects like trust – into “synthetic situations”. The
physical presence of participants in an encounter is the defining characteristic
of the face-to-face situation. In the synthetic situation, physical co-presence is
not defining – what’s relevant is how the electronic media and screens recon-
figure the situation. In addition, “synthetic” agents, the algorithms and soft-
ware robots just mentioned, can be present and either serve us or compete
with us in performing the tasks at hand. Algorithms operate under the surface
of screens, so we don’t encounter them as we would a physical being or an
avatar. But we encounter the results of their actions (e.g. price and liquidity
changes in markets) and induce their agency in the background.

2 The synthetic situation

Why and how is the presence of scopes of interest to human interaction? The first
answer to this is that on a global scale a social “situation” invariably includes,
and may in fact be entirely constituted by, on-screen projections – it becomes a
synthetic situation. I take the synthetic situation to be the most basic unit of global
structural forms. Sociology, communication, and similar fields traditionally use a
body-to-body starting point for the conceptualization of what goes on in human
interaction. For many authors, social interaction is “that which uniquely transpires
in social situations – in environments in which two or more individuals are physi-
cally in one another’s response presence” (Goffman 1983: 3). Goffman (1972: 63;
1981: 84) defined the situation accordingly as “any physical area anywhere within
which two or more persons find themselves in visual and aural range of one
another”.2 The centrality of the face-to-face situation for him and other authors is

2 There is a significant body of literature treating aspects of what Goffman called the interaction
order (for overviews of important dimensions see [Stone and Farberman 1981; Fine 1984; Scheff
1990]). My purpose is simply to point towards some features that seem central to the creation of
global spheres and that need to be emphasized in regard to this context. There is now also an
interesting body of work on human–machine interaction (e.g. Suchman 1987; Turkle 1995) and of
related ethnomethodological studies of work (for overviews see Ten Have and Psathas 1995; Button
1993; see also Goodwin 1995); but my focus is rather on transnational interactions in which the
computer becomes transparent and third parties are charged with guaranteeing its (and the soft-
ware’s) functioning.
46 Karin Knorr Cetina

rooted in what we think are universal preconditions of human life – the mundane
need for intimates and strangers to come together at fixed times and places to get
things done. Ethnomethodologists have expressed something similar through the
idea of the “local accomplishment” of social order, where local means “witnessa-
ble” through sight or hearing, as opposed to imputation or inference.3 Anthropolo-
gists too prefer the notion “local” and in essence this is also a spatial idea – in
which the ethnographer is included as a participant observer, or as a subjective
and perhaps sympathetic (if somewhat head scratching) actor trying to fashion an
understanding of what’s going on.
Goffman and other microsociologists as well as anthropologists are of course
correct when they refer to the fact that, often, for things to be accomplished in
human life people have to come together in particular spaces. In fact, we could
add other “universals” to this: for example reproduction, which involves the need
for infants to be raised in physical social situations. Yet it is also true that today
a substantial and increasing portion of everyday life is spent not in the physical
co-presence of others but in virtual spaces. Thus conditions that were once central
and held to be universal may change: the face-to-face domain, for instance, no
longer has the structural importance it once had. This is a somewhat tricky hypoth-
esis to prove empirically since we lack comprehensive data, but it is plausible
enough if we just call to mind the many areas of everyday life that have now
migrated to the Internet. An increasing portion of banking, travel booking, shop-
ping (including grocery shopping), even reading or what substitutes for it are now
no longer handled face-to-face, but electronically.4 So are some parts of our jobs –
from student advising and lecturing to library searches and meetings. A recent
global consumer survey released by IBM suggests that people now spend as much
or more time online as they do watching TV: accordingly, 19 % said they spend 6+
hours a day online vs. 9 % who indicated watching 6+ hours of TV; and while
60 % said they spend 1–4 hours a day online, 66 % said that they watch 1–4 hours
of TV (Blodget 2007). Even in digitally deprived groups, innovative ways are being
found to use fast and facile electronic transmission and storage for intermediary
business links, with material inputs and outputs limited to the beginning and end
of a chain of transactions.5

3 This formulation is suggested by the ethnomethodologist Anne Warfield Rawls (oral communica-
tion, August 15, 2000). The emphasis on witnessability derives from Garfinkel (e.g. 1967: 9–13). In
their definitions ethnomethodologists have not restricted themselves to physical setting in quite
the same sense Goffman did, rather placing greater emphasis on accomplishment. But this shift in
emphasis leaves intact the tendency of ethnomethodological studies to equate fundamental reality
with what is highly focused in a small space, involves talking rather than writing, and points to
the nano-world of the non-verbal signals accompanying such exchanges (Goodwin 1981).
4 The New York Times observes that “The next generation does not read books” but rather watches
“content” on the Internet or reads other media content (Rich 2008).
5 One example is phone card banking, in which the payout of real money is made redundant, no
contracts are necessary, and human interaction is limited to the beginning and end of the transac-
tion chain.
 Scopic media and global coordination 47

The loss of centrality of the face-to-face situation is not hard to prove in global
situations. In fact, as suggested before, it seems obvious that if we think of the
global not just in terms of flows of resources, interconnected economies, and so
on, but as fields of practice, these could not exist if the physical co-presence of
participants was required. The universal precondition of such domains, we may
say, is that they don’t require “being there” in person, but allow for participants
and objects to be dispersed and yet to process things interactionally and collec-
tively. Actors (human or other) don’t need to be physically co-present; instead they
must be response present – a term Goodwin (1981) once used for the “mediated”
presence afforded by electronic communication technologies. In the face-to-face
situation, participants find themselves accessible to the naked senses of all others
who are present and find themselves similarly accessible (Goffman 1972: 63–64).
When in each other’s presence, Goffman (1983: 3) observes, “individuals are admi-
rably placed to share a joint focus of attention, perceive that they do so, and
perceive this perceiving”. Thus the “ecological huddle” (Goffman 1972: 63) that
ensues from the joint ratification and reflexive orientation in the face-to-face situa-
tion does not come about in the same quasi-automatic manner on a global level.
Rather, the result is much more likely a muddle: a disorderly interactional arrange-
ment struggling with problems of differential access, orientation and perspective,
and coordination. Yet interestingly, synthetic global situations are not miserable
interactional arrangements but provide for efficiently, even elegantly organized
global encounters. These do, however, have preconditions.
In contrast to any embodied presence, I define response presence to mean that
the interacting party is not or need not be physically present, but is accountable
for responding without inappropriate delay to an incoming attention or interaction
request (see also Knorr Cetina 2009). And I define the synthetic situation as an
environment augmented (and temporalized) by fully or partially scoped compo-
nents – in which we find ourselves in one another’s and the scopic components’
response presence, without needing to be in one another’s physical presence. With
this definition, we (1) abandon the body-to-body starting point of the face-to-face
situation – as suggested, the response presence referred to is an accountability for
responding, not a physical presence. We also (2) abandon an exclusive focus on
human interaction and human mutual monitoring – but we do not give up sym-
bolic interaction or monitoring per se, as the next section argues. Finally (3), with
the proposed definition we emphasize the translocal and potentially global nature
of the synthetic situation. The scopic components enable translocal imports from
the outer world to be collected, projected, and augmented on-screen. The bound-
ary condition of the translocal is the global – a horizon and possibility in some
areas, an accomplishment in others. To put this more strongly, the synthetic situa-
tion not only transcends the local and the face-to-face but also enables global
orders of activity.
Synthetic situations need not be global of course, and they involve various
degrees of “syntheticness.” Depending on how encompassing the synthetic is, we
48 Karin Knorr Cetina

can distinguish four types of synthetic situations. In the markets studied, the envi-
ronment in which two or more individuals find themselves in each other’s
response presence consists of a foreground and a background. The foregrounded,
attention-demanding global situation; and, separately for each participant, a back-
ground section of the physical trading floor: that section of the floor to which
traders are sensorily attuned and over which they command some auditory atten-
tion while focusing on the electronic environment. The electronically projected
situation reaches far beyond what would ordinarily be visible in a physical setting.
Not only does it include many layers and windows providing geopolitical and
epistemic depth and internal contextualization, but it also stitches together an
analytically constituted world made up of “everything” potentially relevant to the
interaction.
Now a second type. Consider the case of two spouses having an argument
where these battles usually take place: in the material environment of a kitchen
or living room. If this argument were conducted in an environment similar to that
of global markets, the two counterparties would be surrounded not by furniture
and equipment, but by screens containing strictly what is relevant to the argu-
ment: their past history of togetherness perhaps, the significant others that come
up in such fights, psychobiological states and needs, money and accounts, expert
opinions, legal advice, and sample cases of relationships that one of the quarreling
spouses may wish to invoke. This type of synthetic situation is somewhat farther
down the scale of “full” scoping. Its hallmark is a clean distinction between the
synthetic environment present in the first type and an interaction that is not syn-
thetic in that it remains face-to-face. The third type is yet farther down the scale
and the most encountered: there are synthetic components in the situation, but
the physical world is more encompassing. We can here imagine a living room with
a TV streaming information (say in the form of a sports game) to those present.
The case is tricky in that the synthetic component, albeit limited, may nonetheless
dominate the encounter. What takes place on TV is likely to capture and hold
participants’ attention. A New Yorker cartoon picturing people talking around a
Thanksgiving dinner table in a room without a TV and then ceasing to talk and
all turning their attention to the TV when it appears in the room, illustrates this
well.
Another version of this third type is the case of a surgeon operating on a
patient, guided by screen images of the body section involved and the instrument
moving through it, while also monitoring the body’s vital function signals to keep
informed on how the patient is doing during the operation. The peculiarity here
is that the screened reality turns the patient inside out – although the patient is
present live, it is his or her scoped, augmented version that provides the relevant
information. A final arrangement that I distinguish from the earlier ones (type
four) involves the participants in the encounter having a telepresence, as in a
videoconference setting. What we mostly see in videoconferences are blurred and
 Scopic media and global coordination 49

somewhat ghastly upper-body images of a few others, with whom we conduct

surrogate face-to-face interactions against a nearly empty background. Note that
all types of synthetic situations I have described can be potentially global, in the
sense of participants not being physically co-present but sharing the same screen
content, similarly to the case of currency markets. What they differ in is the degree
in which screens are all-encompassing, projecting the referential whole of every-
thing taken as relevant to the situation.

3 Four features of the synthetic situation

The “naked,” nonaugmented face-to-face situation has traditionally been linked
to two major concepts: that of the definition of the situation and that of the interac-
tion itself and its negotiated outcome (Strauss et al. 1963; Fine 1984). With the
synthetic situation, this duality of concepts will have to make room for further
distinctions and properties, largely because the situation is not “naked” – it is
scopically articulated and augmented. Several features stand out. First, the syn-
thetic components, and as a consequence the synthetic situation, may be entirely
informational; second, it becomes ontologically fluid; third, it requires frequent if
not continuous monitoring; and fourth, it may project a party to the interaction.
While real-time contexts do of course contain information, they have the feel
of a taken-for-granted material world that has emerged over time, in line with
evolutionary principles and human efforts at construction (a house, a garden) and
transformation (a wildlife refuge). An encompassing synthetic situation, in con-
trast, is a composite of information bits that may arise from many areas around
the world and feature the most diverse and fragmented content. Synthetic situa-
tions are always in the process of being assembled: from automatic and less auto-
matic information feeds, from real-life reporting, and from the interactions them-
selves that can be instantly mirrored on-screen and generate their own contexts.
In a global process, one would think that much depends on getting the synthetics
right – on assembling the right pieces of information, ordering them adequately,
and doing all this within particular time frames (in currency markets, within split
seconds). This in itself implies a shift in power and relevance from the interaction
to the situation. We cannot take the synthetic situation for granted the same way
we do a “natural” situation, the sort of situation confronted in everyday life and
in analysis.
Definitions of participants continue to matter, of course, but other things also
matter. For one, a situation that is an informational assemblage does not simply
sit there as a silent reference object, the other side of human referring activity.
Through screens, these assemblages emit sounds, produce written utterances self-
described as particular speech acts, and transaction challenges. Synthetic situa-
tions also have to be created specifically and delivered reliably to the interaction.
50 Karin Knorr Cetina

Martha and George (or Taylor and Burton) in the film version of Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? illustrate, for example, how the marital argument would not profit
from a synthetic environment containing market data; they would need input rele-
vant to their specific state of marital discord and to such matters in general, and
that evolves along with pertinent changes. And if we were to analyze this, we, like
they, would want to know what gets on these screens by what means and how the
interaction between participants and screens develops. The quality of the informa-
tion may become a moral responsibility of participants. For example, doctors and
staff who electronically assemble the test results and routine measurements of a
particular patient will have the normative obligation to maintain these records
collectively, meticulously, and completely. If the hospital also feeds the scope (i.e.,
puts on the electronic platform) relevant literature about the treatment of such
cases, available medications and their success, and the opinions of medical
experts located elsewhere, we would have a strong informational scopic element
to which the patient may become a relatively inactive, and at times immobilized,
live attachment. What is available on-screen would be crucially important for the
embodied treatment of the patient. And in studying the interaction order of patient
care, we would need to address questions regarding the preparation, composition,
accessing, and updating of the situation’s relevant synthetic component.
This brings me to the second feature of the synthetic situation, its temporal
nature. It is clear from the previous example that a scoped situation needs continu-
ous updating – with patients, this includes new daily measurements of tempera-
ture, blood pressure, and so forth, new test results, the response to treatment, and
perhaps caretakers’ observations of mood and body function. A synthetic situa-
tion’s assemblage and projection is a continuous project. A living room serving to
situate many encounters may be assembled once and for all. But informational
realities carry a time index; their components tend to require frequent or continu-
ous updating, or else their iterated presentation as still “live” and relevant. “The
market always looks for the next piece of information” is the way the traders I
studied put it. Electronic global markets in institutional currency trading provide
an interesting example of this temporalization and the resulting ontological fluidity
of a synthetic situation. The scoped global market that traders confront on 4–6
screens allows for many separate information streams – actual and indicative pri-
ces, transaction records, trading conversations, headline and financial news, com-
mentary and analysis, bulletin board entries, newly published indicators and sta-
tistics, technical and fundamental research and figures, and perhaps a soccer
game and Bloomberg news – all streamed on-screen in separate windows. Streams
run at different speeds: prices may change within split seconds, analysis and head-
line news trickles in more slowly and is reiterated repeatedly, transaction records
nearly match the speed of transactions. Everything scrolls down the screen as new
information arrives.
Habitually traders are well aware of the fluidity of the market situation, as
seen in the following brief exchange with a proprietary trader:
 Scopic media and global coordination 51

KK: I want to come back to the market, what the market is for you. Does it have a particular
shape?

LG: No, it changes “shape” all the time.

The ontological fluidity of such a situation invites comparison with our everyday
notion of reality. The latter is a spatial notion – we see reality as a spatial environ-
ment existing independently of us and in which we dwell. It is the case that the
notion of a world on-screen also suggests spatiality; it suggests that the idea of a
spatial environment can be extended to electronic domains as these become – for
some of us – a place to work and live. The naked situation, as indicated, has
strong spatial connotations. Spatial concepts do not deny temporal processes. But
they imply that time is something that passes in the spatial environment and is
extraneous to the environment itself. Presumably we also express durability
through spatial concepts. The synthetic situation, however, is inherently in flux;
it has none of the durability of a physical situation. Traders perform their activities
in a moving field constituted by changing, incoming, and disappearing bits and
pieces. As the information scrolls down the screens and is replaced by new infor-
mation, a new market situation – a new reality – continually projects itself.
In this case, then, the synthetic situation is a patchwork of parallel, itemized
flows that manifest themselves as running lines of text and numbers, and running
(live) pictures, figures, and graphs. It is somewhat like a dynamic version of an
impressionist painting, revealing the contours of familiar objects through flicker-
ing, temporal, dissociated sensations. To use another image: the screen reality in
the fully scoped case of markets, for instance, is like a carpet whose small sections
are both being woven and rolled out at the same time in front of us. The carpet
grounds experience; we can step on it and change our positioning on it. But the
carpet composes itself only as it is rolled out; the spatial illusions it affords hide
the intrinsic temporality of the fact that its threads (the lines of text appearing on-
screen) are woven into the carpet only as we step on it, and that they unravel
again behind our backs (the lines are updated and disappear). As the carpet is
woven it assumes different patterns; the weave provides specific response slots to
which traders react, taking the patterns in different directions. In sum, the screen
reality is a process, but it is not simply like a river flowing from one location to
another as an identical mass of water. Rather, it is processual in the sense of an
infinite succession of nonidentical matter projecting itself forward as a changing
situation.
The third feature of the synthetic situation I would like to discuss has to do
with this fluidity and this also brings us back to an elaboration on what response
presence means in synthetic situations. Synthetic situations demand more moni-
toring – we need to know and keep track of the now of the message-multiflows
that characterize their augmented and temporalized content. Traders, for example,
not only keep track of but also induce the agency of human or synthetic actors
52 Karin Knorr Cetina

behind the flows, in order to base their responses on these inductions. In electronic
global markets, response presence is a more complex and institutionally organized
phenomenon. It always includes, for example, arrangements for substitute re-
sponders if the addressed person or bank cannot answer. It can mean a personal
(friendship-based) or institutional division of labor across time zones, so that trad-
ers and desks are available around the clock to respond to situation changes and
pick up requests. On the level of individual traders, response presence also entails
more than continuous monitoring: a mode of implicit information processing that
I cannot detail here (see Knorr Cetina 2012) other than saying it is not based on
explicit, prefrontal thinking, enables efficiency with complex tasks, and requires
full attention and concentration. It’s as if a traders’ brain was attached to the
market, and not just the trader him/herself as a behaviorally engaged actor. Trad-
ers are able to respond to a global situation by springing into action quickly and
“unthinkingly” when prompted. Their way of translating this capacity is to say
that they trade “by the seat of their pants”, based on a “feeling for the market”.
This suggests that some types of trading conform more to Mead’s model of a con-
versation of gestures than to models of deliberation and calculation. Understanding
speculative trading may require that we move away from exclusively cognitive and
deliberative decision-making frameworks – and that we add to these models an
understanding of the preparatory work, and the work of seeing and attention, that
readies participants for “unthinking” responses.
The last aspect I want to discuss here is that features of the synthetic situation
may become symbolic interaction partners for participants. Here I am not referring
to the synthetic agents which, as algorithms, are “inside” or part of the media
components of these situations. I rather mean the screens or mediascape and what
it represents itself, all of which may become reified as a party to ongoing interac-
tion. Let me again take the example of traders in a global market. In the typical
face-to-screen situation on trading floors, traders interact primarily with what goes
on on-screen. More specifically, when a trader makes a deal in the synthetic situa-
tion’s electronic environment, he or she is oriented to, monitors, engages with,
and influences “the market”. The trader holds a position “in” an environment (the
market) while responding to parts of this environment (prices, trading instru-
ments). Behind the prices and information presented on-screen stand other human
participants with whom a trader at times engages in mediated person-to-person
trading and other interactions, and algorithmic participants with whom they don’t
engage directly. An example is when participants trade through “conversational
dealing” screens, through which they can conduct a direct, electronically enabled,
dyadic dealing-conversation (consisting basically of the demand for a price for an
amount of currency, the response, a choice, and a preprogrammed confirmation
sequence). But 80 % and more of the deals are made through more automated
venues like the electronic broker system (EBS). These systems summarize and
sequence the trading interests of different parties and present them abstractly on-
 Scopic media and global coordination 53

screen as changing prices; traders do not engage particular persons but simply hit
on a price by typing the instruction on their machine. The central point here is
that the tradable prices seen on-screen are presorted, sequenced indications of
select market participants’ interests – a summarized, abstract version of the aggre-
gate of all participants that becomes reified by participants as “the market”. We
can perhaps say that the system streams multiple market interests nested in space
into one global conversation – but this is a conversation traders conduct in the
face-to-screen situation with a mostly anonymous market, rather than with par-
ticular others. When a trader buys or sells (in sufficient quantity) and influences
these prices, he or she influences an intermediate sphere, a symbolic “face” of the
aggregate of human traders and a signaling reality in its own right. This reality
conforms to its own principles and dynamics – for example, to the forces of aggre-
gate supply and demand. The reality also includes contextual information partici-
pants see on-screen. For traders “the market is everything” that occurs at a particu-
lar point in time and is available in the synthetic situation – an all-encompassing
definition that reflects the fact that participants cannot tell in advance which por-
tion of the context may become relevant to responses. Thus, when the screen
projects an “other” for participants, with whom these participants interact, it pro-
jects a comprehensively synthesized, worldwide situation.

4 Scopic coordination
Many authors in sociology and other social sciences have argued that coordination
and cooperation, as well as trust and trustworthiness sustained by norms of reci-
procity, are key elements in a well-functioning social system. In the last few dec-
ades social scientists have associated these elements with networks of social rela-
tionships. In a network, participants monitor each other’s’ behavior and sanction
it if necessary. Thus a network can deter its members from opportunism and mal-
feasance through internal self-regulation – which may simply be more effective
and efficient than the use of hierarchy in organizations, or the use of legal sanc-
tions (e.g. Granovetter 1985, Bandelj 2012). In this section I want to return to the
idea of networks I brought up earlier and show that scopic media offer an alterna-
tive mechanism of coordination and of accomplishing trust and trustworthiness.
First, not everything that looks like a network is one. Second, when things
can be projected to an attentive globally dispersed audience more or less simulta-
neously, those in the audience get all the messages and information, and will
achieve a level of integration without resorting to networks: “when you can scope
it, you don’t have to network it”. Third, scopic media are well suited to conveying
trust and allow trust management, and participants use them in this way. Fourth,
scopic media afford more than trust, for example they augment and enhance the
fatefulness of situations through the epistemic participation they afford.
54 Karin Knorr Cetina

To take these arguments up in turn, let us look again at the example of cur-
rency markets: one of the most dispersed (though concentrated in global cities)
and global structural form there is today. A trader transacting in these markets is
always in a global situation – even when the transaction is “just” between Zurich
and London, it will be observed and registered on screen by currency traders
worldwide and this information will be taken into account in subsequent transac-
tions. The reason for this is simply that all professional trading desks worldwide
in institutional currency trading share the same media and the same form of medi-
atization – the same terminals, hardware, and software leased from Reuters and
Bloomberg and provided with content by these financial service firms. Though
traders can and do adapt the windows they open to their specific needs and may
use different platforms offering dealing prices, those trading the same currency
pair will coercively watch the same price, order, and transaction information as
well as the same news items pertaining to that pair. Thus whether the person
trades in London or Singapore, in Zurich or New York, it makes no difference to
the availability of identical content.
The material infrastructure of financial markets then includes much more than
electronic networks – which are not Internet connections but secure proprietary
cable and satellite connections between banks and continents. In particular, it
includes the work stations, terminals, and computer screens with their hardware
and software capabilities, and the streaming content they display: these are the
objects that present the market and to which participants are oriented, and these
should be our starting point when analyzing these markets. What this implies is
that the electronic interconnections that link the terminals and institutions are not
simply co-extensive with the social networks through which transactions flow. As
electronic networks they correspond to different construction criteria, they involve
electronic nodes and linkages irrelevant to social relationships, and much of what
flows through them – for example an electronically brokered deal in response to
an anonymous buying and selling offer – does not derive from social relationships.
Most importantly, the terminals deliver much more than just windows to physically
distant counterparties – although they provide that too through their “conversa-
tional dealing” functions. They deliver the reality of financial markets and their
context – the ground on which traders step as they make their moves, the world
which they literally share through their shared technologies and systems, the refer-
ential whole of “everything” to which traders point when they talk about the mar-
ket. Thomson Reuters prides itself on having 200 bureaus and 2700 full-time jour-
nalists on the ground worldwide, serving approximately 130 countries with news
and global event coverage.6 The thickly-layered screens surrounding traders draw

6 http://thomsonreuters.com/content/media/pdf/news_agency_overview.pdf. Retrieved August 13,

2009. For Reuters global locations see http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/media/media_
locations. Retrieved August 13, 2009.
 Scopic media and global coordination 55

heavily on these services. They come as close as one can get to delivering a stand-
alone world that includes everything for its existence and continuation: at the
center the actual dealing prices and incoming trading conversations; in a second
circle the indicative prices, account information, and some news (depending on
the current market story); and additional headlines and commentaries in a third
layer of information. It is this delivery of a world, assembled and drawn together
in ways that make sense and allow navigation and accounting, that suggests the
global reach of this form of coordination.
The notion of a network draws on a powerful convergence of organizational
changes, technological developments, and broader cultural transformations of val-
ues – all of which sustain the network not only as an analytic concept for the
investigation of social structure, but also as a model and advertisement for how
things in many areas should be structured. The most important convergent devel-
opment that has contributed to the recent renaissance of network concepts is
surely that of information and communication technologies. These technologies
are based on electronic linkages between geographic areas and are referred to in
terms of a vocabulary of nets, webs, circuits, and nodes. Information and commu-
nication technologies have made the network notion salient, strengthened pre-
existing trends toward network forms of organization, while also facilitating some
of these developments. Accordingly, Castells (1996: 476–477) writes of the network
society where “flows of messages and images between networks constitute the
basic thread of our social structure”. He sees dominant societal functions orga-
nized in global information technology networks linked by these communications,
while subordinate functions fragment in local settings where people become
increasingly segregated and disconnected from each other. But the central ques-
tion for social scientists is how these technologies are instantiated in concrete
areas of practice, and here a different picture emerges. From the perspective of
both participants and the observers of these lifeworlds, the dominant elements on
trading floors, for instance, are not the electronic infrastructural connections – the
“pipes” (Podolny 2001: 33) or arteries through which transactions flow – but the
computer screens and the dealing and information capabilities which instantly
reflect, project, and extend the reality of these markets in toto. They give rise to a
form of coordination that includes networks but also vastly transcends them, pro-
jecting an aggregate, contextualized market to a global audience. If the screens on
which the market is present are identically replicated in all institutions and on all
trading floors, they form, as it were, one huge compound mirroring and transac-
tion device to which many contribute and on which all draw. As an omnipresent
complex “other”, the market on screen takes on a presence and profile in its own
right with its own self-assembling and integrating features (for example, the best
prices world-wide are selected and displayed), its own calculating routines (for
example, accounts are maintained and prices may be calculated), and self-histori-
cizing properties (for example, price histories are displayed and a multiplicity of
56 Karin Knorr Cetina

other histories can be called up). The electronic programs and circuits supporting
this screen-world assemble and implement on one platform the previously dis-
persed activities of different agents: of brokers and bookkeepers, of market-makers
(traders) and analysts, of researchers and news agents. In this sense, the screen
is a building site on which a whole economic and epistemological world is erected.
It is not simply a channel for the transmission of pre-reflexive interactions.
Scopic markets of this sort are not relationship markets but instead are based
on a regime of attention and perception: of watching the market on screen continu-
ously, synchronously, and immediately. Attention to the screens is mandatory and
coercive – the equivalent of a scopic mechanism on the human side and a behav-
ioral pattern that identifies professional market participants. Coordination results
from the simultaneous injection of bursts of content onto a collective of observ-
ers – or to put it the other way round, from the simultaneous and continuous
exposure of an attentive and expectant group of market participants to bursts of
information. The exposure results in a level of attentional integration – within a
bounded market environment a shared awareness (and distributed conversation)
of the state of the market and the world relevant to it – while also resulting in
different responses. We can think of this attentional integration in informational
terms, visualizing it in terms of the market’s collective cognition, to use a contem-
porary term for what Hayek described in 1945. We can also visualize this atten-
tional integration and the emotions and talk carried along with it as a social mem-
brane of the market field. The screens feed and renew the membrane – and they
provide a sophisticated feedback and support system for the market discourse that
develops around their bursts of information.

5 Trust and fate: how scopic media do it

Are scopic media able to manage and convey trust? Many areas today, including
those of commercial exchange and financial markets, involve considerable sources
of uncertainty and risk. These may be dealt with by formal rules and mechanisms,
for example accreditation procedures of parties (banks, trading firms, fund mana-
gers etc.) in a transaction. Networks, as suggested in the literature, are another
way to police and regulate such risks. But risk control and the management of
trust can also be implemented with the help of scopic media, as we show in our
ongoing research on the role of these media in various settings. One example is
German debt auctions (Reichmann 2013). Germany auctions off about 97 % of its
debt in the form of bonds, selling these instruments to a consortium of banks that
offer the bonds on international financial markets. Auctions are prepared and held
according to a schedule that is fixed in December of the year preceding the auc-
tion. The technical infrastructure for these events is “secured” by multiple means.
For example, there are two separate auction management teams in case one team
 Scopic media and global coordination 57

is unable to operate; emergency systems are in place; operations are conducted in

a heavily secured and policed zone of the National Bank’s buildings and site; and
the selection process of bidders requires personal identification. Bidding is for
minimum volumes, and forbids any “testing of the waters” (i.e. fake bids not
meant to be realized in practice). These are all mechanisms that guarantee the
special character of the occasion and convey its “serious”, reliable, trustworthy
character. Additional mechanisms also stimulate trust. For example, the auction
is not scheduled when market prices are favorable, but rather according to a prede-
termined schedule and predetermined quantities: only this limited quantity will
be auctioned off regardless of whether there is higher demand. In fact, the auction
will be held as scheduled even if it results in “negative interest” for the National
Bank, which doesn’t act “opportunistically”. Investors appreciate this, placing
trust in non-opportunistic behavior. It means that there will be bonds for them to
bid on “next time”, even if they were not able to get them at the earlier auction.
Another trust-generating factor is that the Bank corrects errors fastidiously: If a
bidder makes an offer that’s recognized as erroneous, he or she is immediately
informed about the presumed mistake. The point is that scopic media fully trans-
mit and implement trust management practices. Moreover, because of the trans-
parency they afford and their speed, they are an additional resource in such
efforts. Recall the inclusionary effectiveness of scopic media, the coordination of
consciousness they afford – everyone eligible to bid and in possession of the media
will be included in the information flow surrounding an auction simultaneously
and in synchronicity with everyone else. Unlike networks (whose reason for exis-
tence is often to exclude outsiders from information flows) scopic media create
something of a public: an audience of watchers who can all know what is happen-
ing, as long as the activities can be realized through and limited to these media.
German debt auctions build on this resource.
Media can be associated with a type of sociality that is largely devoid of deeper
meaning – think of Twitter or Facebook, and the hundreds or thousands of
“friends” and followers users may have there. Such relationships are presumably
similar to our postsocial relationships with objects, which may also lack the depth
of meaningful human interaction. While this sort of emptying out may correctly
describe our heavily mediated human social relations, it doesn’t necessarily
describe the synthetic situation, which can have a heightened rather than a
reduced significance. Conveying trust through reducing behavioral and network
risks – through exploiting the possibility of scopic media to make things visible
and accountable for all, through using the speed these media enable by eliminat-
ing delay associated with physical distance or absence, through exhibiting reliabil-
ity and straightforwardness at the expense of heightened profit, and through con-
spicuously enhancing the security features these media require and enable – all
of these features enrich the synthetic situation rather than emptying it out. There
are other features of the synthetic situation that also point to such enhancements.
58 Karin Knorr Cetina

One example is fatefulness. Synthetic situations can be associated with increased

fatefulness, or in other words with additional layers of meaning significant to the
persons in the synthetic situation. Goffman (1969) used the term fatefulness when
he analyzed casino gamblers’ opportunity-taking and risk-taking and found that
these actions may have lasting consequences – they are fateful. Their effects “spill
over in the rest of someone’s life” because when someone is gambling away a
fortune he or she will have to bear the consequences of this action. Hence a gam-
ble’s consequentiality is the “capacity of payoff to flow beyond the bounds of the
occasion in which it is delivered and to influence objectively the later life of the
bettor” (Goffman 1969: 116). Expected consequences may of course also influence
how the situation proceeds. Fatefulness, in this case, is not just a post hoc effect
but is part of the situation. For example, the dread of losing may contribute to the
thrill of gambling. Goffman’s (1969: 119) use of the term “fatefulness” was limited
to actions that in addition to having consequences are chancy. I use the term here
in a more general way to point to the phenomenon that situations are often
charged with special significance – deriving not only from anticipated consequen-
ces but also from unexpected consequential matters that may become fore-
grounded in a situation. Think of a plane in flight – many of the formal rules
regulating passenger conduct and the informal conventions of behavior passen-
gers adopt when they come on board will be shaped by the understanding that
the plane ride is a time of shared fate. In fact, not only the interaction order of
the flight but also that within the various areas of the airport through which flyers
pass before take-off are informed by this understanding. In financial markets,
someone buying a currency or stock creates a claim that the buyer acquires on
future growth. The transaction is a time machine in a double sense. It transfers
the immediate command of resources to the more remote future7 – this creates,
for the buyer, an extended situation. And the investor’s or speculator’s money
allows the party receiving the money to jump start the future in the present: to start
investing in future outcomes with an eye to creating returns on the investment.
The transaction creates a level of increased fatefulness: it thrusts the investor and
speculator into a temporal engagement with a receiving party and the market on
whose performance they now depend. Many other situations are set up or staged
to allow for and convey increased fatefulness. Any conversation can be so config-
ured; for example it may consist of a succession of question–answer pairs to which
the fate of a nation becomes publicly attached, as in a presidential debate.
Synthetic situations have an intrinsic capacity to increase the fatefulness of
social situations. This simply derives from the fact that screens project information
that is not otherwise available to participants in the situation. And this information
can exhibit an incipient fate by specifying with causal efficacy distant as well as

7 The notion of a time machine was used by Keynes to make this point (see Davidson 1980: 297,
cited in Rochon 1999: 47, 204).
 Scopic media and global coordination 59

higher and lower level processes that are not visible to the naked eye – but which
do, or will in the future, influence entities and behavior. The synthetic components
of a situation are not limited to that which is available to us in everyday encoun-
ters. They bring near, articulate, and project a developing fate. The mediascape of
the cockpit of a plane may indicate the dangers of a close plane, flocks of birds,
severe weather, and turbulences – before any of these dangers actually hit the
plane. They may predict and convey engine problems, assess pilot fatigue, and
much more, thus sketching out an imminent fate and inducing corrective action.
Consider also a medical example. Imagine the ultrasound scans offered to a
woman during pregnancy. The images and videos present the various stages of
fetal development, allowing doctors to measure and assess not only the estimated
weight of the fetus, its sex, and the functioning of vital organs, but also many
details such as its abdominal and skull circumference and the length of its femur
and spinal cord. The “anomaly” scan done at twenty weeks, for example, offers a
multitude of cross-sectional views, long views, and sonographic specifications of
the fetus that reveal as many of its “fateful” properties as technically possible.8
The developing fetus acquires a second presence in the resulting videos and
images. There is an external visual and informational articulation of its features,
looks, and internal environment – an articulation that also projects what the infant
will be and suffer when born, what may happen before birth, and what medical
measures should possibly be taken.
The visual images, in this case, allow for medical and scientific analysis; they
are configured for the purpose. The synthetic components of a situation often have
an epistemic function – they make information available that indicates fateful
processes currently under way, and available for early adjustment and professional
intervention. Differently put, synthetic situations acquire fatefulness through the
informational and epistemic enhancement their scopic components offer. Algo-
rithms may provide the calculations that specify an emergent fate. But they may
also add to the fatefulness of situations as synthetic software agents capable of
swift, calculated activities that may target and threaten human positions. When
algorithms are not simply “tools” that execute human instructions, they can
deepen and also undermine the strategic games humans play. This, too, increases
the fatefulness of synthetic situations.

8 The scan indicates the head’s shape and internal structure down to the form of the lip and,
potentially, the palate; the alignment of the spinal vertebrae and the spine’s skin cover in the back;
the abdominal wall and whether it covers all organs at the front; the atria and ventricles of the
heart and the valves that open and close with each heartbeat. Further scans reveal the kidneys
and the presence of regular urine flow, and inspect the hands, feet, fingers and toes, the umbilical
cord, the amniotic fluid, and the location of the placenta. It is even possible to count the three
blood vessels in the umbilical cord (see http://babycenter.com.au/pregnancy/antenatalhealth/
scans/secondtrimesterscans/#6, retrieved September 28, 2008 for further details).
60 Karin Knorr Cetina

6 Prospects
This chapter focused on the mediatization of the face-to-face situation and the
need for an updated understanding of one of the most basic units of sociality, the
social situation. Scopic mediatization is a particular type of mediatization involv-
ing screen-based electronic media. The technologies involved differ – think of an
fMRI technology in comparison to the Reuters and Bloomberg screens used in
finance – but in all cases they “present” and make available to participants what
lies spatially and temporally beyond their reach.9 In contemporary global financial
markets this means practically everything that is relevant to financial transactions.
The concepts I have offered – scopic media and the synthetic situation, the notion
of response presence and that of an attentional regime, and attentional coordina-
tion that contrasts with network coordination – are designed to capture the impact
of the mediatization of face-to-face situations (see also Knorr Cetina 2009, 2012).
The story that began here with scopic media does not, of course, end with the
synthetic situation on its own. National debt auctions, for example, involve not
only situational but institutional means: that is rules, resources, and conventions
that are implemented through the media together with interactional capabilities.
This points beyond the media situationalism on which this paper has focused, to
a media intuitionalism. Global forms that persist and stretch across countries and
cultures are not simply agglomerations of brief encounters – they are often also
simultaneously institutional spheres, as the example of global currency trading I
have used in this chapter illustrates. Global scientific projects in the area of high-
energy physics, for example, work within time schedules extending over three
decades – the time it now takes to conduct one experiment. High-energy physics
“situations” that involve a detector – a scientific instrument the size of a several-
story building, that takes approximately fifteen years to build – are generally not
brief; and scopic media are used in these cases not only to enable communication
among the several thousand physicists and engineers that participate in such pro-
jects and are located all over the globe, but also to project and monitor the institu-
tional rules such projects require. More generally speaking, the synthetic compo-
nents of social situations project and articulate trust, fatefulness, and coordination
in specific rather than general ways. But in all cases they substitute the possibility
of global coordination and informational significance for the ecological huddle of
the naked, unmediated face-to-face situation.

9 See Schutz and Luckmann (1989: 131–132) where the term is spelled “appresentation”. I use the
notion to refer to the process of making available to participants in the situation “what lies spatially
and temporally beyond their reach”, as Schutz and Luckmann put it.
 Scopic media and global coordination 61

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Risto Kunelius
3 Climate change challenges: an agenda for
de-centered mediatization research
Abstract: Climate change underlies the deep interconnectedness of people, calls
for new kinds of models of transnational governance, requires a radically future-
oriented political imagination, and challenges the very material base that our mod-
ern, carbon-thirsty cultures are built on. In this chapter climate change works as
a prism through which to develop a de-centered perspective to mediatization. This
means looking at the way the saturating “presence” of the media – from techno-
logical shifts in attention dynamics and interactional affordances to the politics of
representation – shapes the mutual interaction of social actors. It also means avoid-
ing being abstracted from particular, historical subject matters and taking seri-
ously the particularities of the problem constructions that bring social actors into
interaction. Starting from these premises, the chapter discusses mediatization of
climate change through the frameworks of attention management (the global cli-
mate news agenda, representing the real (climate science and media logic), political
representation (climate change, media, and the political field) and journalistic pro-
fessionalism. As a conclusion, the chapter briefly tackles mediatization as a dis-
course, and the normative dimensions mediatization research.

Keywords: climate politics, post-normal science, risk, global journalism, profes-

sionalism, media events, media-logic, mediatization

1 Introduction: mediatization and climate change

Type “climate change” into a Google picture search and you will probably end up
with a picture of a polar bear trying to float on a small island of ice. Often enough,
there are a couple of young ones also in the frame, struggling on an increasingly
sparse arctic ice-cover. Somewhat amazingly, if you stop to think about it, the
polar bear has, in a decade or so, become an icon of a looming threat that humans
seem to have created for themselves and their livelihoods. It is a telling example
of the “power” of the media how such symbolic dimensions have been so quickly
attached to a particular species and how its fate has been represented as a power-
ful metaphor of an extremely complex phenomenon referred to as “climate
change”. “Personalizing” the future to the visually powerful image of the polar
bear and simplifying our risky future through the wishful and romantic survival
narrative of its small family neatly illustrates many of the things we relate “media
logic” with. So, climate change surely is a thoroughly “mediatized” question
around which simplifications and dramatizations run wild.
64 Risto Kunelius

At the same time climate change is a global problem construction that surpas-
ses all earlier common political challenges in its complexity. It underscores the
deep interconnectedness of people, calls for new kinds of models of transnational
governance, requires a radically future-oriented political imagination, and challen-
ges the material base that our contemporary cultures are built on. Talking about
it requires abstractions that transcend from the concrete and real (weather) to the
abstract system (climate) and that reach from the tangible present to imagined
pasts and futures. The scope and complexity are not only challenging, they are
also easily paralyzing. Hence, perhaps the slightly romantic and yet detached sym-
bol animal: we can relate to polar bears but will not thoroughly identify with them.
Hence, perhaps the tendency to represent human suffering through drowning
houses rather than people. Hence, the need for future scenarios to always have
optimistic curves of emissions side by side with the ones that describe the path
we are really on.
This chapter argues that climate change provides a particularly interesting and
important challenge to thinking about media and mediatization. The importance
is evident because of the weight of issues raised by climate change: it is, at least,
a mighty case study. But it is also more than that: climate challenge stretches
down just about as deep as you want to imagine to our carbon-thirsty way of life.
It has potential to cut across and deep into the social systems we live in and think
by (cf. Giddens 2009; Hulme 2010a; Urry 2011). Thus, testing some of the aspects
of mediatization theory by thinking them through and in connection with climate
change becomes unavoidable. As a starting point, this task calls for discussing (at
least) three issues in the current debate about mediatization.
First, thinking about social theory through climate change points to something
trivial but crucial: at the root of the mediatization narrative (both in academic
and popular discourses) is the image of a modern, functionalistic, institutionally
differentiated society. As a concept denoting a process, mediatization assumes that
at a constitutive level, modern societies are made of some kind of sub-systems
(domains, fields, institutions) with their designated tasks, values systems, particu-
lar practices – and certain level of autonomy. It is the borders of these differenti-
ated systems that are at stake when we experience something called mediatization,
whether we talk about politics, science, family, individuality, or something else.
Starting from this experience of media “invading” a sphere or a domain in a new
way, mediatization inquiry opens its key questions. What kind of change takes
place inside these domains (e.g. How mediatization of the school changes the
demand for particular pedagogic skills)? What happens to the (power) relations
between such domains in a media-intensified environment (e.g. Are politicians
more vulnerable to mediatization than economic power holders?)? And, perhaps
most obviously: how different actors learn to operate with the increasingly impor-
tant media actors and institutions (e.g. Do all public actors need media training?)
Because an unspoken assumption about a “healthy” degree of differentiation (a
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 65

desirable diversity of rationalities) is deeply rooted in our modern social imagina-

tion, answers to such questions often acquire a normative twist. Thus, talk about
mediatization often comes with a sense of threat or loss (of the rational, the
authentic, the real, etc.). Symptoms of mediatization are declared by guardians of
different domains who feel irritated and threatened by the changes (parents, teach-
ers, priests, politicians, etc.). From a more general perspective, the normative
value invested in differentiation, the de-centralization of power and the ideal of
“balance” between different domains makes us easily point to the “black box” of
“media logic” as a pejorative shorthand standing for something alien penetrating
these fundamental spheres of life and the categories we think by. Against this
background, climate change is a highly potential sparring partner for mediatiza-
tion theory because it is not a domain, a field, or an institution but a complex,
wide-ranging and multi-level problem construction that cuts across many of our
imagined differentiated modern spheres, from science to politics to culture and
from public to private. Hence, just as carbon dioxide respects no national bounda-
ries, climate change by its “nature” challenges the modern imagination of institu-
tional differentiation.
Second, climate change poses questions at the level of historical narratives,
suggesting a broad and multidirectional context of several interrelated influences.
Mediatization, on the other hand, too easily turns into a somewhat linear and
almost causal relationship. In a simple form this refers to an effect-relationship
between “a medium” (journalism, television, Internet) and some target domain
(for instance how journalism shapes the public role of religion). In a slightly more
diffuse sense it can refer to a particular development in the environment (for
instance visualization or digitalization) and its influence on a specific field (for
instance visualization of politics). However, taken as an aspect of a more general
narrative of social process, mediatization must refer beyond the “effects” of par-
ticular forms of media institutions or the cultural effects of particular affordances.
Mediatization begins to make deeper sense only when looked at in the broader
landscape of technological, economic, political, and cultural factors in which all
institutions and social domains of action are situated. This includes media institu-
tions – “the media” – too. It means that despite the irritating tautology, it makes
sense to talk about “mediatization of the media” (for instance journalism) (Kune-
lius and Reunanen 2012a, 2012b). In this sense, media institutions are the not the
“origin” of mediatization. Instead, stabilized forms of media (say journalism or
book publishing) will also have to adapt to a general process of mediatization
(the changing social conditions and media environment for all institutions). The
business model of a newspaper can erode, the self-evident nodal role of book
shops may evaporate, and newspapers and bookshops can become “mediatized”
(or disappear altogether). True enough, mediatization is (perhaps always) recog-
nized in a particular domain, and takes the shape of a claim of “media” affecting
someone (journalism influencing political practice, television shaping family rou-
66 Risto Kunelius

tines and rituals, mobile phones transforming parent–children relations, social

networking reworking privacy, etc.). However, such pressures are never just sig-
naled into institutional domains as pure “stimulus” (of, say new media technolo-
gies) but always come into play in institutionalized forms and formats (e.g. new
aggressive values of professional journalism, the confusingly complex articulation
of the self in social media or mobile phone applications). These, of course, are
already articulations of several factors (technology, markets, legislation, etc.).
Thus, underneath such “effect”-frames, as a theoretical aggregate, mediatization
points to a bigger change in which all the actors and domains are embedded in a
new kind of environment where speed of information, volume of exchange, com-
plexity of connections, and reach over distance take place in a new scale. At this
level, the object of analysis of mediatization is not this or that “domain” or “insti-
tution” but rather, the transforming patterns and practices of mutual interaction.
As a way of operationalizing such an object for research, a problem construction
like climate change can be potentially useful. In order to understand the shape and
changes of such an object, we need to look at the interests (the power relations,
the discursive fissures, or what have you) of different actors as they are articulated
in relation to a particular topic or problem construction. “Climate change” in Bang-
ladesh articulates a different kind of field for social actors to engage in than it
does in Finland (cf. Kumpu and Rhaman 2012). This difference is linked to but
goes beyond the generally identified local traditions and history of media–political
system relations. And while this is true in almost any topic, in relation to climate
change (due to its depth as a problem construction) this question of how institu-
tional relations are shaped by concrete issues and interests is particularly interest-
ing.
Thirdly, climate change can help to situate mediatization within the larger
(global) social, political, and historical conjuncture in which we find ourselves.
Mediatization as a phenomenon and as a discourse earns the true depth of its
meaning in a particular historical context. At the broadest level this includes a
new global shape of economic power, new conditions, mobility, and division of
labor in global markets, new investment logics and dynamics, a new intensity of
cultural diversity in most parts of the world – and so on. Some of these trends
have long been identified in the broad trajectories of global capitalism or history’s
“longue durée” (e.g. from Braudel 1982 to Harvey 1989 to Arrighi 1994), but they
have recently been accentuated in our imagination by the contemporary economic
crisis (cf. Calhoun and Derluguian 2010). However broad and sweeping such
remarks on globalization sometimes are, they remind us that our newly “mediat-
ized condition” – of everyday life, politics, religion, or of journalism – is taking
place at a particular moment. New media infrastructures, forms, and their uses
emerge and become molded by historical circumstances, by specific moments of
action, and through specific articulations of social relations. From this perspective,
“mediatization” and “globalization” are deeply mutually interdependent concepts
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 67

and discourses (cf. Ekecrantz 2007; Krotz 2009), and any talk about the “mediat-
ized public sphere” is also talk about the “global network society” (Castells 2009)
or about the “mediapolis” (Silverstone 2007). It is of course true that the features
of social media cannot be explained only by referring to ideological struggles of
the political public sphere (for instance on multiculturalism). But it is equally
important to bear in mind that such politically substantial questions also shape
and empower the actual forms that mediatization takes. There is, then, a need to
weigh in the particular, real, and concrete historical conjuncture in which the
concept and discourse of mediatization begins to gain strength (in popular imagi-
nation, in media studies, perhaps in social theory more generally). Recognizing
that mediatization always is about mediating not only between actors and institu-
tions in general but also that it is about mediating and articulating particular
issues and realities in a particular situation, is well accentuated by climate change.
Thinking about mediatization of climate change begs a look at the power relations
of the world in all their complexity. Thus thinking through climate change, as a
key “global crisis” (Mann 2013: 361–399) necessarily links the mediatization debate
to some of the “ideological” power resources of capitalism, markets, and nations
states. It also brings in – forcefully, in fact – other resources and structures of
power and their soberly constraining counterweight to too enthusiastic claims of
radical social change related to mediatization. Not surprisingly, several works of
recent “global history” end up by articulating environmental issues as a test case
of the future of current global system of power (Mann 2013 361–399; McNeil and
McNeil 2003: 284–288; Fernández-Armesto 2011, 1024 ff.).
To summarize, then, this chapter attempts to use climate change as a tool to
develop a more de-centered view on mediatization. By focusing on a particular
problem construction rather than particular institutions, I try to question the
assumptions of differentiation that (silently) inform much of mediatization debate.
I also try to steer clear of linear and causal narratives, see mediatization as the
emergence of new kind of mutual interaction between social actors. Hopefully, this
also anchors mediatization to history and the structural conditions in which it takes
place. I will walk this de-centered, problem-framed path by discussing how media
research on climate change offers evidence and modifies the evidence on mediati-
zation within the following themes.
– Mediatization and attention (management): the global climate news agenda
– Mediatization and representing the real: climate science and media logic
– Mediatization and political representation: climate change, media and the
political field
– Mediatization and professionalism: climate change and professional autonomy

As a conclusion, I will briefly reflect on issues concerning mediatization as a dis-

course, and in particular, the normative dimensions of this discourse.
68 Risto Kunelius

2 Mediatization and attention (management):

the global climate news agenda
In some ways a primary, fundamental way to identify media influence and growth
of its importance, is to think about the media as a crucial factor in distributing
public attention (or, visibility [cf. Thompson 2005; Adut 2012; Kunelius and Reuna-
nen 2012a]). Recent history of global media coverage of climate change offers an
evidence to reflect on this.
Climate change became introduced to the media agendas mostly in the science
sections of journalism in the 1980s, as the “greenhouse effect”. It lived a fairly
long “bubbling under” period, peaking in different countries according local and
global catalyzing effects (local politics, weather events, and international political
events, such the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 or the US decision to withdraw from
the Kyoto Protocol in 2001). In the 1990s it slowly ascended on the media attention
radar (Boykoff 2011). In the mid 2000s “global warming” and “climate change”
then phenomenally broke into virtually global media consciousness (Boykoff and
Mansfield 2013 and Schmidt et al. 2013 provide a recent literature review of
research focusing on climate change media attention).
At first sight, this rise of attention speaks of the power of the media’s ability
to set the public agenda – and in time, also political agenda. Particularly interest-
ing here is the fact that mainstream media attention since 2004 also grew relatively
steadily globally (Boykoff and Mansfield 2013). This suggests that media’s agenda
setting capacity was able to transcend its usual, nationally grounded, domestic
boundaries of news relevance. Of course, journalism was supported here by several
“extra-media” factors such as warm winters and other weather phenomena, US
ex-Vice President Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and its
Oscar Award, the publication of the 4th IPCC Assessment Report in 2007, and a
flood of books and other publications (cf. Boykoff 2011: 1–29). These factors helped
mainstream journalism become sensitized to the topic and often to lift it from the
science pages to the center of political global attention. This peaked first in 2007
and then again two years later 2009 during the Copenhagen COP-meeting.1 The
attention shift thus was not only caused by the media, but the peak also testifies
of the power and ability of the media to build a momentary dramatized global
focus. During the late 2000s in the global North, at least, it seemed that media
was indeed crafting climate change as a “common denominator” for transnational
and national public discourses, a saturating factor in the political landscape that

1 COP refers to the “Conferences of the Parties” on the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) a treaty negotiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED) Rio de Janeiro in 1992, aiming at preventing dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system. Following the 1992 framework, the COP’s (global climate
summits) have been organized yearly. See http://unfccc.in
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 69

influenced public rhetoric and deliberation across the board, from energy politics
to development policies to individual consumer choices. If one bears in mind that
this rise took place in the part of the world that is thoroughly “carbon driven” and
where there are strong politico-economical and everyday psychological reasons
that support forms of denial, this can be seen as remarkable proof of media’s
capacity to focus attention and political priorities. The long incubating period
(from 1980s to the 2000s) of climate issue on the science pages (often detached
from general political news and debate) speaks of the power of the modern differ-
entiation bureaucratized logic over professional journalism of those periods. But
the persistent rise of attentions testifies to the cross cutting power of the media to
arrange the order of the “environment” (to offer a public representation of the
“outside” of institutions, as Luhmann [2000] puts it) in which institutions act.
In the light of mediatization theory, it is also interesting to think of how the
attention break-through happened. Indeed, there is some evidence that media
attention can be a self-catalyzing and self-cumulative process where “attention
drives attention” (Djerf-Pierre 2012): initial media attention increases the activity
of public actors which in turn widens the perspectives on the issue, politicizes
issues, and creates more newsworthy public action. This upward attention cycle
is also strengthened by the conflicts of interest that are activated with the invested
attention and that fit well with dominant news criteria. (For a broad argument on
issue dynamics, see Djerf-Pierre 2013.) Such a “spiral of attention” can also be
seen in climate coverage in a more short range analysis (behind particular peaks
of attention). Hulme, for instance, (2010a, 63–66) shows how “global warming” in
1988 first (momentarily) broke through to US public consciousness via a conver-
gence of events (warm records from 1987, drought in the US Midwest), politics (a
Senate hearing), institutional innovations (climate science borrowing the idea of
an international treaty from ozone layer politics), and charismatic individuals
(NASA scientist Jim Hansen dramatically testifying in the US Senate). Such sym-
bolic centripetal moments cannot be reduced to the strategies of particular actors.
Rather, the agenda setting attention spiral is a result of mutually reinforcing moves
by a number of actors. More broadly, it suggests that mediatization can take the
form of crafting momentary “public truths” (Reunanen et al. 2010) where the mere
pressure and volume of attention becomes a normative action horizon to political
actors, leading to fluctuations in the intensity of mediatization over time (cf. Röd-
der and Schäfer 2010). Climate coverage offers examples of how such of globalized
media attention can also increase the stakes of political moments. A particular
example is hubris during the Copenhagen COP 15 meeting in 2009 (cf. Eide, Kune-
lius and Kumpu, 2010; Painter 2010).
At the same time, the variations of global attention to climate change coverage
offer sobering counter-evidence about the limits to a strong mediatization thesis.
Schmidt, Ivanova and Schäfer (2013), for instance, have shown the amount of
media attention to climate change in different countries varies according to funda-
70 Risto Kunelius

mental economic and political factors such as carbon dioxide emissions or net fuel
exports. Again, there is no single or simple explanatory factor behind the local
news agendas. In addition to constraints related to the location (carbon politics,
geopolitics, political order, media system), there are also differences over time.
Thus, as the attention cycle of the 2000s peaked in Copenhagen 2009, it also sank
incredibly fast as the political-economic elites of the hegemonic blocs of the world
became preoccupied with the financial crisis and recession. In Durban 2011, the
media attention of global journalism on the COP-process had diminished to a mea-
ger 28 % of that of Copenhagen (Kunelius and Eide 2012; Nossek and Kunelius
2012).
The reduction in mainstream media attention on climate change thus offers
some lessons as well. The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit looks like a “super-
nova” kind of media event (star quality participants from Obama to Arnold Schwar-
zenegger, enormous attendance) where media managed to create a “global public
sphere” – momentarily. Importantly, this seemed to be possible despite the support
of a fairly flimsy political structure (the COP-process). There was, it seemed, real
pressure for the global political elites into a come up with a “big deal”. The quick
fall of this attention, then, testifies the hard non-mediatized resources of political
power (both globally and domestically). It also shows the diverse and contradic-
tory set of desires that are lumped together in moments of high attention. For
mediatization theory, this underlines a paradoxical aspect of attention driven
media power: if the media controls the short-term attention economy, a strong use
of this resourse of always makes it more volatile and exposed. The more political
interests are focused by media attention to a particular issue, the stronger the
pressure that a dominant media frame will begin to break. The power of attention
draws in other forms of power.

3 Mediatization and representing the real: climate

science and media logic
A key question in thinking about mediatization refers to the way media’s habits
and routines of representation shape our relationship to reality. Roughly put, in a
mediatized condition, one might argue, we live in a world of increasingly multi-
plied realities where things near and far (both in time and place) are part of our
everyday action horizons. Climate change offers a fascinating case of the interplay
of such complex representations. These issues become particularly evident in the
relationship between climate science and the media. Any attempt to represent the
“physical base” (as the IPCC2 calls it) of climate change demands a staggering

2 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988, provides scientific
review on the current state of knowledge about climate change and its potential environmental and
socio-economic impacts. It operates in a United Nations framework, collecting and synthesizing
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 71

amount of interdisciplinary work. When one adds to this the globally diversified
political and economic stakes, it is no wonder that the climate science–media
relationship has also become a tense affair. Focusing on how media (with the help
of science) tries to represent the “reality” of climate change points to at least two
slightly different to lessons to mediatization debates.
First, communication of climate science exemplifies many of the “normal”
challenges of the media–science media interaction. In this relationship, we usually
think that it is in the nature of media to simplify, to exaggerate the recent and
most “interesting”, to look for clear and tangible results, to demand direct applica-
tions and consequences. Science “itself”, on the other hand, is often seen as more
focused on nuances, details, and incremental accumulation of knowledge. The
relationship of these two “logics” can, then, lead to problems and tensions: a
paradigmatic moment for mediatization discourse to appear. Hence we can detect
various kinds of “biases” in media’s manner of representing the “results” and
conclusions of science (cf. Mann 2012: 87–89). Looking at the media reception of
the 2007 IPCC reports, Hulme (2010b) for instance concluded:

The UK print media also adopt a distinctive linguistics repertoires in reporting IPCC assess-
ments. The repertoires favour an “alarmist” discourse over others that emphasize contingency,
agency and opportunity.
The reasons for these preferences need further investigation. They may have as much to do
with journalistic norms and practices favouring bad news and melodrama over more nuanced
and contingent interpretations of climate change than they are the result of different newspaper
ideologies. (Hulme 2010b: 127, [my emphasis])

Articulating a similar kind of assumption about “media logic”, Painter (2013: 141)
offers practical advice to scientists in dealing with the media, suggesting that “sci-
entists should stress early on in interviews with the media where there is broad
consensus about climate science, and then later on where there are degrees of
uncertainty”. In a survey of German climate scientists, Ivanova et al. (2013) too
have found some support of the general influence of media: over 80 % of scientists
said media concerns had partly influenced their choice of research topic. Given
the tradition of upholding the image of autonomous science, this is a somewhat
staggering figure.3 This is so even with the elaboration that the felt mediatization
effect of climate scientists is differentiated by the seniority (cultural field capital)

the works of thousands of scientists from all over the world, assessing the most recent scientific,
technical and socio-economic information. It does not conduct any research itself, nor does it
monitor climate related data or parameters. The IPCC is an intergovernmental body, currently with
195 countries as members. Governments participate in the review process and the plenary Sessions,
where the main decisions about the IPCC work program are taken and reports are accepted,
adopted, and approved. The latest Assessment Report 5 (focusing on physical base of climate
change) was published in September 2013. See http://climatechange2013.org/
3 Reunanen, Kunelius and Noppari (2010) have similar results for politicians.
72 Risto Kunelius

of the scientist: more senior scientists are in more intense interaction with media
professionals but feel – in a self-reporting data anyway – less of their impact.
Such takes of the media–science relationship suggest, at a general level, quite
a strong grasp of “media logic” (and a need to react to it) over the scientific one.
But the variations between scientists’ views also point to a slightly understudied
object of mediatization: the mutually negotiated professional rules between scien-
tists and media. Such a focus refers beyond the question of “bias” of the media to
issues related to the language with which scientific representations are constructed
and mediated to the public. In climate science, a potential distinction here emerges
between the language of “uncertainty” and “risk”. Painter (2013) elaborates this
well, now from the point of view of journalists. (For a theoretical elaboration see
Beck 2010: 16–19, 129–139.)

Many of the journalists interviewed during the course of this study stressed
the difficulties of communicating climate change in ways that help their
audiences to understand the complexities and importance of it. It’s a very
knotty problem in part caused by the complexity of the science and the
distance in time and space of the impacts and in part by the way everyone
filters messages about climate change through their own value systems.
There is no simple recipe or panacea to communicate it well. But risk has
the obvious advantage of being a language common to other areas of life,
and risk language is probably less of an obstacle to understanding and
engagement than strong messages of uncertainty and future catastrophe.
Risk can offer a more helpful and appropriate context in which to hold
the debate about climate science and what to do about climate impacts. (Painter, 2013: 142)

Painter’s advice to scientists and journalists is to negotiate their way from the
language of uncertainty to the frame of risk. This points to a second and more
fundamental level of questions in science–media relationship: the incompatibility
between the epistemologically different vocabularies of science and the media.
There are several “logics” at play at the same time. On one hand, we have the
“old media logic”, where journalism identifies itself with the (high) modern, realist
imaginaries and with reporting facts: telling the audience how things are. On the
other hand, we have the 20th-century logic of falsification: the idea that everything
grows from the recognition of uncertainties and that “knowing how things are”
would denote the end of science. This gap between what constitutes acceptable
knowledge has, as we know, caused considerable problems at the interface of
media and climate science. In this respect, looking at the way in which the IPCC
presents its work and its results in its latest Assessment Report (5) (IPCC 2013) on
the physical base of climate change, offers little evidence of any deep “mediatiza-
tion effect” in the field of science. Contemporary (climate) science seems to still
be confidently relying on the language of uncertainties, modeling highly complex
future pathways and reporting diverse probabilities and confidence levels. It still
expects public discourse to accept its own way of framing the evidence.
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 73

Taking a step back, one might actually argue for “counter-mediatization” from
science to journalism. Perhaps the paradigm of uncertainty and doubt has made
a stronger mark on the logic of media and journalism than vice versa. The Climate-
gate controversy in 2009, where selective, strategic pickings from a massive
amount of hacked and leaked emails from key climate scientists was used to raise
doubt about the quality of science, can serve as an example here. It illustrates
how various strands of climate change deniers (and the fossil fuel lobby that often
funds them) have been able to capitalize on both the uncertainty logic of contem-
porary science (bluntly: there can be no denial that there is uncertainty) and the
logic of doubt in journalism (highest form of journalism is the investigative, watch-
dog-variant that finds all sorts of “gates” to be linked to the Watergate tradition)
which always favors a healthy suspicion of institutions and pledges to defend the
“underdogs”. Simplistically put, the Climategate affair is an example of how such
late modern epistemologies of journalism can be taken advantage of by playing
on the tensions between epistemologies of “lay man” realism and contemporary
science. (For more detailed and partly contradictory versions of the leaked emails,
see Pearce 2010; Mann 2012, 207–248.)
While the claim to know the truth for contemporary scientists seems like a
vulgar and unreasonable (even unscientific) demand, it reflects the strong grasp
of the modern, progressive image of science. Paradoxically, this image also stands
behind much of the cultural authority of science. What complicates the situation
for scientists, then, is that climate change as a global problem is one that also
seems to demand that science re-situates itself in public life and in relationship to
policy matter: science becomes a combat sport in the public, or a war (as Michael
Mann’s book title – The Hockey Stick and Climate Wars. Dispatches from the Front
Lines – illustrates). The IPCC itself, as an intergovernmental scientific panel illus-
trates the development of trans-boundary, “post-normal” science, a situation
where “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”
(Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). The gravity of the problem and possibility of unimag-
inable damages of climate change, then, changes the functionalistic boundaries
of disinterested, falsification-oriented science (Hulme 2010a: 77–80; Mann 2012:
253–258). It places increasing pressure for concerned scientists to speak in public
with a language that commands authority and can help to pressure policy solu-
tions. But at the same time, these very claims can detach scientists from their own
institutional fields and their specific knowledge practices.
What emerges from the intense encounter of media and science (and politics,
as we will see below) is not a simple narrative of media defining the rules of
game, but an image of how different institutions carry with them (also internally)
contradictory and sometimes incompatible commitments and beliefs about their
role in the representation of the “real” (see Latour 2013, 1–16). In the case on
climate change, the “real” carries such a strong, undeniable power that these
tensions become particularly visible. From a de-centered perspective, there ten-
74 Risto Kunelius

sions and multiple logics in representing reality – and the oscillation between
them – are what mediatization actually means.

4 Mediatization and political representation:

climate coverage and the political field
Another dimension of representation in climate coverage points to the media–
political system axis. This has perhaps been the most studied and debated relation-
ship in mediatization research in general (Asp 1986; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999;
Strömbäck 2008). By situating these questions into the context of climate coverage,
at least two interrelated points on this dimension can be elaborated. 1) the crucial
importance of the relation between media and the local political field in which it
functions and 2) the more general context of journalistic institutions vis-à-vis the
identity politics of post-modern societies. Together they articulate the question
about the re-politization of journalism in the mediatized conditions.
A fruitful round of discussion on the relationship between political systems
and media has been provoked during the last decade by the work Hallin and
Mancini (2004) from whom we have received useful rough characterizations of
different media–politics models and traditions. While the empirical validity of such
models is always problematic, they underline the general importance of local
variations. Inherited institutional and cultural patterns are important variables in
understanding mediatization of politics and governance in particular contexts.
Factors such as the size of the country, media systems’ political parallelism, the
number and nature of political parties, and the logic of election system have long-
reaching effects on the structure and internal communication of the political elite
and their interaction with the media. A small, multi-party country with a relatively
strong tradition of democratic corporatism and coalition governments will “react”
to mediatization in a different way than a large, federally structured country with
a strong tradition of two-party system and majority rule (see Reunanen, Kunelius
and Noppari 2010).
Looking at the coverage of climate change, however, suggests an even more
particular look at the structural conditions of the political field: it emphasizes the
importance of the subject matter or policy area (and perhaps suggests a look at
the key political disputes that give shape to the institutions and traditions). In
mediating climate politics, then, the national or local stakes in carbon economy
(or elsewhere: stakes in politics of development and vulnerability) play a crucial
role in shaping the local dynamics of the media field and its interaction with the
political field.4 Such a concrete, issue-focused view of politics may help to look

4 For examples of vulnerability as a key factor of local political field see Rhaman 2010, for “by-
stander” logic as a contrast to this see Kumpu and Rhaman 2012.
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 75

beyond the public image of political representation and the “professionalism” of

media. It sometimes shows rather nakedly how both the political and journalistic
fields are embedded in local economic structures. From this perspective, what
looks like a media’s increasing control over public “attention” can, at the level of
political representation, begin to look much more limited.
Australian coverage of climate change offers telling evidence on this. Chubb
(2012), for one, has argued that in the intensively coal-dependent national econ-
omy of Australia, the public debate on climate change has increasingly been
reduced to a general ideological distinction between “liberals” (right) and “labor”
(left). Indeed climate change has become one of the major politically loaded signi-
fiers that have decided the fate of a series of prime ministers, on both sides of the
political aisle (Chubb and Bacon 2010). In a country heavily implicated in export-
ing carbon-based energy (coal), industry lobbying and media management has
been fierce (McKewon 2012), and the effects of this pressure have begun to affect
also the professional norms and judgment of journalism. At its worst, it has led to
explicit denials of the basic norms of accountability (Chubb 2012).5 Recent exam-
ples of editorial reactions to the latest IPCC report (September 2013) can illustrate
this divided political field.

The IPCC report was an exercise in rebuilding credibility

THERE is an inevitable compromise at the heart of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change fifth assessment report on the state of scientific knowledge about what is happening
to the Earth’s climate. It is inescapable that this is a political document as much as a scientific
one.
This reality was explicit in comments by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri when he opened
week-long negotiations in Stockholm this week, saying the report “sets the stage for a positive
outcome” in negotiations for a global agreement to limit carbon dioxide emissions, which is
due to be finalised in Paris in 2015.
Further evidence comes from the fact that it was representatives from 110 governments who
attended the Stockholm meeting to refine the final draft “line by line”. (The Australian, Sep-
tember 28, 2013; my emphasis)

Onus on Abbott to act on climate change

The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report should be a game-changer in how
Australia tackles global warming. But it won’t be – not without strong leadership from Prime
Minister Tony Abbott.
Future generations will look back, see the clear evidence of human induced climate change in
this and previous IPCC reports and wonder why more wasn’t done sooner to tackle the prob-
lem? They will look at the safety-first approach of the Howard Coalition government on, say,

5 Similar polarized structures have also been seen elsewhere, for instance in the USA, although
climate change has never become as central a political focal point (see Boykoff 2011). There is also
the question about how such polarizing tendencies travel through transnational networks, but I
will not dwell on that here.
76 Risto Kunelius

terrorism, where substantial policy, investment and cultural change was implemented to mini-
mise that risk.
Why, they will ask, does this Abbott Coalition government at best play down the risk of
global warming and at worst deny it to protect vested interests and reinforce the ideological
groupthink among its cheer squad? (Sydney Morning Herald, September 28, 2013; my empha-
sis)

What makes climate change coverage interesting in this respect is not only how
politics overruns evidence, but also how such political polarization extends across
national political fields. These transnational links and networks of actors can
sometimes be rather complex and not very visible. But sometimes – as in the case
of the News Corporation and its owner Rupert Murdoch – we can also point to
how direct use of media outlets can polarize and sharpen political disputes inter-
nationally. This is also true of other issues than climate change. But for mediatiza-
tion research one lesson is at least an important one: even if there might be some-
thing that we can call “media logic”, there is still strong evidence to suggest that
politically motivated economic power can forcefully set the dynamics of public
debate. The “logic” of Murdoch media (from the Australian to the Wall Street Jour-
nal to FOX News) is very different from The Guardian or the The New York Times.
Although an explicit media-activity in politically polarizing climate change
discourse appears only in some contexts, such examples also point beyond the
traditional idea of media being embedded in local political fields or even larger
economic power struggles. Hallin and Mancini (2004: 263 ff.) offer a useful back-
ground to this broader sociological view by noting a trend they call secularization.
By an extended use of the term, they mean not the weakening of religion in the
life of citizens, but the eroding power of “traditional” modern institutions to define
collective identities – and the simultaneous increasing sense of individualization.
As both media and politics derive much of their cultural capital from the idea of
representing the public, this general shift in the real life-worlds and imagined
social landscape has potentially large consequences. A fast forward version this
shift goes like this. Western modern societies of the mid 20th century were much
based on (the assumption of) fairly stable, broad collective identities (most often
the interplay of class and national identity inherited from the 19th century [cf.
Mann 1993; 2013]). Their mass media were able to take these structures mostly for
granted. At minimum these structures supported the enduring occupational habits
of journalists. The two main modern versions of mass media – the political paral-
lelism of the party press and the professional, objective, public service news jour-
nalism – both situated themselves to this stable identity landscape, serving it with
different “logics”. Political journalism claimed it represented existing, stable,
almost “natural” social groups. Professional journalism claimed it rose above the
same taken-for-granted distinctions, focusing on facts and relying on the social
coherence of the natural collective identities to organize opinions and interpreta-
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 77

tion. It is this (real and imagined) landscape of predictable collective identities

that the “secularization” process erodes, thus theoretically leaving the “media”
(and politics) more in need to actively – itself, constantly – develop and cultivate
the broad, ideological frames of interpretation. At the same time the media tech-
nology has additionally shaken the taken-for-granted (often virtually monopo-
lized) control of media over audiences’ attention. Thus, it should not come as
a surprise that crafting loyalties, reinforcing identities, and defining opponents is
becoming a more integral part of professional “media logic”. From this perspective
of representation, then, mediatization also refers to a re-organization of the system
in which political identities are reproduced and in which political representation
takes place. Political identities no longer are imagined as something a priori to
communication but increasingly as something constructed actually in it. In a medi-
atized condition, identities and opinions of issues have become unbundled and
more floating, causing loyalty problems both for media institutions and political
parties. Such problems have been largely tackled with targeting and audience pro-
filing (both by media and politics). In journalism, Hjarvard (2008) suggests a new
kind of re-politization of media as a key issue in mediatization. Such a develop-
ment can be seen as a shift of emphasis taking place inside media logic of the
modus operandi of the media, to a new role of “media-affiliated political commen-
tators” (Hjarvard 2013: 72–77). Climate coverage, and the sometimes incompatible
realities that it is able to create, offers telling evidence on mediatization at this
level.
Thus, from a broader perspective of thinking about mediatization as a general
social, late-modern condition (rather than a new, dominant institutional logic), we
can see how mediatization means both the increasing importance on media institu-
tions (in constantly reproducing collective identities) and their diminishing cen-
trality (in being able, or even willing, to craft a shared representations of reality).
This poses the question about professional autonomy.

5 Mediatization and professionalism: climate

change and professional autonomy
At first sight, there is often a sense in which “mediatization” and “professionaliza-
tion” of journalism seem to overlap. We can certainly point out that the lament,
particularly by politicians, about mediatization has intensified during the same
period that an increasingly professional, independent, and autonomous journal-
ism has proliferated. Much of the research that juxtaposes “media logic” with
“political logic” elaborates these issues (Esser 2013). Several studies of textual
analysis testify, at the surface level anyway, of the increasing “control” and
“authority” of journalists over how the news are contextualized (for an overview,
78 Risto Kunelius

see Fink and Schudson 2013). As Esser (2013) points out, however, this does not
mean that “media logic” would be a one-dimensional, simple matter: it “includes”
at least technological, commercial, and professional aspects. Indeed, also Bour-
dieu (1998; 2005; Benson and Neuve 2005) with his notion of the “journalistic
field” points to the paradox of this development where journalism at the same
time is becoming more “autonomous” (from the point of view of the news sources)
and more “heteronomous” (from the point of view of the journalists) because of
increasing commercialization. What for many news sources (and perhaps also for
the public at large) looks like a period of the increasing autonomy and power of
journalists, for journalists themselves seems like a time of increasing pressures
time, publication space, and money – not to mention the ever more powerful army
of public relations professionals and lobbyists. In a nutshell, for journalists this
spells the loss of autonomy and control of their own work, and thus the “mediati-
zation” argument can also be pointed to media institutions themselves, leading to
a question about what is the “medium” that mediates (penetrates) journalism as
we have come to know it (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012). In journalism, this means
that a process of technological, economic, and social development has made the
boundaries of professional identities, institutions, and practices much more
porous and difficult to manage than they used to be and journalists have lost
control of some key aspects of their professional field. This is well reflected and
debated by recent calls for re-thinking (see Lewis 2012) or re-inventing (see Wais-
bord 2013) professionalism in journalism.
To begin with, climate coverage offers a lot of evidence that supports the worry
of declining professional values. We have already noted the way questions relating
to what constitutes respectable science has spelled trouble for professional values
of journalism. Even more concretely, Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) have nicely
defined how the professional value of “balance” has created paradoxical results,
keeping up an image of doubt in an age of ever more increasing certainty about
anthropogenic climate change. Several scholars provide diverse evidence of the
strong, concerted, and often transnationally well linked tactics with which indus-
tries involved in the fossil fuels business have backed information campaigns and
lobbying efforts to sustain doubt and distribute misinformation (cf. Boykoff 2011:
159–164; Orekes and Conway 2010; Mann 2012).
Reflected in the context of climate change, however, the “loss of autonomy”
can also point to possibilities (of this conjuncture of “mediatized journalism”).
Particularly during moments when global attention to the issue is intensified (cli-
mate summits, new scientific discoveries or reports), there have been signs of a
transnational journalistic field being articulated around the topic of climate change
(Kunelius and Eide 2012). Such “moments of hope” were particularly visible in the
coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit of 2009, during the high point of the
last attention cycle. Perhaps the most striking sign of this was the shared editorial,
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 79

initiated by The Guardian and published in 56 newspapers in 46 countries around

the world (Eide 2012a), concluding that “If we, with such different national and
political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders
can too” (The Guardian, December 6, 2009). There are also examples of how jour-
nalists are – at least potentially – able to challenge local political pressures and
the narrow “domestication” logic of their own, national “primary definers” – by
drawing from an emerging “cosmopolitan” professionalism of climate reporting.
(Eide and Ytterstad 2011; Eide 2012b; Tegelberg 2010)
Such leads could also provide new impetus on reflections about the possible
emergence of “global journalism” (Reese 2001, 2008; Berglez 2013; Waisbord 2013).
Often such discussions have tried to identify relatively abstract shared values that
would inform journalistic practices transnationally. But looking at the consequen-
ces and potentials of the newly connected and networked (mediatized) condition
of journalism through a global problem construction such as climate change could
possibly open another dimension. There is some evidence of how journalists can
develop – through the recognition of a shared problem – some global resources
to support their autonomy vis-à-vis other institutions. What this means is re-think-
ing and re-examining different global discourses (such as climate politics) as an
integral part of journalistic judgment. We can well think that some “ideological”
elements have in time become a part journalistic professional canon: free speech
and human rights come to mind first. Whether climate concerns can – in the long
run and quickly enough – reach this level of shared contemporary social imaginar-
ies is an open question. But arguably, on a global level, there are some indications
of such transnational professional climate values, that can become part of the
professional aspect of “news-media logic” (Esser 2013). More broadly put, there is
the question of how the high stakes and risks (the post-normal potential) of cli-
mate change can lead to new kinds of professional “creativity”. Berglez (2011), for
instance, has shown how environmental reporters in Sweden use the exceptional
gravity of climate change as an issue to argue for new insights into what “profes-
sionally high level journalism” can be.
Climate coverage also offers examples of renegotiating the relationship
between journalists and civil society activists in a manner that suggests new inter-
pretations of journalistic autonomy. During the relative attention peaks of climate
summits (cf. Russell 2010; Russell et al. 2012) some journalists have engaged in
new ways of interacting and forming “alliances” that support their reporting. Civil
society actors have both recognized their role as clearing houses of information
for journalists but also as independent sources of news and knowledge in the
networked media environment. The blurring of these boundaries (often within the
same person, as journalists act both as institutionally accredited reporters and as
individually profiled blogger-commentators at the same time) are, of course, from
the point of view professionalism a sign of renegotiating autonomy and the bound-
80 Risto Kunelius

aries of the field. They are a sign of “mediatization of journalism” by new kinds
of actors and their “logics” and a symptom of journalists adopting some of those
logics. The alliances formed on the basis of the shared concern and political
urgency also serve as an important factor that facilitates interaction and innova-
tion in journalism (see Russell 2013).
Thus, the exceptional weight of climate change as a global political problem
can help open up the complicated situation where “professional journalism” today
is situated. There are plenty of things to be really worried about in the “mediatiza-
tion” of journalism (or, de-professionalization of journalism). But a de-centered,
problem driven perspective to the new context of journalism – or the mediatization
of journalism – can also point to or even help to identify new resources for the
“self-defense” of journalism by opening up the formal boundaries of the profes-
sion. The urgency, global nature, and complexity of an issue like climate change
(or surveillance and privacy, as we have seen elsewhere) can lead to innovative
solutions and interaction between journalists and other actors.

6 Conclusion: mediatization discourse and media

criticism
As a register of general, popular criticism, talk about “mediatization” often in-
cludes a recognizable normative aspect. Complaining about the influence of “the
media”, dominant representatives of various social domains articulate the sense
of “the media” penetrating the area where they – by virtue of the self-image of
their own field – feel they should be in control. In such claims, “the media” is
used as a sweeping generalization that includes many different and also contradic-
tory forms or logics of more or less institutionalized communication. This is prob-
lematic, at least if we think that “mediatization” as a discourse should provide a
reasonably elaborated image of what is going on. For instance simplistic claims
about the sensationalist logic of journalism hardly apply with similar validity to
the tabloid press and elite outlets or to comedy news shows and news agency
reports. The popularity of the “mediatization” discourse (or more general laments
about “media power”) outside academia is an indication that public discourse has
become more sensitized to the way the complex changes in the media environment
are posing new questions to social actors. While this sensitivity is itself a healthy
sign of recognizing the important role of media and communication in current
societies, there is still some way left from a completely media-blind social imagina-
tion to one that would be able to set questions about media (media policy, media
criticism, media responsibility) in a more nuanced and analytic manner. While
academic, or research-based knowledge on mediatization cannot alone solve this
dilemma, it must be part of such an effort, i.e. an effort to help public discourse
on the media and its consequences to become more rational.
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 81

In the field of academia too, social theory and social research in general –
from the point of view of media researchers – seem often somewhat innocent and
uninterested about the complexity of the role of the media. Academic discourse
on media still often evaluates “the media” as something that should have a
“proper” role in social and institutional interaction. Traditionally (in the 20th-cen-
tury imaginary of social order) this tended to mean that media should transmit the
valid information, viewpoints, and knowledge produced and presented in other
fields and domains. A good media, in this view, only mediates, in a neutral sense.
The professional values of 20th-century news-journalism are an example of this:
accuracy, objectivity, and balance have pointed to the “proper” place of the media
against which biases, wrongdoings, and quality have been measured. This ideol-
ogy has for decades been under severe critical scrutiny from media researchers.
Recently, this neutral objectivity-paradigm has eroded and perhaps is in the pro-
cess of being increasingly replaced by a role of emphasizing transparency, expo-
sure of wrongdoings, and a general, abstract, critical attitude – a development
that partly is the immediate reason of popular mediatization discourse.
As mediatization has become a more urgent concern in the diverse institu-
tional quarters of contemporary societies, this can seductively suggest a new kind
of “centrality” to media and communication research. This certainly poses a big
challenge to media research, and a challenge it should try to rise to. “Mediatiza-
tion” and its fairly quick rise into an almost fashionable position in academia can
be seen as one way of meeting these expectations. However, too simplistically
taken such a centrality also has risks. Conscious of this, I have tried here to
develop an idea of de-centered mediatization research. As a conclusion, this de-
centering, in my mind, has two aspects that also have consequences for the norma-
tive aspect of mediatization discourse.
First, it would be healthy to see the object of research in mediatization as a
pattern of relationships. The great potential usefulness of the debate over mediati-
zation is that it indeed articulates an important current development that has come
to challenge some of the basic groundwork of modern social theory.6 Taken in
all its depth, mediatization calls into question our differentiation-obsessed social
vocabularies and legitimation discourses and demands a serious look at what is
happening inside and between institutional boundaries. It forces us to ask how
mediatization changes the “communicative figurations” (Hepp 2013) of different
domains as well as how the interaction between various domains (and, in particu-
lar between them and the “media”) is shaping up (Hjarvard 2013). This means that
the way the saturating “presence” of the media – from technological shifts in
attention dynamics and interactional affordances to the politics of representation –

6 This is not to say that such challenges had not been developing elsewhere than in media studies.
Rather, the point here is more to juxtapose a popular public self-identity of modern society and its
legitimation discourses and the potential built into mediatization discourse.
82 Risto Kunelius

closes and opens horizons for social actors is seriously seen as a field of inquiry.
Such a perspective to mediatization, I think, rules out a normative starting point
to mediatization. The role of mediatization research is to look at the changing
international patterns between social actors and the different roles that “media”
(defined in different ways) play in this. This should mean consciously avoiding
research perspectives that frame media research from particular stakeholder posi-
tions and which lead to posing the questions, collecting evidence, and evaluating
the performance of the media from a particular stakeholder position. Any a priori
normative perspective will radically narrow down the critical potential of mediati-
zation research.7 Rather we need mediatization research in which different stake-
holder positions are built into the research designs and conceptualization of medi-
atization.
Second, a de-centered view of mediatization cannot allow itself to become
abstracted from particular, historical subject matters. If mediatization research
means looking at media’s role in the interaction pattern between social actors, one
crucial aspect of such work is to factor into the research the particularities of the
problem constructions that bring the said social actors into interaction. Thus,
studying mediatization of the “European debt crisis” will be different from study-
ing mediatization of climate change (politics). This means that we will be able
only rather cautiously to develop a “general” theory of mediatization (if that is
necessary at all). But we will be better informed in understanding how different
forms of media matter in the actual, meaningful dynamics of contemporary life.
Such a de-centered perspective would also mean that the normative aspects of
mediatization – the different ways in which social actors evaluate their goals, the
opportunities of the media environment or the action of “the media” – would be
an integral part of what is studied. Studying the mediatization of a particular
problem construction thus will bring in the specific and contested discourses that
shape our understanding of the problem at hand. In climate change research, for
instance, a wide terrain of questions relating to the problems of communication
emerge, ranging from issues of “knowledge” to those of “justice”. It may be that
universal attempts to build, from a communication theory perspective, normative
answers to the “quality” of communication (or consequences of mediatization) are
doomed to being always temporary and inadequate. But a de-centered mediatiza-
tion research on climate change might serve as an example of fleshing out what
media ethics – or media research that would not shy away from a normative
vocabulary – might mean. It would argue that in the context of climate change
politics there are meaningful debates about “accuracy”, “sincerity”, “accountabil-
ity”, “justice”, “care”, “solidarity” (see, for instance, Couldry 2012: 180–210) that

7 A somewhat educated, cynical guess would be that if you take this seriously enough it will not
help your research funding. The power of the “mediatization” concept in an academic practice also
partly derives from the need and desire to control and govern the process.
 Climate change challenges: an agenda for de-centered mediatization research 83

our results feed into. Such media research can identify moments where some
aspects of mediatization (say: new resources of professionalism by alliances with
some actors) open up progressive potentials and where some aspects of it (say:
polarization of political discourse) seem to hinder our ability to live in the con-
flicted, interconnected and risky conditions we have created.
The current conditions of mediatization underline the fact that we have in a
new way become dependent on a shared communication infrastructure and medi-
ated interaction. Climate change politics perhaps remind us that this interaction
and its consequences not only take place between nations and interest groups but
also between humans and non-humans and between us and generations to come.
The two global, de-centering narratives “mediatization” and “climate change” take
place at the same time. There is no reason why this should not make us talk about
what would be a better and more sustainable way of living in this story. When you
wish that the polar bear and its young ones “make it” on the thinning layer of ice,
I guess you hope for yourself too.

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Wanning Sun
4 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics:
political legitimacy, public diplomacy and
the new art of propaganda
Abstract: Mediatization has become a fact of life in China, as have globalization,
urbanization, and commercialization. Yet changes in the Chinese media and com-
munication practices in the reforms era have almost always been documented
within the framework of duality between the state and market. Little attention has
been paid to the ways in which media logic informs and shapes the interplay of
these sometimes oppositional, sometimes complicit forces. While the state is keen
to experiment with a range of media forms and formats, it is more interested in
mediatization by the government and less interested in mediatization of politics.
This discussion shows that while such media practices may have worked to some
extent to maintain social stability at home, it has become increasingly problematic
as China intensifies its public diplomacy efforts to engage and communicate with
members of the public in foreign countries. By discussing the challenges facing
China’s state media in its selection and presentation of Chinese news for the con-
sumption of foreign audiences, this chapter argues that capacity of the Chinese
state to harness mediatization is crucial to its soft power objectives. This discus-
sion adds a cross-cultural dimension to its theorization, and at the same time
facilitates a much needed rethinking of the propaganda practices pursued by Chi-
nese media.

Keywords: mediatization with Chinese characteristics, mediatization by the gov-

ernment, soft power, public diplomacy, propaganda, media events, censorship,
political legitimacy, authoritarianism

In a country ruled by a party-state which holds on to power through coercion

rather than democratic elections, the issue of political authority and legitimacy is
of paramount importance. It is widely understood that without social stability,
there will not be economic prosperity. And without economic prosperity, it will be
hard for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to maintain power. Hence, the late
paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping famously said that “stability trumps all”,
and indeed an obsession with “maintaining social stability” (weiwen) has driven
the agenda and modus operandi of the Chinese Communist Party for several dec-
ades. It is a widely known fact that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) now
spends tens of billions of dollars on weiwen – more, indeed, than on external
defence. Given the importance of weiwen to the Party, officials use all available
88 Wanning Sun

resources, from overt state oppression to subtle cultural manipulation, to maintain

their goal. Having become both the means and end, stability – or the threat of
instability – has provided justification for not only the Party’s oppression and
censorship, but equally importantly, its media strategies and media practices.
In addition to maintaining stability inside China, China’s state media have
taken on the primary role of pushing China’s new public diplomacy agenda outside
China. In recent years, especially since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, there has
been a prevalent feeling among Chinese policy makers that although China’s
global influence in the domains of politics, economics, and international relations
has grown exponentially, the international community’s understanding and
knowledge of China is limited, biased, and inaccurate (Wang 2008; Hu and Ji
2012). Therefore, projecting a global image of China that is “objective, truthful,
and three-dimensional” (li ti) has become not only necessary but also urgent”
(Yang 2011). China’s new public diplomacy is intended to address this issue by
building “an objective and friendly publicity environment” (People’s Daily 2004) in
which the state media can “actively cooperate with Chinese national development
strategy and gradually change China’s image in the international society from
negative to neutral to positive” (Wang 2008: 269). More specifically, China’s public
diplomacy has four stated objectives. First, China seeks understanding for its poli-
tics and policies, which are based on the principles of “harmonious society” and
“scientific development”. Second, China wants to be seen as a stable, reliable, and
responsible economic partner that does not pose a threat. Third, China wants to
be seen as a trustworthy and reliable member of the international community that
is actively contributing to world peace. Finally, China wants acknowledgement
and respect for its contribution to culture and civilization (d’Hooghe 2008). And it
goes without saying that if Chinese state news media manage to improve the CCP’s
credibility and reputation in the global domain, the CCP will by default gain politi-
cal mileage with the domestic audience and boost its claim as the only rightful
and legitimate ruling party.
Policy-makers have realized acutely that the old geopolitical imagination of
the world outside China, divided into those countries which are China’s friends
and those which are China’s enemies, is no longer adequate. Old-fashioned gov-
ernment to government diplomacy therefore must be supplemented by a range of
other forms of diplomacy, including public diplomacy, media diplomacy, and peo-
ple-to-people diplomacy. In the domain of China’s communication and media prac-
tices, there has been a shift from an emphasis on propaganda to public relations
(Brady 2008; Chen 2004). This shift has implicitly done away with the notion of
the “enemy”, a concept and term which was much utilized in China’s foreign
policy during the socialist period to describe and account for China’s foreign affairs
decisions. Instead, the West has been re-imagined as the key and most difficult
target of China’s “external propaganda” (wai xuan), whose unfavourable, negative
and unfriendly view of China stands to be corrected and changed.
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 89

The state media’s dual task – maintaining stability at home and pursuing
public diplomacy abroad – faces further challenges as well as opportunities as a
result of the explosion of information and communication on the Internet, and the
phenomenally high uptake of social media in everyday Chinese life. If mediatiza-
tion has a “specific form” in “each specific epoch” (Krotz 2009: 27), it also has
place-specific implications and impacts the particular social, political, and cultural
context. In China as elsewhere, increasing penetration of media and media tech-
nologies into the lives of individuals is reshaping the ways in which people relate
to each other, to society in general, and to the government. At the same time, it
is redefining the boundary between “domestic audience” and “international audi-
ence”. The implication of this process is clear. On the one hand, the boundary is
becoming increasingly deterritorialized and cannot be fixed to geographic demar-
cations separating guonei (inside China) and guowai (outside China). On the other
hand, domestic audiences and global audiences continue to exist in vastly differ-
ent and incompatible symbolic universes, and effectively mediating the differences
across these two symbolic universes is the key to the success of public diplomacy.
Much has been written to theorize the relationship between politics and media
from the analytic perspective of mediatization. Societies are, to varying degrees,
subject to the tension and conflict between political logic and media logic (Ström-
bäck 2008; Strömbäck and Esser 2009). As a result, questions are asked about how
“government is mediatized” and how “the mediatization of government” plays out
(Couldry in this volume). For this reason, politics, like family and education, is to
be examined as an institution, whose nature and characteristics are subject to
change due to its growing dependency on and interaction with media (Hjarvard
in this volume). While these perspectives have gained much analytic purchase in
the examination of media and politics in Europe and within English-speaking
scholarly circles, their analytic validity has not been tested outside this “comfort
zone”. To what extent is the mediatization of politics also happening in non-West-
ern societies, which, though still under authoritarian or even totalitarian rule, are
nevertheless equally caught up in the “meta-processes” (Krotz 2009) of urbaniza-
tion and globalization, as well as mediatization? “Media logic” has been conceptu-
alized as a tripartite combination of a commercial logic, a technological logic, and
a cultural logic (Mazzoleni 2008). However, Lundby (2009), by outlining a range
of positions, demonstrates the contested nature of this concept, and points to a
divergence of views about its relationship to the concept of mediatization. Never-
theless, Mazzoleni’s tripartite notion of media logic is useful for framing the
research questions to be pursued in this paper. For instance, how does media
logic, thus conceptualized, manifest itself in societies – such as Russia and China –
which are transitioning from socialist to neoliberal economies? If the tension and
conflict between media logic and political logic form a key dimension of mediatiza-
tion (Strömbäck and Esser 2009), are there differences and similarities in the ways
in which such tensions and conflicts are managed and negotiated in media sys-
90 Wanning Sun

tems which face the dual pressures of the “party-line” and the “bottom line” (Y.
Zhao 1998)? Above all, how can the mediatization of politics and government, as
a theoretical position and analytical method, continue to be productive outside
the Western liberal-democratic social context?
To date, inquiries into Chinese media and politics framed with these questions
in mind are few and far between. In particular, how the meta-process of mediatiza-
tion affords China’s state media both an opportunity and a challenge in its dual
objective of maintaining stability and pursuing public diplomacy remains largely
unexplored. Yet, looking back at the major innovations in its media practices over
the past two decades, we can see clearly that a deliberate strategy of engaging
with various dimensions of mediatization has been at work. This chapter is con-
cerned with the different facets of this strategy. In what follows, I discuss the
interplay between media and politics by looking at how China’s state media fulfils
its dual mission of maintaining stability and pursuing public diplomacy. The chap-
ter offers a critical account of state media practices and the news media’s success
and failure in such endeavours. I consider some of the innovative aspects of the
state-authorized and state-staged media campaigns, spectacles, and initiatives.
Then, continuing in the vein of innovation, and paying particular attention to the
media campaign in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, I examine
some new strategies of news-making in the state media which enable the govern-
ment to engage in mediatization for purposes of shoring up leadership in times of
disasters and national tragedies. This is followed by a discussion of the undesira-
ble consequences of mediatization from the perspective of the Chinese govern-
ment. By examining social media’s responses to the Wenzhou high-speed train
crash in November 2011, I point to a process of mediatization against government,
which takes place as a result of the government’s attempt at suppression and
media censorship. Finally, I return to the questions regarding media logic, media
logic versus political logic, and mediatization of politics/government. Building on
the discussion of these cases, I put forward some analytic perspectives that may
enable us to better understand how mediatization works in non liberal-democratic
systems. In doing so, I also hope to advance an alternative way of examining
the impact and implications of China’s media – and particularly propaganda –
practices.

1 Chinese media events

Ceremonial media events can be understood as classic examples of mediatization
in that they exploit the logic and rules of media events as a format of presentation.
Considered, among many other definitions, to be “a particular way of seeing, cov-
ering and interpreting social, cultural and political phenomena” (Strömbäck and
Esser 2009: 212), the concept of media logic draws our attention to the form and
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 91

formats in which information and experience is selected, organized, and presented

(Snow 1983; Altheide 1995). Exploiting media logic, media events effectively har-
ness broadcast technologies to deliver integration and national unity in spatial
and temporal senses (Mazzoleni 2008). Processes of mediatization affect almost all
aspects of our social lives, and levels of mediatization have increased exponen-
tially from early modernity to late modernity (Lundby 2009). Given the phenome-
nal growth of Internet usage, the adoption of digital media technologies in our
everyday lives, and the increasing popularity of social media as an alternative to
mainstream media, it is not surprising that we are witnessing a growing tendency
and capacity to exploit media logic not only on the part of state broadcasters, but
also individuals and groups with an alternative or anti-establishment political
view. In this sense, both the continued practice of centralized ceremonial media
events and news coverage of disasters are but various manifestations of mediatiza-
tion.
Media events, as they are defined, are pre-planned, transmitted live, intended
to interrupt viewers’ routines, and transmitted to a remote audience (Dayan and
Katz 1992: 7). For the past two decades, Chinese television has actively experi-
mented with new broadcasting formats for showcasing China’s achievements on
economic, scientific, and technological fronts. These include the opening of the
Yellow River Xiaolangdi Dam in 2001, the completion of the Three Gorges Dam
Project in 2006, and the successful launch of space shuttles in 2003 and satellites
in 2007. In a gesture towards a more open media environment, the state media has
also adopted the format of media events. In 1998, for the first time in history,
Chinese state television decided to televise US President Bill Clinton’s press confer-
ence at Beijing University. Questions to Clinton from journalists and Chinese stu-
dents, as well as Clinton’s answers, went to air live without editing, sending a
refreshing and powerful message to the international as well as domestic commu-
nity about China’s willingness to be more open and transparent. However, more
often than not, in addition to showcasing national achievements, media events
are reserved for occasions symbolizing the prowess of the nation as well as the
leadership’s absolute command of the army. The television ceremony of the mili-
tary parade on October 1, 1999 marking the 50th anniversary of the People’s Repub-
lic of China had the most obvious element of what Dayan and Katz call “conquest”
and “coronation”. The televised ceremony featured President Jiang Zemin, keen to
consolidate his power base following his recent ascent, standing on a slow-moving
car, driving past a display of impressive-looking weapons and military equipment,
waving to soldiers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
In the eyes of the global audience, the most spectacular media event ever
staged by Chinese television was the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Accessed via
satellite television, on the Internet, and a wide range of other technological plat-
forms, the event combined all the defining features of a classic media event and
many more. Described as China’s biggest “coming out party”, the media event
92 Wanning Sun

signalled post-Olympics China’s emergence as a “world power” that has re-

asserted its deep commitment to a return to national glory (Finlay 2008). If the
Olympic Games was the most spectacular, the annual Chinese Spring Festival Tele-
vision Gala is arguably the most innovative media event format on Chinese televi-
sion. For centuries, Chinese families have celebrated the Chinese New Year with
an annual family reunion, where family members gather on New Year’s Eve at the
dinner table to feast on good food. In 1983, China Central Television (CCTV)
launched its first Spring Festival Eve Television Gala. Lasting four to six hours,
the Gala was packed with entertainment and performances by nationally known
celebrities and timed to coincide with the family reunion dinner, thus starting a
new national ritual. Some describe the annual TV Gala as a “happy marriage
between an ancient Chinese ideal and a modern Western technology, whereby
happy family gatherings are turned into ‘national reunions’” (B. Zhao 1998: 46).
Others view the show as a replacement for the sacred time that was formerly used
for offerings to deities and ancestors (Lu 2009: 113).
By delivering strong messages of patriotism and national unity packaged as
entertainment, fun, and family festivity, the Gala allows the Chinese state to enter
the domestic sphere of private citizens for the first time, to carry out its ideological
work in the home. Since its inception, the Chinese state media has explored ways
of maximizing the reach of its audience. In 1994, CCTV started to broadcast the
gala event simultaneously to Chinese communities in North America and Australia.
In 1997, ratings for domestic audiences were recorded at 90.67 % (Zhao 1998), not
including the diasporic Chinese communities all over the world who could also
watch via satellite. Since 2005, the Gala has been broadcast all over the world in
four languages, including English and Spanish, thereby becoming a truly global
affair. The Gala not only introduces a modern and mediatized way of conducting
a traditional ritual, it has also irreversibly changed the pattern of interaction and
socialization among family members in the domestic space. Finally, in addition to
exploiting the cultural and technological logic, the Spring Festival Television Gala
has effectively tapped into the commercial potential of mediatization. In 2005,
advertising rates for the initial several seconds before the show were an astonish-
ing 3–10 million Yuan (US$ 360,000–1.2 million) (Martinsen 2005).
The proliferation of transmission technologies and delivery platforms in this
case has not fragmented the Chinese audiences. On the contrary, it has enabled
the Chinese state to effectively reach overseas audiences, which are the intended
target of China’s public diplomacy exercise. In other words, state-supervised cere-
monial media events not only refuse to decline; they have actually gained a height-
ened relevance due to China’s continuing need for nation-building and its going
global, soft power agenda.
While there is much talk about a post-broadcasting era and the de-massifica-
tion of media audience, live transmission of national ceremonies, rituals, and
events, particularly via satellite, is still a significant nation-building media strategy
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 93

and practice in the political communication in China. In fact, two factors – techno-
logical and political – have given further rationale for the continuous deployment
of this media form. The widespread use of satellite transmission has enabled the
state media to reach both the most remote areas inside China and the diasporic
Chinese communities and global audiences beyond the national border. The
increasingly high uptake of online technologies in the domestic setting makes it
possible for viewers to access media events staged on Chinese television online as
well as via television.
Though separated by the tyranny of distance, viewers around the world can
re-territorialize themselves by tuning in to the “comfort zone” of the motherland.
But most importantly, the Gala forces us to rethink the classic definition of media
events as intrinsically disruptive to the rhythm and routine of the broadcaster and
audience’s everyday lives. Rather than forcing ordinary viewers to leave the space
of home or cancel or delay their family reunions, television becomes an expected
family guest whose presence adds rather than detracts from the festivity of the
occasion. The synchronization of the traditional Chinese calendar with the tempo-
rality of official media ensures the regular imagining of the nation.

2 Mediatization by the government

In their attempt to provide a post-9/11 update on the genre of media events, Katz
and Liebes point to the decline of ceremonial events both in frequency and central-
ity. At the same time, they observe that Terror, Disaster, and War – the unholy
trinity of trauma – have taken center-stage. Contemporary television coverage of
Terror, Disaster, and War resembles news events in that it is unexpected and not
pre-planned, and always has an element of surprise. However, it differs from news
events in the early decades of television in a number of ways. First, whereas news
events in earlier decades were unscripted traumas reported mostly in bulletin
mode, contemporary coverage of Terror, Disaster, and War has evolved to take on
what Liebes (1998) calls the “marathon” mode. In these “disaster marathons” (Lie-
bes 1998), television coverage gives meticulous attention to any major and minor
developments, endlessly repeating horrific images of death and trauma, following
every rescue and relief effort, interspersed with interviews with experts and politi-
cians regarding the causes, consequences, significance, and implications of the
events. Second, media events of ceremonies and rituals are occasions whereby the
political logic and media logic of mediatization dovetail to achieve a “happy”,
“successful”, and, some may even say, magical outcome. In contrast, mediatiza-
tions of Terror, Disaster, and War often become occasions whereby the media logic
of mediatization takes precedence over the political logic of stability and unity.
As Katz and Liebes (2007) observe, ceremonial events are characterized by “co-
productions” between broadcasters and establishments, whereas disruptive events
94 Wanning Sun

are characterized by “co-productions” between broadcasters and anti-establish-

ment agencies, be they terrorists, forces of Nature, or enemy forces. Often, a likely
consequence of this marathon live coverage is that the government is put under
pressure to take action. This leads to another major difference between media
events of a ceremonial and ritualistic nature and media events reporting on Terror,
Disaster, and War. Whereas in the former, the establishments, in alliance with the
broadcaster, are often in firm control of the script, the format, and the construction
of meanings of the event, in the latter scenario this sense of control can no longer
be assumed on the part of the political establishments. Instead, they must act and
often improvise in response to what is happening.
Rather than seeing the original format of media events as being “upstaged” or
even replaced by live coverage of Terror, Disaster, and War, some prefer to think
of them as various components or forms of a communication ecology. For instance,
Rothenbuhler (2010) proposes a “larger encompassing paradigm”, which is able
to account for media events, disaster marathons, as well as routine news. Well-
known for his interest in the ritual dimension of communication, Rothenbuhler
argues that understanding how ritual and ceremony function in society is key to
our understanding of human communication. If we consider media events, disaster
marathons, and routine news as all having a distinct ritual dimension, we are
better positioned to understand how a distinct media form can develop its own
genre rules that “help it be what it is and do what it does” (2010: 39). Although
Rothenbuhler does not explicitly advocate this, he is indeed advancing a holistic
view of communication that considers “all of the varied acts, processes, and arte-
facts of communication” (2010: 39–40) in juxtaposition and combination with one
another. Only when each media form is examined as part of a communication
ecology can one start to reveal how a “cross-referencing, mutually supporting net-
work” constitutes the “reality” we know (2010: 40).
Lundby’s study (2012) of the Norwegian news media’s responses to the terrorist
acts committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in July 2011 serves as a good
example of how various acts, processes, and artefacts of communication can be
examined in juxtaposition and combination. Lundby’s analysis shows that the
media’s coverage proceeded in three phases. In the first phase, the media was
“taken by surprise”. Adopting routine techniques and procedures in covering
unexpected events, media practitioners treated the terrorist acts as a news event,
and acted accordingly. Editors and journalists set out to report the incidents by
investigating what had happened, establishing the cause of the incident, and iden-
tifying the culprit. The second phase of the coverage featured mainly media events,
whereby funerals and the memorial ceremonies were televised on national televi-
sion. This was followed by a phase of “critical journalism”, the final and longest
phase of coverage, during which media reflected not only on issues confronting
Norway in terms of anti-terrorism and protecting citizens, but also the inadequa-
cies and blind spots in the media’s own coverage of the event.
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 95

In Norway, as in most places in the world, terrorist acts, large-scale accidents,

and natural disasters are part and parcel of what media has to deal with. On May
12, 2008, less than three months before the Beijing Olympics, an earthquake of 8.0
on the Richter Scale hit Wenchuan and its neighboring towns in China’s Sichuan
Province, killing more than 70,000 people and leaving millions homeless. Within
the first few hours after the quake struck, CCTV, unable to get to the scene of the
disaster, resorted to using video footage taken by citizens. Also, contrary to its
normal practice of minimizing or even censoring information about natural disas-
ters in the media, the state media, CCTV in particular, acted quickly to launch a
sustained media campaign, covering the disaster and its aftermath 24 hours a day
for two weeks on end. The coverage documented the relief and rescue efforts with
an unusual level of detail, including the latest death toll, injuries, damage reports,
the number of people displaced, and the logistical difficulties hampering the rescu-
ing efforts. The news coverage took on the appearance of factual, balanced, and
uncensored reporting – a style of news reporting that would resonate with Western
viewers. The coverage included round-the-clock updates of the latest develop-
ments, on-location interviews with rescue coordinators and experts, as well as
CNN-style banners running across the bottom of the television screen with the
latest casualty figures. The coverage struck most Chinese as being refreshingly
candid, given that they were mostly used to the state media’s tendency not to
reveal the extent of large-scale disasters and crises, most recently during the SARS
(Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis. The lack of timely and accurate report-
ing during the Tangshan earthquake of 1979 was also still vivid enough in the
people’s memory to form a striking contrast.
The human interest angle of some stories was obvious. While showing the
Chinese government to be firmly in control of the relief and rescue efforts, the
coverage portrayed Premier Wen Jiabao and provincial and local-level cadres
doing their best in coordinating relief and rescue efforts, while revealing them-
selves to be caring, strong, yet vulnerable individuals (Sun 2010). Premier Wen
gained a reputation as “Premier Warmth”, and stories of heroic but human individ-
uals – police, army, fire fighters, and teachers – who devoted themselves to saving
strangers despite the grave risks were palpably moving. Among these, for instance,
were the widely circulated and well-published stories of the “police mum”, a local
policewoman, Jiang Xiaojuan, who selflessly breastfed many infants orphaned
during the earthquake (Ma and He 2008). To Chinese viewers, especially those
middle-aged or older, her generosity evoked the well-rehearsed socialist cultural
representation of a village woman in Linyi, Shandong Province, who gave her
breast milk to a dying soldier during the War against Japan. For weeks on end,
Chinese viewers were treated to a roller coaster of high dramas against the back-
drop of a spectacular natural disaster, consisting of stories of the orphan, the
selfless mother, and the kindness of the heroic stranger. These are not only stories
which evince the essence of socialist realism frequently deployed in socialist cul-
96 Wanning Sun

ture, but they are also universal human interest stories which global audiences
could identify with and relate to.
The most powerful moment in the process of mediatizing the earthquake disas-
ter took place on May 12, 2008, when, for the first time, a Chinese media event
was organized around the themes of grief, death, and loss, instead of conquest
and success. By announcing to viewers that it would coordinate a three-minute
silence, CCTV tried something new not only in the history of media in the PRC,
but also in the world. Prior to the three-minute silence, viewers were repeatedly
advised, in the form of words running across the television screen, on what to do
during the three-minute period: “If you are walking or driving, please pull up by
the road. If you are seated, please stand up. Wherever you are and whatever you
are doing, please stop still for three minutes to pay respect to the dead.” At 2:28
P.M. on May 12, 2008, China stood still for three minutes, and the television screen
featured nothing but the haunting sound of sirens and horns reverberating
throughout the nation. This was the first time mourning of this scale was repre-
sented as a “media event”, and is perhaps the most powerful and memorable
moment in the history of Chinese television (Sun and Zhao 2009). When relayed
by Western media, global audiences were equally moved and haunted by the
three-minute silence. Western audiences, long used to images and narratives of
China’s poor human rights record, seemed genuinely impressed by the state
media’s display of compassion for ordinary Chinese people. For the Chinese,
including those now living outside China, the ceremony provided a virtual time
and space for people to mourn, to reach for some kind of closure (Sun 2010). The
government presented itself as not only the benevolent lifesaver in the aftermath
of the earthquake, but, equally importantly, the only agent capable of healing the
collective wound inflicted on the national psyche.
Public opinion outside China took note of the uncharacteristically open man-
ner in which this large-scale natural disaster was reported in the Chinese media,
and was suitably impressed. CCTV, as part of its comprehensive, all-angles report-
ing of the event, provided a regular summary of foreign national leaders’ favoura-
ble assessments of the Chinese government and its people during the relief and
rescue efforts. It also summarized or cited verbatim the foreign media’s acknowl-
edgement of the Chinese media’s exceptional willingness to be honest about the
number of casualties and the level of difficulty in relief and rescue efforts. On May
26, in a reporting segment titled “A true account of the Wenchuan earthquake”
(wenchuan da dizhen dishi), CCTV 1 (targeting domestic viewers) and CCTV 4 (tar-
geting international Mandarin-speaking viewers) listed the Associated Press, The
Independent in Russia, The Times in the UK, and Lianhe Zaobao in Singapore as
examples of foreign media praising the Chinese media. Individual blogs on the
Sichuan earthquake were abundant, and social media was also actively circulating
images and information related to the earthquake. They were almost exclusively
in line with the state media in tone and sentiment, echoing a heightened sense of
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 97

patriotism and renewed allegiance to the Party. The following comment made by
a Chinese blogger about the lack of criticism of China from the Western media
could also be true of the reason behind the lack of criticism in the Chinese blogos-
phere.

Since the Chinese media coverage was extensive and multi-dimensional, Western media was
hard pressed to find some angles which would embarrass China. In this sense, China not only
won the battle of relief and rescue during the Wenchuan earthquake, it also triumphed in its
media war with the West. (Ketcat 2008)

The Sichuan earthquake is not so much a case of “making the foreign serve the
Chinese”; rather, it is a case of using foreign media to shore up the legitimacy of
the Chinese state and its media. While both foreign publics and the domestic audi-
ences were the targeted audiences in this case, the “surplus value” afforded by
the foreign media generated an extra layer of meaning intended for the domestic
audience – the Chinese government is strong and powerful and is the best option
on offer for the happiness and stability of the Chinese people. Indeed, the state
media’s coverage had raised the eyebrows of some China-watchers, some of whom
saw it as a sign that China had finally mastered the art of soft power and had
become an integrated part of the world’s media, as well as of the global economy
and international politics (Hunter 2009).
Compared with the Norwegian case in Lundby’s study, CCTV’s coverage of the
earthquake also went through the initial phase of “being taken by surprise” and
the subsequent phase of “media events”, but with one visible difference. In the
Chinese case, the initial news event phase was brief, followed by the second phase,
during which news events and media events proceeded in parallel. The biggest
difference, however, lies in the fact that the third phase of critical journalism,
featuring reflections on the issues and problems on the part of the government
and media, is conspicuously missing in the Chinese case. Due to the absence of
this phase, a range of issues which would call into question the role and perform-
ance of the media and the government at both national and local levels were
conveniently left out. Questions that were left out include the issue of corrupt local
officials, who, bribed by developers, may have allowed sub-standard buildings to
be built prior to the earthquake, causing more buildings than necessary to collapse
and more lives to be lost. They also include the cases of individual local officials
absconding from duties in a time of crisis, or even worse, pocketing large sums of
money donated to victims of the earthquake. Finally, they include the question of
how and why media could not include stories that go against the hegemonic dis-
course of national unity under the central government.
As discussed elsewhere, natural disasters have no known human culprits.
Since the Chinese government could not possibly be held responsible for causing
the earthquake, it could step in good conscience as the supreme savior and rescuer
of victims. Furthermore, the reporting of natural disasters presents clear-cut and
98 Wanning Sun

universally intelligible symbolic actions such as death, survival, human resilience,

and the triumph of the human spirit. It also has a pre-determined narrative struc-
ture, starting with destruction and conflict, followed by crisis, and ending with
closure and the restoration of normalcy. All these factors conspire to make the
coverage of natural disasters the safest topic with which to experiment with alter-
native news styles, including objective reporting (Sun 2010). Natural disasters are
likely to afford a shared space whereby audiences from different cultural and
political backgrounds can all recognize the symbolic forms and actions. In other
words, the across-the-board positive response to Chinese state media’s coverage
of the disaster is not so much due to the intrinsically accurate, truthful, and
“warts-and-all” accounts. Instead, it is due to two things: the outlook and format
of objective reporting, a globally recognized symbolic form; and a welcome and
refreshing departure from the convention of propaganda-style reporting of human
tragedies, contrary to the expectations of domestic and international audiences.
Such mediatization is not undertaken with the primary intention to inform the
audience fully, objectively, and accurately. Rather, it is to create a sustained sym-
bolic space in which the government, without revealing the workings of the politi-
cal process, can nevertheless be seen to perform its role as a benevolent savior
capable of decisive actions and humane responses. However, as the case of the
Wenzhou train crash incident – discussed below – shows, projecting such an
image is not always possible or easy.

3 Mediatization against government

On July 24, 2011, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Prov-
ince, killing at least 39 people and injuring 192. News of the accident was initially
transmitted via social media by one of the injured passengers. Immediately after
the crash, media at both national and provincial levels gave extensive coverage to
the incident. However, it soon became apparent to the central authorities that this
detailed coverage could result in the accident becoming a catalyst for widespread
criticism of the government, especially China’s Ministry of Railways (MOR), thus
triggering instability or even unrest. After a short-lived period of media transpar-
ency, the government promptly shifted to damage control. The Ministry of Railways
immediately held a press conference, citing the breakdown of railway signals as
the cause of the accident. The Ministry’s spokesperson, Wang Yongping, was eva-
sive and dismissive of journalists’ questions, sparking further outrage. Following
orders from above, the state mainstream media fell silent on a number of ques-
tions, including: Who was to blame for the train crash? Was the decision to literally
bury the train wreckage in made in order to “bury” the story? Why was there an
infant still alive when the rescue operation was declared complete? The media was
prevented from asking the more far-reaching questions, including whether the
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 99

accident was a result of the China Rail Corp pushing for breakneck economic
growth at the expense of ensuring safety, and if the crash exposed deeply
entrenched and wide-reaching corruption within the railway industry. The last two
questions came to assume more pertinence later on, given that the head of the
Ministry of Railways, Liu Zhijun, was sacked from his position only a few months
prior to the train crash, having been found guilty of corruption on a massive scale
in early 2013, and sentenced to death with the possibility of reprieve.
Unlike the Sichuan earthquake, the government kept a tight leash on what
was permissible in the media. The authorities ordered the media not to send
reporters to the scene, not to report too frequently, and not to link the story to
high-speed rail development. Journalists were told not to ask about the causes of
the accident, not to follow further development of the incident, not to speculate
on the impact of the accident, and not to circulate or publish personal microblogs.
Instead, they were told to look for “moving” stories of bravery and individual
sacrifice, such as the blood donation of local people, in order to show love and
compassion during a time of disaster (Branigan 2011). Censorship of news coverage
of the train crash was just as tight one year later, when the site was cordoned off
by the police, and China’s Ministry of Railways contacted media organizations and
told them not to report on the anniversay (Tovrov 2011).
If state media had conducted a highly successful campaign after the Sichuan
earthquake, winning public opinion both at home and abroad, its lack of a media
campaign in the coverage of the train crash, compounded by the vociferous
response from the Chinese online blogoshere and the international media, ensured
that the train crash was not only a disaster resulting in the loss of lives, but also
a political disaster from the point of view of propaganda and public diplomacy.
Mediatization took place not in spite of but because of the censorship, and pro-
ceeded in a number of ways.
First, where state media was muted on some key questions, social media and
individual bloggers started to ask trenchant questions. They were remarkably
forthright about their determination of the motive behind the government’s action.
Whereas the authorities were eager to erase evidence of the wreckage by burying
it, footage of earth movers burying the train wreckage quickly found its way to
YouTube. While the government spokesperson justified the burying of the wreck-
age on safety and logistical grounds, individual bloggers saw it as a blatant
attempt to “bury” the story of the disaster. Rather than taking on the official expla-
nation for the cause of the accident – signal failure – bloggers questioned if the
MOR had put speed over safety in its race to score political points through the
development of high speed trains. Bloggers repudiated the MOR spokesperson’s
attempt to frame the crash as an isolated incident and to restore faith in high
speed train development. Instead, they saw it as a tragic result of the deep-seated
corruption in the railway industry, as well as the government’s tendency to privi-
lege political expediency over the livelihoods of ordinary Chinese.
100 Wanning Sun

Chinese social media also treated as newsworthy any attempt on the part of
the Chinese propaganda department to cover up the incident. A considerable num-
ber of video clips uploaded on Yukou, the Chinese version of YouTube, were news
and commentary programs that had been cancelled, censored, or reprimanded as
a result of criticizing the authorities and showing sympathy for the victims of the
train crash. For example, one of the hosts of 24 Hours, a current affairs program
on CCTV, began the program with what later became a widely circulated – via
Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) and text messaging – quotation:

Can we still drink milk without worrying about its poisonous content, live in buildings which
do not crumble, walk on roads which don’t collapse, travel in high-speed trains which don’t
crash? Can we hope that when there is a train crash, there is not such a hurry to bury the
wreckage? China is hurtling along as fast as its high-speed trains, but what is the cost of
going so fast? Please slow down, don’t leave people’s souls behind.

The same program also featured, from a human interest angle, the situation of a
two-and-a-half-year old girl who was seriously wounded in the accident. According
to social media, the producer of 24 Hours, Mr Wang Qinglei, was suspended
because of these critical remarks made during the program (http://youtube.com/
watch?v=pCKdlXJectA). As a result, the show he produced went “viral” through
social media.
Second, the knee-jerk response from Chinese state media to hush up the inci-
dent sent a signal to the foreign media that it was an incident well worth scrutiniz-
ing. A quick survey of the stories that appeared in major international newspapers
such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Figaro Times,
Lianhe Zao Bao, Asahi Shimbini, and Japan Economic News, as well as news agen-
cies such as Reuters, indicates that Chinese censorship of the accident was as
newsworthy as the accident itself. Moreover, the censorship of the state media
inadvertently led to the coalition between Chinese social media and foreign media.
Chinese bloggers wanted to know what foreign media was saying and why the
accident was of news interest to them. In a blog article entitled “Why are foreign
media interested in the train crash”, a blogger, citing numerous articles from for-
eign media, attributed foreign interest to a number of factors, including the issue
of safety, the modus operandi of the rescue team, the cause of the accident, and
finally, to the power of the Internet in giving voice to ordinary people. While Chi-
nese bloggers were assiduously gathering, circulating, and analyzing the views of
foreign media, foreign media, long suspicious of the state media, found much
resonance in the views expressed in the blogs. A New York Times opinion piece
contributed by David Bandurski, a Hong Kong-based researcher on Chinese media,
quoted Chinese blogger Tong Dahuan, who urged the Chinese government to “slow
your soaring steps forward, and wait for your people”. “We don’t want derailed
trains, or collapsing bridges, or roads that slide into pits. We don’t want our homes
to become death traps. Move more slowly. Let every life have freedom and dignity”
(Bandurski 2011). Interestingly, Tong’s appeal to the Chinese government,
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 101

expressed in his blog post, became more widely circulated in the blogosphere after
it was cited in the New York Times piece.
Unlike the earthquake, asking questions about motives, causes, consequences,
and significance in this case necessarily means questioning whether the govern-
ment is responsible and in what ways the government is responsible. Whereas, in
the case of the earthquake, it is much easier to identify the cause of the event as
the force of Nature, the causes of the train crash were much more contested and
perhaps multifactorial. After the earthquake, it was much easier for the Chinese
government to act as a savior, powerful yet compassionate, in the relief and rescue
efforts, but after the train crash, the government inhabits the ambiguous space
between hero and villain. Whereas the earthquake became an effective catalyst for
Chinese patriotism, the train crash instead activated a parallel latent collective
sentiment – a distrust of the official lines spun out by the state media. As a result
of these factors, foreign media, following its own “symbolic strategy” of rendering
reality into comprehensive accounts by giving explanations which “make sense”
to its intended audience, found an unlikely ally in the Chinese blogosphere. Or,
framed differently, middle-class bloggers’ collective “political speech act” in their
commentaries of the train crash (Wu 2012) dovetailed surprisingly well with the
Western practices of selecting, presenting and organizing material for news.
The Chinese government is the key political actor in domestic news, and its
image depends upon the ambiguous and contradictory ways the Chinese party-
state is regarded by its own people. On the one hand, there is widespread and
deep-rooted distrust of government news and propaganda; on the other hand, the
state is expected to play the benevolent role of taking care of its people in times
of crises. To understand how the Chinese news constructs reality is to understand
how this constellation of uncertainty, ambiguity, and ambivalence intersects to
produce meaning in highly contingent circumstances. In the case of the Wenchuan
earthquake, the government succeeded in projecting itself as a caring and respon-
sible leader to its people. In contrast, in the case of the Wenzhou train crash, a
widespread cynicism and skepticism of the government’s intention prevailed.

4 Conclusion
When it comes to the issue of the relationship between media, politics, and society
in China, the most common framework in both journalistic and scholarly dis-
courses in the West is still that of propaganda control and censorship. The focus
on crackdowns, bans, and censorship usually tells us something about what the
party-state does not like, but it reveals little about what it does like, and indeed
what it does in the realm of media in order to preserve stability. This framework
also tends to take as given the desire and intention of the central propaganda
authorities to control the speech and thought of the population. A recent but
102 Wanning Sun

increasingly regular strand has also been added to this dominant narrative: the
efforts from the grassroots via the growing use of digital technologies (e.g. Weibo)
and social media among ordinary citizens to strive for a more transparent and
open media environment. This framework of control is often deployed to demon-
strate the determination and enduring capacity of the Chinese government to
maintain a propaganda regime precisely because of China’s status as a global
player in economic terms. Within this framework, the digital resistance strand is
also often taken up to describe the complex, ambiguous, and often evolving
dynamics between the party-state and society, as well as the impact of such
dynamics on China’s prospects for political democratization and social change.
However, this framework comes with several problems.
First, this framework largely assumes that the Chinese government is neither
interested in nor capable of exploiting media logic for the purpose of improving
and enhancing its image, reputation, and credibility, and that it only resorts to the
suppression of negative news in order to minimize damage. Secondly, it assumes
media censorship, usually considered the trademark of the propaganda practices
in authoritarian regimes, forms a discrete area of inquiry that is separate from
mediatization, thus failing to realize that mediatization and censorship often go
hand in hand. Thirdly, this framework mostly assigns online and social media the
exclusive role of opposition to state media, placing on it hopes of a more open, if
not democratic, media and information environment in China. But, as the above
discussion makes clear, none of these positions are tenable.
Like the rest of the world, China has experienced unprecedented levels of
globalization and privatization, as well as mediatization. Like these other “meta-
processes”, mediatization has not weakened state power. In fact, these meta-proc-
esses have been steered and harnessed by the party-state to travel a distinct path-
way at every juncture, and have come to bear the distinct imprimatur of the Chi-
nese government. As this chapter shows us, the Chinese state media has been
keenly experimenting and innovating with the classic format of the media event.
It may be true that throughout the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century,
media events were seen to be in decline and “upstaged” (to use Katz and Liebes’s
term) by disasters, war, and terrorism in the Western and Arab world. Despite this,
ceremonial media events celebrating national unity and triumph and signalling
China’s rise have gone from strength to strength. Media events staged in China
continue to be viable, finding new ways to incorporate elements of disaster and
national grief and turning them into symbolic resources for promoting national
unity and social stability.
To be sure, one could say that these are merely another way of doing propa-
ganda. Indeed they are. However, it is important to acknowledge that propaganda
would not be effective unless it exploited the technological, cultural, and commer-
cial logic of media events. This discussion advances a new framework for under-
standing propaganda, which is perhaps best described as “mediatization with Chi-
 Mediatization with Chinese characteristics 103

nese characteristics,” invoking the familiar Chinese expression that has been
appropriated by the West to make sense of various Chinese practices – as in “capi-
talism with Chinese characteristics” (Huang 2008) and “neoliberalism with Chi-
nese characteristics” (Harvey 2007).
I argue that although “mediatization with Chinese characteristics” has largely
succeeded in maintaining stability and promoting national unity and patriotism,
its attempt to establish affinity with a global audience has so far failed, largely
due to the fact that, in comparison with its Western counterparts, the Chinese state
media has mostly pursued mediatization by the government instead of mediatiza-
tion of the government. One does not see the competition and contestation
between the ruling party and its opposition, especially during elections; instead,
one sees a unified party. One does not see debates between different ideological
factions within the party or between parties in the process of making policies;
instead, one sees consensus when policies are announced. Nor does one see
behind-the-scenes political wheeling-and-dealing or political scandals. Rather
than “mediatization of politics”, what has largely been put on public display is
mediatization without politics, or mediatization in lieu of politics. Politics, the
main stuff out of which mediatization emerges in the liberal-democratic contexts,
is largely missing.
Here lies the crucial clue to China’s prospects in obtaining its propaganda
objectives both at home and abroad. In the Western context, mediatization of poli-
tics is usually seen as an inevitable but problematic process. After all, media is
thought to have the capacity to dictate the political agenda, a tendency towards
spectacular and personalized news coverage, an obsession with elites, and a frag-
mented approach to political processes (Mazzoleni and Schultz 1999). These tend-
encies lead critics to conclude that the mediatization of politics is likely to have
negative implications for democracy (Mazzoleni 2008; Mazzoleni and Schultz
1999). While the scenario of “media logic trumping political logic” presents many
problems (Strömbäck and Esser 2009: 220), a system which lets political logic
dictate media logic, as we see in the case of China, is certainly not a better alterna-
tive. In the Chinese context, a lack of mediatization of politics, or a low level of
mediatization of politics, does not automatically mean better prospects for democ-
racy. On the contrary, convincing its own and global audiences of Chinese media’s
capacity for mediatization of politics may be the only pathway to realize China’s
“media going global” vision. Mediatization of politics, problematic as it may be in
its own right, may be seen as the only true tell-tale sign of China’s genuine willing-
ness to embrace political and media reform. Until China puts genuine politics into
its own media and presents it in the style, language, and visual idioms that are
familiar to global – particularly Western – audiences, China’s public diplomacy
through media is severely limited. Mediatization without politics will continue to
sustain nationalism, patriotism, and a growing sense of Chinese identity in the
global sphere, but the Chinese government will continue to undermine its own
claim to authority and legitimacy through its knee-jerk censorship practices.
104 Wanning Sun

In other words, mediatization and censorship, as practiced in China, are differ-

ent sides of the same coin; both are driven by a desire to avoid real politics. As
the Wenzhou train crash accident indicates, while mediatization can be harnessed
and engineered to put the Party in the driving seat, it can at the same time hijack
the party-state’s political agenda, catch its propaganda machine off guard, and
put the government on the back foot. Thus, the lesson for propaganda strategies
is clear: censorship and information control may work in an era when people’s
everyday lives are not saturated with the use of media and communication tech-
nologies. However, in this day and age, when societies are highly mediatized,
hiding truths through censoring images and information will only result in their
amplification and proliferation, intensifying their detrimental effect on the govern-
ment’s credibility.

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III. The long history
Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz
5 Understanding mediatization in “first
modernity”: sociological classics and their
perspectives on mediated and mediatized
societies
Abstract: This chapter consists of two main parts: the first summing up why we
may look to the classics to understand mediatization processes in the long term,
e.g. through a historical perspective, especially with regard to the history of com-
munication. The second part looks more closely at the writings of three classic
authors: Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Ernest Manheim (a direct student of
Tönnies), and thus illustrates the first part. Manheim was the first European
thinker to use the term “mediatization” explicitly to explain the cultural and social
shift in mass-mediated societies as early as 1932/1933. He was a forerunner of
Habermas in describing the rise of a public sphere since the 17th century. A further
reference is Jürgen Habermas himself and his historical perspective on the rise of
the bourgeois public sphere, demolished by the mass press from the late 19th cen-
tury onwards, as well as his assumption of the mediatization of the lifeworld in
his theory of communicative action. Habermas’ more recent work of the 1990s and
2000s, on the concept of public communication and civil society, is not as cultur-
ally pessimistic as it first seems. The frameworks of mediatization research by
Winfried Schulz and Jesper Strömbäck explain which (historical) stages of mediati-
zation are visible in the classics of first modernity.

Keywords: mediatization as a historical process, phases of mediatization, history

of mediatization research, public sphere theory, Jürgen Habermas, Ernest Man-
heim, Max Weber, communication history, media history, history of communica-
tion research

This chapter focuses on two arguments: one summing up why we should look at
the classics to understand mediatization processes in the long run, e.g. through a
historical perspective, especially regarding the history of communication. The second
argument looks more closely at the writings of three classic thinkers: Max Weber,
Ferdinand Tönnies, and Ernest Manheim (a student of Tönnies) and thus illustrates
the first argument.
All cases originate in the German tradition − even though Weber, Tönnies, and
Manheim have also had impact on transnational theory building. This is especially
true for their successor Jürgen Habermas and his approach to think and rethink
the public sphere and social communication. Habermas is not a sociological classic
110 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

of the first modernity but of the so-called “second” or reflexive modernity,

although his work has historical dimensions that lead us back to the 18th century.
What is lacking are examples of classics from the French tradition of thought on
social communication (see Averbeck-Lietz 2010) such as Gabriel Tarde (Katz 1999;
Mattelart 1997: 218–287) or Emile Durkheim (Carey 1992: 19), also contributing to
the analysis of mediated and symbolic communication in first modernity.

1 Why look at sociological classics? Challenges to

understand mediatiziation as an ongoing
historical process and how to learn from
Habermas
The purpose of this contribution is the search for concepts of mediatization prior
to the age of digitalization. No less than Friedrich Krotz himself claims the need
to historize the concept of mediatization for the time before digitalization (Krotz
2003, 2012: 37). My aim concerning the historization of the mediatization concept
is twofold, namely, to embed the meta concept mediatization into the history of
communication, as well as into the history of ideas about communication. Not only
is it necessary to know what has changed in the world and in which way, but we
also need to know how to observe those changes as scientists (see Livingstone 2008:
2–4). Moreover, these two aspects are interrelated. Therefore, I suggest looking at
the classics of the so-called first modernity, ergo the thinkers of the industrial age
(Beck 1986; Münch 2004: 516–519; Saxer 2012: 110–111) and their observations of
media and social change. Mediatization and modernization are intermingled proc-
esses (Saxer 2012: 869). The readings of the classics are a source of communication
history in telling us how communication had been observed in former times. We
may also read them conceptually by interpreting their observations for systematical
aims and understanding communication and media change in general (Rühl 1999;
Averbeck 1999a; Hardt 2001; Meyen and Löblich 2006). The classics help us under-
stand social changes and media shifts as well as the tradition of thought in which
we are embedded and involved in Western communication sociology while “stand-
ing on the shoulders of giants” (Merton 1965).
Giants like Max Weber (1864–1920) and his brother Alfred Weber (1868–1958),
Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) and his cousin Ernest Manheim (1900–2002), Ferdi-
nand Tönnies (1855–1936), Albert Schäffle (1831–1903, concerning him see in detail
Meyen and Löblich 2006: 109–128), or less well known brilliant thinkers from Ger-
man newspaper research such as the Munich scholar Otto Groth (1875–1965, con-
cerning Groth see in detail Langenbucher 1995; Marhenke 2004; Pietilä 2005: 47–
55). Groth as a Jew was widely banned from teaching as well as from publishing
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 111

during the so called Third Reich. We should also name the director of the Institute
for Newspaper Studies at the University of Leipzig Erich Everth (1878–1934) (see
in detail Averbeck 2002), fired by the Nazis for his political opinions, and Hans
Traub (1901–1943) with a career at the Universities of Berlin and Greifswald
stopped by the Nazis in 1937 (in detail Averbeck 1999a: 355–404; Beck 2009: 197–
214).1 Alfred Weber (together with Emil Lederer and Hans von Eckardt) institution-
alized and headed the Institute for Newspaper Research at the University of Heidel-
berg during the Weimar Republic. Karl Mannheim held courses such as “Public
Opinion and the Newspaper” at the same University in the early 1930s (in detail
Reimann 1988; Averbeck 1999a: 226–234).
Jürgen Habermas (born 1920) needs to be named at this point. He learned a
lot from these predecessors, especially concerning press history as can be seen in
his early book from 1962. He himself impressed several generations of communica-
tion scholars with his thinking about “The Public Sphere” in historical and system-
atical manners. He shares this double concept, the historico-systematical view,
with his predecessor Ernest Manheim and his book on public opinion written in
1932 (Manheim 1979 [1933]), which Habermas cited in his own book (see Habermas
1996 [1962]: 95). He also referred to some of the press histographic workings of the
Weimar Newspaper Studies, for example from Erich Everth, Helmut Fischer, Karl
Bücher, and others (see for example Habermas 1996 [1962]: 72–77).
From the early writings on communication and media change, at least in the
works of some classical authors (above all Ernest Manheim, see section 3 of this
chapter), there are identifiable concepts of mediatization (Mediatisierung) as well
as of mediation (Vermittlung) (especially Otto Groth who largely was influenced by
the epistemology of Max Weber, see Langenbucher 1995; Marhenke 2004) and
Erich Everth, who was inspired by the formal sociology of Georg Simmel, see Aver-
beck 2002).2
Jesper Strömbäck (2008) also mentions mediatization and mediation as con-
cepts worth looking back at, taking into account the history of ideas of communi-
cation. His example for an early theorist is the US journalist and scholar Walter
Lippman with his famous book on public opinion from 1922, which still today is
often cited for its early description of framing processes by mediated communica-
tion (Strömbäck 2008: 230). Mediation and mediatization are not exclusive of each
other but rather they are complementing concepts. Mediation means the mediation
of sense and sense-making (for and by individuals, groups, and institutions in
their roles of communication agents and or professional communicators) in a given
society via the (mass) media. Mediatization means the intermingled process of

1 The German “Zeitungswissenschaft” (newspaper studies) has been dominated by high conform-
ity and loyalty to the Nazi state (see Kutsch 1987; Averbeck 1999a: 102–144).
2 Erik Koenen is working on a dissertation project concerning Erich Everth’s role in German news-
paper studies.
112 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

media, cultural, and social change (for the contemporary discussion concerning
differences and complementarities of mediation and mediatization-concepts see
Strömbäck 2008; also Livingstone 2008; Lundby 2009: 12–15; Hepp 2011: 35–41;
Averbeck-Lietz 2013).
In addition – in the German context, and so far as I know only in the German
one − there is the almost not translatable notion of “medialization” (“Medialisie-
rung”), meaning inter- and transactions between the media and the media system
on one side, and politics, policies, and the political system on the other. Communi-
cation historians in Germany like Erik Koenen and Arnulf Kutsch (2004), Frank
Bösch and Norbert Frei (2006), Rudolf Stöber (2010), Jürgen Wilke (2011) or Klaus
Arnold, Christoph Classen and Susanne Kinnebrock (2010) solely use the notion of
“Medialisierung” for describing the co-changes in the media and the political sys-
tem since the 18th century.3 This goes along with the similar notion of “Medialisier-
ung” as understood by political communication research in German-speaking
countries (Imhof 2006; Donges 2008; Marcinkowski and Steiner 2010; Meyen 2009;
Wendelin 2011).
The reasons German historians speak of Medialisierung are rooted in a termino-
logical clash (which provoked and provokes a lot of misunderstanding). In German
historical science and largely in humanities the term “Mediatisierung” means the
implementation of former autonomous political unities, little feudal states, under
the big “Reichsstände” like Prussia or Bavaria in the early 19th century (Livingstone
2008; Stöber 2010). Or mediatization means – especially in political communica-
tion research – the representation of the people’s sovereignty by their elected par-
liaments. As Gerhard Vowe has shown, Jürgen Habermas uses the term “Mediatisi-
erung” (mediatization) in this same way of mediating institutions between the
citizen and the state via parties, unions, and/or the mass media (Vowe 2006: 441).
Indeed, Habermas sees the whole power structure of society “mediatized” in the
(enlightened) public sphere of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Habermas
1996 [1962]: 74).
Ernest Manheim (1933) goes beyond this to general changes in communicative
behavior and in symbolic power matches in society from the time when media got
popularized with a culture of magazines from the late 17th century onwards (Man-
heim 1979 [1933], 1964). The 17th century and the ‘longue durée’ of a bourgeois
public sphere is (empirically and systematically) nearly spared by Habermas, as
newer literature concerning the maturing of a German press culture from the 17th
century shows and directly criticizes Habermas from this standpoint (Böning 2002:
456–463; Stöber 2010: 286).
Concerning a Habermasian “medialization”(!)-concept, Manuel Wendelin and
Andreas Scheu refer more generally to his (and also to Adorno’s) normatively nega-

3 An exception in the milieu of German communication historians is Koenen (see Gentzel and
Koenen 2012) who understands the terms “medialization” and “mediatization” complementary, as
I do myself.
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 113

tive hypothesis of a cultural industry overwhelming and destroying the bourgeois

public sphere since the late 19th century. That means the substitution of face-to-
face semi-public discourses of scientific societies, of privately organized intellec-
tual saloons, of nearly closed language and masonic communities by modern
“mass culture” and its rationalized production processes in a “refeudalized”
pseudo public sphere overwhelmed by political public relations (Scheu and Wen-
delin 2010: 454). In this process of structural change the bourgeois public sphere
has largely been destroyed. This is the diagnosis derived from Habermas’ first
writings on public opinion and the press in the 1960s (Habermas 1996 [1962]).
Even so, there is a much more positive concept in Habermas’ idea of the public
sphere than in Adorno’s diagnosis of the “Verblendungszusammenhang” of mass
culture: the critical potential of the public sphere as a positive goal for reflexive
modern societies (see also Scheu and Wendelin 2010: 452–456). With Habermas’
later concepts from the 1980s till today (in his theory of communicative action and
his thinking on civil society and the constitutional state) we might even be able
to speak of the mediatization of public communication: the (mass) media have to
re-implement the periphery of civil society into the public discourse (Habermas 1998:
431– 435). Habermas sketches an ideal type of democratization and participation
grounded in the “networks of communication” of the so-called lifeworld (Haber-
mas 1998: 429; see also Lingenberg 2010: 25–30). Mediatization is thought of posi-
tively here and public communication as technically mediated and embedded in
interpersonal communication at the same time. We will find the same motive for
his predecessor Ernest Manheim (see below). Even if Habermas himself does not
use the mediatization concept of Krotz or others, we may read him in this direction
(in the same sense Scheu and Wendelin 2010: 455–457 by using the term “mediali-
zation”).
Lundby (2009: 4) and also Krotz (2009: 33) mention the negative side of medi-
atization in Habermas’ reflection on rationalization processes, the de-possession of
the lifeworld via system imperatives, including the mass media themselves as part
of the systems imperatives. Habermas’ theory of communicative action indeed is
crucial for understanding his late concepts of public communication and the medi-
atization of every day as well as of political communication (Habermas 1988: 452;
1998: 436–437). However, contrary to Krotz and Lundby (and with Scheu and Wen-
delin) my argument is: Mediatization in this sense is – as I read the late Habermas
(1998) – a process in two potential directions: positively, leading to “networks of
communication”, including the impact of the peripheral actors of civil society;
negatively, leading to a closed power structure with mass media, political parties,
and other influential political actors in the center (Habermas 1998: 339–436).
The Swiss communication researcher Ulrich Saxer gives a short but relevant
critical hint on Habermas’ mediatization concept, which he estimates is too nar-
rowly focused on the side of the system and its rationalization processes. For
Saxer, himself a system theorist, in the process of medialization/digitalization/
114 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

economization – in the long run – the system and the lifeworld are so much
“interpenetrated” that it makes no sense to separate “medialization” (this is the
term Saxer strictly uses) from the lifeworld as Habermas seems to do (Saxer 2012:
389, 858–860). At the theoretical level Saxer argues with Schimank’s theory of
structuration (Schimank 2000), ergo the analysis of actor’s constellations, their
possibilities of acting and communicating with and against constraints in systemic
environments (Saxer 2012: 91–93). At the phenomenological level Saxer argues
with lifeworld changes and changes in the demarcation line between the public
and the private, as we recently know them from online connected and constructed
lifeworlds (Saxer 2012: 732–735, 858). It may indeed be difficult to rethink online
privacy with Habermas, who is clearly defining the public and the private as two
different but interacting spheres of the social (Habermas 1998: 442–443). But this
is a problem not to solve here. Even so, I want to strengthen the argument that
medialization is an applicable term to analyze the lifeworld – if we takes into
account Habermas’ communication theory and its relevance for the development
of his public sphere theory after 1998: the “networks of communication” in the
sense of Habermas are not only public arenas. They are at the same time lifeworld-
communication arrangements (encounters, group communication) and they are
able to gain systemic (institutionalized) potential, especially in times of crisis,
when professional communicators and their routines collapse and lose credibility.
Habermas himself describes this process in “Faktizität und Geltung” (1998: 339–
436).
Following Knut Lundby (2009: 11) I do not understand the “Medialization”-
concept as synonymous to the “Mediatization”-concept. In my opinion, they are
complementary, but different (in content and in genesis). When we read Habermas
under a medialization/mediatization-perspective as I do here, the two perspectives
are both visible in Habermas’ lifelong writing on the public sphere as a publicistic
sphere (Publizistische Sphäre) embedded in and inspired by lifeworld activities
of human communication. Habermas has described the open and participatory
discourse between actors of the center (for example parliament actors) and periph-
eral actors (for example civil society) via face-to-face and technically mediated
communication (Habermas 1998: 442–447, 456–467).
The “medialization”-concept mainly refers to mass media as corporate organi-
zations of sense-making with political impact, which are deeply embedded in soci-
ety after long and ongoing institutionaliziation processes (Saxer 2012). This con-
cept is close to Stig Hjarvard’s (2008) approach of the Mediatization of Institutions
or Strömbäck’s (2008) Four-Dimensional Conceptualization of the Mediatization of
Politics.
Whereas the concept of mediatization in the sense of Friedrich Krotz refers to
the dynamics of communicative action via media and social change (deeply rooted
in the social theory of action from Max Weber to George Herbert Mead to Alfred
Schütz – which are also the main anchors of thinking in Habermas’ theory of
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 115

social action). Krotz’s empirical approach is embedded in a general theory of social

action, symbolic interactionism, and social constructivism (Krotz 2008, 2012; Hart-
mann and Hepp 2010; Gentzel and Koenen 2012: 200–201) – this is the common
denominator with Habermas. From this starting point it is possible to define “medi-
atization” as follows:

We defined mediatization as a meta-process that is grounded in the modification of communi-

cation as the basic practice of how people construct the social and cultural world. They do so
by changing communication practices that use media and refer to media. (Krotz 2009: 25)

Krotz explicitly provides a link between his own perspective and the one of Haber-
mas, namely to start with “the problem of communicative action” (Krotz 2009: 29).
My suggestions on terminological differences in mediatization and medializa-
tion, which contain different lines of thinking about media communication, are
my point of departure for explaining the role of the classics in the light of today.
The classical perspective is – as we find it for Habermas and as well for his prede-
cessors – twofold: they look on organized public communication, its role in society
and politics and − as well – on social and cultural change via media and communi-
cation.
The classics highlighted
– the organizational part of public communication, namely the organization and
the economization and the press (Weber 1911, 2001a [1910]; Tönnies 2002 [1922];
Groth 1928; also Traub 1933 for radio), so to speak medialization
– highly mediated sense-making and symbolization processes in modern media
societies (Weber 1911, 2001a [1910]; Tönnies 2002 [1922]; Mannheim 1931 his
pupil Carlé 1931; Manheim 1979 [1933]), so to speak mediatization.

We also have to see the limits of interpreting the classics from the reflexive per-
spective of second modernity and be aware not to overstress the paradigm of medi-
atization:
– Media, for the classics, mainly meant print media only (one exception was
Hans Traub’s 1933 analysis of radio).
– Communication mostly meant political communication embedded in the upris-
ing democracy processes of Western societies – entertainment or soft power
processes had been not yet in focus.
116 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

2 Concepts to look backwards on mediatization:

Strömbäck’s Four Phase Model and Schulz’s Four
Types of Mediatization and their application to
press history
The phenomenon of mediated politics is thus older than theories about the phenomenon,
although some observers in the early twentieth century offered analysis that are still highly
relevant today. (Strömbäck 2008: 230)

Heuristically, I propose the “Four Phases of Mediatization” from Jesper Strömbäck

(2008) as well as Winfried Schulz’s (2004) four dimensions of mediatization as
models for analysis. Neither Strömbäck’s nor Schulz’s categories completely fit,
because we have to take into account the media and political historical back-
ground.
Strömbäck’s phrase for summing up mediatization research in the institutional
tradition is very helpful and applicable for understanding classical readings:

What matters is whether the mass media constitute the most important channels for informa-
tion exchange and communication between people and political actors. Mediated politics
should be understood as something different from politics experienced through interpersonal
communication or directly by the people. (Strömbäck 2008: 211)

Strömbäck outlines that the mediation of politics through media is the “first phase
of mediatization” in a long historical process. The second phase describes when
media become institutionally more autonomous from other institutional bodies
(Strömbäck 2008: 236–238) – in the history of the German press this is early the
case. That means not at all that the press and the political system become com-
pletely autonomous from each other, but that the press as an institution was able
to have political impact (see also Requate 1999). Max Weber in his “Plan for a
Presse Enquete” highlighted that the press is a capitalist economic power with its
own “Institutionencharakter” (institutional character) (Weber 1911, 2001a [1910],
Gentzel and Koenen 2012: 204). Press historian Rudolf Stöber describes how the
press developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time the press
claimed autonomy indeed, either as a counterpart for political parties or as their
representative. On this note, Stöber speaks about newspapers which sided with
parties (like the Frankfurter Zeitung), influenced parties (like the Germania), or
were a party themselves (like the Vorwärts, the daily journal of the Social Demo-
cratic Party) (Stöber 2000: 202).
Press made politics in the late 19th century in Germany; it was a corporative
political actor in itself. Max Weber in his publication on “Politics as Profession”
(2001b [1919]) described this for the social democratic press (even if this press
was suppressed during the times of the “law against socialism”, the so called
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 117

“Sozialistengesetz”, including censorship and interdictions of press titles). The

Social Democratic Party and the social democratic press intermingled on the micro-
meso of a milieu of persons in dense interaction: Journalists became politicians
and vice versa (Weber 2001b [1919]). The media and the political system have been
observed and thought by the classics of first modernity as close together. The ideal
of the “fourth estate” and the neutral role of the media was not the leading one
at that times, but more the idealtype of politics via the media (see also Behmer
2004).
In Max Weber’s and also in Ferdinand Tönnies’ or Karl Bücher’s descriptions
about the contemporary structure of press organization, the economy or the press
as an enterprise plays a crucial role beside the cultural and social functions of the
press (in detail for Weber and Tönnies: Hardt 2001; Averbeck-Lietz 2014; for
Bücher: Hardt 2001; Kutsch 2008; for Knies, Schäffle, Bücher, and Groth: Pietilä
2005: 29 f.). The contemporary so called “dual nature” of the press − at the same
time an economic and a cultural good − especially was formulated by Karl Bücher
(Pietilä 2005: 30–31, Kutsch 2008). Strombäck (2008: 237) stresses very correctly
the press history in the second phase of mediatization processes of economization
and professionalization (for press history and the side of professionalization see
Requate 1995, for press history and the side of economization see Birkner 2010).
Even Strömbäck’s third phase of mediatization, the phase of adaptation of
media as communication sources in all parts of societies (Strömbäck 2008: 237–
238) can be found in the classical readings: in the workings of Weber and Manheim
predominantly. Strömbäck argues here with Altheide and Snow’s (1979) notion of
a “media logic”: All social institutions are media institutions (Strömbäck 2008: 238
citing Altheide and Snow 1991: xi). I want to emphasize that as early as in the
classical readings the point of no return, that first modernity and media modernity
are one, is clearly under focus in the writings of Weber and Manheim.
Strombäck’s four phases are highly artificial types4, as are Schulz’s four
dimensions of mediatization (Schulz 2004) – but they are helpful to qualify the
thinking of the classics. Strömbäck’s fourth phase mainly considers the radical
adoption, even the internalization of the media logic(s) by political actors and
institutions and at the same time high degrees of institutional independency of
media actors and institutions from political ones. In the classical texts, which are
under focus here (in detail see below), the tension between the media and the
political system is much more open: Manheim’s book on public opinion (1979
[1933]) teaches us a kind of communication logic, overwhelming the whole society,
which is as feasible for single, corporate, or strongly organized communicators
and their political ambitions – including the media as actors (see below section 3
of this chapter, in detail Averbeck 2005, Averbeck-Lietz 2014).

4 “The four phases of mediatization identified here are somewhat idealized, and as in all proc-
esses, the distinctions between the phases are less clear in reality than in theory” (Strömbäck 2008:
241).
118 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

Mainly Max Weber (see also Hardt 2001; Gentzel and Koenen 2012) – went
beyond the topic of the press as a source for and of public opinion to media culture
in the vast sense of lifeworld changes, for example concerning the changes of
topics and styles of interpersonal communication in the long run evoked by the
consumption of newspapers (Weber 2001a [1910]). Schulz, referring to new media,
highlighted the same process of transformation of communication via the profes-
sional and the ordinary use of media:

The new media bring about new languages and interaction rules shaping and, to a certain
degree standardizing the new media environment. (Schulz 2004: 96)

Not least Clifford Geertz cited Max Weber, when he described culture as a network
of human constructed meanings (Gentzel and Koenen 2012: 203, Geertz 1983: 9).
But Weber was not solely standing there as a giant: The “Kulturbedeutung der
Presse”, the cultural meaning of the press, has been a vast theme of research in
early newspaper studies in a milieu next to “Kulturwissenschaft”, concerning the
so called Historical School of Early German Cultural Studies and its crossing to
newspaper studies (for further reading: vom Bruch and Roegele 1986; Pietilä 2005:
15–55; Gentzel and Koenen 2012). Weber’s groundbreaking program of a “press
enquête” as early as 1909/10 had been planned as a teamwork with (today mostly
famous) scholars from several backgrounds, for example: Martin Spahn (newspa-
per studies and history), Otto Groth (newspaper studies), Oscar Wettstein (law and
newspaper studies), Ferdinand Tönnies (sociology, especially of public opinion),
Georg Simmel (sociology, especially of modern life), Werner Sombart (economy),
Rudolf Michels (sociology, especially sociology of political parties), Alfred Vier-
kandt (sociology, especially group sociology) (see Obst 1986; Kutsch 1988; Meyen
and Löblich 2006: 131–159; Weischenberg 2012: 78–109).
Winfried Schulz (2004) published a conceptual proposal for understanding
“mediatization”5 which – in my estimation – helps to categorize the observations
made by the classics. Schulz (2004: 98–99) offers four interwoven processes of
mediatization:
1. Extension or the overcoming of time and space
– “the media extent the natural limits of human communication capacities”
(anthropological perspective)
2. Substitution of primary experience through mediatized secondary experience
– “the media substitute social activities and social institutions”
3. Amalgamation of primary experience and mediatized secondary experience
– “media amalgamate with various non-media activities in social life”

5 Schulz himself in his German-language publications uses the term “Medialisierung” (“medializa-
tion”), see Schulz 2006.
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 119

4. Accommodation, meaning the adjustments of public and private life to “media

logics” (logics in plurality)
– “the actors and organizations of all sectors of society accommodate to the
media logic”

With this differentiation Schulz delivers tangible proposals for modeling the meta-
process mediatization into smaller processes. He perceives these processes as heu-
ristic conceptions, which are also applicable to communication eras before digitali-
zation. As examples for the extension of time and space he named Werner Som-
bart’s analysis of capitalism from 1927 (Schulz 2004: 88). In fact, it was Habermas
who also cited Sombart to show the new dimensions of the traffic of goods and
messages in early capitalism (Habermas 1996 [1962]: 70–71).
On the basis of Schulz’s categories, Rudolf Stöber demonstrated the process
of press expansion (growing actuality, shorter periodicity, greater variety of print
media), of the institutionalization of stable media routines (accommodation) and –
relying on this − the wave of political public relations and symbolic politics in
the 19th century and its amalgamation with interpersonal communication processes
(Stöber 2010: 79–81).
Schulz and Stöber do not use the terms primary and secondary experience –
I have borrowed them from a young PhD student Walter Auerbach and his disserta-
tion at the University of Cologne from 1929 (Auerbach referred to the writings of
the German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt). According to Auerbach the mediation
via press – seen from the part of the reader – is always an indirect or secondary
experience (“indirektes Erleben”). At the same time it goes together with direct or
primary experience (“direktes Erleben”) from (former) face-to-face contacts, per-
sonal memoirs, and speech (including speech about media content) (Auerbach
1930). Auerbach fled the Nazi regime (Averbeck 1999a: 308–332).
Additionally, the concept of secondary experience is crucial in Otto Groth’s
dogma of “Vermittelte Mitteilung” (mediated message) (Langenbucher 1995) or in
Jaeger’s paradigm of “Mitteilung statt Medium” (the message, not the medium)
(Averbeck and Kutsch 2000) as well as in Manheim’s concept of the social mediati-
zation of human interrelations via press (“Die gesellschaftliche Mediatisierung
menschlicher Unmittelbarbeziehungen”, see Manheim 1979 [1933]: 24).

3 “Mediatization” – an explicit concept by the

young sociologist Ernest Manheim in 1933
The explicit notion “mediatization”, was introduced as early as 1932/33 by Ernest
Manheim – with the German term “Mediatisierung” in his book Public Opinion and
its Social Sources. The Sociology of the Public (in German: Die Träger der öffentli-
120 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

chen Meinung. Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit). This book, however, was
banned by the Nazis while Manheim fled via Hungary to London (where he
received a second PhD degree from the London School of Economics under the
supervision of Bronislaw Malinowski and Karl Mannheim)6 and then to the United
States (where he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and
built up the Department for Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Kan-
sas City, Missouri during the 1940s). Although Manheim had a successful career,
his early book on public opinion had almost no impact on the social sciences,
neither in Germany nor in the United States or elsewhere (there is a Spanish trans-
lation from the late 1930s).7 Today, Manheim’s book, re-edited by Norbert Schind-
ler in 1979, is well-known only by the insiders of emigration research (Baron, Smith
and Reitz 2005), a few German-speaking sociologists (Imhof 2003; Beetz 2005) and
a few communication scholars (Averbeck 1999a: 414–442). The Austrian journal
Medien & Zeit set his works on the agenda in 1998 and an article concerning his
relevance, honoring Manheim’s 100’s anniversary, was published in the Kölner
Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie in 2000. The re-edition of some of
his texts appeared in the Jahrbuch für Soziologiegeschichte (Yearbook for the History
of Sociology) in 1995. In 2000 Manheim received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Leipzig, his alma mater in Germany – the same country where he
was degraded as a “Jew and foreigner” and his work banned 66 years earlier. The
most famous trace of Manheim’s early works is indeed the citation of his book in
Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit from 1962.
Manheim was one of the most innovative and promising young German sociol-
ogists working on the subject of public opinion during inter-war times (see the
excellent reviews of his book on public opinion from 1934 by Herbert Marcuse in
the Journal of the Frankfurt School and also by the professor for newspaper studies
Wilhelm Kapp in 1935 in the central Journal of German Newspaper Studies).
Manheim, born in Budapest in 1900 as Ernö Manheim, was the younger cousin
of Karl Mannheim, famous for his concept of a sociology of knowledge. After World
War II the younger Manheim edited the writings of the elder (Manheim and Kecske-
meti 1956), even though he was a life-long critic of Karl Mannheim’s too stable
concept of a sociology of knowledge, not reflecting communication dynamics in
processes of gaining knowledge and internalizing opinions. Ernest Manheim criti-
cized Karl Mannheim’s concept for its inability to explain opinion shifts (Manheim
1998 [1972]).

6 This was in the field of anthropology, largely referring to Weber’s theory of authority and cha-
risma: Ernest Manheim: Risk and Authority in Primitive Societies. PhD London School of Economics
[unpublished manuscript].
7 For Manheim’s personal and scientific biography see the website in his honor of the Archive of
the History of Sociology of the University of Graz: http://www-classic.uni-graz.at/sozwww/agsoe/
manheim/ (27. 2. 2013), also Welzig 1997; Averbeck 2000.
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 121

As a student at the University of Kiel in the early 1920s, Manheim was a direct
student of Ferdinand Tönnies. Additionally, he adopted Weber, especially his epis-
temology of the social sciences.
The young Ernest Manheim, then assistant in the sociology department at the
University of Leipzig, used probably for the first time the term “Mediatisierung”
(mediatization) to describe and to analyze a fundamental transformation of society
by communication via and of print media and their messages beyond singular
media effects. This transformation occurs concurrently with industrialization,
urbanization, alphabetization, secularization, rationalization, democratization,
and marketization (also the marketization of media). Those processes were also
described in depth by those giants on whose shoulders he stood, not least Weber
and Tönnies (concerning them see Hardt 2001; Weischenberg 2012; Averbeck-Lietz
2014).
Manheim conceptualized the mediatization of direct human relations by public
communication as a categorical principle, crucial for the sense and the context of
communicated contents (Manheim 1979 [1933]: 24). His deeper explanation focused
on the transformation of the civic public as a dominant societal force in the course
of this mediatization process since the 18th century. Contrary to the sociology of
knowledge developed by his cousin Karl Mannheim, he not only looked at the
“Standortgebundenheiten des Wissens”, that is the social roots of knowledge and
meanings (Mannheim 1931), but he also considered the communication processes
behind them (Manheim 1998 [1972]). Furthermore, “the public” no longer remains
an elite of intellectuals as in Tönnies’ description (Averbeck 1999a: 255–262) as well
as – in some manner − in Karl Mannheim’s concept of a “free-floating intelligence”
(“freischwebende Intelligenz”). The young Ernest Manheim did not regard primarily
the mediation of elite communication and elitist ideas, but the broader public and
its dynamics (see also the interview with Ernest Manheim, Averbeck 1999b). Man-
heim analyzed early civic communities (literary round tables, clubs, the often
nationalistic German and language societies; the mediation of their ideas by differ-
ent branches of the upcoming bourgeoisie, including prayers, teachers, lawyers,
and journalists) and – from the late 18th century − the general transformation of
their oral communications in semi-public, more or less closed, more or less elitist
communities, to public communication in a general and democratic sense by the
use of media. This meant media production and – complementary – use in the
sense of newspaper reading with a focus on addressees such as scientists (Gelehrte
Journale) or bourgeois families (via journals like the Gartenlaube), later on the
wider public by mass press (Manheim 1979 [1933]). And this was not – as in the
case of Habermas – sketched by Manheim as a history of decay, but as a history
of democratization by mediated and mediatized communication. The decay that
Manheim instead observed was meant in a completely different sense: the rise of
the National Socialist Party in the early 1930s and its special type of political
communication via “public and private channels”, via the press, meetings, and
122 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

demonstrations (including violence) in the streets – as well as via public and

private encounters (Manheim 1940 and Manheim in his interviews with Greffrath
in 1981 and with Averbeck [1999b]).
According to Manheim, the carriers of public opinion and their motives to
publish changed during the rise of the public sphere (Manheim 1979 [1933]: 71–122,
also Manheim 1964). At first, the civic collectives of the early bourgeoisie were
cohesive inwards and acted via interpersonal communication (like literary round
tables). Later on, during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, they transformed
their contents while addressing them. They felt a sense of mission based on a
general humanism: Potentially each person is a member of the public. During that
process, the actively discussing and publishing part of the bourgeoisie (bourgeoi-
sie in a very broad sense, including some parts of the nobility and of the official-
dom) became politically aware and addressed a broader public or “the” public
(Manheim 1979 [1933]: 71–122, also Manheim 1964). For an empirically based typol-
ogy of communication processes in the sense of Manheim this meant not to focus
exclusively on the ideal type of discourse (which he like Habermas typified as an
ideal in the sense of Kant, see Manheim 1979 [1933]: 50–51, 102). Manheim
switched to the sociology of strategic communication concerning political goals.
He (Manheim 1979 [1933]: 49–62) differentiated three analytical types of public
opinion, which qualify for empirical operationalization (see also Beetz 2005).
1. the pluralist type → processes of persuasion
2. the transcendental type → processes of deliberation
3. the qualitative type → processes of affirmation

In real life these get mixed up. According to Manheim, “Diskursivität” (discoursiv-
ity) and deliberation are only one side of the public sphere, and there is no pure,
transcendental type (in the sense of Kant) that could meet this norm. Something
else is essential: Interpersonal and media-based communication form hybrids in
each of the three types and need each other to exist (see also Manheim 1940
[1939]). Mediatization implies the reshaping and alteration of interpersonal rela-
tions by technically mediated communication. It does not imply the substitution
of interpersonal relations. This is amalgamation (before digitalization) in the words
of Schulz:

Media use is woven into the fabric of everyday life; the media pervade the professional sphere,
the economics, politics and the public sphere. Media activities and non-media activities amal-
gamate. (Schulz 2004: 89)

Manheim declared a sociology of the public sphere (“Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit”)

as his broader sociological interest as early as 1933, analyzing publicistic socializa-
tion (“publizistische Vergesellschaftung”, see Manheim 1979 [1933]: 20–26). Mediat-
ized communication processes were leading to new social realities and identities.
At this point, Manheim’s theory of the public sphere becomes highly relevant. It
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 123

exceeds the normative concept of the society of scholars (“Gelehrtenrepublik”)

coined by his teacher Tönnies. Manheim was the first theorist to succeed in giving
up the concept of elites in the public sphere and who turned towards an analytical
concept. Tönnies’ concept of a republic of scholars (Stöber 2009: 56–57), dominat-
ing the public sphere had become obsolete, since modern mass society cannot be
perpetuated by groups of discussing elites, but by networks of public interests.
The 20th century could not step backwards and ignore the fact that society had
evolved and became a media-based society.
Ironically, it was Tönnies who opened the scene for this new approach. With
his book on public opinion from 1922 and his own differentiation of a unified (and
elitist) public opinion and a plurality of different more or less “gaseous” and “fluid”
opinions in society (Hardt 2001: 107–125), he impressed the younger generation of
social scientists in the Weimar Republic, including Manheim (in detail see Aver-
beck 1999a: 242–254).

4 A spotlight on the “giants”: media, cultural and

social change in and by the media as described
by Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies
[Max] Weber is aware of the effects of a mediated reality (to use a late-twentieth-century expres-
sion). (Hardt 2001: 139)

This is not the place to discuss the very well-known works of Weber and Tönnies
in detail, but to weigh their concepts for the history of mediatization as well as
for mediatization research. As early as 1910, Weber perceived the press as a social
institution in itself, as an institution changing modern life as a whole, socially,
politically, and culturally (Gentzel and Koenen 2010: 204–205). Weber understood
“press as one means of coining the subjective character of modern human beings”
as well as “press as a component of the objective character of modern culture”
(Weber 2001a [1910]: 316). The famous German citation is:

[…] die Presse als eines der Mittel zur Prägung der subjektiven Eigenart des modernen Menschen
[…], die Presse als Komponente der objektiven Eigenart der modernen Kultur. (Weber 2001a
[1910]: 316)

Following Weber, we can argue that, at the turn of the century, the press gained
autonomy, publicistically as well as economically. This is reflected by his demand
to analyze professionalization in journalism, the internal differentiation of press
organizations, including the evolution of editorial departments − his early (but
never operationalized plan) for an “Enquete” on journalism research (in detail
described by Obst 1986; Kutsch 1988; Hardt 2001: 127–143, Meyen and Löblich
124 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

2006: 145–159, Weischenberg 2012: 79–109). With his plan for press and journalism
research Weber established the research topoi that we still lean on:
– Journalism as a full-time profession, differentiation of journalistic roles
– Self-conceptions and working habits of journalists
– Thematic specializations in journalism and developments of editorial depart-
ments
– National differences of media systems and journalism
– Interdependencies between economic concentration, the public, and the
advertising market
– Relations between journalism and news agencies
– Readers’ buying decisions, changes in the daily uses of language because of
newspapers and telegraphy, impacts of journalism on knowledge and public
discussions

The journalistic function is the mediation of information and opinions to society,

which makes the press an agent of change for everyday culture. The economic
function of the press guarantees a free press through advertising (including dys-
functions if advertising is not transparent) (Weber 1911, Weber 2001a [1910]).
Just as in Weber’s concept of inquiry, Tönnies also refers on economy and
ethics of the press. His criticism on public opinion of 1922 includes internationali-
zation as well as cultural aspects of change, too: Tönnies analyzed “solid” public
opinions as value systems that apply transnationally. Examples are discussions of
women’s rights, the death penalty, or even democracy as a political ideal for man-
kind. Tönnies observed those discussions not only in European States but also in
the US − in daily life as well as in the national and international press discussions
(Tönnies 2002 [1922]: 600).
Other than Weber, Tönnies explicitly developed a theory of the public sphere;
nevertheless he fell short of Weber’s ideas – which also had been shared by Man-
heim − especially on the epistemological side like the idealtype and the dogma of
“Werturteilsfreiheit” of science (the non-normativity of scientific analysis). Tönnies’
argumentations were primarily normative.
In a first step, his criteria to describe public opinion are systematic. He calls
them “solid”, “liquid”, and “gaseous”. Much later, the liquid type was adopted by
Noelle-Neumann for her spiral of silence: opinions that are morally charged (see
Noelle-Neumann 1991: 91).
In a second step Tönnies’ concept of the so-called “Gelehrtenrepublik”
(“republic of scholars”) has been highly normative and insofar not compatible with
Manheim’s (nor later with Habermas’ views) on the discourse as a formal proce-
dure: Following Tönnies, public opinions as well as discourses are consolidated
not because of the discourse itself, but because of the morality and integrity of its
participants. Outstanding personalities are seen as watchdogs over the press and
within the institution (Tönnies 1929: 26, Poske 1999: 62–67). This normative
 Understanding mediatization in “first modernity” 125

approach is not yet feasible for a process model of mediatization as Manheim

proposed it.

5 Summary
Modern history of communication and social theory as theory of change relate to
each other. We see this in the writings of the classics. The role of the press as
outcome, indicator, and also agent of social and economic change has been speci-
fied in Weber’s, Tönnies’, and Manheim’s works and we may call this extension
and accommodation in Winfried Schulz’s terminology an approach on mediatiza-
tion. Going beyond this, Manheim’s explicit idea of mediatization describes the
tensions between primary experiences and mass-mediated secondary experiences.
This bears relevance to politics and to day-to-day routines, namely the intertwining
of public and private life and alteration of modes of communication. In Schulz’
terminology we may speak of amalgamation.
The classics do not describe entire substitutions of institutions and/or types of
social activities via technical media (I myself have a lot of doubts that they might
exist even today). They lived in a pre-digital media environment. In my estimation,
they tell us about social change via social action and this social action is more
and more mediatized by the mass media as organizations and institutions (in the
sense of Strömbäck and Hjarvard) in their times. We can learn from this that the
“mediatization of communication” (Krotz 2012: 45) is always embedded in contexts
of action, institutions, organizations, and structures.
Concerning the interconnection of social history and media history, we deal
with transactional processes (in the sense of Werner Früh, see Wirth, Stiehler and
Wünsch 2007), not with technical determinism. Transactional processes are the
kind of processes whose effects become again causations of the process. Thus,
there are feedback-loops. The mediatization of actions/communication, institu-
tions, organizations, and structures is not a one-way-process induced by the
media, it occurs only in contexts of action/communication, institutions/organiza-
tions, and structures or structurations. Learning from the classics, we have to look
at the macro-level on changes within society (structures), at the meso-level on
changes within and between organizations (differentiation of functions and roles)
and institutions (rules and norms), as well as at the micro-level on changes of
social action and communication (lifeworld routines).
Veikko Pietilä writes on the early 20th-century perspectives on the press:

What separated the ‘old’ and ‘new’ society was especially social organization, that is, the kind
of connections between people. (Pietliä 2005: 15)

How the classics thought and observed the shifts in the connections between peo-
ple socially, culturally, and politically is not thinkable any longer without regard-
ing the interconnections between people and ideas via the mass media.
126 Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

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Friedrich Krotz
6 Mediatization as a mover in modernity:
social and cultural change in the context
of media change
Abstract: This chapter reconstructs the upcoming of the mediatization approach
in the 1990 as an academic answer to the upcoming digital and computer related
media. First it reports on the basic discussion about what to call this development
from a communication studies perspective, its main questions and its consequen-
ces for traditional communication studies. Mediatization is understood as a histori-
cal and actual development similar to globalization and modernization. In the
second part, by identifying sub-processes, more complex characteristics are pre-
sented: its relation to medium theory, its character as a historical meta process
and its complexity. Finally, a definition is given.

Keywords: mediatization, medium theory, medium concept, media change, cul-

tural change, meta process, long term development, social world, modernization,
communication studies

1 Mediatization: a conceptual answer to what was

happening
Compared with former times, we live in a world of change: technology, the media
system and the use of media, culture and society, conditions of work and leisure,
everyday life – nowadays all this and much more can no longer be regarded as
stable, but must be seen as “processes”. Of course, this does not mean that every-
thing is changing in a fundamental way – what we call “structures” are changing
slowly. This is the background against which we observe what is changing more
rapidly. Nevertheless, if we compare the living conditions of a person with an
average length of life at the beginning of her or his life and at the end, it seems
that nearly everything that we have concepts of has changed, maybe with the
exception of rather abstract observations such as “There is no society without
power” and the like.
One reason why things are changing is that media is changing. Here we use
the concept mediatization in order to grasp media change and the developments
that depend on that. “Mediatization” is a word that has a surprisingly long history
in communication studies, as Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz’s chapter in this volume
shows. Nevertheless, the first attempts to develop this concept systematically as a
basic one for communication studies were not seen before the second half of the
132 Friedrich Krotz

1990s.1 Today, increasing numbers of academic researchers are discussing the con-
cept and its basic assumptions, are trying to find out whether they could refer to
it in doing their own research, and so are contributing to the development of the
concept.
We thus can say that the rise of the concept “mediatization” at the end of the
last century was an academic answer, especially of communication and media
scholars, to the growing importance of digital and computer directed media, which
was accompanied by a change in old media. One idea behind this concept is that
media have to be understood in a broader way, also historically, as processes
which are changing over time. But at that time the rise of digital media, the grow-
ing importance of media and media services for more and more areas of the life
of more and more individuals, for economy and democracy, for culture and society,
could no longer be overlooked, and more and more researchers agreed on the
idea that new theoretical approaches and methods to study and reconstruct these
developments were needed (cf. also Livingstone 2009, Couldry 2008). A side effect
of that development was that it put into question the old, mass communication
centered approaches and the theories of the classical postwar communication and
media studies of industrial societies in the northern parts of the world.
In times of social and cultural change it becomes evident that academic social
sciences are not only empirical sciences, but also need adequate concepts and
theories to describe the world and its development. The different disciplines begin
to construct concepts which help to develop the theories, so that they make a
contributution to developing answers to open questions and grasp developments
theoretically. Of course, they must be adequate and accepted – which means they
should be theoretically and empirically fruitful to describe and understand the
new developments, should assist the reanalysis of old, already existing, concepts
and insights, and should become accepted over time by researchers.
Mediatization is such a concept. Today it is used by increasing numbers of
academics with reference to the developments in culture and society based on
media development. This chapter will first establish relevant basic features of this
concept, as they have been discussed in the recent past – the label “mediatiza-
tion”, the need to think in processes, the core questions of the concept, and some
resulting concepts for the future of communication studies. Then further possibili-
ties and problems of the concept will be introduced: its relationship to medium
theory and the idea that mediatization is not only an actual process concerned
with digital media, but has taken place in the past, as, for example, the long-term
process of societies to become literate and the way book culture has changed. We
thus can understand mediatization as a historical long-term process that has

1 I myself used this concept for the first time in a publication (Krotz 1995) after having developed
the concept in a broader research project about changing public communication, supported by a
grant from the Volkswagen Foundation.
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 133

occurred since the beginning of human communication. We will discuss the com-
plexity of metaprocess mediatization, that today may be understood to consist of
partial processes. Further, we will describe how mediatization is working and how
the relation between media change and change of culture and society can be
understood. A final definition of mediatization and some further comments will
conclude this chapter. The main aim is thus not only to develop an analytical and
at the same time integrating concept of mediatization, but also to show that we
here have a concept which is crucial for humanity in modernity and postmodern-
ity.

2 Basic features of “mediatization”

2.1 Why call it mediatization?
In the 1990s, it became clear that mobile phone, Internet, and so on were not just
new media, but that they were the visible peak of a more penetrating development.
Some researchers started to analyze single upcoming media or the developments
of old media like television or books. Others tried to take the whole development
into consideration and thus made a step into the mediatization research of today.
But at that time, the process attracted various labels. Some called the develop-
ment “digitalization”, others spoke about the rise of a network, information, or
knowledge society, but besides mediatization there were also labels like “media-
tion”, “mediatation” or “medialization”. Thus, we need a reason for why to use
this or that concept. Of course, behind all existing labels there are specific theoreti-
cal concepts, but the question is whether they hold in the given case.
Firstly, we should decide whether we want to use a dynamic, process-oriented
label like mediatization or digitalization, or a label that refers to a stable final
result of the development like network society or the upcoming information or
knowledge society.
Three reasons make it clear that a dynamic label for such a development is
better: 1) Every society is a network, information, or knowledge society – such a
label thus is not very clear as it does not emphasize a visible difference between
today and the future. 2) There is the question of how one should define “informa-
tion society”: Is this the case today, was it the case ten years ago, when the label
was first coined, or will society in the next ten years finally be an information
society? The concepts “network” or “knowledge” society reflect that something is
changing, but the labels themselves do not make this really clear. 3) It is not
known whether at the end of today’s media development and all the other existing
long-term developments like globalization or individualization, there still will exist
what sociologists call a society. Thus, a process-related concept seems to be more
adequate, as it is more open.
134 Friedrich Krotz

Secondly, with reference to dynamic concepts, we must decide whether digital-

ization or a media-related concept like mediatization, medialization, or mediata-
tion is better. To decide this, we must look at what exactly is changing today.
On the one hand, today there is of course a process of analog data being
transformed into digital data – that is the fact which seems to make a label like
digitalization relevant. But if we look at why this new form of data is important,
we observe that this is the case because there are computers as “universal
machines” that are able to work with data in digital form. It is the computer that
organizes, sorts, controls, and directs digital data, that transforms, translates, and
uses data, that makes the Internet, the mobile phone, or interactive media pos-
sible. The digital form of the data is only a technological condition of today for
that. If we accept that media development today includes basic changes in culture
and society, then it is not the form of the data that is relevant but the fact that
there are more and more computers all over the world that work with the data.
Thus, the label digitalization is a bit misleading; instead a label like computeriza-
tion would be more apposite.
But both concepts – digitalization and computerization – refer to the technical
conditions. In contrast to that, people as users, as citizens, and as economic and
consuming subjects do not experience technology. Instead, they experienced the
rise of new media like computers, digital TV, or cellular phones. They experienced
the growing importance of media and the changing communication habits of more
and more people at work, at home, and in their leisure time. And they experienced
that new types of media, social communication, and social activities become nor-
mal – websites, organized by single people, wikis, Wikipedia and wikileaks, online
games, flashmobs, and so on. Thus, a label that refers to these media develop-
ments would be much closer to the experiences of people, as it became obvious
that growing up and becoming socialized in society changed, as social relations
and working conditions changed and information and its consumption increas-
ingly took place by using media. Over time then, economy and administration,
learning and political communication, advertisements and public discussions
change as a consequence of media change.
Thus, a media related label like mediatization or mediatation or something
like that would be much more adequate than digitalization or computerization,
when referring to the experiences of people, who construct reality and media by
using and communicating with them.
Thirdly, there then was a still ongoing discussion, whether mediation or medi-
atization, medialization or mediatation is the most adequate label, and what
exactly is meant by this. Again, it is clear that behind these different labels there
are different theoretical concepts, as the work of Lundby (2009a), Hjarvard (2009),
Hartmann and Hepp (2010), Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby (2010), Thompson (1995),
Silverstone (2007), Livingstone (2009) and Couldry (2008), cf. also Krotz and Hepp
(2012), shows. But the ongoing discussion also shows that “Mediatization” is
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 135

accepted by most people and that this includes the broadest approach, at least
at the moment (cf. also Steinmaurer 2013). Thus, we should concentrate further
discussion on important questions instead of going over the label again and again.

2.2. Learning from sociology: processes and meta processes

Using a label like mediatization as the name of a media-related development of
culture and society leads to a lot of open questions: What does this mean exactly?
What becomes mediatized? Where does it start? And so on. We will discuss these
and other questions in this chapter, but first it is necessary to develop an under-
standing of what is meant by process and how we can study and think academi-
cally in processes.
Let us start with the slightly more general question: With which theoretical
concepts we can analyze change? Communication and media studies until now
have not been greatly interested in describing developments – and if they have,
they mostly described developments of single media.2 As so often, sociology is a
bit broader, as there is a lot of work on social change, which is its own subfield, as
seen in the work of authors such as Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, or Immanuel
Wallerstein. In recent decades especially so-called transformation research was
influential here (e.g. Müller and Schmid 1995). But still, as far as I can see, there
are no consensually used concepts that could be transferred to other fields or even
clear definitions for concepts like change, development, evolution, and revolution
and so on in order to grasp what “not stable” could mean.
The only well-defined and accepted concept that is used in sociology and
communication studies seems to be the concept “process”. It is, for example, used
by Everett Rogers (1996) to describe the diffusion of innovations. Here, a process
starts with a fixed given innovation, for example an object like a new technology,
a new drug, or a new way of doing something, like healing a person or producing
more rice. Rogers’ theory then describes the diffusion of this innovation over time
in a given geographical area by describing different states at different points of
time. Here, the innovation is assumed to be stable over time. The description of
such a process of diffusion usually consists of percentages of people or experts of
the whole relevant population, who use this innovation, measured at different
points of time. This is exactly the definition of process for example in the encyclo-
pedia of sociology (Fuchs et al. 1978, 527 f.).3 It is evident that this definition of
“process” follows the rules of mathematical thinking and the way, as Bertrand

2 Of course, the so-called medium theory is also based on the idea of media change, but does not
refer to media development – we will discuss this below.
3 A more open definition is given by Norbert Elias (1998), who wrote the article about “social
processes” in another encyclopedic volume. This is much closer to what we call meta process (see
below).
136 Friedrich Krotz

Russell pointed out, in which quantitative social research understands and

describes the world. He once said that on the basis of formal logic and mathemati-
cal thinking a flying arrow does not move but is just at different points of time at
different places in the space (Russell 1975). This idea is similar to the fact that a
movie is a rapid sequence of single stable pictures.
But there are at least three arguments why it is not always helpful to reduce
our understanding of reality to such a concept of change, as Rogers used it, when
we think about mediatization.
First of all, Roger’s approach is not really helpful to describe the diffusion of
a medium, as a medium itself is not a stable innovation, but a process and continu-
ously under development: For example, the innovation “computer” changed over
time, as it got a hard disk and later a colored screen and then became a part of
the Internet and so on. Thus, the respective percentages of users and non-users
describe different things at different points of time and cannot be compared. Evi-
dently, a mediatization process is much broader than the diffusion of one or a few
media as it asks in addition for the relevant social and cultural changes. And the
development which we call mediatization does not take place in one area only,
but in different areas of lives of people, in different regions, and different cultural
areas – of course nonlinear, not simultaneously, and with different results, for
example in school, jobs, political discussion, or shopping.
Secondly, we should doubt whether all kinds of processes can be regarded in
the same way as the process of diffusion of innovations, i.e. in a way that continual
changes and motions are reduced to a sequence of stable states. A movie for exam-
ple may consist of a sequence of pictures, but we experience it as an ongoing
continual process. Rogers and Russell’s analytic perspective is thus not helpful in
reconstructing the people’s experience, as it cannot be called a way of experienc-
ing and thinking in processes. What we need is to learn to think in open and broad
processes, the beginning and the results of which we do not know.
Thirdly, in addition, we can learn from sociology. There it is clear that not all
developments can be understood in such a narrow way as process as this is the
case with the diffusion of innovations, as developments like modernization, globali-
zation, enlightenment, individualization, or civilization are of different type: con-
cepts like these are well defined and used in sociology, and we also use them in
our everyday life to explain the world, but they are much broader and more open
than a process in the sense defined above: They do not take place in restricted
areas, they are long-term and last over a few or several generations, they may not
have a clear beginning and may never have a clearly defined end. In addition,
they may take place at the same time with different intensities and directions in
different societies and cultures, as in their concrete form they depend on a lot of
conditions given by the respective culture and society they are part of. For exam-
ple, it is arbitrary to say that modernization or civilization have begun at this or
that date, and those developments took place in very different ways in Europe,
the Arab countries, or in China.
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 137

Here we cannot develop a theory of change, but will concentrate on the third
point: In the following we will call such overriding developments meta processes.
Meta processes are long-term processes of processes that are relevant for the actual
and the long-term development of everyday life and identity of the people and for
culture and society in general. Of course, they can take different ways and direc-
tions in different cultures and societies and historical phases, as it is the case with
media development in different cultures and under different historical conditions.
As examples for meta processes, taken from sociology, the terms modernization,
enlightenment, or christianization can serve here, but also individualization, glo-
balization, and commercialization. With regard to communication studies, for
example, we can observe the coming into existence of a book culture that took
place in China, Korea, and Europe as an earlier mediatization process, but at differ-
ent moments in time and with different forms of development (Bösch 2011). This
example also shows that the rise of book culture ignored the printing press in
China, but in Korea and Europe, the printing press became highly important –
nevertheless all three societies became literate. Thus, meta processes are rather
complex and may differ in a relevant way in different cultures and under different
historical conditions (in more detail: Krotz 2003, 2007: 25 ff., 2009a).
In this sense then, we speak of a meta process mediatization which is taking
place today, nonsimultaneously in different cultures, societies, and different areas
of everyday life and which must be analyzed through communication studies. As
an aside, we can say that cultural and societal developments do not, of course,
depend only on one of the named long-term meta processes. Empirical studies and
theoretical conclusions thus must take into consideration the interplay of such
developments – but we will here concentrate on mediatization as a meta process.
While doing so we should bear in mind that today the meta processes globaliza-
tion, individualization, and commercialization together with mediatization are the
movers of modernity.

2.3 The core topic of mediatization: the relation between media

change and the change of everyday life and identity,
culture and society
In the following we understand mediatization as a meta process as explained
above, as a long term development that includes media change and the respective
change in culture and society (Krotz 2011). In the introduction to this chapter, I
described mediatization as an answer to the empirically observed facts that we
live under changing conditions of media and media development and at the same
time in changing cultures and societies. By going into more detail, we can describe
this central topic of Mediatization better. Let us start by using the field of political
communication as an example and then come on to more general statements.
138 Friedrich Krotz

Political communication research is mainly concerned with the role of media

in the field of politics. Today, political parties, the administration, government and
all democratic institutions have had to learn to relate in new ways to the media,
which increasingly do not only report and comment on what has happened or
serve as an arena (as in former times), but appear as actors with own their interests
in shaping politics, in order to earn money or at least to gain attention. This means
that the media have become actors of a new type in the political field and must
be taken into consideration by the traditional actors such as parliament, the politi-
cal parties, political organizations, or the lobby. This is what researchers in politi-
cal communication sometimes call medialization (see, for example, Schulz 2008).
But by far this is not all that has been changed in the field of political commu-
nication by what we here call mediatization. On a meso level, the administration,
the parliament, the government, and the political parties “mediatized” themselves
as they used digital media for their tasks, their organization, and their contacts
with their members and the people. Political parties, for example, created virtual
member groups, virtual meetings, developed newsletters and websites, blogs and
used Facebook and Twitter – in this sense, all these institutions and organizations
became producers of media for their own purposes. In tandem, the political partici-
pation of people became mediatized, not only because ever more people used the
new media, but because new forms of participation became possible: new access
to information, new contacts between politicians and voters, new websites to con-
trol and evaluate political developments or politicians and so on. The relevant
contexts of political communication and political discourses also became different
by commenting blogs, wikileaks, a changing in the information gathering of news-
papers, the Clinton hearing via the Internet in Europe, virtual political groups and
online discussions, cyber war, data surveillance and so on. All this together cre-
ated and still is creating new mediatized contexts of political development, as all
these developments are transforming the communicative construction of reality, of
politics and interaction by the people into a mediatized construction of reality.
Thus, it is recommended that researchers in political communication broaden their
understanding of what they describe to be medialization or mediatization.
This example includes the idea that mediatization is a meta process that is at
least relevant for the different forms of communication in a society. In general
terms, communication increasingly takes place with relation to media. I will ana-
lyze this in more detail in section 3 below, but will state here that this does not only
mean that people communicate by media – it is also the case that our knowledge
of everything depends on media or that media may be seen as mighty institutions,
which are relevant for political decisions and processes. Mediatization thus is a
much broader concept in its influence on culture and society than just looking at
media or even at mass media content. On the level of communicative action, we
can differentiate this in the following way:
On the one hand, there is mediated communication, which means that commu-
nication takes place with media like TV or computer games or by using telephone,
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 139

letters, or e-mail, for example. Besides mediated communication, there is media

related communication. This happens if we communicate in the presence of media,
while using media, for example while listening to music or watching pictures, but
also if we communicate about media or using or referring to media content, or if
we communicate by using information which we got from the media, or refer to
emotions that we have had by using media: All these together may serve as the
context of our thinking, our expressions, and our understanding. This then means
that the growing use and meaning of media today not only changes culture and
society, because people use media for more and more purposes and interests, but
also that the contexts of communication more and more are media related: Com-
munication under such conditions is what we might call mediatized communica-
tion, which is much more than mediated communication. The socially and commu-
nicatively constructed reality thus became a mediatized reality, as mediated and
media related communication becomes more and more relevant.
On the basis of this we finally can say that mediatization does not only include
changes in culture and society because of increasing media use, but also a new
quality comes into existence, because this development is not linear and causal,
recursive and reflexive, as the media may play different roles and have different
points of reference. We communicate with the help and in the presence of media
and refer to knowledge and norms, values and emotions, that we learned and
experienced by media, and thus communication, culture, and society cannot be
understood without such a reference to media: As more and more areas of human
life were communicatively constructed in a mediatized way, whole areas and in
the long run the whole culture and society cannot be understood if we does not
take into account that the contexts of communication are mediated and media
related also, and this is what makes communication mediatized. As the develop-
ments have to be described by quantitative and qualitative changes, not just as a
“more and more”, but also as a complex and non linear evolution, in obviously a
similar complexity as globalization or modernization, it makes sense to understand
mediatization as a metaprocess, that of course must be studied further.

2.4 Necessary enlargments of communication studies

To sum up: starting with the point that we live in a rapidly changing world with
rapidly changing media and media services, we assume that we can describe and
theoretically grasp this development as a metaprocess called mediatization. The
question behind this is how media are developing and how this is relevant for the
everyday life of people, their social relations, and their identity and how this is
relevant for the meso level of organizations and institutions and the macro level
of culture and society. We understand this development as an open process that
may be influenced by people and civil society, by government and bureaucracy,
and, of course, enterprises, industry, and other organizations and institutions –
140 Friedrich Krotz

while all these entities will also be changing if this metaprocess goes on. Further
questions will be discussed in the rest of this chapter, but before we do so we
want to state that such a view also demands changes in communication studies.
Communication studies as a type of social science have until now mostly been
interested in questions of media use, media content, and media effects, whereupon
effects have been defined to be causal consequences of content (see, for example,
McQuail, [1996] 2010). This traditional orientation of communication studies of
course took seriously what public opinion and political institutions wanted to
know from communication studies: How do media influence people, democracy,
and the society by content?
But today, media are much more than an arena, an actor with an opinion, and
an agent of information, as for example Newcomb and Hirsch (1986) described
them. Today, we are not only concerned with what formerly was called mass
media, but also with media of interpersonal and interactive communication. Media
belong in addition to the everyday life of people. They are of high importance for
children and young people, as they grew up with them. Their existence generates
control and power, as they penetrate everyday life, culture, and society. This was
already a topic in early communication studies and also one of McLuhan, Meyro-
witz and others (see below), but has been forgotten in main stream studies.
In this sense then, the study of mediatization is a must for communication
studies. It gives this discipline a broader perspective such that it can contribute to
find answers for civil society and politics, and of course, for an economy interested
in human development, where we go. In the future, at least in the next decades,
communication studies must work under changing media conditions and will
study for example communication with robots and augmented reality, just to name
some developing topics. We also think that a mediatization approach may serve
as a common frame for the different disciplines that are concerned with media
change and other related topics. And we think that such an approach is necessary
if we want to understand the historical development of media and communication
in the past. Other academic disciplines like sociology, psychology, political sci-
ence, or the research on child development today are also interested in media
development and are doing a lot of media related research – we should cooperate
with them (Krotz 2009b).
This helps us to draw further conclusions. For example, communication stud-
ies cannot further be restricted to understand the human being as a part of an
audience at the end of a line of transport of information as described by Harold
Lasswell with his famous set of questions: “Who says what in which channel to
whom with what effect?” (Lasswell 1964, 32–51). Instead, we need an understand-
ing of the human being as a socially and communicatively constructed subject in
society that communicates in specific social and mediatized worlds on the base of
different social and cultural conditions, forms, habits, technologies, and interests
with others. Each subject today is becoming an individual that is living with parts
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 141

of his or her identity in the net and is understanding media like the smartphone
or Google Glass as a part of his or her body.
In connection with the relevance of all these developments, we must decide
what kind of modernity we want. Or to paraphrase Herbert Schiller (1989): We live
in a big experiment that industry, government, administration, and economy is
realizing, without knowing how and why and where we go. It’s the task of acade-
mia and especially of communication studies to inform civil society so that it can
decide what should be done. The following sections now will describe that concept
in more detail in order to collect more knowledge about mediatization develop-
ment and to avoid misunderstandings.

3 Further features of mediatization

While in section 2 of this chapter we have developed the basic features and charac-
teristics of the actual mediatization approach, we now will discuss characteristic
assumptions and ideas belonging to this approach that are not shared by all
researchers working on mediatization.

3.1 Revisiting medium theory: from historical phases to media

change
In some sense, mediatization research is a child of medium theory. Joshua Meyrow-
itz (1997) labeled the common work of those researchers who asked for the role of
media in culture and society with the attribute “medium theory”. It is well known
that Harold Innis (1951, 2007), Marshall McLuhan (1992), Neil Postman (1982) and
Joshua Meyrowitz (1990) already analyzed the role of media in society, starting
with the assumption that culture and society are influenced and formed by the
respective leading media of a historical phase. Besides these researchers, there are
other scholars like Eric Havelock (1990), Walter Ong (1995) or Jack Goody and his
collaborators (1986), who may be added to this approach. They have worked in a
similar way in the same direction, asking for the importance of media for culture
and society, but they differ in relevant points from the first group and belong to
medium theory only in a wider sense.
What is common to all these scholars? They did not reduce the role of (mass-)
media to the content which they transport, as it is for example expressed in the
well-known Lasswell formula, which was basic for main stream communication
studies (see above). Instead, they thought that media technologies themselves just
by their very existence and by human use have been relevant in shaping culture
and society, and – as far as the medium theory researchers are involved – that the
human history can be segmented into phases that are determined by a central
142 Friedrich Krotz

type of media. They thus speak for example from the era of oral, written, or printed
communication or use similar attributes like the TV age. Under this umbrella,
different ideas have been realized.
Whereas Innis (1951, 2007) asked for the relation between media and power
in different societies and showed that stable stone tables supported a different
type of hierarchy and societal power, compared with light paper, McLuhan (1990)
understood media as extensions of human beings and was concerned with the
changing perception and the changing activities of people, in as far as they used
different media. Postman (1983) then did not create as many of his own ideas but
used McLuhan’s argument to become the “Kassandra” of media development,
which he thought would ruin analytical thinking, democracy, and all the rest.
Meyrowitz (1990) was the empirical researcher of medium theory. He mainly was
concerned with television. His idea was that by the technology of TV basic social
rules that formerly had been relevant for the acceptance of hierarchies, the differ-
ence between men and women, or group building processes would disappear. It
is well known that the researchers of medium theory, with the exception of Mey-
rowitz, did not try to test their hypotheses empirically and that they mostly took
a technologically based argumentation. A further common feature of those me-
dium theory scholars is that they usually tried to explain the whole of human
history by the role of the media. They did so by defining a main media that shaped
and influenced culture and society in a special way for each single phase of human
development (Krotz 2001).
The other scholars mentioned above came from different approaches and disci-
plines and studied the rise of writing, the role of the printing press, and tried to
find out how oral culture could function. They did not develop an overall theory
as this was done by Innis and McLuhan, but studied media and their meaning for
society in a similar way. Nevertheless, they have in common that they all asked
for the role of media in general and not for media effects by content of media.
The work of the scholars of medium theory was of great importance for com-
munication studies, as they worked on a neglected field and created many
insights. Nevertheless, a number of their assumptions must be seen to be wrong:
the technologically based argumentation, their explanations of human history only
or mainly by the influence of media, and the labeling of the epochs of human
existence as oral, electrical, and so on. And of course it is true that human commu-
nication is the basic human activity to construct a common culture and society,
but we should not overestimate media and neglect all other relevant fields that
influence human existence.
Nevertheless, the mediatization approach is committed to medium theory for
some ideas, but must try to avoid the mistakes of medium theory. In the following,
we will discuss in more detail three problematic conclusions that might be drawn
from medium theory but which may lead mediatization theory in the wrong direc-
tion.
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 143

Firstly, there are some researchers like Finneman (2011) who took over the idea
that human history is substantially influenced and formed by media and that it
makes sense to segment history into phases that are labeled by the predominant
media like oral, written, printed, or electric communication. This, of course, is
correct in as far as media are relevant for culture and society, power and organiza-
tion of the society. In the perspective of a mediatization approach, this is the case
because media are relevant for the way in which the world is communicatively
constructed. But we must take into account that mediatization is only one meta
process, and the development of culture and society is not only a result of mediati-
zation. Media are probably overestimated, if it is maintained that they determine
the entire human life.4 In addition, if we look for example at the sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu (2005), it is evident that media are important, but that social, cultural,
financial, and symbolic capital as the resources to be successful in a society may
also come from institutions other than the media.
Further, it cannot be assumed that the development of the whole media system
in history takes place in steps, from writing to printing, from printing to radio and
TV, such that the former media disappear or become irrelevant: As empirical
research is showing, in general the old media will not be substituted, but will take
over new roles, as for example the radio did after the invention of TV. While the
radio before the dissemination of TV was relevant for news, it was no longer rele-
vant for that for most people after TV came into most households. Instead, music
and the transmission of practical information by radio became of importance, and
the radio became a medium of accompanying people in their everyday life. We
should describe this as an ongoing process of differentiation of the media system.
And finally, it should be noted that the mediatization approach emphasizes the
changing of media, culture, and society and does not assume that between the
changing epochs and the points of change which are assumed by medium theory,
nothing happens – on the contrary, these development processes are the main
topic of mediatization theory.
Secondly, there are researchers who take over from medium theory the idea
that media as technologies directly influence the human existence and people’s activ-
ities and thus are relevant for their lives, independent from the culture and society,
in which the people live who use these media. It is well known that this assumption
of the scholars like Innis and McLuhan has again and again been criticized.
Indeed, Innis and McLuhan assume in their argumentation that a medium can
only be used in one way, which is equivalent to assuming that technology deter-
mines what can be done with a media. Meyrowitz argued differently, as he tried
to find out how the use of TV opens new perspectives on and orientations for
activities in a society, but he then argues in a similar way, that every single person
must understand this in the same way.

4 McLuhan, Innis and Finneman do not have an argument why media should be so relevant. They
just argue about what can be done with media, but this of course is not enough.
144 Friedrich Krotz

Against this, we here understand media not only to be a technology. Referring

to Raymond Williams we define a medium as a technology and a social form, given
by social institutions and enterprises, related with rules, laws, expectations of the
people and the media makers, and so on. These two “dimensions” – cultural form
and/or social institution and technology – at least describe the structural view of
a medium. In addition there is at the same time a situational view, that understands
a medium as an ongoing machine of distributing, producing, and transporting con-
tent, that on the other hand serves as a space of experience of the users. Both
definitions together – similar to the definition of language as given structure and
situational use as parole, following Ferdinand de Saussure (1998) – thus could be
understood as a semiotically based definition of media. Referring to this definition,
it is clear that an only technologically based analysis of media as done by Innis
and McLuhan cannot hold.
Thirdly: There is a further argument about the mediatization meta process that
can be rejected with reference to the above given definition of media. This is the
frequently heard assumption that the reason behind mediatization is a given intern
media logic (e.g. Altheide and Snow 1972; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Schulz 2004,
2008; and others). The underlying argument here is that each medium follows an
own given logic, which is valid under all conditions and always in the same way.
If this is the case, then a medium would operate outside of culture and society.
But this is not possible. If we for example look at the history of TV in the last five
decades, it is obvious that TV is quite different today, compared with earlier times.
If we compare TV in Saudi Arabia or Iran with the private TV in US or public
service TV in some countries of Europe, there are also great differences. For exam-
ple, while the public service stations in the US are independent of ratings, the
private stations put pressure on people to watch more and more TV because of
their economic interests. Against these capitalist goals, the pressure to watch TV
in Saudi Arabia comes from the religious society, which presents itself in a reli-
gious TV in order to educate its members. In sum, there is no overall media logic,
whatever this should be exactly, that holds for mass media, telephone, Internet,
and computer games in the same way. We thus conclude (see also Lundby 2009a;
Hepp 2012) that the idea of media logic cannot hold. Instead, it may make sense
to speak of a capitalistic logic that is relevant for media, at least in a lot of nations
and internationally, but this is not meant by media logic and this discussion seems
to disappear behind the media logic discussion.
Against these three misunderstandings that often are transported from
medium theory to the mediatization approach, we would now mention the ideas
that are common to both approaches. The main thing that mediatization research
in my opinion is taking over from medium theory is the perspective to ask for the
role of media and media change for culture and society. This defines a core question
of both approaches, as it also makes clear if we look at the introductory definition
of mediatization: How do culture and society change in the context of media
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 145

change? In other words, it is the common assumption between medium theory

and mediatization research that there is a relevant influence of media and media
change to the everyday life of people and to culture and society.
While medium theory, as shown above, takes the media technology for the
media, it only asks whether and how media are influencing culture and society.
Because mediatization theory understands media as a technology and cultural
form, we here take the other question into consideration as well: How are media
shaped by culture and society? More precisely this means for example that TV and
other media in different societies may be differently embedded in the respective
society, by laws, organization, and norms, by content and production, by use of
the users. Media change, cultural and social change thus must be understood as a
dialectical process that must be reconstructed in a dialectical way by mediatization
research. Media are created, formed, and influenced by culture and society in an
ongoing process, and they are vice versa influential for culture and society and its
social construction. Both processes take place continually and simultaneously, but
also in a sequence of different steps, where processes may become denser or
looser. This will be discussed further below; it is the question how mediatization
works.
But before doing so let us finally point to another important fact: We said in
the above chapter that the idea to develop a mediatization concept came up with
the rise of digital media and the media explosion that frequently is said to be a
revolution. It is without doubt true that a lot of new technologies came up and
were used by people and by this were installed as media. The appearance of new
media of course is changing the media system as a whole. But this is only one
part of media development that is relevant for changes in culture and society.
What has to be taken into consideration as well is the fact that the old media are
changing, as this also is a reason why the media system is changing. Understand-
ing mediatization thus demands a perspective on the whole media system of a
culture and society, of course with its relations to other cultures and societies. We
will show that below by using some examples. And we will also argue that because
of this mediatization is a metaprocess that was discovered studying digital media
development, but the concept can and should also be used for the description of
other historical developments of media, culture, and society.

3.2 Mediatization as a long-term process that accompanies

human development
In this section, as a consequence of the above argument, the following question
will be discussed: Is mediatization a current process that started with the digital
media in the 20 th century or with the technical media in the 19 th century, or is it a
long-term process that has been taking place over a long time already?
146 Friedrich Krotz

Now, as far as we refer to medium theory, it would be an simple argument to

say that mediatization research takes over the idea of a long-term development of
mediatization from medium theory. We could also refer to the Austrian Josef Riepl,
who studied the media of the antiquity as well and showed that in those times
there already existed different media that changed over time in production and
use, and that no old medium was substituted by the new one (Riepl 1913). Similar
conclusions could be drawn from media and communication history. But we want
to go a bit deeper and will report two historical case studies: 1) the long-term
process of growing literacy in the world, and 2) the process of the changing modes
of reading in the outgoing Middle Ages in Europe. Both can be understood as sub-
processes of the meta process mediatization, each having a different character.

1. There is broad historical research about the slowly, but continually growing
importance of reading and writing from the invention of writing until today (Stein
2010; Raible 2006) which could be called the “becoming literate” of the world. It
is described as a process drawing from different sources: the personal interest of
some people, a growing number of jobs and working places where reading and
writing was important, for example the church, traders, the administration of King-
doms and cities, the growth of universities in the 13th century and later, and so
on, of course, different ones in different phases of history. This growth of literacy,
at least in Europe, was a long-term process, that for a long time was controlled by
the church and the monasteries and which in most times only integrated a few
children and adults. But then the Prussian King Frederik instituted schools for
everybody in Germany in the 18th century and so gave all children the chance to
go to school, but at the same moment forced them to go to school. As Stein empha-
sizes in his brilliant historical overview of the development of the ability to read
and write in Europe, it was not until the rise of industrial society in the 19th century
that the great mass of children learned to read and to write in Germany, the UK,
and France. He also shows that with the ability to read the book culture made a
great development – that the newspaper culture, the book entertainment culture,
reading in trains and elsewhere was growing. Thus, this development may be
understood to be a process of mediatization long before the rise of digital media.
Of course, it should be noted that this was not a process that the governments
of the respective countries promoted in order to give their inhabitants the chance
to participate in democracy or to offer them ways of self-realization. Instead, the
aim was the production of people who then should be able to work in the factories
and produce more complicated things (Stein 2010) or, in the case of King Frederik
of Prussia, to get better soldiers. The same is described by the historian Juergen
Osterhammel (2011) in his world history of the 19th century. He also describes the
rise of schools as a way to enforce segmentation into social classes by promoting
children of the higher classes. And Stein (2010) reminds us of the fact that even
in 20th-century schools children spent more time in learning good handwriting
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 147

than how to participate actively in democracy and society by writing good argu-
ments and ideas. This did not change until the Internet.
Thus, we can conclude that the long-term process of a society becoming liter-
ate can be understood to be a part of the human meta process of mediatization.
Nevertheless this was not a free decision of the people, but an enforced process.

2. The second historical case study refers to reading in the 11th century in Europe.
We here refer to the impressive example given by the sociologist and historian
Ivan Illich (2010) (see also Krotz 2012, 2014 for more details; Bösch 2011). Illich
wrote a commentary about the book “Didascalicon” written by the monk Hugo of
the monastery Saint-Victor in France in the first half of the 11th century. Hugo’s
book explained how to read correctly. To understand this, we must start with a
description of what a book at that time was. For Hugo, a book is always written
in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, and the author is one of the famous scholars of the
Christian church, of the Roman Empire, or of the Greek times like Plato or Aristotle.
Reading in this sense is free from any relation to your real life, and you must have
high respect for the author and his ideas. In addition, a book is written by hand,
without a lot of features that we expect from a book. It neither had a table of
content nor subtitles or punctuation, and mostly there would have been no spaces
between words. Thus, you can only read such a book aloud, following the
sequence of letters, and by listening to what you are saying, if you want to find
out what was written there. This was the way to understand the author, whom
one must believe and treat with respect. Thus, reading is accompanied by memo-
rizing the text and it usually, at least in the monasteries, ended in a believing
meditation.
Illich explains all this to his readers, and he also makes clear that Hugo wrote
his book in a historical moment of change: a century later, books have been much
more like books as we know them today, with all the things that we would miss
in Hugo’s books. In addition it then was no longer usual to read aloud and in
some sense “by your ears”, but by your eyes. Following Illich, the reason for this
development was the change in social life: Changes in agriculture, craft, and trade,
in the administration of the church, and of the possessions of the nobles and so
on. All that produced a demand for knowledge, and thus books became more
practical. They were written in the languages people used in their everyday lives,
arranged by titles and subtitles and easier to read. Finally even a critical reading
became possible, which by Illich was called scholastic reading. This all happened
centuries before the invention of the printing press, but more or less at the same
time as the idea of the university came into existence in Europe. This also may be
understood as a mediatization development, as here again we have a relation
between culture and society on the one hand and media development on the
other – it is obvious, that there are complex dialectic relations between all these
changes.
148 Friedrich Krotz

Both examples make clear, that mediatization understood as the relation

between media change and cultural and societal change is a process that did not
start with the digital media, but includes many developments that had happened
before digitalization. We thus can learn a lot about the structures we are living in
today, if we understand mediatization as an ongoing meta process that already
started long ago, and the relations between media, culture, and society do not
only exist today, but already did so in the past. Europe’s becoming literate was
evidently a development that fits under the concept of mediatization, as it hap-
pened together with a long lasting process of changing culture and society. This
process also influenced reading, writing, people’s knowledge, and a lot of other
things. The same is true if we look at the transformation of books, and the transfor-
mation of reading and its aims that were shown in the second example.
We thus conclude that mediatization should be seen as a meta process, that has
accompanied humanity since the invention of communication. Also the development
of audible and visual media in the 19th and 20th centuries may be analyzed in its
relation to changing culture and society. And all this shows that we must take
into consideration historical processes if we want to understand the mediatization
process of today. An understanding of mediatization that cuts the actual develop-
ment off from the former developments is thus not helpful. As the examples above
show that media development takes place in relation to power in a society, we
also need critical consideration and critical research.

3.3 Sub-processes of a meta process: the complexity of

mediatization
Let us now as the next step in developing the mediatization concept have a more
detailed look at problems of how to describe and theorize media change as a part
of what mediatization research must analyze. Here we discuss first ways of media
change and then sub-processes of mediatization. Both perspectives together make
it clear that mediatization is a highly complex meta process that must be studied
empirically in a detailed way.
As has already been said above, if we want to study mediatization starting
with the analysis of media change, we must always ask for the change of the
whole media system. This is the case because changes may come up with new
media, with resulting changes in old ones, but it also may be the case that only
the old media are changing, without new ones coming into existence. In both
cases, the relations between media may change, and this may be a starting point
to look for follow up changes in culture and society.
In addition, in order to describe media changes systematically, it is necessary
to remember an adequate definition of media such that one can describe conse-
quences of different ways of media change. Above, we defined media as consisting
of four “dimensions”: structurally a technology and an embedded social institu-
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 149

tion, situationally a machine for producing and distributing content in specific

forms and a space for experiences (see also Williams 1958, 1990; Krotz 2012). Hav-
ing this in mind, we should conclude that media change can start everywhere in
this square: Structurally by the invention and distribution of a new technology or
socially by the rise or disappearance of institutions, for example, if censorship is
abolished or new rules for advertising will come into effect, and situationally as
shown above by new interests and demands of users or by changing content and
its presentation.
Examples for this are easy to find – the mobile phone was a technologically
driven invention, while radio and the Internet are technologies which were
invented by the military and later promoted by the government. An example for a
technologically driven media change of an already existing medium today is the
cinema, as it becomes more and more an arena for new experiences by technologi-
cal developments. Complex and expensive innovations take place there, as 3D-
movies, live transmissions of sport events or opera, theater, and music events for
public viewing, or the distribution of movies via satellite, which also can be
received in restaurants or cafes and not only in classical cinemas. This in the long
run may contribute not only to changing communicational habits of the people,
as it for example promotes public viewing, but also may change the role of opera,
concerts, or sport events as part of our culture.
Other media innovations may come into existence directly from the users. They
usually are not a homogenous group or audience, and thus specific subgroups
may demand other content or new communicational forms. Such groups even may
create new forms of mediated communication, which lead to new forms of media
use. The classic example for this is the unexpected “invention” of SMS by children
and young people when the mobile phone became a medium used by the masses.
Another example is given by the above reported research of Ivan Illich about books
in the Middle Ages. Here, already existing media are changing fundamentally, and
by this or in the context of this the prevailing ways to use a medium will change.
Similar conclusions can be drawn for example from the work of Jonathan Sterne
(2003) about the coming into existence of audible media. It is also well known
that the introduction of the telephone at the end of the 19th century (Degele 2002
with further quotations) spread out much faster in the more open US society than
in the much more hierarchical society in Great Britain, where people felt frequently
disturbed by the sudden symbolic presence of a caller; here it is obvious again
that the relevant conditions of the life of people may be of high relevance for their
fears and expectations.
As a consequence, we can conclude that mediatization research cannot con-
fine itself to one-medium-studies only and that the history of media cannot be
understood as a sequence of upcoming new media, but must include changes of
old media and take the whole media system into consideration in any case. In
addition, if we look for follow up changes in culture and society, we should not
150 Friedrich Krotz

only analyze the features of the new media or of the changing old media, but we
must see whether and how these new or changing media are becoming a part of
the media environment of a person – here domestication theory may be helpful –
and whether and how they are really used. Here “the media environment of a
person” is an empirical concept that is necessary as it asks for the real existence
of the media in the everyday life of people and thus allows understanding the
concept “media system” as a social fact in the perspective of the individual. We
further can conclude that mediatization research cannot be done in a media cen-
tered way.
As a consequence, in the context of the analysis of media change further con-
ceptual questions arise. Evidently, there is the question how we can differentiate
between two technologies and between two different media. This is of interest,
because if we speak of media change, then we must answer the question whether
a medium is developing, but still is the same medium, or whether it is developing
into a new medium.
For example, are colored TV sets a new medium compared with black-and-
white TVs, do we call TV sets with a remote control new media in contrast to TV
sets without a remote control, or are all these forms of TV the same category, and
a new one did not come up before satellite TV, or perhaps even later with the new
generation of TV sets − the LED TV with Internet connection? Similar questions
can be asked with respect to other media. In addition, it is unclear, whether an e-
book with its paper-like screen is nothing more than a new carrier of written texts
and thus is a book, or whether it is a computer, as it usually has a connection to
the Internet. This question is of importance, if we state like Riepl (quoted above)
that new media may substitute old ones or not (see also Peiser 2008).
Thus, if we are concerned with media development, we need a discussion
about how to define what. To decide when we speak of a new medium compared
with the old ones, there are at least two solutions: We can take a technological
invention as relevant to differentiate between two media, or we can ask for differ-
ent types of uses by people to define a new medium. In the first case, the color
would be relevant, if we speak of a new generation of TV sets as a new medium,
in the second case the remote control would be the characteristic to make it a new
medium, as this changes the use of TV. Similar questions can be asked for the
book, the computer, or the Internet. In a mediatization perspective that refers to
media change in order to study the developments of culture and society the second
way seems to be more adequate, but this needs more empirical research.
If we look at this the other way round, then we find out that both solutions
may give us different ideas. Take for example the rise of e-books. On the one hand,
we can understand them just as a new carrier of texts that are helpful for some
purposes. E-books thus are a new invention after paper and parchment, black-
boards and similar materials that together with texts make reading possible.
It is obvious and well known that those different carrying materials together
with institutionally guided rules and norms of how to use such media, give hand-
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 151

written or printed texts different features, what can be done with them, may be,
these for the transport of information, those for better memories, some for instruc-
tions, others for entertainment. Thus, not only the goals, when to use what, but
also the accepted ways to approach such a written text and to use it, may be
different, as it was in the Middle Ages, described by Ivan Illich, or as it is the case
today, as most women use e-books on their holidays for entertainment and leisure,
while male users use them as part of their work for instructional reading.
In such a perspective, the e-book is not so much a computer based medium,
but a medium to read, a successor to paper. It could also be regarded as a follower
of the first home computers and the early Internet that started with screens only
for representing characters and signs, which were used as comfortable writing
machines with databases, (and in some cultures, e.g. Japan, as the first typewrit-
ers that really could represent all possible signs). Even computer games on the In-
ternet started as texts, if we think of MOOs and MUDs of the early net (see
www.mud.de). Probably it is still true today that analphabets cannot use the net
or a mobile phone or only in a highly reduced way, as people using the net have
to read a lot. We perhaps should name the smartphone the smartbook.
Thus, in such a perspective, the decline of newspapers printed on paper is not
a democratic catastrophe, which will lead to the end of reading, but just a sign of
the development of a new carrier of written texts, which for some goals may be
better. Thus, society (and the owners of newspapers) should finish sleeping and
develop new ideas how to transfer their symbolic capital to newsreaders on screen.
But in another view, e-books are computers that in the long run will change
reading radically, as more and more pictures, sound, and moving images will
appear here and thus reading will become rarer and more difficult. In such a
perspective, e-books are dangerous for our culture, which for thousands of years
has been based on writing and reading.
Evidently, neither view is wrong, and both should be discussed in public. In
addition, both descriptions may be understood as sub-processes of mediatization,
as they are concerned with the relation between media, cultural, and societal
change. Above all, these considerations making it clear that mediatization is a
rather complex topic, just as the topic of “media change” must be seen as rather
complex. In addition, the above argument makes it clear that the described single
processes may be considered as sub-processes of an overall mediatization process.
This leads us to the second topic of this section, as the question of sub-processes
of mediatization is an old one.
As it is well known in mediatization research, the consideration of sub-proc-
esses was an early idea of Winfried Schulz and Gianpetro Mazzoleni, who defined
mediatization by four sub-processes. They called them extension (to describe that
with media one can perceive over space and time), substitution (of communication
without media and communication mediated by old media), amalgamation (for
mixing mediated communication with other activities), and accommodation (if
152 Friedrich Krotz

social actors adapt to media logic) (Schulz 2004, 2008; Mazzoleni and Schulz
1999).
These four developments are formulated in a very general way, and they may
take place in the case of mediatization, but they also may take place in other
contexts, and in addition, they are of different type, as we will argue in the follow-
ing.
The Extension sub-process obviously refers to McLuhan’s media concept, for
whom a medium was everything that enhanced human perception and action pos-
sibilities. Nevertheless, in social reality it must be said that it well may be that the
invention of a new medium does not enhance the possibilities of all people, as
not all may have access to such a new medium, for example if it is too expensive
or too complicated, while at the same time because of substitution old media
services may disappear, such that it is only an extension for some. In addition,
the extension concept ignores that some new media (e.g. computer games) do not
extend something, but create a new form of reality, which makes the simple idea
behind “extension” obsolete. Amalgamation is not specific for the media develop-
ment of today, as it already took place, for example, in the case of driving a car
or taking a train while listening to the radio; it depends on the respective media
and the ways how it is used in a culture and society. If we look for example to the
earlier production of cigars, there was always a person who read the laborers texts
while they worked – this already was amalgamation, not depending on media
development but organized by trade unions. Accommodation – if we understand
media logic as the rise of powerful media as societal actors – may take place
whenever something is invented that may influence the power relations in a soci-
ety, but accommodation of interpersonal media do not make sense. Finally the
substitution sub-process should also be regarded in a more diligent way − as we
have already argued above, it needs some theoretical ground to say that a medium
substitutes another one, which is not given here.
Thus, in sum the ideas of Schulz and Mazzoleni are helpful in order to remind
us of sub-processes of mediatization, but have to be developed in many ways.
Seen from the perspective of mediatization as a meta process, we may define and
observe a lot of sub-processes in other historical phases, as we have done in this
chapter, and there may be sub-processes following Schulz and Mazzoleni also. But
this must be shown in much more detail, and in addition, such sub-processes
alone cannot constitute a common long-term process like mediatization. Probably
because of this Schulz and Mazzoleni do not have any argument why the processes
they mention are the relevant ones for mediatization or why they assume that
these constitute the whole mediatization meta process, and what relation exists
between the sub-processes.
Indeed, it must be said that there are many more sub-processes than those
mentioned by Schulz and Mazzoleni, as we have already shown with the process
of making a society literate. Furthermore, the development of visual culture with
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 153

the consequences that Benjamin, for example, described (1980) or the creation of
sound culture as it is reconstructed by Jonathan Sterne (2003) are also relevant
sub-processes of a greater historical mediatization process. Mazzoleni and Schulz
ignore all that – this makes clear that the idea of sub-processes has to be elabo-
rated much more.
In addition, there are sub-processes of a further type: The example of the
changing technology “book” in the European Renaissance as described by Ivan
Illich, in the terminology of sub-processes can perhaps be understood as a segmen-
tation of a mediatization sub-process into two other ones: at first the medium
“book” was newly arranged for new needs and ways to use it, and after that the
printing press was invented to care for an easy and cheap diffusion of this new
type of book. While the domestication process (Silverstone and Haddon 1996)
describes the development of a new medium as a circle between the households
and the industry, here media change is seen as a linear process that consists of
two parts.
Finally, Mazzoleni and Schulz do not really explain their concept of mediatiza-
tion as an integrating process, and also not under which conditions and how
new or changing media give reason to such developments. The core task of any
mediatization concept is that it has to explain what the connection between media
development and the development of culture and society is, which means how
mediatization as a complex concept “works”. Assuming media logic is not enough.
We will develop an answer in the frame of the mediatization concept as presented
in the next paragraph.
To summarize, we have shown in this chapter that the meta process mediatiza-
tion is complex and may be considered as consisting of many sub-processes in time
and by system. This is what must be studied in more detail by actual and historical
mediatization research. But it does not mean that mediatization can be explained
or understood only by reducing the overall process to some sub-processes which do
not refer to one another.

3.4 How mediatization works

After all these critical remarks and examples from history, we now will be con-
cerned with a positive answer about how mediatization works. This gives us the
possibility to avoid all those problems and to integrate the given historical exam-
ples and empirical observations. Thus, the question here is, what the connection
between media change on the one hand and social and cultural change on the other
hand is, without referring only to technological influences and without describing
mediatization only by independent sub-processes.
In order to discuss this, we again have to recall the definition of a medium as
a structural and situational entity. With such a definition it is clear that a medium
is not a stable thing but depends on culture and society and its developments, in
154 Friedrich Krotz

which it is a medium, as it is a social and cultural entity, besides being a technology.

It is a consequence of this that an invented technology for communication is not
automatically a medium, but must become one. Of course, it can be used to dis-
seminate content, which is set in scene for that technology. But only if this technol-
ogy is used as a space of experience and becomes integrated into society by social
institutions, norms, rules, individual and collective expectations, then this tech-
nology becomes a medium. Thus, an invented technology must be developed into
a medium, and this is a collective process that takes place in a whole society,
which means that it has to be developed into a structural and situational reality.5
This happens, if people use a technology for communicational aims and expe-
riences, and if society as a whole domesticates the technology, to refer here in a
slightly different sense to the work of Silverstone and Haddon (1996). If people
use the newly invented technology for communication, this has a lot of consequen-
ces. They communicate differently, they change the media system, and they
enhance their personal media environment. They for example manage their per-
sonal relations differently if it is a technology of interpersonal communication. In
general, if people get access to new media, they also get access to new information
and orientation and create a different inner reality of the outer world that then
becomes relevant for their further experiences and activities. Thus, they especially
interpret reality differently, but they also create different contexts of their own
communication and media related contexts for others, if they want others to under-
stand what they communicate.
This for example is the process that Joshua Meyrowitz (1990) showed empiri-
cally by analyzing the way how hierarchies, gender relations, and group building
processes can be changed by television. This is also similar to what happened,
when the mobile phone or the Internet came into existence, as from then on the
relational environment of most people changed. Further, under these new techni-
cal conditions, every single person could be addressed, served with wanted or not
wanted information, and observed, or even controlled, in an individual way. In
addition, each person using these media may construct her or his social relations
in different ways, at work, during leisure time, within the family, and everywhere
else, and this is also influenced by changing ways of perception and orientation,
the new possibilities for social organization, influence, and control and the pro-
duction of cultural meaning. All this is concerned with the new forms of communi-
cation and is constantly producing new realities.
This all together then is the complex background for people reproducing cul-
ture and society henceforth differently if new media come up or under the condi-
tion of changing old media. The relation between media change and the change of

5 It should be noted that this must hold for media of interpersonal, of interactive, and of media
of formerly called mass communication, which should better be called media of standardized and
generally addressed communication.
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 155

cultural and social life thus is communication. We do not need media logic, techno-
logical constraints, or specific sub-processes to explain the relation between
changing media and changing culture and society. It is simple: Media directly can
only influence communication in this or that way, and it is this, what is changing
by media change. But if human communication is changing because of media
changes, then this does not only mean a differentiation of media, but also a differ-
entiation in communication, and thus the communicatively constructed world will
henceforth be reconstructed in different ways by the people.
A good example for this is the change in book technology and culture and
society as described by Ivan Illich. Here, new needs came up and changed what
people expected from a book. As more and more books fulfilled these expectations,
it can be assumed that the demand for these kinds of books was growing. They
got more practical value, for example for education or agriculture, for orientation
and understanding the environment. We assume that people thus got new perspec-
tives and orientation, what was real, what was possible, and what they could do.
Thus, perception and meaning changed and also new practical activities became
possible – this finally is experienced as a change in culture and society.
These arguments show the relation between media change and social and
cultural change. Media in this perspective are giving communication a specific
form if they are used, what may be understood to mold communication. But at the
same time, new and other forms can be used to tell other narratives and set already
existing ideas into scene. Both together mean that communication and as a conse-
quence, culture, society, sensemaking processes, and so on are changing. And
because of this finally we are able to act and to perceive differently as a conse-
quence of media development and construct a different social and cultural reality.
This is the reason why the mediatization approach must understand communi-
cation as the central connecting link between media change and changes in cul-
ture and society, and it is the reason why we are interested not primarily in media,
but in the communication possibilities which media are offering.6 The new forms
of reading and writing, of using pictures and books, of producing and receiving
music, and using other audible media, this is what is relevant, not the media itself.
This is also the conclusion of historical research on sound and visual culture, and
it is true for media development and its role in culture and society in general:
As people use technologies, these become media, and they do so because the new
possibilities and functions are helpful for them. Thus the communication modes and
styles of the people are changing, because they become modes and styles of medi-
ated forms of communication and this generates different social and cultural rela-
tions and facts, different perceptions and orientations, and different meaning, and
this finally is what we understand to be social and cultural change.7

6 This is already explained in Krotz 2001, where I analyzed the mediatization of communicative
action.
7 A more differentiated view and further historical examples will appear with Krotz 2014.
156 Friedrich Krotz

4 A final definition and some conclusions

As announced above, we finally sum up and thus also offer a definition as to what
mediatization means on the basis of the discussions presented here.
The mediatization approach is a theoretically based conceptual approach of
historical and actual societal and cultural developments in the context of the
development of the (communicative) media. It is assumed that media exist and
have been developed since the invention of human communication, which means
the birth of humankind. Media then are constructed by communication and social
action of the people by using technology for communication, and communication
is transformed and modified by media. This is expressed in the idea that mediatiza-
tion is a meta process like Individualization, Globalization, and Commercializa-
tion, a complex process of processes.
In more detail, new media come into existence as technologies for communica-
tion, in as far as these are accepted and used by people and thus become media –
structurally as technologies and social institutions, situationally as producing and
distributing specific content, such that spaces of experience for the receivers are
created. This includes that historically people increasingly use media for more
and more intentions, but also, that communicational forms and communicative
activities of the people are changing by referring to media. This then means that
the world becomes communicatively constructed in a different way, while media
are themselves processes, which develop in the respective culture and society
where they exist. Of course, there is also the inverse relation, as these develop-
ments in communication, culture, and society may create new needs or ideas for
new or for other media. The relation is dialectical.
Mediatization thus can be analyzed on the micro, meso and macro level – we
must ask for changing communication and interaction in everyday life and the
personal environments of the people, for changing organizations and institutions,
relational nets and enterprises, and for the changes in the overall areas like democ-
racy, economy, culture, and society.
Mediatization research then consists of a historical and an actual branch, but
also needs a critical perspective. This is of importance because mediatization today
takes place mostly in the interest of economy and administration and as reaction
to that, but it must take place guided by civil society and the people. Otherwise it
is not oriented towards the future of humankind. Thus, it must follow a strong
critical perspective.
An advantage of the mediatization concept is that we can order academic work
by this concept: questions, empirical research, and theoretical approaches. The
single developments that belong to mediatization today are studied in a lot of
distinct academic disciplines. They are relevant for sociology, political science,
psychology, pedagogic, social anthropology, and others. Today, there exists a mul-
tiplicity of results of these studies. It is obvious that they all belong together, but
until now they have referred only occasionally to one another. Thus, mediatization
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 157

as a concept could be used as a common point of reference to bring the different

research results together, to create a common overview, and to create a common
theoretically based roof. It also serves to construct a general perspective of the
developments of the past and of today, perhaps in some dimensions into the
future. And it may serve to analyze concrete developments in a very concrete way,
as it is not only an overall process, but has concrete articulations in specific cul-
tures and society.
Further it should be mentioned that mediatization includes a way to describe
and reconstruct developments. Together with other meta processes of today like
individualization, commercialization, and globalization we can describe the ongo-
ing development of culture and society. We even can develop assumptions about
the future and thus try to actively shape the development of culture and society.
This is necessary, because, as said above with reference to Herbert Schiller (1989),
today we live in a great experiment with media and communication, while we
have no idea in which direction we finally will go. This development happens
guided by the short-term interests of enterprises, accompanied by a government
and administration that does not really understand what happens, and a civil
society, in the name of which everything happens, but which does not really care
and does not have enough information to become active. Here, finally, is the rele-
vance of all this work. Of course, we must develop the mediatization approach in
the context of all that into a real theory and connect it with other theories like
those of Bourdieu and Foucault, Elias and Schütz, Marx, Durkheim and Simmel,
and others, of course also with the relevant theories of communication and media
studies.
On the basis of the above considerations and arguments we now can say that
mediatization research should consist of three branches, as it is explained in the
following (see also Hepp 2012, Krotz and Hepp 2013):
First of all, there is actual mediatization research to understand the develop-
ments and processes in media change of today and its consequences as part of
the meta process mediatization. Here, we can ask questions to precise actual
research, for example about the Internet, mobile and smart phones, social soft-
ware, and new questions like augmented reality and so called intelligent software
(Krotz 2012). Mediatization may, for example, then serve to bind research in differ-
ent perspectives between different disciplines together and may by this enhance
the knowledge of communication and media studies. This also may include
research on the basis of ideas won by historical studies of earlier media.
Secondly, there is historical mediatization research in order to understand the
coming into existence of specific communicative habits, ways to use media, selec-
tion of media, and the ways that technologies work thus that they may become
media. Examples for this have been given in this chapter. Here, especially the
coming into existence of the old media and the changing old media of today have
to be studied. Mediatization research then not only may ask historical questions
158 Friedrich Krotz

coming from the reflection of actual research, but also may emphasize knowledge
gathered in historical studies in order to make it fruitful for a better understanding
of the actual developments. For example, it was Bertolt Brecht who once
demanded that the radio as a technology missed the possibility that the people
can talk back. This comment of Brecht at that time was not an abstract idea but
referred to a lot of radio groups of workers and other people, who planned an own
radio for workers and their interests. But this changed rapidly; administration and
private enterprises got control of the radio, because the government feared that
otherwise society would not remain stable. Today, the Internet is frequently
regarded as a medium that enables people to contribute to societal development
and to make participation in democracy possible – this may be the case but this
is not sure. It can become a net of consuming and control, if we do not care, which
is much less then it could be possible.
Thirdly then, mediatization research should have a third integrative and critical
branch, a perspective that understands mediatization as a meta process in the
capitalistic society. This, for example, includes taking into consideration that there
are, as mentioned above, other long-term meta processes, that are intertwined
with the mediatization meta process. Studying these developments together would
inevitably lead to critical questions about privacy, about new forms of control,
alienation and exploitation, and so on. In addition, it must be seen that the most
important difference between face-to-face-communication and all forms of media
related communication is the following: In contrast to face-to-face-communication,
in all mediated forms a third actor is present, for example, a provider, a search
engine, a website owner, or unknown observers. This must be used as a starting
point for systematic critical research – in this case compared with historical obser-
vations, as letters on paper were effectively protected from misuse. This is no
longer the case today with all those new forms of media related communication,
as is well known.
Mediatization in the here described sense is a mover of modernity and post-
modernity and is relevant for all three perspectives. Today we live under social
and cultural conditions (if not to say, in a society) which are more and more
determined by economic and political interests which try to use and to influence
the media and shape the media development to be successful. All great media –
books and letters, radio and TV, and finally the mobile phone and the Internet –
started with a phase of freedom and creativity, the book culture, the radio culture,
and also TV, but they were soon controlled by economy and administration. This
is not as easy today with the Internet and mobile phone, but it is not at all out of
sight. Civil society then must find a balance between these two forces.
 Mediatization as a mover in modernity 159

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Eliseo Verón
7 Mediatization theory:
a semio-anthropological perspective
Abstract: In this chapter, mediatization designates not just a modern, basically
20th-century development, but a long-term historical process resulting from the
sapiens’ capability of semiosis. The concept of mediatic phenomenon is defined
as the exteriorization–materialization of mental processes under the form of a tech-
nical device, and mediatization as the long historical sequence of mediatic phe-
nomena. The crucial moments of this history – writing, the emergence of the book,
printing, photography, inventions allowing the construction of time sequences of
sounds and images – have three characteristics in common: they produce radial
effects affecting all levels of social functioning, they are non-linear processes far
from equilibrium and they accelerate historical time. The case of the emergence
of writing is briefly discussed as an example. Mediatic phenomena show, all
through human history, different modalities of alteration of space and/or time
scales, which is the core of mediatization. The central problem for future research
on mediatization is to conceptualize adequately the endless tension between the
auto-poietic socio-individual systems of the actors and the multiple mediatic phe-
nomena operating in their environment of social systems and sub-systems.

Keywords: semiosis, mediatization, mediatic phenomenon, auto-poietic systems,

production grammars, reconnaissance grammars, non-linear processes, literacy,
writing, space-time alterations.

1 Mediatization and its timespan

The (relatively) old problem of the relationships between media and the societies
in which the expansion of the communication networks takes place has received
a huge impulse over the last 20 years and has consequently adopted a new shape.
In recent years, a number of theoretical perspectives and research projects around
this problem have been loosely identified as belonging to the study of “mediatiza-
tion”. As “mediatization” is, linguistically speaking, a noun-naming process, the
entities considered as being subject to such a process are in most cases the socie-
ties themselves or particular sub-systems of them. In addition, in most cases, the
historical period under scrutiny is that of modernity, and sometimes of late mod-
ernity, as for example in Hjarvard’s use of the concept: “Mediatization is no univer-
sal process that characterizes all societies. It is primarily a development that has
accelerated particularly in the last years of the twentieth century in modern, highly
164 Eliseo Verón

industrialized and chiefly western societies, i.e., Europe, USA, Japan, Australia
and so forth” (Hjarvard 2008: 113).1
Here I will adopt almost the opposite point of view, in favor of a long-term
historical perspective of mediatization. How long should this perspective be? As
we shall see, the longer the better, and this justifies the qualification of such a
perspective as “anthropological”. Mediatization is certainly not a universal process
characterizing all human societies, past and present, but it is, nevertheless, an
operational result of a core dimension of our biological species, namely its capabil-
ity of semiosis. This capability has been progressively activated, for different rea-
sons, in a variety of historical contexts and has therefore taken many forms. But
some of its consequences were present in our evolutionary history from the very
beginning, and affected the social organization of Western societies long before
modernity.
We need some conceptual tools to go further. I will call the products of the
semiotic capacity of our species mediatic phenomena. A mediatic phenomenon is
the exteriorization of mental processes under the form of a given material device.
Mediatic phenomena are, indeed, a universal characteristic of all human societies.
The first stage of human semiosis was, therefore, the systemic production of stone
tools, beginning around two and a half million years ago. The stone industries,
from a semiotic point of view, are secondary meaning-systems (compared with a
primary meaning-system such as language) in terms of the classical distinction
proposed a long time ago by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958). The perception, by a
member of a primitive community, of a stone arrow head – a material element
within the immediate psychological space of the community – implied the activa-
tion of a semiotic process, properly speaking: backwards, towards the sequence of
technical behavior leading to its fabrication; forwards, towards its use as an instru-
ment to obtain food. Both mental movements are – following the dimensions of a
Peirce triad – indexical sequences (secondness) contained in the iconic configura-
tion (firstness) of the stone arrow head. If in the community the perceiver is, say,
a hunter, a mental movement concerning the rules for the correct use of the instru-
ment (a thirdness) would probably also be activated.2 The ongoing vigorous discus-
sion concerning the origins of language should take into account the underlying
functioning of semiotic processes implied in iconic visual exteriorizations and in
indexical sequences of technical operations of the instrument’s production, both
processes preceding the appearance of language and qualitatively different from
it (Verón 2013, chapter 11).

1 In this respect, cf. also Thompson’s classic (1995).

2 As is well known, Peirce discussed his model of the three categories in many different ways all
along his writings. One particularly interesting and clear presentation, probably composed in 1894,
has been included in the selection recently published by the Peirce Edition Project: Peirce ( [1894]
1998, Volume 2: 4–10).
 Mediatization theory:
a semio-anthropological perspective 165

The central point here is that the mediatic phenomenon of the exteriorization
of mental processes has a trifold consequence. In Peircian terms again, its firstness
consists in the autonomy from senders and receivers of the materialized signs, as
a result of exteriorization; its secondness is the subsequent persistence in time of
the materialized signs: alterations of space and time-scales become inevitable, and
narrative justified; its thirdness is the body of social norms defining the ways of
access to signs which are already autonomous and persistent. In other words: a
trifold creation of differences.
The conditions are therefore given for the history of mediatization to begin.
Some of its moments have already been subject to historical scrutiny: the rise of
writing; the passage from rolls to codices, i.e., the surge of the book; the “unac-
knowledged revolution” of printing, in the happy expression of Elizabeth Eisen-
stein (1983); the proliferation of pamphlets and the subsequent rise of newspapers.
Beginning in the middle of the 19th century, new technical devices allowed the
appearance of new mediatic phenomena consisting, for the first time, in the indexi-
cal production of time-framing and time-sequenciation of images and sounds,
devices culminating, a century later, with the invention of television (for all these
crucial moments see Verón 2013 and the bibliography there included).
In this context, mediatization is just the name for the long historical sequence
of mediatic phenomena being institutionalized in human societies, and its multiple
consequences. The conceptual advantage of a long-term perspective is to remind
us that what is happening in societies of late modernity began in fact long time
ago. The initial stage of each crucial moment of mediatization can be dated,
because it consists of a technical-communicational device that has appeared and
stabilized itself in identifiable human communities, which means that it has been,
in one way or another, “adopted”. There is no technological determinism implied
here: each time, the appropriation by the community of a technical device could
take many different forms; the configuration of uses that becomes finally institu-
tionalized in a particular place and time around a communication device (configu-
ration that can be properly called a medium), needs only historical explanation.

2 Mediatization as a non-linear process

In the first place, the surge of a medium (or several media), operating through a
new technical-communicational device, typically produces “radial effects”, in all
directions, affecting all functional levels of society in different ways and with dif-
ferent intensities.
Secondly, these transversal, radial “effects” of mediatic phenomena are the
result of their systemic nature, implying an enormous network of feedback rela-
tionships: mediatic phenomena are clearly non-linear processes, typically far from
equilibrium (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Kauffman 2000). Within the frame
166 Eliseo Verón

of a theory of social discourse, this non-linear character of communication can be

represented by the distinction between production conditions and grammars, on
the one side, and reconnaissance conditions and grammars on the other: at the
societal level, discourse circulation of meaning is structurally broken.3
Thirdly, the above two aspects explain the most impressive consequence of
mediatization: the acceleration of historical time. Each case of acceleration should,
of course, be evaluated according to the rhythm characterizing the historical
period we are talking about.

2.1 The first primary mediatic phenomenon: writing

Let’s just take an example – historically the most important one – of the multi-
dimensional change induced by a mediatic phenomenon: the emergency of writing
and literacy. Jack Goody is the best authority in this case; his analysis of the
consequences of literacy can be synthesized in the following points:

2.1.1 Adoption of a meta-linguistic position and beginning of the reflection on

language

Words become enduring objects rather than evanescent aural signals. This transformation
means that communications over time and space are altered in significant ways. At the same
time, the materialization of the speech act in writing enables it to be inspected, manipulated
and re-ordered in a variety of ways. […] Morphemes can be removed from the body of the
sentence, the flow of oral discourse, and set aside as isolated units capable not simply of
being ordered within a sentence, but of being ordered outside this frame, where they appear
in a very different and abstract context. (Goody [1977] 1995: 76–78)

2.1.2 Stimulation and persistence of a critical attitude

The specific proposition is that writing, and more especially alphabetic literacy, made it pos-
sible to scrutinize discourse in a different kind of way by giving oral communication a semi-
permanent form; this scrutiny favoured the increase in scope of critical activity, and hence of
rationality, scepticism, and logic […] It increased the potentialities of criticism because writing
laid out discourse before one’s eyes in a different kind of way; at the same time increased the
potentiality for cumulative knowledge, especially knowledge of an abstract kind […]. (Goody
[1977] 1995: 37)

3 Non-mediatic communication is also a non-linear process. Mediatization may be described as

the macro-generalization of this condition of human circulation of signs, consisting in the struc-
tural gap between production and reception (reconnaissance). The conceptual development of
these points exceeds the limits of the present paper; see Verón 1987, 2013.
 Mediatization theory:
a semio-anthropological perspective 167

2.1.3 Cultural reorganization of mental spaces concerning historical time

At the enunciation level, the persistence and autonomy generated by the mediatic
phenomenon of writing transformed texts, as a result of accumulation, into mate-
rial testimony of the passing of time, measured by the different calendar systems
that began to take shape. At the statement level, the role of discursive proto-genres
should be taken into account, particularly the list (Goody [1977] 1995: 74–111). To
produce lists is a cognitive process strongly dissociated from oral communication
(Goody [1977] 1995: 80–82). The lists played a fundamental role in the political
and administrative control of the new societies where literacy spread.

2.1.4 Transformation of oral exchanges

As a result of these new mental spaces associated with literacy, oral communica-
tion is itself transformed. In relation with what Goody calls the “decontextualiza-
tion” produced by writing, he says:

I do not wish to imply that these processes cannot take place in oral discourse. For example,
we may suddenly stop the flow of speech and repeat something we have just said […] So too
one may correct a part of speech or rephrase a sentence even after it has been composed or
spoken in order to avoid splitting an infinitive or ending with a preposition. But the very
statement of these possibilities makes it obvious how writing can facilitate the process or
reorganization, as well as affecting more permanently the sphere of verbal communication.
For there are two oral situations: that which prevails in the absence of writing and that which
prevails in its presence. These two situations are certainly different, for writing is not simply
added to speech as another dimension: it alters the nature of verbal communication. (Goody
[1977] 1995: 78)

2.1.5 New forms of control, bureaucratization, and domination

The invention of writing produced, from its very beginning, an ideal instrument
of social control, which made possible the expansion and stabilization of bigger
and bigger empires, facilitating their necessary bureaucratization. “But what is the
topic of the bulk of the written material? Even in Assyrian times, it is not the main
‘stream of tradition’, either in the form of literary creations or the recording of
myth and folktale, but rather the administrative and economic documents found
in temples and palaces throughout Babylonia and covering a wider geographical
and chronological extent than the more academic records” (Goody [1977] 1995: 79).
In this respect, we can hypothesize a long historical process with many feed-
back loops. Literacy facilitates the organizational and bureaucratic dimensions of
society, legitimating at the same time hierarchical relationships. The increasing
complexity and size of literate cultures increases the importance of autonomy and
168 Eliseo Verón

persistence of discourses aimed at the management of beliefs, assuring a collective

stabilization of the latter. Face-to-face oral situations find it more and more diffi-
cult to obtain such stability, leading finally to the notion of “sacred scriptures”,
where written materials assume the central role of structuring affects and beliefs
concerning the foundational narrative of society.

2.1.6 Transformation of the social conditions of individuation

In communities without writing, cultural contents are primarily stocked in individ-

ual memory. Elements significant within the multiple situations of everyday life
are preserved and activated by personal contacts between members; the rest is
forgotten. In a written culture, cultural contents increase constantly, and the indi-
vidual member of society becomes a sort of palimpsest composed of many layers
of beliefs and attitudes belonging to different historical periods (Goody and Watt
1963).
In short: literacy transformed the relationship to tradition, and the ways of
accumulating and transmitting cultural values; modified profoundly the social rep-
resentation of time and history; reshaped conversation and interpersonal
exchanges; made possible the operation of new economic and political mecha-
nisms leading to the emergence of big empires, and made possible new ways of
constructing personal identity. This kind of cluster of social change is what I call
“radial effects”, characterizing the non-linear nature of each one of the central
moments of mediatization.

2.2 The acceleration of historical time

In order to have a minimal narrative, let’s mention at least three points here.
1. When the cultures of the Upper Paleolithic appeared, the products of the stone
industries passed from twenty basic types of tools to two hundred varieties
and – Richard Leakey (1994) has judiciously remarked – the scale of change
passed from hundreds of thousands of years to a rhythm of thousands of years.
2. Printing appeared in the middle of the 15th century; there is, I think, a large
consensus among historians that during the two centuries following Guten-
berg’s invention, Europe has changed economically, politically, socially, and
culturally, more than in the previous fifteen hundred years (see Eisenstein
1979, 1983, 2011).
3. In the last ten years, the Internet has altered the conditions of access to scien-
tific knowledge more than these conditions changed since the surge of modern
scientific institutions during the 17th century.

Many other examples of this acceleration of historical time resulting from the rise
of mediatic phenomena may be identified, of course, in a much more precise way,
 Mediatization theory:
a semio-anthropological perspective 169

concerning practically any particular sector of social and/or cultural activity. The
transformation of the musical world, for instance (in all its aspects: composition,
performance, and audiences), during the two or three decades following the inven-
tion of recording at the end of the 19th century, is incomparably more profound
than what happened in that musical world during the previous three or four centu-
ries (Philip 2004). The invention of photography, and its consequences upon the
traditional frontier between public space and private everyday life, is another case
worth mentioning (Verón 1994).

3 Scale alterations
We have already underlined the fact that mediatic phenomena produce autonomy
from senders and receivers, and persistence of discourses through time. The first
consequence of autonomy and persistence is de-contextualization of meaning,
which has marked from its very beginning the history of the localization, safe-
guard, reading, and interpretation of texts – first of the rolls and later of the
codices. De-contextualization opens the door for the multiple breaks of space and
time produced by each technical device in a specific way, all through mediatization
history. The invention of printing democraticized, so to speak, de-contextualiza-
tion, and made it available to all. From this point of view, the history of mediatiza-
tion can be told as the interminable struggle between confronted social groups
trying to stabilize meanings, struggle that becomes, all through the history of our
species, increasingly complex and increasingly condemned to failure.
In the social sciences, interpersonal or “face-to-face” communication has been
very frequently conceptualized as a “direct”, linear exchange, opposed to commu-
nication processes mediated by a technical device. In my view, human communica-
tion is entirely non-linear at all levels of its functioning, because it is a self-organiz-
ing system far from equilibrium. The specificity of “face-to-face” communication
is not its supposed linearity, but the absence of mediatic phenomena. As a conse-
quence, in interpersonal exchanges the enunciation positions (enunciator, dis-
course, and addressee) are localized at the same homogeneous space-time point.
In this context, can de-contextualization take place in a non-mediatic level of com-
munication? Yes, because oral language, in a human community before the
appearance of writing, makes possible imaginary alterations of space and time,
even if they are fleeting, fragile, and have no material persistence: for example,
an adult explaining to a group of children, in an illiterate society, how to behave
during the ritual ceremony that will take place next day. We can consider this
kind of situation as implying an imaginary distortion of space and time. Mediatic
phenomena materialize the distortions and make them space-time breaks. The
recently developed methodology of cognigram analyses of prehistoric tool behav-
ior formalizes the distance between problem and solution: a given tool behavior
170 Eliseo Verón

is oriented to the material production of an object, say a knapping tool, with

material qualities that will be meaningful in other places and/or at other moments
(Haidle 2009). With the mediatic phenomena, the differentiation between social
systems and psychic systems – in Luhmann’s sense (Luhmann [1984] 1995; Verón
2013) may begin, and with no possible return: with writing, Homo sapiens defini-
tively abandoned a certain kind of space-time structural location.
Let’s make a phylogenetic synthesis. Mediatic phenomena are a precondition
of the psychic systems of Homo sapiens? The answer is no. Inversely: Psychic
systems of Homo sapiens are a precondition of mediatic phenomena? The answer
is yes. Psychic systems are a precondition of social systems? The answer is yes,
not in a linear way, but through the appearance of mediatic phenomena. Mediatic
phenomena are a precondition of complex social systems? The answer is yes. Medi-
atic phenomena, and therefore mediatization, are as fundamental as that.

4 The never-ending negotiation between social and

socio-individual autopoietic systems
Today, it seems to me that the central point both for research and theory construc-
tion, is to work on the particular relationships between mediatic phenomena and
non mediatic phenomena, relationships characterized all through mediatization
history by extremely important tensions and contradictions. In other words, we
have to pay special attention to the non-mediatized dimensions of social processes.
Because if all is mediatization, the concept itself loses most of its interest.
This problem has been discussed by Niklas Luhmann under the concept of
“interpenetration” between social and psychic autopoietic systems (Luhmann
[1984] 1995: 210–254). In my terminology, the operation of the logic of psychic
systems (which I prefer to call socio-individual systems) is the crucial dimension
not of the production grammars of mediatized discourses, but of the reconnais-
sance grammars in reception.
From their beginning, around the 1980s, the methodological design of most
reception studies (including mine) allowed the grasp of only small fragments of the
socio-individual systems operations.4 There seemed to be no other way to obtain
significant discourse from the individual actors but around a specific mediatic
product (newspaper materials, film, television program, etc.). This methodological
procedure allowed the evaluation in a much more precise way of the so-called
“effects” of such or such mediatized discourse, and was extremely important in

4 All through the “reception turn”, the medium that concentrated most of the research interest
was television. See, among others, Morley (1980, 1986, 1992), Verón (1983, 2001, 2013), Livingstone
(1990), Katz and Dayan (1992), Silverstone (1994), Liebes and Curran (1998), Dayan (2000).
 Mediatization theory:
a semio-anthropological perspective 171

the re-orientation of the debate on mass media power. The clearly different recon-
naissance grammars applied by different socio-individual systems to the same
mediatized product, indicated (1) the qualitative specificity of the reception logic
operating in the reconnaissance grammars (contrasted with the ones of the produc-
tion grammars); (2) the complexity of the reconnaissance pole within a given soci-
ety in a given moment; (3) the impossibility to deduce any generalized “effect” by
studying only the semiotic characteristics of the mediatized discourse.
The time has come, perhaps, to concentrate our efforts in the comprehension
of the rules that give form to the multiple strategies activated by the socio-individ-
ual systems to cope with an increasingly mediatized environment. In other words,
we must find new methodological paths to have access to the processes through
which the socio-individual systems use mediatic phenomena to assure their own
self-organization. Contrary to Luhmann, who speaks of “communication” as the
central concept when dealing with social systems and sub-systems, and of “con-
sciousness” when dealing with what he calls the “psychic systems”, I think that
the semiotic processes, in one case and the other, are isomorphic. The qualitative
difference results here not from an ontological difference between “communica-
tion” and “consciousness”, but from the simple fact that the social and the socio-
individual are different auto-poietic systems – the socio-individual being organic
systems, which the social systems are not. In other words, the qualitative differ-
ence between the logics operating in production and in reconnaissance is a result
of a systemic factor, not of a semiotic one. This is not surprising: it would not be
improper, at the level of the species, to see the negotiation of the socio-individual
systems with their increasingly mediatized social environment as an endless con-
versation of Homo sapiens with himself.

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IV. Media in society
Göran Bolin
8 Institution, technology, world:
relationships between the media, culture,
and society

Abstract: In this chapter three approaches to mediatization are discussed: the insti-
tutional, the technological, and the media as world. Each of these has a different
ontological and epistemological background, and it is argued that this has conse-
quences on which questions are posed, and which kinds of answers are possible
to give. For these backgrounds it is accounted, with a special focus on how these
approaches theorize the relationship between media and society, how media are
defined and which historical perspective is privileged.

Keywords: mediatization, modernity, second modernity, media technologies, cul-

tural technologies, culture, society, Baudrillard, structuralism

1 Introduction: the different strands of

mediatization
The widespread popularity of the concept of mediatization has, as is usually the
case with popular concepts, brought with it a range of different uses, interpreta-
tions, and perspectives. All these perspectives are based in specific epistemological
approaches, in turn possible to relate to basic ontological standpoints. In this
context I want to focus on three such areas where clarification is needed. Firstly,
different takes on mediatization vary in their views of the relationship between
the media and society: How can we understand this relationship? What is the
possible impact of the media on society? Or what roles do we ascribe the media
in mediatization processes? Secondly, and following from the first, it is not always
entirely clear what is meant by “the media”, and although various theorists do
mention the mass media and digital media, we seldom see differentiation between
different types of media in mediatization theory; thus, one could ask whether all
media play the same role in social and cultural processes. And although many
refer to the media as mass media or digital media, there are few who distinguish
between media as organizations and as technologies. Thirdly, although most medi-
atization theories describe and analyse processes and thus implicitly deal with
historical change or modernization processes, the specificities of their historical
perspectives are seldom discussed at length.
176 Göran Bolin

Against the background of these three areas of enquiry, I want to discuss three
mediatization approaches. Firstly, I will account for the “institutional” perspective,
focusing on the media as institutions and how they have related to other social
and cultural institutions. As this account is well represented in the literature, I will
deal with it quite briefly. Secondly, I will describe the “technological” approach to
mediatization, emphasizing the technological impact of the media on wider social
and cultural processes. Thirdly, I will contrast these two perspectives with the
“media as world” perspective. This perspective is less insistent on theorizing the
concept of mediatization, to the benefit of a more general discussion on the role
of media in culture and society. If the two first perspectives emphasize historical
linearity and process in an objectivist manner, the media as world perspective is
more phenomenological in the sense that it adds an experiential dimension, and
is hence more subjectivist. While the two first perspectives, from an objectivist
position, focus on the question “What does it look like?”, the third adds the phe-
nomenological question “What does it feel like?”. The following discussion will
emphasize the consequences of each of these perspectives on the analysis of the
roles and relationships between media, communication, culture, and society.
To be clear from the outset, I do not argue that any of these are “wrong” and
that there is one, superior and “right” version of mediatization theory. Although I
should also make it clear from the outset that I, like anyone else, speak from a
certain position and have preferences when it comes to these perspectives, it
should be emphasized that they are rooted in the fact that each one opens up for
different sets of questions, and that my preferences are based in these sets of
questions and not on the intent to dismiss any of the approaches as false, wrong
or reductionist.

2 The institutional perspective

Quite often in accounts of mediatization the media are theorized in their capacity
as institutions, and as such are seen as an external force that has come to affect
other social institutions and social life (e.g. Asp 1990; Strömbäck 2008). This take
on mediatization builds on a specific set of ontological and axiomatic presupposi-
tions about the nature of society, which often takes its departure in the “media
logic” theory of Altheide and Snow (1979). This is the “processual” (Krotz 2007)
or the “institutional” (Lundby 2009a: 5; Hepp [2011] 2013: 42; Hjarvard 2013: 4)
perspective on mediatization, focusing on institutionalizing processes on the meso
level, for example in journalism.
This perspective is founded on the drive for causal explanation, and with it
follows a specific linear historical perspective whereby events follow in causal
order, and the historical direction is described in terms of progress (or, indeed,
decline). It is also based in the analysis of institutions, or spheres, related to one
 Institution, technology, world 177

another, as exemplified in this quote from Jesper Strömbäck: “The process of the
mediatization of politics can be described as a process through which the impor-
tant question involving the independence of the media from politics and society
concludes with the independence of politics and society from the media” (Ström-
bäck 2008: 241). The quote sets up “society” as separate from “politics” as well as
“the media”, all of which are seemingly independent from each other. In the arti-
cle, Strömbäck also marks out “four phases” of the mediatization process, in the
first of which – “the media” – becomes “the most important source of information
and channel of communication between the citizenry and political institutions”
(Strömbäck 2008: 236). Following from this, there was a time when “political insti-
tutions” operated without the influence of “the media”, while today these institu-
tions have been invaded, or subsumed, by the media. This quote obviously only
makes sense if by media we mean mass media institutions, for example the institu-
tion of journalism, as one could well argue that modern mass democracies have
never been and could never function without some form of mediating technologies
extending the human body (in antiquity, for example in ancient Greece, rhetoric
was clearly a communications technology used for political purposes, although
not one that extended the human body).
The ways of looking at the relationship between media, society, and other
social institutions (politics, the economy, education, etc.) naturally differ between
scholars. One can also, for example in Stig Hjarvard’s extensive writing from
within an institutional perspective, see a gradual nuancing or fine-tuning of these
relationships, most explicitly in the introductory chapter of his recent The Mediati-
zation of Society (Hjarvard 2013), where he emphasizes the “role of the media in
culture and society” (p. 2, my emphasis). With this he points to “culture” and
“society” as larger and more encompassing entities, within which social and cul-
tural institutions are then related to one another.
Describing these relationships is a delicate matter, and there are also instances
in Hjarvard’s earlier writings that are more unclear when it comes to this relation-
ship, for example in his oft-quoted definition of mediatization as “the process
whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or become dependent on,
the media and their logic. This process is characterized by a duality in that the
media have become integrated into the operations of other social institutions,
while they also have acquired the status of social institutions in their own right”
(Hjarvard 2008: 113). This quote seems to imply, if we think of “the media” as
institutions (for example, journalistic news media), that they are separate from
“society” and that their logics would then also be developed from society’s outside.
There is, however, another way to read this quote, thinking of the media here not
as institutions but rather as technologies having become integrated into other
social institutions (that then to a certain extent relate to these technologies in
specific ways). Such a reading would perhaps make more sense.
The advantage of the institutional perspective is that it can easily be operation-
alized into the analysis of powerful media institutions affecting or influencing
178 Göran Bolin

various social processes in society – or from society’s outside, as some seemingly

suggest. Thus there is a wealth of studies engaging in the mediatization of politics
(e.g. Asp 1990; Strömbäck 2008; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999), war (e.g. McQuail
2006), religion (e.g. Hjarvard and Lövheim 2012), fashion (Skjulstad 2009), and
storytelling (several examples in Lundby 2008), to name but some areas of enquiry.
A disadvantage is, as Knut Lundby (2009b) has pointed out, that the institutional
approach, especially that which leans most heavily on the media logic perspective,
often (although naturally not always) brings with it sweeping generalizations, and
oversimplifications of the workings of the media. Nick Couldry (2012: 135–136)
extends this criticism, questioning whether all media share the same logic,
whether this logic is stable or changes over time, and whether this model can
actually capture the complex dynamics of the social. Indeed, as Friedrich Krotz
(2009: 26) argues: “there is no media logic independent of social and cultural
contexts, and independent of history”.
Another problem with the institutional perspective on mediatization is that it
largely neglects the role of media as technologies in less institutionalized forms.
Although there are examples of mediatization processes around which the rela-
tionship is not between institutions but between institutions and individual sub-
jects (i.e. children) through “play” (Hjarvard 2013, chapter 5), most institutional
perspectives deal with the relationship between journalistic institutions and other
institutional spheres in society. It is definitely not overstating the case to say that
the mediatization of politics is the dominant perspective in this regard, and that
the two institutions of journalism and politics are the most well-researched.
The institutional approach also works within a quite short-term historical per-
spective. For example, this approach seemingly presupposes that politics at one
point in history was independent of the media in society, while at a certain histori-
cal moment the media entered the political stage and affected the political process,
for example the process of opinion formation. However, this only makes sense if
we think of the mass media and journalism as institutions, as modern politics
has always involved media as technologies (pamphlets, books, newspapers, etc.).
Indeed, Jürgen Habermas’ ([1962] 1989) seminal work on the bourgeois public
sphere pointed to the centrality of privately owned newspapers as the vehicle
through which political deliberation occurred, and around which political discus-
sions were centred.
There is of course no denying that political opinion formation has changed in
many aspects over the years, even in their less institutionalized forms, and surely
the print, electronic, and digital web-based media have been involved in these
changes. The question is, however, if they have done so from a position outside
society, as Strömbäck seems to imply. As technologies are born and developed
within social and cultural frameworks, that is, inside society, it makes little sense
to argue that the technologies themselves affect society from outside.
 Institution, technology, world 179

Neither is there any denying that journalism as an institution, or a field, grew

increasingly stronger over the 20th century, and has become an important institu-
tion “in its own right”, as Hjarvard (2008: 113) rightly points out. The institutional
perspective on mediatization is, of course, one approach that can be adopted for
the analysis of these processes, but there are also other, competing, perspectives
that can be adopted, depending on one’s research interest (cf. Habermas [1968]
1972). Elsewhere I have suggested another way of analysing this growth in auton-
omy of the subfield of journalistic production, within the framework of Bourdieu-
ian field theory (Bolin 2007). However, it can also be analysed as a process of
professionalization (e.g. Petersson 2006) or as one of institutionalization (Eke-
crantz and Olsson 1994).

3 The technological perspective

A very different take on mediatization is represented by what could be called the
technological perspective, emphasizing the technological impact on the social and
cultural process. These analyses are often on a more abstract historical and socie-
tal level, even on the level of modernization. Some would argue that it could
also be labelled the “second modernity” perspective (Lundby 2009a: 2). Second
modernity is said to follow on a first modernity, supposedly marked by rationality,
the nation state and the nuclear family. As argued by Ulrich Beck and Christoph
Lau (2005), rather than theorizing the present in terms of postmodernity, a term
that suggests that modernity is now over, we should speak of second modernity
as there is no clear break in societal development, but rather a “transformation”
of the basic institutions of society. Today, in a similar argument Scott Lash (2005)
claims that mediatization is “the form that reason takes in second modernity”.
Lash takes a wide historical grip, taking his departure in the development of rea-
son. The argument is similar to Hjarvard’s, in that Lash argues that ‘the logic of
the media is taking over more and more areas of life’ (Lash 2005: 1). However,
and contrary to Hjarvard and others who focus on the media as institutions, Lash
emphasizes the media as technologies. Where representatives of the institutional
perspective highlight institutional forms, Lash talks of “the equivalent to digital
media”, emphasizing the technological aspect.
The roots of Lash’s perspective are to be found among medium theorists such
as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. McLuhan, of course, did not use the
concept of mediatization, but his most famous slogan “the medium is the mes-
sage” (McLuhan 1964) indeed suggests that it is the technology and not the institu-
tional form of the media, or the content, that is of importance. Baudrillard does
indeed use the concept of mediatization quite early on, and despite Kent Asp’s
(1986, 1990) bold claim to have introduced the term, Baudrillard in fact was
already using it at the beginning of the 1970s, for example in the 1971 article
180 Göran Bolin

“Requiem pour les media” (1971, also in Baudrillard [1972] 1981: 164–185), but
more elaborated in his L’échange symbolique et la mort (Baudrillard 1976: 98), later
translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death (Baudrillard [1976] 1993).
Here Baudrillard, in a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s ([1936] 1977) theses on pho-
tography and film in the age of mechanical reproduction as well as Marshall McLu-
han’s (1964) analysis of the impact of television, discusses the idea of “l’informa-
tion médiatisée”, claiming that today’s object “no longer has anything to do with
yesterday’s object, any more than ‘mediatized’ information has with the ‘reality’
of facts” (Baudrillard 1993: 63).
It is quite easy to misread Baudrillard’s quote as a suggestion that there is no
reality (of facts), which, as Hjarvard (2008: 111) points out, is a simplification of
his argument. At the same time it obviously produces ambivalences, as the same
Hjarvard argues that Baudrillard, and postmodernist thinkers more generally, “pro-
claims the disappearance of reality”, and has too-grand theoretical claims (Hjar-
vard 2008: 111). These ambivalences highlight a common misinterpretation of
Baudrillard’s ideas, likely with roots in an insufficient acknowledgement of the
philosophical traditions from which he comes. And although Baudrillard is most
often dismissed as a “postmodernist”, his thinking is rather rooted in neo-Marxist,
structuralist semiology, linguistics, and anthropology. Thus his interest is not in
the media as institutions, but rather in the (dis)abilities of the media as technolo-
gies to provide for symbolic exchange and communication, and that they provide
for simulations of communication, that is, to make us believe we are communicat-
ing while we are actually engaged in an empty mimicking of genuine symbolic
exchange. And this is a far cry from denying any external reality as such. I will
return to this quote, but I first want to take a detour to explain the philosophical
roots of Baudrillard’s thinking.
Baudrillard has basically two influences: Marxist theories of production and
consumption, and Saussurean structural linguistics (and, in its wake, structural
anthropology), not least the way the semiological heritage of Saussure was man-
aged by Roland Barthes, for example in his The Fashion System (Barthes [1967]
1990). Rather than proclaiming the disappearance of physical reality, Baudrillard
is pointing to a shift in our relation to basic categories of production and consump-
tion, and to ‘the object’. If Marx ([1867] 1976) in Capital pointed to a change in
our relation to objects under industrialization and the rising capitalist system of
production, whereby the fetish character of the commodity stripped the object of
its relations to the labour laid down in the production process (by, for example,
an artisan), Baudrillard, in a series of five books (1968; [1970] 1998; 1981; [1973]
1975; 1993), points to another shift whereby the emphasis on production has
changed to the benefit of consumption, and the sign qualities of commodities.
In traditional political economy from Adam Smith ([1776] 1991) and onwards
over Marx and others, the distinction between the use and exchange values of
commodities was introduced and theorized. Use value, as described by Marx, is
 Institution, technology, world 181

that which fulfils a human need, irrespective of whether this need stems from “the
stomach” (material needs), or “the imagination” (immaterial needs) (Marx 1976:
125). All objects that fulfil human needs have use value. Objects that in addition
can be sold on a market also have exchange value. Exchange value is produced
through human labour (plus raw material), as human labour has the capacity to
produce more than it takes to be reproduced.
However, already in the 1950s it was apparent to economists such as John
Kenneth Galbraith (1958) that phenomena such as advertising interfered with these
laws of economic theory. Baudrillard was indeed influenced by Galbraith (see, e.g.
Baudrillard 1998: 70), but took his ideas on the symbolic dimensions of commodi-
ties a step further. In line with Galbraith, Baudrillard argued that the signs
attached to consumer goods contributed to the exchange value of the commodity.
However, he also argued that this “sign value” is also a value in its own right,
contributing to the status of the consumer when consumed. Furthermore, he
argued that what we pay for when buying commodities today is less and less
connected to their use value – that is, their functionality – and more and more to
the sign value itself. An illustrative example from his PhD thesis from 1968 – Le
système des objets – is the tailfins of American cars. These fins signify “speed”,
but in their functionality actually do not make the car faster (rather to the con-
trary). But it is not the functionality of driving fast that the consumer pays for, but
rather the sign “speed” in terms of “that is really a fast car”. And when consumed
by the buyer, this sign value confers to him or her a certain status as “one who
drives a really fast car”.
Baudrillard thus expanded on the value forms that were introduced in political
economy to “utility value, commercial value, statutory value” (Baudrillard 1981:
125). And in Baudrillard’s analysis, there is also a shift in emphasis from the func-
tionality of the object, over its commercial qualities as commodity, to its signifying
qualities over time (a relative loss of functionality that Lash [2005] also points to).
Let us return to the context of the quote in which Baudrillard refers to “mediatized
information”, by quoting the passage in full:
Every image, every media message and also every surrounding functional object is a test. That
is to say, in all the rigour of the term, it triggers response mechanisms in accordance with
stereotypes or analytic models. The object today is not ‘functional’ in the traditional sense of
the term: it doesn’t serve you, it tests you. It no longer has anything to do with yesterday’s
object, any more than ‘mediatized’ information has with the ‘reality’ of facts. Both object and
information already result from a selection, an edited sequence of camera angles, they have
already tested ‘reality’ and have only asked those questions to which it has responded. Reality
has been analysed into simple elements which have been recomposed into scenarios of stable
oppositions, just as the photographer imposes his own contrasts, lighting and angles onto his
object […]. Thus tested, reality tests you in return according to the same score-card, and you
decode it following the same code, inscribed in every message and object like a miniature
genetic code (Baudrillard 1993: 63).1

1 It should be noted that in the French original, “reality” is put in quotation marks in the passage,
whereas “l’information médiatisée” is not (contrary to the English translation).
182 Göran Bolin

This quote illustrates the way Baudrillard sees the changing status of the object,
and how he incorporates the fact that the value of the object is of another kind
today, compared to historically (although the exact period he is referring to is
unclear). What we consume today, he argues, is increasingly the sign value of the
object, rather than its functional use value. The reason for this shift can be attri-
buted on the one hand to the organizational principles of “the system of objects”
(i.e. capitalist commodity production), and on the other, to the ability of the media
to technologically organize communication into a structured code, a kind of struc-
ture that Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev once described as “an autonomous entity
of internal dependencies” (quoted from Barthes 1990: 3).
There is no doubt that the structuralist influences from Barthes’ The Fashion
System shine through here, as fashion is a good example of the dominance of
sign value over use value, whereby the “signifier/signified distinction is erased”
(Baudrillard 1993: 87). Fashion, however, is based on tangible commodities, pro-
duced by a combination of raw material (cloth, linen), labour, and design. In the
contemporary world of digital intangible objects and commodities, the principles
by which fashion works have extended to non-tangible, digital commodities. In
the next section I will thus discuss the wider implications of sign value in relation
to production in contemporary media and cultural industries.

3.1 Sign value and the labour of signification

To Baudrillard, the most important feature of contemporary objects and commodi-
ties is their sign qualities. The sign value of commodities as they are conferred on
physical objects by, for example, the advertising industry, adds to their economic
value according to the logic that consumers are prepared to pay more for a distinc-
tive commodity (one that distinguishes the consumer from his or her fellow con-
sumers in what Bourdieu [1979] (1989) would label a “field of consumption”). To
use the analogy of fashion, haute couture is more distinctive than mass-produced
clothing from H&M or GAP. The fashion (de)sign of haute couture is produced
through semiotic labour, that is, in the practice of signification carried out by the
designer: Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, and their colleagues. And the
exchange value of haute couture is more dependent on the signifying practices of
this group of designers than it is on the quality of the raw material they work
with (although this naturally also contributes to the exchange value of fashion
commodities). This is what Baudrillard (by way of Barthes) hints at when he argues
for the dominance of sign value over use value – the function of covering the
body, or keeping it warm, is of less importance than the effect of distinguishing
the clothes-bearer from his or her contemporaries.
Now, why is an understanding of the fashion system important in the process
of mediatization (or, for that matter, anything else outside the fashion system)?
This was admittedly a relevant question to Baudrillard at the time his theories
 Institution, technology, world 183

were formulated. In his attempts at elaborating Marx’s theory of value, Baudrillard

wanted to develop a political economy of the sign. However, although he did
acknowledge that “the epicentre of the contemporary system is no longer the pro-
cess of material production” (Baudrillard 1975: 130), which was rooted in his early
critique of Marx whom he argued was only useful for analysing “material produc-
tion” (Baudrillard 1981: 165), he has had surprisingly little to say about the specific
character of the opposite, the “immaterial” or intangible commodities supposedly
dominant at the time in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is not surprising, then,
that his writings are often incoherent, and that he had obvious difficulty freeing
himself of the dominant perspective on commodities as having some kind of mate-
rial or tangible base. At his best, using examples from fashion and the above-
mentioned example of the tailfins of American cars, he could point to instances
in which the non-functionality of sign value dominated over functional use value.
But he did not formulate a coherent theory of pure sign commodities, that is,
commodities entirely constructed of combinations of signs.
However, just as we can say that the ideas of McLuhan are of more obvious
relevance today (cf. Merrin 2005: 45), we can hold that the ideas on sign value
and the relative importance of signifying practices are of importance if we are to
understand the cultural commodities that circulate consumption markets in the
digital present – a present that is – if not dominated – then at least heavily marked
by sign commodities. Today, with the widespread digitization of the media, it fol-
lows that media content to an increasing degree is becoming separated from its
tangible carriers. With the sophisticated personal, digital, and mobile means of
consumption of today (hardware such as laptops, mobile phones, and tablet com-
puters, and software services such as social networking sites, Spotify, iTunes, Vodd-
ler), the cultural object as an assemblage of digits can travel between a range of
different tangible carriers. Before digitization a piece of music, a novel, a feature
film, was bound to its material, physical form: the record, the book, the celluloid
film. The object itself – the song, the narrative of the novel, the cinematic film –
is a construction composed of an “edited sequence”, “scenarios of stable opposi-
tions” that have to be “decoded” according to the “same score-card” they were
encoded in. They are pure sign structures that have no tangible base. The semiotic
labour of composing the cultural object has its correspondence in the semiotic
labour of consuming it.
Sign value, then, as theorized by Baudrillard, is – just as is exchange value –
the result of the development of the fetish character of the commodity (i.e. the
abstracted reified labour) (Baudrillard 1981: 130–142). It contributes to exchange
value, as the example of fashion obviously reveals. But it can also be extracted as
a value in its own right, which is realized in consumption: the value that differenti-
ates the consumer from other consumers. It therefore also has a relatively autono-
mous relation to exchange value, and circulates in a different economy, deter-
mined by a different logic: that of differentiation. If use value, as theorized by
184 Göran Bolin

Baudrillard, is coupled with a functional logic, and exchange value with an eco-
nomic or commercial logic, sign value is coupled with a differential logic (Baudril-
lard 1981: 123). These logics are governed by the general principles of “utility,
equivalence, difference” (Baudrillard 1981: 126). In this sense, sign value replaces
neither use nor exchange value, but adds a quality to the object, in the same way
as exchange value adds the quality of equivalence to the logic of utility. That
something has sign value does not mean it is emptied of use value, but rather that
the compositions of value are more complex.
It could be argued that the intertwinement of these logics is more pertinent
today, since cultural objects have become freed of their fixation to tangible carri-
ers. A piece of music in its commodity form was previously bound to its tangible
carrier. It thus had a material base in raw material as well as the sign qualities.
When you buy a piece of music from iTunes today, this is not the case. Arguably,
you need the means of consumption to decode the commodity into consumable
form, but the commodity itself – the thing you buy from iTunes – has no tangible
base. It still has a material quality, of course, since light floating through fibre
optic cables also consists of physical energy, but you cannot put the song as a
commodity in your pocket or hold it in your hand unless it is laid down on a
physical carrier.
The above argument means that the commodity in itself, the thing bought and
sold, is a composition of signs without any raw material. There are of course means
of production taken advantage of in the process of production (studio space,
microphones, instruments, computers), but the act of signification does not tool a
raw material into something new. And thus, for the digital commodity, the labour
of signification is of crucial importance for its exchange value. Imagine, for exam-
ple, the production process behind a hit single by Lady Gaga: she or someone else
has an idea for a song, a combination of chords and a melody over a beat. When
the involved musicians are content with how the tune sounds there will be object
form, there will be use value and in the process of marketing and promoting the
tune, there will be a commercial form and exchange value added. But what is the
signified? The signifier “Bad Romance” as a commodity and object, that is, as a
cultural product that has both use and exchange value (it is functional in that you
can dance to it, and it has economic value as you can sell it), has no signified
besides the tune itself. Of course its individual components in the forms of lyrics,
instrumentation, and generic belonging carry a range of connotations, but as a
commodity, that is, as a unique combination of signs (sounds, timbre, harmonies,
etc.), it has no signified besides its own signifier. Furthermore, it shares this qual-
ity with all other pure sign commodities.
Admittedly, there were cultural commodities that were pure sign structures
before digitization as well. Music pieces as well as television and radio pro-
grammes are all examples of non-tangible commodities that existed in the ana-
logue era. But digitization radicalizes the non-tangible sign commodity, if not by
 Institution, technology, world 185

quality then by scale, reach, and transformability. As non-tangible objects, how-

ever, contrary to tangible commodities that become worn down in use, intangible
commodities have a potential for eternal life. This is where the commercial sign
system must work at its own destruction in order to close the production–con-
sumption circuit. As tangible commodities wear down with use, non-tangible com-
modities in sign systems wear down by the signifying practices producing new
signs: the fashion of 2014 will be destroyed by the introduction of the fashion of
2015.
So, to summarize this section, mediatization, as argued by Baudrillard (and
his followers, such as Lash 2005), is related to the technological features of the
media, rather than the institutional arrangements of the media as media corpora-
tions, or the institution of journalism. Instead, the objects and phenomena that are
seen as mediatized are subjected to the logic of the medium as a communication
technology. Mediatization has to do with form; not in the same way as McLuhan
argued that form was the most important effect of the media, but form in the way
information and content are subsumed the code imposed by the media. “What is
mediatized”, argues Baudrillard, “is not what comes off the daily press, out of the
tube, or on the radio: it is what is reinterpreted by the sign form, articulated into
models, and administered by the code (just as the commodity is not what is pro-
duced industrially, but what is mediatized by the exchange value system of
abstraction)” (Baudrillard 1981: 175–176).
Mediatization, then, does not result from the impact of technology itself, and
neither is it produced by the ways the media are organized into institutions of
either mass or personal media. It is rather an effect of the system of signification.
This is also where it can be suspected that the root might lie in the misconception
of Baudrillard’s mediatization concept, and the idea that he is denouncing the
existence of reality. What he is arguing for is thus not the disappearance of physi-
cal reality, but the increased presence of what could be called self-directed signifi-
ers, that is, signifiers without signifieds or referents outside the sign system itself.
But it does not follow from this that these combined signifiers/signifieds are not
real. They might be intangible, but they are nonetheless taken account of by con-
sumers and media users in social action. This means that sign structures are real
in the sense that they do exist, are acknowledged to exist, and are acted upon in
ways that indicate that media users and consumers think of them as existing. Even
simulations are real in this sense – as simulations. And signs and simulations are
also part of society. Furthermore, it is equally clear that the simulations are born,
interpreted and acted upon inside, rather than outside, society. This brings us back
to the discussion on the relationship between media as institutions and technolo-
gies on the one hand and culture and society on the other, and in the next section
I will introduce a third position.
186 Göran Bolin

4 The media as world perspective

A third, more integrated, approach to mediatization can be labelled the “media as
world” perspective, whereby mediatization is regarded as a force, perhaps what
Andreas Hepp (2013: 54) has termed a “moulding force”, working from within
societies (rather than from outside). And indeed, Hepp, his colleague Friedrich
Krotz, and their research environment at the University of Bremen can be said to
work within this tradition, emphasizing “mediatized worlds” (Krotz and Hepp 2011,
cf. Krotz 2001).
The roots of this perspective are somewhat harder to trace, and the back-
ground is more heterogeneous. Furthermore, although the concept of mediatiza-
tion is adopted in these debates it is used in a wider sense, referring to the more
general role of the media in culture and society. A typical example of this approach
can be seen in the following quote from Paul Lazarsfeld’s (1941) classic text
“Remarks on administrative and critical communications research”, where he pos-
tulates that “critical research is posed against the practice of administrative
research, requiring that, prior and in addition to whatever special purpose is to be
served, the general role of our media of communication in the present social sys-
tem should be studied” (Lazarsfeld 1941: 9). We should note that Lazarsfeld is
talking about “the general role of our media of communication in the present
social system”, which is something quite different from “the independence of poli-
tics and society from the media”, as Strömbäck (2008: 241) believes. It is also very
far removed from the version of mediatization as subsumption under the code
advocated by Baudrillard.
So, an underlying presupposition in Lazarsfeld’s quote is an integrated social
world. It does not ascribe to “the media” an outside position, as either institution
or technology. To quote one of the pioneers of Swedish media and communication
research, Kjell Nowak, the media are “an integral part of fundamental social and
cultural processes, and of human life in contemporary (and past) society” (Nowak
1999: 68, my translation). Lazarsfeld does not use the concept of mediatization,
while Nowak does (Nowak 1996: 159–161; 1999: 67). Still, their view on the role of
the media in social and cultural processes is nonetheless the same.
Lazarsfeld and Nowak are, of course, not alone in sharing this view on the
relationship between our communication media and society. This perspective is
far older than that, and some of the influence of what I here call the “media as
world” perspective can be attributed to American philosopher John Dewey, who,
in his Democracy and Education, proposed that “[s]ociety not only continues to
exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in trans-
mission, in communication” (Dewey [1916] 1923: 5). This quote was later picked up
by James Carey (1975: 2), who used it to distinguish between a transmission and
a ritual approach to communication. While the transmission approach privileges
causality and linearity in communication, the ritual approach is apt to answer
 Institution, technology, world 187

other kinds of questions – on shared meaning, culture, identity. If a society exists

both by communication and in communication, it also follows that there are no
communicating positions outside society. Surely there might be institutions, and
these might have autonomous status in relation to other social institutions (politi-
cal parties, for example). But these institutions will also be a part of the wider
society, and contribute to its specific character. So, the institutional perspective
on mediatization as I have described it above has to a great degree adopted a
transmission perspective on mediatization, while what I call the media as world
perspective is closer to the ritual approach.
This ritual approach is integrative. It does not presume society as atomistic
but rather as a whole – encompassing several dimensions, but nonetheless an
integrated unity. Its roots are traced by Carey to the functional sociology of Durk-
heim ([1912] 2001) in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, but it can also be
found in the writings of Raymond Williams ([1962] 1966), whom Carey (1975: 19)
explicitly quotes. However, to me another quote than that referred to by Carey,
taken from the same chapter in Williams’s Communications, is more fitting for
illustrating the ritual view on the relationship between media and society:

Many people seem to assume as a matter of course that there is, first, reality, and then, second,
communication about it. We degrade art and learning by supposing that they are always
second-hand activities: that there is life, and then afterwards there are these accounts of it.
[…] We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the
business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe,
to understand, to educate, is a central and necessary part of our humanity. This struggle is
not begun, at second hand, after reality has occurred. It is, in itself, a major way in which
reality is continually formed and changed. What we call society is not only a network of
political and economic arrangements, but also a process of learning and communication (Wil-
liams 1966: 19).

It is quite clear from the quoted passage that Williams opposes a view that sepa-
rates mediated communication from reality, and is especially opposed to denigrat-
ing communication and art to “second-hand activities”. These are rather to be seen
as “a central and necessary part” of society. In this sense the representations,
accounts, stories, and ideas of individuals are part of social reality just as much
as are the more physical objects society also comprises.
The ritual perspective does not primarily analyse casual effects, directions of
influence and impact. Although it is also involved in descriptive analysis of the
state of the media, seeking answer to the question “What does it look like?”, it is
equally occupied with the analysis of meaning. It thus adds the subjectivist ques-
tion “What does it feel like?” to the objectivist descriptive approach.2 It focuses

2 It should be pointed out that although Baudrillard’s techno-structural perspective is hard to

combine with a subjectivist approach, just like all hyper-structuralist accounts, the institutional
perspective does not rule out subjectivist approaches. The institutional perspectives of mediatiza-
tion, however, seem to be less interested in this aspect (but see Hjarvard 2013: 137 ff.).
188 Göran Bolin

not only on the materiality of social and cultural relations but also on subjective
perceptions of them. This is sometimes theorized as an oscillation between the two
perspectives, a will to overcome the objectivist/subjectivist divide. One example
of such an approach is the “constructivist structuralism” of Pierre Bourdieu ([1987]
1990: 123). This approach holds at its centre the axiomatic view that social struc-
tures have come into being as a result of social actions formed not only by the
objective structures that structure behaviour, but just as much by the agent’s inter-
pretations of these structures. As David Morley (1997: 126) once formulated it,
“macro structures can only be reproduced through micro-processes”, and these
micro–macro relations can only be studied if one tries to understand the world-
views of individual subjects related to the structuring constraints of previous social
action. This is, of course, a classical tension between structure and agency, which
has also been formulated by Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not
make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx
[1852] 1995). The “circumstances” mentioned by Marx have been formed by previ-
ous generations, who in turn have acted within the structural constraints as well
as possibilities of even earlier generations, in a perpetual generational spiral. The
constraints as well as the possibilities to overcome them include all the structuring
institutional arrangements made in culture and society, which develop in conjunc-
tion with each other. However, the ritual view need not necessarily encompass a
linear historical explanation, but is rather open to alternative historical under-
standings, taking their departure in alternative conceptualizations of historical
time alongside the linear, for example in circular time (emphasizing its repetitive,
ritualistic quality) or even punctual time (whereby time is defined not by its suc-
cession of moments but by its social or cultural quality).
This is also a perspective on social and cultural development that could
emphasize the role of the media not in terms of causality but as archive, as a
common intellectual resource, a heritage that includes prehistoric art and litera-
ture, early forms of communication and cultural formation, cultural practices, the
assemblage of cultural technologies at our disposal in the form of both technologi-
cal hardware (machines of different kinds) and technological software, that is,
the various techniques men and women have developed for communication (the
signifying practice of language as such, poetry, genres, and other presentational
forms, etc.) – in sum, all the things that have played a part in the forming of our
present social and cultural worlds: the poetry of Homer; the cave paintings of
Altamira, Spain; the archaic, Akkadian and Assyrian cuneiform tablets; the Gil-
gamesh epic.
In this approach mediatization points more to the roles of the hardware and
software of communication in society and how we as social and cultural beings
form – and are formed by – the surrounding media landscape as “material and
mental environment” (Nowak 1996). Mediatization, then, points to the increased
 Institution, technology, world 189

presence of the media as technologies in society, and the consequences of this on

its qualitative character (Hannerz 1990; cf. Fornäs 1995). According to Nowak
(1996: 164–166), social and cultural action is carried out within as well as with and
through the media environment. First, we communicate within an increasingly
media rich environment where we have access to increasingly many and more
differentiated media technologies. Second, these media technologies increasingly
allow human–machine interaction, so that we more often communicate with tech-
nology, for example with Apple’s “intelligent assistant” Siri, who “understands
what you say, knows what you mean, and has the answers you need”.3 Third, we
naturally communicate through technologies such as e-mail, SMS and chat rooms,
mobile phones, etc. And if society, as Dewey (1923) argues, exists in communica-
tion, this is indeed an increasingly technified – mediatized – form of communica-
tion. In combination, these increased communicative possibilities make us live a
virtual “media life”, as Mark Deuze (2012) argues in a similar way to Nowak, albeit
updated to the contemporary media environment. This media life is virtual, not in
the sense of “fake” or “simulated” but in the sense of that which “is so in essence
or effect”.4 It is a “real fact” according to the logic that holds that “[i]f men define
situations as real, they are real in their consequences”, as the Thomas theorem
goes (Merton [1949] 1957: 421–422). In this sense, Baudrillard’s simulations and
simulacra are real in their consequences, which is why they should not be dis-
missed as not having to do with reality. And in this sense, we should acknowledge
some mediated phenomena produced in an increasingly mediatized communica-
tion environment as important instances of late modern media life. Let me con-
clude the discussion by giving some examples of media phenomena that indeed
have an impact on the character of society, but are difficult to analyse in terms of
the media imposing themselves on a supposedly previously unmediated phenom-
enon. Two such examples are the media event (the Eurovision Song Contest, the
Olympics) and the sign commodity (texts, audiences, formats, the brand). These
phenomena have little existence outside the media, either as institutions or tech-
nologies. Nonetheless, they need to be seen as social and cultural phenomena that
are clearly part of our present social realities.

5 Objects and commodities in a media(tized) world

In this last section I want to briefly discuss some late modern phenomena that are
indicative of our mediatized worlds of the present. They have been chosen because
they are examples of phenomena that do not pretend to represent or make a medi-

3 Quoted from http://apple.com/iphone/built-in-apps/, accessed 21 January 2013.

4 Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, entry: virtual. Accessed 21 January 2013.
190 Göran Bolin

ated account of a social reality outside the institution of the media, but nonethe-
less need to be considered part of everyday social reality.
The first example is the Olympic Games in their modern form. While these
games do indeed have an unmediated prehistory dating back to ancient Greece
(ca. 776 BC to 394 AD), it should be noted that the modern games as introduced
in 1896 by Pierre de Coubertin appear during the era of mass communication: the
mass press, and the new medium of cinematic film. The modern games are also,
contrary to the ancient games, international. This presupposes some form of com-
munication medium to report back to the partaking national audiences. Indeed, it
would be peculiar if one arranged an international competition of supposedly great
national interest if there were no means to report back to citizens of partaking
nation-states.
We can thus argue that the modern Olympic Games have never occurred in
unmediatized form. The media as technologies and as institutions (sports journal-
ism) have always been an integrated part and a main component. Admittedly, the
media technologies have changed since 1896, which has had an impact on the
ways the Olympic Games have been mediated back to national audiences, the ways
they have been represented. But there has never been an unmediated Olympic
moment in the modern era. The Olympic Games are mediated in the meaning that
they develop in tandem with the media organizations and technologies involved
in their mediation to national audiences.
Perhaps even more striking in this respect is a phenomenon like the Eurovision
Song Contest (ESC). This long-standing institution in European television history,
initiated in 1956 by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and broadcast yearly
to European (and some other) audiences, was in fact initiated as a cultural technol-
ogy (Bolin 2012) to communify the European countries through a common enter-
tainment competition. From having been a limited phenomenon at its start (only
seven countries took part in the first competition), it has today grown to be one
of the largest non-sport media events in Europe.
As a production initiated by the EBU, however, it has little life separate from
the media; that is, if by media we mean the integrated efforts of television, the
Internet, the tabloid press, weeklies and fan press, as well as the music media –
record companies, streaming services, and others with an interest in making reve-
nues out of the music. From an institutional perspective, the ESC is an institution
in its own right. It naturally affects other media institutions, including journalism,
but it makes little sense to say that this conglomerate of media technologies and
institutions has an impact on other non-media institutions in society, as the media
form is always already there. There is no unmediated version of ESC that can be
affected, and although there is a live studio audience present at each final, the
production is clearly not aimed at these individuals but rather at the viewing audi-
ence in countries all over Europe (Bolin 2006: 202).
 Institution, technology, world 191

Most media commodities today also have the characteristic of being sign com-
modities.5 The most obvious example is the media text, or, as the industry jargon
goes, content. The first of these appears with broadcasting technology, whereby
the radio programme or television show, initially broadcast live, consists of noth-
ing but airwaves. Indeed, this is just the point Thomas Streeter made when he
called his book on the history of commercial broadcasting policy in the US Selling
the Air (Streeter 1996). The commodity at the basis of the commercial broadcasting
system was a combination of signs that were technologically encoded and decoded
in the transfer from broadcaster to the viewing and listening audience. Broadcast-
ing was analogue, at least initially, and with digitization this quality is further
established. However, with digitization even media texts that were previously not
pure sign structures but were rather firmly bound to their tangible carriers – for
example the book or the newspaper – now became intangible and versatile, and
could float between technological platforms of storage and distribution. With digi-
tization, then, many (if not most) media texts become pure sign commodities.
A specific content form is the format, that is, the basic idea for the production
of a television show (often in the reality genres) that allows for national adapta-
tion. Formats are a specific kind of commodity that is bought and sold at the large
television MIP-TV and MIPCOM fairs in Cannes, France, and other places in the
world. In the words of Australian television researcher Albert Moran, in turn quot-
ing a television producer, a format is similar to a pie, whereby “the crust is the
same from week to week but the filling changes” (Moran 2004: 5). However, this
crust is, contrary to the crust in an apple pie, not possible to put on a plate, and
it is consumed in its sign form, as a principle for how to put together and produce
a television show. This is also why the legal frameworks protecting this commodity
are so weak, which makes this specific market for formats totally reliant on the
common belief among those involved in the commodity. If the involved parties of
buyers and sellers were to doubt the value of the commodity, the market would
disappear instantly.
A second sign commodity that appears, not with digitization but rather with
the rationalizations of the commercial mass media, is the audience. Audiences, if
we distinguish this commodity based on statistical aggregation from the social
subjects who listen, read, and watch mass media, have become an increasingly
sophisticated statistical construct. This commodity is worked upon by the market-
ing and audience analysis divisions of large media companies, and is tooled into
the commodity that is the basis of their revenues. This construct is based on math-
ematical calculation, estimations and probability theory through a range of data-
generating technologies: telephone and postal surveys, people meters, user panels,
etc. Although there have been dramatic advances in methodology, all these tech-

5 This section builds on a much more elaborated discussion on sign commodities in Bolin (2011:
117 ff.).
192 Göran Bolin

niques share the disadvantage that they do not represent social reality 1 : 1. They
are estimates, ranging from pure guesswork to statistical descriptions with high
significance – but they never equal social reality. They are merely representations
of this social reality, and the basis for the calculation of prices for advertising (or
other marketing techniques). The commodity sold is based on the common agree-
ment between seller and buyer on a price, and the mutual belief that the calculated
statistics are good enough. Like any other market, the audience market is based
on the belief that the signifier – the figure indicating the size and composition of
the audience – has a referent in social reality (cf. Galbraith 1970).
A third sign commodity is traffic. In the digital world, media users have
increasing access to means of production and distribution on social networking
sites and other forums that, as their business model, have user traffic at their
centre. The tightened bonds between the telecommunications industry and other
parts of the media and advertising industries mean that much of the media econ-
omy builds on bytes transferred through fibre optic cables or Wi-Fi networks. In
such an economy even waste turns into economic value, because it matters very
little to the telecommunications companies what content flows through their net-
works as long as it produces traffic. Illegal downloading is then also to the benefit
of these companies, as is spam mail. Spam mail, in fact, is a very peculiar entity
in this economic circuit. Most of it is never opened by its addressee, and quite often
it goes directly, via spam filters, to the waste-basket. Nonetheless, it contributes
to the “traffic commodity” (Van Couvering 2008). This is, however, a general kind
of traffic commodity. Through new business models and opportunities provided
for by digitization, there has also appeared a specific traffic commodity. As the
telecommunications companies – our telephone and Internet service providers –
have access to the data we as users produce, they can also map out our behaviour
on the web and produce user behaviour profiles. The websites we visit, the pat-
terns of our e-mail correspondence, our patterns of search on Google, Yahoo! or
bing, our postings on social networking sites like Facebook, produce information
that can then be sold to third parties to take advantage of through cleverly con-
structed algorithms that provide us with tailored marketing messages. And all
these commodities have the quality of being intangible. They consist of aggregated
information in large data banks that can be harvested and turned into economic
value by those who control the communication flows.
My fourth example of a sign commodity is the brand. A brand can be described
as a complex signifier, constructed in semiotic labour with the purpose of produc-
ing a specific signified connected to a company or a consumer commodity. The
brand is the most obvious sign commodity, as it is a construct that everyone
acknowledges as a construct. A brand is descriptive as well as prescriptive. It is
“a practical effort to make the world conform to the structures of the conceptual”
(Carrier 1998: 2, quoted in Moor 2007: 5). As such it works at the level of the sign,
and is thus subsumed by the laws of signification. In the traditional industrial
 Institution, technology, world 193

production of tangible commodities, brand differentiation was adopted as a strat-

egy to separate one commodity from another within the same functional area.
With increased market competition, branding strategies became more important,
and hence the sign value of commodities, as the value brands are built on, gradu-
ally took command over the functional use values of objects and commodities,
and the sign value itself became the most important object of consumption (Baud-
rillard 1968: 229). We need only take a quick look at the mobile phone market to
realize that brand recognition is more important than the technological informa-
tion of functionality; Apple has been particularly successful through their (de)sign
strategies, creating hype around their products, most notably the iPhone and iPad.
A strong consumer demand is created through this, built less on functionality and
more on sign appearance: “iPhone 5 – The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since
iPhone”, as the self-hype on Apple’s web pages goes. This slogan is followed in
an animated row by six other slogans, the first dealing with its design and the
next five with its functionality (technical performance, new application features,
etc.).6 Design is thus the first and most important argument in the brand construc-
tion of Apple’s iPhone.
These four kinds of sign commodities arguably are indicative of how contem-
porary media industries work. This is an aspect of “the media” – as institutions
and technologies – that is not truly possible to grasp only with the institutional
or the technological mediatization perspective alone, and as these examples
reveal, there is a need to take seriously the workings of communicative significa-
tion as well as approaches rooted in phenomenology and social constructionism
if we are to understand contemporary media landscapes. The second modernity
perspective, with its roots in linguistic, anthropological, and (post-)structuralist
theory, and the world perspective in phenomenology need to be brought together
and seen as complementary rather than as rivals, as they highlight different
aspects of these roles of the media. Or, to phrase it differently, if we cannot con-
sider the institutional power relations in conjunction with the specificities of both
technological and communicative form, and if these cannot be related to the sub-
jective apprehensions of media users and producers, we have little chance of cap-
turing the complexities of late modern media cultures and societies.

6 Conclusion
In the above I have tried to discuss three strands of, or approaches to, mediatiza-
tion theory. First, I have discussed the institutional perspective, with its mainly
causal explanatory approach, leaning towards a linear, transmission perspective,
based in an historical view that could be described as close to a modernization

6 Retrieved January 23, 2013, from http://apple.com/uk/iphone/.

194 Göran Bolin

perspective. As the focus is on the impact of the media as an institution affecting

social processes, it mainly theorizes the media as a phenomenon that works on
social institutions from the outside. This is mediatization as institutional impact,
and the logic emphasized is that of the institution.
Second, I have accounted for the technological perspective, which is based in
linguistics, structural anthropology, semiotics, and Marxism, arguing that we have
now entered a second modernity, and emphasizing the play of signifiers, sign
value, and a media and cultural production process marked by signifying practi-
ces. The historical view is not necessarily linear, although there are also strong
such influences. The role of the media in this perspective is on the level of form,
and concerns how it provides a code that is decisive for the quality and character
of communication. This is mediatization as communicative quality. The logic fore-
fronted is that of the sign, and the impact of signification and difference.
The first and second perspectives are both centred on a specific, processual
view on history. In the first case linearity and causality are emphasized, while the
second approach, in line with its post-structuralist influences, forefronts the break
with previous historical developments. But this is also a perspective informed by
linear thinking, as you can only introduce a break if there is a previously formed,
continuous succession of events. However, both have very little to say about indi-
vidual action, the dynamics of media use, or the consequences of perception on
the structural matrixes that form our cultures and societies.
Third, I have pointed to the media as world perspective, rooted in phenomenol-
ogy and social constructionism, and with a clearer, integrative approach to the
relationship between media, culture, and society. It shares with the second per-
spective an emphasis on the production and sharing of meaning, but is less post-
structural and rather rooted in constructionist approaches and the will to overcome
the micro–macro divide in theory. If there is a logic emphasized – and it should
be stressed that the concept of logic fits less well within this paradigm – it is to
be found in the interplay between a logic of relations and a logic of the social, of
action. Within the world perspective the interpretive actions of human subjects
are acknowledged, and contrary to post-structural sign theories, whereby meaning
is produced as an effect of signification, the world perspective has a sensitivity to
the range of interpretations made, all resulting from the variations in different
experiences of the human subjects. This is the “constructivist structuralism”
argued for by Bourdieu, or the lived experience of Williams, and it also appears
at the bottom of theories such as the encoding/decoding perspective of Hall ([1973]
1980), and so on. These are all approaches that have tried to overcome some of
the problems that at the bottom line can be traced back to the classical tensions
in the philosophy of science: subjectivism–objectivism, structure–agency, individ-
ual–society. They are, of course, not solved by the arguments above, but their
reappearance is constantly provoked by the continuously new constellations and
relational conditions of the media, culture, and society.
 Institution, technology, world 195

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Stig Hjarvard
9 Mediatization and cultural and social
change: an institutional perspective
Abstract: This chapter develops an institutional perspective on mediatization in
order to grasp the changing structural relationships between media and different
spheres of society. Today, we experience an intensified mediatization of culture
and society that is not limited to the realm of public opinion formation but cuts
across almost every social and cultural institution, such as family, work, politics,
and religion. Increasingly, other institutions need the resources of the media,
including their ability to represent information in particular ways, construct social
relationships, and produce attention through communicative action. Because of
this general development, we need to analyze the role of media in a multitude of
social contexts, necessitating a firmer rooting of mediatization theory in general
social theory. Inspired by recent developments in structuration theory and the
institutional logics perspective, media are understood as structures (i.e. resources
and rules) that both condition and enable reflexive human agency. The influence
of media on cultural and social change is not about the media’s “colonization” of
other institutions but about changes in inter-institutional relationships. All institu-
tions, including the media, are dependent on a variety of other institutions, and
cultural and social change may emerge through new configurations of relation-
ships between media and other institutions.

Keywords: agency, institution, institutional logics, meso-level, middle-range

theory, modernity, regimes, rules and resources, structuration, transformation

1 Introduction
Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1992) begins his seminal book Public Opinion with a story
about a remote island where a few Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen lived in
1914. Their only connection to the outside world was a British mail steamer that
arrived every 60 days and supplied them with – among other things – the latest
newspapers. Since the boat’s latest arrival in the summer of 1914, they had dis-
cussed the news about the upcoming court case in France against Madame Cail-
laux, who had shot the editor of the journal Le Figaro, which had been campaign-
ing against her husband, the French Minister of Finance. Awaiting the mail
steamer in mid-September, they were eager to learn more about the outcome of
this political-celebrity scandal. Upon the boat’s arrival, the Europeans learned
something very different, which not only changed their view of the world but also
their internal relationships. Germany had been at war with Britain and France
200 Stig Hjarvard

since the end of July: “For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends,
when in fact they were enemies” (Lippmann [1922] 1992: 3).
Lippmann uses the anecdote to illustrate the power of newspapers to change
“the pictures in our heads”, that is our interpretation of the social world, and how
this subsequently comes to inform our relationships with and actions towards
other people. Lippmann further argues that the “the pictures in our heads” may
not necessarily correspond to the actual reality of “the world outside” because the
media’s representations of political and social affairs are often based on ill-
informed and prejudiced stereotypes and political manipulation. Despite the dis-
crepancy between media representation and reality, news media and public opin-
ion influence the actual world; even if perceptions of the world do not correspond
with reality, they may have real consequences since humans act on their percep-
tions of the world, not on an absolute insight into the “truth” about the world.
Lippmann’s ([1922] 1992, [1925] 1993) analyses of public opinion formation are
interesting in their own right, but I will here consider them from two perspectives
in order to specify the agenda of mediatization research. Lippmann was among
the first to acknowledge how “a revolution is taking place, infinitely more signifi-
cant than any shifting of economic power” (Lippmann [1922] 1992: 158) due to the
rise of newspapers and various research-based communication techniques for the
creation of political consent. As such, his writings are emblematic of a general
development in the inter-war period in which media and communication studies
began emerging as a result of political and commercial interest in taking advan-
tage of new communication media to influence public opinion. This was accompa-
nied by public concern over the media’s harmful influences on political and cul-
tural affairs. Lippmann was among the first to recognize that media had come to
play a more prominent and influential role in culture and society. Unlike some of
his contemporaries, his focus was not just on particular instances of communica-
tion but also on the changing structural relationships between newspapers, public
opinion, and politics, although he did not himself describe it in these terms. The
study of these structural changes in the political public sphere gradually became
more theoretically informed (e.g. Habermas [1962] 1989) and has functioned as an
important context for the study of the mediatization of politics (e.g. Strömbäck
2008).
Lippmann’s studies not only signal continuity between early media and com-
munication studies and contemporary mediatization research but also make evi-
dent the profound historical differences between the media–society relationship
of the early 20th century and that of today, which should be reflected in our con-
ceptualizations of mediatization. Lippmann’s story about the isolated Europeans
appears innocent and outdated to a modern reader simply because it is at odds
with our experience of the contemporary media environment. Not only has the
print culture of the newspaper long since been supplemented by various forms of
audiovisual media, but today, almost every corner of the world is covered by vari-
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 201

ous forms of transnational media (Internet, mobile phones, satellite television,

etc.). Media are not embedded and governed within national political contexts to
the same degree as earlier, but due to globalization and commercialization, they
are both available across national and cultural borders and increasingly under
the control of global media conglomerates. In addition, mass media have been
supplemented by a variety of interactive media, allowing everyone not only to
receive but also to actively engage in various forms of communication with a
potentially global reach. As a result, various forms of media have become inte-
grated into the practices of everyday life, from the workplace to the family.
From a historical point of view, the study of the structural changes in the
relationships between media, public opinion, and politics may be considered a
precursor to contemporary mediatization studies, and it is with good reason that
this area of inquiry continues to constitute an important part of the agenda of
contemporary mediatization theory. The contemporary media environment, how-
ever, also reflects a profound quantitative and qualitative change in the relation-
ship between media, culture, and society. Today, we experience an intensified
mediatization of culture and society that is not limited to the realm of public opin-
ion formation but cuts across nearly every social and cultural institution, such as
family, work, politics, and religion. Media are co-producers of the pictures in our
heads, our actions towards and relationships with other people in a variety of
private and semi-private contexts, and we should consider this significant “revolu-
tion” as well. Due to the very process of mediatization, a theory of the media’s
influence on structural changes in culture and society cannot be restricted to the
public and political realms alone. As a consequence, contemporary mediatization
theory should provide a theoretical framework for media influence in culture and
society as a whole while retaining the ability to inform conceptual development
and empirical studies within more specific areas of culture and society. The influ-
ence of media on the formation of public opinion has not diminished, and one
important influence of the media ‒ including interactive digital media used in
private contexts ‒ is its ability to push human communication and interaction into
a (semi-)public virtual realm through which communication and interaction
become observable and retrievable by others. Thus, although the advent of new
media does not make the study of public and political communication less impor-
tant, mediatization studies should address the transformative role of media in a
wider set of institutions as well as the media’s influence on the changing bounda-
ries between public and private spheres of communication.

2 An institutional perspective
In this chapter, I will argue the advantages of an institutional perspective on medi-
atization when it comes to grasping the changing structural relationship between
202 Stig Hjarvard

media and different spheres of society. The notions of social institutions and the
institutionalization of social interaction are helpful because they allow us to study
processes of mediatization at a level that is at once analytically ambitious in terms
of conceptualizing patterns of systematic change and sensitive to empirical circum-
stances within particular social and cultural domains. More specifically, the insti-
tutional perspective is advantageous in terms of considering the following three
dimensions:
1. Mediatization concerns the long-term structural transformations of the rela-
tionship between media and other social spheres. In contrast to “mediation”,
which concerns the use of media for specific communicative practices in situ-
ated interaction, “mediatization” concerns the changing patterns of social
interaction and relationships between various social actors, including both
individuals and organizations. From this perspective, mediatization involves
the institutionalization of new patterns of social interactions and relationships
between actors, including the institutionalization of new patterns of mediated
communication.
2. The institutional perspective locates the analysis at the meso-level of social
and cultural affairs. As such, it attempts to avoid both macro-level theorizing
about media’s universal influence in culture and society and micro-level analy-
ses of endless variations of social interaction. From this perspective, mediatiza-
tion theory is a conceptual framework to support the development of theories
of the middle-range (Merton 1968). The outcomes of mediatization may vary
considerably depending on the historical and geographical context of the field
in question, and the institutional perspective serves as a flexible analytical
framework for considering the appropriate level of generalization of results in
each particular case.
3. Mediatization is a reciprocal process between media and other social domains
or fields. Mediatization does not concern the media’s definitive “colonization”
of other fields but concerns instead the growing interdependency of and inter-
action between media, culture, and society. Analytically, we can study these
relationships and processes by considering both media and other social
domains as institutions (e.g. family or politics) or practices located within par-
ticular institutional frameworks (e.g. children’s play within the family or elec-
tion campaigns within politics). Mediatization concerns the co-development
and reciprocal change of institutional characteristics of both media and other
domains. These changes may be analytically understood as transformations
from one inter-institutional configuration or regime to another.

The application of an institutional perspective is not without its theoretical impli-

cations since the very notion of “institution” presupposes a particular understand-
ing of culture and society. Not only is “institution” defined differently by different
social science theories, but its definition also involves a specific understanding of
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 203

other social dimensions, such as human agency and social structure. As Mohr and
White (2008: 488) suggest, to “speak with any specificity of the nature of institu-
tions one must invoke a theory of actions, persons, social organization, cultural
systems and the like and these issues are still very much in flux in contemporary
sociological theory”. Our institutional perspective on mediatization will, therefore,
lead us into general sociological theoretical terrain in order to identify the implica-
tions of this institutional dimension not only for our understanding of media but
also for our understanding of the media–society nexus. The effort expended on
such a theoretical detour will hopefully be rewarded by a deeper understanding
of mediatization processes through the use of a much more extensive and well-
developed sociological framework. From the media studies point of view, our insti-
tutional perspective on mediatization is also a means of “mediatizing sociology”
by adding and specifying the role of media within a sociological theory of high
modernity.
In the following, we will develop the concepts of “institution” and “institution-
alization” from the point of view of structuration theory (Giddens 1984; Stones
2005), which builds upon the idea of a “duality of structure” in which the structure
is both a medium for and an outcome of social practice. Structuration theory is
helpful because it transcends the traditional dichotomy between a top-down so-
ciology in which structure determines agency and a bottom-up sociology hyposta-
tizing the primary power of agency. The institutional perspective on mediatization
is thus not intended to favor social structure over agency or to highlight institu-
tional order at the expense of social practice but is, on the contrary, committed to
elucidating how social structures work as resources for social interaction in par-
ticular situations and how social structures are reproduced and perhaps altered
through agency. It should, however, be noted that our general concepts of mediati-
zation and institutions are not necessarily dependent on the specificities of struc-
turation theory, and there may be other approaches to considering institutions and
institutionalization in relation to mediatization (e.g. Schrott 2009).
Institutions provide stability and predictability across time and space yet are
also dynamic structures that provide organizations and individuals with material
and symbolic resources for acting reflectively and creatively in various circumstan-
ces and thereby possibly renewing the institutions themselves. As a consequence,
the accumulated change in practices of mediated communication over time may
evoke institutional transformations. The emerging theoretical framework of “insti-
tutional logics” (Thornton and Ocasio 2008; Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury 2012)
is used as an inspiration for considering mediatization as an inter-institutional
process in which particular practices of mediations (e.g. children’s use of media
at home) are influenced by several institutional structures (e.g. the family, the
commercial market, the educational system, etc.). The inter-institutional dimen-
sion of mediatization also allows for an understanding of how the logics of the
media intersect with the logics of other institutional domains. I then move on to
204 Stig Hjarvard

discuss how institutional change may be conceptualized through the notion of

regimes: A process of mediatization does not take the form of a linear evolution
but may be understood as a transition from one regime to another, that is from a
constellation of relationships and modes of interactions between different institu-
tional agents to a new and different constellation of relationships and modes of
interaction between institutional agents. Finally, I discuss how the media may
generally be understood as resources or “social tools” of representation of informa-
tion, communicative action, and construction of relationships, which make them
valuable across society as a whole. Mediatization is, obviously, dependent on the
proliferation of various media forms, but the transformative process of mediatiza-
tion is a result of various institutions’ changing access to and varying control over
these vital resources.

3 Mediatization: theories of the middle range

Mediatization reflects a new condition of the media’s intensified and changing
importance in culture and society. Mediatization denotes the processes whereby
culture and society become increasingly dependent on the media and their logic
as media are integrated into cultural and social practices at various levels. From
an institutional point of view, mediatization is characterized by a double-sided
development, in that the media have become institutionalized within other social
domains at the same time as they have acquired the status of a social institution
in their own right. As a result, social interaction – within the respective institu-
tions, between institutions, and in society at large – increasingly takes place under
the media’s influence. The notion of a “media logic” is used to recognize that the
various media have particular characteristics and modi operandi that influence
other institutions and society in general as they come to rely on the resources that
the media both control and make available to them. “Logic” as a conceptual cat-
egory is not restricted to the media alone but is, on the contrary, a general way of
describing the particular modus operandi of an entire institution or a smaller cul-
tural and social domain. More precisely, I will understand logics as the particular
rules and resources that govern a particular domain. I will develop this general
perspective on logics in the sections below on “Institutional logics”.
By applying an institutional perspective, I also advocate a level of generaliza-
tion concerning the processes of mediatization. An institutional approach favors
the meso-level of cultural and social affairs since it is concerned with the supra-
individual and supra-situational level of human interaction. It focuses on general
patterns of practices within a particular institutional context, not on the myriad
of variations of situated interaction. At the same time, an institutional approach
insists on an empirical grounding of generalizations and theory building and thus
remains skeptical of macro-scale assertions of media’s universal influence in cul-
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 205

ture and society independent of context. As such, mediatization theory should

support the construction of middle-range theories, i.e. propositions concerning the
influence of media within particular institutional domains or sub-domains (like
politics or children’s play) in a given historical and socio-cultural context. Merton
(1968) developed the notion of middle-range theory and positioned it between the
general and the particular, between the macro and the micro: “It is intermediate
to general theories of social systems which are too remote from particular classes
of social behavior, organization and change to account for what is observed and
to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all”
(Merton 1968: 39).
Considered as a middle-range theory, mediatization theory departs from the
medium theory approach of, for instance, Innis (1951) and McLuhan (1964), who
make grand-scale assertions concerning the influence of various media on human
civilization or societal epochs. Our approach does, however, share affinities with,
for instance, Meyrowitz’s (1986) version of medium theory since he is much more
focused on the study of broadcast media within a particular historical period and
cultural context and their influences on particular relationships between politi-
cians and voters, men and women, and parents and children. From a mediatization
perspective, the media can exert influence across a variety of institutional
domains, but the outcome of this influence may be varied due to the media’s
intersection with other logics. As Hepp (2009) suggests, the notion of “mediatiza-
tion” is a recognition of the “transgressing power of the media” across different
fields, but this “does not result in a homology of these fields; rather, it is trans-
formed by the ‘inertia’ of the institutions within each context field” (Hepp 2009:
154).
Boudon (1991) has correctly observed that the notion of “middle-range” theory
is not clearly developed by Merton and that it thus does not specify the precise
level of generalization to guide empirical enquiry and theory building. Rather, it
reflects a double-sided ambition to develop more general propositions and to
remain in contact with the empirical world. The looseness of the concept may also
be its advantage; it does not a priori favor a particular level of generalization but
leaves it to theoretically informed empirical work to decide the appropriate level
of generalization within the particular field in question. The institutional perspec-
tive also asserts that mediatization is a particular process of (high) modernity
comparable with globalization and urbanization and that, in this sense, mediatiza-
tion may also be considered a macro-theoretical framework concerned with overall
societal developments. At this level, mediatization theory builds on general socio-
logical theory concerning modernity, structure, and agency. In order, however, to
study processes of mediatization, a meso-level approach is generally preferred for
building theoretical propositions, i.e. middle-range theories.
206 Stig Hjarvard

4 Structuration theory
Social institutions are the best-established and most pervasive structures of soci-
ety, both in terms of historical persistence and geographical reach. Institutions like
family and politics do, of course, display considerable variations historically and
in relation to social and cultural contexts, but they nevertheless provide a struc-
tural framework for the continuous reproduction of particular domains of society.
As such “social institutions are the ‘cement’ of social life” (Giddens 1989: 381).
From the point of view of structuration theory (Giddens 1984), institutions are
conceptually considered similar to social structures in general, but they embody
“practices which have the greatest time–space extension” (Giddens 1984: 17). Insti-
tutions may thus be located at one end of a continuum extending from practices
with the highest level of time–space extension (institutionalized practices) to the
those with the lowest level of time–space extension (idiosyncratic practices). In
common with structures in general, institutions consist of rules and resources. By
“rules”, we should understand “techniques or generalizable procedures applied in
the enactment/reproduction of social practices” (Giddens 1984: 21). These may be
of an informal (e.g. norms) or formal (e.g. laws) nature. “Resources” provide the
infrastructure for social practice and can be either material or authoritative/sym-
bolic in nature. In the field of media studies, such an approach to institutional
analysis has at least implicitly informed newsroom studies in order to demonstrate
how the practice of news journalism has been conditioned by the formal and
informal rules and resources of the journalistic profession and the news organiza-
tions (see Hjarvard 2012a for an overview of such studies).
Following Giddens’ notion of the “duality of structure”, institutions are not
external to social practice. Institutions like the family or religion may certainly
endure beyond the individual human being and any particular situated encounter,
but they are nevertheless evoked and (re)produced through the interaction of indi-
viduals in social situations. Institutions may acquire a permanent and external
material presence, for example in the form of buildings or texts, but institutions
are also to be understood as mental and embodied rules and resources that inform
human interaction. In line with this thinking, institutions are acquired and acti-
vated through cognitive schemas (Piaget 1959) and embodied habitus (Bourdieu
1998a, 1998b) that inform individuals’ interpretation of specific situations and
guide their role playing in social encounters (Goffman 1956). As such, institutions
are sense-making tools, normative compasses, and mental scripts for action, but
they are not full-fledged “instructions” that determine sense making and action in
an automatic or uniform way.
Structuration theory insists on the interdependency of social institutions and
human interpretation, of structures and hermeneutics (Stones 2005). Rules are of
a methodological nature, and the individual makes use of these in a reflexive man-
ner by adjusting them to the particular situation at hand. Institutional rules and
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 207

resources both enable and constrain social interaction and as such they are not to
be understood simply as society’s external pressure on the individual to make him
or her conform to existing norms. Through the individual’s socialization in a vari-
ety of institutions (family, education, work, etc.), she becomes capable of employ-
ing a variety of social rules and resources in particular situations and may be able
to act creatively not in spite of but because of the acquired institutional rules and
resources. For example, an individual with an extended social network of family
and friends, a high level of education, and extensive and varied work experience
has more institutional rules and resources to draw upon and may, therefore, be
able to act more flexibly and creatively in social situations compared to an individ-
ual with a small social network, less education, and limited work experience.
Accordingly, institutional structures are not society’s “straitjacket”, constraining
the individual to behave in particular and affirmative ways. The individual’s free-
dom to “act otherwise” is not a subjective residue outside the reach of institutional
structures. Institutions may enable and constrain the individual to reproduce the
existing social order, but they may also be the medium through which alternative
rules and distributions of resources occur. The social reproduction of an institu-
tion, for example the family, should be theoretically distinguished from the consol-
idation of social cohesion (Giddens 1984: 24); the family may continue as an insti-
tution, but it may be renewed over time, and its reproduction may not necessarily
entail that family members or other social actors depending on the family may
become more closely tied to each other than before. A point to which I shall return
is that the presence of a variety of (competing) institutional resources and rules
within a particular social setting is particularly prone to instigate social and cul-
tural change.
Stones has convincingly argued (2005) that Giddens’ contribution to structura-
tion theory concerns a highly abstract and ontological level of analysis and there-
fore has several shortcomings. Giddens’ abstract theory of structuration builds an
important conceptual bridge between structure and agency, but it requires further
development if it is to inform empirical analysis. Stones suggests the need to
develop a meso-level of conceptual analysis that incorporates variations and rela-
tive degrees of structural features’ endurance, importance, and flexibility as well
as graduations of social agents’ ability and motivations to alter institutional struc-
tures. Combining such meso-level theorizing with a sensitivity to substantive
details at the “ontic” level, i.e. the level of empirical study, makes it possible to
consider the duality of structure in empirical detail without a priori ascertaining a
particular degree of freedom for individual agency or a specific importance of all
of the structural features in question. As Stones puts it, “if one is in the business
of building bridges between abstract ontology-in-general and substantive, empiri-
cally informed, studies then such sliding ontological-ontic scales can be extremely
useful” (Stones 2005: 78).
Thompson (1989) has criticized Giddens for paying too much attention to indi-
vidual agency and the reflexive use of structural resources and rules and too little
208 Stig Hjarvard

attention to the constraining force of external institutional structures that leave

little space for “doing otherwise” in particular situations. Not all resources and
rules are of such a methodological nature as to be employed by individual agents;
they may more accurately be described as a set of conditions that are external to
yet influence individuals’ actions. For instance, the existence of a particular media
system (for example a public broadcasting monopoly) in a given historical context
is a structural condition that cannot meaningfully be understood as a rule in Gid-
dens’ sense of something that an individual social actor can reflectively employ
and change through social interaction. Furthermore, Thompson argues, structures
are also characterized by a differentiation of possibilities to act according to the
individual’s social class or gender, and these differentiated structures cannot be
understood as rules in Giddens’ sense of the word. Some structures, Thompson
(1989: 66) writes, are not to be understood as rules but are better conceptualized
“as a series of elements and their interrelationships which together limit the kinds
of rules which are possible and which thereby delimit the scope for institutional
variation” (emphasis in original). Stones (2005) acknowledges the relevance of this
critique but does not desire a return to a more conventional notion of institutional
structures as implied by Thompson’s argument. A conventional notion of structure
would eliminate the insights into the interdependency of structure and agency
that represent the key contribution of structuration theory. Stones instead develops
the notion of “strong structuration” in order to provide a more nuanced under-
standing of the structuration process. Instead of Giddens’ two dimensions of struc-
turation (structure and agency), Stones divides the process into four components
(Stones 2005: 84–85):
1. External structures that condition the actions of social agents. These are auton-
omous from the social agent in question;
2. Internal structures within the social agent that comprise both internal struc-
tures of specific relevance to the situational context and general dispositions
or habitus of the individual social agent;
3. Active agency/agent’s practices, including the ways in which the social agent
employs structures either routinely and pre-reflectively or consciously and
reflectively;
4. Outcomes in the form of (re)production of external and internal structures and
as events.

Stones labels this four-dimensional model as the “quadripartite cycle” of structura-

tion, and it may thus also be considered a process model of the continuous (re)pro-
duction of structure and agency in the flow of everyday practices. The distinction
between external and internal structures is helpful because it situates human
agency as conditioned by an overall societal context at the same time as it recog-
nizes the ability of human agency to make use of internalized social structures in
both routine and reflective ways. Stones’ distinction may, however, potentially
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 209

blur Giddens’ key insight that structures are not just external but also have an
internal cognitive and bodily existence. External structural conditions such as liv-
ing in a war zone or in a prison may be completely outside the control of individual
agency, but they are very likely highly internalized and influential to the human
interpretation and agency that is evoked to survive under such conditions. Exter-
nal conditions may thus only be external in the sense that they are non-negotiable;
they are not necessarily external in the sense of not informing cognitive sense
making and methodological schemas for agency. Some structural conditions may
only be external if they are not recognized or previously learned and internalized,
and similarly, some structural conditions may only be internal relative to a particu-
lar situational context, such as when an individual’s agency is informed by a moral
codex that is out of sync with a contemporary context. In line with this thinking,
Stones’ logical distinction between external and internal structures may be better
conceived of as a continuum or scale between two opposite poles: On one side of
the scale, we find structural conditions outside any control of the individual, and
on the other side, we find structures that may be reflectively employed to alter
existing structures. All along this scale, structures may have both external and
internal presence. Such a gradual scale would also be in accordance with Stones’
own arguments concerning the conditions that enable the individual to “act other-
wise” in a given social situation. He suggests that, for a social agent to resist the
pressure of structural constraints, he or she should have adequate power to resist
them without endangering his or her core commitments, adequate knowledge of
alternative courses of action, and adequate critical distance in order to take up a
strategic position and act against situational pressures (Stones 2005: 115). In the
case of all three requirements, the term “adequate” signals that it is a matter of
degree and not an absolute measure.
Structuration theory provides an important framework for understanding
mediatization processes in several ways. It suggests how media may be simulta-
neously inside and outside human agency: They represent an external structural
condition in terms of the available communicative resources (the media environ-
ment) and rules pertaining to their uses (laws, prices, etc.), which are in some
senses non-negotiable from the point of view of individual agency, and they are
also internal resources and rules in the form of interpretative schemas and scripts
for action (for example knowledge of the appropriateness of particular genres and
media for interaction in particular contexts), which may enable agents to “act
otherwise”.

5 Mediatization as a process of high modernity

Under modern conditions, the social reproduction of institutions is characterized
by particular dynamics. Almost all aspects of society are subject to a growing
210 Stig Hjarvard

differentiation through which a specialization, rationalization, and distanciation of

practices occur (Giddens 1990; Held et al. 1999; Ritzer 1999). A growing division
of labor was prompted first by the industrial revolution and later by the emergence
of a global network society (Castells 1998–2004, 2011) that not only increased spe-
cialization but also created a global division of labor. Urbanization has moved
people out of smaller and traditional contexts and into large-scale modern environ-
ments in which more individualized forms of life predominate. Within structura-
tion theory, the dynamics of modernity (Giddens 1990) are understood as time–
space distanciations that disembed social practices from local settings and re-
embed them in larger and more abstract environments. Social practices are
“stretched” across time and space and differentiated into sub-practices through
specialization and division of labor. Accompanying these processes is a growing
reflexivity in which “social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the
light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively alter-
ing their character” (Giddens 1990: 38). The institutionalization of social practices
becomes disembedded from traditional experiences and local contexts and
becomes informed by a growing reflexivity among both individuals and within
society at large. Both media and various expert systems provide a steady stream
of information that guides individuals and organizations to readjust their practices
to contemporary conditions, thereby installing an ongoing reflexivity into the very
institutionalization of social life.
The media are both subject to these processes of modernity and come to play
particular functions that depart from the general patterns of institutional develop-
ments. Over the past hundred years, the media have become differentiated from
other social practices and have become a separate institution in society. The
decline of the party political press and the development of independent journalis-
tic media are paradigmatic of this development. Political newspapers were once
integral to political organizations and movements as one of a number of venues
for political communication. With the rise of journalism as an independent profes-
sion and the growing independence of mass media from political parties, news
media became a partly independent societal institution, increasingly steered by its
own institutional logics, for example professional norms such as news value, etc.
(cf. Cook 1998). The uses of various media have concurrently been integrated into
the practices of other institutional domains. With the rise of interactive and digital
media, this process has intensified, making mediated communication indispens-
able to nearly every institutional domain, like politics, education, work, etc. At the
same time as the media acquired a momentum as a separate institution of its own,
the media became omnipresent in almost all spheres of society. The media are
used for a plurality of purposes, including to make possible the time–space distan-
ciation of modernity and to relieve social actors from the many coordination tasks
that result from living in institutions stretched across time and space. The mobile
phone, for instance, seems to support an extensive “microcoordination” of work
and family life (Ling 2004).
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 211

The media also acquire a particular position within modern society as they
constitute a public sphere that potentially interconnects with all other social insti-
tutions. The media’s public sphere is not restricted to political affairs but also
involves cultural matters, the commercial market, and increasingly intimate
aspects of life as well (Plummer 2003; Dahlgren 2006; Gripsrud and Weibull 2010).
A variety of hitherto private matters also achieve a semi-public character through
social network media. The media’s public sphere provides a realm of shared expe-
rience that to some extent compensates for the differentiation characterizing most
social domains. Society as a whole hereby acquires a capacity to reflect on itself
as a collective at the same time as the media provide the connecting nodes for the
institutions’ internal communication as well as for their interaction with other
institutions. For example, politicians can reach their constituencies through the
media and vice versa, and private companies can reach their potential consumers
at home through commercial advertising. In light of this institutional perspective
on modernity, mediatization should be understood as a process of late modernity
in which the media are not only subject to key transformations of modern society
but are themselves agents of modernization (Thompson 1995). In particular, the
media makes possible differentiation and time–space distanciation at the same
time as it acquires a particular role as an institution of collective reflexivity con-
cerning both public and private affairs. Media thus facilitate key aspects of mod-
ernity while simultaneously being a product of modernity.
By connecting the concept of mediatization to the institutional transformations
of high modernity, our approach departs from certain strands of mediatization
theory. Krotz (2007a, 2009), seconded by Couldry (2012), has suggested that we
understand mediatization as a “meta-process” of social and cultural change on
par with concepts like globalization and individualization. Following the sociology
of Norbert Elias ([1939] 1978), Krotz regards mediatization as a civilizational pro-
cess that is not restricted to the modern phase but began with the rise of media
for writing in early civilizations. Krotz will not specify a more precise definition of
mediatization since “mediatization, by its very definition, is always bound in time
and to cultural context” (Krotz 2007b: 39, my translation). The notion of “meta-
process” may be useful to the extent that it points to the trans-institutional dimen-
sion of mediatization, that is that mediatization occurs across a variety of social
domains and cultural contexts. However, it seems to be less productive to make
mediatization synonymous with any form of influence from the media since the
dawn of civilization. Various forms of early media – from the invention of writing
to the printing press – may have had important influences on culture and society
(cf. Eisenstein 2005), but it does not necessarily follow as a result that cultures
and societies such as the ancient Egyptian Empire, early Christianity, or the Viking
Age could aptly be described as mediatized cultures and societies. Writing became
important in these cultures, but the media of writing were to a large extent subor-
dinated to religious, political, or military interests.
212 Stig Hjarvard

In order to speak of mediatization as a cultural and social condition, we need

both a more intense proliferation of media and a modern differentiation of social
spheres through which the media arise as a semi-independent institutional force
at the same time as they are integrated into the life-world of other domains of
society. The mediatized condition entails that the media both connect the individ-
ual parts of the larger society by constituting a common public sphere to reflect
upon collective affairs and are situated “inside” the smaller units of society, for
example the life-worlds of family. When considering mediatization in relation to
the longer history of mediated communication, we should take care not to confuse
an “ontology of communication” with a “history of the media”. From an ontologi-
cal perspective, communication (with or without media) has always been integral
to both the larger society and to the smaller life-world of social existence. Through
communication, we not only talk about or reflect on a pre-existing, external reality;
in addition, the very act of communication is co-constitutive of the social and
symbolic reality in which we live. To the extent that we use technical media to
communicate, these media have also been integral to the construction of the reality
of both the larger society and the smaller life-world. This does not, however, alter
the historical fact that the media only gradually came to be integrated into culture
and society and that this integration has intensified during the age of modernity.
The radio, for instance, began as a special interest of engineers and the military
in the early 20th century while the rest of society – the family, the school system,
the music scene, and politics – lived uninfluenced by this medium. During the
1920s and 1930s, the radio became integrated into ever more institutions of social
and cultural life and came, for instance, to influence the experience of music for
large parts of society as well as for our collective feeling of belonging to a nation.
The principal argument ‒ that, ever since the birth of technical media, these media
have been integral to human communication ‒ is correct from an ontological per-
spective, but such an argument completely overlooks the historical perspective in
which the cultural and social processes through which media become integrated
into society display both quantitative and qualitative differences. By considering
the processes of mediatization within the broader institutional changes of modern-
ity, it becomes possible to acknowledge not only the ontological notion that media
is inside of culture and society but also the actual historical processes that make
this a profound aspect of contemporary life. Friedrich Krotz’s comparison of medi-
atization to globalization and individualization also seems to indicate that mediati-
zation – despite Krotz’s trans-historical perspective – becomes more dominant
within modernity even within his framework since such processes are generally
considered to be key dynamics of modernity.

6 Institutional logics
The notion of “institutional logics” has received attention in sociological theory
over the last two decades, and I will attempt to incorporate some of the insights
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 213

from this strand of social research into our institutional framework of mediatiza-
tion theory. In particular, I will use “institutional logics” to consider how institu-
tional change can be influenced by the presence of media and how media have
come to occupy key functions in the overall “inter-institutional system” of society
(Friedland and Alford 1991). “Institutional logics” is a more recent addition or
corrective to the “new institutionalism” approach that began influencing parts of
sociology from the late 1970s and onwards. The tenet of new institutionalism
theory was to consider organizations within a larger social and cultural framework.
The structures and workings of organizations were not only to be explained by
internal demands concerning production efficiency, technical demands, etc. Di-
Maggio and Powell (1991: 8) formulated the core idea of new institutionalism as a
“rejection of rational-actor models, an interest in institutions as independent vari-
ables, a turn to cognitive and cultural explanations, and an interest in properties
of supraindividual units of analysis”.
From this perspective, organizations adapt to and incorporate prevailing
“rules, understanding, and meanings attached to institutionalized social struc-
tures” (Meyer and Rowan 1977: 343). For instance, the professional norms of doc-
tors and engineers structure the organization and work of hospitals and technol-
ogy-intensive industries. Other prevailing institutional norms from the family or
state may also inform ways of organizing and conducting work in such organiza-
tions. The norms of various institutions work as “powerful myths” (Meyer and
Rowan 1977: 340) for the individual organization, and through the adoption of
such myths, the organization acquires a higher degree of legitimacy because social
actors act in accordance with the prevailing norms of wider society. Because the
various institutional considerations may not necessarily work in tandem with or
fit the particular objectives of an organization, organizations become complex enti-
ties with multidimensional concerns that may occasionally conflict with one
another. One consequence of organizational adaptation to prevailing institutional
norms is a growing structural isomorphism (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and
Powell 1991): Over time, organizations within the same field come to display simi-
lar structures and patterns of action. New institutionalism is thus also trying to
analyze why there exists a “striking homogeneity of practices and arrangements
found in the labor market, in schools, states, and corporations” (DiMaggio and
Powell 1991: 9). Similarly, March and Olsen (2004) oppose a purely instrumental
view of actions by individuals and organizations and have developed the notion
of a “logic of appropriateness”. Social actors not only attempt to maximize their
individual interest in particular situations but are embedded in a social collectiv-
ity: “Actors seek to fulfill the obligations encapsulated in a role, an identity, a
membership in a political community or group, and the ethos, practices and expec-
tations of its institutions” (March and Olsen 2004: 3). Within media studies, the
new institutionalism approach has had a particularly strong role in informing the
study of news and journalism as well as the interaction between the institutions
of news media and politics (Cook 1998; Ryfe and Ørsten 2011).
214 Stig Hjarvard

As indicated above, the “institutional logics” approach builds on as well as

departs from the “new institutionalism” perspective. It shares with its predecessor
the attempt to understand organizational structure and social action as influenced
by a wider social and cultural context, but it does not put the same emphasis
on the similarities or isomorphism between various organizational structures and
actions as an outcome of their adaptation to prevailing institutional norms.
Instead, the institutional logics perspective focuses on the processes of institu-
tional change, including how individual and organizational actors may both influ-
ence and be influenced by a historically contingent set of loosely coupled institu-
tional logics. The institutional logics perspective thus places more emphasis on
two levels and on their mutual dependency: the possibilities for agency at the
micro level and the inter-institutional structure at the macro level of society. Insti-
tutional logics are generally understood in a way resembling Giddens’ (1984)
notion of institutions as structured by resources and rules and is thereby compat-
ible with our notion of “media logics” (cf. above and Hjarvard 2013a). For instance,
Thornton and Ocasio (1999: 804) define institutional logics as the “socially con-
structed, historical pattern of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and
rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, orga-
nize time and space, and provide meaning to their social reality”. Institutional
logics thus encompass both material and cultural dimensions as well as function
as a cognitive resource by providing sense-making categories for interpreting the
world.
The notion of society as an inter-institutional system was suggested by Fried-
land and Alford (1991) and further developed by Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury
(2012). The general assumption is that society consists of a number of institutions,
each of which have a partly independent history and have partly co-developed
through interaction with one another. Friedland and Alford (1991) name five insti-
tutions that have played a central role in the development of modern Western
societies: the family, the capitalist market, the state bureaucracy, political democ-
racy, and the church. The precise number or labels of these institutions is hardly
original since it reflects a categorization found in mainstream sociology, and
Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury (2012) present a slightly different set of institu-
tions while also expanding their quantity by including, for instance, professions
as an institutional order. Seen from the point of view of structuration theory, insti-
tutions are not defined in absolute terms but, rather, as structures with the largest
time–space extension, thereby allowing for flexibility in our understanding of
institutions. As a result, if we, for instance, consider education as an institution
at the overall societal level, we may – by scaling down the level of time–space
extension – identify (sub-)institutions within the overall institution of education,
such as the primary school, secondary school, and university. All of these (sub-)
institutions are governed by particular logics that differentiates them from one
another, but they nevertheless share some common features in terms of available
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 215

social roles (teacher, student), overall purpose (learning), typical practices (teach-
ing, exercises, exams), etc. I will argue for a pragmatic and empirically based
approach with regards to the precise number and types of institutions since bound-
aries between institutions have changed historically and are contingent on the
overall social context. Furthermore, I will not a priori consider any of these institu-
tions and their logics to be more important than any others. Their relative impor-
tance is an empirical question, not a logical or ontological one.
In relation to the inter-institutional system, the important argument is that
each of the institutions “represents a governance system that provides a frame of
reference that precondition actors’ sensemaking choices” (Thornton, Ocasio and
Lounsbury 2012: 54). However, most contexts of social agency are not governed
by one set of logics from one institution alone but instead from multiple, heteroge-
neous, and often contradictory sets of institutional logics. Social conflicts and
transformations are thus often the result of overlapping institutional considera-
tions: “Some of the most important struggles between groups, organizations, and
classes are over the appropriate relationships between institutions, and by which
institutional logic different activities should be regulated and to which categories
of persons they apply” (Friedland and Alford 1991: 256).
This may be illustrated by an example from the media: The political regulation
of public broadcasting organizations has historically been subject to conflict
between various political interests within the political institution. It has also, how-
ever, been intertwined with questions and stakeholders from outside of the politi-
cal domain, which are concerned with the role that public broadcasting ought to
play relative to other institutions like the market (e.g. how much advertising
should be allowed?), the family (e.g. what sort of programming is suitable for
children?), religion (e.g. should broadcasting be religiously neutral or give priority
to majority religions?), and the state (e.g. should broadcasting be the voice of the
nation-state or of a transnational entity?). In this example, the institutional logics
of each institution entail not only different sets of preferred actions in terms of
broadcasting legislation and program policy but also different cognitive categoriza-
tions of the very idea and purpose of broadcasting (e.g. is it a commercial, cultural,
or educational practice?) and of who the viewers are (e.g. are they customers,
families, or citizens?). Such inter-institutional conflicts rarely result in the confine-
ment of broadcasting to serve only the interest of one institutional domain but
result, rather, in a delicate balancing of various institutional interests. Because of
this, broadcasting as a practice involves continuous negotiation between a com-
plex set of institutional logics. As I will return to later, we may historically discern
particular configurations (“regimes”) of such intersecting institutional logics, and
within each of these configurations, we may observe a stabilized pattern of power
relationships between various institutional logics. When one such inter-institu-
tional configuration breaks up, as was the case with the end of the public broad-
casting monopolies in Western Europe in the last decades of the 20th century, a
216 Stig Hjarvard

period of instability and fierce competition between different institutional logics

may occur until a new configuration or regime solidifies for a period.
A general argument in the “institutional logics” literature is that transforma-
tions in social practices may occur when competing logics overlap within a particu-
lar domain. The neoliberal deregulating of public sector institutions over the past
decades is a prime example of this. Through a state-initiated introduction of mar-
ket-like steering logics into public institutions like hospitals and public transporta-
tion, these institutions have been transformed not only in terms of how they
finance their public services but also with regards to the kinds of cultural values
that inform their management decisions and how they evaluate their performance.
Another example is the hiring of professional media expertise into political parties.
The initial rationale for this may be a simple wish to strengthen the political party’s
ability to project its own policy to its potential voters, but once the media profes-
sionals are inside the political organization, they may introduce new logics to the
communication of politics. Change in social practices is often instigated by so-
called institutional entrepreneurs who “creatively manipulate social relationships
by importing and exporting cultural symbols and practices from one institutional
order to another” (Thornton and Ocasio 2008: 115). In the case of political media
advisors, they not only provide neutral expertise to the political institution but
become a lever for importing new ways of thinking about political communication.
This is not a one-way street since political media advisors may move back and
forth between jobs in, for instance, political parties and news media, and when
returning to their former journalistic profession, they may carry political percep-
tions and relationships into the newsroom.

7 Institutional overlap
Media may introduce structural overlap between institutional logics in three differ-
ent ways. Firstly, the media provide a public sphere for society’s reflection on itself,
and through this the media provide the very forum that both makes the various
institutions visible for all and involves a discussion concerning which resources
and rules should be available for and apply to nearly every aspect of social life.
The public sphere should ideally be understood as a sphere between the state and
the civil society in which citizens may deliberate politically about the most sensible
solutions to common problems (Habermas 1989). In actual practice, the media’s
public sphere constitutes a public realm that is in no way restricted to rational
and political deliberation but is open to the public representation and discussion
(rational as well as irrational) of matters concerning all social institutions, ranging
from the intimate sphere of family and sex to cultural experiences to the world of
international politics (Plummer 2003; Dahlgren 2006). The public sphere may be
subdivided into a political and a cultural public sphere, but most aspects of social
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 217

life are becoming increasingly present in at least one – and in many cases, both –
of these public spheres although in different ways. For instance, questions relating
to sex life may be treated in political news media in relation to questions of sexual
diseases or sexual abuse while they may be discussed in the cultural sphere
through the genres of fictional literature or television satire. When media bring
particular institutional orders into the public realm, these institutions are con-
fronted with questions of the legitimacy of rules and resource allocation from other
institutional orders and from society as a whole. For instance, as studies in the
Nordic countries have demonstrated, news media bring the prevailing Christian
religion into contact with the secular values of society, which may cause religious
organizations to modify their values and behavior (Christensen 2012; Hjarvard
2012b).
Secondly, media are also present inside institutions and have become impor-
tant for the very practice of “doing” family life, going to school, and getting work
done. One important consequence of this internal presence is a virtualization of
institutions (Hjarvard 2013a). Digital media are increasingly disembedding social
practices from physical settings, for instance allowing various forms of work to be
conducted at home and making it possible to carry out bank businesses from a
desktop computer. Mobile media have accentuated this virtualization by making
it possible to access nearly all institutional domains from any location. Through
your tablet computer or smartphone, you can visit the library or an art exhibition,
call your family, or post a comment on a political blog. This does not render physi-
cal space or place unimportant since most institutions still maintain a core physi-
cal location as its main site of interaction, such as the home (the family), the
school (education), the parliament (politics), etc. It does, however, mean that
physical locations become intertwined with a virtual space as it becomes possible
to perform more and more practices outside of the physical location. In general,
this virtual dimension makes institutions more fragile because it becomes more
difficult to regulate the behavior of the people involved. Children may be present
in the home together with their parents while being simultaneously socially
engaged in interaction with their peers. An employee may be present at his work-
place, yet he may also be chatting with his friends on Facebook or taking care of
private bank business on his laptop.
Institutional “presence” is no longer provided through physical presence but
becomes to some extent a matter of individual choice. In order to ensure sense
making and adequate social interaction, institutions need to regulate access to
social situations and rules of social interaction. The potential virtual presence of
an institution inside the realm of another institution creates an overlap of institu-
tional logics that may induce various forms of change. For instance, when digital
media like computers and mobile phones are introduced into the educational sys-
tem because of their assumed potential for new forms of learning, they may not
only create a clash between old and new pedagogical paradigms but also make
218 Stig Hjarvard

available a whole range of other logics from other institutional orders. With Inter-
net and mobile phones available in the classroom, the educational institution must
begin to negotiate its own authority and rules of interaction vis-à-vis other institu-
tions. The “voice” of other institutions may intervene in the relationship between
teacher and pupil when parents are able to communicate with their children while
they are at school and when pupils can seek alternative sources of information
when present in the classroom (Hjarvard 2010b; Carlsson 2010). Similarly, the
growing presence of computer-mediated work in the home prompts a renegotiation
of the borders between leisure, family, and work life when the logics of the work-
place have to find a place within the home.
A particular kind of blending of institutional logics is fostered by the media’s
ability to bring together mixed content and social roles from different social
spheres into the same communicative circuit. Not only are different institutional
logics simultaneously available through the media, but they acquire a mixed pres-
ence through their integration into particular media and genres. Meyrowitz (1986)
points to the influence of radio and television on the modality of social interaction
because of the media’s ability to bring very different types of content into a unified
information system: broadcasting. Before the advent of electronic media, Meyrow-
itz argues, information circulated within confined circuits of communication allow-
ing for a greater distance between, for example, the world of children and the
world of adults, between men’s and women’s worlds, and between the various
social classes. When broadcasting brought information from all sorts of social
spheres into the same communication circuit to be heard and viewed by everybody
(men and women, children and adults, upper and lower classes alike), a change
in behavioral norms occurred. Because all types of information could now be
potentially visible to everybody, it was no longer possible to circulate information
that was intended only for a particular audience. As a consequence, it became
prevalent in broadcasting to blend behavioral norms from a variety of public and
private settings for particular audiences into a mixed so-called “middle region”
behavioral norm (Meyrowitz 1986; cf. Hjarvard 2013a). Meyrowitz’s observations
are clearly based on the experience of mass media and are therefore not neces-
sarily accurate for the present media environment in which digital media have
allowed for a variety of other forms of communication flows compared to mass
media’s one-to-many structure. It seems, however, with regard to the media’s
potential for mixing social contexts that new media may to some extent push in
the same direction as mass media. Marwick and boyd (2010) analyze the ways in
which users engage in social network media like Twitter and observe a similar
blurring of boundaries, which they label as a “context collapse”: “Like broadcast
television, social media collapse diverse social contexts into one, making it diffi-
cult for people to engage in the complex negotiations needed to vary identity
presentation, manage impressions, and save face” (Marwick and boyd 2010: 123).
Social network media also seem to bring together various institutional logics and
thereby potentially create impetus for social change.
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 219

The media’s construction of a middle region of social interaction points to our

third and final way in which institutional logics are influenced by the media. Media
not only bring various logics from other institutions into contact with each other;
the media have also become a semi-independent institution that increasingly
brings its own institutional logics into almost every domain of society. Accordingly,
the logics of the media influence not only how social actors from various institu-
tions perform in the public sphere but also the inner workings of other institutions
and their interaction with other institutions (that need not be performed in the
public sphere). The media are being embedded into other institutional domains
because they represent an important resource for communication and interaction.
Besides the shared logics of the media as an institution of public communication,
the various media possess particular structural features or affordances (Gibson
1979; cf. Hjarvard 2013a) that may influence how they become embedded in par-
ticular institutional contexts. For instance, when religious organizations begin
making use of Internet websites or social network media as resources for communi-
cating with their followers, they may gradually need to accommodate to the vari-
ous social, technological, and aesthetic rules that have already been institutional-
ized in society for these forms of communication. As a consequence, religious
organizations may have to perform their authority in different ways, and believers
may have the ability to adopt a more individualistic, interactive, and consumer-
like orientation towards religious messages (Hjarvard 2012b) compared with earlier
forms of religious communication. As media are integrated into the practices of
other institutions, they need to accommodate to the logics of these institutions:
The particular outcomes of these reciprocal accommodations should be examined
empirically, and the logics of the media are certainly not always the most influen-
tial. The key point, however, is that the blending of institutional logics provides
fertile ground for social and cultural change.

8 Changing institutional regimes

Mediatization as a process is dependent on the growing proliferation and use of
media in modern society, but the various changes it involves should not be under-
stood simply as a linear process stimulated by an ever-growing media presence.
Instead, we should understand social and cultural change as a transition from one
configuration of institutional influences within a particular domain to a different
configuration that changes the “balance of powers” between the institutions in
question and perhaps introduces new institutional resources and rules into a
domain. We may analytically understand such configurations as “regimes” that
entail a dominant mode of structuration within a particular domain. We should,
however, be careful not to equate the existence of a dominant mode of structura-
tion with the absence of alternative practices or lack of conflict. On the contrary,
220 Stig Hjarvard

Fig. 1: Mediatization as a non-linear process of qualitative shifts from one configuration/regime

to another.

within the “regime” of a particular domain, we often find social agents with com-
peting interests, norms, and practices, but their mutual interdependency has cre-
ated an equilibrium within a given phase and context. Cultural and social change
may not necessarily entail a transition from one stable regime to another; it may,
in some cases, be more adequate to speak of the breaking up of an existing regime
without a new regime following after. In such cases, we may find a period of
instability and uncertainty concerning norms and values of practices. For instance,
the proliferation of digital media both inside and outside of the educational sector
in the Nordic countries has created new impetus for pedagogical innovation, but
so far, it does not seem to have resulted in stable new pedagogical paradigms or
educational practices. Instead, it has created a state of flux allowing a variety of
new educational paradigms and practices to compete and be tested (cf. Carlsson
2010; Sørensen, Audon and Levinsen 2010). Figure 1 presents a schematic model
of mediatization as a transformation from one regime to another.
Our notion of “regimes” as configurations of institutional influence is often
implicit in historical studies that use the notion of “phases” to differentiate
between various periods dominated by a particular set of interests, discourses, and
practices. For instance, Blumler and Kavanagh (1999: 211) distinguish between
“three distinct ages” of political communication, each of which is characterized
by “a distinctive organizing principle” due to influences from media, political
organizations, and other social factors. Similarly, Djerf-Pierre (2000: 240) distin-
guishes between three phases in the history of the Swedish public service broad-
caster SVT’s news, each of which is dominated “by coherent systems of rules and
norms pertaining to news selection and modes of representation”. In her study,
Djerf-Pierre (2000: 257) finds little support for the idea of a linear and continuous
development from serious to populist news but instead sees qualitative shifts
occurring due to the “power struggles between SVT and the dominant institutions
in society, as well as the existence of oppositional journalist cultures within media
organizations”. Djerf-Pierre and Weibull (2008) advance this argument further and
regard the phases as “regimes”. By this, they understand the “fusion of ideals and
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 221

norms on the one hand and practice and production on the other” (Djerf-Pierre
and Weibull 2008: 196). From this perspective, a regime describes the dominant
discourse of a domain, in this case journalism, in a particular social and historical
context. I will generalize this notion of “regime” to include not only the discursive
level but also the overall constellation of institutional resources and rules within
a particular domain. The discursive level is no doubt important, but material
aspects such as, for instance, technology and economy may be just as important
factors behind the transition from one regime to another and for structuring
agency within a particular regime.
From the perspective of institutional logics, Thornton (2004) has studied the
historical development of the book publishing industry and stipulates a transition
from one phase to another, from the period of the 1950s and 1960s, which was
dominated by an “editorial logic”, to the 1980s and 1990s, which was increasingly
dominated by a “market logic”. Each of these logics is characterized by a particular
structure of organizational identity, legitimacy and authority structure, mission
and focus of attention, etc. Again, the development is not linear but should be
understood as a transition from one regime to another. Thornton (2004) considers
these phases to be “ideal types” because they are analytical constructions to
inform theory building on the basis of empirical analysis. The actual empirical
world of publishing may thus display many variations and deviations from these
ideal types at any given time, but the construction of ideal types may help us to
build middle-range theories in order to understand the particular composition of
institutional influences within a given period and context.
The analysis of particular clusters of relationships between institutions is not
restricted to historical research but may also be fruitfully pursued in comparative
studies. For instance, Hallin and Mancini (2004) have done a paradigmatic study
of the interrelationships between media systems and political systems in the USA
and Europe and have used this to develop a typology of three dominant media
models: the Anglo-American Liberal Model, the Democratic Corporatist Model of
North-Western Europe, and the Polarized Pluralist Model of Southern Europe.
These media models provide “a framework for comparing media systems and a
set of hypotheses about how they are linked structurally and historically to the
development of the political system” (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 5). Hallin and
Mancini later attempted to expand this comparative typology beyond the Western
world (Hallin and Mancini 2012). Such models always entail the risk of simplifying
structural properties within a media model’s given geographic context, and this
may also be the case in relation to these models (Hjarvard 2010a), but they never-
theless serve an important heuristic purpose as analytical tools for discerning the
interplay between various institutions while taking into account the path-depend-
encies of the past.
222 Stig Hjarvard

9 The general resources of the media

In this chapter, I have argued for an institutional perspective on mediatization
and emphasized the importance of considering the particular institutional contexts
of mediatization. We must, however, also consider the supra-institutional, societal
level of mediatization and ask if there are special qualities of media that make
them influential across institutional contexts, albeit with different “local” conse-
quences. Couldry (2003) makes use of Bourdieu’s own concept of “meta capital”
and suggests that media represent a kind of meta capital, which allows them to
become influential in a variety of social fields. This is a plausible assumption, yet
it does not identify which properties or processes permit the media to acquire this
meta capital. Inspired by system theory, Kunelius and Reunanen (2012) posit that
public attention is the general “power resource” of the media and, by extension,
that mediatization is understood as the “increasing influence of public attention (as
the generalised medium of the media) in other fields and institutional domains”
(Kunelius and Reunanen 2012: 12; emphasis in original).
Kunelius and Reunanen (2012) focus explicitly on journalistic mass media, and
in this context, public attention is clearly a prominent resource to which other
fields or institutional domains strive to gain access. If we wish to consider media
in general (i.e. encompassing mass media [one to many], interpersonal media [one
to one], and social network media [several to several]), public attention is not the
only attention at stake, and the control of attention in private and semi-private
forms of communication may be of equal importance. Furthermore, attention may
perhaps better be understood as an outcome of mediated communication than as
the actual resource of the media. Generally speaking, media enable users to extend
communication in time, space, and mode of representation. From this perspective,
the media are a resource to represent information and construct relationships
through communicative action. This general resource is put to different uses by the
individual media and genres: For instance, social network media such as Facebook
tend to structure information as half-public, half-private written conversations
among an extended network of “friends” whereas news media typically structure
information as news of high importance for society, to be received by a public
audience of citizens. In both cases, the attention of Facebook friends and the
attention of the public are an outcome of the media’s ability to represent informa-
tion in particular ways and to circulate it among a particular group of users, who
become related to one another in specific ways through this very act of communi-
cation. It should be stressed that, in this context, information is understood in a
generic or broad sense as encompassing all representational acts used for both
informational and entertainment purposes.
The media are social tools for the production of attention, but the actual
resource is the media’s ability to control how information is represented (e.g. ideo-
logically framed or artistically narrated), how relationships are constructed (e.g.
 Mediatization and cultural and social change 223

who gets to be connected to whom in what ways), and what social purpose the
communicative actions serve (e.g. entertainment, education, persuasion, etc.).
Because these resources may be important for all kinds of cultural and social
interaction, the media may come to exert influence in every social domain, albeit
in different ways and with different intensities. In order to gain access to the
resources of the media, social agents from other institutional domains must adhere
to the various rules that have come to govern the media. Because many media
today have become multi-functional, we should not necessarily ascribe particular
social rules to the level of individual media. For instance, both television and the
Internet are used for a variety of purposes related to different social institutions
and cultural practices, and an individual media company like Google is involved
in a variety of media genres that relate to different institutional domains like librar-
ies, research, news, personal mail, commercial advertising, etc. We should also,
therefore, following Schulz (2004; cf. Hjarvard 2013b), focus on the various com-
municative functions of the media when we study the institutionalized rules per-
taining to their use and not just consider the individual media or media organiza-
tions.
Lippmann’s ([1922] 1992) study was an early indication of the news media’s
development into a semi-independent institution in society during the 20th century.
Parallel to this, as Lippmann also noted, various forms of media and communica-
tion expertise began spreading within political and commercial institutions with
the aim of influencing public opinion in various ways. Today, this double-sided
process – through which the media is developing into a semi-independent institu-
tion and are being integrated into other institutions – has accelerated. The process
is no longer restricted to public and political affairs but has become prevalent
across almost all social institutions and cultural domains. As institutions become
differentiated and extended in time and space under conditions of high modernity,
the media have become indispensable tools for social interaction inside institu-
tions, between institutions, and in society as a whole. As a social process, mediati-
zation is spurred by both the development of the media and the dynamics of a
variety of other institutions in which social agents try to make use of the media’s
resources for their own purposes.

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Nick Couldry
10 Mediatization and the future of field
theory
Abstract: This chapter reviews the recent history of mediatization research from
the perspective of its potential contribution to social theory. The starting-point for
this is to conceive mediatization not as a logic internal to media contents (as for
example in the pioneering work of Altheide and Snow), but as a meta-process
that emerges from many simultaneous transformations in specific settings. Only if
mediatization is understood this way can it address the differentiated account of
social space found in field theory and elsewhere in social theory. But mediatization
research also helps us see the need to refine field theory to take account of trans-
versal effects of media across all social space: these are explored through the
concept of media meta-capital. This intersection between mediatization research
and social theory is placed alongside other possible intersections, for example
through notions of institutional logics or figurations. The contribution of each
approach is then developed briefly in relation to the challenge of understanding
how government is mediatized. In these multiple ways the chapter explores how
mediatization research can contribute flexibly to understanding how the possibili-
ties of order within social space are changing through media, particularly digital
media.

Keywords: mediatization, fields, Bourdieu, figurations, social theory, media logic,

media meta-capital, social space. government.

Debates about mediatization have until now been largely an internal concern of
media and communications research, yet carry the promise of opening up some-
thing more fundamental: a complete rethinking of the dynamics, even the dimen-
sionality, of the space of social action in an age when everyday life has become
supersaturated with media flows. This chapter will explore what mediatization
theory might plausibly contribute to that larger question within social theory,
focusing particularly on how the concept of mediatization, understood from a cer-
tain angle, can enter a productive dialogue with those working within the tradition
of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory; there are indeed other possibilities for mediatiza-
tion scholars to engage with social theory as noted earlier, but this seems one of
the most promising for reasons explained below. Such arguments will be devel-
oped within the broader context of debates on media’s contributions to late mod-
ernity and in particular on the transformations associated with the predominance
of digital media contents and platforms.
Any such dialogue, however, requires from mediatization scholars two prelimi-
nary adjustments. First, mediatization theory must rethink itself as a contribution
228 Nick Couldry

to social theory, and so submit itself to all the requirements that social theory must
meet to justify its formulations as plausible starting-points for analysing social
action and social space. Second, and more specifically, mediatization needs to be
conceived as a meta-process that emerges from the continuous, cumulative circula-
tion and embedding of media contents across everyday social action, rather than
as a reproductive logic or recipe already lodged somehow within media contents
themselves.
The stakes then are high: a repositioning of mediatization theory – and media
and communications research – within wider social theory, and, from the other
direction, the reenergizing of social theory through a deeper reflection on the con-
sequences of media and communications that it had for so long neglected. The
chapter will proceed by a series of steps towards the point where this more ambi-
tious horizon comes clearly into view: first, the history of mediatization as a con-
cept will be reviewed, but obliquely, that is, from an angle concerned with the
social-theoretical potential, and limits of specific formulations; second, and for
balance, the limits of field theory will be discussed, particularly from the perspec-
tive of its failure so far adequately to address the consequences of mass media, let
alone digital media, for its model of social space; third, mediatization theory will
be reviewed for the possible ways in which it might contribute to the theorization
of social space, including an account which is designed to fill the gaps within field
theory; fourth, in order to bring out how such a social-theory-oriented research
agenda around mediatization might develop, I offer a brief proposal for what medi-
atization research might look like, if applied to understanding media’s consequen-
ces for the broadest practices that seek to manage social space, that is, govern-
ment.

1 Mediatization’s social theory deficit

“Mediatization” is the term around which research within various national tradi-
tions about the widest consequences of media flows has come to converge: I will
not recap here the debates that led to that terminological convergence (for this,
see Couldry [2008a, 2012: 134–135]). The real debate in any case is not about termi-
nology, but about the type of explanation at which we are aiming. The starting-
points are agreed: first, that media influence now extends to “all the spheres of
society and social life” (Mazzoleni 2008); second, that, because of this pervasive-
ness, new types of causal complexity emerge and it is exactly these complexities
that we are trying to specify. As Knut Lundby (2009) has pointed out, there has
been considerable overlap between the assumptions of apparently separate enquir-
ies into “mediatization” and “mediation”. Roger Silverstone (2005: 189), favouring
the term “mediation”, summarized the basic complexity of media’s social effects
in these terms: “processes of communication change the social and cultural envi-
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 229

ronments that support them as well as the relationships that participants, both
individual and institutional, have to that environment and to each other”.
It follows that the transformations of social space that are associated with
media’s continuous and cumulative flows must be understood in a non-linear fash-
ion (Couldry 2012: 29). Only very rarely would we expect such transformations to
simplify into something usefully approximated via a linear causal account, that is,
an account of how one factor changes social life from one state of affairs over
time to another, distinct state of affairs. The principle of non-linear explanation is
probably now an agreed starting-point among mediatization scholars. At issue
however is how we grasp that non-linear complexity. For Silverstone, it was best
understood as an open-ended dialectic that resisted further systematization; most
scholars now would insist on going further in specifying how such causal complex-
ity works, and its particular consequences for the way that the social is organized.
It is here that the difficulties begin.
David Altheide and Robert Snow were pioneers in the late 1970s and early
1980s (Altheide and Snow 1979; Snow 1983; Altheide 1985) of an approach which
conceived of what media do in and to the social world through the idea that media
spread the formats required for media performance: they refer to this (1979) as a
“media logic”. But from the point of view of social theory this explanatory account
(which we should note in passing Altheide and Snow called “mediation”) was
always problematic. Certainly, their approach to media power was original and
interesting, suggesting that it derives not simply from institutions’ production of
media and audiences’ use of those productions (the two models then available)
but from something more complex: the way everyone in society interrelates with
media. While this basic insight was profound, Altheide and Snow developed it in
a problematic way, seeing media as the new “collective consciousness”, and find-
ing the mechanism of this growing influence in the adoption of a “media logic”
across everyday life: “media are powerful” they wrote “because people have
adopted a media logic”. Yet the very notion of “media logic” brings explanatory
problems from the outset, which can be quickly stated. Do all media have a logic?
Is it the same logic and, if not, what is the common pattern that unites their logics
into an overall “media logic” (this problem only becomes more acute with media
proliferation)? Alternatively, when media change over time (as they are doing
intensively today), do they acquire a wholly new media logic or does something
remain constant? Finally, even if we can tie down such a notion of media logic, to
the regular features of certain media formats, and show that they and their copies
are pervasive in everyday life, does that adequately capture the range of ways in
which media appear to influence the social?1 Indeed mediatization research has

1 For debate on whether mediatization is best understood through the notion of “media logic”,
see Couldry (2008a), Lundby (2009), Hjarvard (2013). Examples of earlier discussions which
appeared to continue Altheide and Snow’s notion of “media logic” can be found in Hjarvard (2006:
5, 2009: 160), and Schrott (2009: 47).
230 Nick Couldry

been characterized by a certain instability in which counts as an influence worthy

of the term. While some still see mediatization in the sense primarily of a “format”,
others use “mediatization” to refer to “the whole of [the] processes that eventually
shape and frame media content” (Mazzoleni 2008, quoted in Lundby 2009: 8), or
even two new factors (Schulz 2004: 90): the extension of human capacities and
the structural organization of social life.
A second type of problem from the outset lay in deciding what counts as
empirical evidence for mediatization, for example in accounts such as Altheide
and Snow’s. Altheide and Snow’s account was not based on any evidence from
the social world of systematic patterning by media formats, but in claims (Altheide
1985: 9) about the wider impact of “the diffusion of media formats and perspectives
into other areas of life” that in effect were projections from media productions’
known internal features to imagined changes in the external patterning of social
action. While acknowledging (Altheide 1985: 13–14) earlier sociology of experience
(Goffman’s account of the “frames” through which we orient ourselves to the
world; Simmel’s account of social forms as the constant patterns that underlie
social relationships), Altheide and Snow proposed, in effect, a rather arbitrary
grafting of media formats onto the forms and contexts of social action. This risked
from the outset blurring a number of ways in which we might imagine social
processes being transformed by media: through actual media presentation formats
which may be adopted for specific purposes; through the wider evaluation of
media’s authority and importance; through people’s changing definition of what is
real; people’s desires for that media reality; and finally, and more broadly, through
transformations of social space as a whole. In so far as the term “media logic”
continues to be used as shorthand for the type of causal process which mediatiza-
tion identifies, its very singularity risks repeating such blurring and reducing a
diversity of causal processes to one, apparently homogeneous term, so undercut-
ting the multiplicity of processes (Schulz 2004) already acknowledged within the
umbrella term mediatization. In doing so, the continued use of the term “media
logic” (for example, by extension, to refer to a “new media logic” or “digital media
logic”) risks falling short of what William Sewell (2005: 369) has argued should
be one of sociology’s tasks: to contribute to “the de-reification of social life”. A
multiplicity of mid-range terms would be more productive, of which “logic” can
perhaps be one: the problem is not so much with the term “logic” as such (pro-
vided its use can be justified in particular settings) as in its reified application.
Meanwhile, the underlying social-theoretical grounding of most mediatization
research’s diagnosis of social change has remained unstated: most approaches to
mediatization have been characterized by a lack of specificity about how they
understand social ontology. This is the third and deepest problem, which emerges
when we ask the following questions: on what basis do we believe that the social
world is liable to be transformed so easily, or at least so directly, by media materi-
als or media-based processes? Indeed should we imagine social space (as a whole)
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 231

as available for transformation by any logic or principle, whether media-based or

not? A number of important sociological approaches would cast doubt on precisely
that assumption, for example: Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) field theory which insists
that the space of the social is not unitary but differentiated into multiple fields of
competition; Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) insistence on value plurality in the
social world; and Norbert Elias’ (1994) account of social order as something built
up through emergent solutions to complex problems of interdependency. Unless
mediatization research rejects out of hand all of these accounts of social space, it
needs to do more social-theoretical work than it has so far to defend the idea that
mediatization refers to a single logic originating in media and working seamlessly
across every part of social space; and if mediatization research does not intend
any such converging explanatory account, it would be safer to avoid a shorthand
language that appears to suggest precisely this!
A useful step forward is to follow Friedrich Krotz and insist that mediatization
is not a specific transformational process but “a meta-process that is grounded in
the modification of communication as the basic practice of how people construct
the social and cultural world”. This is to see mediatization as a structural shift
comparable to globalization and individualization: this structural shift is associ-
ated with the increasing involvement of media in all spheres of life so that “media
in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social construction of every-
day life, society, and culture as a whole” (Krotz 2009: 24, 26–27). On this approach,
mediatization can encompass many different types of process across different sites;
it is also, for example, perfectly compatible with field theory’s insistence upon
paying attention to the multiple logics or workings of specific fields, or indeed
(see Hjarvard’s chapter, this volume) multiple institutional logics.
Much work in clarifying exactly what mediatization can contribute to social
theory’s understanding of the space of social action remains to be done, but at
least this alternative concept of mediatization clears the way for that work, rather
than tying us to an explanatory model that is, or inadvertently appears to be, at
odds with many approaches within social theory. Our starting-point for this new
work is the idea that mediatization is not a single transformative logic “within”
media but a meta-category of social description that points to the changed dynam-
ics and dimensionality of the (whole) social world in a media age. It follows that
mediatization research, conceived this way, should be interested in the new types
of non-linear causality that follow when media become an irreducible aspect of all
social processes and their interrelations. As promised from the outset of this chap-
ter, I will explore how much adaptations of field theory can contribute to this
discussion.
Before, however, we can begin to develop mediatization approaches in that
direction, we need to acknowledge the corresponding limitations of field theory
itself. For field theory was an explanatory model that found its shape long before
the need to consider media’s broader social consequences began to be addressed
by social theory.
232 Nick Couldry

2 Field theory’s media deficit

Pierre Bourdieu insisted that we cannot analyse sociological processes without
first relating them to what goes on in specific fields of practice where particular
forms of capital are at stake. Bourdieu’s field concept is a highly sophisticated
response to the processes of differentiation in late modernity: Bourdieu readily
acknowledges that fields are emergent phenomena and the concept should only
be used if it helps us grasp the order in what particular types of people do, but he
rules out immediately any account which does not acknowledge the deep differen-
tiation of social space in late modernity. Well-known examples analysed by Bour-
dieu’s field theory are fields of cultural production, such as literature, art, and
politics (Bourdieu 1993, 1996b; Champagne 1990). Over the past decade, work has
emerged on journalism as a specific field (Bourdieu 1998; Marlière 1998; Benson
and Neveu 2005), and the specific relations between the journalistic field and other
fields such as medicine and economics (Champagne and Marchetti 2005; Duval
2005). Here, however, I will be concerned more with field theory’s general model
of social space and whether this can account for the types of transversal media
effect in which mediatization is interested: by “transversal” I mean linked effects
and transformations that occur simultaneously at all or very many points in social
space simultaneously.
Bourdieu himself, in his early work on symbolic power (collected as Bourdieu
1991) completed well before he developed his field theory, showed considerable
interest in the role of symbolic institutions in shaping belief right across social
space as a whole. Bourdieu’s concern then was with religious institutions, not
media. In an early essay he suggests that some concentrations of symbolic power
are so great that they dominate the whole social landscape; as a result, they seem
natural and get misrecognized, their underlying arbitrariness becoming difficult to
see. In this way, symbolic power moves from being a merely local power (the
power to construct this statement, or make that work of art) to being a general
power, what Bourdieu (1991: 166) called a “power of constructing reality”. Under-
stood this way, symbolic power plays a deep definitional role in social life and is
involved “in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced and repro-
duced” (Bourdieu 1977: 88). Two decades later Bourdieu (1998: 22) recalled this
when in a popular work he made some controversial claims about television’s
effects: “one thing leads to another, and, ultimately television, which claims to
record reality, creates it instead. We are getting closer and closer to the point
where the social world is primarily described – and in a sense prescribed – by
television”. How such claims could can be understood to work consistently with
field theory remained unclear.
A similar urge to understand media’s general consequences for social space
characterizes work by Bourdieu’s followers. Patrick Champagne (1990) analysed
media’s impacts on the field of contemporary politics, suggesting boldly that the
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 233

journalistic field has acquired a relationship with the political field so close that
it becomes “a journalistic-political field”. This relationship, Champagne argued,
has transformed the definition of politics in damaging ways. By a “circular logic”,
both journalists and politicians “react” to a version of public opinion which they
have largely constructed, for example through the framing of questions for opinion
polls, through the reported reactions to those polls’ results, and through the influ-
ence of journalists’ accounts of politics.
We are not concerned in this chapter directly with the particular problem of
how to understand media’s influence on the field of political competition. More
interesting here are the implications of Champagne’s way of exploring media’s
broader influences for the original model of field theory as a whole. For we can
ask: how exactly do representations made by actors in one field come to have such
influence on the actions and thoughts of actors in another field? Champagne (1990:
237, 239, 243) introduced the notion of “media capital” to capture people’s relative
ability to influence journalistic events. But this seemingly plausible and intuitive
notion generates major difficulties for field theory’s strictly differentiated social
ontology. Either we understand Champagne to be claiming that media capital is a
new basic form of capital like economic capital that applies anywhere (a claim he
never makes explicitly). Or we try and fit his statement within field theory’s basic
assumptions, which is difficult: where exactly is media capital acquired and exer-
cised? In the media field or in the (political, medical, academic, etc.) field where
the agent in question primarily acts? Perhaps the point of the hybrid term “journal-
istic-political field” is that such questions don’t matter, but suppose we were to
repeat Champagne’s move in explaining all non-media fields and their relation to
media: the result would be either to fuse all fields into one “journalistic-cultural
field” or to generate an open-ended series of hybrid “journalistic-specialist” fields
(medical, political, and so on), each with its own version of media capital. Either
way, field theory (both its social ontology and its toolkit of mid-range concepts,
such as capital) would no longer serve to differentiate the dynamics of particular
fields.
The underlying problem is that field theory was born out of an account of
social differentiation developed long before the transversal operations of media’s
representational and categorizing power became such a dominant feature of social
space. Yet such transversal effects cannot be ignored, and both Bourdieu (in his
popular book on media : Bourdieu 1998), and Champagne (1990) in his developed
work on the journalistic-political field recognized this. Their difficulty was that
field theory’s differentiated model of social space does not provide any obvious
way of registering what some educational sociologists have called “cross-field
effects” (Lingard, Rawolle and Taylor 2005). But it was exactly such cross-field
effects (and what I am calling “transversal” effects) of media flows on social action
that mediatization theory was developed to address.
Some accommodation of mediatization theory and field theory would therefore
seem to be useful. In the next section, I want to explore how field theory might
234 Nick Couldry

be adjusted to take account of universal or cross-field effects, but without under-

mining the logic of field theory itself. This will start to flesh out what I mean by
an approach to mediatization that engages with, and contributes to, social theory.
Note already however that this is not the only route by which mediatization theory
can enter into dialogue with social theory; indeed, because of the limitations of
field theory, other ways must be explored and some further candidates for this
will be discussed in the next section.

3 Converging mediatization and general social

theory
Field theory is, I suggest, the most promising potential interlocutor for mediatiza-
tion research within general social theory. This is for at least two reasons: first,
field theory proponents have in the past decade become interested in media proc-
esses, as was Bourdieu in his last years; second, the differentiated nature of field
theory’s analyses (which always respect the specific dynamics of, and capital for-
mation within, particular fields) naturally generate a diversity of cases where our
thinking about mediatization as a broad meta-process can be refined and applied.
This is not the place to consider multiple such examples, but a discussion of how
to think through media’s consequences for the fields of politics, art, education,
and religion within a broader mediatization approach can be found in Couldry
(2012: chapter 6). My interest here is rather in the “meta”-question of how transver-
sal or cross-field media effects can be thought about in ways that both capture
their pervasive reach – indeed their potentially disruptive and de-differentiating
effect – yet remain consistent with the differentiated nature of social space, as
conceived by field theory. Making progress on this is potentially an important
contribution to mediatization research, understood in relation to wider social
theory.

3.1 Revising field theory from the perspective of mediatization

An important clue to squaring this circle comes from Bourdieu’s late work on the
state. Bourdieu takes over and extends Weber’s notion of the state, conceptualizing
it as a monopoly of not just legitimate physical but also legitimate symbolic vio-
lence (Weber 1947; Bourdieu 1996a). This generates a fascinating question: what
is the nature of the resulting power that the state exercises over the rest of social
space, that is, over all fields and space simultaneously?
In his book La Noblesse d’Etat (in English, The State Nobility) Bourdieu was
interested in the state’s preeminence over social definitions, for example, of legal
and educational status (Bourdieu 1996a: 40–45; 1990: 239–241): clearly this influ-
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 235

ence works not in one field only, but across all fields via what Bourdieu calls the
field of power. The concept of field of power is rather undeveloped in Bourdieu,
as Göran Bolin (2009: 352–353) notes. Formally, the field of power is the space
above and beyond specific fields where the forces that vie for influence over the
interrelations between fields operate: the state is the main focus of the field of
power, but perhaps not the only one, a point to which I return later. This field of
power is arguably not best understood as a “field” in Bourdieu’s normal sense,
that is, a bounded space of competition over specific forms of capital by defined
sets of actors; rather it is a general space where the state exercises influence over
the interrelations between all specific fields and so over the dynamics of social
space itself. As Bourdieu puts it, the state is “the site of struggles, whose stake is
the setting of the rules that govern the different social games (fields) and in par-
ticular, the rules of reproduction of those games”; more precisely, the state influen-
ces what counts as “symbolic capital” in each particular field. Bourdieu calls this
influence over the “exchange rate” between the fundamental types of capital at
stake in each individual field (for example, economic versus cultural capital)
“meta-capital”.2 This meta-capital of the state is, crucially, not derived from the
workings of any specific field, but works across them.
What if media institutions have an influence over what counts as capital in
particular fields that is similar in type to the influence Bourdieu attributes to the
state? Could the types of pervasive media influence in which mediatization
research is interested be conceived – at least in part – along these lines? This too
would be a form of “meta-capital” through which media exercise power over other
forms of power. It would operate only at the macro-institutional level (the level of
meta-process, or “mediatization” in Krotz’s sense), and so would be quite distinct
from, although linked to, media-related capital at work through individuals’
actions in specific fields. We could hypothesize that the greater the media sector’s
meta-capital, the more likely the salience of media-related capital for action in any
particular field, but this would not be a general logic, but rather an emergent
process from transformations under way in many fields simultaneously: that is,
transformations in the types of capital needed by social actors in particular fields
of action where capital derived from media-related activities has increased in
importance.
By incorporating the broad concept of media meta-capital, mediatization
research can give clearer shape to Bourdieu’s own most interesting insights about
the media. When Bourdieu (1998) discusses the increasing pressure of television
on, say, the academic field, he notes the obvious economic dimension (a large
television audience means more books sold), but suggests that television exerts
also an indirect pressure by distorting the symbolic capital properly at stake in the

2 See respectively, Bourdieu in Wacquant (2003: 42, added emphasis); Bourdieu (1996a: 265); Bour-
dieu in Wacquant (2003: 23).
236 Nick Couldry

academic field, creating a new group of academics whose symbolic capital within
the academic field rests partly on television appearances. If comparable shifts are
occurring in other fields too (see Couldry 2012, chapter 6 for detailed discussion),
this requires an overarching concept to capture such a transformation and the
concept of media meta-capital performs this role.
Another interesting point follows. Although the notion of media meta-capital
was developed originally (Couldry 2003) to address the challenges of field theory
(and initially outside the context of mediatization research), it points to one of the
key ways in which media flows transform everyday social action: through the
transformation of what count as resources for action, and particularly as legitimate
bases for recognition within particular settings. This is an insight which can be
extended to aspects of social life that are not field-focused, for example, within
the general domain of media and cultural consumption (Lahire 1999). Meanwhile,
the concept of media meta-capital is also quite consistent with Bourdieu’s funda-
mental point that capital is only realized by agents in specific forms in specific
fields. The symbolic capital among chefs, for example, that derives from doing a
successful television cookery series is not necessarily convertible into symbolic
capital in a very different field, such as the academic field; this is because the
former need involve few, if any, of the specific attributes valued by media in repre-
sentatives of the latter. But this does not make the work of media across fields any
less significant; nor does it rule out the possibility that media-based symbolic
capital developed in one field can under certain conditions be directly exchanged
for symbolic capital in another field. Indeed an interesting development is how
particular media domains (for example, business-based “reality” programmes such
as The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den in the UK and elsewhere) have become sites
where PR companies, politicians, and business people can work together for over-
lapping promotional advantages (Boyle and Kelly 2010). When the media inten-
sively cover an area of life (cooking, business, gardening, and so on), they alter
the internal workings of those sub-fields and so widen the valence of media meta-
capital across the social terrain. Indeed this is one important way in which, over
time, media institutions have come to benefit from a truly dominant concentration
of symbolic power. Mediatization approaches have so far been strong in pointing
to the social significance of media institutions’ rise to power (see especially Hjar-
vard 2013), but this refinement, developed through an engagement with field
theory, uncovers one key social mechanism through which this has happened.
Yet media meta-capital (which concerns ultimately the resources or capital that
individual actors have under their control) is only one dimension of the meta-
process of mediatization, as it is worked out in social action. Think of other aspects
of what social actors do: the stable configurations of actors, institutions, and infra-
structures that shape the space-time in which certain concatenations of action are
possible, and others impossible; or the meaning-contexts in which certain types of
action make sense, while others do not. Mediatization as a meta-process is con-
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 237

cerned equally with transformations in those dimensions of social action. In a

moment I will consider, briefly, how mediatization research could contribute to
social theory’s understanding of those areas too.
Before that, however, it is worth summarizing what my direct drawing on the
language of field theory has, and has not, achieved for mediatization research.
First, it has provided a way of understanding of a mass of field-specific transforma-
tions in a linked way, but without reducing them to one single mechanism that
would cut across the distinctive causal dynamics of each field. Understood this
way, mediatization is consistent with diverse outcomes in fields whose structure
(their distinctive forms of capital, their closeness to economic power or to the state)
differs, perhaps quite substantially. Second, it has helped isolate one process-type
to which mediatization research should pay attention: that is, media’s implications
for the resources upon which social actors can individually rely to act and to
influence the actions of others, whether close or remote, and whether or not within
a bounded field of competition. But, third, because it has refused any notion of a
general “logic” internal to media contents and media operations themselves, this
account has avoided assuming that mediatization will automatically lead to the
increasing convertibility of media-related symbolic capital across social space as
a whole: that outcome remains undecideable at this stage, even though we can
see various evidence from diverse sub-fields pointing in this direction.
But my account also leaves certain important questions unanswered. One
question is how we should understand the impact of media meta-capital on the
state: the state (and the specific fields of practice within the state that generate
policy) are certainly subject to media’s meta-capital, via the latter’s operations
within the political field and, in turn, politicians’ executive influence over the
state. But what deeper implications does this have for political authority in differ-
ent countries? This requires further investigation. An even broader question is how
does media’s meta-capital interact not only with the meta-capital of the state but
also with that of business in shaping the overall field of power? Through loose
competition, or through a complex hierarchy of forces that we have yet to under-
stand (compare Bolin 2011: chapter 2, 2009)? Resolving these questions would
perhaps be mediatization research’s ultimate contribution to field theory, but as
yet it is some way off.

3.2 Alternative interfaces with social theory

Field theory, while it was offered as a complete rethinking of the space of social
action, nonetheless has gaps. Bourdieu always acknowledged that fields are emer-
gent, need to be empirically established, and that the boundaries between fields
may not be fixed or clear. This leaves open the possibility that some areas of social
space are not yet, or have never been, caught up in an external field of competitive
action. Bourdieu and his followers tended to neglect this possibility, with the result
238 Nick Couldry

that field theory left under-developed its account of how social action is shaped
in spaces that are not fields (Lahire 1999), but there are at least two ways of explor-
ing it. One is to explore media’s growing role in the internal structures and organi-
zational “logics” of specific institutions and institution-types; the challenge there
remains to understand how such institutional dynamics link to the wider field-
based competition in which such organizations are involved (on which see Hjar-
vard, this volume). Another is to consider media’s many diverse consequences for
the only partly competitive space of everyday consumption and leisure. A high
proportion of everyday social action takes that form, including many activities
where people use for serious or playful purposes media contents and media plat-
forms. How, from the perspective of mediatization research, are we to understand
the media-related forces shaping such activities, in a way that is sensitive to the
challenges of social theory? Let me focus on this latter route.
The arguments against assuming such non-field spaces are structured by any
singular media logic (because of the diversity of media types and the changing
dynamics and features of media, and so on: see earlier) still apply, but a different
type of explanatory account needs to be developed which does not rely on the
scaffolding of field theory. One emerging candidate for such work is “figurations”.
Norbert Elias (1994) introduced the notion of “figurations” to capture the emergent
patterns of practice that arise over time as stable solutions to the many normative,
resource, and personal conflicts that derive from the changing weaves of mutual
interdependence. His early modern examples include the minuet dance as an
ordered form of group entertainment and the rules and technologies of table man-
ners for eating. Such figurations, once established over time, spread throughout
social space, not because they contain within themselves any particular logic or
generative force, but because they have de facto become working default solutions
(though made of many heterogeneous elements) that reduce certain pressing risks,
regulate the satisfaction of certain basic needs, and channel the pursuit of certain
basic pleasures. Because they multiply, they generate other forms, indeed whole
cultures, of extension, adaptation and appropriation. Can the notion of “figura-
tion” help us understand the patterning at work in our contemporary media-
related practices under conditions of media supersaturation and today’s highly
complex relations of interdependence between media and many other institutions?
For an excellent recent overview of the latter, see Mansell (2012).
It is too early to give a definitive answer to this. I tentatively suggested the
notion of figuration in an earlier essay (Couldry 2011: 201–202) as a way of making
sense of the enduring role of “reality media” in Western and non-Western media
systems since the early 1990s. The detailed explanandum in that case was the rise
and surprising persistence of claims to present “reality” in many different and
evolving television and online formats, and the curious moral and social force that
such formats have acquired: particular rules for presenting social “reality” through
media; certain forms of authority to judge everyday and more spectacular perform-
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 239

ance; certain new forms of expertise to underpin such judgements. Why reality
media formats emerged at a certain point of history in Europe and North America
and quickly spread globally is overdetermined, but some less explored factors are
the progressive decline of traditional forms of social authority and role-model, and
a growing legitimation deficit affecting not just political but also media institu-
tions. A new stage emerged where “reality” could be presented in a different,
compelling, and legitimate way, and where populations could be made to “appear”
to each other and to government (Couldry 2011, drawing on Arendt 1958). The
result is a phenomenon of primary importance for mediatization research to under-
stand. A new research programme is now also under way in Germany which will
explore the usefulness of “figurations” as a concept for understanding the patterns
emerging in the multidimensional process of mediatization.3
The outcome of these applications of Elias’ notion of figuration within mediati-
zation research is unknown, but they promise to be an important new front in
enriching its interface with social theory. It is worth noting however that the term
“figuration” only points in broad terms to a type of emergent order or pattern,
without giving any detailed account of how figurations emerge, or of how they do
their structuring work. To go further, the notion of “figuration” needs to be con-
nected up with a series of more specific concepts that help us piece together those
social mechanisms, as they operate in the relatively unstructured space of every-
day leisure and much everyday interaction: a key link here, I will suggest, will be
understanding media’s role in contemporary processes of categorization and norm-
formation.
There remains a further possibility for mediatization research’s developing dia-
logue with social theory. This is to bring it face-to-face with the sort of iconoclastic
social theory that denies “the social” itself and offers an alternative “associo-logy”
(Latour 2005), building its explanations out of contingent networks and assembla-
ges. For sure, if mediatization research is serious about engaging with social
theory, it must not evade this challenge to the notion of the social. There is also a
related challenge: this argues that the very notion of “mediatization”, because of
its root in the term “media”, risks locking in a view of how contemporary worlds
are built that overplays the causal importance of “media” (Slater forthcoming).
These two challenges – to the explanatory valence of “the social” or alternatively
of “the media” – intersect, since mediatization is an attempt to think through the
structured ways in which media, and particularly larger-scale media institutions,
are involved in the enabling and shaping of social space and action. The means
for addressing these two fundamental challenges are also connected. Although
there is no space to discuss this in detail here, a key step is to notice the failure
of Actor Network Theory (and its successors) to grasp that representations are more

3 ‘Communicative Figurations’, Universities of Bremen and Hamburg, 2013: http://kommunika-

tive-figurationen.de/?L=1
240 Nick Couldry

than links in a reified assemblage out of which new spaces of action are built
(Couldry 2008b, 2012: chapters 1 and 2). Media institutions are, at their most basic,
mechanisms for the production and distribution of re-presentations of the world
in which we live and are embedded. While those representations can certainly
become routinized, reified, and locked into everyday life and habit through catego-
ries and symbols, they are never entirely black-boxed and always remain open to
further hermeneutic work (for a hermeneutic sociology, see recently Sewell 2005:
chapters 5 and 10). In their semiotic content, they carry the means for further
interpretative work: even when temporarily reified, they do work in organizing the
social, by providing tools for one category of person or thing to be marked off
from another. The outputs of media organizations (representations) provide the
raw material for people’s (indeed societies’) ongoing hermeneutic work and trans-
formations. All this open-ended cultural work is absent (Couldry 2008c) from the
explanatory models of Actor Network Theory and Latour’s associo-logy, even as
they claim to build from different materials a new explanatory model of the condi-
tions of everyday action. By taking seriously media as institutions that produce
representations, mediatization research is therefore explicitly and justifiably at
odds with the general trend towards non-representational theory in contemporary
sociology (for more detail see Couldry 2012: chapter 1).

3.3 Summary
Through these various approaches to media’s consequences for social ontology, it
should, I hope, have become clear that mediatization research occupies a distinc-
tive position within the explanation of everyday action, allied particularly to her-
meneutic approaches to culture and social organization (Sewell 2005). It is not the
case (contra Slater) that mediatization research allocates to “media” in advance
a prevailing importance in the overall mix of social explanation, at least not if
mediatization research is understood, following the argument of this chapter, as
open to multiple causal dynamics. Mediatization research’s only assumption –
surely uncontestable in large, “developed” societies – is that media platforms and
contents play a large and significant role in people’s and institutions’ everyday
lives, and more specifically in their rules and resources for everyday action. In
this way, mediatization research contributes directly to the understanding of the
“structure” of social action (compare Sewell 2005 chapter 4, discussing Giddens
1984) in late modernity societies supersaturated by media.4

4 For “supersaturation”, see Couldry (2012: 5–6).

 Mediatization and the future of field theory 241

4 Government and the future of social-theory-

oriented mediatization research
At this point, a further challenge comes into view. Mediatization research, if it is
serious about engaging with and contributing to the wider space of social theory,
should be willing to address the question of what it would mean to say that gov-
ernment is mediatized. A lot of the initial research in mediatization looked at
political communications and the most competitive aspect of government commu-
nications (during elections and so on). But there has been less consideration of
mediatization as a meta-process affecting the general nature of government.5 It
would be absurd to claim to treat such a large topic in any substantive detail here.
My aim instead is to sketch the shape of a plausible approach to the mediatization
of government by way of illustrating the social-theory-oriented approach to medi-
atization research in general that has been developed in this chapter (compare
also Ihlen, this volume, on public bureaucracies and mediatization).
Government in modernity is the attempt to manage the totality of human
affairs within a defined territory, and it is common knowledge that it is saturated
by media processes at every level. Mediatization debates have contributed to our
understanding of these processes.6 Government is the most ambitious institution-
ally-based process that mediatization research could track in attempting to under-
stand media’s contribution to social change. It is inconceivable that media have
not changed how government is done and is imagined. Government is a multidi-
mensional process and, though of course it involves a very direct and continuous
instrumental use of media which arguably (Couldry 2012: 148) is one sphere where
something close to “media logics” (plural) play out daily, the overall process of
government cannot be understood if it is reduced to the processes of government
that are directly “about” media communication. It is necessary also to think about
how political strategies are formed and framed, how policy is generated, how pol-
icy is implemented and resisted, in other words, media contents’ and contexts’
role in the transformation of all stages in the governmental process.
To understand the mediatization of government in the broadest sense requires
us to think of mediatization from within multiple perspectives on social theory. It
is essential to follow how governments are, or are not, able today to exercise power
over particular fields of competition, and media’s role in shaping that process of
exercising power in what Bourdieu calls “the field of power”. The concept of media
meta-capital already discussed is one way into understanding this, since media
are clearly a central tool today for governments to influence the terms of play
within the fields they wish to dominate: governments everywhere from the USA to

5 For an exception see Cook (2005).

6 See for example Mazzoleni (2008); Strömbäck and Esser (2009).
242 Nick Couldry

China use negative media coverage as a threat and a weapon over their opponents,
and in the long term this may affect what counts as capital in particular fields. It
is also important however to think about how the general flow of media mes-
sages – from and about government – affects governments’ conditions of opera-
tion, including their possibilities for taking action and sustaining legitimacy (Ros-
anvallon 2011). Much of this interplay occurs in general discourse, rather than
being confined to the specific boundaries of the field of political competition. One
way forward to grasp this would be to look at the role media processes play within
the specific institutions of government (compare Hjarvard, this volume). Another
approach is through the concept of figuration which may point us towards some
key aspects of how mediatization works in this context. Speculatively, one might
see as a figuration the necessity for professionals in the political field (whether
or not politicians) to be “on message” at all times, that is to conform all their
communications, public and increasingly also private, to a communications “line”
(whether of policy, or more frequently, just of how to interpret a policy or an event
or another communication). There is no tolerance for communication deviance
because the costs (in terms both of damaged capital and further interpretative
turbulence) are too great.
It is not just politicians of course but every institutional actor in the govern-
mental process, who must submit to the overwhelming need, at all costs, to control
and conform their communications: indeed all are deemed accountable for such
conformity, whether it is desirable in a wider sense or not. This is an area where
communications pressures, because such communications are continuously feed-
ing on themselves, are having profound implications for the mediatization of man-
agement in all institutions, and above all for government as the institutionally-
based attempt to manage “everything” (Bimber 2003). The structural account of
social space and the field of power derived from field theory is particularly helpful
for grasping the complexity of government’s communicational and organizational
task under conditions of mediatization. Government seeks to dominate the field of
power, but it is no longer the only force in that field: media and broad forms of
corporate power, as already noted, compete in that space to influence the overall
terms of competition and basic existence in society and in specific fields. Govern-
ment nonetheless is specifically accountable for (and its legitimacy depends on)
how far it appears able to control key activities and outcomes in every, or most,
specific fields. But media affect every aspect of that process: first, the instruments
of government (the tools it uses to communicate its actions, proposals, responses,
sanctions) are mediated; second, the objects of government action (the actors in
each field) compete with government for media attention, and good media cover-
age; third, every action in each field is potentially mediated, and is available to
be interpreted and presented in multiple ways through media, and most actors
with whom government interacts work from that starting-point. The idea that gov-
ernment regulates the operations of any field “freely” from the outside is not sus-
 Mediatization and the future of field theory 243

tainable under these conditions because both government and governed are entan-
gled in an open-ended skein of actual and anticipated mediated communications.
The very stuff of government, its space of possibility, is already (and has been for
more than a decade) profoundly mediatized (Meyer 2003).
There is clearly a great deal more work to do on understanding how in detail
the mediatization of government plays out, but we have done enough already to
establish that mediatization research needs to operate flexibly, drawing sometimes
for example on field theory, sometimes on notions of figurations, if it is to be
adequate to grasping the complex ways in which something like “government” is
mediatized. Actor-Network-Theory-inspired notions of assemblage and infrastruc-
ture will also no doubt contribute to understanding the mechanisms whereby this
occurs. What matters in mediatization research most now is a commitment to
explanatory plurality as the best way of dealing with the epistemological challen-
ges set by media’s supersaturation of the social.

5 Conclusion
This chapter has argued that mediatization is best conceived as a contribution to
wider social theory, rather than understood narrowly as a branch of media studies.
This reconceptualization has as its precondition that mediatization research moves
beyond an explanatory model that treats mediatization as something that works
through a logic that is internal somehow to media contents.
Instead mediatization research must be alive to multiple explanatory models
of how the meta-process of mediatization is worked through in specific domains
and fields, while at the same time looking for a linking account that enables us
to see the connections, say between how the mediatization of politics and the
mediatization of the literary field might work: that was the rationale for reintroduc-
ing here my earlier work on media meta-capital, as a concept that can supplement
field theory in such a way that cross-field effects derived from media are under-
stood without disrupting the basic principles of field theory.
The chapter has also however argued for mediatization research’s need to be
open to other ways of interfacing with social theory, including through drawing
on Elias’s concept of figurations. We have explored the implications of such alter-
native approaches, whether independently or in tandem with an approach to medi-
atization oriented more to field theory.
This chapter has aimed to illustrate how an understanding of mediatization
and a corresponding programme of empirical research, provided it is flexible and
draws on a range of conceptual toolkits and explanatory models from across social
theory, can begin to tackle quite fundamental questions, as yet unanswered in
social theory, about how everyday life’s supersaturation by media contents is
changing its very possibilities of order.
244 Nick Couldry

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V. Movement and interaction
Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink
11 Human interaction and communicative
figurations. The transformation of
mediatized cultures and societies
Abstract: This chapter introduces the concept of “communicative figurations” as
an analytical tool for investigating mediatization with a special focus on changing
human interaction. The concept of “communicative figurations” is used to develop
a transmedial analysis of the changing communicative construction of mediatized
cultures and societies. Foci of this approach are the communicative forms, media
environments, actor constellations, and thematic framings of social entities, for
example the mediatized family, mediatized organizations, or the mediatized field
of religion. This makes it possible to investigate patterns of belongings, power,
rules and segmentation within processes of mediatization. The arguments are as
follows: First, the chapter outlines a general approach on how to reflect the interre-
lation between mediatization, interaction and communication. Based on this, the
concept of communicative figurations is introduced. This is followed by a reflec-
tion of the empirical grounding of communicative figurations, and then a conclu-
sion regarding the relevance of this concept for mediatization research that is
oriented to questions of interaction and communication.

Keywords: interaction, communication, communicative constructivism, communi-

cative figurations, translocality, transmediality, belonging, power, rules, segmenta-
tion, mediatization

1 Introduction
A main problem of any mediatization research is how to ground it in a practicable
empirical approach. When we argue that within an ongoing mediatization process
our cultures and societies transform, how can we investigate this in detail? What
might be the intermediate concepts by which it becomes possible to research
empirically in which way mediatization is related to the change of culture and
societies? By posing questions like these, it becomes evident that media as such
“do” nothing on their own. They become influential in the way that they “alter”
the processes of symbolic interaction or, to be more precise: of communication.
We are confronted with complex processes of interweaving in which certain
human practices become institutionalized and reified in something that we call “a
medium”, which – itself continuously changing – “alters” our (communicative)
construction of cultures and societies. If we want to analyse the mediatization
250 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

of cultures and societies in such a way, we need an intermediate concept for a

corresponding analysis. This chapter outlines the concept of “communicative figu-
rations” as such an approach: This concept makes it possible to develop a practi-
cal, transmedial analysis of the changing communicative construction of medi-
atized cultures and societies.
To grasp these considerations, we want to argue in three steps. First, we out-
line a general approach on how to reflect the interrelation between mediatization,
interaction, and communication. Based on this, we continue by introducing the
aforementioned approach on communicative figurations. This is followed by a sec-
tion which outlines an empirical grounding of communicative figurations. And
finally, we conclude with some arguments for a mediatization research that is
oriented to questions of interaction and communication.

2 Mediatization, interaction and communication

If we consider the present state of mediatization research, we can distinguish two
intertwined traditions that we can call “institutional” and “social-constructivist”
(cf. Hepp 2014). Both differ in their focus on how to theorize mediatization: While
the “institutional tradition” is until recently mainly interested in traditional mass
media, whose influence is described mostly as a “media logic”, the “social-con-
structivist tradition” is more interested in everyday communication practices –
including their relation to digital media and personal communication – and
focuses on the changing communicative construction of culture and society. While
these two traditions have certain different foci of research, they have nevertheless
come closer together over recent years, which makes it possible to formulate a
core definition of mediatization across the two. Doing this, we can define mediati-
zation as a concept to analyse critically the (long-term) interrelation between the
change of media and communication, on the one hand, and the change of culture
and society on the other (for further aspects of defining mediatization see part
one of this volume). 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 in the
process of sociocultural change. This means that it does “matter” which kind of
media is used for which kind of communication. The differences between the two
traditions is how they define this media specificity – either as an institutionalized
“media logic” or more openly as a highly contextual moment of “altering” commu-
nication. Another point of dispute is the question of a historical perspective on
mediatization, that is if mediatization is rather a short-term process since (early)
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 251

modernity or if it is a process that has to be theorized as a long-term historical

process (for these differences again see the various chapters in part one).
However, beyond such differences “social interaction” becomes a central con-
cept for both traditions. In his recent volume on the (then) present state of mediati-
zation research, Knut Lundby (2009b: 108) argued that we have to consider “social
interaction as the key” to describing processes of mediatization. With reference to
the institutionalist tradition of mediatization research, his argument is that “media
logic” as a concept refers back to a certain understanding of “forms” or “formats”
of social interaction. Originally and with reference to Georg Simmel, David L.
Altheide and Robert P. Snow (1979: 15) argued that “media logic constitutes […] a
form”, that is “a processual framework through which social action occurs”. In
their later work they preferred the concept of “format” to describe this social form
(cf. also Altheide 2013). As Knut Lundby puts it: “Media logic is a codification of
how media formats work; of rules, ways, and regulations in ‘the underlying inter-
active order’” (Lundby 2009b: 108).
If we have more the social constructivist tradition of mediatization research
in mind, social interaction is obviously crucial. The reason for this is that any
constructivist approach is based on the argument that the social world of human
beings is not a given but “constructed” in social interaction. As Hubert Knoblauch
puts it: “Social constructivism in this sense assumes that social reality is built on,
by and through social actions” (Knoblauch 2013: 299). As part of this tradition,
“communicative constructivism” has gained a higher relevance over recent years.
Referring back to the original insights of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
(1967) and the later development by Luckmann himself (2006), the idea of “com-
municative constructivism” is to emphasize the central role of communication for
the constitution of cultures and societies. This does not mean that any aspect of
“social construction” is communication – but always when questions of meaning
are involved does communication play a role. This is the reason why symbolic
interaction is in such a perspective the core for understanding the constitution
and transformation of cultures and societies.
Such a central positioning of symbolic interaction is not unquestioned in medi-
atization research. For example, Stig Hjarvard recently reminded us of some prob-
lems when overemphasizing “social interaction” in a “one-sided” way as this
might “obscure the question of how to grasp the specificities of the media” (Hjar-
vard 2013: 18). However, this being said, he nevertheless acknowledges that social
interaction is fundamental for any understanding of mediatization – we will come
to this later.
At this point it becomes important how we define “social interaction”. In the
most general understanding – and this is also the way Georg Simmel (1972) used
the concept, and referring back to him Altheide and Snow (1979) – social interac-
tion is fundamental for social sciences as a whole. It was Max Weber in his “basic
sociological terms” who made “social action” – that is, action oriented to other
252 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

human beings – to the fundamental unit of each analysis (Weber 1978: 4). Under-
stood in this way, any social and cultural analysis deals with the (inter)action of
human beings. Mediatization research then becomes preoccupied with how this
social interaction changes when technical communication media become part of
it.
A more specific understanding of social interaction comes from “symbolic
interactionism” as a particular approach within social sciences. Referring back to
scholars like George Herbert Mead (1967) and Herbert Blumer (1969), who devel-
oped it out of the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. The fundamen-
tal idea of this approach is that “human beings are distinct from other creatures
because they have the capacity for language and thus can think, reason, communi-
cate, and coordinate their actions with others” (Sandstrom 2007: 1). One main
concept of symbolic interactionism is the idea of “significant symbols”. These are
all words or gestures that have the same meaning for a certain group of people
who share them. If we follow symbolic interactionism, most human interactions
are based on these “significant symbols”. And we can refer this back to concepts
as they have been adopted in mediatization research. For example, Kent Sand-
strom argues that Altheide’s and Snow’s idea of “media logic” as a “format” is the
main way symbolic interactionism found its way into media and communication
research (Sandstrom 2007: 5 f.).
Reflecting this overall discussion, we can say that communication is one kind
of social interaction. There are other kinds of social interaction, and communica-
tion is interconnected with them. When we build something together (a garden
fence for example) we socially interact on this process of building, and we coordi-
nate this by communication. The characteristic of communication as a form of
social interaction is its foundation in symbols. In other words, “communication”
means any form of symbolic interaction conducted either in a planned and con-
scious manner or in a highly habituated and socially situated way (Reichertz 2011:
159–160). Communication therefore involves the use of signs that humans learn
during their socialization and which, as symbols, are for the most part entirely
arbitrary, depending for their meaning upon conventionalized social rules. Com-
munication is fundamental to the social construction of reality: that is, we our-
selves “create” our social reality in multiple communicative processes (beside
other forms of social interaction). We are born into a world in which communica-
tion already exists, we learn what is characteristic of this world (and its culture)
through the (communicative) process of learning to speak; and when we proceed
to act in this world our action is always related to communicative action. Peter
Berger and Thomas Luckmann formulated this as follows: “The most important
vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation. One may view the individual’s
everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that
ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective reality” (Berger and
Luckmann 1967: 172).
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 253

For describing communication as one form of social interaction, different con-

cepts are common in media and communication research. These are “forms”, “pat-
terns”, “practices”, and “types” of communicative action. Basically, all these dif-
ferent concepts refer to the same fundamental idea. This is an understanding that
communication is not solely “ephemeral” but based on “social rules” which are
performed situatively. These rules not only refer to the “use of symbols” but also
to “rules of how to use these in action”. The difference between the terms above
is the level on which they locate and how they contextualize these rules.
In a certain sense we can say that “forms” is the most general word reflecting
that different kinds of “content” can be communicated alongside various “forms”
of communicative action. These can be very “small” as for example the “replies”
and “responses” analysed by Erving Goffman (1981: 5–77), or the “conversational
sequences” investigated by ethnomethodology (Sacks 1995). The term “forms” is,
however – and here especially in media and communication research – addition-
ally used on a more general level to name certain “formats”, for example of radio,
television, or internet-based media. This is also the way Altheide and Snow used
the term in the aforementioned way of defining “media logic”.
The term “pattern” in this context means very generally that there are certain
regularities in communicative interaction. These regularities can be either at the
level of single communication actions. Here the term “pattern” is more or less a
synonym for the “small” kinds of communicative action discussed above. But
also – and at this point the term is an extension – variations of these “small forms”
can build more complex patterns. These can be either patterns of how these forms
are typically linked (for example questions, response, explanations etc. in a discus-
sion). Or it can also be other kinds of patterns, for example how a certain group
of people uses specific forms of communication, and thus builds a certain culture.
If we come to the concept of “practice”, again different nuances of meaning
come into play. First of all, this term refers to a more general “practice approach”
on media that moves the human agency/human acting into the foreground of
analysis in place of a more detached investigation of “media contents” or “media
effects” (Reckwitz 2002; Couldry 2004). Practice, in this case, is understood in an
inclusive way, not only practices of media use, but also all other kinds of practices
that are related to the media, including practices of media production. Beyond this
overall context, the term “practice” mainly refers to how different “forms” alto-
gether build a more complex and socially situated “pattern” of acting with media.
Here we can think of the “practice of online dating” which involves different
“forms” of personal data representation in online dating platforms, certain “forms”
of searching in these platforms, other characteristic “forms” of online chat, and
so on. Therefore, the term “practice” emphasizes more the social embedding of a
set of communicative forms as well as their relation to human needs (cf. Couldry
2012: 34).
Finally, the possibly most complex concept is the concept of “type”. Again it
can be understood in a very wide sense, meaning that communication as well as
254 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

human interaction in general is based on a reciprocal perception of the alter ego

referring to “typifications” we learned in the process of socialization (Berger and
Luckmann 1967: 28–33). Here, we can think about the typification of the other as
“representative” of a certain social role (“teacher”, “journalist”, etc.) or a certain
social collective (“British”, “French”, etc.). But also what has so far been called
“form” can be understood as a typification of action, that is typifications of “how
to do it right” (in the social sense of the word). The term “type” gains an additional
complexity if we relate it to questions of methodology. Then the process of describ-
ing “forms”, “patterns”, and “practices” of communicative action is a way of “typi-
fying” them by analysing specific occurrences. At this point Max Weber’s concept
of “ideal types” (Weber 1978: 20 f.) is still of relevance. “Ideal types” are forms of
typification that are built analytically; that is, beyond the assumption that they
would exist in a “pure way”. However, these ideal types are helpful when describ-
ing different forms of human action as they offer an analytical framework. When
media and communication research refers to “basic types” of communication (for
example face-to-face communication) as a point of departure for describing more
specific “forms”, “patterns”, or “practices” of communication, a comparable un-
derstanding of building up conceptual tools is present.
If we take these fundamental reflections on communication as a form of social
interaction as a starting point, the striking question is: How can we relate this to
mediatization research? At this point, it is worth recalling John B. Thompson’s
reflections on the “mediazation of culture”. Interestingly, he already argued across
the “institutional” and “social constructivist” traditions of mediatization research.
For Thompson, mediatization is fundamentally about the transformation of com-
munication as a form of symbolic interaction, a statement which can be proven
by his analysis of the emergence of modern society. So he wrote about early mod-
ernity: “Patterns of communication and interaction began to change in profound
and irreversible ways. These changes, which loosely can be called the ‘mediazation
of culture’, had a clear institutional basis: namely the development of media
organizations […]” (Thompson 1995: 46).
Thompson’s description of mediatization1 is closely related to a distinction of
three basic types of communicative interaction, that is “face-to-face-interaction”
(dialogical interaction as conversation), “mediated interaction” (dialogical com-
munication with media as a mobile phone call), and “mediated quasi-interaction”
(monological communication with media as television) (cf. Thompson 1995: 82–
87). Mediatization is therefore a process in which new basic types of mediated
interaction develop, types that make possible a translocal communicative action
“at a distance”: “today it is common for individuals to orient their interactions
towards others who do not share the same spatial-temporal locale” (Thompson
1995: 100).

1 As said, John B. Thompson uses the term “mediazation”. However, for consistency we will stay
with “mediatization” in the following.
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 255

In a comparable orientation, Friedrich Krotz (2001: 73–76) also argued that

mediatization is not about a direct effect of the media but about how media
“change” the various forms of communication. As he wrote, with mediatization
“increasingly more and more complex forms of media communication developed,
and communication takes place more often, with a longer duration, in more areas
of life and in relation to increasingly more topics in relation to the media” (Krotz
2001: 33).2 However, having the increasing relevance of computerized environ-
ments in mind, Krotz distinguishes a fourth basic type of communication, namely
the communication in virtual software environments. This comes together with
another idea by John B. Thompson, that is the idea of an emerging reflexivity of
mediatization: With an increasing “self-referentiality within the media” (Thom-
pson 1995: 110) we are confronted with what he calls “extended mediazation”,
meaning that “media messages” become “incorporated into new media messages”.
If we consider more recent reflections, these early arguments of focusing medi-
atization research on questions of symbolic interaction and communication are
supported by new evidence. For example, in his aforementioned chapter “Looking
for social interaction”, Knut Lundby argued that we have a “need for middle-range
explorations” (Lundby 2009b: 113) that move “social interaction” into the focus of
analysis if we want to understand what happens with mediatization. As he writes,
it is necessary “to specify how various media capabilities are applied in various
patterns of social interactions” as “transformations and changes in the mediatiza-
tion process take place in communication” (Lundby 2009b: 117). This goes hand
in hand with Eric Rothenbuhler’s thoughts about the theorem of “media logic”
that maybe “the logic is not in the medium but in the communication” (Rothen-
buhler 2009: 228). The same line of argument can be found in Nick Couldry’s book
Media, Society, World, in which he argues for an approach that locates what he
calls “mediatization debate” (Couldry 2012: 134) in the frame of field theory (see
also Couldry in this volume). For him, this means an investigation of communica-
tion practices and their relation to changing media environments that is sensitive
for the specific character of different social fields, and not positing a general
“logic” of change. And while Stig Hjarvard in his most recent definition of mediati-
zation stays with the concept of “media logic” as a “shorthand for the various
institutional, aesthetic, and technological modus operandi of the media” (Hjarvard
2013: 17), he nevertheless emphasizes the necessity to reflect social interaction as
the “logic of the media influences the social forms of interaction and communica-
tion” (Hjarvard 2013: 17). Therefore, irrespective of the preferred detailed concept
of mediatization, there is a shared understanding in present mediatization
research that any description of mediatization must be based on an analysis of
how media change is related to its “influence on communication”, that is symbolic
interaction.

2 This and all following non-English quotes are translations by the authors.
256 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

Tab. 1: Basic types of communication.

Direct Reciprocal media Produced media Virtualized media

Communication communication communication communication

Constitution in Co-present con- Separation of con- Separation of con- Separation of con-

time and space text; shared sys- texts; extended texts; extended texts; extended
tem of space and access to space access to space access to space
time references and time and time and time

Range of Variety of sym- Limitation of sym- Limitation and Relative limitation

symbolic bolic means bolic means standardization of and standardiza-
means symbolic means tion of symbolic
means

Action Oriented to Oriented to Oriented to an Oriented to a

orientation specific others specific others indefinite poten- potential space
tial number of of action
addressees

Mode of Dialogic Dialogic Monologic Interlogical

communication

Form of Local Translocally Translocal open Translocally

connectivity addressed indefinite

Source: Hepp 2013: 65, based on Thompson 1995: 85 and Krotz 2007: 90–92.

If we take this as a common ground it is helpful to refer back to the above

mentioned distinction of basic types of communication and systematize them fur-
ther. It seems to be appropriate to distinguish four basic types of communication
(see Table 1):
– firstly, as direct communication, that is, direct conversation with other humans;
– secondly, as reciprocal media communication, i.e. technically mediated per-
sonal communication with other persons (for instance, through the use of a
telephone);
– thirdly, as produced media communication, characterizing the sphere of media
communication classically identified by the concept of mass communication
(newspapers, radio, TV);
– fourthly, virtualized media communication, namely communication by means
of “interactive systems” created for this purpose; computer games are one
example, and another would be robots.

If we refer this back to questions of mediatization, we can first of all argue quanti-
tatively speaking that the spread of technical communication media is first of all
related to the emergence of basic types of communication beyond direct communi-
cation: Only with technical media can we think about reciprocal media communi-
cation, produced media communication, and virtualized media communication.
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 257

All of these offer the possibility to extend our symbolic communication translocally
while at the same time narrowing the range of symbolic means. Additionally, we
can say that these different basic forms of media communication became more
and more familiar in temporal, social, and spatial terms. Qualitatively speaking,
we can argue that each kind of media – the mobile phone, social web, television,
etc. – shapes the related basic types of communication in a different way. This is
where the various concepts to analyse this media specificity come in: “media
logic”, “media affordances”, “moulding forces of the media”, and so on. Irrespec-
tive of their detailed theoretical roots, these concepts try to describe how certain
media have an “influence” on the way we communicate – whereby this is not
understood as a process of direct “effect” but as a process of appropriating these
media.3
If we locate this in the present discussion about communicative constructiv-
ism, we gain a certain understanding of how all this is related to the transforma-
tion of cultures and societies. Following the idea of “communicative constructiv-
ism” we can argue that “communicative forms are the major ‘building blocks’ for
the construction of reality in that they allow us to coordinate actions and motives”
(Knoblauch 2013: 306). In other words, we construct our cultures and societies as
meaningful realities by communication, namely forms and practices of communi-
cative action. The main argument at this point is that what we call media are
on the one hand “institutionalizations” and “reifications” (or “objectivations”) of
communicative action: With media we “institutionalize” the forms we communi-
cate and “reify” the possibilities of communication in technologies, infrastructures
and interfaces (cf. Hepp 2013a: 58–59; Hepp 2013b). And as soon as communicative
action is “institutionalized” and “reified” by a medium, this in turn has a certain
influence on our communication. We are confronted here with an interrelated pro-
cess of change in which we cannot define what the driving force of change is. The
aforementioned basic types of communication are to be understood as an analyti-
cal point of departure for describing the specific forms and practices of communi-
cative action that are involved in this process.
This becomes more complicated when we consider that the communicative
construction of culture and society presently does not only rely on one single
medium but on a variety of media working together. This is reflected for example
in statements such as we would need a new perspective on the present situation
of the “media manifold” (Couldry 2012: 16), of “polymedia” (Madianou and Miller
2013: 169), or “transmediality” (Evans 2011: 17) to understand what’s going on

3 This is a highly important point, more generally outlined by Hans Matthias Kepplinger (2008)
who argued that mediatization research is not a new form of effect research. Stig Hjarvard (2013:
2–3, 17) for example emphasized the same in relation to his understanding of “media logic”. The
core idea of “affordances” is about the influence of specific (material) objects in processes of
interaction (Gaver 1996). And also the idea of the “moulding forces” of the media is explicitly
positioned against the “effect paradigm” (Hepp 2013a: 54).
258 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

with media change. While concepts like these differ in their detailed analytical
orientation, all of them share the same fundamental argument: That is that the
present situation of “media-saturation” (Lundby 2009a: 2) and a “mediation of
everything” (Livingstone 2009: 1) asks for a media and communication research
that does not focus on one single medium but on how different media in their
entirety are involved in the changing construction of culture and society. There-
fore, it would fall short to discuss the transformation of the communicative con-
struction of mediatized cultures and societies only in the perspective of one
medium; rather we need an approach that is able to include a variety of different
media in the analysis as far as they are relevant for a certain change.

3 Communicative figurations as an intermediate

concept
While arguments like these are driven theoretically, a more practical question is:
How can such a transmedial analysis be undertaken practically? It is obvious that
we need an intermediate concept beyond the more general approach of mediatiza-
tion to analyse the referred to change of symbolic interaction and by that the
transformation of the communicative construction of cultures and societies. As we
want to argue in the following, such an intermediate might be developed if we
focus on “communicative figurations”.
What is a communicative figuration? As a first approximation some examples
are helpful: Families can be described as a communicative figuration since they
are sustained as communitizations through various forms of communication: con-
versations, communication via (mobile) telephones and the social web, (digital)
photo albums, letters and postcards, or by watching television together. Also
(national or transnational) public spheres can be comprehended as communicative
figurations sustained via different kinds of media and confronted with special
normative expectations. Among these media are not only traditional media of mass
communication but increasingly also so-called new media like Twitter and blogs.
We are, however, also dealing with communicative figurations of learning when
school teachers, for example, use interactive whiteboards, software applications,
or intra- and internet portals in order to teach in a “contemporary” manner.
More generally speaking, communicative figurations are patterns of processes
of communicative interweaving that exist across various media and have a thematic
framing that orients communicative action. Such an approach to communicative
figurations picks up reflections like those formulated by Norbert Elias, but takes
them a step further. For Elias, figuration is “a simple conceptual tool” (Elias 1978:
130) to be used for understanding social-cultural phenomena in terms of “models
of processes of interweaving” (Elias 1978: 130). For him, figurations are “networks
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 259

of individuals” (Elias 1978: 15) which constitute a larger social entity through recip-
rocal interaction – for example, by joining in a game, or a dance. This could be
the family, a group, the state or society. Due to this kind of scalability, his concept
of figuration traverses the often static levels of analysis of micro, meso and macro.
The figuration as developed by Elias is considered to be one of the basic
descriptive concepts of the social sciences and cultural studies and was adopted
in different ways in theoretical as well as empirical works. The significance of the
figuration concept for media and communication research has been more and
more emphasized (Ludes 1995; Krotz 2003; Couldry 2010; Willems 2010). The rela-
tionship between figuration analysis and current media and communication
research can be found in the common interest to describe actors and their inter-
weaving which, according to Georg Simmel (1972), can be conceptualized as a
common pattern of interdependency or reciprocation. Unlike the also widely dis-
cussed current developments of structural network analysis (see, for example,
White 2008), the figuration concept is better at enabling the integration into
research of not only the dimension of communicative “meaning”, but also of his-
torical transformation. The concept of communicative figuration therefore becomes
an ideal starting point for analysing the transformation of communicative con-
struction processes in relation to mediatization.
When claiming that transmedia communicative figurations exist, we mean that
a communicative figuration is based on different communication media – often,
therefore, integrating several of the aforementioned basic types of communication.
Which of these kinds of communication and, based upon them, which communica-
tion media must be taken into consideration when describing a specific communi-
cative figuration depends on their characteristics: The communicative figuration
of a political commission is different from that of a national public sphere. The
transformation of both communicative figurations is, however, connected and
refers back to certain communication media. Consequently, it can be assumed that
the communicative figuration of political commissions changes as soon as the
direct communication of everyone involved does not only rely on the documents
carried along but also on instantly-accessible online information and the possibil-
ity to transmit decision-making “live” to the national public via smartphone. Inte-
grating people in the public sphere is, due to the diffusion of digital media, no
longer a “two-step flow” (Katz 1957) from manufactured or produced mass commu-
nication to direct communication. These days it is much more a case of creating
an additional “public connection” (Couldry et al. 2007).
Such statements show quite plainly that the analysis of communicative figura-
tions has to deal with a careful investigation of the role of various media in the
communicative forms and practices which are characteristic for each communica-
tive figuration. As argued at the beginning of this chapter, concepts to describe
this regularity become relevant when considering that the characterization of a
practice-oriented access does not only deal with purely situational actions, but
260 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

that it moves the regularities and socio-cultural embedding of communicative

actions to the fore of the analysis (Couldry 2012: 33–35). For the description of
communicative figurations it seems not only possible but necessary to work out
the regularities and their transformations. In an analysis of communicative figura-
tions, the terms of “form”, (overlapping) “patterns”, and “practices” of communi-
cative action are expedient since they detach our view from the individual medium
and are applicable to different levels.
Consequently, the guiding idea is the assumption that the characteristic, recip-
rocal relationships of media-communicative and socio-cultural transformations,
described by the term mediatization, are materialized in specific communicative
figurations. With the alteration of communicative figurations, processes of commu-
nicative constructions of socio-cultural reality are changing. At this level, an analy-
sis of the transformation of cultures and societies becomes accessible as it takes
place with mediatization.

4 Approaching communicative figurations

empirically
To sum up the arguments developed so far: As demonstrated, communicative figu-
rations are defined as patterns of processes of communicative interweaving that
exist across various media and have a thematic framing that guides communicative
action. In and through these communicative figurations, humans construct in sym-
bolic interaction their symbolically meaningful socio-cultural realities. Conse-
quently, communicative figurations do not constitute static phenomena but must
rather be observed in their constant state of flux – as a “process”: They are realized
in communicative practice, thus re-articulated and, hence, they continuously
transform to different degrees. In the sense of social constructivism, we can con-
sider communicative figurations as the basis of the communicative construction
of socio-cultural reality: The reality of a culture or society is “constructed” in or
through the different communicative figurations. Making this more general idea
of communicative figurations researchable in an empirical way, we can argue that
each communicative figuration is defined in core by four features (see Figure 1):
– Firstly, we are dealing with forms of communication. This concept includes the
different convention-based ways of communicative action, which develop into
more complex patterns of practice (communicative networking or discourses,
for example).
– Secondly, in respect of these forms of communication, a specifically-marked
media ensemble can be described for each communicative figuration. This
refers to the entire media through which or in which a communicative figura-
tion exists.
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 261

Fig. 1: Heuristics to analyse communicative figurations.

– Thirdly, a typical constellation of actors can be determined for each communi-

cative figuration which constitutes itself through its communicative action.
– Fourthly, every communicative figuration is characterized by a thematic fram-
ing; thus there is a guiding topic which must be specified.

To explain these four features further, it is helpful to link them to our reflection
on mediatization and communication. If we take the argument that symbolic inter-
action is the core anchor to describe mediatization, it becomes obvious how far
“communication” builds the first feature of each communicative figuration. How-
ever, if we consider communication as part of figurations, we are less interested
in the “individual utterance” but more in the forms of communication which are
characteristic for a certain communicative figuration. Families as communicative
figurations, for example involve other typical forms of communication than politi-
cal public spheres do. To describe the different communicative forms as they are
characteristic for a certain communicative figuration, the distinction of basic types
of communication is helpful insofar as it orientates our focus to the fundamental
differences between various communicative forms.
In addition, each communicative figuration is located in a certain “media envi-
ronment” (Morley 2007; Meyrowitz 2009) that can be described in relation to this
figuration as its media ensemble. At this point it becomes possible to integrate
262 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

media specificity into the analysis of communicative figurations. As outlined, in

present mediatized cultures and societies it is not one single medium that shapes
the communicative construction of a certain entity, but rather a group of (different)
media in their entirety. This means we are not analysing one single “media influ-
ence”, but how the “institutionalizations” and “reifications” of different media
altogether “mould” communicative figurations. Focusing media ensembles –
which correlate in individual perspective with “media repertoires” (Hasebrink and
Popp 2006; Hasebrink and Domeyer 2012) – seems to be the appropriate way to
analyse the complexity of present mediatizing processes.
With reference to constellations of actors, we have in mind that each communi-
cative figuration is also defined by a certain intertwined group of typical actors.
These can be either individual actors (humans) or collective actors (organizations
of different complexity). The term “constellation of actors” as we use it is influ-
enced by Uwe Schimank’s theory of social action, who in his approach also refers
back to Norbert Elias (Schimank 2010: 211–213). In such a view we are confronted
with a constellation of actors as soon as we have an interference of at least two
actors who themselves recognize this interference as such (Schimank 2010: 202).
The argument at this point is that each communicative figuration has one specific
constellation of actors who perceive themselves as part of this communicative
figuration. There is no need that this constellation is “harmonic” or “friendly”, it
can also be “conflicting” and “struggling”. However, the involved communicative
actors are aware of each other as being part of this communicative figuration.
Maybe the most complex point about communicative figurations is their the-
matic framing. Using this term, we refer less to the “framing analysis” as it is well
known in media and communication content research. Our terming is much more
grounded in fundamental social theory, and here the “frame analysis” as it was
outlined by Erving Goffman (1974: 21–40). Frames in his understanding have an
interactionist as well as a cognitive moment: On the one hand, frames orientate
our interaction as it becomes understandable, for example if we consider a teach-
ing situation in a classroom as a frame: We “produce” this situation by our interac-
tion being oriented to a shared frame of action. On the other hand, recognizing
“frames” makes it possible for a person who enters a room to understand “what’s
going on”. In such a more general sense, also communicative figurations have a
certain thematic framing: Their communicative forms, media ensemble, and con-
stellation of actors build up a “unity of meaning” which orientates the ongoing
procedure of “producing” as well as the “perception” of this communicative figura-
tion.
By describing the characteristic forms of communication, media ensemble,
constellation of actors, and thematic framing, we can describe a communicative
figuration on a fundamental level. However, to get a deeper understanding of
communicative figurations a further contextualization is necessary. This is the
point where the four construction capacities of description come in that we have
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 263

to have in mind when describing communicative figurations. They can be

described in a first approach with the help of four questions: How do communica-
tive figurations construct our different “belongings”? How are certain “rules” cre-
ated through communicative figurations? How does a communicative figuration
produce characteristic “segmentations”? How do communicative figurations create
or maintain “power”?
The construction capacity of belonging picks up the work on inclusion, commu-
nitization, and socialization through processes of media communication. This
includes issues of a mediated construction of national communitization, while the
present research presumes that only with continuing mediatization was a compre-
hensive communicative integration into a nation possible, and an implementation
of national culture (cf. Anderson 1983; Schlesinger 1987; Billig 1995; Hjort 2000;
Morley 2000). From the viewpoint of political communication research, a debate
on mediated relationships is about integrating people into a national and transna-
tional public sphere, which may also happen through conflicts (Dahlgren 1995;
Gripsrud 2007; Wessler et al. 2008; Koopmans/Statham 2010). Especially with an
increasing mediatization, the possibilities for relationships in and through media
communication have increased; complex forms of “citizenship” are emerging
which are much more based on popular culture than on political affiliation (García
Canclini 2001; Couldry 2006; Dahlgren 2006). Different communitizations and
socializations should be mentioned which also contribute to the gains of relevan-
cy of media and communication change. This concerns transnational diasporas
(Dayan 1999), popular-cultural communitizations (Jenkins 2006), religious commu-
nities (Hoover 2006) or new social movements (Bailey et al. 2008). It also concerns
commercialized belongings with companies and associations as to be found in
or through PR, or changing links on the level of personal networks and groups
(Granovetter 1983; Gauntlett 2011).
The construction capacity of rules does not only concern political and legal
regulations of media communication but also social and cultural rules as they are
discussed for example in communication and media ethics. Consequently, this
construction capacity is about all processes of setting and changing rules, ranging
from a “top-down-regulation” and a “co-” and “self-regulation” to “spontaneous
negotiation of rules”. In today’s communicative figurations, processes of rule-mak-
ing change as the national frame, which for a long time was the primary vanishing
point for regulations, is losing this role as a consequence of the self-transformation
of the state (Chakravartty and Zhao 2008). Besides state regimes, privatized and
hence new spheres of influence appear in regulation, for which “ICANN”, responsi-
ble for the regulation of Internet addresses, or the World Summit on the Informa-
tion Society are mentioned as prime examples (McCurdy 2008). Other problems of
rules become tangible due to the public discussion surrounding copyright, security
issues and private sphere on the Internet. Besides privatized and globalized
regimes, supranational regimes gain importance, as exemplarily demonstrated by
the guidelines of media politics in Europe (Levy 2007; Kleinsteuber and Nehls
264 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

2011). This issue continues to sharpen as with the continuous establishment of

digital media, the demarcation between traditional forms of public and personal
communication becomes blurred and, consequently, the role of public-service
media institutions for civil society must be determined in different ways. On top
of this, digital media demonstrate that especially media-ethical and aesthetical
rules are reified through “code” – the software-technical or algorithmic architec-
ture of platforms or communication services (Lessig 2006; Zittrain 2008; Pariser
2011). If we investigate communicative figurations, we also have to have this con-
struction capacity of rules in mind.
The construction capacity of segmentation is more or less related to the tradi-
tion of investigating inequalities in media and communication research. One of
the questions of research on “knowledge gaps” is about whether the distribution
of certain media increases the difference between the “information-rich” and the
“information-poor” (Tichenor et al. 1970). Such a discussion was picked up by the
so-called digital-divide research (Norris 2001), which investigates to what extent,
with the expansion of digital media, socially existing segmentations increase in
respect of certain criteria like age, gender, education, etc. Issues about media and
inequality, however, reach a lot further. From the point of view of mediatization
research such descriptions appear to be problematic, if they exclusively depart
from the diffusion of an individual medium. Especially in the case of the “digital
divide”, a cross-media perspective is just as central as the consideration of direct
communication because insufficient “access” and “ways of use” of one medium
can generally be balanced with other forms of media – while this is, however, not
an automatism (Madianou and Miller 2012). In this sense, the “digital divide […]
has to be understood as a dynamic multi-level concept” (Krotz 2007: 287) which
takes into account the different “equalities” and “inequalities” in their potentially
reciprocal enforcement and their possible compensation. From this point of view,
the “digital divide” as well as other segmentations in changing communicative
figurations refer to the very basic question of the extent to which, according to
Pierre Bourdieu (2010), communicative figurations and their growing mediatiza-
tion increase “economic”, “cultural” and “social capital”.
Finally, the construction capacity of power is of high importance also to
describe communicative figurations. The change of communicative figurations
thus involves a change of the possibilities for “empowerment” and “disempower-
ment”. Manuel Castells discussed this in great detail for the establishment of com-
prehensively mediatized “network societies” (Castells 1996, 1997), in which social
movements are able to unfold a new form of power with the help of their “project
identities”. Yet he increasingly refers also to opposing moments due to the roles
of companies and governments as “switches” between power-networks (Castells
2009). In addition, even communicative figurations related to the audio-visual are
about power. Thus, hegemonic concepts of “individualized life styles” in consumer
societies are communicated through transmedia productions, such as can be found
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 265

in nomination shows and make-over formats (Ouellette and Hay 2008; Thomas
2010): The paradigm of “individualized choice” and “selection” is legitimized
through the (e.g. internet-based) voting and the representation of an individually-
selectable life in such programmes.
If we take these four construction capacities – belonging, rules, segmentation,
and power – together it becomes obvious how we have to contextualize our analy-
sis of communicative figurations further: If we understand communicative figura-
tions as the structured ways by which the communicative construction of culture
and society takes place, they are also the means by which power, segmentation,
rules, and belonging are produced. And therefore we have to consider this in our
investigation of communicative figurations.
However, it is important to have in mind that our operationalization is not
about describing communicative figurations as such. As outlined above, we under-
stand them as an intermediate concept to analyse mediatization practically. They
are a helpful tool to focus what “changed” with mediatization. More generally
speaking, the concept of communicative figuration offers a way to reflect that
media are not the only driving force for change. Therefore, the more prominent
question might be to investigate how mediatized cultures and societies transform
and which role media have for this transformation process. The concept of commu-
nicative figuration gives us the possibility to research this question in a twofold
manner, either in a “diachronous” or in a “synchronous” way (for a more detailed
explanation see Hepp 2014).
Clearly diachronous mediatization research entailing a comparison over time
is the more obvious way: We investigate the communicative figurations at different
points in time and compare the results of this. We can investigate for example the
communicative figuration of families of the 1950s, do the same in the 1980s and
2010s, and then compare the results. For sure, the family has changed, and this
is interwoven with media communicative change. The same can be said for other
communicative figurations like the communicative figurations of public spheres,
for example. To give a more detailed answer to how this change takes place in its
relation to media communication we must turn to an analysis of the changing
communicative figurations over the period of time in question.
But not only for practical reasons – diachronous research of this kind is enor-
mously elaborate and mostly also expensive – is there also the need for synchro-
nous mediatization research. The main reason for this is that the mediatization
process is not linear but has certain “eruptive” moments we might call “mediatiza-
tion waves”. This term indicates that certain media developments might result in
a qualitatively different media environment that makes completely new communi-
cative figurations possible. We can understand the recent phenomenon of digitali-
zation as such a “mediatization wave”, which is at the same time related to a far-
reaching transformation of formerly non-digital media – television becomes Inter-
net television, cinema becomes digital cinema and so forth. But also other, never-
266 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

theless far-reaching changes in media history can be identified, like for example
the emergence of photography and related visual media.
It is especially this kind of synchronous mediatization research that needs
further methodological reflection than it has been undertaken up to now. This is a
point where Actor Network Theory (ANT) can be a help for mediatization research.
Starting with their methodological standpoint to “keep the social flat” (Latour
2007: 159), this approach is interested in how the social is made up by humans
and their (inter)action with things. From such a more general, sociological point
of view, also the emergence of certain media became an object of investigation, so
for example the Kodak camera and the “mass market” of amateur photography. If
we follow at this point Reese Jenkins’ (1975) historical analysis and Bruno Latour’s
(1991) interpretation, we can capture a detailed step-by-step process in which the
Kodak camera (as a certain media technology) and the “mass market” of amateur
photography (with all its related practices) emerged simultaneously. Therefore, it
is not the invention of a “new medium” which then was appropriated. In contrast,
it is a circular, simultaneous process of “developing” this medium, on the one
hand, and its “appropriation” by a wider group of people on the other. Therefore,
important for synchronous mediatization research is an investigation of the close
interweaving of media development and its appropriation. This is not something
that came up lately, as it is often assumed in research on “social media” and the
relation of programmers and users there. Rather, this seems to be a general pattern
of media emergence.
While we also find concepts of such close interrelations in media and commu-
nication studies (see for a classical approach Mansell and Silverstone 1998),
detailed analysis on these processes are far less common. The typical argument
within media and communication research is rather the idea of the “diffusion” of
an “innovation” (Rogers 2003); that is, the dissemination of a medium that is
thought as something already “complete”. In extension to this, synchronous medi-
atization research might learn from ANT and comparable approaches that media
change happens in a much more complex way – namely, in an interweaving of
emerging media and the articulation of further media related practices. It becomes
necessary to investigate such processes of co-articulation, especially in moments
when so-called “new media” come up and turn the media environment upside
down, and therefore the communicative figurations we are involved in and by
which we communicatively construct our culture and society.

5 Conclusion: the transformation of communicative

figurations
This article covered a broad spectrum of arguments: We started with the reflection
that mediatization research should be grounded in symbolic interaction, a perspec-
tive that moves “communication” into the foreground. Because of that it is neces-
 Human interaction and communicative figurations 267

sary to reflect how far the mediatization process is linked to the spread of four
basic types of communication – types that still offer us a fundament to analyse
specific forms, patterns, and practices of communication. However, such an over-
all approximation falls short of providing an appropriate foundation for a practical
investigation of mediatization. For this, we need a middle-range concept to ground
the overall general idea of mediatization in symbolic interaction and in so doing
make it researchable. We therefore outlined the concept of communicative figura-
tions. The potential of this approach is that we can use it to analyse various phe-
nomena at different levels. As Elias already wrote when he developed the idea of
figurations: The potential of this idea is that we can analyse figurations across
micro, meso and macro levels. This general statement is also correct for communi-
cative figurations while our idea of communicative figurations is much more con-
crete: We understand communicative figurations as defined by certain forms of
communication, by a typical media ensemble, by a constellation of actors, and by
a thematic framing. In so doing, communicative figurations are the structured
communicative processes by which we construct our changing culture and society,
related belongings, power relations, segmentations, and rules. In such a view, a
practical mediatization research means the analysis of changing communicative
figurations (diachronous research) and upcoming new (synchronous research).
The core point for us is that such a move from an overall “meta process” or
“panorama” of mediatization to symbolic interaction, and then to communicative
figurations, also means a re-orientation of what mediatization research is about:
Taking seriously the idea that mediatization research is interested in the interrela-
tion between media-communicative and socio-cultural change, we have to develop
an analytical narrative that avoids moving the media unquestioned into the centre
of our conceptualizing of change. Also other “factors” can be driving forces of
change. Again at this point the idea of communicative figurations is most helpful:
It offers us a way to analyse the transformation of mediatized cultures and socie-
ties by focusing the changing communicative construction process as such. Only
from such a conceptual starting point do we have the chance to reflect where the
media are highly important for this transformation and where they are less so. In
this sense, the outlined approach of communicative figurations is also a plea for
a non-media-centric form of mediatization research.

Acknowledgement
This article was written within the research network “Communicative Figurations”
(University of Bremen, University of Hamburg) which is supported as creative unit
by the institutional strategy “Ambitious and Agile” of the University of Bremen,
University of Excellence, funded by the Federal Government and the Fed-
eral States.
268 Andreas Hepp and Uwe Hasebrink

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André Jansson
12 Indispensable things: on mediatization,
materiality, and space

Abstract: This chapter approaches mediatization as a movement through which

media technologies and related artifacts become indispensable to people in their
everyday lives, and places and practices become materially adapted to the exis-
tence of media. This perspective emanates from a broader conceptualization of
mediatization as a meta-process involving interconnected regimes of media-related
dependencies and normalizations. The chapter introduces a three-level framework
to the study of material indispensability and adaptation. It includes Ihde’s notion
of “I-technology-world” relations (media technics), Bourdieu’s theories of socio-
cultural legitimation and practical knowledge (media properties), and Lefebvre’s
phenomenology of the materialization of everyday life (media textures). Altogether,
these perspectives enable the researcher to identify internal tensions and fluctua-
tions within the mediatization meta-process as it unfolds in relation to different
technological regimes, during different periods, and in diverse socio-cultural con-
texts. In particular, the chapter detects an ongoing shift from mass media textures
to transmedia textures, signifying the coming of a new sub-stage of mediatization:
transmediatization. This shift actualizes how new media forms, understood as both
technics and properties, amalgamate with pre-existing socio-material patterns in
increasingly flexible and open-ended ways.

Keywords: mediatization, materiality, social space, phenomenology, everyday life,

technology, culture, communication

1 Introduction
One of the clearest expressions of mediatization is the historical pervasiveness
through which various media forms have become materially indispensable to peo-
ple in their everyday lives, and how people have (re)arranged their life environ-
ments materially in response to the appearance (and disappearance) of media.
This chapter establishes a theoretical framework for sorting out the different mech-
anisms that are involved in these historical and ongoing movements. How and
why do “media things” become indispensable? These questions beg for complex
answers that must ultimately take into account the contextual conditions where
media are actually put into use. One way of introducing the theme of this chapter,
then, is to peek into the diverse everyday spaces where material indispensability
274 André Jansson

and adaptation come to surface. The following interview extracts are taken from
a recent Swedish research project:1

Quote 1:
We have six TV-sets. Three upstairs, one in the living room, one in the basement and one
downstairs in the playroom. Only two of them are connected to the cable, for watching televi-
sion. One is for video and the home-theatre, one is for TV-gaming in the basement, and the
kids have one each with DVD players in their rooms. And then one in our bedroom where we
can watch television, just like in the living room. (35-year-old man, Swedish small town)

Quote 2:
I’ve had an iPhone since last Christmas, I held out for a long time, I was waiting for my old
Nokia to break but it never did. You just discover new uses for it everyday, I’d be lost without
it. I don’t have a great number of apps but Travel, Dictionary, Wordfeud, messages, email.
(65-year-old woman, Stockholm city)

Quote 3:
Without my mobile I would feel like I was missing something. I would miss the contact with
the Internet, yes the whole information society. I mean, if I’m in town without my phone, then
I’ll have to wait until I get home before I can check out what’s happening in the world. So I
would feel like being left behind, strange as it might sound, but I wouldn’t be updated until
I got home. (33-year-old man, Swedish mid-size town)

Quote 4:
In the new factory there are mounted cameras, about ten cameras, which overlook the whole
production in the new hall. And those who built the new factory can watch it, in Slovenia.
[…] Right at the steering unit there was a camera pointing straight down on us, and we never
understood why it had to be there, so we poked it upwards a little, just so it couldn’t see us.
Because it felt like nobody trusted us. (26-year-old man, Swedish small town)

Many of us can probably identify, at least to some degree, with the experiences
and conditions reflected in these statements. They are more or less ordinary, albeit
contextually specific. Whereas mediatization may involve a plethora of everyday
material transformations, a common denominator is the experience of living with
media things as naturalized elements of the lifeworld (Schutz and Luckmann 1973).
The indispensability of media things, and thus the material force of mediatization,
becomes particularly obvious at occasions of absent or malfunctioning media tech-
nology. As the third informant puts it, without the media “one would feel like one
was missing something”.
A closer look at the quotes may also help us reveal some important distinctions
as to what mediatization does and does not mean in the context of material trans-
formations. Firstly, mediatization cannot be described merely as a linear process
of material accumulation making our social spaces occupied, or cluttered up, with
more media technologies (including everything from books and letters to television

1 The interviews, 48 in total, were gathered in 2010–12 within the research project Secure Spaces:
Media, Consumption and Social Surveillance, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden.
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 275

sets and smartphones). Whereas the first quote may indeed point to such a process
of escalating media-over-abundance, ongoing technological developments also
point to the integration (or remediation) of a multitude of old media forms, as well
as services, within transmedia platforms. As reflected in the second quote, the
emergence of such platforms, and the expansion of entire transmedia environ-
ments, bring along the successive marginalization or elimination of many “stand-
alone” media forms (such as newspapers, radio receivers, etc.).
Secondly, mediatization does not only refer to people’s celebration of, and
longing for, new media stuff. As a meta-process (Krotz 2007), mediatization also
includes social, cultural, and ideological resistance to such consumption practices.
Not everyone would like to have six television sets at home, even though it would
be economically and spatially possible. Not everyone welcome the increased reach-
ability and potential monitoring, enabled by mobile, interactive media. The last
quote provides a striking snapshot of a directly oppositional intervention into the
material normalization of ubiquitous media infrastructures. Such resistances and
negotiations, and their material and spatial consequences, are also part of the
mediatization meta-process.
Thirdly, the material and spatial dimensions of mediatization cannot be
unveiled only, and perhaps not even most prominently, through analyses of the
very material presence of various media. As mentioned in the beginning, one must
also take into account how various places and practices are materially adapted to
the existence of media. This condition holds an implicit presence in the first quote,
where the home environment is not only filled with media, but also accommodated
to particular forms of media consumption. It is also shown in the last quote, where
the factory workers themselves probably do not feel that surveillance cameras are
indispensable for their work, but nonetheless have to adapt their performances to
the potential tele-presence of others.
I will return to these interview extracts throughout the chapter. I will use them
as prisms for discovering and illuminating the material complexities, as well as the
common traits, of mediatization. My aim is not to conduct a sociological analysis
of the stratified, and otherwise socially structured, ways in which mediatization
unfolds materially. Rather, I will approach mediatization from a generalized, socio-
phenomenological point of view, guided by the works of Ihde, Bourdieu, and
Lefebvre. As already stated, the premise here is to think of mediatization as a
movement through which media technologies and related artifacts become indis-
pensable for carrying out practices that are essential to the maintenance of society
in its various parts, and places and practices become materially adapted to the
existence of media.
Media things do not become indispensable by themselves, however. There are
no media (if we think of “media” as means of communication operating through
certain symbolic codes) whose social success was given already at the time of their
invention. Over the years, many technologies have failed to reach any major social
276 André Jansson

significance (Marvin 1988, Gitelman and Pingree 2003), while others have rapidly
fallen into obsolescence due to various contextual (cultural, economic, technologi-
cal, and so on) circumstances (Löfgren 2009; Acland 2007). Media (like other tech-
nologies) become indispensable only when practical affordances are brought into
a meaningful relationship with pre-existing, or emerging, socio-material condi-
tions, thus giving shape to a particular cultural form (Williams 1974). This is an
important reminder of the non-media-centric nature of mediatization research; we
must never isolate the significance or impact of the media from surrounding proc-
esses in society.
Indispensability can thus be understood as a bonding force between social
subjects, technologies, and the world. Whereas the term does not say anything
about the functional linkages that keep such “I-technology-world” relationships
(Ihde 1990) together, it points to the strength of these relationships, and their level
of social embeddedness (Giddens 1991). The third interview quote illustrates this
duality, pointing both to the felt need to stay connected to the world via smart-
phone and to the socio-spatial articulation of such needs (albeit the very usage of
smartphones may have a disembedding effect upon social life), giving rise even to
feelings of “being left behind” if connectivity cannot be granted here and now.
It goes without saying, then, that the formation of “relationships of indispen-
sability and adaptation” may look very differently depending on type of technol-
ogy and socio-cultural context. It would take more than this chapter to cover the
whole spectrum of factors at play when indispensability arises, consolidates or
wanes away. Therefore, my ambition here is more modest. My aim is to introduce
a systematic approach for studying the social construction of material indispensa-
bility. It does not mean that I claim this model to be the only one; rather I would
like to suggest three complementary levels of analysis, each suggesting a certain
array of analytical entry-points for empirical study. I will also assert the value of
combining these three analytical levels for gaining relatively holistic understand-
ing of indispensability. At the first level, and at the core, I discuss media things
as technics, following Ihde’s (1990) phenomenological view of technology and the
lifeworld. At the second level, I look at the media as properties in a Bourdieusian
sense (Bourdieu [1979] 1984, [1997] 2000), addressing the cultural shaping of indis-
pensability. Finally, following Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) understanding of textures, I
discuss how the media, as both technics and properties, become part of the felt
cultural-material fabric of everyday social space.
Throughout these discussions, and in the concluding part of the chapter, I pay
particular attention to the ways in which the material shape of mediatization has
altered due to a general shift from mass media textures to transmedia textures
(see also Jansson 2013). The categorical distinction between “mass media” and
“transmedia” operates as shorthand for a bundle of technological developments
marking out the digital era (including for example convergence, interactivity,
streamability, and miniaturization) which at the level of everyday life come to
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 277

surface as a successive shift from stand alone media fixtures to increasingly inte-
grated and flexible media environments. This transformation, which I also refer to
as the coming of transmediatization, implies that material indispensability and
adaptation are brought about under altered conditions, exposing partly new fea-
tures. This is neither to suggest the end of mediatization, nor to advocate a media-
centric or techno-deterministic perspective. My point is that transmediatization is
to be understood in terms of ongoing qualitative, socially shaped transformations
within more foundational regimes of mediatization. In order to explicate this per-
spective the chapter begins with an outline of my conceptual view of mediatization
based on Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space.

2 A triadic conceptualization of mediatization

In spite of ongoing academic debates and several recent efforts to gather a compre-
hensive view of the concept of mediatization there are still conflicts as to some of
its key meanings and implications (see Lundby 2009; Hepp 2013; Hjarvard 2013).
Notably, there is a general division between those using the term mainly to
describe the growing autonomy and expansive logic of “the media” as a composite
institution (see e.g. Hjarvard 2008; Strömbäck and Esser 2009), and those referring
to mediatization as a meta-process, comparable with individualization and com-
mercialization, involving contradictory forces and contextual variations within the
general movement towards further media saturation and dependency (Krotz 2007;
Hepp 2009a, 2010). The former perspective has certain advantages, especially as
a platform for social critique, but its relevance can be empirically sustained only
as long as the analytical focus is on well-defined media institutions. A case in
point here is Asp’s (1990) classic studies of the mediatization of politics, which
explicate the adaptation of political agency to the logics of (mainstream news)
media and public exposure (see also Boorstin [1961] 1992). The very conception of
media influences in terms of successive processes of “adaptation” or “accommoda-
tion” (Schulz 2004) steers the analytical centre of gravitation away from more
linear notions of media uses and effects (mediations) towards mediatization.
Still, if we want to study the adaptations of everyday life, we cannot rely on
any clear-cut model as to what media (technologies, texts, and institutions) differ-
ent groups and individuals primarily adapt to and under what circumstances.
Everyday life does not to the same extent as for example politics or commercial
life follow a goal-oriented rationality-type with homogenous rules and resources.
Furthermore, contemporary media environments, where the eras of mass media
and transmedia intersect, are too multifaceted for being approached as a coherent
institution, albeit certain media institutions and actors may indeed hold a domi-
nant position within certain social contexts. For many individuals today everyday
life takes on the status of a “media life” (Deuze 2011) marked by the seamless
278 André Jansson

integration and penetration of media forms and contents in all social regions.
Conceiving of mediatization as a meta-process is a way of increasing one’s analyti-
cal sensitivity to these complexities. Still, in order to make it possible to actually
pin down and explain concrete expressions and consequences of (trans)mediatiza-
tion today we need analytical categories that are comparable across time and
space.
As for the transformations of the everyday social world, which is at the centre
of attention here, I have previously (Jansson 2013) suggested a categorization
based on Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) triadic model of social space. My point of depar-
ture is to think of mediatization as a meta-process that brings about (amongst
other things) altered dynamics in the production of space. Space, in turn, is to be
understood as a social product, always “under construction” and the object of
negotiations and struggles in material, representational, and mythological/ideo-
logical realms. Whereas these three realms, which Lefebvre terms perceived, con-
ceived, and lived space, are mutually dependent, inseparable in spatial production,
they allow us to distinguish three separate regimes of mediatization. Mediatization
is a movement that operates not only within the representational realm, shaping
the symbolic order of people’s lives; it also holds a material, ideological, and men-
tal presence, affecting the ways in which everyday environments are spatially
arranged and how people go about and make meaning out of their daily routines.
The three regimes are mutually interdependent and pertain to processes related to
both mass media and transmedia:
1. Material indispensability and adaptation (corresponding to perceived space): A
key feature of mediatized society is that certain types of tools and systems are
seen as necessary, or indispensable, for leading a comfortable and socially
integrated life. The indispensability of new “media things” refers to the general
social acceptance of literally buying into a particular way of communicating,
and to the restructurings through which the material presence of these things
are naturalized in people’s day-to-day lives. A key example is Moores’ (1988)
study of how radio entered the ordinary living-room, occupying not only a
particular place in the household, a “box on the dresser”, but also giving rise
to a series of material adaptations to the physical, visual and audible presence
of this new object.
2. Premediation of spatial experience (corresponding to conceived space): The
media not only shape our expectations and anticipations of future events and
experiences, but also generate particular forms of action and interaction that
are performed, or staged, in order to become mediated within a certain repre-
sentational register (Grusin 2010). A good example is tourism, whose very exis-
tence largely rests upon the circulation of phantasmagorical media images,
and where the sharing and storing of spatial representations via postcards,
photos, and other media are essential parts of the experience (Strain 2003;
MacCannell [1976] 1999; Jansson 2002). Mediatization implies that an expand-
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 279

ing register of spatial experiences is premediated in a similar manner via vari-

ous (trans)media circuits.
3. Normalization of social practice (corresponding to lived space): The last regime
refers to the ways in which the appropriation of media changes social norms,
conventions, and expectations at the level of everyday practice. These normali-
zations, which operate through common sense and thus contribute to the main-
tenance of shared value systems and mythologies, pertain both to the timing
and spacing of people’s life activities. During the mass media era, for instance,
television brought along the normalization of certain rhythms and rituals
within households and other communities, as well as informal agendas of
“media-related talk” and modes of domestic monitoring and control (e.g. par-
ents vs. children) (see Lull 1990). These phenomena evolved in relation to
pre-established structures of lived space, such as politically and religiously
grounded family values, and were thus not the product of television alone
(Spigel 1992). In times of expanding transmedia networks we can see many
new forms of social normalization taking shape, notably related to what we
may call “smartphone culture”, which does not necessarily mean that founda-
tional values are altered (Goggin 2006; Ling 2008).

Breaking down mediatization into these three regimes enables us to delineate

social and cultural change with greater specificity, and discern internal contradic-
tions within the meta-process at large. A key point here is that the three regimes
are interdependent. The relations between them may take on antagonistic as well
as symbiotic qualities depending on contextual conditions. To a great deal, and
what is normally meant by mediatization, alterations within one regime corre-
spond in a positive manner with alterations within the other two. For example,
the common experience of not managing one’s life without a smartphone (indis-
pensability) is positively correlated to managing and planning all kinds of upcom-
ing events online (premediation) and a sense of belonging to a well-functioning
modern media society where such practices are positively sanctioned (normaliza-
tion of practice). However, as mentioned already at the outset of this chapter,
mediatization also involves tensions. The indispensability of a smartphone may
thus also be linked to feelings of ambiguity and stress; feelings of being forced
into certain modes of routinized sociability (notably via social media platforms)
and exposed to spaces, events, and (commercial) publicity beyond one’s actual
wants and desires.
These points, and the general socio-spatial approach to mediatization, are
important to keep in mind throughout the remainder of this chapter. The forthcom-
ing three sections deal exclusively with perceived space and the regime of material
indispensability and adaptation. Nevertheless, this regime, which I deconstruct
further via the concepts of technics, properties, and textures, cannot be uncoupled
from the rest of the triadic model.
280 André Jansson

3 Media technics
A particularly relevant starting-point for understanding how different technologies
are appropriated, perceived, and positioned as indispensable parts of the lifeworld
is Don Ihde’s “phenomenology of human–technology relations” (1990: 72). Ihde
introduces four principal sets of human–technology relations.
The first set consists of embodiment relations. In this set, typically represented
by optical technologies such as eyeglasses, the world is perceived through a tech-
nology, whose presence is barely noticed or reflected upon by the subject. When
wearing glasses, if they function well, they “withdraw” from the wearer’s experi-
ence of the world. Embodiment relations may thus be described as “the symbiosis
of artifact and user within a human action” (Ihde 1990: 73). This means that the
user and his/her tool or equipment become one, as in contexts of long-developed
relations of handicraft (hammer, knife, etc.) or sports (skis, racing car, etc.). As
Ihde points out, the dream of seamless body–technology relations has been perti-
nent throughout modern history, giving rise to utopian as well as dystopian proph-
ecies of human cyborgs. Still, media technologies have rarely managed to occupy
such a symbiotic, invisible relationship with the body and the senses. Probably the
telephone is the best example of a medium of communication whose technological
functioning and material presence “withdraw” during the act of use.
The second set of human–technology relations Ihde calls hermeneutic technics.
Here we encounter the type of relations that have most generally marked mass
media society. In contrast to embodiment relations they involve some act of read-
ing, where a technology is positioned as the interface through which the user can
read the world. This is to say that hermeneutic technics, such as maps, charts,
and written texts, provide (potentially premediating) representations of space (cf.
Lefebvre 1991). In ideal cases, when hermeneutic technics are working smoothly,
the user does not reflect on this interface even though the object of perception is
precisely the technology as such rather than the world. One could say that a differ-
ent type of symbiosis or transparency occurs, one between technology and the
world, when the user enters the representational realm through the praxis of inter-
pretation. As Ihde (1990: 82) explains, “textual transparency is hermeneutic trans-
parency, not perceptual transparency”.
This means that a technology, whether we speak of a thermometer, a newspa-
per, or an industrial switch-board, can become transparent and thus integrated as
part of the taken for granted lifeworld only if the user possesses the appropriate
hermeneutic skills, that is, masters one or several codes. The relationship also
depends on the user’s trust in the mediating capability of a technology. Transpar-
ency is immediately threatened if the reader does not find a certain scale trustwor-
thy or suspect that information is incomplete or biased – a problem which has
been scrutinized extensively and from different perspectives in media and commu-
nication studies ever since Shannon and Weaver ([1948] 1963) introduced their
influential model of radio transmission.
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 281

The third and fourth variants of human–technology relations are called alterity
relations and background relations, respectively. These sets are distinct from the
previous ones in the sense that technology does not in any significant way mediate
between the individual and the world. Nevertheless, these types of technologies
are essential to the composition of modern lifeworlds. In the case of alterity rela-
tions, technology itself becomes the object of attention; the user is not given access
to any other world than the imaginative space of technology itself. This is also an
often mythologized or ideologically saturated (lived) space. Ihde mentions several
different forms of alterity relations; the personalization of technology, through
which artifacts are fetishized or sacralized; the othering of technology as some-
thing to master or contest; technology as a toy or object of fascination, and tech-
nology as something to interact with as a competitor. As Ihde argues, many tech-
nological innovations in history have attained the status of sacralized objects of
fascination, before successively being turned into more mundane objects for daily
use. This condition also holds true for many media technologies (Marvin 1988;
Mosco 2004).
The final variant, background relations, is different from alterity relations in
the sense that technology is not placed at the centre of attention, but operates in
the background of other practices. In background relations technologies function
as “texturing” devices (Ihde 1990: 109) for creating certain environmental experi-
ences (visually, audibly, or materially), either within open spaces or as means for
generating spatial encapsulation (e.g. Jansson 2007a). Background technologies
thus attain the position of “an absent presence as a part of or a total field of
immediate technology” (Ihde 1990: 111). This does not mean that they are neutral
or less significant to the lifeworld than focal technologies, however. As Ihde
argues, background technologies attain different types of texturing affordances
and often “exert more subtle indirect effects upon the way a world is experienced”
(1990: 112). A case in point here is the taken for granted but nonetheless crucial
presence of audible background media in such commercial spaces as department
stores.
There is an important common denominator to these four variants, pointing
to the very core of the mediatization meta-process. Ihde’s phenomenology of tech-
nics, which I have introduced just briefly here, clarifies in a systematic way how
experiences of indispensability, and the necessity of adaptation, run parallel to
the naturalization of artifacts in the lifeworld. This does not mean that a particular
technology in fact, or in any fundamental sense, becomes indispensable to social
life or human existence just because its existence is taken for granted. However,
the more a particular medium is taken for granted and the more it becomes transpar-
ent as technology, the more difficult it is to exclude it from the practices of day-to-
day life. This is also the point of departure for Deuze (2011) in his perspective on
“media life” (albeit Ihde’s work is overlooked).
It is possible to assess, at least in a tentative manner, the significance of medi-
atization according to each of the four human–technology relations mentioned
282 André Jansson

above, and gain a more systematized understanding of how the indispensability

of media evolves as a socio-material phenomenon of our times. Even though Ihde’s
systematization preceded the vast expansion of mobile media technologies, it is
particularly apt for clarifying how the introduction of networked, portable comput-
ers, touch-pads, and smartphones has propelled the mediatization meta-process
into a sub-stage of “transmediatization”.

3.1 Lubricating mediatization: transmedia technologies and

their disappearance
In the qualitative interviews referred to in the Introduction (which were conducted
in diverse social contexts in Sweden between 2010 and 2012) we asked our respon-
dents which medium was the most important one in their lives. Most respondents
mentioned television, laptop, and/or mobile telephone. The latter two were moti-
vated in terms of their portability and versatility, highlighting the social signifi-
cance of the technological leap from “ordinary” cellphones to smartphones (basi-
cally computers). The original transparency of telephone technology that Ihde
talks about, the propensity of technology to “withdraw” through embodiment
when talking to somebody, is combined with both portability and a number of
other human–technology relations. The smartphone, and related platforms, thus
represent technologies that cannot be categorized according to just one of Ihde’s
four variants, but involve processes of naturalization and “disappearance” at dif-
ferent levels, making them increasingly indispensable omnibus devices. As Wise
argues, what is new about “the clickable world” is not disappearance as such,
but “the scale of the disappearance, and the power the attenuating technologies
potentially have over our lives” (Wise 2012: 162).
Still, in order to systematize our discussion, we may look at each of the four
sets of relations separately. Firstly, the fact that technological miniaturization
makes it easier to carry, even wear, digital communication devices close to the
body, implies that a whole new range of embodiment relations have emerged. Even
though most functions embedded in for example smartphones require some kind
of interaction via an interface, and thus imply hermeneutic relations, the experi-
ence of “nakedness” when not wearing one’s mobile indicate that the very habit
of having permanent, and instant, access to contacts, information, entertainment,
and so on, via the online realm implies a sort of technological embodiment.
Secondly, the development of new software applications and refined interfaces
has contributed to the transparency of hermeneutic relations and thus provided a
sort of lubricant to mediatization processes. The appropriation and installation of
new mobile devices rarely requires any separate instruction manuals; users are
guided through the installation process, and can start using the new device within
minutes. There is thus less hermeneutic work and a less arbitrary learning process
involved for “getting started”. Furthermore, the iconography of smartphones and
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 283

touch-pads entails a more direct code than older, text-based menus and com-
mands, which dominated the digital realm just a few decades ago. Today, even
one-year-old children quickly learn how to master these devices, and navigate
between different functions and contents.
In addition to this, the interactive nature of many applications, as well as
online search engines and commercial websites, integrate algorithms that to some
extent enable technologies to adapt to the user and his/her habits and preferences.
As users we encounter special offers and recommendations, based on aggregate
data categorizing us into certain patterns and segments. This means that it
becomes easier to find relevant information and services, provided that we submit
to a certain degree of surveillance (e.g. Andrejevic 2007, 2014). Our view of the
world, which the (mass)media have traditionally provided via news and other
types of content, is thus to a growing extent combined with a view of an interactive
“service space” (banking, e-commerce, and so on), as well as a mirroring view of
ourselves, our habits, and preferences. We do not merely “read ourselves into any
possible situation without being there”, as Ihde (1990: 92, italics in original) puts
it, but also track ourselves, and even start developing our lifestyles according to
“nudging” applications (Wilson 2012).
Altogether, the altered shape of hermeneutic relations sustains indispensabil-
ity in two complementary ways: on the one hand, through adaptable software and
simplified interfaces that make technology increasingly transparent, and on the
other hand through the opening of a multitude of worlds via one single (and
potentially interconnected) media device. Whereas these factors do not in them-
selves explain (trans)mediatization, they are important to its lubrication.
Thirdly, smartphones and associated devices make the lines between herme-
neutic technics and alterity relations diffuse. As already indicated, the types of
“worlds” that these technics provide access to are increasingly diverse, and some
of them also more or less self-contained and self-referential. For instance, many
lifestyle applications where users are encouraged to track and improve their per-
formances, typically in sports, are designed to enable a significant degree of play-
ability and shareability. It means that users enter into a world of play and competi-
tion, which on the one hand refers to a social world outside of techno-space (and
thus can be seen as a hermeneutic relation), but on the other hand contains modes
of representation and attention-building that are more akin to alterity relations.
Besides the fact that new technology may occupy a more or less sacred position
within the lifestyles of certain groups and individuals, related to novelty and par-
ticular brand value, an entire new world of game and play is thus created. These
worlds can also be accessed almost anywhere and anytime due to the portability
of new online devices, making these devices indispensable for “killing time” while
waiting or in transit. These examples highlight the complexity of indispensability,
and clearly illustrate how this regime of mediatization is tied to both premedia-
tions (conceived space) and to the successive normalization of new social practices
(lived space).
284 André Jansson

Finally, the media have a long history of generating and entering into back-
ground relations, in private as well as public spaces. Perhaps radio and other
audible media have had the most prominent role for giving a certain “feel” to
spaces and situations marked by other social functions and practices (Tacchi
1988). Here, the main key to extended indispensability is whether such back-
ground relations involve a sustainable form of textural amalgamation between
media uses and other practices, or not. As Schulz (2004) argues, amalgamation is
one of the basic forms that mediatization takes, and it is not limited to relations
through which media technologies produce socially shared environments. Again,
the portability and versatility of new media devices enable single users to generate
their own, technologically invisible, soundscapes through which they can experi-
ence the world around them, for example while exercising (see Bull 2001, 2007).
It becomes a mode of being alone together with others (see also Deuze 2011).
One may of course discuss whether this generation of private, encapsulated
textures, operating at the same time (and interchangeably) as text and context
(Jansson 2006, 2007b), is a valid sign of material indispensability. Wouldn’t it be
possible to dispense with media under such relatively exclusive conditions?
Wouldn’t it be possible to exercise without listening to one’s favourite music, for
example? Questions like these are ultimately tied to moral philosophical concerns
and the dilemma of what constitutes an actual need among human beings – mate-
rially, socially, or in other ways. If we consider the other aspect of this regime of
mediatization, adaptation, however, the picture becomes clearer. The amalgama-
tion of private media technologies and other practices through the creation of
background relations constitutes a good example of how certain individual activi-
ties are ritually adapted to the material existence and affordances of the media. I
return to these issues in relation to Media Textures (Part 5).

4 Media properties
As demonstrated in the previous section, mobile transmedia technologies (com-
pared to singular media) may be incorporated within the lifeworld in increasingly
complex, open-ended ways. This must not be misunderstood as a techno-determin-
istic view, however. Even though it is clear that technologies are significant in
themselves, notably by means of their technological “disappearance”, the actual
magnitude of (trans)mediatization can never be estimated or understood without
also taking into account the contexts, or social lifeworlds, within which particular
“I-technology-world” relations materialize. In other words, “media things” are
much more than technics. To a significant extent they are also cultural properties
that may be appropriated or rejected on the basis of cultural values as much as
functional assets. This is to say that our key concept, indispensability, is to be
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 285

seen partly as a cultural construct, whose phenomenological status fluctuates

according to structural conditions.
Here, Bourdieu’s work on taste and practical knowledge provides a bridge
between phenomenology and structuralist theory on socio-cultural reproduction.
An illustrative example is Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984) discussion of “the taste for
necessity”. In Bourdieu’s analyses such an orientation is identified primarily
among the working classes, where the habits and preferences of social actors often
remain stable even though the material conditions have altered. The inclination
of demanding considerably less than what might be economically possible to
appropriate implies that the taste for necessity is “operating out of phase, having
survived the disappearance of the conditions that produced it” (Bourdieu [1979]
1984: 374).
In other parts of social space, however, the force of habitus – the invisible
hand of socially inherited dispositions – may look considerably different. Among
mobile middle class groupings, particularly among the “new bourgeoisie”, one
might discern conditions where subjects have a vested interest in expressive con-
sumption. This is partly due to the need for acquiring “correct” lifestyle attributes
that can match the standards of one’s social aspirations. It is also, and at the same
time, connected to a social desire for “ethical retooling” (Bourdieu [1979] 1984:
310) of the economy as such. The interests of emerging middle-class factions bene-
fit from the continuous production of symbolic and social needs; a hedonistic
morality based on consumption and spending practices that reject the traditional
ethic of sobriety, saving, and accumulation.
If we combine such lines of thinking with Bourdieu’s general argument regard-
ing economic versus cultural capital, we can conclude that the social judgment of
such phenomena as “necessity” and “indispensability” may fluctuate not only in
terms of to what extent individuals and groups are inclined to appropriate new
media things – that is, making them their properties (Bourdieu [1997] 2000: 134) –
but also what types of things they regard as desirable and/or necessary properties
in their lives. Most of the time these judgements are not reflexively developed, but
integral to the lifeworld itself, structured by the force of habitus. Processes of
appropriation are thus thoroughly interlaced with practical knowledge, and inform
the structures of classification that provided the conditions for cultural judgments
in the first place:

[P]ractical knowledge is doubly informed by the world that it informs: it is constrained by the
objective structure of the configuration of properties that the world presents to it; and it is
also structured through the schemes, resulting from incorporation of the structures of the
world, that it applies in selecting and constructing these objective properties (Bourdieu [1997]
2000: 148).

This perspective adds a contextualizing layer to Ihde’s phenomenological view of

technics, stressing that the constitution of technological relationships partly depends
on whether those can be legitimized within a certain socio-cultural setting or not.
286 André Jansson

From this also follows that whereas the economic epicentre of mediatization, that
is, mediatization seen as a materially expansive process, is located in those parts
of social space where the production of new mediatized needs are deemed socio-
culturally beneficial (typically within the mobile middle classes), there are also
social sites where processes of extensive media appropriation are met with moral
and cultural skepticism, and where the functionalities of certain new media forms
may collide with practical knowledge.

4.1 Cultural battles of (trans)mediatization

As a case in point, we may here return to the first of the introductory interview
extracts. Even though the respondent, when describing the various functions of
the household’s six television sets, does not define those properties in terms of
“indispensability”, he provides a rationalized explication of what type of “I-tech-
nology-world” relation each television set is needed for: gaming, video films, chil-
dren’s programmes, and so on, depending on their functional status. Accordingly,
older machines are successively moved to more peripheral places in the home,
used for more confined purposes. But these are not value free judgments. In a
different social setting, obeying a moral economy (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley
1992) marked for instance by the possession of greater amounts of cultural capital,
such a mode of legitimization would have been less likely. The cultural skepticism
towards television in general, and excessive television watching in particular,
which also manifests itself through the material shaping of households – such as
the placement, size, and quantity of television sets and associated properties
(video recorders, satellite dishes, and so on) – has been reported repeatedly in
studies of broadcasting audiences (see e.g. Moores 1993; Jansson 2001). Further-
more, it follows from the autonomizing logic of cultural capital that most popular
forms of alterity relations – the fascination with new technology; the sacralization
of certain brands; “escapist” forms of gaming, and so on – are met with suspicion.
This way of handling media things, as markers of taste and lifestyle, proves
that we cannot understand the fluctuations of material indispensability and adap-
tation merely through the lens of technological-relational dependency. As indi-
cated by the empirical examples, the felt need for (or disgust with) certain media,
regardless of what type of phenomenological relation they may represent, points
beyond the realm of technics. The need for properties is certainly not the same
thing as the need for technics, and sometimes this leads to experiences of ambigu-
ity among social subjects.
This is shown in the second interview example. The respondent, a 65-year-old
female teacher in Stockholm, describes how she “held out” and wanted to use her
old mobile phone as long as it was still working, expressing a distinct moral (anti-
materialist) attitude towards the value of properties, informed by cultural rather
than economic capital. Eventually she got herself a smartphone, due to the felt
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 287

need for staying in touch with her son (who helped her to decide) and other rela-
tives around the world via social media. As a further consequence, she has succes-
sively established a growing number of world-relations via her smartphone, and
now finds it difficult to do without it. In this case, thus, the process of appropria-
tion is rather stretched out and grounded in the value of particular hermeneutic
relations rather than in the symbolic value (alterity relation) of the artifact itself.
A parallel example is the declining market for traditional newspapers. In Scan-
dinavian countries the daily broadsheet has had an extremely strong position for
many decades, especially due to subscriptions, and often been a more or less
indispensable part of people’s everyday (morning) rituals. Due to the competition
from other media, including online distribution, this position is threatened, not
only in economic terms, but also from a cultural point of view. Readers are more
or less forced to appropriate new technologies for getting access to their favourite
news source. This signifies a general shift in the movement of mediatization,
through which one relation of indispensability replaces another one. The shape of
this new era of immediacy (Tomlinson 2007), in which news is expected to be
available “at one’s fingertips”, is illustrated by the third interview extract. Discon-
nection from the world of news becomes more or less unthinkable, as told by the
informant’s experience of being “left behind” after less than a day offline. How-
ever, to certain groups of the market such a shift means much more than just the
adaptation to a new form of hermeneutic technics. It also means, potentially, the
loss of a signifying property, namely the classified and classifying marker of the
printed newspaper, enhanced by the value of particular brands.
When analysing the significance of properties from a Bourdieusian perspective
we are thus able to grasp in a deeper and contextualized sense the phenomenologi-
cal complexity of technological relations, and thus the dynamics of mediatization.
The fact that certain groups are willing to defend their printed newspaper, for
example, unveils that there are alterity relations, such as the sacralization of print
media, at play, besides the hermeneutic value of news-reporting. This, in turn, can
be taken as an illustration of the internal tensions of the mediatization meta-pro-
cess – an expression of resistance to (trans)mediatization linked to the cultural
desire for maintaining clear boundaries in terms of time, space, and social rela-
tions. From such a view-point, the integrated and system-dependent nature of
transmedia technologies constitutes a threat to individual autonomy and estab-
lished criteria of cultural quality (such as “originality” and “objectivity”).
The introduction of converging (trans)media platforms tends to diffuse such
modern categories. Transmedia devices hold the potential to establish a diverse
array of relations, and can be dynamically adapted to different functional needs.
At the same time, the interconnectivity and open-ended flow of digital data
between different platforms (smartphones, cameras, computers, and so on) imply
that the material spaces of everyday life are turned into integrated media environ-
ments, where one particular function or relation might be established via various
288 André Jansson

access-points. As Madianou and Miller (2012) argue, the question of which media
to use for fulfilling which social need is not related to functionality alone, but
also, and increasingly, to moral and cultural predispositions in combination with
situational conditions. As processes of media appropriation become more open-
ended, so does the value of “media things” as properties. In a material environ-
ment where there are (hypothetically) no longer any record collections, newspa-
pers, and books to put on display, the cultural value, and thus indispensability,
of various devices will to a greater extent follow from how they are put into use,
that is, how they are embedded in textural relations.

5 Media textures
Analysing textures does not mean that we turn to an entirely new dimension of
media things. Rather, reaching the third level of analysis means that we look at
media things in their dual capacity as technics and properties; the means for build-
ing certain world relations as well as the means for cultural classification. Studying
textures also means that we look at the ways in which media things become indis-
pensable not merely through their functional and symbolic capacities, but also
through what they feel like when they enter into patterns of amalgamation through
social practice. Texture thus brings together the key ideas of a materialist frame-
work, which as Wise (2012: 160) argues, “is more about resonance than representa-
tion, about forms and substances brought into relation”. To some extent we have
already touched upon these issues. In Ihde’s work there are overlapping argu-
ments in his discussions of the lifeworld as a “technologically textured ecosystem”
(Ihde 1990: 3), as well as in his discussions on background relations. In Bourdieu’s
([1997] 2000) analysis of bodily knowledge we find corresponding observations as
to how the positionings and relations of people and properties in social and physi-
cal space are both enacted by and inscribed in the body as a sort of ongoing
material socialization, and/or social materialization.
More significantly, however, my understanding of texture builds upon Lefeb-
vre’s (1991) critical theory of the production of space. Here, the concept of texture
points to the “communicative fabric of space” (Jansson 2007b), established
through the meaningful repetition of spatial practices and ordering of communica-
tive properties in space, as well as to the naturalized bodily and sensory experi-
ence, the “feel”, of this fabric (see also Adams, Hoelscher and Till 2001). Spatial
practices are sometimes of a deliberately communicative nature, such as dinner
conversations around the kitchen table, or crowds of people gathering at the movie
theatre in the evening. But they also include those infrastructures and everyday
streams of activity that leave meaningful, communicative traces in social space:
daily-commuting patterns in the city; the spatial organization of our home environ-
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 289

ments; border arrangements at airports, and so on. All such arrangements are
communicative.
Textures enable and give shape to certain types of communication in a given
setting, while excluding other types of communication (as well as groups of peo-
ple). They thus support our sense of continuity and belonging (or “out-of-place-
ness”) both at the representational level and in an embodied sense, as we learn
how to move and act in various settings (Moores and Metykova 2010; Moores 2012).
Accordingly, textures do not appear at random; they materialize through certain
spatial and temporal regularities and rhythms:

Paths are more important than the traffic they bear, because they are what endures in the
form of the reticular patterns left by animals, both wild and domestic, and by people (in and
around the houses of village or small town, as in the town’s immediate environs). Always
distinct and clearly indicated, such traces embody the ‘values’ assigned to particular routes:
danger, safety, waiting, promise. This graphic aspect, which was obviously not apparent to
the original ‘actors’ but which becomes quite clear with the aid of modern-day cartography,
has more in common with a spider’s web than with a drawing or plan. Could it be called a
text, or a message? Possibly, but the analogy would serve no particularly useful purpose, and
it would make more sense to speak of texture rather than of texts in this connection. […] Time
and space are not separable within a texture so conceived: space implies time, and vice versa.
(Lefebvre 1991: 118)

The last point helps us to further explicate the nature of indispensability. When
theorizing how media things and associated media practices amalgamate with
other spatial practices (Schulz 2004) we may distinguish the spatial/vertical
dimension and the temporal/horizontal from one another.

5.1 Vertical amalgamations

Along the vertical dimension amalgamation takes the shape of layerings or “thick-
enings” (cf. Hepp 2009b) of practices and artifacts at a particular place. This refers
to the fact that social actors learn what to expect from certain places, and also
shape places, in terms of “what goes with what”. In many institutional settings
there are functional reasons to this type of amalgamation. In a train station, for
example, travellers expect to find electronic information screens, timetables,
clocks, and surveillance cameras; these are part of the preconditions for the provi-
sion of efficient and safe transit systems. As illustrated by our fourth interview
extract, even though the systemic imposition of abstract technologies, notably sur-
veillance cameras, is not always socially embraced – depending on type of setting
and cultural context (see Jansson 2012) – these systems are part of constructing
the need for textural adaptation and routinization on behalf of social agents.
There are also spatial amalgamations based on cultural conventions and ritual
practice. Many of us have the habit of reading the newspaper, checking out Face-
book, or playing Wordfeud, while waiting for or travelling by public transit. Certain
290 André Jansson

media forms, translated into practice, thus have a stronger potential to amalga-
mate with certain spatial practices than others. Through repetition these amalga-
mations are turned into durable sediments, implying that we “cannot have one
thing without the other”: “no running without my portable music”; “no breakfast
without my newspaper”, and so on. The indispensability of a media device can
here be traced to the fact that the overall feel of texture, the “comfort of things”
that Miller (2008) speaks about, is ruptured, and associated practices even disa-
bled, if the particular device is somehow missing or displaced. The indispensability
of media becomes symbiotically linked to the normalization of social practices,
thus reinforcing the overall mediatization of social space.

5.2 Horizontal amalgamations

Along the temporal/horizontal dimension we find textural amalgamations
grounded in routinized, or functionally interdependent, sequences of practice. We
can express this type of temporal ordering as such: “after doing this, I have to do
that,” or; “before doing that, I have to do this.” Horizontal amalgamations thus
create certain rhythms in everyday life, which may take on different shapes in
different cultural and historical settings. In contexts of agrarian society we can
envision the regular, mostly cyclic, sequences related to the cultivation of land
and cattle. The integration of media technologies, however, took off, and had an
accelerating effect, during the industrialization process, which among other things
demanded more abstract forms of time-keeping (Schivelbusch 1987; Kern 2003).
Clocks and other time-keeping devices have had a pervasive effect on modern life,
also within the private realm; even the very adjustment and maintenance of such
technologies have been an amalgamated part of everyday textures (such as wind-
ing up the clock in the morning, or adjusting the alarm clock before going to
sleep).
Perhaps even more prominently, however, the time-binding role of the media
has been associated with broadcasting, and the scheduling of radio and television
programming. Such examples range from the ritualized forms of Friday night gath-
erings in front of the television set, to the more practical necessity of listening to
weather forecasts before setting out on journeys in the mountains or on the sea.
Omitting such media practices, or the technologies that are indispensable for
them, may evoke feelings of insecurity as well as emptiness.
Still, we must keep in mind Lefebvre’s basic point that time and space are
impossible to keep separate in actual processes of texturation. Horizontal amalga-
mation most often implies vertical amalgamation, and vice versa, since a particular
(mediatized) practice may have the tendency to occur at a certain time and place
according to certain, functionally or culturally conditioned, logics. The textural
inseparability of time and space testifies to the strength of certain amalgamations
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 291

of media; the fact that particular technologies (often by way of the contents they
carry) are felt to be indispensable at a certain time and place.

5.3 Transmedia textures

It is difficult to say whether the ongoing shift from mass media textures to transme-
dia textures generates “stronger” or “weaker” amalgamations. One can at least say
that they are qualitatively different; indispensability evolves in partly new ways.
This is reflected in how people’s horizons of expectations shift, in terms of when
and where they expect certain media devices and information flows to be available
and for what purposes. In the era of mass media, most access points were tempo-
rally and/or spatially fixed and predefined. Newspapers were categorized as “even-
ing papers” or “morning papers”, distributed according to institutionalized trans-
port routes to particularly assigned media outlets, or to the customer. Radio and
television technologies were for a long time highly stationary technologies – a
type of everyday fixtures – whose contents were not easily transferrable to other
platforms (Moores 1988; Adams 1992). Sound- and video-cassette recorders, as well
as portable devices, successively enabled some degree of flexibility (such as “time-
shifting”), but it is not until the above discussed expansion of converging digital
media that we can discern a major textural shift.
Above all, “transmediatization” means that the ways in which media amalga-
mate with other practices are becoming more open-ended and individualized.
When media contents are expected to be available anytime and anywhere, and
through different platforms, textures are no longer (to the same extent) institution-
ally determined. This does not mean that the material force of mediatization has
weakened, however; as shown repeatedly throughout this chapter, and by the
opening quotes, the versatility of transmedia devices enables them to interweave
with everyday textures in increasingly complex ways. Sometimes this involves the
amalgamation with stable routines, such as regular Spotify listening in the car
every morning. At other times, as Soukup argues in an ethnographic account of
postmodern media culture, everyday life is rather characterized by “fleeting
moments without clear unity or sequence” marked by “the experience of being
between screens and/or cultures rather than firmly entrenched in a single machine
or cultural boundary” (Soukup 2012: 234–235).

6 Conclusion: the coming of transmediatization

Following Lefebvre’s triadic model of social space I have argued that mediatization
may be divided into three mutually interdependent regimes: (1) material indispen-
sability and adaptation, (2) premediation of spatial experience, and (3) normaliza-
292 André Jansson

tion of social practice. Together these regimes chart out the complexity and perva-
siveness of mediatization in modern life. In order to grasp how mediatization
operates as a socio-material force of everyday life I have in this chapter focused
on the first of these three regimes. This does not mean that the other two regimes
have been entirely left out of the picture, however. Rather, the analytical frame-
work suggested here unveils the ways in which different forces are interwoven in
the shaping of mediatization.
The analytical framework includes a three-level approach to the study of mate-
rial indispensability and adaptation. I have argued that a fuller understanding of
this regime can be reached through a combination of Ihde’s (1990) core notion of
“I-technology-world” relations (media technics), Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1984) sociologi-
cal theories of socio-cultural legitimation and practical knowledge (media proper-
ties), and Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) phenomenology of the materialization of every-
day life (media textures). Whereas certain technological shifts, such as extended
portability and simplified iconographic interfaces, may indeed contribute to the
“disappearance”, or naturalization of media within the lifeworld – and thus to the
“lubrication of mediatization” – the full potential of such innovations of technics
can only be realized so long as their affordances resonate with pre-established
structures of practical knowledge and legitimation within concrete settings of
appropriation, and if the practical usage of new media devices creates strong tex-
tural amalgamations with various other social practices in time and space. By
means of various real-life examples I have demonstrated that the threefold
approach suggested here is instructive for identifying the internal contradictions
and fluctuations of the mediatization meta-process.
Another key theme of this chapter has been the altered shape of mediatization.
One of the main strengths of the mediatization concept is the avoidance of techno-
logical determinism; the non-media-centric view of interdependencies between
media developments (technological, institutional, and representational) and struc-
tural conditions in society. Such a perspective is integral to the analytical frame-
work outlined in this chapter. Still, one cannot deny that the general appearance
of mediatization, the way it looks, is largely linked to the ways in which the media
operate, that is, to what types of communication existing technologies enable and
what types of communicative needs they satisfy in certain contexts. Here, I have
tried to outline the implications of digital transmedia technologies in terms of a
qualitative shift within the regime of material indispensability and adaptation. This
is not to say that mediatization has essentially acquired a new meaning or that
entirely new regimes are emerging. However, the ways in which such conditions
of media dependence and normalization develop look considerably different in the
transmedia era, compared to the mass media era. From the viewpoint of indispen-
sability I have chosen to describe this as a textural shift, through which new media
forms, understood as both technics and properties, amalgamate with pre-existing
socio-material patterns in increasingly flexible and open-ended, yet integrating,
ways. This is what transmediatization signifies – the new face of mediatization.
 Indispensable things: on mediatization, materiality, and space 293

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Niels Ole Finnemann
13 Digitization: new trajectories of
mediatization?

“Media matter to practices of communication

because embodiment matters.”
(J. D. Peters 1999: 65)

Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to clarify what the concept of digital media
might add to the understanding of mediatization and what the concept of mediati-
zation might add to the understanding of digital media.
It is argued that digital media open an array of new trajectories in human commu-
nication, which were not anticipated in previous conceptualizations of media and
mediatization. If digital media are to be included, the concept of mediatization
has to be revised and new parameters must be integrated in the concept of media.
At the same time, it is argued that the concept of mediatization still provides a
variety of perspectives of relevance to the study of digital media.
The claim that the concept of mediatization has to be reinterpreted can only be
legitimized if digital media are considered distinct from the media formerly
referred to in mediatization theory. Such characteristics are presented and digital
media are defined in section 2, while section 1 is devoted to theories of mediatiza-
tion and the notion of media. Section 3 analyses the relation between mediatiza-
tion and digitization. Finally, in section 4, medium theory is revisited with a view
to harvest some missing fruits in contemporary mediatization theory.

Keywords: digital materials and genres, digitization and mediatization, grammar

of digital media, institutionalization of media, Internet and mass media, materiali-
zations of media, media theories: modern or general, medium theory, modes of
mediatization, notion of networked digital media

1 Theories of mediatization
For years processes of digitization have represented a major trend in the develop-
ments of modern society, but they have only recently been related to processes of
mediatization.
Among the unresolved questions in recent discussions on the concept of medi-
atization are the following questions: When did mediatization emerge? Which
media are taken into account? How do different media add to the concept? How
are the relationship between the time/space properties, the material characteristics
of various media, and the institutional forms understood?
298 Niels Ole Finnemann

Some answers to the first question refer exclusively to “contemporary media”

(Strömbäck 2008; Hjarvard 2008); others refer to all sorts of communication
throughout history (Rothenbuhler 2009). The most dominant idea, however, is to
see mediatization on a par with processes of individualization, modernization, and
globalization, which are closely connected to modern media, print, radio, film and
television, and digital media (Krotz 2007; Lundby 2009; overview in Finnemann
2011; Hepp 2013). Except for Rothenbuhler (2009), focus is exclusively on modern
media or what Altheide and Snow (1979: 11) called modern “overshadowing”
media.
The second question, about which media are taken into account, refers back
to the first question of emergence. But the question of “which media” is not simply
a matter of historical origin and the particular long-term perspective referred to;
it is also a matter of which communicative activities within a given society are
included. Thus, it remains unsettled whether the concept includes the overall set
of media within a given society (Rothenbuhler 2009), a selected set (Hjarvard
2008), whether it relates to a specific medium (Strömbäck 2008) or it refers pri-
marily to an evolutionary logic in the incorporation of new media whenever they
emerge (Schulz 2004).
The third question, about what different media add to the concept, is more
complicated. According to Krotz (2007), mediatization is a metaprocess that does
not depend on particular media. Mediatization is everywhere, at least in modern
societies. On the other hand, mediatization can only exist in particular practices,
as there is no general logic of media. However, it also seems that mediatization
has a kind of history that unfolds itself somehow, though the agencies in these
processes are seldom made explicit. Others have argued that the concept is closely
connected to specific institutional forms, which also add a sort of historical agency,
an ability to impose a particular logic, and agenda-setting capacities (Hjarvard
2008; Strömbäck 2008).
The fourth question – How is the relationship between the time/space proper-
ties, the material characteristics of various media, and the institutional forms
understood? – seems to be the most difficult; there have been quite a lot of indica-
tions that the materiality of media does not matter at all, but very few attempts to
provide an answer. It appears that all sorts of media technologies – writing sys-
tems, the printing press, the telephone, television systems, the Internet – are sim-
ply reduced to “technology”, which can be left out of the analysis of media cul-
tures. Hepp builds on a distinction between “first order media”, such as “the
internet as a vehicle for the transmission protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP)
model”, and “second order media”, which “are in addition social cultural institu-
tions of communication” (2013: 4). In this case, media technology, for instance
TCP/IP Internet protocols, does not seem to be part of a social cultural institution
of communication. This is a surprise. Media and communication studies are based
on these “technical media”, the properties of which it will exclude in a theory of
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 299

mediatization. Since digital media introduce a radical change in the materializa-

tion of media, this blind spot will be further discussed below.
To include digital media, the concept of mediatization will in the following be
used as a metaconcept, referring to the basic characteristics of human communica-
tion: it is always mediated, but in a variety of historically distinct forms. Conse-
quently, mediatization cannot be said to comprise a general set of properties char-
acterizing all sorts of mediated communication or a family of properties distributed
in different ways among the members. Instead the concept will be used to denote
main parameters for analysing particular mediatization processes related to par-
ticular media in particular constellations of media.
Any such constellation of media which is available in a society is denoted as
a matrix of media. The particular institutionalizations are denoted as media sys-
tems. The matrix may be the same, even if usages and institutionalizations differ
in say different countries, as shown in Hallin and Mancini (2004) for print news
media. Mediatization processes will always refer to both dimensions. The matrix,
the set of available media, specifies the material repertoire as well as the time and
space constraints of communication, but it does not reveal how the repertoire is
institutionalized and used in a given society. Thus, agencies and institutionaliza-
tions are not part of the matrix, but of the media systems that comprise the whole
chain of communication within a society, including all communicating agencies
(Finnemann 2011).
Usages come into question in both dimensions. On the one hand, usages are
constrained and facilitated by the properties of the available media in the matrix.
On the other hand, the selected utilizations also depend on the interplay between
the economic, institutional, political, social, and cultural needs of the citizens.
The metaconcept is derived from Krotz, but in a more generalized interpreta-
tion, embracing the whole history of human communication. This is in accordance
with the claim that all forms of human communication are externalized, material-
ized and encoded in a shared social system (Peters 1999; Rothenbuhler 2009: 287).
Thus, mediatization is not exclusively related to modern media, even if they add
a series of new trajectories for communication.
In this there are two hard pills for modern media theory to swallow. First,
writing and speech are both considered media. Since its emergence in the 1970s
and 1980s, the discipline of media and communication studies has defined itself
in opposition to a narrow concept of text as written or printed. While print is
sometimes included, writing is seldom acknowledged as a medium. It seems that
“the media” come into play only when “mechanical devices” detached from the
human body are involved in the reproduction process. This is the modernist bias
of media theory. The second pill is perhaps even harder to swallow, as speech is
most often considered a conceptual antipode defining “non-media”. Speech is seen
as opposed to externalized, tangible media and is often also associated with
authenticity and intimate privacy. Here media theory is in accordance with a more
widespread ignorance in modern thinking.
300 Niels Ole Finnemann

In a recent discussion of the genesis of the media concept, Guillory stated that
a notion of “media” for modern communication technologies appears only in the
late 19th century “as a response to the proliferation of new technical media – such
as the telegraph and phonograph – that could not be assimilated to the older
system of the arts” (Guillory 2010: 321). He also argued that modern thinking did
not make room for a notion of media, even if it did often stumble into the need,
referring, among other things, to Ferdinand Saussure’s interpretation of writing as
subordinate to speech, while ignoring other media in his theory of language. One
cannot but think of Plato and Descartes’ distinctions between the ideal world of
forms, res cogitans, both outside the constraints of time and space, and the mate-
rial world, res extensa, which only exists in time and space. Since media are mate-
rial vehicles for ideas, they belong to both spaces or to a third space in between;
the existence of such a space is excluded in these dualisms.
To capture the field excluded by Cartesian dualism, one may need to redefine
the concept of a medium, which in the following will be used for any sort of
organized physical material used for some symbolic purpose, i.e. for communica-
tion. This is comparable to a classic definition given, for instance, by Altheide and
Snow, according to whom a medium is “any social and technological procedure
or device that is used for the selection, transmission, and reception of information”
(1979: 11). Even if this is a wide definition which explicitly includes calendars,
fashion, and dance as media, it completely excludes the material properties of
media.
Whether the physical material takes the more fluid form of energy or the more
fixed form of matter is important for the understanding of the distinct properties
of different media, but it makes no difference for the fundamental definition. Both
energy and matter are physical, and if organized for communicational purposes
and intentions, this organization is what turns physical material into media. Media
are always in between, mediating between matter and mind as well as between
humans and between humans and our imaginations, experiences, and ideas of the
world. The triple nature of this definition can be clarified by the distinction
between three types of noise derived from Shannon’s mathematical theory of infor-
mation, though he did not explicitly identify all three forms (Shannon and Weawer
[1949] 1969). The first form is trivial physical noise disturbing communication, as
the physical forms used for communication are more or less drowned by, for
instance, background noise or other sources. The second form is semantic noise,
which occurs when the message is not properly understood due to coding discrep-
ancies between the sender and the receiver, when they do not use the same codes
for interpreting the physical forms as mediated signs. The third form is media
noise in the form of the occurrence of a physical form that is legitimate form in a
given coding system, say an alphabet, but not meant to be part of the actual
communication. Shannon found the third type particularly interesting, and his
solution was to increase the redundancy in the messages transmitted (Finnemann
[1994] 1999a: 156–196).
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 301

There are two main reasons for leaving the platonic and the modernist bias
behind.
First, speech and writing that predate modern mass media have never been
fully replaced, while their functions and usages have changed relative to the inclu-
sion of new media in the matrix. The histories of all societies include a history of
rostrums for speaking in public – be it thing steads, thrones, pulpits, cathedrae,
courts, chairs, lecterns, Hyde Park corner, or wherever people might gather around
a speaker. Such floors where speakers can speak to somebody in front of them are
institutionalized parts of the media systems in all known societies. Around the
formalized thrones and chairs there is always also a sphere for more or less
informal and often less public spoken negotiations.
Second, when it comes to digitization, there is no exclusive limit between
media and non-media. Speech, writing, radio, as well as television can be made
subject to digitization. Such digital reproductions can be combined deliberately.
This is possible, because they are already mediated, speech included, although in
different physical forms. Digitization implies that non-digital originals are con-
verted into a shared physical format – the binary alphabet – that can be mechani-
cally processed bit by bit, simply because the bits are defined as physical units.
The question of whether it is possible to limit mediatization to not include speech
and writing and only embrace some digital media and not all of them will be
further discussed below.
Since the history of media is characterized by the recurrent advent of new
media, it follows that processes of mediatization take on new forms and properties.
These processes take place neither as an additive aggregation of forms, nor as a
mere increase in the number of different types of media, but as major reconfigura-
tions of the relations between media on the level of institutionalization as well as
on the level of the matrix. In this respect, the point of departure is Wolfgang
Riepl’s theory of media evolution (Riepl 1913), modernized, among others, by Mey-
rowitz (1985), Schulz (2004), Krotz (2007, 2009) and Finnemann (1999b, 2011).
According to Riepl, new media seldom or never fully replace old media. More
often they initiate functional changes. If so, new media lead to the establishment
of a new general matrix of media that is more complex, both because the array of
media is widened and because old media are often developed and used for new
purposes and functions. The introduction of new media implies that a new layer
is incorporated in the communicational infrastructure. The invention of writing
induced a more complex matrix of media and led to a variety of new media sys-
tems, ranging from the systems found in Greek city states to the systems found in
Chinese, Roman, and other empires and medieval European principalities. Without
writing there would be no state, no general law, and no clear distinction between
past and present. In Europe the take-up of print based on movable types in the
15th century also brought new layers to the matrix, as did the invention of radio
and television in the more globalized and US-dominated world of the 20th century.
302 Niels Ole Finnemann

Since evolutionary theory is often described as linear and deterministic or not

applicable to cultural phenomena, three things should be noted.
First, no determinism is necessary, as there is no reason to claim, for instance,
that writing caused the development of state, law, and the writing of history. Writ-
ing is merely a necessary precondition for these developments, and they, of course,
have to be explained in a broader analysis of the dynamics of the societies in
question.
Second, some of the most interesting aspects of evolutionary processes are
precisely their nonlinear nature, manifested in the principle of refunctionalization
identified by Riepl and others. In modern evolutionary biology the notion of exap-
tation has been proposed, focusing on the non-deterministic increase in complex-
ity. The concept of exaptation was introduced in Gould and Vrba (1982) as “the
process by which features acquire functions for which they were not originally
adapted or selected” (Oxford English Dictionary). Among the examples, Gould
(1991) mentions the development of human speech: a most vital medium of human
communication. For a critical discussion see Buss et al. (1998).
Third, attempts to stress a fundamental ontological distinction between natu-
ral processes of evolution and cultural processes make sense only in a Cartesian,
dualistic interpretation of bodies living in a biomaterial world (as part of res
extensa) and human minds living in a distinct mental world (res cogitans). As said,
Cartesian dualism did not allow for any sort of medium in between the two realms.
It has been argued (Hepp 2013: 51), with reference to Norbert Elias (1991),
that there is a difference between the “instrument of transmission and change” in
biological evolution, which is driven by genes, and sociocultural development,
which is driven by symbols.
If there is a difference, it cannot be a difference between two completely sepa-
rate spheres. It has to be a distinction in the very same biological or biosemiotic
universe. Biology as a science may not include culture and, thus, still reserve itself
to a reductionist stance, but human communication is necessarily embodied and
mediated in between living organisms. The mind operates in the very same time
and space as the brain and both are incorporated in the body of a living organism.
In the following it is assumed that all media always mediate between physical,
biological, and mental dimensions. This is possible only because they are materi-
ally organized to fulfil some sort of symbolic articulation.
Epistemologically this implies a move from the psychophysical parallelism of
the 20th century (information theories, game theory, structuralism, etc.) to non-
causal psychophysical interactionism. Today we can safely assume that mental
processes are materially processed in the neurophysiological system; res cogitans
is intertwined with res extensa. The brain is a medium of the mind; mental states
may change physical states and vice versa. Reductionist theories deny such char-
acteristics, as they do not allow individual events that are not rule-governed. How-
ever, if all individual events were determined by previous events, there would be
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 303

no language and no meaning. If all parts of a linguistic sentence were causally

determined by rules, it would not be possible to express any unique message in
that language.
This is the point of departure for the anchoring of the media concept in
between biophysical and symbolic processes, which again is a precondition for
anchoring the concept within human communication. Media become part of
human epistemology, as they both limit and allow communication. What we can
know about the universe depends on the available media for observation and
communication. Contemporary ideas of the universe, including theories of the Big
Bang and black holes, are based on indices provided by mediated recordings of
digitized signals from outer space, thus making our worldview conditioned by the
capacities of digital observation media. The worldviews of today could not exist
without digital media. Even if this notion of media goes well beyond the usual
perspectives of media and communication studies, there are no safe arguments for
a more restricted conceptualization.
The main parameters for all known kinds of human communication relate to
time, space, material form, and institutional form. It is argued that following these
four parameters all media may be characterized as unique relative to each other.
For any medium, additional parameters, for instance perceptual and semiotic
parameters, may come into question, but all sorts of human communication can
be characterized according to these four parameters, cf. Finnemann (2011).
The space, time, and material characteristics of media relate to technologies
that – even if they are societal constructs and thus variables – are also transcen-
dent to the particular social context in which they are constructed or used. This is
why they can be identified as media. Face-to-face communication is the only form
of communication, if any, in which the communicating partners can be in almost
the same situation. But only almost in the same situation. If nothing else, language
will always extend beyond the situation. The same is the case for memory, which
also connects the individual to extra-situational experiences. Thus, all media,
speech included, somehow transcend the situation in respect to time and/or space.
The relevance of mediatization theory relates both to an understanding of the
general characteristics of a given constellation of media and to the characteristics
of changes in the set of available media and media institutions within a society. It
may also be included in the analysis of the relation between media epochs and
wider issues of historical epochs. Finally, mediatization theory in this form makes
it possible to predict a range of new trajectories opened by the advent of new
media as a result of the identification of ways in which they may be used to change
the overall matrix, including time, space, material, and institutional aspects of
human communication.
The concept of mediatization is not applicable on the micro level of the single
act of communication, as it refers to general features, which are transcendent to
any particular communication act. No such singular act provides sufficient infor-
304 Niels Ole Finnemann

mation to reveal whether it is part of established routines, belongs to any specific

cultural context, or eventually becomes part of a new trajectory. These questions
can only be answered if one adopts perspectives which transcend the situation.
The world cannot be conceived of as consisting of associated situations and local-
ized contexts only or as an infinite array of mediatized worlds separated from each
other. The global reach of the Internet does not imply a global village, but it does
imply that any situation can easily be extended globally by any citizen. Today, we
have synchronous face-to-face communication and textualized near-synchronous
communication across any distance on earth, and you can never know if you end
up on YouTube tonight.
However, in the case of digital media, the issue is not simply a matter of the
number of particular characteristics of new media. It is a matter of conceptualiza-
tion of both mediatization and of digital media.

2 The concepts of digitization and digital media

Digital media emerge as materials of stored content, as a repertoire of methods for
search, analysis, and presentation, and as media for communication. Digital media
always convey some sort of digital material, and they are always also search
engines which provide a repertoire of possible methods for analysing and present-
ing in a perceptible form otherwise invisible, stored digital materials. If they are
interconnected, they may also serve as a means for communication in all spheres
of society.
These three basic dimensions of material, method, and media are intertwined
and their interrelations are variable. As a consequence, the utilization of one of
these dimensions will also affect the two other dimensions, but since the relations
are variable, this is not a predetermined relationship.
Each of the three dimensions provides a register of new opportunities for
human communication and together they open up for a far-reaching reconfigura-
tion of the communicational infrastructures in human history – insofar as some of
the new opportunities are selected and utilized to meet certain needs and desires.
In the following, a few unique characteristics of each of these three dimensions
will be presented briefly to indicate a profile of the disruptive potentials of digital
media in the history of media.

2.1 Digital materials

Digital materials are manifested in the binary alphabet. This is their only shared
characteristic. The hidden algorithmic structures and the semantic representations
on the level of the interface may vary. Thus, digital materials differ from each
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 305

other, because they are somehow marked according to their provenances, what
they are about, how they are produced and used, and in what sorts of formats.
This is where culture and politics sneak into the very roots of digital media in still
new ways.
Brügger and Finnemann (2013) distinguish between digitized materials and
“born” digital materials. The former includes all analogue materials that have been
digitized, as is the case with a growing range of cultural heritage materials, such
as digitized print materials, newspapers, radio programmes, and television pro-
grammes. Digitized materials are reproductions of non-digital originals. Depending
on the source, the reproduction is subject to some sort of distortion or noise. A
linguistic text coded in the Latin alphabet may be reproduced in its entirety. The
digitized reproduction of the material qualities of the paper will be noisy. A tiny
grain on the paper may look like a punctual mark, i.e. noise type three. Digitized
reproductions of non-digital sounds and images will also be noisy due to the
binary coding of colours varying on a continuous scale, as is well-known. Never-
theless, digitization of non-digital materials gives rise to a range of new opportu-
nities for the use, further reproduction and distribution and, not least, the study
of these materials, due to the characteristics described below in sections 2.2, 2.3
and 2.4.
Born digital materials, of course, come without such distortions. They also
differ from digitized materials because digital materials may include hypertextual
and interactive features as original features, whereas such features can only be
non-original additions to digitized materials.
Digitized materials exist in a digital format, which is defined a posteriori to
the original format. Born digital materials can both be created in their own digital
format and recreated in different formats; the latter is, for instance, the case with
archived web materials, which constitute one of the most complex sets of data
materials.
Digital materials also include a huge variety of forms which are seldom
included in media and communication studies. This is the case for geo-located
online information, which is now frequently utilized even in the online editions of
mass media. We also find a growing variety of digital materials distributed via
mobile devices in public – sometimes interactive – spaces, such as cities and other
networked spaces, making these spaces communicational spaces not formerly con-
sidered mediatized. Digital media are used for surveillance of people’s behaviour
in public as well as private spaces. This is both performed by separate surveillance
media and by utilizing the huge amounts of information “given off” by people
travelling the net. Service providers increasingly create so-called “data doubles”
of the people using the services.
People also produce an increasing number of digital self-representations, such
as personal profiles on a variety of digital platforms. While some are private pro-
files, created for use in connection with home banking or online health services,
306 Niels Ole Finnemann

others are anonymous and semi-anonymous usernames used in various debate

and chat forums, online gaming sites, quasi 3D universes, etc., and finally others
are public personal profiles, such as those used on Facebook, LinkedIn, and simi-
lar services. The range of such “avatars” widens over the years, thus reflecting
changing age, personal preferences, tastes and interests, identities, and social
belonging.
The universe of digital materials goes even further as it also includes the use of
digital circuits in mechanical devices, be it traffic lights, cars, washing machines,
dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, watches, printing presses, electronic measuring
instruments, robots, or alarms; the Internet of things; more sensitive utilizations
such as electronic tags on prisoners, children, and senile people; circuits incorpo-
rated in pacemakers or operated into the body to replace ruined nerve fibres and
connecting patients and hospitals for monitoring and adjustment purposes; obser-
vational data from scanning our interior parts, including the brain; and creating
data from outer space, which all together allow us to reconsider the structure of
the universe as well as our ways of thinking and creating meaning in and of the
world.
Thus, the question is raised whether it is possible to limit the concept of medi-
atization to include only some of these digital materials and methods and ignore
others. Of course, this question also concerns the very notion of media and the
delimitation of the object proper of media and communication studies.
These questions cannot be safely answered without looking at the dimensions
of search and communication.

2.2 Digital methods for search and representation

Digital materials can only be accessed by means of digitally supported search and
retrieval methods to establish the re-presentation of the invisible, stored content
on a screen or another output device. This relation is not conceivable in phenome-
nological interpretations of media communication, but it is a part of all forms of
digital media and a fundamental part of the contemporary processes of mediatiza-
tion, if digital media should be included.
Any digital device includes a digital search engine, as it is the mechanism
used to set in motion any sequence of bits processed in the machine, whether a
mainframe, a PC, a laptop, a web server, a mobile device, a pedometer, a scanner,
or other. Even without recognizing it as such, the mobile devices people carry in
their pockets today work as search engines. People feel uncomfortable without it.
The search engine inherent in all digital devices opens a new trajectory in human
communication as the basis for a fast growing amount of digital search procedures,
also accompanied by the development of software-supported methods for analys-
ing digital materials.
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 307

Search is an old activity, but mechanical search is rather new. Mechanical

search by means of punch cards was developed before the advent of modern digi-
tal computers. Also radio receivers were early on capable of detecting radio sta-
tions based on wavelength. But the rich semiotic potentials of digital search were
only slowly and gradually acknowledged, until Google short-circuited the classic
search paradigms in the late 1990s (Halavais 2009).
The cultural role of digital search for digital materials, search engines, and the
ever-growing array of search methods and paradigms takes digital media beyond
formerly known media. Insofar as contemporary culture is increasingly articulated
in digital forms, it follows that the methods used to find, use, and study these
matters will increasingly have to exploit digital search methods. None of this
applies to any formerly known machines or media.
The new methodological perspectives go beyond the scope of this article, but
an example may give an indication. Survey methods are well-established. Web
surveys constitute an emerging field. The conditions of validity differ from former
survey methods, and a whole range of new options are to be explored, as it is
now possible to utilize the hypertextual, interactive, and multimodal repertoires
in combination with scalable reach according to the local/global and time scale.
Thus, it is possible to develop interview strategies which combine quantitative and
qualitative questions, to use answers given to ask new questions, to stretch the
time scale, to establish dialogic relations between interviewers and respondents,
or to include references to materials from the web. The array of new methods also
includes, among others, website analysis, web-sphere analysis (Foot and Schnei-
der 2006), and a range of link- and big data analyses.
This does not mean that older methods should necessarily be dismissed. They
may still be useful and incorporated in the composition of multi-layered methodol-
ogies developed as a response to the increasing complexity of the media systems
and the overall matrix. However, without utilizing software-supported methods
there will be significant and growing lacunae in what we do know in media and
communication studies.
All media convey materials, but in different formats, allowing different kinds
of operations and all media may serve as means of communication in one or sev-
eral respects, but most do not include a methodological component, either for
search or for making the materials visible. Digital search engines represent one of
the most fundamental and unique innovations provided by digital media and form
the basis for major changes in the role of media in a society and, thus, in the
history of media.

2.3 Digital communication institutionalized

“New media” studies tend to consider “new media” the sole media in history and
often also ignore the history of digital media and the transformations of the media
systems. Thus, one might look to mediatization theory to bridge the gaps.
308 Niels Ole Finnemann

However, even if mediatization theory includes institutionalization, changes

in the media systems due to the utilization of digital media and the new, more
complex matrix are seldom addressed. Even Schulz, who describes a set of evolu-
tionary features, concludes in the end “that new media are not actually that new”
(2004: 97), though he did not analyse the new media system. Recent interpreta-
tions tend to give up the idea of the existence of a media system. Dahlgren and
Alvares (2012) claim that the distinctions between old and new media are eroding,
but they leave the erosion process itself out of sight. This is strange, as almost all
mass media have been striving hard to reinvent themselves in recent years, offline
and online (Küng, Picard and Towse 2008).
According to Schulz (2004), the media system comprises economic, techno-
logical, and semiotic dimensions. Digital media are used as game changers in all
three dimensions.
In the development from stand-alone computers to networked digital media
these media have changed from being mainly instrumental for the mass media to
being a new field for their activities. In the late 20th century, the mass media had
gained editorial control over public communication. With the Internet, their posi-
tion as gatekeepers to the public had weakened. Direct access to the public for
everybody was primarily provided via the web protocols published on the Internet
in 1991. The open Internet allowed a much more varied set of editorial criteria to
be practised. Individual citizens, communities, professional expert systems as well
as all kinds of political, cultural, and social agencies were now able to bypass the
mass media and communicate directly to the public. With the American decision in
1993 to open the Internet for commercial activities (Boucher’s Bill) new commercial
enterprises entered into the business field of mass media, providing news, back-
ground information, opinion building processes, and entertainment. For a wider
public the value of the Internet was made clear in the wake of the 9/11 terror
bombing in New York during the burst of the IT bubble in 2001, as the Internet
turned out to be superior to other means of communication for governmental insti-
tutions, companies involved, relatives, and other concerned people around the
globe.
In the early 21st century a new business model emerged. It was centred on the
search engine, providing a set of search facilities for free, while financing the
activities by relating ads to the inputs of users. The basic model could be applied
on any scale from local to global and for any sort of activity. Within few years,
however, a small group of new global players (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon,
Apple, YouTube) became dominant. Each of these services was used by a wider
audience than any of the mass media and they took over a large part of the reve-
nues in the media industries. The new players, thus, became a threat to the mass
media, due to economy, due to their scalable reach, ranging from local to global,
due to the scalable variation of public, semi-public and private communication
and, more generally, due to their better understanding of the new modes of com-
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 309

munication and search made possible by the Internet. The media systems experi-
enced still ongoing structural changes on a global scale (Castells 2009).
In the same process the mass media tried to digitize themselves and enter the
networked digital platforms. They changed from being anchored primarily in a
particular media technology (print or electronic) to becoming multi-platform media
corporations (Wurff and Laub 2005). Their role as gatekeepers for access to the
public and for maintaining the distinction between what should – and what should
not – be considered of public relevance with respect to moral and quality stand-
ards has weakened, but they still hold an important role in public opinion building
in many countries. To perform this role, however, they have had to establish them-
selves on the Internet and they are increasingly dependent on the wider array of
public voices articulated elsewhere on the Internet.
A most important feature underlying this process is the speed and global reach
of digital communication, as it allows for near-synchronous communication
between people and all sorts of digital archives on a global scale, be it news
archives, health services, image archives, or any other sort of information or news
service. This is why concepts like interoperability between different kinds of digital
resources have grown into prominence in the IT strategies of today, for instance
in the world of libraries as well as in the US and EU research infrastructure initia-
tives and elsewhere. There is no reason to rely on the idea that these developments
will remain irrelevant to the mass media. On the contrary, if mass media do not
adjust to keep pace, they will be “googled” once again, as they were “googled”
with the launch of Google ads in the early 21st century. Networked digital media
have also made possible the development of a range of new short, written formats,
ranging from email, chat, messaging, texting, blog entries to comments, status
updates, and tweets (Baron 2008). Thus, personal near-synchronous and asynchro-
nous typewriting is included in the range of public media.
The speed of electronic media is a precondition. But so is the storage capacity.
While writing and print media are storage media which may be distributed, ana-
logue electronic media are primarily media of high-speed communication. The
related storage media, if any, are usually separate, such as the gramophone record,
the film roll, the (video) tape of the tape recorder. The seamless integration of the
speed of electronic communication and the storage capacities of print media in
one digital device forms the basis for a growing variety of digital genres in between
and beyond previously existing genres, whether spoken, written, printed, or elec-
tronic. Finally, it also makes everything digital searchable. In this respect too elec-
tronic digital media differ radically from analogue electronic media. Analogue elec-
tronic media are also gradually digitized, which means that properties of digital
media are gradually built into formerly analogue media. Teletext can be seen as
an early and popular example, predating the short formats mentioned above, but
utilizing only a limited set of digital features. The existence of intermediary forms
in between analogue and digital media does not reduce the significance of the
310 Niels Ole Finnemann

differences. On the contrary, it documents that analogue electronic media cannot

fulfil contemporary needs for communication.
The integration of storage and high-speed communication in globalized net-
works changes the conditions of media and communication studies. It affects the
fundamentals, not simply of the objects and the people who use the media, but of
scholarship and media and communication studies as a discipline, including theo-
ries, methods, and materials (Reips 2008), allowing shortcuts in the academic
knowledge production chain (Finnemann 2013).

2.4 Digital media defined

Compared to former media materials, digital materials differ in a number of
respects, some of which become evident when comparing analogue materials with
their digitized equivalents. For instance, a printed text can only be “manually”
searched, while a digitized version of the text can be searched mechanically for
any particular sequence. To this comes the range of hypertextual, interactive, and
multimodal facilities of contemporary digital media, which have only rudimentary
forerunners in the printed world. For images the difference is even more funda-
mental, since the digital representation implies that even still images, formerly
existing and understood as units independent of space and time, in their digital
form become a product of serial processes performed in time, even if they are still
perceived as still images. This is also the case for television, but digitization
implies textualization of the image with respect to editability. In the extreme, each
pixel in a digital image can be ascribed and edited in keeping with its own distinct
timeline. There is no final limit for the editability of digital images. Any single
image can be converted into any other possible digital image. While all images
may be digitized, there is no way back from a digital version to the analogue
original. Instead, we have an indefinite repertoire of possible printouts of new
instances of any sort of digital material, limited only by the question of whether
it makes sense for somebody. Digital media do not imply the end of print, but
rather the end of out of print.
Digital materials cannot be handled without the use of digital methods for
storing, searching, combining, analysing, and presenting. They may, in some
respects, still be analysed using well-known methods, but since a fast growing
number of social, cultural, and political activities are articulated in digital forms
and performed via digital platforms, it follows that the development of digital
methods, both in society at large and in research, will have a still more significant
role to play. Thus, media and communication studies are confronted with a
medium which trespasses the boundaries between the object and the methodologi-
cal devices and architectures for studying the object, which at the same time has
become a moving target.
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 311

The variability of the relations between digital materials, methods, and modes
of communication makes these media more open for projections of different ideas
than any formerly known device. They come with a variable functional architec-
ture, both on the level of the devices and, even more so, on the software level.
The relation between fixed hardware and modifiable software is itself variable. It
may, in many cases, be convenient to dedicate a device to a limited set of purposes
by integrating a greater part of the functional architecture in the hardware. This
is why the explosive growth of software formats and genres goes hand in hand
with an explosive growth of dedicated devices and gadgets, ranging from main-
frames and PCs to mobile devices and microchips, which may be implemented in
everything and everywhere. The functional architecture can be modified according
to any set of ideas, needs, and desires. Digital media can be made responsive to
the content of individual messages. Thus, they allow us to produce growing
amounts of still more different kinds of digital materials and digital devices, which
may be tailored to almost any convenient physical form and are mainly restricted
by the human need for interfaces to make sense of binary processes.
In Brügger and Finnemann (2013) we argue that the ongoing development
of new types of digital materials combined with the variability of the functional
architecture as well as the growing number of dedicated devices calls for a reinter-
pretation of the computer. Thus, “digital media” is used to denote not simply the
networked connections between many computers, but also to replace 1) the con-
cept of uniform digital datasets with the notion of heterogeneous digital materials,
2) the idea of computation as a uniform (mathematical, logical, rule-governed)
process with the conceptualization of digital processes such as search, storage,
and representation, supported by hypertextual, interactive, and multimodal
means, and 3) the idea of the computer as a programmed machine performing the
same limited set of repetitive or iterative operations (and the equivalent idea of IT
as a given constant) with the idea that digital media have a variable functional
architecture.
This definition of digital media deviates, on the one hand, from the concept
of the computer as a rule-governed machine, which originally developed in con-
nection with the interpretation of the mainframe machines of the 1950s and 1960s.
On the other hand, it deviates from the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) con-
ceptualization of a digital toolbox interpreting the personal computers of the
1980s, and which paved the way for the spread of computers from the specialized
fields of IT experts into society at large. Both of these definitions were based on
stand-alone computers. The definition of digital media, however, also deviates
from the widespread “new media” concept (or the implicit assumption) of the
computer as a plastic and freely malleable device that comes with no built-in
constraints. The definition will be further unfolded in section 5 by drawing on
main insights from medium theory.
This prehistory of the concept is still important, not simply because previous
conceptualizations are still around, but also because the prehistory reveals that
312 Niels Ole Finnemann

digital media enter into the history of media from the outside and were only very
recently recognized as media, both by the mass media and the media scholars.
During the 1980s and 1990s the literature on IT came predominantly from other
areas than media and communication studies.

3 Digitization meets mediatization

The processes of mediatization meet digitization processes in two ways.
First, since the 1970s digitization has taken place from within in many particu-
lar parts of the media institutions, mainly as a substitute for a particular function
like typesetting or bookkeeping, without wider implications for the function of the
media in society. Today most processes in the production, technical reproduction,
administration, and communication of media are digitized. In principle, the mass
media could have been fully digitized without affecting their functioning in society
significantly. However, the very same processes also open up for quite different
developments as a result of social and cultural needs and desires and changes in
the conceptualization of digital media and the whole range of new facilities they
provide (Finnemann 2014).
Second, digitization processes came to the mass media from the outside. Even
if the mass media started digitization processes in the 1970s, they did not become
a main agency in the innovative usages of digital media, which took place in the
same years, leading to the Internet, and were later followed by a growing array of
dedicated digital devices, some of which are mobile devices. The mass media were
absent from the development of the international digital networks and, thus, more
or less absent in the first fifty years of digital media.
Mediatization theory has followed the mass media and did not confront itself
with processes of digitization and the spread of digital media before they became
disruptive in the history of mass media in the early 21st century. As a consequence
of this, a main issue for mediatization theory is to specify the criteria for inclusion
of digital media in the conceptual framework. Is it possible, for instance, to delimit
only the processes which relate to the mass media? Or should the concept be
extended to include all sorts of digitization processes?
Conceptually, mediatization comes off as a broader concept than digitization,
as it includes references to a number of non-digital media. On the other hand, it
is still unclear whether it should include all kinds of digital processes, as described
above. If mediatization does not include all sorts of digital processes, where the
limit should be drawn will become a constant issue.
A most familiar suggestion would be to include only digitization processes in
the sphere of mass media. These are usually limited to television, radio, and
printed newspapers. Today such an approach would have to include some parts
of the Internet, such as the websites of mass media, their Facebook sites, and
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 313

other external forums under the editorial supervision of established media. It fails,
however, as news production and news distribution and public opinion building
also take place in numerous places elsewhere on the net. Mass media are not the
only agencies that can now publish on a 24/7 basis. This is also the case for
politicians, lobbyist groups, any sort of expert system, and every citizen. Why
should their contributions not be included? Even Google cannot keep track of this
new universe of news, while the mass media are left further behind, because they
are unable to include the long tails of diversified news and information of rele-
vance to people. According to a survey on media usage in Denmark in 2009, televi-
sion was still the most widespread medium, while print media and radio fell
behind the Internet. Most people also used Google and Facebook, but even more
people also used a number of specialized websites, each of which may only have
been used by relatively few (Finnemann et al. 2012). The Internet is fit to serve
such long tail patterns, which are increasingly important due to the exponential
growth in knowledge and news production and entertainment.
Some critics might suggest that an editorial quality criterion could form a basis
for deciding what counts as media, thus refraining from including all digital media
as such. It would be easy, however, to identify numerous websites which outdo a
majority of existing mass media with regard to quality of information.
A wider approach might include all sorts of public spaces on the Internet,
including blogs, debate and chat forums, some parts of Facebook, Twitter, You-
Tube, some mailing lists, commercial as well as civic sites addressing issues of
common interest. Such an approach also fails, because the very distinction
between private and public – and semi-public – spaces on the net is not decided
by “the media”, but by individuals and groups who may change their priorities
from situation to situation, making some information public one day and private
the next due to changing perspectives and motives.
The concept of media is most often used for articulations manifested in exter-
nalized communication media. A third distinction, therefore, might be related to
externalization. Digital processes are only included if they are manifested in exter-
nalized, tangible devices, which can be handed over between people. This would
equal a distinction between “unmediated” speech and mediated writing, as the
product of writing can be handed over to others, whereas speech cannot. However,
wireless communication between a pacemaker and a hospital, scanning internal
bodily states, brain states for instance, can easily be made part of public communi-
cation, because externalization in a tangible, stored form is already required. Thus,
digital media transcend the distinction between internal and external. They can
do so, because both internalized and externalized processes mediate between
physical and mental processes. Thereby, they also reveal the dogmatic assumption
that speech is immaterial and unmediated or less material than externalized media
articulations. This distinction is rooted in Cartesian dualism, while res cogitans in
today’s epistemologies is moved into res extensa, as argued in section 1, as a result
314 Niels Ole Finnemann

of the study of brain processes, revealing that mental processes are embodied and
situated in time and space, even if the content of the mind may be fiction, mere
imagination, memories of the past, or ideas and phantasies of the future.
Insofar as the notion of mediatization includes all sorts of digital processes, it
opens up for the inclusion of a growing list of new trajectories, not simply because
digital media are already incorporated in existing institutional frames (e.g. reli-
gion, education, home banking, media for the public, etc.), but also due to the
innovation of new – digital – communicational features, genres, strategies, and
eventually new societal fields, as there are no areas left that can remain perma-
nently untouched by digitization. Still, digitization makes a difference both to non-
digital phenomena and different kinds, strategies, and genres of digitization.
This is not to say that everything will be made digital. First, it is most likely
that, in many cases, people will prefer non-digital interactions. Second, digital
processes can never be made exclusively digital. They exist only as distinctions
within a continuous physical universe. Embodiment matters for machines as for
humans. There will always be some degree of materialization and anchoring in
time and space in the form of a device and an interface allowing humans to make
sense of the processes.
So far, it seems that digitization should be seen as a particular mode of mediat-
ization or rather a set of particular modes of mediatization. These modes will
always share the use of the binary alphabet, allowing the blending of expressions
and genres as well as of platforms, while search, both on the algorithmic level of
syntax and on the semantic, interfacial level of human experience and meaning,
occurs in different modes and still evolving genres. As previously argued, they will
also always deploy different forms of hypertextual, interactive, and multimodal
means of expression.
The inclusion of all sorts of digital materials does not settle the issue of how
mediatization relates to digitization. While mediatization is a broader notion than
digitization, because it includes non-digital media, digitization is still a broader
notion than the concepts of mediatization developed so far, because digitization
includes not only digital materials, but also the coexistence of digital materials,
digital media, and digital search facilities. The coexistence of these is unique,
insofar as the relation between the material, the search method, and the media is
variable. There is always a layer of software in between the tangible device and
the genres and messages. This layer can both be used to define (and vary) the
functional architecture of the device and to make the device responsive to the
content of individual messages. None of this can take place in analogue electronic
media or print media. Whether ordinary language (spoken or written) could be
said to allow for similar interrelations will remain an object of further analysis.
Consequently, the machinery itself can never be left out as an invariant pre-
condition for digital communication. Traditional “Newtonian” machines, however
complex they are, can be defined as based on an intended repetitive functional
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 315

architecture built into a physical, fixed form. Furthermore, the materials processed
were not meant to interfere with the modus operandi of the machine, as it would
disturb the processing. The images on the television screen should not change the
functioning of the screen. Digital media are also mechanical devices, but they
differ from “Newtonian machines”, because the functional architecture can be
defined in the form of organized physical energy, delivered as editable software.
Thus, digital media enter more directly into the genres and content of communica-
tion than former media. As a consequence, the notion “media” is often both used
for software applications (such as social media for instance) and for the devices
in which they are implemented alongside other applications. Digital media are, in
this respect, less able than older media to be transparent when used. They draw
more attention to themselves than radio and television. To use the terms of Mey-
rowitz (1993), the functional architecture of digital media enters into the grammar
of communication and not simply into the settings and channels.

4 Medium theory revisited

Within media and communication studies, medium theory is routinely criticized
en bloc for being deterministic or dogmatic. The criticism may be directed towards
the strong ideologies of McLuhan and others, who try to establish a very close
relation between a particular medium and a general worldview, or it may be
directed towards particular concepts like the notion of “bias” or, as is the case in
Hepp, it may be argued that medium theory “leaves the impression of being an
inadequate approach to the description of media culture, precisely because it redu-
ces this media culture to that of one dominant media culture. But this is too sim-
plistic: cultures moulded by media are much too contradictory to be reduced to
any one dominating medium” (2013: 16).
This may be true, but it depends very much on what is meant by “dominating”
and by “moulded”. It also depends on the choice of sources. The criticism, for
instance, does not fit well with Walther Ong and his analyses of the intricate
relations between speech, writing, printing, and analogue electronic media, as
expressed, for instance, in the notion of a secondary orality which denotes an
“electronically mediated” oral form presupposing both writing and print (Ong
1983: 136). Likewise Meyrowitz (1985) repeatedly stresses that literacy remains
important, and they both subscribe to the idea that old media are seldom replaced
by new media. See also Meyrowitz (1994) for a less simplistic description of first
and second generation medium theory. Even if medium theory in some interpreta-
tions reduces media culture to one dominant medium and culture, it is not neces-
sarily an intrinsic part of the approach.
Furthermore, the idea of dominant media does not necessarily imply a reduc-
tion of media cultures, but it does imply the existence of relations between media,
316 Niels Ole Finnemann

the complexity of which is a matter of empirical study. For Altheide and Snow
there is no doubt that “every historical epoch is marked by the dominance of some
media over others” (1979: 11). Today it would be difficult to find a medium that is
not affected in a variety of ways by our usages of digital media. The issue is rather
how such relations between media develop.
There are plenty of theories of the relations between media, including replace-
ment theories (new media replace old media), theories of extension, different theo-
ries of convergence, theories of media evolution (both linear like Schulz [2004]
and theories of increasing complexity), and finally theories of coevolution; see
Finnemann (2006) for an overview. These and other theories also deviate in what
they claim to be significant characteristics of the various media. There are also
many empirically oriented cross-media and communication studies to consider.
Hepp is correct, however, in arguing that McLuhan, Meyrowitz and Ong and
others include analogue and digital electronic media in one overarching concept of
electronic media, but there is a huge amount of literature that clearly distinguishes
between analogue and digital electronic media, focusing on the particular biases
and affordances of digital media as markedly different from those of analogue
electronic media. For examples see Zuboff 1988; Bolter 1991; Landow 1992; Lanham
1993; Poster 1995; Levinson 1997; Castells 1996–1998; Deibert 1997; Finnemann
1999a, 2011; Benkler 2006; Baron 2008; Cardoso 2008.
Thus, it seems more preferable to consider medium theory part of a series of
attempts to reflect the specificity of certain media, whether denoted as biases of
media (Innis [1951] 1977), as enabling and disabling capacities of media (Pool
1990), or as affordances in the tradition of J. J. Gibson (1979).
While biases refer to properties of a particular medium, affordances refer to a
particular relation between an organism and the surroundings. The concept has
been transferred to human computer interaction and media and communication
studies by Norman (1998) and Hutchby (2001) and others, referring to features that
“invite” media users to engage in certain actions rather than others. While biases
are more common in macroanalyses, affordances seem more popular in micro-
level studies of particular media usages. A main difference, though often ignored,
is whether the properties referred to are considered the properties of a medium, a
bias, or refer to a relation between a medium and a particular kind of usage, an
affordance anchored in particular properties of both.
Refuting medium theory approaches, but nevertheless asking for reflections of
the specificities of media, Hepp suggests the notion of a “moulding force of
media”, which “reflects that media are at the same time an institutionalization as
well as a reification of communication” (2012: 24), thus also including a loosely
identified power issue, which may explain why the moulding force cannot “be
seen beyond its context.” It is not completely clear, however, how the notion of a
moulding force differs from the established notion of affordances. If there is a
difference, it seems to be that affordances are anchored in a relation between an
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 317

organism and the surroundings, while the moulding force seems to be fully
defined by and absorbed into the context in which it is identified. But if so, one
might ask why the moulding force is not merely a part of the context, rather than
“a force of the medium” (Hepp 2013: 60)?
It is not clear yet what the notion of a moulding force might add to the under-
standing of media and mediatization, but on the basis of medium theory
approaches and other contributions it is possible to identify spatiotemporal, mate-
rial, perceptual, and semiotic criteria characterizing particular media, though it
will be necessary to include the whole matrix of media, as does for instance Ong
(1983), when identifying the characteristics of each. It will also be necessary to
distinguish between historical time/space relations related to the media generally
available to society at large and the time/space scales of particular communica-
tional acts.
A main question today is how these notions are affected by the advent of
digital media, as it is possible to digitize all former media, if we so want. Thus,
all the characteristics – biases and affordances – of the former media that were
assumed to be stable become variable and editable in the new medium. The fixed
text – formerly written, typed, or printed – becomes dynamic and hypertextual.
The moving images as well as dynamic speech become storable in the very moment
of digitization – even if they are redistributed in streamed formats, which cannot
be stored. The flow television, formerly defined by the institutionalization of the
mass media, now becomes an option on a par with other options for deciding
when to see what on which screen. This is, of course, an option on the level of
institutionalization, as it presupposes an open Internet, rather than proprietary
systems, such as French Minitel in the 1980s or America Online (AOL) in the USA
in the 1990s. The time/space characteristics of the 5 major media epochs is pre-
sented in Finnemann (2011).
As mentioned in the previous section one of the crucial dimensions of this
change can be described as a transition of a range of media characteristics from
what Meyrowitz (1993) defined as the settings of the medium, referring to the
relatively stable parts of a media landscape, to the grammar of the medium, refer-
ring to the set of variables which can be used in the articulation of individual
messages in a given medium.
The grammar of a medium equals linguistic grammar, as it specifies an array
of rules and redundancy structures allowing the composition of an infinite number
of different messages. However, the grammars of modern media, at the same time,
differ from the grammar of both written and spoken language, as modern media
come with an externalized and institutionalized grammar separate from the human
memory. What a grammar does is primarily to describe possible rule-based or
redundant patterns for articulation of meanings; in this respect, it will always
transcend actual use, as do the linguistic grammars of our mother tongues. There
is an infinite array of possible sentences still left to be articulated in the future.
318 Niels Ole Finnemann

Like writing, print, radio, and television, digital media also open up for new tra-
jectories marked as different from those opened by the former media. Regardless
of whether this is progress or not, it is an empirical fact.
For digital media such new trajectories are opened both due to the navigation-,
browse-, and search facilities and due to the hypertextual, interactive, and multi-
modal potentials of computers. All digital expressions can be related to these
dimensions in one way or another.
For the Internet of today, based on a globalized set of standardized protocols,
such as the TCP/IP, and generally open for new entry points, we can add three
more grammatical dimensions to the new trajectories. These are the seamless
variations on the scales of a) public, semi-public, semi-private, and private com-
munication, b) local, national, and transnational reach, and c) the choice of com-
munication partner, both on the side of senders and receivers (Finnemann 2005).
Any digital expression utilizes these dimensions, and its particular utilization
of these may be analysed; some are defined on the level of the software used,
some are defined on the level of sociocultural selection and institutionalization,
and some are defined by the individual users according to their individual purpose
and skills.
In the end, all these dimensions are anchored in the fundamental structure of
digital media which, contrary to formerly known mechanical devices, are charac-
terized by a variable functional architecture that always represents some search
method for combining and presenting data in a perceptible form, allowing people
to make sense of it.
Insofar as new media do not replace old media, there is still a need for a
concept of mediatization that refers to the overall set of available media, the
matrix, and which cannot be reduced to the forms of mediatization implied by the
use of any single medium, however dominant it may turn out to be in a long-term
perspective. To include digital media, media and communication studies should
provide itself with a concept of digital media, and to do so, it has been argued, it
is also necessary to redefine the concepts of media and mediatization.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of the COST Action IS1004
WEBDATANET: web-based data collection, methodological challenges, solutions
and implementations. www.webdatanet.eu
 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization? 319

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Mirca Madianou
14 Polymedia communication and mediatized
migration: an ethnographic approach
Abstract: This chapter investigates the cumulative consequences of new communi-
cation technologies for the phenomenon of migration. Drawing on a five-year-long
comparative and multi-sited ethnography of long-distance communication within
Filipino transnational families I demonstrate that the recent convergence in new
communication technologies has profound consequences not just for the migrants
and their left-behind families but for the phenomenon of migration as a whole.
Although new media cannot solve the fundamentally social problems of family
separation, they have become integral to how these relationships are experienced
and managed. Despite the transnational asymmetries in infrastructure and media
literacy, the increasing availability of transnational communication is used as a
justification for key decisions relating to migration or settlement in the host coun-
try. This discourse, which ultimately normalizes migration decisions, is also evi-
dent at an institutional level. The chapter brings together research with institutional
actors as well as migrant families and shows that transnational communication
through new media – understood as an environment of polymedia – has become
implicated in making female migration more socially acceptable while ultimately
influencing patterns of migration. By bringing together an analysis of interpersonal
communication as mediation and social change as mediatization the chapter
shows that media do not just add a new dimension to the phenomenon of migra-
tion – they transform it altogether. The chapter also outlines the distinct contribu-
tion of an ethnographic approach to mediatization.

Keywords: migration, transnational families, interpersonal communication, family

relationships, social change, media anthropology, ethnography, new communica-
tion technologies, media environments, polymedia, convergence

The field of migration research offers fertile ground for the investigation of the
consequences of new media. The continuing rise in global migrations is a key
phenomenon for contemporary societies affecting both sending and host countries.
Migrants as transnational subjects can be sophisticated users of new communica-
tion technologies in order to keep in touch with left-behind families (Madianou
and Miller 2012), or to improve their life chances before and post migration (Elias
and Lemish 2009; Hiller and Franz 2004). Contrary to popular stereotypes which
cast migrants as perpetually destitute and information poor, recent research points
out that certain groups of economic migrants (though certainly not all) are early
and avid adopters of new technologies (Fortunati, Pertierra and Vincent 2012; Mad-
324 Mirca Madianou

ianou and Miller 2012; Qiu 2009) who are prepared to invest in hardware and face
the necessary connection costs. Of course, many other social groups are, or are
claimed to be early adopters of new media. What makes some migrants’ experience
significant is their dependency on new technologies, for example, under condi-
tions of family separation. While for most people family life will involve a combina-
tion of mediated and non-mediated interactions (Clark 2012) for many migrants
family life is almost entirely dependent on communication media (Madianou and
Miller 2012). The experiences of such migrants exemplify a form of “media life”
(Deuze 2012).
Traditionally, most research on media and migration has focused on the ques-
tion of representation – the ways migrants are (mis)representend in various for-
mats of news and popular culture (Moore, Gross and Threadgold 2012) and the
way such representations reproduce racism and xenophobia in society (Hartman
and Husband 1973; van Dijk 1991; Philo, Briant and Donald 2013). Although the
issue of representation of difference is of unquestionable political and social
importance, it does not address the ways migrants themselves become creative
users, or producers of new media not only to keep in touch at a distance, but also
in order to develop their own content and take control over their representation.
The migrants’ perspective is very important as it reveals the issues that matter to
them the most as well as the difference that the media make (or not) to their
own lives. A number of audience-centred studies (Gillespie 1995; Georgiou 2006;
Madianou 2005b; Sreberny 2005; Sun 2009 among others) have contributed impor-
tant insights with regards to questions of identity, belonging, and exclusion. Less
common are studies that bring together the migrants’ perspectives as well as those
of other institutions and relevant stakeholders, such as government representa-
tives, non-governmental organizations, and telecommunications companies them-
selves. Adopting a wider analytical lens helps to address the cumulative conse-
quences of the media for migrants themselves and for the phenomenon of
migration more broadly. What does it mean for a migrant woman from the Philippi-
nes to leave the webcam on for the whole weekend in order to achieve a sense of
co-presence with her left-behind children? What are the implications of “ambient
co-presence” achieved via constantly updating and checking social networking
sites on one’s smartphone (Madianou forthcoming 2014)? Do these communication
practices have any implications for decisions relating to migration or settlement
in host countries (Madianou 2012) thereby shaping patterns of migration?
This chapter addresses the cumulative consequences of new media for the
phenomenon of migration. Drawing on a long-term ethnography (2007–2011) of
transnational communication between UK-based migrant women and their left-
behind children in the Philippines, I argue that new media are more than channels
for personal communication while they have significant consequences which affect
the whole process of migration, including the motivations to migrate and settle
abroad as well as the justifications for such decisions. The increasing taken-for-
grantedness of transnational communication made possible because of the avail-
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 325

ability and affordability of new media emerges as an important catalyst for the
transformation of patterns of migration and migratory experiences.
The Philippines, one of the most intensely migrant societies, has come to
exemplify the phenomenon of transnational mothering and left-behind children
due to the prevailing feminized migration flows (Asis 2008; Parreñas 2001). The
research on which this chapter is based investigated the role of the ever-proliferat-
ing new communication technologies for Filipino families whose members experi-
ence extended periods of separation. What makes the Philippines particularly
interesting for examining the convergence of new media and migration is that the
country is at the forefront of new media developments, especially mobile phones
(Madianou and Miller 2012; Pertierra 2010). The primary aim of this chapter is not
to report on the findings of this research as this has been done elsewhere (see
Madianou 2012 and Madianou and Miller 2012), but to address the deeper implica-
tions of the increasingly ubiquitous presence of new media in transnational family
life.
As a theory of social change mediatization provides a very suitable framework
for assessing the cumulative consequences of new media on migration. There are,
of course, different traditions of mediatization research (for a discussion see Coul-
dry and Hepp 2013; Lundby 2009b). This chapter develops a hybrid approach that
draws on the social constructionist tradition of mediatization (Couldry 2012; Coul-
dry and Hepp 2013; Hepp 2012, 2013) as well as on the growing field of media and
digital anthropology (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002; Horst and Miller
2012; Madianou and Miller 2012). Given the parallels between the two traditions
there is scope for theoretical convergence. My integrative approach brings together
the migrants’ own perspectives and the wider social and institutional contexts.
Media anthropology has traditionally resisted the temptation to isolate the focus
on media texts, production or consumption and has instead insisted on “following
the thing” (Marcus 1995) – that is, following the subject of study and its relation-
ships in a multi-sited, transnational context. Adopting a wide-angle approach and
bringing together different levels of analysis is essential for capturing social
change. There are strong parallels here with mediatization research and some ear-
lier work on mediation (Livingstone 2009; Silverstone 2005; Martin-Barbero 1993).
Apart from highlighting the cumulative consequences of new media for migration,
this chapter will also discuss what a media anthropology perspective can contrib-
ute to a mediatization approach.
Although the title of the chapter refers to mediatized migration it is evident
that migration is too complex and diverse a phenomenon for a single type of social
change to occur. The Philippines, of course, is one of the most intensely migrant
societies globally, but it cannot possibly represent all types of migration flows
which can be long term, short term, or circular; voluntary or forced; documented
or undocumented to name a few (Castles and Miller 2009). Moreover, the context
of the destination country is very important in shaping migration experiences and
326 Mirca Madianou

outcomes. For example, migrations from the Philippines to the UK and the US are
fundamentally different (Madianou, in preparation). Also significant are the media
which are available to each population. The Philippines, for example, is at the
forefront of mobile media developments (Pertierra 2010) and this particular media
environment – different for other countries in the developing world – shapes the
contours of mediatization. The argument developed here concerns a specific type
of migration, that is predominantly female economic migration from the Philip-
pines to the UK which is often described as short-term and individual, often involv-
ing family separation at the nuclear level. Migrants are typically employed in the
care sector occupying different types of low-skilled (domestic work) and high-
skilled (nursing) jobs although even those in low-skilled jobs are often secondary
school- or college-educated prior to migration. The characteristics of this migration
are presented in detail in section 3 so this brief discussion only serves to indicate
that the present argument on the mediatization of migration is primarily related
to the particular migration flow I have been working with and, possibly, to other
similar flows. Although it is conceivable that some of the arguments presented
here could apply to very different migration flows, this will need to be the focus
of a comparative research inquiry.
This chapter discusses the ways in which members of transnational families
maintain personal relationships at a distance and the implications this has for the
phenomenon of migration more broadly. The research reported here points to two
parallel processes of mediatization: the mediatization of family life through practi-
ces of parenting at a distance and the mediatization of migration. I will here only
focus on migration research although I fully recognize that social change or medi-
atization occurs at the level of relationships themselves (for a discussion on moth-
erhood, individualism and ambivalence see Madianou 2012).
The following two sections are dedicated to the key literatures informing this
chapter, namely research on media and migration; and mediatization. Following
that is a discussion of Filipino migration with special reference to the UK as desti-
nation/host country before moving on to the research design. The empirical discus-
sion brings together the perspectives of various stakeholders involved in the pro-
cess of migration. We will first consider the institutional and public discourses
regarding new communication technologies in the context of migration followed
by the perspective of the migrant women and their left-behind children. This is
supplemented by a consideration of mediated communication in the context of
migration before addressing the social transformation of migration through new
media.

1 Media and migration: the story so far

Migration and media research are flourishing interdisciplinary fields. Although
there has been a significant body of research on media and migration within media
studies, migration research has largely ignored the media (some notable excep-
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 327

tions include Baldassar 2008; Vertovec 2004). As a result the following paragraphs
will primarily focus on work within the field of media research, some of which has
had an impact in social science more broadly. Research on media and migration
has typically fallen into one of the three dominant approaches in media studies,
either focusing on text/representation, production, or reception/consumption. Tex-
tual research has mainly addressed the important question of representation of
difference and the reproduction of racism in Western contexts. The debates around
representation of difference are very important as they point to overt or banal –
yet always pernicious – forms of xenophobia and racism which are becoming
increasingly prevalent (Hartmann and Husband 1973; Kaye 2001; Loshitzky 2010;
Moore, Gross and Threadgold 2012; van Dijk 1991). Debates about immigration
have always been politically sensitive if not controversial, and this trend has been
exacerbated by the global economic downturn since 2008 during which migrants
have often been scapegoated for the rise in unemployment and other social prob-
lems. The steep rise of xenophobia and racism in Europe coupled with the rise of
the radical right (Guibernau 2010) are often attributed to the negative media cover-
age of immigrants and asylum seekers (Kaye 2001; Moore, Gross and Threadgold
2012).
The other tradition of media research focuses on production – the ways in
which journalists covering immigration understand, research, and report on the
subject. Fewer studies have emerged from this approach – a notable recent excep-
tion is the groundbreaking work of Benson (2013) who developed a cross-country
(French and US) comparison of journalistic accounts on reporting immigration.
Within the production approach we also find studies which have focused on the
production of migrant and community media by migrants themselves (Husband
2005). Kosnick (2007) has developed an exemplary ethnography of Turkish media
in Germany which also took into account media discourse. Recent years have seen
the development of research that examines the rise of migrant blogs or production
of content on social media as part of their efforts to gain visibility and amplify
their voice in the public domain (Franklin 2001; Mitra 2001; Siapera 2005).
Transnational audience research has been expanding over the past two dec-
ades encompassing significant work on reception as well as consumption and
wider cultural practices (Georgiou 2006; Gillespie 1995; Madianou 2005a; Sun 2009
among others). Recent studies on media consumption in the context of diasporas
and immigrant groups have pointed to the changing and dynamic nature of ethnic
and cultural identities; the diversity within ethnic groups, for example along lines
of gender or class (Georgiou 2006; Hegde 2011; Sreberny 2005); the multiplicity of
belongings; migrants’ social (rather than merely ethnic) uses of media (Robins and
Aksoy 2001; Madianou 2005b); and finally, the boundary-making role of the media
contributing to processes of exclusion from public life (Madianou 2005b) or condi-
tions of subjugation (Sun 2011). Media consumption emerges as a key site in the
symbolic articulations of identities which are recognized as processes of negotia-
328 Mirca Madianou

tion and ambivalence, a point made early on by Gillespie (1995). Identity – a term
that can be too bounded to explain the dynamism and fluidity of transnational
phenomena – dominated the agenda in this earlier generation of transnational
audience research (for a discussion see Madianou 2011).
The advent and proliferation of new media has opened up the research agenda
moving beyond the preoccupation with identity to include questions around tran-
snational practices and relationships (Baldassar 2008; Vertovec 2004). Studies
have focused on a range of practices from the instrumental uses of new media as
part of the preparation for migration (Hiller and Franz 2004) and the ways in
which new media help close knowledge gaps (Elias and Lemish 2009) to the ways
in which transnational communication through new media helps revitalize dias-
pora connections (Miller and Slater 2000) or contributes to the entrenchment of
asymmetrical power relationships (Sun 2011). This second generation of studies
has paved the way for the mediatization perspective discussed here although most
work rarely moved beyond the reporting of particular cases. There are some nota-
ble exceptions which have made broader arguments for the consequences of media
for migration and wider social change. For example, Qiu’s (2009) work on (inter-
nal) migrant workers in China argues that information technologies are implicated
in class formation. Despite new media’s opportunities for social capital for the
“information have-less”, new media can also be responsible for entrenching social
positions and hierarchies (Qiu 2009). Although he doesn’t draw on mediatization,
Qiu’s argument on the way media are implicated in social class formation is
remarkably close to the mediatization approach discussed in this volume. Madi-
anou’s earlier work (2005a) on minority exclusion and silencing as the result of
cumulative processes of mediation represents another example. Diminescu (2008)
also adopted a wide lens approach when making a broad argument about “the
connected migrant” while recent work by Hepp (2013) on “communicative figura-
tions” and Wallis (2013) on gender and mobility in China also represent efforts to
address wider social transformations.

2 Mediatization, mediation and polymedia

Mediatization has emerged as one of the most exciting and promising intellectual
developments in media and communications research in recent years. Mediatiza-
tion represents the convergence of efforts to capture the cumulative social conse-
quences of media. Various terms and approaches have previously aimed to do so
including mediation (Silverstone 1999; Martin Barbero 1993; Livingstone 2009) and
mediazation (Thompson 1995) while parallel efforts can be traced in research
within media and digital anthropology (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002;
Horst and Miller 2012). Consensus is currently emerging around mediatization as
the most suitable term to capture the deeper implications of what it means to live
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 329

in intensely mediated environments. In my past research I drew on a mediation

framework (see also Silverstone 2005) – not dissimilar to the mediatization
approach proposed here – to argue for the boundary-making role of the media in
the context of exclusion and belonging in the nation-state (Madianou 2005a). Here
I argue, following other scholars, that a terminological differentiation between
mediation (a term which can be too ambiguous given its various meanings in
social theory) and mediatization is a useful way forward – both terms are retained,
each serving a distinct purpose.
This chapter broadly draws on the social constructionist perspective on medi-
atization (Couldry and Hepp 2013) as well as a media anthropological approach.
As noted earlier, ethnographies within the rapidly expanding field of media and
digital anthropology have also often been taking a wide-angle approach to media,
not just focusing on a specific moment (for example the production or consump-
tion of a specific text) but trying to describe a wider process of social change. This
wide-angle approach is often achieved through multi-sited ethnographies (Marcus
1995) where researchers “follow the thing”, that is the subject of research, transna-
tionally. Media ethnographies have moved beyond a presentist perspective and
often include historical accounts (see Larkin 2002) as well as the perspective of
multiple actors from institutions, the state, and individuals as well as the media
and technologies themselves. Importantly, ethnographic fieldwork because of its
open-ended and inductive nature can reveal surprises (Strathern 1996) and so the
unexpected consequences of the media. Given that social change is often unpre-
dictable, such insight is invaluable for a mediatization approach. One of my sec-
ondary aims in this chapter is to highlight the ways in which media anthropology
can inform mediatization theories.
This anthropological perspective is compatible with the social constructionist
approach to mediatization which emphasizes the role of media in the social con-
struction of reality (Couldry and Hepp 2013; Berger and Luckmann 1967). In this
vein, mediatization aims to reveal both how the social is captured in the media
and how in turn the media have “a contextualised consequence for the overall
process of the social construction of reality” (Couldry and Hepp 2013: 196). This
approach, which echoes Silverstone’s earlier conceptualization of mediation (1999
and 2005) as a dialectical process centred on the “circulation of meaning”, is more
open than the concept of “media logic” which has dominated the institutional
approach to mediatization (Hjarvard 2008, 2013). The inevitably singular notion of
“a logic” seems less suited to capture processes of convergence as media, technol-
ogies and practices continually intersect (for a discussion see Lundby 2009a).
Recent research points to the conceptualization of media as environments with
“media ecologies” (Horst, Herr-Stephenson and Robinson 2010, among others) and
“polymedia” (Madianou and Miller 2013) representing two such efforts. Addition-
ally, social life (and social change) is often messy and unpredictable and thus not
always subject to “a logic”, however appealing that might be. What we’ll see here
330 Mirca Madianou

is that mediatization does not have a pre-determined consequence; it’s the result of
the mutual shaping of technology and social contexts. The benefit from comparing
migrations from the same country (Philippines) but to different destination coun-
tries (UK and US) which have differing legal frameworks and labour markets
reveals that media change is dependent on the social contexts (Madianou, in prep-
aration).
If mediatization is the framework to capture social change then is there still
analytical value in the notion of mediation? I argue that retaining both terms is
useful as each can do a different kind of analytical work. Couldry and Hepp (2013:
197) describe mediation as “the process of communication in general” following
Krotz (2009) for whom mediation can simply help distinguish between mediated
and face-to-face communication. I argue that things are a bit more complex than
that given that even face-to-face communication is socially mediated (one can
think of language as the most fundamental form of mediation). A crisper definition
of mediation matters for the present chapter as its thesis draws on a study of
mediated interpersonal communication and its wider social consequences.
At a very fundamental level mediation is the process of communication. This
is a useful starting point, but it is clear that mediated communication takes differ-
ent guises and shapes depending on the media and platforms employed. Commu-
nication media introduce structural and technological parameters in human inter-
actions. Different media have different affordances (Hutchby 2001; see also Baym
2010) allowing users some interactions and preventing others. In other words,
interactions through social media, or email, or an environment of polymedia (Mad-
ianou and Miller 2013) will be structured differently. In order to understand media-
tion we need a socio-technical approach that is attentive both to the architectures
and affordances of specific platforms and to the social dimension of human rela-
tionships. Rather than implying that affordances introduce a version of media logic
at the level of mediation, I argue that mediation requires a combined understand-
ing of technological form and the social shaping of technology (MacKenzie and
Wajcman 1999). I propose that the theory of polymedia (Madianou and Miller 2013)
can offer this approach.
Polymedia understands media as part of a composite environment within
which each medium is defined relationally to all other media. In the past, when
users mainly had access to one medium – say, letter writing – to keep in touch,
we observed that the particular medium would shape interactions in specific ways.
For example, the temporality of letters would cause frustration as “news” was
actually one month old (Madianou and Miller 2011). By contrast, today users can
choose from a plethora of media and platforms; what one platform cannot achieve
can be accomplished by another. Increasing convergence intensifies the switching
between platforms as is evident in research with smartphone users (Madianou
2014). Polymedia pays attention to the ways in which users exploit the differences
among media in order suit their interactions and manage their relationships.
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 331

Assuming users have unconstrained access to and can skilfully use at least half a
dozen communication media, the choice of one medium (for instance, email) over
another (say, Skype) acquires communicative significance (for example, a user
may wish to introduce some distance in the communication context exploiting the
temporal structure of email). The recognition of media as an environment and the
emphasis on the ways in which users navigate this environment can provide a
magnifying lens revealing the inner workings of mediation. Polymedia can provide
an analytical framework to unpack mediation – a term often criticized for being
too vague or abstract. This matters because mediatization only occurs because of
mediation – so to understand the latter is essential for understanding the former.
In sum, this chapter adopts a hybrid model of mediatization drawing on the
social constructivist tradition as well as media anthropology. Mediatization as a
theory of media and social change is differentiated from mediation which is under-
stood as the analysis of technologically mediated processes of communication.
The sociotechnical theory of polymedia (Madianou and Miller 2013) helps unpack
the workings of mediation by providing an analytical framework to reveal the ways
users navigate the environment of new communication technologies.

3 The empirical and research contexts

This chapter reports on empirical work with Philippine transnational families.
With over 10 % of the population working abroad and over one million migrants
(equivalent to 3,500 daily departures) deployed annually (Asis 2008) it is hard to
think of a more intensely migrant society than the Philippines. Remittances
reached 24 billion USD for 20121 making the Philippines one of the top three remit-
tance-receiving countries globally, behind China and India, both considerably
larger countries (Jha, Sugiyarto and Vargas Silva 2009). The dependency of the
Philippine economy on remittances explains why migration has become a clear
economic policy for the Philippine government (Acacio 2008; Asis 2008) as the
state actively promotes and regulates migration. Ever since the years of the martial
rule, migrants have been hailed as “the heros of the Philippine economy” (Asis
2008). In recent years, dedicated government agencies identify needs in the global
labour market and then actively recruit, train, and deploy Filipino workers. The
Philippine government has signed bilateral agreements with countries, especially
in the Middle East, to provide them with workers usually on short-term contracts.
The one million annual deployment figure quoted above was an official govern-
ment target (Asis 2008). The demand for care and domestic work in what is called
the “global north” has been one of the factors contributing to increased female
migration (Parreñas 2001). So although in previous decades Philippine migration

1 http://theguardian.com/global-development/2013/jan/30/migrants-billions-overshadow-aid
332 Mirca Madianou

was predominantly male with emphasis on seafaring and manual labour, in recent
years women are as, or more likely, than men to migrate. Given that many of these
female migrants are mothers the Philippines has come to exemplify the phenom-
enon of transnational mothering (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Hochschild
2000; Parreñas 2005).
Female migration and transnational mothering has been a source of contro-
versy in Philippine society. Although the government promotes and encourages
female migration there are strong voices in Philippine society which oppose the
family separation this often entails. Interestingly, similar concerns are not
expressed for male migrants who presumably are as likely to be fathers separated
from their children, confirming the prevalence of traditional gender roles and ste-
reotypes about motherhood and mothering as “the light of the home” (Arellano-
Caradang, Sisin and Caradang 2007). Although there are precedents of internal
migration involving women who left their island communities to seek employment
as maids in Manila, female migration remains contested. The national press is full
of references to the social costs of separation and “bad mothers” who leave their
children behind, while popular culture is awash with stereotypes of troubled youth
who grow up without maternal love and care (see Parreñas 2008). Popular films
such as Anak2 (the Tagalog word for child) portray a left-behind daughter who
falls into a world of vices after her mother leaves for Hong Kong. Migrant women
are caught in the midst of contradictory discourses that simultaneously brand
them “bad mothers” and “heros of the economy”. My ongoing research with Fili-
pina migrant women focuses on how they negotiate these contradictory discourses
and articulate their own personal and maternal subjectivities through their every-
day practices, whether mediated or unmediated.
The UK is the sixth most popular destination for Filipino workers (POEA 2009),
officially estimated at just over 200,000 although the real number is likely to be
higher than that. Many migrants arrived between 1999 and the mid-2000s as the
UK’s National Health Service systematically recruited nurses from the Philippines.
The UK Filipino population also includes domestic workers and nannies who
arrived via the Middle East and caregivers who typically came to the UK on student
visas and therefore do not appear in the official statistics. Their strong presence
in the care sector suggests that the UK Filipino population is strongly female as
confirmed by earlier statistics (POEA 2005). Although there are no official data,
my long-term involvement with the Filipino communities in England suggests that
these migrants tend to be well educated often with college degrees which are
common even among domestic workers. Although there are occupational divides
which map onto digital literacy and exclusion – nurses, for example, are much
better connected than domestics (as are their largely urban middle-class families

2 Anak was a very popular Filipino film released in 2000 and directed by R. Quintos featuring the
local film star Vilma Santos.
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 333

back home) and thus better equipped for long distance parenting – the arrival of
smartphones and cheap netbooks seem to open up the opportunities for transna-
tional communication for even the least privileged of migrants within this group.
Broadly speaking, many Filipino migrants in the UK (though certainly not all)
come from what would be considered middle-class backgrounds confirming migra-
tion patterns to other destinations (see Constable 1999), although the notion of
middle class in the Philippines does not entail the same degree of security as in
Europe or the US (Parreñas 2001). This confirms a pattern in migration research
that migrants need to already possess the necessary economic, social, and cultural
capital in order to undertake the expensive project of migration (Portes and Rum-
baut 2006). This observation, of course, contrasts starkly with phenomena such as
involuntary migration or refugee experiences where social exclusions, including
digital, are very profound. Acknowledging the characteristic Filipino migration to
the UK (a group diverse in itself) matters for a chapter on the mediatization of
migration. The ways this particular migration is transformed because of the
increasingly ubiquitous presence of new communication technologies depends on
its defining parameters and prevailing issues, a point to which I will return later
on.
The research which informs this chapter consists of participant observation
and interviews which took place in three waves between 2007 and 2010.3 The first
period of research (2007–2008) was UK-based and consisted of 53 interviews with
Filipino migrants, mainly women with children left behind. During this time we
developed links with and spent time at Filipino associations and centres in London
and Cambridge. This first research phase was followed by fieldwork in the Philippi-
nes during 2008/9 consisting of 53 in-depth interviews and participant observation
with the (young adult) children of some of these mothers as well as other left-
behind children. During this period we also met several other participants (family
members, carers, and younger left-behind children) as part of the ethnographic
encounter while I also interviewed representatives from government agencies and
regulatory bodies dealing with migration as well as officials from migration agen-
cies, advocacy groups, and telecommunications companies. I also attended the
mandatory Pre-Departure Orientation Seminars organized by the Philippine Over-
seas Employment Agency for migrants prior to their deployment to the UK. On
returning from the Philippines, I re-interviewed and maintain contact with 13 of
the initial informants. In total, 106 participants were interviewed (several of whom
more than once) and we were able to pair 20 mothers and children.
This research has traced participants involved in different aspects of the migra-
tion process. The empirical section will begin with a discussion of the public and

3 Fieldwork, especially in the early stages of the research, was conducted jointly with Daniel
Miller. I would like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC in funding the study ‘Migration, ICTs
and the Transformation of Transnational Family Life’ (RES-000-22-2266).
334 Mirca Madianou

institutional discourses regarding new media in the context of migration and fam-
ily separation. Such accounts reveal the wider social assumptions about the role
of communication technologies in the context of family separation. We will
observe the optimism regarding the arrival of new media, especially mobile
phones, for alleviating the social costs of migration. We will then contrast the
perspective of migrants as well as their left-behind children. Contrasting the two
will allow us to assess the success of transnational communication. Bringing
together these perspectives allows us to observe the circulation of discourses on
migration and transnational communication (cf. Silverstone 1999) and the implica-
tions this has for the phenomenon of migration.

4 The institutional perspective

As a theory of social change mediatization necessitates a wide-angle approach
which in this particular research was greatly informed by media anthropology. As
a study of new media and transnational families the research reported here had
to move beyond the narrow focus on new media use and examine the wider social,
political, historical, cultural, and economic contexts. This explains the transna-
tional focus of the research as well as the inclusion of various stakeholders, from
government agencies dealing with migration to telecommunications companies. I
will specifically focus on these two here, beginning with the government agencies
which, as already mentioned in the previous section, are pivotal in encouraging
and regulating migration.
The government sponsored “pre-departure orientation seminars” have become
an essential part of the Filipino migration experience. These are mandatory for all
migrants before deployment and are typically organized by the dedicated govern-
ment department dealing with emigration. The Philippine Overseas Employment
Administration (henceforth POEA) issues all visas and contracts and these will
typically be signed on the successful completion of a pre-departure orientation
seminar. These are usually one-day long and consist of practical information about
the destination country as well as advice about conduct and behaviour.
I attended such a workshop in the crowded and labyrinthine POEA building
in Manila in January 2009. The workshop was aimed for migrants departing to
Europe – including the UK – and the overwhelming majority of participants in
that workshop were women who were taking up care and domestic jobs. A whole
section of the workshop was dedicated to the migrants’ responsibilities to the left-
behind family which included the duty to keep in touch. In the following extract
the workshop leader takes the mobile phone – and thus the availability of transna-
tional communication – for granted: “there’s no excuse not to communicate”.

“And you have a duty to your family. Who are married? Raise your hands. [Do not] forget
about your family in the Philippines. […] because your family is the reason why you’re leaving
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 335

the country. You’re providing financial and moral support to your family in the Philippines.
And you have to communicate. You have to communicate with your family as often as you
can. There’s no excuse not to, because we all have cell phones now. In the previous years,
OFWs [Overseas Foreign Workers] didn’t have cell phones. How did they communicate? They’d
send letters because overseas calls were very expensive. Sometimes they’d record their voices.
The families here would listen to them on radio through cassette tapes. But shipping takes a
while. It takes one month, two months to send something to your loved ones. But nowadays,
there’s no excuse anymore. You have the cell phone. You can call your loved ones. You cannot
abandon your families, okay?” Seminar leader, Pre-departure orientation seminar (PDOS),
Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA), Manila, January 2009

Similarly, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (henceforth OWWA), the

other major government unit dealing with migration and especially the migrants’
welfare, recognizes the importance of transnational communication and has devel-
oped a dedicated digital literacy training programme for migrants and their left-
behind families. The Tulay programme (tulay meaning bridge in Tagalog) was
developed in partnership with Microsoft and takes place in Community Training
Learning Centres (CTLC) throughout the country as well as in international destina-
tions with significant Filipino populations, such as Hong Kong. The officer in
charge of the training programme was very optimistic and spoke with certainty
about the ability of the Internet and webcam in particular to bring the families
together.

”So this is about training. It gives them a way to communicate across the distance because
you see the problems of our OFWs; they are being lonely because they cannot see their loved
ones. But because of the webcam, they can now see their loved ones everyday. And of course
it keeps certain bonds with the family because of these internet facilities.” Tulay programme
officer, OWWA, Manila January 2009

Such optimism is echoed by representatives of mobile phone companies them-

selves which now recognize the importance of the potentially lucrative migrant
market. Mobile telephony is very developed in the Philippines which is popularly
labelled as the texting capital of the world with over 1.4 billion SMS messages sent
each day (Reuters 2008). More recently other pioneering mobile phone innovations
have been launched in the Philippines such as G-Cash, a mobile phone application
which allows users to send remittances bypassing banks or other traditional inter-
mediaries. G-Cash is effectively mobile money (like Kenya’s M-Pesa) and was one
of the first such applications to be launched globally (in 2004) precisely to meet
the large demand for remitting money to the Philippines. It now has a range of
wider uses reminding us that it is not just new media which have consequences
for migration – the reverse is also true.
Both major telecommunication companies, Globe and Smart, have dedicated
departments for product development and marketing for overseas populations.
Globe’s marketing strategy for the OFW market included slogans such as: “With
Globe’s Worldwide Services, the family will always be together.” [Palagi buo ang
336 Mirca Madianou

pamilya.] And: “Christmas is more colorful and happier when the family is
together.” Or: “With Globe, you’re always together.” These slogans were also
echoed by one their senior managers who stated in an interview: “We keep [the
OFW families] together”. Both companies have extensive advertising campaigns
which dominate the national media especially in the weeks before Christmas and
other national holidays when migrants typically return to visit their families.
Turning migrants into a market and branding migration as a source of national
development and pride as the government does, is a neoliberal fantasy where
economic gain and consumption power are given priority over other social values.
New media from mobile phones to webcam – both private resources – are seen as
the solutions to social problems. Crucially, the availability of transnational commu-
nication is increasingly taken for granted and serves as a justification for otherwise
socially contested decisions. Both state and corporate discourses seem to suggest
that if new media can alleviate the social cost of family separation which comes
with migration then migrating with new media is no longer a problem. The synergy
between state and mobile phone companies is evident at many levels including in
the sponsoring of various government events by the telecommunications compa-
nies. Globe, for instance, sponsors OWWA’s “Model OFW Family of the Year” com-
petition which recognizes a financially successful migrant family whose members
maintain close family ties despite separation. This competition seems to encapsu-
late the neoliberal ideology of the government of the Philippines with its emphasis
on economic gain and individualism cloaked under a veil of ethical responsibility
(Ong 2006).
Do these public discourses about media and migration have any resonance in
the experiences of migrants themselves and their left-behind families? Is the opti-
mism surrounding new media justified when assessing the success of transna-
tional communication? The following two sections provide answers to this ques-
tion.

5 The migrants’ perspective

Migrant women expressed much enthusiasm about the arrival of new media as
they afforded them opportunities to perform “intensive mothering at a distance”
(Madianou 2012). How this intensive mothering is performed depends on the age
of the children. For example, mothers with infants or younger children found web-
cam invaluable as it allowed them to sustain a communication which would never
have been possible on the phone as children appreciated the visual aspect of
webcam. Mothers were also very keen to be able to see their children during a
period of rapid development. The visual affordance of webcam also allowed moth-
ers to be recognized by their children as mothers. The importance of this becomes
evident once we contrast it to the past situation of letter writing when mothers
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 337

returned to the Philippines after two or more years’ abroad and their children
would no longer recognize them. Sandra, a domestic worker in her 40s and mother
of two described herself as an “incomplete mother” during that earlier time.
More media and platforms are introduced as the children grow older and we
see that women tend to prefer certain media for certain purposes – for example
IM was popular for helping with homework. Generally speaking mothers would
invest a significant proportion of their income and time to fulfil their communica-
tion needs which were often regarded as a priority. Many participants knew a
tremendous amount of detail about their children’s daily lives, ranging from what
their children had for dinner and how many hours they slept to the feedback on
their latest school assignment. Apart from opportunities for intimacy and care at
a distance new media also afforded opportunities for surveillance and monitoring.
Donna, for example, routinely scours Facebook for any evidence or cue that can
reveal aspects of her sons’ lives. At a more fundamental level the increased social
cues afforded by a combination of media provide migrant women with evidence
of life back home. The contrast with the past situation is again striking. Whilst in
previous years migrants often returned home only to find that their remittances
had been misspent, today they feel much more in control “as they can see with
their own eyes” whether their children are being well-fed and dressed or whether
the repairs to the house are progressing. Being aware of the situation back home
is not always a happy affair – women are often drawn into family feuds and con-
flicts – but participants expressed a preference to know than to be unaware. As
Nora said, “This way I can do something about [the problems]”.
Many participants reported that frequent communication often amplified con-
flict – if not with their children, then with other family members. While in the
past problems were often swept under the carpet and never reported in letters,
it is much harder today to keep family secrets. This is not the only burden of
communication: women reported that the requests for help intensified putting a
strain on their resources. Crucially, every mediated interaction is a reminder of the
distance involved and the fact that “you can’t hug your children” (Donna). This
perhaps explains why many Skype calls end in tears.

6 The left-behind families’ perspective

If mothers were enthusiastic about new technologies, their left-behind children
were markedly more ambivalent about the success of transnational communica-
tion. Rather strikingly, the sample was divided into two: those for whom new
media worked well and who reported an improvement in relationships post-migra-
tion; and those for whom the use of new media for keeping in touch with their
parents represented a deterioration in the quality of the relationship. The latter
group share a number of characteristics pointing to three variables that determine
338 Mirca Madianou

the success of transnational communication. Most of those for whom new media
did not work were very young (typically under 10 years old) at the time of their
mothers’ migration. This was a time when communication was infrequent and
expensive – letters took up to a month to arrive while phone calls were prohibi-
tively expensive. It seems that during this time a gap was formed that was hard
to fill even with the advent of new media. The third factor is the quality of the
pre-existing relationship.
In fact, new media and the frequency of communication they engendered often
brought to the surface problems or family disputes which had been long concealed
and therefore increased conflict. The story of Reno illustrates this: at the age of 14
Reno dropped out of school. He stayed at home all day playing video games and
watching television to the dismay of his elderly grandmother and 16-year-old sister
who was effectively his carer. Neither the sister nor the grandmother dared break
the bad news to the migrant mother so as not to upset her. After all, the reason
she migrated was to provide a better education for her two children. The mother
eventually figured out the truth with help from Yahoo Messenger where she
noticed her son’s status was “on” during school-time. This – entirely mediated –
revelation unleashed a series of arguments which would not have taken place
without the cues accidentally given out by a platform.
More common were the complaints from left-behind children who for years
experienced infrequent and pre-planned communication with their parents. The
arrival of mobile phones and Internet platforms changed all that. Communication
became frequent and spontaneous which was experienced as intrusion and moni-
toring by those teenagers or young adults who felt that their parents suddenly
entered their lives after many years of silence. Needless to say the mothers’ fre-
quent calls or Facebook messages were not always welcome and much effort was
expended on how to avoid such communication (often by switching to different
media, an example of polymedia communication).
By contrast, those for whom new media worked were older at the time of
their mothers’ migration (usually in their teenage years). Age perhaps helps to
understand the reasons a parent is migrating. That was usually after the arrival of
new media, at least mobile phones, which meant that communication was more
frequent and affordable. These teenagers also reported a strong bond with the
mother prior to her departure. The parents’ migration afforded the teenagers with
increased autonomy and enabled them to flourish independently. At the same time
the availability of media provided them with the emotional security and warmth
needed at a time of rapid changes and challenges. Cecilia, for example, developed
a very close bond with her mother following her migration. The two women would
go shopping together (by visiting the same sites whilst on Skype) and send pictures
of their clothes as attachments. Cecilia used webcam to care for her mother when
she developed a serious illness. During the long calls she shared all personal
secrets with her regarding her own relationships. The fact that both women related
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 339

to each other outside the routines and chores of everyday life transformed their
relationship into a kind of “pure relationship” (Giddens 1991) existing mainly for
their mutual enjoyment.
Comparing the migrant mothers’ and left-behind children’s perspective reveals
that new media cannot solve the problems of family separation. While for some
families new media constitute solutions, for others they reveal or accentuate prob-
lems which had hitherto been concealed. New media can even accentuate conflicts
and appear to deteriorate relationships. What emerges clearly is that media
become constitutive of how relationships are enacted and experienced (a point
further developed in Madianou and Miller 2013). Apart from this constitutive role
of media in the experience of relationships there appears to be a further conse-
quence for the process of migration as a whole. To understand this we need to
return to the mothers’ perspective.

7 Sorting the puzzle

At the early stages of this research we were faced with a puzzle: why did our
participants prolong their stay in the UK when some of the key economic reasons
that propelled them to migrate had been dealt with? Why did they not return when
the loan was repaid, or when the house was finally built? Why did they choose to
extend their stay in London or Cambridge given how much they missed their chil-
dren? After all they often described themselves as temporary migrants, echoing
the words and policies of their own government. Finding an answer to this puzzle
became important as it seemed inevitably connected to the key question the
research sought to answer which is about the nature of these long distance medi-
ated relationships.
In order to answer this puzzle we need to look into participants’ personal
trajectories and wider migratory experience. Through the ethnographic encounter
it was possible to find out not only about family members’ uses of media but also
about participants’ personal histories, relationships, aspirations and how all these
fed into the project of migration: the motivations for migration, the reasons for
returning to the Philippines or settling abroad, and the ways in which such deci-
sions were justified.
Examining the motivations for migration revealed that the decision to migrate
was usually the result of a convergence of factors. Apart from the well-documented
economic motivations (which ranged from situations of urgent need to aspirations
of home ownership and better schooling for one’s children) we found a plethora
of social and other personal motivations including the desire for self-improvement
and autonomy (see Madianou 2012). Almost invariably economic reasons would
be coupled with other personal motivations. Such personal motivations need to be
understood in the context of gender power relationships in the Philippines which
340 Mirca Madianou

many of our participants had found oppressive in the context of their personal
relationships. It is thus not surprising that many participants experienced migra-
tion as empowering and spoke very positively of their time in the UK despite the
fact that many had also experienced situations of exploitation and hardship (see
Madianou 2012 for an extended discussion). As one of my participants told me:
“My family only started listening to me after I started sending remittances”. Unsur-
prisingly, many women were reluctant to give up their newfound status and sense
of personhood once their contracts came to an end. So many of our participants
decided to prolong their migration and continue to stay in the UK despite the fact
that the most compelling economic factors that catalysed their migration had been
dealt with. Although migration to the UK is considered officially to be short-term
(according to the Philippine government), it appears to be gradually turning into
a long-term migration or diaspora.
If the real reason for prolonging one’s stay is to retain one’s independence
and autonomy then this is not easily articulated in social contexts. Recall that
female migration and the attendant family separation are still contested within the
Philippines despite government policies which encourage migration. Interestingly,
participants decided to justify their decisions by referring to their newfound ability
to mother at a distance through new media. Nelia, a domestic worker and mother
of a young boy told me: “It’s the right decision for me – as long as I keep sending
money and as long as I keep calling them”. “Calling” or practising “intensive
mothering through new media”, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, provides
women with a socially acceptable justification for their decisions which are deeper
and more personal. That this justification is publicly available and even dominant
among government agencies and telecommunication companies only helps to rein-
force its credibility.
It is not possible to say whether it was migrants themselves or other actors
such as the state or the market who first adopted the optimistic discourse about
the power of media to “keep the family together”. As is often the case, there is
mutual reinforcement and not necessarily a casual relationship. Migrants appropri-
ate new media in creative ways and leave the webcam on for hours; companies
realize the market potential; governments seek to present a solution for social
problems generated by flawed economic policies while in turn migrants seek justi-
fication for their personal decisions. I would not assume, however, that migrant
women are simply influenced by the neoliberal ideologies of the Philippine govern-
ment (Padios 2011). The predicament of female migrants is incredibly complex as
they have to negotiate not only neoliberal ideologies and conditions of labour
exploitation, but also asymmetrical gender power relationships exacerbated by
normative expectations of motherhood (Madianou 2012). Many participants experi-
enced violence or humiliation in their personal relationships and these experiences
were important catalysts for migration. It is not surprising then that for these
women migration can be a source of empowerment and reinvention despite the
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 341

associated hardships and exploitation. Branded simultaneously as “heroes of the

economy” and “exploited workers”; ”bad mothers” and “light of the home”;
“breadwinners” and “caregivers” I argue it’s more important to listen to the voices
of the women themselves and how they negotiate these contradictory positions.

8 The mediatization(s) of migration

What emerges from the analysis is that the taken-for-grantedness of personal com-
munication at a distance is beginning to contribute to the shaping of the wider
phenomenon of migration itself. Migrant women justify decisions relating to migra-
tion as well as decisions relating to the prolongation of their stay on the availabil-
ity of transnational communication. Even though new media will not solve prob-
lems that are fundamentally social, the fact that they are perceived as solutions
to the problems of separation reveals their significant power to contribute to the
shaping of the phenomenon of migration. The availability of cheap and instant
communication is not the reason why women migrate or why they prolong their
stay – there are strong personal and social reasons why they choose to do so.
But the availability of transnational communication makes these decisions socially
acceptable. The fact that institutions dealing with migration have adopted dis-
courses that highlight the taken-for-grantedness of new media further entrenches
these views. As a result we see that new media and migration become enmeshed
as is evident in lowering thresholds for migrating or settling in the UK and thus
changing migration patterns. New media are more than channels for communica-
tion as they contribute to the transformation of migration as a phenomenon.
Although media are more than channels for communication, they are clearly
also serving the purpose of interpersonal communication. The wider structural
changes are made possible through the micro-processes of mediated interactions
which are analysed here as mediation. It is the perpetual and taken-for-granted
mediated everyday communication, sometimes banal, other times fraught that sus-
tains social change. Polymedia provides a framework to unpack the ways in which
users navigate the environment of media and thus exposes the inner workings of
mediation. The research revealed that mothers and their left-behind children man-
aged their relationships through their choice of media. Choosing a platform over
another from within the menu of available media opportunities acquired communi-
cative intent and became constitutive of their relationships.
The findings reported here about mediatized migration do not necessarily
apply to all kinds of migrations. Migration is not a homogenized phenomenon.
There is no single type of migration but there are several social, political, eco-
nomic, gender, and cultural factors which determine migration flows and migrant
experiences. Being an economic migrant from the Philippines differs fundamen-
tally from being a refugee or asylum seeker from a war-torn country. The migrant
342 Mirca Madianou

flow addressed here was characterized by family separation at a primary level

and systematic transnational communication. It is the frequent, almost ubiquitous
communication at a distance that sustained and influenced the wider structural
transformations. The argument presented here is only likely to be relevant to other
migrations that share this fundamental characteristic as well as some of the other
structural parameters.
Apart from developing an argument about the mediatization of migration this
chapter proposed a distinctive approach to mediatization which draws on media
anthropology. The chapter has traced parallels between the two traditions and
argues that there is scope for theoretical convergence. The ethnographic approach
proved to be invaluable in uncovering social change. The finding about mediatized
migration was not a clear research hypothesis or foretold conclusion. It emerged
through the long-term engagement with my participants and through the investi-
gation of different stakeholders, from government agencies to mobile phone com-
panies themselves. At this point it’s worth reflecting on what an anthropological
approach to mediatization would include: first, a wide lens approach, investigat-
ing not just the uses of media but also the wider social context. For this particular
study this meant investigating the motivations for migration and the reasons for
prolonging migration as well as how such decisions were justified (not the same
thing!). It also meant investigating the family relationships in question as well as
the wider social norms regarding family life and parenting. This wide lens
approach requires research to include a wide range of relevant stakeholders or
actors: from the research participants to representatives of institutions and organi-
zations relevant to the research.
Second, a historical perspective; ethnography is often considered as too preoc-
cupied with the present. That is not accurate and there is a plethora of ethnogra-
phies, including media ethnographies (see Larkin 2002), which encompass a his-
torical approach. A diachronic perspective matters particularly in research on
social change and our present study included an oral history of how people
remembered the past situation of communication via letters and cassette tapes.
The contrast with this period of scarce and expensive communication was particu-
larly revealing of changes brought about by new communication technologies.
Related to this point about temporality is the importance of a long-term per-
spective. Many participants in this research were interviewed more than once,
while 13 participants have been key informants with whom I have maintained
social relationships for over six years. Anthropologists typically work in a geo-
graphical area, or with a group of people, and will often argue that fieldwork is
largely about maintaining social relationships. This long-term involvement has
provided me with unparalleled insight into the lives and relationships of these
people who I have come to know as friends.
Fourth, being able to improvise and “to follow the thing” is important – field-
work is like a solving a mystery, full of surprises and unexpected twists (see also
 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach 343

Strathern 1996). These should be welcomed for their revelatory potential. The
unpredictability of the research findings and the flexibility to adapt to events as
they present themselves is one of the reasons why ethnographic research is well
suited for capturing social change particularly on sensitive topics where vital
issues will not be expressed in an interview, but in practices or decisions.
Finally, a comparative perspective. This research benefited from data from the
Philippines and the UK. Focusing only on one empirical site would have produced
an entirely different set of conclusions. An empirically grounded study of mediati-
zation of migration would ideally need to extend these comparisons to different
migrant populations, migration patterns as well different destinations/host socie-
ties. This will allow for the disaggregation of factors relating to sending countries,
receiving countries, legal frameworks, and media environments which will contrib-
ute to theory building and the further understanding of the deeper social conse-
quences of the media. So although the thesis presented here may have wider appli-
cability in different empirical contexts it is understood as only the beginning of a
larger project of new media environments, migration and social change.

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VI. Power, law and politics
Kent Asp
15 Mediatization: rethinking the question
of media power
Abstract: This chapter presents mediatization of politics as a process of media-
induced societal change that goes beyond the visible face of media power. Three
questions are central to my attempt to rethink the question of media power: the
nature of mediatization, its causes, and effects. Five key elements make up the
core of my account of the mediatization theory: (1) adaptation as a process of
social learning to a changing media environment, (2) the media as constraints on
actions; the emergence of powerful and independent media institutions, and (3)
the increased media dependency as causes of mediatization, and (4) shifts of
power as an effect, and (5) social change as a consequence.
The age of television was the background for my original account, relevant first
and foremost for the systems world. Today, my conclusion is that the news media
have become an integral part of the political institutions, whereupon the mediati-
zation of politics should have reached a final phase. But whereas the process of
mediatization may have peaked on the systems level, the mediatization of the
lifeworld has only just begun. Consequently, mediatization theory should also
today – in the age of the Internet – be a most relevant tool for approaching and
rethinking the question of media power.

Keywords: mediatization, conceptualization of mediatization, media power, medi-

atization of politics, political communication, societal change, media logic, new
institutionalism, media dependency, exchange theory.

Mediatization is new as a concept, but not as a social phenomenon. Ancient

empires and civilizations were also transformed by existing media technologies
(Innis 1951), and within media and communication studies the question of how
the media act as drivers of societal change is classical (Katz and Szecskö 1981).
When I used the concept of mediatization in my dissertation Mäktiga massme-
dier (Powerful Mass Media, 1986), the aim was to approach the question of how
the media influenced politics and affected the distribution of societal power.1 It

1 Whereas I in the Swedish text had used the Swedish term of “medialisering”, the term that
appeared in the English summary was that of “medialisation”. A visiting American scholar, how-
ever, told me that he had never encountered the word (which he, by the way, considered to be
somewhat “awkward”), whereupon he suggested that I instead should spell it with a “z”. Conse-
quently, in two subsequent works in English (Asp 1990; Asp and Esaiasson 1996), I used the term
“medialization”. While “mediatization” is the term that tends to appear in the contemporary
debate, the two terms are, at least in my view, altogether comparable. Moreover, the distinction
that Krotz (2007) makes between “Medialiserung” (the consequences) and “Mediatiserung” (the
350 Kent Asp

was a conscious attempt to introduce a concept that in the same way as “American-
ization” is self-explanatory in nature.2 The hope was also that the concept would
find its way into the national Swedish debate on the media, which happened.3
Therefore, the introduction of the concept 4 itself can be seen as an example of the
mediatization of science.5

process) is analogous to the Swedish distinction between “medialisering” and “mediatisering”. But
while Krotz’s way of separating the one from the other is worth considering, I personally prefer to
use one and the same term. In my view, there is otherwise a risk that discussions on mediatization
will be reduced to discussions on terminology. As my contribution shall hopefully illuminate, I
favor a concept that is as clean and simple as possible.
2 More recently, I have understood that the origin of the concept has been debated (e.g. Lundby
2009b) and that Scandinavian scholars (Hjarvard 2008: 106; Lundby 2009b: 12; Strömbäck and
Dimitrova 2011: 30) have referred to my dissertation (Asp 1986). In the discussion of the origin of
the concept, the oldest non-Scandinavian references that I have found are those of Manheim (1933),
Habermas (1987), Thompson (1995), and Baudrillard (1993). At the time for my dissertation, I had
for rather obvious reasons not read either Habermas (1987) or Thompson (1995) – and in my view,
neither of them is really discussing mediatization. Baudrillard, on the other hand, is quite to the
point, although his description of the consequences is somewhat exaggerated. Moreover, back in
1986 his work (and Manheim’s) was unknown to me, and I was not aware of the fact that the term
had been used in discussions on Napoleon’s relations to various German duchies.
At this time, my main sources of inspiration were the Norwegian sociologist Gudmund Hernes
(1978); the background to this being the debate on whether or not there was a “leftist” media.
While there, in my view, were tendencies of this kind (in Sweden as in other countries), what was
most conspicuous was not the “political bias”, but the “media bias”. Hence, to me the works of
James Coleman (1964), Peter Blau (1964), and Thomas E. Patterson (esp. 1980) turned out to be
important; other sources of inspiration were Carl Joachim Friedrich’s “rule of anticipated reactions”
(1963); Altheide (1985); and, somewhat less important, Altheide and Snow (1979).
3 It was, for example, taken up by the mass media at an early stage, and somewhat later it has
occurred in the national debate literature (e.g. Björnsson and Luthersson 1997; Bengtsson 2001);
in textbooks (e.g. Strömbäck 2004): and in Government Commission Reports (e.g. SOU 1999: 126).
In contrast, the concept did initially not occur very frequently in the research literature (and when
it was used, it was in a media critical and heuristic way). However, in 1990 the Swedish association
of media scholars (FSMK) organized a conference on the subject, where Asp (1990) was presented
as an introductory speech.
4 According to Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011: 32), mediatization started to appear as a concept
in the international research literature in the mid-1990s, and a search in the Web of Knowledge
confirms it: before 1997, one article on music was published in 1992; between 1997 and 2001 it
occurred in ten articles within the research field of media and communications studies; between
2002 and 2006 the corresponding figure was 15; and between 2007 and 2011, this figure was 85
(the frequently used medical term mediatization not included). Of course, all publications are not
included in the Web of Knowledge, but the point here should nonetheless remain valid: before
the mid-1990s, the concept did really not occur in non-Scandinavian media and communication
studies.
5 In Swedish (as in other Scandinavian languages, probably also in German), there is really noth-
ing “awkward” about “medialisering” (swe)/“medialisierung” (ge), quite the opposite. In Swedish,
the term appears as rather catchy; whereas it verges on the self-evident it is still vague enough to
remain user friendly. Theodore Adorno is known to have said that “a good concept is like a fly
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 351

1 Two faces of media power

The empirical data in my dissertation showed – at least in my view – that the
media are powerful in two ways: by influencing the audience’s perceptions and
beliefs, and by exercising a considerable amount of discretionary power over the
content that influences the audience. In the final chapter I wished to look ahead
and see beyond the visible face of the power of the media. In my view, the media
also exert a more latent form of power, where the power mechanism is the adapta-
tion of individuals and societal institutions to the media. My thesis was that this
invisible face of media power is of even greater importance for the distribution of
societal power than the manifest power of the media.
When the concept of mediatization was first utilized, the consequences of the
process were said to be a political system that is highly influenced by and adapted
to the terms imposed by the media (Asp 1986: 359). Thus, the premise for the
process of mediatization is the Janus face of media power. In my view, the impact
power of the media is a prerequisite for the adaptation power of the media (cf.
Schrott 2009: 46),6 and my conceptualization was therefore an attempt to “rethink
the question of media power” (Livingstone 2009: 3). In brief, this is the origin of
my hypothesis on the mediatization of politics (Asp 1990).

1.1 Key elements: conceptualization

The theory was originally presented as follows. The mediatization of politics is a
process of change in which politicians tend to adapt to various constraints imposed
by the media. The adaptation of politicians is caused by the emergence of powerful
and independent media, and an increased dependency on the media. The media
dependency increases the power of the media, which leads to shifts of power that
in a fundamental way change both the political system and the distribution of
societal power (Asp 1986: 357–361).
Consequently, five key elements are at the core of the original thesis: (1) adap-
tation to a changing media environment, (2) media as constraints, (3) increased
media power and media dependency as causes of mediatization, (4) shifts of power
as effect, and (5) societal change as a consequence of mediatization.
The sections below will explicate and discuss the five elements that are funda-
mental to the theory of mediatization. Three themes are central: the nature of
mediatization, its causes, and its effects.

paper – everything sticks to it”. As far as I can see, ”medialisering” appears to have had that fly
paper quality.
6 “Mediatization exists as soon as the media become influential and formative” (Schrott 2009: 46).
352 Kent Asp

As my attempts to rethink the question of media power had their point of

departure in the Swedish context, I will, in this chapter, also discuss the main
conclusions that can be drawn from analyses of the existing empirical data.7
Five hypotheses will be examined: (1) the hypothesis of the five phases of
mediatization; the adaptation of politicians to a changing media environment, (2)
the hypothesis of formative moments; the emergence of media as a powerful and
independent institution as a cause of mediatization, (3) the hypothesis of media
dependency as an underlying cause of mediatization, (4) the power shifts hypoth-
esis; increased media power as an effect of mediatization, and (5) the audience
democracy hypothesis as a societal consequence of mediatization.
I will also suggest some new theoretical directions for the field. Whereas the
original theory was concerned with the transformations of the systems world dur-
ing the age of television, a question that today needs to be asked is whether the
conceptualization is also relevant to the mediatization of the lifeworld in the age
of the Internet.

2 Adaptation to a changing media environment

The driving forces behind mediatization are the dynamics of the media environ-
ment and the continuous adaptation of individuals and societal institutions to this
environment. Thus, adaptation is the first key element in the theory of mediatiza-
tion.8

7 The Swedish Media Election Studies (SMES) are carried out within the framework of the research
program “Journalism and Democracy”, at first in the Department of Political Science, and later at
the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG) at University of Gothenburg. The
analyses cover news media’s coverage of ten general election campaigns (1979–2010) and three
national referenda (on nuclear energy in 1980, entry into the European Union in 1994, and member-
ship in the European Monetary Union in 2003).
The coverage of general elections is limited to the final four weeks of the campaign in the press,
radio, and television. In the case of referenda, the material also includes all broadcast programs
relating to the referendum as well as editorials and other op-ed material. Ensuing studies have
been reported in conjunction with each election in more than 30 years. I have chosen not to refer
to all these reports in the discussion of empirical findings. A summary of the theoretical starting
points for the SMES is published in Asp (2007).
8 In the writings of mediatization scholars, one can broadly conceive of two views regarding the
question of what triggers mediatization. On the one hand, there are those who emphasize the
reactions of the actors as the genesis of mediatization (be it in terms of adaptation, adjustment,
adoption, accommodation, or amalgamation, see for example Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Kep-
plinger 2002; Schulz 2004; Strömbäck 2008a; Hjarvard 2008; Strömbäck and Esser 2009); on the
other hand, there are those who emphasize the media as the genesis of mediatization. In this latter
group, it is the media that shape, mold and transform (Couldry 2008; Lundby 2009c; Livingstone
2009; Hepp 2009). Consequently, media logic is either being seen as “the core” (Schrott 2009: 48)
or “the engine” (Strömbäck and Esser 2009: 212) of mediatization.
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 353

Although it would not come first in a model of causality (processes of adaptation

must be conceived of in relation to the contexts in which they come into play),
the adaptation of actors outside of the media is nevertheless what triggers the
process of mediatization.
Consequently, the casual mechanism in the process of mediatization is adapta-
tion. Following this, the strength of mediatization is directly related to the degree
to which actors outside of the media adapt to the media. This basic point of depar-
ture is really the first premise of the overall theory of mediatization. The second
premise stems from the belief that the processes of adaptation reflect actual shifts
of power. In other words, the more individuals and institutions adapt to the media,
the more powerful the media are assumed to be. In this way, the concept of mediat-
ization is more theoretically distinct than the concept of mediation (Couldry 2008;
Strömbäck 2008a; Livingstone 2009; Bennett and Entman 2001).
Furthermore, the relation between actors and the media must be explicated in
two respects. Firstly, a distinction should be made between actors with different
logics of action. The adaptation to the media can be assumed to differ for actors
on the systems level (where money and power are the steering media and rational-
ity and strategic action form the basis for the logic of action) and actors in the
lifeworld (where participation, communication, and consensus are steering media
and the construction of identity, deliberation, and rational reflection form the basis
for the logic of action [Habermas 1987]). If the challenge is to develop a theory
that encompasses both the mediatization of the systems world in the age of televi-
sion and the mediatization of the lifeworld in the age of the Internet, this distinc-
tion is vital.
Following the first premise, a second distinction should be made between
different degrees of adaptation. In contrast to other scholars of mediatization, I
am however not certain about the fruitfulness of distinguishing between different
kinds of mediatization (Schulz 2004: 98; Hjarvard 2004, 2008: 114–115; Strömbäck
2008a; Hepp 2009: 142–143). The reason is that this would imply the risk of reduc-
ing the distinctiveness of the concept. Consequently, mediatization should be con-
sidered a one-dimensional concept.9

Of course, the here suggested division between an actor perspective and a media perspective
must not be taken too far. More than anything else, the stressed perspective reflects the research
interest of the scholar in question; and generally, both perspectives can be found in the writings
of one and the same researcher.
9 In my view, different degrees of adaptation are really a most crucial theme also in the contribu-
tions that others have made. In Schulz’s account (1998: 98), “four different processes of change
represent different aspects of mediatization: extensions, substitution, amalgamation and accommo-
dation”. Whether the discussed phases are to be seen as causes, effects, or results of mediatization
itself, is, however, not altogether clear (Schrott 2009: 44). In my view, all four aspects that Schulz
discusses can however be conceived of in relation to different degrees of adaptation (to provide
but one example, the way smart phones are integrated into people’s lives should be a most appar-
ent example of what Schultz discusses in terms of “extension”).
354 Kent Asp

The conclusion is therefore twofold: Whereas a distinction will be made between

actors that are marked by different logics, a distinction will not be made between
different dimensions. Regardless of what medium is being discussed, the adapta-
tion of individuals and societal institutions to the media environment is a one-
dimensional process of social learning.
Essentially, this learning process occurs in two subsequent steps; a sense-
making process (including recognition and acclimatization to the useful/powerful
media) and a process of accommodation (including adjustment, adoption, and
integration of the ideology and the logic of the useful/powerful media).
The following will discuss the different degrees of adaptation more thoroughly.

2.1 Five phases of mediatization

As a historical process, mediatization can be conceived of as a number of different
phases. Essentially, this approach underlies my previous account of the three
phases of mediatization (Asp and Esaiasson 1996; cf. Blumler and Kavanagh 1999;
Hjarvard 2008; Djerf-Pierre and Weibull 2008; Østbye and Aalberg 2008). Later on,
the three phases were further elaborated by Strömbäck (2008).
Today, however, the process of mediatization has reached even further. Conse-
quently, I would here like to expand the time perspective and supplement the
previous analyses. Based on the interaction between the two driving forces of
mediatization – the emergence of the news media as a powerful and independent
institution, and the adaptation of the politicians to the changing media environ-
ment – five phases of mediatization can be identified (Asp 2011: 152–154).
The first phase of mediatization took-off when television and the news media
became the predominant channel for political communication. In Sweden, this
occurred in the early 1960s. Whereas the media at this stage had acquired power
over their audiences, their content was still highly influenced by the political par-
ties. However, as television became increasingly important, the politicians gradu-
ally understood the importance of the media. Consequently, recognition of the
influential media can be said to be the first degree of adaptation.
The second phase emerged as journalists increasingly started to act independ-
ently; in Sweden, this phase began in the early 1970s. In contrast to the earlier
period, when the media were powerful only in relation to their audiences, the
media were now also powerful in relation to the content. Consequently, acclimati-
zation to the independent media is considered the second degree of adaptation.

In the same vein, of central importance to Hepp’s distinction between quantitative and qualita-
tive mediatization (2009: 142–143); Strömbäck’s four dimensions (2008a), and the way Hjarvard
(2004; 2008: 114–115) distinguishes between direct and indirect meditization is – at least in my
view – in all cases the notion of there being different degrees of adaptation. In other words, a one-
dimensional understanding of the concept is indeed underlying most of the accounts that have
been put forth – and this regardless of whether or not the one-dimensionality is explicitly declared.
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 355

The third phase of mediatization began in Sweden in the mid-1980s as politi-

cians increasingly started to adjust to the powerful media and their modus oper-
andi. By copying the media, the politicians’ understanding of media logic gradu-
ally improved. Therefore, adjustment to the powerful media is the third degree of
adaptation.
The fourth phase of mediatization took in Sweden place in the 1990s as the
independent power of the media continued to increase. Political actors and institu-
tions now accommodated to the media rather customarily; over time, they increas-
ingly incorporated what they had learned. Consequently, adoption of the media
logic is the fourth degree of adaptation.
Finally, in the beginning of the 2000s, the fifth phase of mediatization began
to evolve. During this phase, the Swedish (news) media institutions increasingly
became an integral part of the political institutions. Therefore, integration with the
media institutions emerges as the fifth degree of adaptation.
Together, the five aforementioned phases lead to a hypothesis on how the two
driving forces behind mediatization have interacted and evolved during the last
fifty years.
All in all, the hypothesis suggesting five phases of mediatization has gained
empirical support in the series of Swedish Media Election Studies (SMES). Although
differences will emerge if the developments in different countries are compared,
it is my belief that the overall developments should be quite comparable.
The following two sections will discuss the causes of mediatization more thor-
oughly.

3 Media as constraints: emerging independent

institutions
The media as constraints on actions is the second key element in the theory of
mediatization. As constraints, the media can be conceived of in a number of differ-
ent ways: as technology, as societal institutions, as organizations, and as text
structures.
Regarding the question of what it is that individual and institutional actors
adapt to, there is no unitary view among mediatization scholars. Basically, two
groups can be identified: researchers who focus on how action is constrained by
communicative forms, technology, and text structure, and researchers who adhere
to an institutional perspective. Generally, those who share a form perspective (e.g.
Couldry 2008; Lundby 2009c; Hepp 2009; Rothenbuhler 2009) place great empha-
sis on the production and construction of messages. As a general rule, a range of
different media is being considered (not least digital), and often in relation to
everyday life (Lundby 2008). Most importantly, researchers within this group tend
to conceive of the media itself as the genesis of mediatization.
356 Kent Asp

In comparison, amongst researchers who conceive of the media as an institu-

tion and organization, stress is often placed on media logic as constraints on
action; those who adhere to an institutional perspective tend to study news media
and politics (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Meyer 2002; Schulz 2004; Schrott 2009;
Kepplinger 2002; Strömbäck 2008a; Strömbäck and Esser 2009). Although the dif-
ference must not be exaggerated, researchers with an institutional perspective tend
to conceive of the actors’ adaptation to the media as the genesis of mediatization.10
Then, how should one understand the notion of media as constraints – from
either a form or institutional perspective? Since the media appear in different
guises, the term “media” is itself quite ambiguous. Here, however, I have chosen
to utilize an institutional perspective when conceiving of the media as constraints
on action. The reason is that adaptation to the media as “form” can be considered
an adaptation to a set of rules.11 Consequently, when discussing the media as an
institution, what I have in mind is the norms and routines, principles, and values
that together form “the rules of the game” (North 1990).
Owing especially to Cook (1998, 2006), Sparrow (1999) and Ryfe (2006), a neo-
institutional perspective (March and Olsen 1984, 1989, 1994; Powell and DiMaggio
1991) has recently had a large impact on media and communication research.12
Among mediatization scholars, Hjarvard (2004, 2008) was early to conceive of
mediatization from an institutional perspective; an important contribution that
shaped my own way of approaching the question was also made by the Danish
media and communication researcher Mark Ørsten (2004).
A neo-institutional perspective is, however, not unproblematic, since it implies
several scientific-philosophical problems (e.g. Pedersen 1991; Sjöblom 1993; Peters
1996). Consequently, it needs to be explicated in four respects.
The first problem is related to the fundamental premise itself: the existence of
institutions. As all social constructs, the concept of institutions opens up for wish-
ful constructions; scholars easily run the risk of designing institutions in ways that
automatically produce the desired result. For example, March and Olsen were early
criticized, not least for failing to make a clear distinction between institutions and
organizations.

10 To what group the researcher who first used the concept of media logic, Robert P. Altheide (e.g.
Altheide and Snow 1979; Altheide 1985; cf. Lundby 2009c), belongs is not self-evident. As it appears
from Altheide’s more recent writing (2004) it seems, however, correct to categorize him amongst
the scholars with a form perspective: “Media logic refers to the assumptions and processes for
constructing messages within a particular medium. This includes rhythm, grammar and format”
(ibid: 294).
11 Also the political system puts constraints on the media. For example, besides economic con-
straints (and “a host of other constraints”), Blumler and Gurevitch (1981) discuss legal, normative,
and structural constraints.
12 The person who in media studies was first to use the concept of institutions in a sociological
way, Gaye Tuchman (1973, 1978), has also contributed in a most significant way.
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 357

Later on, however, March and Olsen (1994: 4–5), in addition to others such as
North (1990), clarified the key elements of new institutionalism: “… life is orga-
nized by sets of shared meanings and practices that come to be taken for granted …
actors act and organize themselves in accordance with rules and practices which
are socially constructed, publicly known, anticipated and accepted.” Similarly,
Cook (1998: 70–71) speaks of “the rules and procedures that constitute institutions
are understood as the quasi-natural way of how to get things done”.
Definitions of this kind – where “the rules of the game” serve as the least
common denominator – provide a theoretical ground for the existence of institu-
tions. Within media research, many studies have focused on the news institution.
A main controversy has been whether or not it is correct to consider the news as
a single institution (Sparrow 1999: 8; Cook 1998, 2006; Ryfe 2006); a similar discus-
sion within the mediatization discourse concerns whether it is correct to conceive
of a single media logic (Lundby 2009c; Hjarvard 2008).
A second dilemma involves the constitution of institution, in essence, how “sets
of shared meanings and practices that come to be taken for granted” are under-
stood. The news institution can tentatively be defined in terms of the rules of the
game on two different levels (cf. Ørsten 2004): (1) the media ideology (ideals and
myths), where claims of three kinds form the basis for the news institution –
independence, objectivity, and facticity – and (2) media logic (rules and proce-
dures), where, for example, media dramaturgy, media format, media rationales,
and media routines form the news institution’s modus operandi.
Actors on the societal level are assumed to adapt not only to media logic; a
process of adaptation is at play also with regard to the claims of the news media
(the media ideology). Following this perspective, the rise of the news media as an
independent institution with its own ideology and logic is one of the two driving
forces of mediatization.
A third question is that of institutional change. Be it spontaneous, by planning
or evolution, the news media as an institution must at one time or the other have
taken form (Goodin 1996; Sjöblom 1993; Rothstein 1996). Whereas the news institu-
tion can be assumed to have developed evolutionarily, spontaneous changes and
conscious actions are also likely to have contributed. In any event, it is important
to conceive of this as a historical process, where different elements (e.g. “objectiv-
ity”) may have developed at a different pace due to the specific national context
(Schudson 1978; Höijer and Pöttker 2005; Allern and Ørsten 2011).
Finally, a fourth problem is that of explaining institutional change. Broadly,
theories on how institutions come into existence, are maintained, and changed
can be grouped into three different categories: economic theories, where institu-
tions arise and change as “the social benefits of building institutions exceed the
transaction cost doing so”; political theories, where “institutions are shaped by
those in power in order to stay in power”; and cultural theories, where “societies
hold beliefs that shape” institutions (LaPorta et al. 1999).
358 Kent Asp

Alone or together, efficiency, interests, and beliefs may at various times

explain the emergence of the news media as an institution. However, external
factors and events may also be of crucial importance. For example, in Douglass
North’s account, the rise of private property came about as a response to the Black
Death (North and Thomas 1973). In “our case”, a change that can clearly be related
to the emergence of the news media as a powerful independent institution is the
introduction of the television.
In Sweden, a formative moment seems to have occurred in the 1960s; during
this decade, the media as a constraint on action changed in terms of technology
as well as an institution. As a news technology, television dramatically increased
the impact power of the media. The successful new medium was also of decisive
importance for the rise of the news media as a powerful independent institution –
not least since it signalled independence and non-partisan norms and soon
became the dominant news medium. In fact, the success of television severely
undermined the tradition of a partisan press. Therefore, the objectivity norm of
television indirectly implied the death of the partisan press and the birth of profes-
sional news journalism.
The hypothesis suggesting that the introduction of television is a formative
moment for the emergence of the media as a powerful and independent institution
gains empirical support in the series of Swedish Media Election Studies. The intro-
duction of television is known to have emerged somewhat differently in other
countries – not least in countries without a public service tradition. Nonetheless,
the overall picture should be valid for other democratic countries.

4 Dependency: why actors in society adapt

to the media
The theory’s third key element is the notion that dependency is one of the underly-
ing causes of mediatization. In a basic form, this view underlay the argumentation
in my dissertation. Unequal exchange relations, I argued, (Asp 1986: 357 f.) are the
result of situations where dependency is unevenly distributed. In essence, what
underlies situations of dependency are unbalanced needs; A is dependent on B to
the degree that A’s need for B is not counterbalanced by B’s need for A.
As strategic and goal-oriented actors, politicians are dependent on the media,
since the media can provide them with an audience. Obviously, without an audi-
ence, political power cannot be legitimate; consequently, from the perspective of
politicians, the media indirectly serve as a means for power to become legitimate.
On the other hand, the news media are dependent on politicians, since politi-
cians (and other power holders) deliver information of interest and importance to
their audiences. In other words, the situation is one of mutual dependency and
can therefore be analyzed in terms of a social exchange situation.
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 359

Notably, underlying and structuring the situation are the parties’ resources
and interests; regarding the social exchange relation discussed here, politicians
are assumed to exchange information (resource) for publicity (interest), whereas
the news media exchange publicity (resource) for information (interest).
Therefore, the dependency of politicians is a function of the degree to which
they are interested in what the media control, and the degree to which the media
exercise sovereign control. Consequently, it can be assumed that the dependency
of politicians increases as (1) the control that the media exercise over publicity
increases, (2) the control that the politicians exercise over information decreases,
(3) the media’s interest in the information that the politicians control decreases,
and (4) the politicians’ interest in publicity increases.
As an underlying cause of mediatization, the dependency hypothesis has, in
the first three cases, gained empirical support in the Swedish Media Election Stud-
ies:
1. Over time, the media’s control over the election coverage (publicity) has
increased almost linearly; an indicator is that journalists today are more visible
(in terms of acting subjects) in the media than the party leaders (see Bjerling
2012).
2. An implication of the fact that the space allotted to columnists and commenta-
tors has increased dramatically is that the parties’ control over information
has decreased; not even their own debates are now controlled by the parties.
The instant interpretations of political pundits have become increasingly
important.
3. By investigative journalism and putting priority to their “own” news, journal-
ists have increasingly freed themselves from a former dependency on political
sources. Over time, that is, the media have become less interested in the infor-
mation provided by politicians.

The claim that politicians’ interest in publicity (4) has increased cannot be directly
tested against data from the election coverage. Nonetheless, three reciprocal devel-
opments during high modernity can be assumed to have caused a situation where
politicians are more dependent on the media than ever before.
1. The individualization of society: Higher education levels, diminished conform-
ity towards established institutions and traditions, and increasing political vol-
atility have all implied that the potential for persuasion has grown. For exam-
ple, the share of Swedish voters that changed party from one election to the
other was as low as 6–7 % in the 1950s. Today, the corresponding figure is
as high as 30 %. Consequently, as the potential for persuasion has grown,
a reasonable assumption is that politicians’ keenness for publicity has also
increased.
2. Increased media influence: There are two sides to this issue: on the one hand,
there is the actual power of the media – i.e. the power that the media exercise.
360 Kent Asp

On the other hand, there is the perceived power of the media. As the subjective
perceptions of the growing media influence constitute an independent factor –
a cultural phenomenon with a life of its own apart from objective reality – the
importance of the second kind must not be underestimated. In fact, according
to the Swedish public, Swedish journalists exert a greater influence on the
national political agenda than do politicians. Ever since the late 1980s, the
curve indicating the perceived influence of journalists points steeply upwards.
Conversely, the curves for the government, the parliament, and other agencies
all point downwards (Asp 2012).
3. The professionalization of politics: Since the 1960s, the traditional Swedish
membership parties have increasingly given way to electoral-professional par-
ties (Panebianco 1988). Since appeals to public opinion are often decisive to
parties with weak vertical ties and personalized leaderships, the organizational
developments have, amongst other things, implied that the parties’ interest in
media publicity has increased.

All in all, the Swedish Media Election Studies provide strong support for the
dependency hypothesis. Since there is little reason to believe that Sweden should
be a particular case, the documented development is likely to be at play in most
democratic countries.
In essence, the increased dependency of politicians is an underlying cause of
mediatization, and its effect is shifts of power.

5 Shifts of power: effects of mediatization

Over time, the power of the media has increased vis-à-vis politicians and societal
institutions; these power shifts are the fourth key element of mediatization theory.
Most notably, the increased power of the media is both a cause and an effect from
the process of mediatization. This, however, does not imply that mediatization
“goes beyond a simple causal logic” (Schulz 2004: 90). Rather, it implies that
mediatization is a process where increased power can be perceived of as a cause
at one time, whereas it is perceived of as an effect at a later stage.
The power concept is often introduced by stating that power is among the
most controversial concepts within the social sciences, whereupon there – not so
surprisingly – is an abundance of definitions of power (Wrong 1979; Clegg 1989;
Boulding 1990). Moreover, whereas the concept seems to appear somewhat less
often in the book titles of today than in those of the 1980s (e.g. Paletz and Entman
1981; Ranney 1983; Graber 1984; Altheide 1985), “power” is still a recurring theme
in almost all research on media and politics (e.g. Schudson 1995). In other words,
“power” is still an essential point of departure for most analyses within the field
(Cook 1998).
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 361

To differentiate “power” from the more encompassing concept of influence, a

frequently occurring criterion in the traditional power literature is the prevalence
of intension and resistance (Weber 1976/1992).13 To conceive of power as a nar-
rower concept than influence is not self-evident (Friedrich 1963; Oppenheimer
1981); certain prominent power theoreticians such as Dahl (1957), Simon (1957),
and March (1966) do not make a distinction between the two; rather, they choose
to talk of “power terms” (Dahl 1968). Although the actual terminology is not criti-
cal, the concept of power is here used in general terms (Asp 1996) to analyze (1)
actors who perform deliberate actions (regardless of whether they are being
resisted or not) and (2) actors who do not exercise deliberate willpower. The latter
is a frequently encountered case in media and communication studies.
As previously discussed, underlying the mediatization thesis is a view where
both the impact power and the adaptation power must be considered (the former
is essentially a prerequisite for the latter). Consequently, in order to test the
hypothesis of power shifts, both faces of media power must be explored.
As I see it, the impact power of the media is a function of the power over the
audience, and the power over the content that influences the audience (Asp 1986).
An implication is that “much” power in one respect does not necessarily come
hand in hand with “much” power in the other respect. Obviously, the two aspects
of the media’s impact power can be analyzed separately, and overall conclusions
can be reached only by considering both aspects. Consequently, any overall esti-
mates must consider (1) the independent effect the media exercise on individuals
and society in comparison to other sources of information, and (2) the independent
effect the media themselves exercise on the media content in relation to other
societal actors.
In other words, the hypothesis suggesting power shifts regarding impact power
can be formulated in the following way: when compared to other actors and insti-
tutions, the independent impact power of the media has increased regarding both
audience and content.
In politics, the ultimate way of examining what power the media have over the
audience(s) is to study to what degree the content affects citizens’ voting decisions.
Notably, an important finding within the Swedish Media Election Studies (SMES)
is that there is a strong correlation between media treatment and electoral results
in all ten election campaigns. Tentatively, this finding can be interpreted as evi-
dence of the independent effect of the media coverage.
Moreover, this kind of impact power can also be understood in terms of how
citizens conceive of the political issues. An early example comes from the 1979
election, where the question of nuclear power was much higher on the media

13 Using Weber’s power definition (1976/1992): “Jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen Beziehung
den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widersterbgen durchzuzetzen, gleichweil worauf diese Chance
beruht”.
362 Kent Asp

agenda than on the party agenda. In this scenario, the citizen agenda was indeed
shaped more by the media agenda than by the party agenda (Asp 1983a). The fact
that the media, in this respect, were more influential than the politicians had
repercussions for Swedish politics for decades to come. Ever since, the agenda-
setting function of the media has been a significant feature in all Swedish election
campaigns.
Whereas the media election studies do not provide any answers to the question
of whether the media, over the last thirty years, have come to exercise increased
power over the audience, they do indicate that the power that the media exercise
over the content has increased. In the studies, the influence of the journalists is
understood as a function of the power to (1) identify and select events, and (2)
interpret and present events (Asp 1983b; 1986: 362). Here, the overall trend is clear:
over time, the development goes from a situation of straight reporting of actor-
defined events to a situation of interpretative journalism of media-defined events.
My conclusion is that the hypothesis suggesting impact power shifts has gained
strong empirical support in both aspects that have been discussed above. As in
most established and mature democracies, both the political system and the elec-
tions campaigns in Sweden are highly influenced by the media.14
The next step in the analysis is to test the hypothesis that predicts an adapta-
tion power shift. In the preceding discussion, the adaptation process was outlined
as a process of social learning. All in all, five degrees of adaptation were distin-
guished, and an underlying notion was that increased adaptation indicates
increased media power. In other words, the more individuals and societal institu-
tions have adapted to the media environment, the more powerful are the media.
A total of five degrees of adaptation were identified: a sense-making process
of (1) recognition, and (2) acclimatization to the powerful media, and an accommo-
dation process of (3) adjustment (i.e. learning the rules of the game by copying),
(4) adoption (i.e. learning by incorporating the rules of the game), and (5) integra-
tion (i.e. learning by internalizing the rules of the game).
In this context, the adaptation power of the media means that the media as
an institution exercise power over individuals’ and institutions’ way of thinking.
This, indeed, is the most refined and enduring way of exercising power. The
hypothesis suggesting adaptation power shifts can be formulated as follows: com-
pared to other societal institutions, the media as an institution has become increas-
ingly powerful, whereby individuals and institutions alike increasingly adapt to
the ideology and logic imposed by the media.

14 In general, the Swedish election coverage differs little from that discussed in the international
research literature; amongst its key features are: negative reporting; focus on bad news and con-
flicts (Robinson 1976; Ranney 1983; Entman 1989); poll-driven horse race journalism; game orienta-
tion (at the expense of attention to issues and substance); pack journalism (Patterson 1993; Cap-
pella and Jamieson 1996; Fallows 1996; Gabler 1998); and media intrusion/interventionism
(Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Swanson and Mancini 1996; Strömbäck and Esser 2009).
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 363

As previously concluded, the Swedish Media Election Studies have, all in all,
provided substantial support for the adaptation power shifts hypothesis. Like most
other post-industrial societies, Sweden is simply a country in which the societal
institutions are highly adapted to the terms imposed by the media. Regarding
politics, this overall verdict can be found in other empirical studies such as Ström-
bäck (2008b, 2010) and Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011). Similar conclusions have
recently been proposed for other spheres of society (Lundby 2009a; Hjarvard and
Lövheim 2012).
Following this, my overall conclusion is that the hypothesis suggesting power
shifts is supported; in the long run, that is, the process of mediatization has
resulted in power shifts in politics as well as in society at large. Compared to other
sources of information and actors of influence, the impact power of the media has
increased, whereupon individuals and institutions increasingly adapt to the media
as an institution and with a logic of its own.

6 Mediatization and societal change

Societal change as a consequence of mediatization is the fifth key element in the
theory of mediatization – and until now, negative aspects related to the develop-
ment have generally been highlighted.
This is particularly true for studies on politics and the systems world, where
accounts of a rather dystopic kind can be found (e.g. Meyer 2002). When the two
kinds are compared, research focusing on digital media and the lifeworld appear
rather emancipatory (e.g. Lundby 2008). The fact that studies of the first kind tend
to stress the negative consequences is, however, quite logical. Central to the idea
of mediatization is the notion that the autonomy of other societal institutions has
been significantly reduced.
Somewhat schematically, three competing hypotheses on how the media have
transformed the political system can form the basis of an analysis of how the
distribution of societal power has changed as a consequence of mediatization.
Thomas Meyer (2002) argues that political actors have lost influence to the
media – in Meyer’s words (p. xiii), “the laws of the media system generally prevail
when they collide with those of the political system”. Therefore, in Meyer’s view,
the media are transforming traditional party democracies into “a new form of poli-
tics: media democracy” (p. xiii).
A contrasting perspective is provided by Timothy E. Cook (1998). Having his
point of departure in a neo-institutional approach, Cook argues that politics and
politicians have “accommodated the news” (p. 3), whereupon he conceives of the
news media as “a coherent intermediary institution without which the government
could not act and could not work” (p. 2). In other words, in Cook’s account, the
364 Kent Asp

news media of today are conceived of as a political institution integral to govern-

ment.
Finally, what can be conceived of as a middle position is the view outlined by
Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz (1999). The authors argue that a more
intrusive media system must not lead to the conclusion that a media “takeover”
will be the result (p. 258). In the view of the authors, “political institutions increas-
ingly are dependent on and shaped by the mass media but nevertheless remain in
control of political processes and functions”. The conclusion is that the “third age”
of political communication bears the mark of an “intense yet harmless process of
mediatization of politics” (p. 258).
In sum, the three above accounts provide somewhat different images of how
the media have transformed politics and affected distributions of societal power.
The hypotheses that I proposed in the mid-1980s are very similar to the view advo-
cated by Meyer, although I chose to discuss the development in terms of a trend
towards “mediarchy” (Asp 1986: 363; 1990; cf. de Virieu 1990) rather than “media
democracy”.
In my account, “mediarchy” was the term used to describe a political system
that is heavily influenced by and adapted to the terms imposed by the media; it
is characterized by personalization and volubility at the expense of being in touch
with the people, political competence, and thoughtfulness. Amongst other things,
the demand for incisive wording and simplification results in highly conflict-rid-
den issues, fragmented political debates devoid of ideology, and short-term opin-
ion politics that place the political game and tactical moves at the forefront. What
is lost, then, is a discussion on the long-term political results, factual debates and
the question of statesmanship.
Essentially, the hypotheses concerning the consequences of mediatization had
their point of departure in a model where the political world consists of the rela-
tions between actors and issues (and the attributes of both actors and issues);
underlying my reasoning was the notion that components over time should have
had to increasingly adapt to the media’s logic for storytelling (Hernes 1978; Asp
1986: 360–61).
Very briefly, eight hypotheses were deduced and formulated in the following
way: The more mediatized politics becomes, the more it will … (1) be characterized
by personification; (2) evolve around politicians’ personal traits and attributes; (3)
be marked by confrontation; (4) be constricted to a small number of clear-cut
issues; (5) be marked by attempts to simplify the issues; (6) appear as fragmented
and de-ideologized; (7) evolve around political profiling and packaging; and (8)
be oriented towards the game rather than substantial politics.
Then, thirty years after these hypotheses were first formulated, what empirical
support have they acquired?
The two hypotheses assuming increased personalization have been examined
in a study where data from all Swedish Media Election Studies conducted have
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 365

been pooled (Bjerling 2012). Whereas the study shows that party leaders over time
are portrayed in a larger proportion of the images, it also shows that there is no
trend where the party leaders increasingly appear as political subjects; for the
party leaders, the long-term trend is essentially one of increased objectification
(H1). Moreover, regarding the second of the above hypotheses (H2), the same study
shows that personal traits are being focused on somewhat more often; there is
also a rather dramatic increase in the propensity to focus on the party leaders’
families.
In contrast, the Swedish Media Election Studies have not provided support for
the third hypothesis (H3); that is, that there is a trend of increasingly confronta-
tional politics. The same is true for both the fourth hypothesis (H4) – the number
of issues has not decreased – and (more arguably) the fifth hypothesis (H5).
The sixth, the seventh, and the eighth hypothesis have, however, all gained
robust empirical support; analyses from the Swedish Media Election Studies have
shown that politics, over time, has become increasingly de-ideologized (H6); more
concerned with profiling and packaging (H7) and the political game (H8).
All in all, the empirical indicators of mediatization do not support the notion
of a development towards a full-fledged “mediarchy” – at least not in the way it
was outlined in the 1980s. Nonetheless, to describe the development in terms of
“an intense yet harmless process” is not altogether accurate.
Due to the process of mediatization, the power of the media as an institution
has increased; and an important consequence thereof may be an increasingly
empowered citizenry. Certainly not in the way prescribed by adherents of tradi-
tional party democracy – in a highly mediatized political system, citizens will to
a large extent exercise their influence as an audience (Manin 1997).
In other words, the mediatization of politics has led to the rise of an audience
democracy – a political system in which citizens appear largely in the role of an
audience; they react to alternatives that political actors present on stages made
up by the media.

7 Conclusions
My contribution has evolved around three themes: the nature of mediatization, its
causes, and its effects. This concluding section will discuss the main conclusions.
Firstly, the way I conceptualized mediatization in the mid-1980s shall be seen
against the background of an emerging television society. In my view, television
had fundamentally altered the conditions and workings of the political system,
and mediatization was a concept that opened up for us to rethink the question of
media power. Underlying it was an aspiration to go beyond the question of visible
impact power and focus on the invisible adaptation power of the media. Whereas
366 Kent Asp

I in this way hoped to be able to propose a general theory on media power, I can
only – roughly 30 years later – conclude that this idea was somewhat premature.
Nevertheless, the five key elements discussed here are all part of what is gener-
ally conceived of as the core of the mediatization thesis. Consequently, the way in
which I conceptualized mediatization approximately thirty years ago should also
be of relevance for contemporary scholars. This, indeed, is my first conclusion.
The second conclusion is that my original conceptualization today must be re-
elaborated.
What must be clarified is the causal mechanism – how the process of adapta-
tion occurs. Notably, in my view the concept of adaptation is one-dimensional in
nature, and the adaptation processes of both individuals and societal institutions
can be seen as processes of social learning. The degree of adaptation can be
assumed to vary from a sense-making process (recognition and acclimatization to
useful/powerful media) to a process of gradually increased accommodation
(adjustment, adoption, and internalization of the media logic). Thus, individuals
and societal institutions can both be mediatized to a greater or lesser extent; and
the process of mediatization is applicable to all kinds of actors and to all kinds of
media (cf. Schulz 2004: 99).
The more precise question of to what individuals and societal institutions
adapt – and why they do it – must also be addressed. In my view, important
contributions have been made especially by scholars writing from a neo-institu-
tional perspective; and this with regard to both the emergence of the media as
an independent institution and the question of to what individuals and societal
institutions adapt.
Moreover, concerning the question of why the actors adapt to the media, it is
my belief that for meditization scholars it would be fruitful to once again return
to the basic ideas underlying the social exchange perspective. Essentially, the per-
spective stresses that power shifts occur as there are situations of increased
(decreased) dependency. Therefore, a way to approach the power shifts is to ask
the question of whether it makes sense to assume that social institutions and
individuals over time have become increasingly dependent on the (news) media.
My third conclusion is that the hypothesis suggesting power shifts has
acquired considerable empirical support. From a long-term perspective, both poli-
tics and society are marked by power shifts. The reasons are twofold: the tradi-
tional party system has become weaker, and the media have become increasingly
powerful. Underlying the above account is the notion of how politicians have
adapted to a changing media environment; the power shift was outlined as a his-
torical process with five different phases.
Since I have argued that most post-industrial societies today should have
reached the fifth phase – where the news media have become an integral part of
the political institutions – a most important question emerges: has the process of
mediatization finally reached the end of the road? Regarding politics, I am inclined
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 367

to provide an affirmative answer; for this sphere, the process of mediatization

should essentially be completed. However, this conclusion – that integration is
the logical end station – must not be understood as the end of media power.
Rather, an elegant way of describing the situation is that politicians may have
won the battle, but in doing so ended up losing the war (Cook 2005).
This leads us to another important aspect to consider: as a process of social
learning, mediatization is essentially a two-way process; not only do politicians
learn to think according to media logic, but the media also learn to think like
politicians. Consequently, over time the media will become better at realizing when
they are facing manipulation and clever spin (whereupon politicians’ repertoire of
tricks needs to be expanded once again, with the obvious consequence that the
media will have to find new ways to avoid being used by media-savvy politicians).
In other words, what emerges in the two-way learning process is really a spiral of
mediatization (Asp 1986: 361). In this spiral, I am of the opinion that politicians
should have bigger problems in anticipating what course of action the media will
choose than vice versa.
Following the notion of a spiral of mediatization, it also becomes obvious that
the process of adaptation itself is dynamic. As the media system is not isolated
but part of a larger societal context, the working logic of the media is under rela-
tively constant change; some rules are given up, whereas others are gradually
accepted, embraced, and incorporated.
Bearing in mind the micro-dynamics of the media environment, it is therefore
apt to suggest that the process of mediatization can never come to rest: as long as
society develops, so will the media; and as long as the media environment itself
is not static, processes of mediatization will occur. In other words, mediatization
will be a feature of society as long as the media can be considered an independent
societal institution with a logic of its own; only in a situation where the media is
not an independent institution is it possible to see an end to processes of mediati-
zation.
My fourth conclusion is concerned with the two driving forces behind mediati-
zation: the emergence of the media as an independent institution with a logic of
its own, and the adaptation of individuals and societal institutions to the changing
media environment. As discussed above, there is in my view support for the
dependency hypothesis (i.e. processes of adaptation come into play as politicians
over time become increasingly dependent on the media).

8 The end of mediatization?

When I first outlined the theory, the background was – as discussed above – the
emergence of a television society. In my view, the introduction of television is
intimately coupled to the emergence of the media as an independent and powerful
368 Kent Asp

institution; it is as the rules of the game become increasingly influenced by televi-

sion that the mediatization of the systems world really begins to take off.
Over the last decade, television has gradually lost its role as a rule-defining
medium to the Internet, whereupon media history once again is facing a formative
moment: Will the emergence of digital media in the age of the Internet imply
declined media dependency? Will it imply the death of independent journalism
and professionalism; will it imply the end of mediatization?
Three scenarios for the future are possible (Schulz 2004: 94–98): (1) the end
of mediatization; media no longer acts as constraints, and media dependency
ceases, (2) the process of mediatization endures; some constraints of old media
disappear, and some new constraints of the new media appear, and (3) a stronger
mediatization; new media impose new constraints, which lead to new forms of
dependency.
In my view, the third alternative appears to be the most plausible; new media
in the age of the Internet will most likely lead to societies that are increasingly
marked by strong mediatization. This does not mean that there are no valid argu-
ments against this scenario; the Internet and social media demassify and individu-
alize communication (Castells 1996), and it seems reasonable to assume that
former constraints of (and dependency upon) the “old” media should thus
decrease. When compared to the situation only a decade ago, the proliferation of
new media definitely implies that politicians today have better possibilities to
bypass the traditional news media and still acquire an audience.
But whereas the process of mediatization may have peaked on a systems level,
nothing indicates that the process of mediatization should have made a halt
regarding the lifeworld. Even though the constraints of the new media may
increasingly set the standards, the mediatization of social life is, all in all, quite
similar to the mediatization of societal institutions; once again, it involves a pro-
cess of social learning and accommodation.
As far as I can see, the main differences are really those of pace and scope –
the present process is not only faster, it is also more far-reaching. Today, the new
media substitute non-mediated activities and extend traditional modes of commu-
nication in time, space, and social contexts (Hepp 2009: 142). If this is indeed the
case, will the proliferation of the Internet and social media lead to a sixth phase
of mediatization; the mediatization of interpersonal communications?
By and large, the driving forces behind the mediatization of social life are the
same as those behind the mediatization of societal institutions: digital media for-
mats have evolved to become an independent and powerful institution with a logic
of its own. As new forms of dependencies have emerged, individuals and social
spheres have increasingly adapted to the rules of the game that are imposed by
the new media. Notably, the effects are also the same: over time, the media have
increasingly come to dominate social life, which changes the distribution of socie-
tal power.
 Mediatization: rethinking the question of media power 369

Today, both people’s leisure time and working hours are increasingly orga-
nized around and adapted to the conditions and constraints of the Internet and
social media (the dependency on new media is probably most evident regarding
social media and everyday life). All in all, what the development implies is a
situation where the lifeworld is increasingly colonized by imperatives stemming
from the systems world (Habermas 1987; Livingstone 2009: 12) – and the effects of
this development should, indeed, be discernible on a global scale. In the words of
Schulz (2004: 96): “Although the new networks and storage technologies allow a
more individualized and decentralized media use, they are nevertheless subject to
central controls restraining choices and modes of application.”
In this scenario, the forces that restrain people’s choices – not least by control-
ling their digital fingerprints and selling their identities – are all gigantic American
companies. Consequently, whereas the United States may have lost its status as
the world’s only political and economic superpower, the country’s cultural power
remains as strong as ever. Today, companies in the United States are essentially
in control of what is closest to everyone – people’s identities. Therefore, in a theo-
retical sense, the mediatization of the lifeworld can be seen as a development of
increased adaptation to a logic that is ultimately determined by commercial enter-
prises in the systems world.
Following this, my fifth and final conclusion is that mediatization (as a way
to rethink the question of media power) should be a theory that is of equal rele-
vance today as it was 30 years ago. In other words, whereas I have addressed the
question of how the media have changed political life in the age of television, it
should be quite fruitful for contemporary scholars to utilize mediatization theory
to understand how the media in the age of the Internet transform social life.

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Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser
16 Mediatization of politics: transforming
democracies and reshaping politics
Abstract: The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview, analysis, and
synthesis of theory and research on the mediatization of politics. The mediatization
of politics is defined as a long-term process through which the importance of the
media and their spill-over effects on political processes, institutions, organizations,
and actors has increased. Four dimensions can be distinguished in this process,
related to the importance of media as source of information about politics and
society, the autonomy of media institutions from other social and political institu-
tions, and the extent to which media content and political institutions, organiza-
tions, and actors respectively are guided by media logic or political logic. Both
media logic and political logic are conceptualized as three-dimensional concepts.
While media logic is conceptualized as shaped by professionalism, commercialism,
and media technology, political logic is conceptualized as shaped by polity, policy,
and politics. The chapter also analyzes the concepts of media influence and media
effects within the context of the mediatization of politics. The chapter concludes
by identifying five challenges for further theory and research on the mediatization
of politics.

Keywords: mediatization of politics, media logic, political logic, media interven-

tionism, self-mediatization, media institutions, media influence

1 Introduction
Across Western democracies, political parties and politicians appear to spend ever
more resources and energy on political campaigning (Plasser and Plasser 2002),
political marketing (Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck and Rudd 2010), political public
relations (Strömbäck and Kiousis 2011), and news management (Lieber and Golan
2011). Within government, strategic communication has also become increasingly
important (Sanders 2011). The media, meanwhile, appear to have become more
commercialized (Hamilton 2004), more interpretive (Salgado and Strömbäck 2012),
more critical towards political institutions and actors (Lengauer, Esser and Ber-
ganza 2012), more focused on covering politics as a strategic game (Aalberg, Ström-
bäck and de Vreese 2012), and more inclined to deconstruct strategies of political
communication and news management and turn it into news (Esser and Spanier
2005).
The public, in turn, have become less deferential and more critical towards
political actors and institutions (Norris 2011), less attached and loyal to particular
376 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

parties (van Biezen, Mair, and Poguntke 2012), more inclined to switch and decide
late in the campaigns which way to vote (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), more
postmaterialistic and individualistic (Inglehart and Welzel 2005), and more diverse
and fragmented in terms of media consumption patters (Prior 2007).
Although this depiction of changes in the behavior of politics, media, and the
public is over-generalized, as there are many differences across countries with
respect to political campaign communication (Esser and Strömbäck 2012a), jour-
nalistic approaches toward covering elections (Esser and Strömbäck 2012b), and
voter values and behavior (Dalton 2008), there is little doubt that democracy and
the relationship between politics, media, and the public has transformed during
the last decades (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). We have, to quote Blumler and
Kavanagh (1999), reached a new and “third age of political communication”, while
democracy increasingly appears to have become a “media democracy” (Jarren
2008).
One key concept to understand this transformation of Western democracies
is mediatization, which has also been described as a meta-process on par with
globalization and individualization (Krotz 2009; Kriesi et al. 2013). The mediatiza-
tion of politics is located at the center of the much wider research program on
mediatization in general, as the concept was pioneered and consistently developed
further within political communication research (Asp 1986; Blumler and Kavanagh
1999; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Kepplinger 2002).
Against this background, the purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview,
analysis, and synthesis of theory and research on the mediatization of politics.
The chapter will proceed as follows: first, we will define the mediatization of poli-
tics and outline the conceptualization of the mediatization of politics as a four-
dimensional process. Second, we will address how the key concepts of media,
media influence, media logic, and political logic are conceptualized within
research on the mediatization of politics. Third, we will briefly review some of the
empirical research on the mediatization of politics along each of the four dimen-
sions. Finally, we will address some key challenges in future research on the medi-
atization of politics.

2 Mediatization of politics as a four-dimensional

process
At heart, mediatization refers to a social change process in which media have
become increasingly influential in and deeply integrated into different spheres of
society. Mazzoleni (2008a) thus defines the mediatization of society as indicating
“the extension of the influence of the media (considered both as a cultural technol-
ogy and as an organization) into all spheres of society and social life”, while
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 377

Hjarvard (2013: 17) defines mediatization as “the process whereby culture and soci-
ety becomes dependent on media and their logic”. In the context of politics, Maz-
zoleni and Schulz (1999: 250) have described mediatization as a process in which
politics has increasingly “lost its autonomy, has become dependent in its central
functions on mass media, and is continuously shaped by interactions with mass
media”.
What these definitions have in common is the notion that mediatization is a
process of increasing media importance and direct and indirect media influence
in various spheres of society. As influence and importance are always relational,
mediatization thus implies a process of increasing media influence and importance
more or less at the expense of other social actors and institutions. Also important
is that mediatization is a process evolving over time. The mediatization of politics
could thus be defined as a long-term process through which the importance of the
media and their spill-over effects on political processes, institutions, organizations
and actors has increased (Strömbäck and Esser 2014).
Mediatization, both in general and with respect to politics, is thus distinct
from the related concept of mediation, which refers to the more neutral act of
transmitting messages and communicating through different media (Mazzoleni
2008b; Strömbäck 2008). The fact that more messages and experiences than ever
are transmitted and experienced through media – that is, mediated – is an impor-
tant part of mediatization, but in contrast to mediation, mediatization is a dynamic,
process-oriented concept.
Focusing on the mediatization of politics and following Strömbäck (2008,
2011a; Strömbäck and Esser 2009), this process of mediatization consists of four
different but highly related dimensions (see Figure 1). The first dimension refers to
the degree to which media constitute the most important source of information
about politics and society, and hence also the channel of communication between
political institutions and actors on the one hand and the public on the other. This
dimension refers to the extent to which politics has become mediated, and func-
tions as a necessary prerequisite for further processes of the mediatization of poli-
tics. The second dimension refers to the degree to which media have become differ-
entiated and independent from other political and social institutions. Although all
social institutions should be understood as interdependent, for the media to have
an independent importance and influence in political processes and over political
institutions and actors, they have to form an institution in their own right. As
suggested by Hjarvard (2013: 17), one key characteristic of mediatization is the
duality of the process, “in that the media have become integrated into the other
social institutions and cultural spheres, while also acquiring the status of social
institutions in their own right” (italics in original).
As media become increasingly functionally differentiated from and independ-
ent of political institutions, their modus operandi and coverage of politics will
increasingly be shaped by the media’s own interests, needs, and standards of
378 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

Fig. 1: A four-dimensional conceptualization of the mediatization of politics.

newsworthiness, rather than subordinated to the interests and needs of political

institutions and actors. This holds true for what the media cover as well as for how
the media cover it. The third dimension thus refers to the degree to which media
content and the coverage of politics and society is guided by media logic as
opposed to political logic. The second dimension of mediatization thus functions
as a necessary prerequisite for the third dimension.
As media continues to constitute the most important source of information
about politics and society, while the media coverage of politics is largely shaped
by media logic, political institutions, organizations, and actors find themselves in
a situation where they need media to communicate with larger groups of people
but cannot control what the media cover and how they cover it. When this hap-
pens, political institutions and actors will increasingly come to believe that they
have to take media into consideration and that in order to influence the media,
and through media the public, they will have to adapt to media and media logic.
The fourth dimension thus refers to the degree to which political institutions,
organizations, and actors are guided by media logic as opposed to political logic.
Taken together, the three first dimensions thus contribute to the fourth dimension
of the mediatization of politics (Figure 2).
What this framework highlights is not only that the mediatization of politics
is a complex and multidimensional process, but also that it is possible to break it
down into discrete dimensions which both can facilitate a greater understanding
of the process of mediatization of politics and empirical studies along different
dimensions. This framework should however not be understood as suggesting that
the mediatization of politics is a linear or unidirectional process. The extent to
which politics has become mediatized along any of the dimensions is contingent
on a host of factors on different levels of analysis, and these factors may not only
vary within as well as between countries. They may also – as all other aspects of
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 379

Fig. 2: Relationship between the four dimensions of the mediatization of politics.

the relationship between politics and media – be interactive (Blumler and Gure-
vitch 1995; Hallin and Mancini 2004; Esser and Strömbäck 2014).
Important to note also is that mediatization along each dimension is a matter
of degree. Media can be more or less important as a source of information and
more or less independent from political institutions, and media content as well as
political institutions, organizations and actors can be more or less guided by media
logic as opposed to political logic.
In essence, the degree of mediatization is an empirical question, and a key
argument for breaking down the mediatization of politics into dimensions –
besides contributing to a greater understanding of the process of mediatization –
is to facilitate empirical research on the extent to which politics has become medi-
atized.

3 An institutional perspective on media

One important ambiguity in much research on mediatization relates to the concept
of media. Literally anything that communicates may count as media, but such a
broad perspective is not very analytically useful, and something that refers to
everything usually falls prey to meaning nothing. Equally important is that not all
media are created equal. Some media are more important than others.
Within research on the mediatization of politics, the media that are considered
most important are news media as socio-technical organizations and institutions
(Hjarvard 2008, 2013; Strömbäck 2008; Esser 2013). In essence, this means newspa-
pers, radio, television, and news magazines in their traditional or digital formats,
or purely digital news providers to the extent that they offer journalism in an
organized form and according to professionally recognized criteria.
Although digital technology has created unprecedented opportunities for any-
one to create their own webpages or blogs, or communicate and participate
through various social media, the media that still dominate media environments
are organizational news media, whether in their traditional or digital formats. The
380 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

Internet has undoubtedly transformed many aspects of society (van Dijk 2012),
including politics and political communication, but it has not (yet) replaced tradi-
tional news media (Tewksbury and Rittenberg 2012). Although more people than
ever turn to the Internet for news, and the Internet has contributed to a more
fragmented and complex media environment, it is noteworthy that most people
use digital versions of traditional media brands rather than completely new servi-
ces (Purcell et al. 2010).
An important aspect of research on the mediatization of politics is that news
media should be understood as actor and institution. Both as individual organiza-
tions and an interorganizational field, they pursue certain goals and act in the
interest of reaching these goals (Sparrow 1999; Cook 2005; Allern and Blach-Ørsten
2011; Esser 2013; Asp 2014). Some of these goals are directly tied to the core func-
tions of mass media, which is to provide a common good to an audience that is
large enough to ensure economic success (if dependent on commercial revenues)
or broad public acceptance (if dependent on taxpayer money or license fees). How-
ever, some goals go beyond the core function of the media and take on a life of
their own. Due to inter-media co-orientation, pack mentality, competitive pres-
sures, professional ambition, and a yearning for impact, new values may emerge
that guide the actions of news organizations and became internalized by their
employees. We return to this point in our discussion of “media logic”.
Not only can single news media organizations be conceived as actors, they can
also be grouped together as a transorganizational field that constitutes a singular
institution (Sparrow 1999; Cook 2005; Esser 2013; Asp 2014; Esser and Strömbäck
2014). This is because different news media tend to be structured similarly to
achieve similar goals, because they follow shared norms and routines of what is
considered professional behavior, because they operate in the same economic and
political environments, and because they adopt basically the same rules and
standards of newsworthiness when confronted with the question of what is impor-
tant or interesting enough to be considered news (Sparrow 1999; Esser 2013). As
highlighted by the second dimension of the mediatization of politics, it is through
the functional and structural differentiation of news media from other institutions
that they have come to form an institution in their own right, and it is through
becoming an institution in their own right that the news media have come to
increase their independent importance and influence in political processes and
over political actors, organizations and institutions (Asp and Esaiasson 1996; Cook
2005; Strömbäck 2008, 2011a; Strömbäck and Esser 2009; Esser 2013; Hjarvard
2013). As with other institutions, they are rather stable and predictable over time,
and shaped by their own formal or informal rules, routines, norms, and values.
Through consonant and cumulative reporting, a news institution can exert consid-
erable power on political actors.
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 381

4 News media logic and political logic

Two key concepts in virtually all accounts on the mediatization of politics are
media logic and political logic (Altheide and Snow 1979; Mazzoleni 1987, 2008c;
Meyer 2002; Strömbäck 2008; van Aelst et al. 2008a; Hjarvard 2008, 2013; Schille-
mans 2012; Esser 2013; Asp 2014), and media logic in particular is often ascribed
a key role in processes of mediatization. Schrott (2009: 42), for example, defines
mediatization as “the institutionalization of media logic in other societal subsys-
tems. In these subsystems, media logic competes with established guidelines and
influences on the actions of individuals”. Following the framework used here,
the extent to which media content as well as political actors, organizations and
institutions are guided by media logic as opposed to political logic also forms the
third and fourth dimensions of the mediatization of politics (Strömbäck 2008,
2011a; Strömbäck and Esser 2009).
Despite the importance assigned to media logic and political logic, it is often
unclear exactly what these concepts refer to, and media logic in particular has
been criticized because it is too elusive, because it suggests a linearity and singu-
larity that is not there, because it lends itself to technological determinism, or
because the concept may hide important patterns of social interaction (Couldry
2008; Lundby 2009; Landerer 2013). Only recently have new conceptualizations of
media logic and political logic been suggested, anchored in a neo-institutional
perspective on politics and media (Esser 2013).
The basic idea behind the concepts of media logic and political logic is that
media and politics constitute two differentiated institutional systems that serve
different purposes and that, as institutions, each has its own set of actors, needs,
interests, rules, and procedures. These institutional rules and procedures can be
formal as well as informal, and are often “understood as the quasi-natural way to
get things done” (Cook 2005: 71) within each sphere. Together, they form a certain
logic of appropriateness within each sphere that guides ways of thinking and act-
ing, and that derives its importance because it is perceived as “natural, rightful,
expected, and legitimate” (March and Olsen 1989, 2004: 3).
Logic in the concepts of political logic and media logic should thus be under-
stood as appropriate behavior that is reasonable and consistent within the rules
and norms of the respective institutional context. Neither media logic nor political
logic is set in stone, and both have evolved to serve as guidelines for appropriate
thinking and acting within each institutional sphere and based on each sphere’s
purposes, interests, needs, and institutional structures. Both may thus continue to
evolve in accordance with significant contextual changes. Three major dimensions
shape both media logic and political logic.
382 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

4.1 Mediatization and media logic

The specific logic of appropriateness within the institutional media sphere, that is
media logic, should be understood as shaped by the combined forces of three
dimensions: professionalism, commercialism, and media technology (Esser 2013;
Strömbäck and Esser 2014). Professionalism refers to the extent to which journal-
ism is differentiated as an occupation and institution from other institutions and
characterized by autonomy from outside influences, a distinct set of norms and
values, and a commitment to public service (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Esser 2013).
The implication is that media and media actors will strive to behave in accordance
with rules and norms that signal distance to political dealings (like neutrality,
watchdog, news values instead of political values). Not least important in this
context is a shared understanding among journalists with respect to standards of
newsworthiness (O’Neill and Harcup 2009). Commercialism refers to the fact that
most media are commercial and operate on media markets dominated by commer-
cial media, which means that they have to compete for audience attention as well
as advertiser revenue or subscriptions, while at the same time keeping down the
costs of news production and dissemination (Hamilton 2004). In its extreme, as
McManus (1994: 85) has argued, news media can be expected to “compete with
each other to offer the least expensive mix of content that protects the interests of
sponsors and investors while garnering the largest possible audience advertisers
will pay to reach”. Landerer (2013) even suggests that media logic mainly reflects
commercial logic. Media technology refers to how applied communication technol-
ogies shape content in production and reproduction processes, as well as the proc-
esses of finding or reshaping news to fit the socio-technological formats of different
media (Altheide and Snow 1979). Without falling into technological determinism,
this dimension highlights that each media technology has inherent characteristics
that both enable and restrict news media in their production, processing, and
presentation of news (Hjarvard 2013). The implication is that different media will
strive to find or reshape news that fit their particular media technology.
Based on this understanding, media logic is both consistent and dynamic. It
is consistent in the sense that neither the degree of professionalism nor commer-
cialism changes abruptly and that the media logic of appropriateness proceeds in
incremental and path dependent fashion. It is at the same time dynamic in the
sense that media logic might evolve as media technologies do, and as the relative
influence of professionalism and commercialism might vary across time as well as
countries and media within countries (Esser 2013). While some scholars due to
these differentiations prefer to speak of different media logics (in the plural), we
understand them as context-sensitive variants of the same media logic (in the
singular). Beyond the distinction in semantics, our positions are however not that
far apart.
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 383

4.2 Mediatization and political logic

While there are many definitions of politics, ultimately most of them agree that it is
about processes of winning political power, collective and authoritative decision-
making as well as the implementation of political decisions. The specific logic of
appropriateness within the institutional political sphere, that is political logic,
should thus be understood as shaped by the combined forces of three dimensions:
polity, policy, and politics (Meyer 2002; Pennings, Keman, and Kleinnijenhus 2006;
Esser 2013; Strömbäck and Esser 2014). Polity refers to the system of rules regulat-
ing the political process in any given country, including the institutional structure.
This includes, for example, the type of political system, electoral system, party
system, judicial system, and bureaucratic system. On an overall level of analysis,
the polity forms the basis of the political logic of appropriateness within any coun-
try. Policy refers to the processes of defining problems and forming and implement-
ing policies within a certain institutional framework. This includes the needs and
incentives to coordinate, balance, and aggregate interests, organize negotiations
and bargaining, debate policy choices, devise policy programs, and implement
decisions. Politics refers to the processes of trying to win support for one’s candi-
dacy, party, or political program, either before elections when the short-term goal
might be to make electoral progress and increase the vote share, or between elec-
tions, when the goal might be to increase the standing in opinion polls or increase
public or political support in various processes of problem-definition and framing,
agenda-setting, policy formation, or political negotiations. This dimension recog-
nizes that power, and the battle for power, is an inherent part of all things politi-
cal, and that politicians often have to “go public” to achieve this (Kernell 2007).
Based on this understanding, political logic is shaped by the overall institu-
tional framework of politics in any given country and the need and incentives to
be successful both when trying to win political power and in effecting policy
changes and reforms. Important to note is that politics and political cannot be
reduced to only one or two of these dimensions. Similar to media logic, political
logic is both consistent across time and dynamic. It is consistent in the sense that
political processes are always about power as well as about policies and issues,
and as they always take place within and are conditioned by the institutional
framework. Political logic is at the same time dynamic in the sense that it will vary
across countries within different institutional frameworks, across political institu-
tions within countries with different roles and purposes within the polity, and as
the relative influence of policy and politics might vary across time as well as
countries and political institutions, organizations, and actors within countries
(Esser 2013).
384 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

5 Mediatization as a theory of media influence

Revisiting our earlier definition of the mediatization of politics in light of the dis-
cussion about media, media logic, and political logic, mediatization of politics can
be defined as a long-term process through which the importance of the media and
their spill-over effects on political processes, institutions, organizations and actors
has increased (Strömbäck and Esser 2014). The more important the news media
has become as a source of information and as a channel of communication
between political actors and the public, and the more independent the news media
as an institution has become, the more decisive has news media logic become for
both what the media cover and how they cover it, and the more important it has
become for political actors, organizations, and institutions to accommodate and
adapt to the news media and media logic.
The importance and influence of news media and news media logic thus stems
from the combined forces of several processes and from the fact that news media
and news media logic increasingly permeate all aspects of private, social, political,
cultural, and economic life, from the micro (individual) to the meso (organiza-
tional) and the macro (societal) level of analysis. Media influence in the context
of mediatization is thus broader than traditional media effects. Schrott (2009: 42)
thus notes that mediatization involves “supra-individual media effects”, while
Schulz (2004: 90) notes that media influence from the perspective of mediatization
“both transcends and includes media effects”. While the mediatization of politics
includes traditional media effects – such as, for example, agenda setting
(McCombs 2004), political agenda-setting (Van Aelst et al. 2014), framing (Iyengar
1991), priming (Roskos-Ewoldsen and Roskos-Ewoldsen 2009), and cultivation
(Morgan 2009) – it also includes how news media through their very existence,
formats, semi-structural properties as well as content shape, reshape, and struc-
ture politics.
Kepplinger (2008) emphasizes three aspects of medatization in particular: loss
of autonomy, shift of power, and shift of function. Loss of autonomy refers to new
rationales political institutions use to pursue their goals; shift in power refers to a
reduced scope of decision-making options deemed acceptable; and shift of func-
tion refers to capacities of political actors that are overwhelmed by additional
tasks. On the surface, one could consider all three aspects as media effects. But,
as Kepplinger (2008) argues, for three reasons mediatization research is not a
variant of traditional media effects research and should rather be considered an
approach in its own right.
First, rather than on individuals, mediatization focuses attention on the struc-
tures and work routines of political organizations and institutions (such as parties,
parliaments, governments, or campaign organizations) and how these structures
change under the perception of powerful media of a relatively small set of key
individuals (namely politicians). It is not these individuals’ attitudes or cognitions
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 385

that count but their media-induced actions. Insofar as these actions gain structural
relevance they can be considered as an indicator of mediatization. These structural
implications go beyond the traditional scope of media effects research and illus-
trate how mediatization addresses higher levels of analysis.
Second, mediatization research is interested in reciprocal effects on a key circle
of public figures that use the media extensively. Many politicians rely on the media
to form an opinion about their own public image, about how the media depict
current issues and are likely to depict future issues, and about how the general
public may perceive all this and act on it. Mediatization research is also interested
in indirect or spill-over effects. Indirect effects refer to anticipated effects of future
reports that politicians want to bring about (or want to avoid) which prompts them
to take specific media-related initiatives (e.g. offer an exclusive interview to set a
frame or engage in pre-emptive spin control). These kinds of reciprocal and indi-
rect spill-over effects are hardly discussed theoretically or analyzed empirically
within the traditional media effects research paradigm.
Third, causal explanations of media effects are supplemented by instrumental
ones. Political actors adjust their intentional behavior to the requirements of the
media environment they act in (Strömbäck 2011b; Strömbäck and van Aelst 2013).
This strategic approach implies that the cause of many behaviors is not temporally
prior (as causality-oriented effects research would expect) but temporally later:
politicians employ certain media strategies now to achieve goals in the future that
they deem necessary to their political success (like raising public awareness and
support). This behavior is not due to personal motives but to requirements of the
mediatized environment. The instrumental behavior can be explained in terms of
functionality (and finality) but certainly not in terms of causal temporal succes-
sion.
In this sense mediatization signals for Kepplinger (2008) the arrival of a new
paradigm: it is more interested in structural than individual effects, more in recip-
rocal and indirect than linear and direct effects, and more in instrumental (or
functional) than causal explanations. Thus, from the perspective of the mediatiza-
tion of politics, media influence refers to all politically relevant activities and proc-
esses that are influenced, altered, shaped, or structured by media and the perceived
need of individuals, organizations, institutions, and social systems to communicate
with or through news media.
A key concept to understand the reciprocal and instrumental nature of this
new paradigm is self-mediatization (Meyer 2002) or reflexive mediatization (Mar-
cinkowski and Steiner 2010), which captures the process through which political
actors have internalized and adapted to the media’s attention rules, production
routines, and selection criteria – that is, news media logic – and try to exploit this
knowledge for reaching different strategic goals. The fact that political institutions,
organizations, and actors allocate more time, energy, and resources to news man-
agement, media agenda building, stage management, and other marketing and
386 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

political public relations strategies and tactics could thus be understood as self-
mediatization or reflexive mediatization, and as an expression of the increasing
influence of news media and news media logic. In essence, mediatization does not
rule out that political institutions and actors can be successful in influencing the
media, but it strongly suggests that the key means to do this is by internalizing
news media logic.

6 Empirical evidence for the mediatization of

politics
Since the early 2000s, research on the mediatization on politics has increased
substantially. One illustrative example is that the number of references in Google
Scholar to the exact phrase mediatization of politics has increased from 25 in 2000–
2001 to 77 in 2006–2007 and to 273 in 2011–2012. Thus, to review all research that
deals explicitly with the mediatization of politics within the context of this chapter
is not possible, and it would be a gargantuan task to review all relevant research
that deals with the politics–media relationship. Our ambition is thus more modest.
What we aim to do on the following pages is rather to review some key studies
that either explicitly deal with the mediatization of politics or are of particular
interest in this context. In doing so, we will also discuss how the mediatization of
politics along each dimension has been operationalized.

6.1 Empirical evidence for the first dimension of mediatization

The first dimension of the mediatization of politics focuses on how important news
media, as opposed to personal experiences or interpersonal communication, are
as a source of information about politics and society. While there is a general
consensus that modern politics is largely mediated (Nimmo and Combs 1983; Ben-
nett and Entman 2001, a recent review suggests that there is surprisingly scant
empirical evidence on exactly how important news media, relative to other poten-
tial sources of information, are as source of information (Shehata and Strömbäck
2014). One reason might be that most research focuses not on whether but how
and in what ways the media matter, while another might be that there is no
straightforward way to empirically assess the importance of media as information
source in societies where people are embedded in media from the day they are
born. A third reason might be that there are no common benchmarks for evaluating
the importance of one information source from another.
Nevertheless, there are some studies asking people about their main sources
of political information. The Pew Research Center in the United States has, for
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 387

example, for years asked the open-ended question: “How have you been getting
most of your news about national and international issues? From television, from
newspapers, from radio, from magazines, or from the Internet?” (Pew Research
Center 2008, 2011). The Eurobarometer, conducted among all member states of the
European Union, has similarly asked respondents “Where do you get most of your
news on national political matters?” (Eurobarometer 2012).
Both these studies show that most people name television as their main source
of political information – and that very few name any source of information aside
from news media. According to the Pew Research Center (2011), the information
sources most often mentioned by American respondents were television (66 %),
the Internet (41 %), newspapers (31 %), and radio (16 %). According to the Eurobar-
ometer (2012), the information sources most often mentioned by Europeans were
television (84 %), the press (47 %), radio (37 %), and the Internet (31 %). A number
of single-country studies have also confirmed that traditional news media are very
important as sources of political information (Gidengil 2008; Scammell and Se-
metko 2008), even when listing interpersonal communication and personal con-
tacts with parties and politicians as alternative sources of information (Strömbäck
and Shehata 2013).
Still, none of these studies explicitly targets the relative importance of news
media as source of political information compared to other sources of information.
Another problem is that the Internet is listed as a separate source of information,
as if the Internet was competing with television, newspapers, or radio. While this
can certainly be the case, studies show that most people who turn to the Internet
for political information turn to the digital versions of traditional news media (Pur-
cell et al. 2010). To understand the relative importance of news media as a source
of information, much more detailed studies would thus be needed, and such stud-
ies would need to make finer distinctions between different forms of Internet use.
An alternative approach to asking people about their sources of information
is to investigate the influence of media coverage on people’s awareness of current
events and issues (Shehata and Strömbäck 2014). While such research does not
target the relative importance of news media as a source of information, substan-
tial evidence suggests that the supply of political information in news media
increases awareness of political issues, both in studies within (Jerit, Barabas and
Bolsen 2006; Nadeau et al. 2008; Barabas and Jerit 2009; Elenbaas et al. 2012;)
and across countries (Curran et al. 2009; Iyengar et al. 2009; Iyengar et al. 2010;
Aalberg and Curran 2011). Research on the media’s impersonal influence also sug-
gests that media have a greater influence on people’s sociotropic perceptions while
personal experiences and interpersonal communication may matter more with
respect to personal-level perceptions (Mutz 1998). However, research also suggests
that information from mass media, personal experiences, and interpersonal com-
munication mix and merge; that people have a tendency to seek out information
that is consistent with their own opinions and perceptions; and that the impor-
388 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

tance of mediated information may vary across issues as well as individuals (Mutz
1998; Chong and Druckman 2007). These changes have led scholars to develop
new concepts like “informational interdependence” (Jacobs and Shapiro 2011) to
characterize the conditions in “the new information environment” (Williams and
Carpini 2011; Esser et al. 2012).
Despite some difficulties to draw general conclusions, available evidence
nevertheless suggests that news media, for most people and most issues, constitute
the most important source of information, and that news media is vastly more
important than personal experiences and interpersonal communication. While
more research on the relative importance of news media as source of information
about politics is needed, particularly in light of the major changes of media envi-
ronments that are taking place across advanced democracies, there is little doubt
that modern politics is largely mediated politics.

6.2 Empirical evidence for the second dimension of

mediatization
The second dimension of the mediatization of politics focuses on how independent
news media are from political institutions, i.e., the structural differentiation of
news media as an institution from political institutions. This is an area where there
are substantial differences across time as well as countries, as highlighted by Hal-
lin and Mancini’s (2004) analysis of different political and media systems across
Western democracies. Three important dimensions in their classification of media
systems are degree of political parallelism, degree of journalistic professionalism,
and the role of the state in the media system (see also Blumler and Gurevitch
1995). According to their analysis, three different models can be identified: the
Liberal (Anglo-Saxon) model, the Democratic Corporatist (Northern European)
model, and the Polarized Pluralist (Mediterranean) model. Prototypical cases for
each of these models are the United States, Sweden, and Italy, respectively. In
their analysis,

The Liberal Model is characterized by a relative dominance of market mechanisms and of

commercial media; the Democratic Corporatist Model by a historical coexistence of commercial
media and media tied to organized social and political groups, and by a relatively active but
legally limited role of the state; and the Polarized Pluralist Model by integration of the media
into party politics, weaker historical development of commercial media, and a strong role of
the state (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 11).

With respect to the degree of media autonomy from political institutions, the
media are generally more independent from political institutions in countries with
Liberal media systems than in countries with Democratic Corporatist and, in par-
ticular, Polarized Pluralist systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Udris and Lucht
2014). In both Liberal and Democratic Corporatist systems, the political independ-
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 389

ence of media has eroded political parallelism whereas in Polarized Pluralist sys-
tems, media have been and often continue to be subject to political instrumentali-
zation. Norms that differentiate media and journalism from politics, such as
journalistic objectivity and neutrality, also gained broad acceptance first in Liberal
systems, from where they later diffused to Democratic Corporatist systems. Look-
ing at the last few decades, the media in Democratic Corporatist systems in particu-
lar have become more independent of political institutions. While political paral-
lelism used to be very strong, with most newspapers belonging to a party and
broadcast journalism closely attuned to the needs of the political system, in the
1960s a movement towards more independent media and more independent jour-
nalism gained pace in both print and broadcast media while institutional linkages
were weakened or dissolved (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Djerf-Pierre and Weibull
2008; Esser and Matthes 2013; Udris and Lucht 2014).
Following historical and institutional analysis, key measures of the degree to
which news media have become independent from political institutions are
whether there are any institutional linkages between media and political organiza-
tions; degree of journalistic professionalism and strength of a distinct set of jour-
nalistic norms and values; degree of political parallelism; degree to which political
systems intervene in the media system with measures that interfere with news
media’s power to govern themselves; and degree to which media and journalism
perceive themselves and are perceived by policymakers and the public as inde-
pendent from political institutions. At a general level, it can also be argued that
media are always positioned somewhere between the political system and the eco-
nomic system (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Croteau and Hoynes 2001). Increasing
media independence from political institutions thus tends to go hand in hand with
increasing dependence on the market and media commercialism (Udris and Lucht
2014). Increasing media commercialism may thus be another indicator of media
independence from political institutions.
From this perspective, there is clear evidence that media across time has
become more independent from political institutions, particularly in Liberal sys-
tems such as the United States and the United Kingdom and in Democratic Corpo-
ratist systems such as the Scandinavian countries and Northern Europe (Hallin
and Mancini 2004; Strömbäck, Ørsten and Aalberg 2008; Esser and Matthes 2013;
Udris and Lucht 2014). The situation is quite different in Polarized Pluralist sys-
tems such as Italy or France, where the news media is less independent from
political institutions and more embedded in politics. The implication is that poli-
tics is likely to be more mediatized in countries with Liberal systems, followed by
countries with Democratic Corporatist and, lastly, countries with Polarized Plural-
ist systems.
On a more detailed level of analysis, there is however variation also across
countries within each model. The United Kingdom, for example, is a mixed case
with strong public service broadcasting co-existing with commercial broadcasting
390 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

and a highly partisan – if institutionally independent – press. This makes the

United Kingdom less Liberal than the United States, and more similar to Demo-
cratic Corporatist countries with respect to broadcasting and to Polarized Pluralist
systems with respect to the press.
Hence, while it is important to recognize the general trend towards increasing
media independence from political institutions, from the perspective of the mediat-
ization of politics it is also important to recognize differences across countries. The
degree of media autonomy from political institutions, as the mediatization of poli-
tics in general, should be considered an empirical question. There is thus a need
for further and more detailed analysis of the degree to which media are independ-
ent of political institutions, and to take similarities and differences across coun-
tries into account when investigating the degree of mediatization of politics along
the third and fourth dimensions.

6.3 Empirical evidence for the third dimension of mediatization

The third dimension of the mediatization of politics focuses on the degree to which
news media coverage is guided by media logic as opposed to political logic. The
key question when investigating this is whether different features of news media
coverage indicate news media logic or political logic. To the extent that news
media coverage reflect news media’s professional, commercial, or technological
needs and interests, rather than the needs and interests of political institutions,
organizations and actors, it should be perceived as an indicator that news coverage
is guided by media logic. Two related concepts are media interventionism (Esser
2008) and the media’s discretionary power (Semetko et al. 1991), both referring to
the degree that news coverage is actively shaped by media logic.
Several key indicators of news media coverage reflecting news media logic and
journalistic interventionism have been suggested by previous research. Drawing
on research by Bucy and Grabe (2007), a four-country study of television news by
Esser (2008) linked sound bite news and image bite news to the mediatization of
politics. He used the following reporting features as indications of media logic: (1)
short candidate sound bites versus long journalist sound bites in television news;
(2) short cumulative speaking time for politicians but long speaking time for jour-
nalists; (3) a journalistic preference for sound bites that are driven by attacks and
campaign buzz but devoid of policy content; (4) image bites that portray candi-
dates in a less authoritative light and show journalists in more potent light, mainly
by the use of so-called wrap-ups and lip-flaps. A bi-national comparison of TV
campaign news by Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011) expanded this set of variables
by two further indicators, the framing of politics as a strategic game; and the
degree to which the journalistic style is interpretive as opposed to descriptive (see
also Strömbäck et al. 2011).
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 391

Takens et al. (2013) used three key indicators when investigating news media
logic in election campaign coverage in Dutch election campaigns across time: the
degree to which news coverage was personalized, degree of contest coverage, and
degree of negative coverage. Contest coverage includes, in their conceptualization,
both the framing of politics as a strategic game and news about conflict and coop-
eration (Takens et al. 2013). In an earlier Dutch study, Brants and Van Praag (2006)
had also included interpretive journalism and news focused on the political horse
race as indicators of media logic, while other scholars have also mentioned media
personalization (Campus 2010; van Aelst, Sheafer and Stanyer 2012; Esser and
Matthes 2013) as well as media negativity (Patterson 2002; Farnsworth and Lichter
2011; Lengauer, Esser and Berganza 2012) as indicators of media logic and mediati-
zation. In a recent study, Cushion and Thomas (2013) suggested that live updates,
with non-scripted political reporters relaying the latest news or live two-way sto-
ries, where political reporters are interviewed by a studio anchor and offering
interpretations of events, could also be considered as indicators of a higher degree
of mediatization of political news than traditional, pre-edited and scripted news.
Other features of news coverage that have been linked to media logic and a high
degree of journalistic interventionism are a shift towards soft news and increasing
simplification, dramatization, and sensationalism of news (Esser and Matthes
2013). In yet another approach, van Aelst et al. (2008a) used the extent to which
media attention to politicians deviated from their electoral strength as an indicator
of media logic, while Sampert et al. (2014) investigated how Canadian media cov-
ered party leadership contests between 1975 and 2012, using several indicators of
media logic such as more opinionated, personalized, and sensationalist coverage.
While the ideal way to investigate mediatization along the third dimension
would be studies that compare news media coverage across both time and coun-
tries, such studies are rare. One exception though is Esser (2008), which found
evidence both of transnational news logic and persistent country differences. In all
countries investigated (United States, Great Britain, Germany, France), journalists’
voices outweigh those of political candidates by three to one in an average news
story, and the more tightly controlled political campaigns are, the more journalists
compress candidate sound bites. The study also found that TV news programs
include candidates in voiceless image bites as often as in sound bites. Such simi-
larities notwithstanding, the study also established the contours of three politi-
cal news cultures: a strongly interventionist US American approach, a moderate-
ly interventionist Anglo-German approach, and a non-interventionist French
approach. This finding closely resembles Hallin and Mancini’s three models of
media systems, thus suggesting a linkage between the degree to which media are
independent from political institutions and the degree to which news content is
guided by media logic. Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2011) similarly found that elec-
tion news in the United States was significantly more mediatized than in Sweden.
As for differences across time, there is less clear evidence that news coverage has
392 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

become more mediatized during the last 10–20 years (Takens et al. 2013), but
clearer evidence that it has become more mediatized compared to 40–50 years ago
(Hallin 1992; Patterson 1993; Brants and Van Praag 2006; Strömbäck and Kaid
2008; Farnsworth and Lichter 2011; Sampert et al. 2014; Seethaler and Melischek
2014; for research overviews on key concepts, see Aalberg, Strömbäck and de
Vreese 2012; Hopmann, van Aelst and Legnante 2012; Lengauer, Esser and Ber-
ganza 2012; Reinemann et al. 2012; van Aelst, Sheafer and Stanyer 2012).
The overall conclusion is that from a longer time perspective, there is evidence
that news media coverage of politics has become increasingly guided by media
logic rather than political logic and that media interventionism has increased, but
also that there are persistent differences across countries and that there may be
differences across various indicators of media logic. Research also shows that dif-
ferent media within countries tend to cover politics similarly, suggesting that news
media within countries in fact do constitute a singular institution (Esser 2008;
Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011; Takens et al. 2013).
This is not to suggest that news coverage of politics is singularly governed by
news media logic. Rather, news about politics is always to some extent a co-pro-
duction between news media and those political institutions and actors that try to
influence the media, and will always reflect some degree of both logics (Mazzoleni
1987; Cook 2005; Strömbäck and Nord 2006; van Aelst et al. 2008a). The fact that
there is less clear evidence that news coverage during the last 10–20 years has
been increasingly shaped by news media logic also suggests that mediatization is
not necessarily a linear and unidirectional process. We are led to conclude that
once news media have passed a certain threshold and become largely independ-
ent, the degree to which news coverage is governed by news media logic is more
situational and contextually determined.

6.4 Empirical evidence for the fourth dimension of

mediatization
The fourth dimension of the mediatization of politics focuses on the degree to
which political institutions, organizations, and actors are guided by media logic
as opposed to political logic. In broader terms, it focuses on the core question on
how and to what extent various political institutions, organizations, actors, and
processes are influenced, altered, shaped, or structured by media and the per-
ceived need of individuals, organizations, institutions, and social systems to com-
municate with or through news media. Hence, it includes both the structural influ-
ence that the media through their existence and functions exert as well as intended
and unintended attempts from news media to influence political institutions,
organizations, actors, and processes.
One key challenge when investigating this is the broad nature of media influ-
ence and the fact that media and media considerations have become increasingly
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 393

embedded in political processes. If media, as suggested by Silverstone (2007), have

become “environmental” and a part of all things political, the influence of media
also tends towards becoming less apparent and more invisible. This might make
it difficult for those both inside and outside political processes to fully grasp the
nature and scope of media influence.
Nevertheless, research clearly shows that policymakers in countries such as
Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden perceive the media as highly
influential. Although there are variations across countries, Members of Parliament
(MPs) in these countries ascribe radio and television as much or more influence
over the political agenda than ministers, political parties, interest groups, and MPs
themselves, and only the Prime Minister (PM) is perceived as more influential (van
Aelst and Walgrave 2011). Research also shows that a large majority of MPs in
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden agree that mass media make and break
politicians. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a large majority also agrees that poli-
ticians would do anything to get attention from the media, while the correspond-
ing share in Sweden is about 40 % (van Aelst et al. 2008b; Strömbäck 2011b).
A study among Finnish elite decision-makers also shows that the media are
perceived to be highly influential, not only in general but also in everyday political
action and bargaining (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012). This study, including elite
respondents from politics as well as trade unions, business, administration, the
judiciary, civic action groups, the research sector, and the police, found that 77 %
of respondents could be classified as mediatized. Another Finnish study, based on
interviews with political leaders and press coverage, also found that media are
perceived as increasingly influential (Isotalus and Almonkari 2014) A study based
on in-depth interviews among MPs in the United Kingdom also confirms that the
media are considered to have large influence in politics (Davis 2007).
While perceptions do not tell the full story, research shows that perceptions
matter and that if people think that media are powerful, they tend to behave
accordingly (Tal-Or, Tsfati, and Gunther 2009). A study by Cohen, Tsfati, and Shea-
fer (2008) thus found that the perceptions of media power among members of the
Israeli Knesset had both direct and indirect influence on their behavior. In the
context of the media’s political agenda-setting influence, Walgrave and van Aelst
(2006: 100) similarly note, “The more politicians believe in the media’s political
almightiness, the more they are inclined to embrace media topics … and the might-
ier the media are”.
While research thus suggests that media are perceived to have great influence
over political actors, organizations and institutions, and that perceptions of media
power influence the behavior of political actors, research on the media’s political
agenda-setting influence using objective indicators suggests more limited influ-
ence. In one meta-analysis of the media’s political agenda-setting influence, cover-
ing 19 empirical studies, eight studies showed considerable media impact, four
showed some impact, while seven showed no or weak impact (Walgrave and van
394 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

Aelst 2006). Looking at changes over time, evidence suggests however increasing
political agenda-setting influence of the media (Van Aelst et al. 2014).
What this suggests is that the magnitude of media influence varies not only
across countries (van Aelst and Walgrave 2011), but also across political institu-
tions, organizations, and actors within countries (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012;
Schillemans 2012; Donges and Jarren 2014; Landerer 2014) as well as across differ-
ent kinds of political processes. Going back to the distinction between polity, policy,
and politics, the influence of news media is generally greatest with respect to the
public and symbolic aspects of politics (politics), less encompassing with respect
to issues and substantive matters (policy), and least likely with respect to the
system of rules regulating the political process and the institutional structure (pol-
ity). Conceiving of political actors as strategic actors, trying to use news media to
accomplish different strategic goals, the analysis by Strömbäck and van Aelst
(2013) thus suggests that media influence is greater when political parties act in
the electoral arena than when they act in the parliamentary or the internal arena,
although parties in all these arenas either proactively or reactively have to take
the media into consideration.
Along similar lines, a study by Schillemans (2012) on public service providers
in the Netherlands and Australia found strong evidence of adaptation to the media
through processes of organizational accommodation, amalgamation, and substitu-
tion. The general picture is that these organizations “adapt their own internal
structures and processes in order to be able to cope with the essentially external
logics and rules of the media” (Schillemans 2012: 137). However, the study also
found differences across public service providers, with those closer to government
and the political center, and those more likely to be at the center of media atten-
tion, displaying the highest degree of mediatization. There were also variations
across public service providers based on the availability of resources, competitive
pressures, and whether organizations had as an organizational strategy to try to
use the media as a strategic tool to accomplish other goals (Schillemans 2012).
Similar results emphasizing both a process of mediatization and contextual varia-
tions were found in a comparative study of political parties in Germany, the UK,
Austria, and Switzerland (Donges and Jarren 2014).
These results highlight that one key aspect of mediatization and media influ-
ence is how media and media considerations have come to be increasingly embed-
ded and internalized in political organizations and processes, and how the need to
be successful when managing news media either proactively or reactively creates
incentives for political institutions and actors to change their organizational struc-
tures and processes to accommodate the media as well as their own needs to be
successful when using media for their own purposes.
One example of this concerns political bargaining processes (Spörer-Wagner
and Marcinkowski 2010). While these usually take place backstage, they are often
followed closely by news media, and the results of the bargaining processes will
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 395

sooner or later have to be defended publicly. Although negotiations often require

an atmosphere of confidentiality and trust, participants can also try to increase
their bargaining power by leaking and going public, and thereby trying to mobilize
external support. The news media are also often eager to disclose what is going
on behind the closed doors. This may make it more difficult to reach sound com-
promises – suggesting one kind of media influence – but it also suggests how
media and media considerations have become integrated in the perhaps least pub-
lic of political processes – suggesting another kind of media influence. As con-
cluded by Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski (2010: 20–21), “media logic is omni-
present in political negotiations, but it does not put them at risk per se: Rather,
media impact can be generalized as institutional responses by strategically think-
ing negotiators than can make difficult bargaining and inefficient compromises
more likely”.
This example exemplifies how political actors can use media as a power
resource within different policy networks and policy processes (Kunelius and Reun-
anen 2012). While mediatization suggests that the media have great influence on
political institutions, organizations, and actors, it thus also suggests that recogniz-
ing and adapting to media influence can be a strategic means to enhance political
influence. Thus, media influence may be mediated through the relations and inten-
tions of political and media actors (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012; Strömbäck and
van Aelst 2013). This is also an example of self-mediatization or reflexive mediati-
zation (Meyer 2002; Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010) and of how the struc-
tural influence of the media as an institution is reproduced in everyday political
practices. As noted by Sparrow (1999: 9–10), “As an institution, the news media
constrain the choice sets of these other political actors; that is, they structure –
that is, guide and limit – the actions of those working in the three formal branches
of government, in public administration, and at various stages or parts of the
political process”.
This is perhaps the ultimate form of media influence: no matter how intent or
skilled political institutions, organizations, and actors are at adapting to and trying
to use the media to further their own interests, they cannot do so without confirm-
ing the influence of the media (Meyer 2002; Cook 2005; Strömbäck and van Aelst
2013). In essence, mediatization and the influence of the news media are both
structural and reciprocally enacted in everyday political practices.

7 Discussion and conclusions

This review of the state of theory and research on the mediatization of politics
suggests that there is little doubt that politics has become increasingly mediatized
during the last decades, in the process transforming the structures of democracy,
political communication, and the relationship between politics, media, and the
396 Jesper Strömbäck and Frank Esser

public. Similar to other meta-processes such as individualization and globaliza-

tion, this is a long-term process with profound implications for all parts of social
life, including but not limited to politics. Sometimes the manifestations and conse-
quences of the mediatization of politics are manifest, but oftentimes mediatization
may have the character of an invisible but permanent process and condition of
social life. This is the essence of the media having become environmental and an
increasingly embedded aspect of all cultural, social, and political life.
Although research on the mediatization of politics has advanced significantly
during only the last five to ten years, much work remains to be done however.
Both mediatization in general and the mediatization of politics still resemble a
theoretical framework rather than a proper theory, and there is still a lack of empir-
ical research explicitly seeking to test – and in extension refine – aspects of the
mediatization of politics. In this final section, we would thus like to very briefly
highlight five challenges for future research on the mediatization of politics, aside
from the general need of further theoretical refinements and more theoretically
anchored empirical research.
– First, there is a need for more fine-grained operationalizations of the mediati-
zation of politics that would allow theoretically grounded empirical research
on the extent to which politics along each of the four dimensions have become
mediatized.
– Second, there is a need for further analysis and empirical research on the
linkages between mediatization along each of the four dimensions, and hence
empirical tests of the theoretical linkages assumed by the conceptualization
of mediatization as a four-dimensional process.
– Third, there is a need for further analysis and empirical research on the ante-
cedents and contingencies of the mediatization of politics. The mediatization
of politics is neither a linear nor a unidirectional process, but – at least in
modernized Western democracies – a partly situational, contextual, and inter-
active process that is dependent on a host of factors on the macro as well as
meso and micro level of analysis. Thus, the degree of mediatization of politics
is likely to vary across countries as well as time and across political institutions
and actors within countries, and we need a more differentiated understanding
of what factors influence the degree of mediatization.
– Fourth, there is a need for a more thorough understanding of different forms
of direct and indirect adaptation to the media and hence of media influence.
Particularly with respect to the fourth dimension of mediatization, we need
both more theoretical empirical analysis on how effects that are specific to
mediatization (structural, reciprocal, indirect, instrumental) lead to outcomes
that are also specific (loss of autonomy, shift of power, shift of function) to
the mediatization of politics.
– Fifth, there is a need for further analysis and research on the implications of
media technological changes on processes of the mediatization of politics.
 Mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics 397

While there is little doubt that digital media have had and will have great
influence on all cultural, social, and political processes, as well as on news
media and news media logic, the implications for the mediatization of politics
and the relationships between politics, media, and the public are not yet clear
(Schulz 2014). It may be that digital media marks the beginning of the end of
the mediatization of politics, at least as a process of increasing influence and
importance of news media as an institution, but it may also be that digital
media remodels rather than undermines the dynamics of the mediatization of
politics. At present there is little to suggest that digital media have undermined
the role of news media as an institution in the mediatization of politics, but it
is still too early to tell whether we are witnessing an evolution or the beginning
of a revolution.

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Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen
17 Mediatization of public bureaucracies
Abstract: This chapter provides an analytical platform for studies of mediatization
processes in public bureaucracies. First it discusses how mediatization should be
operationalized to be applicable as a theory guiding empirical research on this
type of institution. Secondly, the chapter proposes key characteristics of potential
mediatization processes, indicating how rule-based public organizations adapt to
and adopt the logic of the news media: The importance of (1) the news rhythm
and (2) news formats, but also (3) how and why being in the media is valued by
civil servants, and (4) how this leads to a reallocation of resources and responsibil-
ities within the organization are discussed. The chapter argues that career bureau-
crats both anticipate and adopt a news logic, and that this to a large extent take
the form of an implicit “logic of appropriateness”. Normative consequences of this
type of mediatization are finally highlighted.

Keywords: mediatization, operationalization, public bureaucracies, the news

media, news logic, bureaucratic logic, democracy, new institutional theory

The stereotype of a civil servant is that of a grey eminence, and the traditional
secluded role of bureaucracies hardly implies regular appearance in frontline
news. Nevertheless, civil servants are increasingly aware of the significance of
being present in the media and many ministries and public agencies appear fre-
quently in the news (Angell, Byrkjeflot and Wæraas 2011; Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen
and Figenschou 2013; Schillemans 2012). Few types of organizations have been the
subject of as many reforms as the public administration in recent decades, and
the results are widely discussed in the literature (for an overview, see e.g. Kettl
2008; Christensen et al. 2007; Olsen 2008). The impact of the mass media on the
functioning of public bureaucracies on the other hand, has until recently received
little attention by media scholars and political scientists alike. Quite a few studies
point to the importance of the media for civil service (e.g. Weaver, McCombs and
Shaw 2004; Cook 1998; Ward 2007) and some studies discuss the normative role
of the media for keeping public bureaucracies democratically accountable (Besley
2006; Maggetti 2012), but only a few studies explore mediatization processes in
public administration in depth (Schillemans 2012; Ihlen and Thorbjørnsrud 2012;
Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013).
The theorizing of the mediatization of government has in general been domi-
nated by studies of party politics (e.g. Altheide 2004; Bennett and Entman 2001;
Bourdieu 1998; Mazzoleni and Schulz 2010; Strömback 2008). The front stage of
politics, heavily populated with a charismatic personage applying an evocative
406 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

rhetoric, is set up to reach and engage the greatest number of people – or voters –
just as popular and dominant formats in the mass media are designed to appeal
to the greatest possible audience numbers. That party politics as a field easily pick
up conventions and strategies from the mass media then, do not necessarily say
that much about the wider implication of mediatization processes in society. If we
instead turn to the role and mandate of public administration, to the civil servants
who prepare, interpret, and execute legislation, we are no longer in the traditional
spotlight of front stage politics, we are backstage among professionals encompass-
ing expert advisers, case workers and administrative leaders.
This chapter argues that it is highly worthwhile to take a closer look at how
the organizations that prepare and implement politics are influenced by the logic
of the news media. All public bureaucracies are headed by democratically elected
political leaders, but they also have their own rationale and a certain amount of
autonomy and immunity from short-term political requests (Olsen 2008). Civil ser-
vants have positions independent of the political party in office and they stay on
when political leaders are replaced (Christensen et al. 2007). Their norms of con-
duct and their conventional technical and juridical language stand worlds apart
from mainstream news values (Tilly 2006). There seems to be a potent contrast
between the traditional rationale or ethos of public bureaucracies and the practices
associated with the adaptation to the format, timing, and values of the news
media. Reaching and engaging a big audience through the captivating, polarized,
simple, and short news format; and delivering messages when they appear as
new, relevant, and able to set the news agenda, do not seem to sit well with
the comprehensive and formal textual procedures associated with bureaucracies.
Hence, even if the mediatization of politics obviously has repercussions for how
bureaucracies work, media impact on public bureaucracies should be understood
on its own terms, possibly revealing how a rule-oriented and formalized system is
modified by the logic of the media.
This chapter is structured as follows: It first conceptualizes mediatization from
an institutional perspective, focusing on processes of mediatization stemming from
the impact of the news institution and its inherent logic. It then outlines the basic
characteristics of a news logic as opposed to the conventional rationale and man-
date of modern public bureaucracies. Based on this discussion, the chapter out-
lines how these two different logics meet and presents four key characteristics of
mediatization processes in public bureaucracies. It finally discusses the potential
wider normative implications of mediatization of public bureaucracies.

1 Operationalizing mediatization: from a media

logic to a news logic
As demonstrated in this volume, mediatization can be defined and analyzed in
different ways, capturing processes of change on many different levels of abstrac-
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 407

tion and scope. The present chapter focuses on changes in institutional practices
due to media influence in a particular type of organization – public bureaucracies.
We follow those scholars of mediatization who have focused on how the media as
an institution, with its own logic might interfere and change the practices and
rationale of other societal institutions (Hjarvard 2008; Krotz 2009; Schrott 2009).
We hold that in order to measure institutional change, what we mean with
“the media” as an institution must be clearly defined. The literature on mediatiza-
tion has often not distinguished between media based on journalistic principles
and other types of media (such as books, music and different types of digital
platforms) (see Hjarvard 2008; Krotz 2009; Schulz 2004). Moreover, it does not
separate between media produced for the masses versus new social and personal
media based on interpersonal communication (Hjarvard 2008; Krotz 2009; Schulz
2004). Although the omnipresence and pluralism of media in high-modern society
is a vital insight of mediatization theory in itself, it leads to inconsistency and
weak explanations to start off with a loosely defined term like “the media” when
applied to media influence on institutions. Hence, the first basic step to capture
how mediatization processes influence public bureaucracies, is to define what we
mean when we use the concept mediatization and to specify what constitutes an
institution and how we should perceive the logics or rules of institutions.
New institutional theory defines an institution as a relatively stable collection
of rules and practices embedded in structures of resources and meaning that
explain and justify behavior (March and Olsen 1984, 2008). The rules or logic of
an institution can be formalized, explicit, and procedural, or it can be of an
implicit and customary nature based on conventions. The media, in the broad
sense, do not qualify as an institution with stable and sufficient homogenous rules.
Building on the seminal work of Cook (1998), this chapter therefore narrows down
the definition of media institutions to the modern news media. The modern news
media are institutions producing a content edited according to journalistic princi-
ples with a mass audience in view. Even if we narrow the media as an institution
to modern news media, it is not unproblematic to regard the news media as a fully-
fledged institution (see Benson 2000; Cook 1998; Kaplan 2006 for discussion). The
news media represents a type of institution with porous borders and non-exclusive
membership, strongly affected by centrifugal changes in technical, political, and
economic conditions. Moreover, its logic is implicit and conventional rather than
formal and explicit. When the aim is to explore how these rules, values, and rou-
tines intervene in and influence other spheres of society, however, the openness
and porosity of the news institution along with its implicit rules, might be one
reason why its rationale seems to be infiltrating other social spheres so deeply and
so fast.
Having delimited the media as an institution to the news institution, the news
logic serves as a starting point in the research on how the news media influence
the practices and rationale of other institutions. The news logic as we define it
408 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

builds on the broader concept of a media logic. As a term, “media logic” was
introduced by Altheide and Snow (1979) to identify how the media production
process required a certain format and form that ultimately led to a specific way of
interpreting social affairs (Mazzoleni 2008). Media logic is the assumptions and
processes – the rhythm, grammar, and format – for constructing messages within
a particular medium (Altheide 2004). The news logic can be defined as the rules
of the news. The news format and genre criteria are backbones in this type of
logic, but the prevalent news logic as we define it is not restricted to mere genre
conventions. The news logic involves a specific rhythm and a certain relation to
time and timeliness. Moreover, news texts, appearing in all types of news media
platforms, derive their power from their interplay with commentaries and op-eds,
talk shows and debates, as well as from their diffusion in social media. Further,
news logic is founded on the premise that news is and should be important and
significant. In short, the power of the news logic is based on the assumption that
the media offer a description of reality that matters and has consequences for
those described (McNair 1998; Schudson and Andersson 2009). News journalism
is known to build on implicit and unquestioned conventions rather than explicitly
stated principles (Cook 1998). We regard the rules of the news as being premised
on what new institutional theory labels a logic of appropriateness: they tend to be
regarded as self-evident, given, natural and therefore not the object of deliberation
(March and Olsen 2006). Public bureaucracies in Western-style democracies repre-
sent the opposite type of institution; they are formalized organizations whose
activities are derived from a comprehensive set of procedures and norms of con-
duct derived from regulations and law.

2 The complex rationale of modern public

bureaucracies
Modern public bureaucracies have been reformed according to a range of different
perspectives on how to improve their functions in the last decades (Kettl 2008;
Peters and Pierre 2004). The New Public Management movement has in particular
been a vital force in pushing reforms emphasizing the need to introduce market
mechanisms and principles of steering adopted from the private sector (Olsen
2008; Christensen et al. 2007). Accused of being ineffective and rigid and not up
for the task of governing increasing complex portfolios, public bureaucracies today
come in an increasingly varied form, involving many types of organizational struc-
tures and principles of coordination. The classic Weberian hierarchical organiza-
tion, with specialized sub-units and clearly defined functions has given way to a
wide range of more flexible and horizontal organizational principles (Pollitt and
Bouckaert 2004; Pollitt 2009). The traditional clear divide between private and
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 409

public organizations has become more ambiguous with organizational hybrids that
involve different types of combinations of public and private interests (Olsen 2008;
Christensen et al. 2007).
Nevertheless, the vital features of public bureaucracies have proved enduring,
the core principles of public bureaucracies, distinguishing them from that of pri-
vate enterprises remain intact (Kettl 2008). At the end of the day all public
bureaucracies have their mission defined by elected political leaders and they are
held accountable to the legislature and ultimately to the voters. Public bureaucra-
cies are supposed to make decisions only based on the regulations of the law. With
a mandate to both distribute and withdraw resources vital to the inhabitants of
the state, public bureaucracies play a powerful role in the functioning of modern
democracies. The traditional bureaucratic ethos is centered on the principles of
the recht staat, aimed at preventing power abuse and arbitrary decisions (Kettl
2008; Meier and Hill 2005; Olsen 2008; Weber 1978). Civil servants tend to work
under civil service rules (Kettl 2008). By law, public administrators are supposed
to demonstrate neutral competence, without regard to political favoritism. Law
forbids discrimination and requires precedence and equal treatment. Traditionally,
these norms associated with neutral expert knowledge and rule-based decisions
have formed an impersonal and detached role of the civil servant and the use of
a technical and juridical terminology (Weber 1978; Tilly 2006).
The literature on public organizations does stress that contemporary public
bureaucracies are complex organizations with competing tasks and conflicting
goals (Christensen et al. 2007). They are judged by different parameters such as
political steering, effectiveness, and loyalty, but also representation and participa-
tion by affected parties, co-determination of employees, sensitivity vis-à-vis users,
transparency, publicity, and insight into decision-making processes (Christensen
et al. 2007). As multifunctional organizations, bureaucracies have opportunities
for discretionary judgment and degrees of freedom in assessing which considera-
tions to emphasize (Christensen et al. 2007). Multiple reforms of the public sector
based on changing ideas of how it should serve society and how it should be
organized in order to reach its goals reflect this fact: different emphasis can be
put on different values, be they responsiveness towards citizens’ initiatives and
affected stakeholders, effectiveness and rationalization of casework – or respon-
siveness towards the media.
Experiments with new approaches to how public bureaucracies should be run,
still need to deal with the core mandate of bureaucracies, and to find solutions to
their great dilemma: How to empower bureaucracies enough to do their tasks effi-
ciently and at the same time restrict them enough to prevent power abuse and
secure accountability (Kettl 2008). Mediatization has been defined as a non-norma-
tive concept (Hjarvard 2008), and although mediatization processes are not nega-
tive per se, it is imperative to investigate the potential normative implications of
the mediatization of democratic institutions. Some have argued that, with new
410 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

organizational forms and more autonomous administrative bodies, democratic

control has been weakened. The critical coverage by the media has been pointed
to as an alternative way to secure accountability. Media are supposed to enable
citizens, who have imperfect information about government activities, to monitor
the actions of ministers and civil servants, leading to government that is more
accountable to its citizens (Besley 2006; Maggetti 2012). But does the influence of
the mass media lead to more accountable and transparent organizations? Further-
more, if the bureaucracy moves in a direction where the influence of the news
media increases, who and what are given less priority? When the logics of these
two very different types of institutions meet, crucial questions are which will domi-
nate and how the core normative values of public bureaucracies are challenged.
The four main features of mediatization of public bureaucracies outlined in
the following aim at capturing the tensions and the meeting points between the
traditional formal rationale of the bureaucracy with the more implicit, but power-
ful, logic of the news institution. The analysis is based on a comprehensive study
of mediatization of the central Norwegian public administration, based on exten-
sive fieldwork, qualitative interviews, document analysis, and content analysis
(see Ihlen and Thorbjørnsrud 2012; Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013 for
further details). It also includes insights from other relevant studies, primarily
Schillemans (2012).

3 Mediatized bureaucracies: key features

3.1 The value of news
The position of the news media in modern society is based on the premise that
they not only tell the truth but report important and attention-worthy issues
(McNair 1998; Schudson and Andersson 2009). A vital professional norm is to be
the watchdog of democracy, to speak truth to power (Ettema and Glasser 1998;
Keane 1991). It is the ambition of news journalists to convey relevant information,
something that matters and sets the public agenda so that other institutions and
actors must react. News provides not only factual information, but is an arena for
stakeholders exchanging and negotiating conflicting views.
Studies indicate that the power and significance of news to a large degree is
internalized in modern public bureaucracies (Schillemans 2012; Thorbjørnsrud,
Ihlen and Figenschou 2013; Ihlen and Thorbjørnsrud 2012). News is a vital source
of information for civil servants, it provides knowledge about the positions of
important stakeholders and clues about the general “opinion climate” surrounding
issues the organization deals with (Schillemans 2012). Keeping up-to-date on the
current news agenda provides the organization with the opportunity to preempt
reactions. Key questions are, for instance, what issues are dominating and how
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 411

might this effect us? Should we prepare a statement? Should we make key persons
available for the media?
In a mediatized public bureaucracy, moreover, it is perceived as strategically
important not only to follow the news, but to appear in the news. Being visible in
the media with “good stories” of how the system works is recognized as a prerequi-
site for establishing trust and for creating a good reputation (van Riel and Fombrun
2007; Wæraas, Byrkjeflot and Angell 2011). Reflecting the bureaucratic rationale,
a good story seen from the perspective of civil servants conveys that the organiza-
tion is well-run and rational; that regulations and laws are fulfilling their inten-
tions within the given budgets and political framework; and that case-handling is
fair, efficient, and correct. In contrast to party politics, where the individual politi-
cians themselves are the front figures, public organizations aim to promote the
system and the rationale on which it is built (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou
2013). Media presence signals openness, seriousness, and professionalism. The
importance attributed to keeping up a good public image in the media will never-
theless not only imply strategies to obtain presence in the news. When the media
is seen as so powerful and a yardstick for success, it is also regarded as paramount
to avoid negative stories being published (Schillemans 2012; Ihlen and Thorbjørns-
rud 2012).
The emphasis on reputation and the necessity of promoting and pitching
“good news” signals a turn away from the norms of neutrality and detachment
towards a strong identification with the image of the organization one serves. It
seems likely that mediatization may involve a shift in the balance between neutral-
ity and loyalty, where the value of loyalty to the organization is perceived as more
important than the value of neutral expert competence.

3.2 The time of the news

The modern news cycle is fast, continuous, and ubiquitous (Brighton and Foy
2007). Online journalism and 24/7 news cycles have speeded up the rhythm and
made deadlines continuous (Fenton 2010; Ward 2002). The timing of news is essen-
tial, not only because of the journalistic requirement to be first with a breaking
story but also in terms of timing publication to maximize reactions from institu-
tions and actors. The 24/7 flow of news alters or influences the work of civil ser-
vants first by demanding continuous monitoring of the news. Media sensitive
organizations have daily routines for the clipping and reporting of any media event
relevant for the particular organization. Issues of particular importance from the
news will be discussed in morning meetings with the leadership – and, if deemed
necessary, be followed up throughout the organization (Schillemans 2012).
Second, reporters’ calls for quick answers speed up the time schedule of civil
servants. When civil servants are asked to provide statistics and facts or to explain
case procedures and decisions, having to manage numerous such requests with
412 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

short deadlines has become part of the daily routine to a much greater extent than
hitherto. The public administrators’ work rhythm and priorities change in adapting
to the news rhythm (Schillemans 2012; Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013).
Journalists’ requests are passed on to the specialist divisions in ministries and
agencies. The administrative leaders, advisers, and caseworkers are requested to
prepare the necessary information. As the number of people working full-time with
media relations increases, it does not mean that the workload related to media
inquiries decreases for the rest of the organization but, rather, the opposite. Many
experts, caseworkers, and advisers spend more of their time providing expositions
and explanations to journalists who seek knowledge on a certain topic. The suc-
cessful adaptation to shorter deadlines implies that other tasks are put aside. There
is a willingness to prioritize media requests over other tasks; not least, when
national media outlets request information, the managers and the press officers
will not leave the office until an answer is provided (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and
Figenschou 2013). This is in line with the advice on media relations found in trade
magazines and public relations textbooks alike – to improve media relations, prac-
titioners should respect journalists’ deadlines and be responsive (e.g. Cutlip,
Broom and Center 2002; Desiere and Sha 2007; Grabowski 1992).
Furthermore, the continuous news deadlines have led to proactive strategies
within bureaucracies to anticipate the media agenda and to prepare standardized
texts in advance. The media relations’ literature calls this proactive information
management (Zoch and Molleda 2006). The aim is to make the often unpredictable
days more predictable, and successful adaptations of the news rhythm increas-
ingly include establishing systematic archives and databases for media requests.
Additionally, public administration aims to anticipate likely peaks and turns in
the requests from the media. Proactively anticipating the timing of the news media
thus means that bureaucracy not only provides rapid answers to the media but
also prioritizes the planning and preparation for future media requests (Thor-
bjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013). One such proactive media strategy is to try
pitching stories during periods where there is reason to believe that a message
will receive much media attention (Sadow 2011). The opposite strategy can as well
come in handy, through “crowding”, information can be disseminated to the press
at a moment when the news agenda is full and focused somewhere else, decreas-
ing the chance of media coverage deemed to be negative for the organization
(Schillemans 2012). This line of thinking was infamously taken to its extreme on
September 11, 2001 when a special adviser in the Blair government in the UK sent
an e-mail stating that “it is a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”
(House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee 2002: 8).
Within this logic, civil servants are, on the one hand, increasingly expected to
strive continuously to pitch positive news stories in order to set the news agenda;
on the other, they are expected to provide press releases on unpopular or delicate
matters at a time when media attention is directed elsewhere. Whether the dead-
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 413

lines and rhythm of news cycles are handled reactively or proactively, it creates a
civil service that follows the rhythm of the news.

3.3 The format of the news

The conventions of the news format are described in a wide range of studies (Cook
1998; Iyengar 1991; Johnson-Cartee 2005; Wahl-Jorgensen and Hanitzsch 2009).
Compared with other text genres, news is short and favors unambiguity. News is
erratic and thrives on conflict. News is often episodic, focusing on a single event
or instance and, in general, does not provide much background information (Iyen-
gar 1991). The news format favors the use of everyday/colloquial language to
describe things in a way familiar to the public. This familiarity is created in part
by building on conventional judgments and commonsense morality. News frames
seldom challenge these conventions; the sensational story is sensational exactly
because it is framed within a context defining what is normal, right, and just.
News, moreover, tends to be constructed as stories/narratives with a beginning,
middle, and end, featuring protagonists and antagonists, and some sort of conflict
resolution (Altheide and Snow 1979; Cook 1998). News needs faces and images to
illustrate the case; it tends towards personalization, featuring stories with emo-
tional cues and a moral, designating roles of heroes, victims, and villains. Popular
or tabloid news, in other words, is replete with human (melo)drama (Sparks and
Tulloch 2000).
The news format is a way of engaging with what goes on in society that is far
from a classic bureaucratic approach. The “format” of bureaucracy builds on
norms of correctness and comprehensive information. Written accounts explaining
decisions typically describe the conformity of a case to specified sets of categories,
procedures for ordering evidence, and rules for interpretation (Tilly 2006). The
bureaucratic language used to describe and explain these procedures tends toward
a technical and juridical style based on carefully-defined expert terminology. In
short, whether applied in casework or in analysis and planning, bureaucratic lan-
guage is neither simple nor short. The traditional ideal is a neutral and detached
language, contrasting with the personal and emotional morality of news (Graver
2007). Government communication is also, typically, more constrained by rules
and regulations than private actors (Graber 2002; Sanders 2011).
Yet the generic characteristic of news influences the practice and functioning
of public bureaucracies in several regards. First, it affects what questions journal-
ists ask, and what aspects of the planning, administration, and casework of
bureaucracies that become news. News conventions also mold the way in which
civil servants answer the questions posed by journalists, more precisely the texts
they prepare as a response to journalists’ inquiries.
There is a shared assumption that there is a need to use a clear and easily
understandable language and administrative leaders have initiated several rounds
414 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

of formal media and communication training (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figen-

schou 2013). More informally, practical experience of dealing with journalists has
resulted in a high awareness of news format and language. Civil servants prepare
talking points on the cases they work on for political leaders, and adapt to the
format and language of the news and particular news formats or programs. In
preparing talking points, it is more important to repeat the key points than to
elaborate on a subject. The communication staff edits and modifies the information
provided by the rest of the organization in a manner (even) closer to journalistic
norms. The communication staff stresses the need to simplify the message and to
avoid expert codes, and might negotiate the final version of the text with casework-
ers and administrative leaders. Both the communication staff and the bureaucratic
experts struggle to balance the ambiguous relationship between providing correct,
neutral, and comprehensive information and providing what political leaders need
and journalists want (Ihlen and Thorbjørnsrud 2012). Civil servants in general find
that news stories do not provide enough context, and many find it hard to correct
news stories they regard as erroneous (Schillemans 2012). When civil servants who
hold extensive background information have to prioritize and formulate a few talk-
ing points, their role as neutral expert is continuously challenged.
In mediatized public bureaucracies, the civil servants will go beyond answer-
ing requests from the media to pitch messages strategically to the news media.
Numerous studies have pointed out how the success of strategic media work
depends on the ability to exploit journalistic news conventions (e.g. Dunwoody
and Griffin 1993; Hertog and McLeod 2001; Ihlen and Allern 2008). Elites (from
labor unions, business, administration, NGOs, police and judiciary, the research
sector, and politics) experience a mutual professionalization of both the media
and the elite networks (Reunanen, Kunelius and Noppari 2010). And it is important
to stress that mediatization is not something that happens to passive organiza-
tions; they in turn can exploit the formats of the news to further their own interests
(Ewen 1996; Motion and Weaver 2005). For this purpose, texts will be adjusted to
meet the news media’s demand for conflicts, faces and feelings. The communica-
tion staff orchestrates the production of these news “rigs” or “packages” which
contain all the necessary ingredients in a news story: a combination of new “facts”
or statistics, an offer of an interview with a political or administrative leader, as
well as someone who is affected (positively) by new policies or regulations, a so-
called “case” (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013). A reverse strategy of
not adapting to the preferred news language but rather conveying a message in
an intricate and large format can, in line with the “crowding” strategy, be used
when an agency or a ministry provides information to the press they hope will not
make it to the headlines (Schillemans 2012).
In a mediatized public bureaucracy, news media language and formats will
not only be adopted in texts produced directly for the press but will also influence
texts written for other purposes. Although not primarily written for journalists,
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 415

public reports and propositions are often written with a clear message, some type
of introductory teaser, personifications, and/or illustrations (photos) (Thorbjørns-
rud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013). Consideration for reputation and how texts will
be received impacts policy preparations, texts are formatted in ways deemed
acceptable to the general climate opinion conveyed in the media (Schillemans
2012). The various adoptions of news conventions can be studied in the interac-
tions between public bureaucracy and journalists (between institutions), interac-
tions that many civil servants find challenging and for which they develop various
coping strategies (Ihlen and Thorbjørnsrud 2012). Many civil servants emphasize
the high risks and stress associated with dealing with the news media (Ihlen and
Thorbjørnsrud 2012; Schillemans 2012). The adoption of news conventions does
not happen without the constraints of a traditional bureaucratic ethos. Many civil
servants define it as their primary duty as professionals to provide correct and
nuanced information and the definition of what is “correct” or “nuanced” enough
is debated internally. Suffice it to say here that mediatization processes within
public administration materialize in the observed focus and pressure to provide
information that suits the tastes of news journalists. News conventions influence
how civil servants explain, describe, and promote the field they govern.

3.4 Redistribution of resources and responsibilities due to

media influence
The reallocation of resources as a consequence of media influence is probably
the most fundamental effect of mediatization. Public bureaucracies have a lawful
mandate to distribute and withdraw rights and duties, resources, and burdens to
and from the citizens they serve. Their work is financed by taxes – the question
of how they spend their time and resources ultimately touching upon their very
legitimacy. The reallocation of resources owing to media influence is of three main
types: (a) internal reallocation and reorganization of personnel resources; (b)
changes in the priorities regarding which problem areas and cases to attend to at
what time; and (c) changes in policies, laws, regulation, or decisions related to
case processing and decisions.
Reallocation of the first type involves a focus on the importance of media
management, a type of work not originally part of the basic mandate of a given
ministry or agency. It is expressed in the increasing number of people working as
communication staff (Difi 2011; Schillemans 2012). Communication departments
have moved upwards within the organization; they are now often placed directly
under the central command, and they work with other departments across tradi-
tional hierarchical organizational structures. A focus on controlling the dissemina-
tion of information can as well lead to centralization and tighter steering of sub
units and departments in the organization. Restricting the number of people who
416 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

are allowed to stay directly in contact with the media leads to a demand for tighter
coordination and central command (Schillemans 2012).
Another far-reaching consequence of mediatization is the extent to which
many administrative leaders, advisers, and caseworkers spend more time on issues
related to the mass media. As described, the most important change in priorities
materializes when questions from journalists are forwarded to other departments
and divisions, implying that specialist supervisors and caseworkers spend their
days working on fact sheets and talking points. As mentioned above, the amount
of time spent might be extensive, but it is often not systematically measured or
evaluated from a cost/benefit perspective. New requirements such as speed, flex-
ibility, and the ability to perform under high pressure are imposed on public ser-
vants. More people with background in the media work in public bureaucracies
than before, and more people without this experience receive media training
(Schillemans 2012).
The next level of allocation of resources owing to media influence pertains to
how bureaucrats respond to different types of focus in the media, be they related
to more general phenomena and problem areas or to single cases waiting to be
processed by the bureaucracy. When a topic is suddenly hot in the news, adminis-
trative leaders and advisers often focus on it as well, on their own initiative or at
the request of the political executive. Yet is it right to choose to focus on one
problem area rather than another according to what is high on the news agenda?
The impact of the media on policy development and policy advice in public
bureaucracies is subtle and hard to measure. It will often involve a type of implicit
judgment of what are feasible alternatives and acceptable arguments based on
the close monitoring of the news agenda more than clear-cut changes in policies
(Schillemans 2012). Nevertheless, on the single case level, the reordering of case-
work in the wake of media coverage does occur (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figen-
schou 2013). The disputed cases that are high on the news agenda might be picked
out from the line of cases waiting to be expedited, and decisions are accelerated.
At a basic level, the dilemma for the public administration can be illustrated in
the following: When the news media request information about a particular case,
this case will be examined and the media or political leadership briefed about the
case status. After the information is passed on, should the caseworker put the
particular case back in the pile or should the case be processed, since it is already
on the agenda?
Picking cases out of the pile is one thing: changing a decision is another
matter altogether. All decisions at the case level must be made according to regula-
tions and law, and the guidelines describing how they should be interpreted.
Changing a decision as a response to massive critical media coverage of a case
sometimes means that the law or the regulations involved must first be changed.
The initiative for such a change must come from the political executive and legisla-
ture, but this initiative can be the result of advice from civil servants within the
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 417

communication staff who deem the media coverage of a certain case as simply too
significant to be ignored.

4 Normative implications: bureaucracies

accountable to the media?
Numerous positive implications of the mediatization of the bureaucracy can be
assumed on the basis of the characteristics outlined above. Essentially, mediatiza-
tion of public administration may make formerly closed decision-making processes
more transparent and more accessible (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 2013).
Adaptation to the language and formats of the media, for instance, may be valu-
able, as traditional bureaucratic language often tends to be cumbersome and inac-
cessible to the public. Adapting to the language and formats of the news media
may lead to a democratization of bureaucratic expertise because civil servants
have to adapt their public explanations and information to more common lan-
guage and common-sense logics. Consequently, more citizens will be able to
understand complex cases and processes; it is easier to expose malpractice and
uncover corruption, and the public and the media have an increased possibility
of influencing decision-making processes.
It is a fundamental tenet of professional journalistic ideology that it is the role
of the press to be the watchdog of democracy, uncovering injustice and power
abuse, whether by the state or other powerful actors. If we accept this mandate as
legitimate and important, it follows, in a democracy respecting and protecting the
individual’s rights, that not only politicians, but also civil servants, should be
responsive to the messages of the news. The critical coverage of practices of
bureaucratic bodies can improve accountability. Correcting, modifying, or chang-
ing work processes and decisions as a response to reports in the news,could be
fully in line with the best principles of bureaucracies, including those applying
knowledge-based rules and the continuous assessment of the consequences of
different types of policies and laws. Not least, it might be in line with the principle
that particularly affected stakeholders should be heard and included in decision-
making processes.
Notwithstanding the above, the responsiveness to the press by public bureauc-
racies calls for deliberation and assessment. One principal question that must be
asked is whether changes in administrative practices come about because of new
information revealed in the news or whether practices are changed and new deci-
sions reached because of the unpleasant noise created and the volume of mass
media coverage. There is a vital difference between responsiveness to the docu-
mentation of the unforeseen consequences of a law or a policy and subordination
to the press because of the noise resourceful stakeholders have been able to make
in the media.
418 Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud, Tine Ustad Figenschou and Øyvind Ihlen

Strategies to profit from media presence – or absence – do not necessarily

lead to more transparency or more accountable bureaucracies. Rather the opposite,
message control and sophisticated formatting of messages might build up informa-
tion barriers protecting the organization as such and not the public interest. Organ-
izations obsessed by their own reputation might lose track of their true mission,
focusing on how they appear to master their tasks rather than on how they actually
function (Schillemans 2012). Loyalty and system protection rather than critical
assessments and innovative thinking might thus be the result.

5 Conclusion
This chapter has provided ways to operationalize and analyze mediatization in
public bureaucracies. Based on an in-depth study of mediatization processes in
the public sector, it has listed key features of how these types of organizations
adopt to the logic of the news media, and how they try to profit from it. The
first main characteristic of mediatization in public bureaucracies focuses on the
recognition of the value of media publicity for reputation building. The second key
characteristic of mediatization focuses on the influence of the time of the news,
describing the adjustment to the requests and rhythm of the media through differ-
ent kinds of services to journalists and the incorporation of news deadlines. The
third aspect of mediatization focuses on adaptation to the formats and language
of the mass media, and the fourth covers the redistribution of resources and
responsibilities between organizations, actors, sectors, and levels in the political
administrative system owing to media impact. These four characteristics illustrate
a gradual intensification of the mediatization of public bureaucracies from superfi-
cial adaptations to media requests to more substantial organizational changes.
The type of mediatization outlined here is suitable as a guide for future empiri-
cally-grounded research on the potential mediatization of different types of public
administration on different levels and in different types of political systems. It is
based on an argumentation that stresses the necessity of employing narrow, pre-
cise operationalization, defining what mediatization processes mean in different
sectors of society. This strategy allows for the testing and modification of the key
characteristics of mediatization discussed in this chapter.
The neo-institutional perspective employed in this chapter illuminates how
the news logic, as a logic of appropriateness (March and Olsen 2006), influences
and interacts with a traditional bureaucratic logic or rationale. It has been argued
that it is the diffuse, porous, and informal character of the logic of news that
makes the news logic so seemingly easy to adopt. It seems plausible that the
many reforms of the public sector, putting flexibility and change to the fore, have
contributed to the willingness of public bureaucracies to adapt to the media. Had
the news logic been more formalized, it might have conflicted more openly and
 Mediatization of public bureaucracies 419

directly with the formal, explicit traditional norms of bureaucracies. By spelling

out the characteristics of mediatization in public bureaucracies, this chapter con-
tributes to the explicit deliberation over the role of bureaucracies in democracies
where the media have taken centre stage. It is an ambition to demonstrate how
mediatization involves possibilities and constraints. The normative implications of
mediatization are complex and must be investigated empirically. Future research
should in particular explore how the type and extent of mediatization are influ-
enced by the proximity or distance of a bureaucratic organization to or from the
elected political leadership. An important question to answer is whether mediatiza-
tion actually implies politicization of bureaucracies, or whether the public adminis-
tration develops its own raison d’être for being present in the news? One hypoth-
esis would be that the greater the independence of a public organization, the more
it will develop media strategies that are meant to serve non-political ends. Another
important issue is to identify the threshold defining when practices, directives,
and laws are changed in the aftermath of news focus on a case, and what role
civil servants play in these processes.

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Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas
18 Mediatization of corporations
Abstract: The corporate institution has received little attention among scholars
working with the notion of mediatization. In this chapter we discuss how the
media is important not only for contestation about the corporate role in society,
but also for promotion of products and services, and for influencing public policy
and knowledge about business in general. We argue that the mediatization of the
corporate institution can be observed by looking at the attention devoted to media
coverage and the resources that are poured into public relations. Management is
often made available to the press and the timing of the media often influences
corporate activities. The tools of media relations are themselves examples of medi-
atization as they are not only adapted to the logic of the news media. They are
also designed with an ambition to become a natural part of all aspects of corporate
activities.

Keywords: corporations, public relations, media relations, legitimacy, reputation,

brands, framing expertise, timing, pseudo events, edited corporation

1 Introduction
With a precious few exceptions (e.g. Pallas and Fredriksson 2013), the literature
on mediatization has paid little attention to what has perhaps become the most
dominant institution in modern society – the corporation. Simple searches demon-
strate how the revenue of many corporations surpasses the Gross Domestic Product
of entire countries. For instance, the 2010 revenue of Wal-Mart made this corpora-
tion the 25th largest economy in the world (Trivett 2011). Several academic and
popular books have also centered on the powerful role of the modern corporation
and its (negative) impact on the public sphere and politics (e.g. Bakan 2004; Boggs
2000; Carey 1995; Korten 2001). At the same time, the increasing significance of
corporations needs to be understood against the backdrop of broad socio-economic
changes that have come to influence and redefine relations between corporations
and their different stakeholders both at the local as well as the global level (see
e.g. Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson 2006; Crouch 2006). Corporations are embedded
in increasingly complex – and often conflicting – contexts that set normative,
regulative, and cognitive boundaries for what the corporations can or cannot do
(Scott 2001). Corporations can no longer be seen as monolithic structures with
clear boundaries and fixed goals and purposes (Thompson 1967; Christensen et al.
2008).
With the increasing focus on the multiplicity of interests that corporations are
expected to relate to and act upon – the issue of accountability and responsibility
424 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

has become central (De Geer, Borglund and Frostenson 2009). Corporate misbehav-
ior has been a focus since the introduction of investigating reporting practice dur-
ing the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Feldstein 2006), and the last couple of
decades have brought to fore a renewed interest for critical scrutiny of corporations
and their activities (Kjaer and Slaatta 2007). One effect of this (mostly) negative
media interest has been that corporations construct programs for corporate social
responsibility (CSR) where they argue that they voluntarily “balance” concerns for
profit, society, and the environment so that a “win-win”-situation is created for
the corporation and society (Ihlen 2011). In this chapter we will discuss the rela-
tionship between the corporation and the media in more detail, focusing on how
the media is an important site not only for contestation about the corporate role
in society, but also for promotion of products and services, and for influencing
public policy and knowledge about business in general. The main question is how
is the corporate institution mediatized?
In answering the latter question we will use the notion of mediatization under-
stood as the way that other institutions adjust to the logic of the media institution
(e.g. Hjarvard 2008, 2013; Strömbäck 2011; see also Hjarvard’s chapter in this vol-
ume). Mediatization means that other institutions are influenced by the working
practices and preferences of the media, and that the media thus crucially shape
the environment and operating conditions for other institutions. Here we follow a
different take on mediatization than suggested for example by Hepp (2009; Hepp
and Couldry 2009). Through his notion of molding forces of the media – i.e. “the
idea that there are different specificities of different media that we have to have
in focus while researching change” (Hepp 2009: 144) – Hepp argues for situating
mediatization into the context of cultural transformation rather connecting it to a
single media logic (see also the introductory chapter in this volume for a more
elaborated discussion on the different conceptualizations of mediatization). Hav-
ing this discussion in mind, we refer in the following to mediatization as a phe-
nomenon akin to other societal developments such as globalization, marketization,
scientification and deliberative democracy (Pallas, Jonsson and Strannegård 2014;
see also Djelic and Andersson 2006). Still, we would like to emphasize that we do
not see the mediatization process as a form of monolithic and unidirectional pres-
sure. Different parts of the social world understand and are exposed to the
media(tization) pressures differently – which has been shown for example by stud-
ies within the political sector (e.g. Kepplinger 2002; Strömbäck 2008) and the field
of research and higher education (e.g. Rödder 2009; Weingart 1998). In addition,
mediatization – similarly to other institutional processes – is not immune to inter-
ests and contestations from parallel or competing institutions (Pallas and Fredriks-
son 2013). The defining feature of the different mediatization processes, we would
argue, is that a) they have a part in how different societal actors relate and under-
stand each other; and b) that it is possible for other institutions like the corpora-
tion to intentionally and skillfully relate to these processes through the practice
of public relations or more specifically media relations.
 Mediatization of corporations 425

Although many definitions of public relations have been introduced, “it is

generally accepted that public relations is strategic communication between an
organization and its publics” (Vasquez and Taylor 2000: 324). With public rela-
tions, corporations communicate with internal and external stakeholders; groups
that can be important for organizational survival. In such a view the media is one
important stakeholder group and the corporations thus develop subprograms for
media relations (e.g. Bland, Theaker and Wragg 2005). But seeing public relations
as a constitutive practice that constructs the corporate environment both intention-
ally (i.e. by promotion of the corporate goals and aims) and by reproduction of
social norms and values (i.e. communication of collectively defined and expected
messages) [Lammers 2011]) enables us to go beyond the purely instrumental expla-
nations and analyze such programs and the way they influence the management
and practices of the corporation as an expression of mediatization.
To understand the process of mediatization, secondly, we discuss mediatiza-
tion effects, and thirdly, we examine the tools of corporations; we focus first on
why corporations devote resources to media relations of media relations. The com-
plexity, but also the flexibility, of the notion of mediatization is illustrated by how
it is possible to argue that these aspects are interrelated and somewhat overlap-
ping. As already pointed out, the fact that a lot of attention is devoted to media
coverage can also be understood as a mediatization effect, and the tools of media
relations can be seen as constituting mediatization. One basic argument that will
be made is that the character of and degree to which corporations are mediatized
can differ, but that it is difficult for corporations to escape mediatization altogether
when other parts of society are thoroughly mediatized. Some corporations are
deeply embedded in mediatized environments, whereas others, like business-to-
business corporations in uncontroversial sectors, are less influenced by the practi-
ces and preferences of the media. This point serves as a bridge to the next section
focusing on the type and necessity of media coverage.

2 Legitimacy, reputation, brand, and policy –

the necessity of media coverage
Corporations or companies, as they are also referred to, are profit-seeking legal
entities that exist outside their members or shareholders, and they have certain
legal rights and liabilities that differ from the latter (see e.g. Bakan 2004; Mick-
lethwait and Wooldridge 2005). The profit motive of the corporation means that it
is necessary to market the corporate goods and services in order to make the
customer aware of the product in the first instance and to crave it in the next. This
can be achieved with the help of controlled media like adverts and media that is
not controlled, i.e. editorial coverage in newspapers, radio, or television. The
426 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

attraction of the latter media is that they provide reach and the credibility of third-
party endorsement (Bailey 2009; Hallahan 2010b). For many people, public rela-
tions is a synonym for publicity, and this impression has historic roots.
When the history of public relations is analyzed, it is often focused on the
publicity efforts of the early practitioners in the US (Broom 2013; Cutlip 1995).
Among the many stories retold is one relating the exploits of the notorious circus
owner, P. T. Barnum, who under false names sent letters to the local newspapers
where he alternately accused the circus of fraud and praised it for its entertainment
value. This caused debate and controversy that resulted in media coverage and
increased ticket sales. The goal justified the means and Barnum is credited with
expressions like “All PR is good PR” and “There is a sucker born every minute”
(Broom 2013; Grunig and Hunt 1984).
The unethical conduct of early practitioners like P. T. Barnum, often called
press agents, has continued to haunt the public relations industry to this very day.
New examples are continuously added, pertaining to such practices as construc-
tion of front groups and spinning stories for questionable political regimes (Miller
and Dinan 2008). While media relations tend to be the most visible part of public
relations, it is probably one of the most reviled parts of the practice (Dinan and
Miller 2007; Moloney 2006). As it was stated in one fiction book: “[Public relations]
means getting stories into papers without paying for them” (Young 2012: 251).
Still, even back in the early days of public relations, some industry pioneers
recognized that something was at stake, both for the industry itself and its corpo-
rate clients. When investigative journalists turned on the corporations and public
sentiment grew, the very legitimacy of corporate existence and behavior was called
into question. The previous notion of “the public be damned” had to be changed
and corporations would start to communicate their positions. The press release
vehicle was introduced and pioneer Ivy Lee sent out so-called fact sheets. In his
statement of principles he argued that his clients should adapt to the public and
that a two-way street between corporate and public interests had to be established.
Nonetheless, the name of the game was still to defend corporate interests using
all means necessary. When striking miners and their families were massacred, Ivy
Lee helped the mining company cover it up citing, for instance, a false eye witness
who stated that the deaths had been caused by an accidental fire (Ewen 1996).
Still, even though Ivy Lee and others might have tried to manipulate public
opinion, at least public opinion was now valued to a greater extent and favorable
media coverage was seen as a crucial tool for the profitably of corporations. A
later practitioner, Arthur Page, is often quoted saying “All business in a democratic
country begins with public permission and exists by public approval” (Griswold
Jr. 1967: 13). Thus media coverage influences the interactions between corporations
and their audiences/other social actors by way of translating and leveling out the
different requirements, ideas, and expectations the corporations and their stake-
holders have on each other. Media, next to its direct role in providing information
 Mediatization of corporations 427

about organizations, is central for building normative, regulative, and cognitive

bases on which corporations are evaluated both as individual organizations and
as societal institutions (cf. Jonsson, Greve and Fujiware-Greve 2009). Legitimacy as
“a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable,
proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values,
beliefs, and definitions” (Suchman 1995: 574) is constructed in the media by pre-
senting corporations in terms of fulfilling necessary legal and moral requirements
and expectations. When the media grant corporations a “license to operate” it is
often done on the basis of their membership in or association with(in) successful
or widely recognized fields or groups of other organizations (Jonsson, Greve and
Fujiwara-Greve 2009; Pollock and Rindova 2003). This realization of the impor-
tance of legitimacy also points to the significance of the media as a site for contest-
ation about legitimacy, and, it should be added, public opinion on what consti-
tutes ethical business behavior is a changing entity. This in turn can be formulated
as posing a call for public relations to engage in continued mapping of the corpo-
rate environment and the issues that are discussed here. Again, media coverage
is important.
Research has shown how media framing influences the reputation of corpora-
tions too (Carroll and McCombs 2003). Corporate reputation can be briefly defined
as the general estimation the public has of a corporation (Gotsi and Wilson 2001).
Being visible in the media is also recognized as a prerequisite for creating a good
reputation, and hence media relations are seen as a pivotal task for organizations
in general (Carroll 2010; Hallahan 2010a; van Riel and Fombrun 2007). The media
generated reputation is also connected to comparing corporations on the basis of
their historical market performance and in relation to other corporations within
the same or similar fields or sectors. Reputation indicates here discriminating qual-
ities (such as price or technical standard) of entire organizations, their parts or
their products. Media ranking lists and ratings commonly reflect performance in
relation to such qualities (Bartlett, Frostenson and Pallas 2013; Deephouse and
Carter 2005). A related effect is the media’s evaluation of corporate status, that is
to say social identity based on how corporations relate to attractive discourses,
values and expectations (Rindova, Pollock and Hayward 2006).
Indeed, being granted legitimacy and achieving a good reputation is seen as
something that can help corporations with myriad goals, such as increased sales,
acceptance of price increases, attracting investors, help recruit and hold on to
valued employees, ease government pressure, and lessen media criticism (e.g.
Fombrun and van Riel 2004; Rindova et al. 2005).
But media – through public relations activities – is important also in building
corporate brands. US public relations pioneers, like Edward L. Bernays, helped
their corporate clients gain media coverage by instituting pseudo-events like jubi-
lees but he also helped with more encompassing tasks. A classic in the annals of
public relations history is how Bernays is supposed to have helped the producer
428 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand target women smokers. In 1929, smoking
women were frowned upon. A psychologist assisted Bernays in identifying this as a
taboo and that cigarettes could be “torches of freedom” against men’s inhumanity
towards women. If some women opinion leaders could show themselves in public
and make this argument vocally and visually, the taboo could be broken. Through
his secretary, Bernays contacted some New York City debutantes and asked them
to join in the freedom fight by lighting cigarettes in the Easter parade and relate
their argument to the press. As the story goes, this public relations stunt was well
received by the media and the smoking salons in the city were opened to women
smokers only weeks later (Tye 1998).
Media coverage is also important for those who want to influence public policy.
After the Second World War, the US public relations industry grew and jumped to
the defense of corporations against government regulation, taxes, unions, and
public interest groups. Certain issues were promoted and public opinion was
courted through, for instance, non-product advertisements. These activities were
supposed to counteract “media bias” and “misleading information” and to over-
come public hostility towards corporations “because of ignorance or misinforma-
tion”. While this had certainly also been the goal of Ivy Lee and other public
relations pioneers, during the 1970s the work took on a more systematic and pro-
active character (Cheney 1991; Crable and Vibbert 1995; Ewen 1996; Heath 1980;
Marchand 1998). This way, corporations and public relations have been tied
together, the latter pointing out how media coverage can help influence public
policy directly or indirectly by creating knowledge about a particular corporation,
an issue or corporate business in general.
In order to influence issues a first step is to call attention to the issue and a
second to present it in a certain way that is in line with your perspective. Well-
known concepts such as agenda setting and framing (Maher 2001; McCombs and
Ghanem 2001) help extol the importance of media coverage. Certain issues are put
on the public or political agenda and thus deemed worthy of discussion. This
happens at the expense of other issues, since public attention is limited. A particu-
lar frame then points to something as a problem, and indicates causality, solutions,
and moral evaluations (Entman 1993). Again, a chosen frame necessarily relegates
other perspectives or interpretations to a secondary role at the most.
To sum up, corporations often need media coverage to help come across as
legitimate actors, to evaluate and judge their performance, to promote goods and
services, and to influence understanding of particular positions or values. Thus,
as a building block in the public sphere, media coverage is more or less indispens-
able for corporations both as social entities as well as institutions.

3 Mediatization effects
Some have argued that we are increasingly living in “promotional times” (Cottle
2003: 3). Media coverage is what counts. This preoccupation in itself can be seen
 Mediatization of corporations 429

as a mediatization effect. And although people and organizations have been preoc-
cupied with their reputation since ancient times, corporations seem to attach more
significance to this aspect than ever before (Carroll 2010). With this increased
attention also comes increased attention and significance attached to media cover-
age. There is by now a growing stream of consulting and academic literature
devoted to legitimacy and reputation management (e.g. Aula and Mantere 2008;
Carroll 2013; Fombrun 1996; Illia, Sonpar and Bantimaroudis 2014). Today, it is
more or less unthinkable that corporations should not have public relations
departments to handle media relations and work with the corporate reputation.
Activists have also singled out corporate brands as the weak spot of corporations
that can be attacked in order to have corporations change their behavior (e.g. Klein
2000). It is particularly corporations that operate within the business-to-consumer
segment where damage to the brand is felt the most and it is necessary to gain
positive media coverage. Negative coverage can influence sales and stock prices
and thus hurt corporate profit.
Beyond noting the effect of increased attention to the media, it is also possible
to single out other mediatization effects that follow from this. The media practices
and preferences have been integrated in the operations of corporations through
the allocation of resources, both financial and human. Public relations as an
industry, both in-house and the consulting industry, has grown tremendously since
the Second World War. This trend can be observed in many countries across the
globe (Miller and Dinan 2000; Sriramesh and Verčič 2009). More people are
involved working with public relations and the communication staff has more
influence in organizations than previously (Zerfass et al. 2012). Said another way,
the much sought after seat at the decision-making table has increasingly been
secured. Corporations and organizations in general seem to put more emphasis on
public relations than ever before (Pallas 2007). This then, serves to illustrate how
the media not only influence the corporation, but also that this influence has more
profound effects that we can call mediatization effects.
Tracking the history of mediatization of the corporation by looking at how the
discipline and practice of public relations have grown, the growth of the practice
of public relations can be read either as a consequence of increased importance
of communication in general and the media in particular or as a consequence of
how public relations has outgrown the traditional media relations function. At the
same time, however, public relations theorists and practitioners are often eager to
separate public relations and media relations, arguing that the latter only forms
part of what public relations is all about (White and Dozier 1992). Junior staff are
often assigned to pitching stories. Nonetheless, as argued by several observers, in
many organizations public relations is really media relations. Getting publicity is
still a major task despite managerial ambitions (Hallahan 2010a; Moss, Warnaby
and Thame 1995; Young 2012).
Mediatization effects can be traced to other corporate practices as well, for
instance the way that management is made available for the media (Graham 1997).
430 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

Journalists typically want access to the decision makers and regularly complain
about being put off by public relations staff. Still, there has been an increased
focus on management in the media (Park and Berger 2004), and this has also
given rise to the phenomenon of the superstar CEO that is loved by the press.
While the superstar CEO brings some attention to the corporation, research has
typically shown that the net effect is negative as the CEO often underperforms
since they spend more time on public and private activities such as book writing
and board seats (Malmendier and Tate 2009). Indeed, the mediatized CEO has also
been called “the curse of the superstar CEO” (Khurana 2002; see also Petrelius
Karlberg 2007).
Another effect of mediatization is the influence on timing. Corporations will
often adjust their communication efforts to the rhythm of the media to maximize
or minimize attention (Grünberg and Pallas 2013; Pallas and Fredriksson 2011).
When is good news dispersed and when is negative information released? Public
companies have to adhere to the rules of the stock market, but will carefully time
publication to the media in order to suit their needs. As an example, a huge Norwe-
gian corporation twice released negative news the same day as the state budget
was published. The strategy of attempting to hide one story behind other more
noteworthy ones is also commonly observed internationally (Palmer 2000). Simi-
larly, Grünberg and Pallas (2013) illustrate how corporations publish their quar-
terly reports in well-synchronized manners. The corporations coordinate their
releases, both timing and thematically, with activities of different media outlets as
well as a number of other news-producing actors such as financial analysts and
specialized news agencies.
However, the effects of mediatization are also traceable outside the boundaries
of public relations/communication departments and their activities. One of the
most obvious examples is how changes are made in the composition of corporate
boards and senior management teams: communication and media issues are
almost always represented either directly by heads of corporate communications
or indirectly as they get inscribed into strategy documents and policies (Ranft,
Ferris and Perryman 2007). But there are also other parts of contemporary corpora-
tions that bear witness to the increased importance of (understanding) the media.
Human Resources and Investor Relations practices, Legal Issues, and CSR depart-
ments are commonly being re-structured and staffed in relation to prevailing cor-
porate media strategies (Engwall et al. forthcoming). Also studies on implementa-
tion of managerial models and concepts have shown that corporate business in
general is dependent on the way media understands and describes its activities
(Sahlin-Andersson and Engwall 2002; see also Alvarez, Mazza and Strandgaard
Pedersen 2005).
In summing up, the mediatization of the corporate institution can be observed
by looking at the attention devoted to media coverage and the resources that are
poured into public relations. Management is often made available to the press and
 Mediatization of corporations 431

the timing of the media often influences corporate activities. Both the two latter
examples are also illustrative of how corporations manage their media relations.
The tools that are used for this job is discussed next.

4 The tools of media relations

Mediatization in corporations is constituted through the tools of media relations,
but this is also where another important point crystalizes: The corporation is influ-
enced by priorities of the news media, but also attempts to turn the journalistic
logic to its own advantage. Mediatization can be “shaped, reproduced and
reshaped” by corporate actors (Pallas and Fredriksson 2013). Much attention has
also been directed at the ways that corporations and public relations influence the
news (Carey 1995; Cottle 2003; Davis 2000; Dinan and Miller 2009). The tango-
metaphor is used to describe the negotiation that takes place; the parties take turn
leading (Gandy 1982, 1992). Still, the resource drain in most editorial offices has
led to a worry about the media’s ability to fulfill its role without depending too
much on the sources (e.g. Davies 2009; Dinan and Miller 2009). This section looks
more closely at some of the tools corporations use to gain media coverage.
Pallas and Fredriksson (2013) have argued that the interactions between corpo-
rations and the media differ as to their formality, time frame, content, and setting.
The authors introduce three different forms of corporate media activities – provid-
ing, promoting, and co-opting. By way of providing corporations that operate in
strong normative and regulative regimes are expected, due to legitimacy reasons,
to provide evidence of following the “rules of the game”. Media activities in such
a context protect corporations as they present themselves as recognized and legiti-
mate actors. A major aim of such media efforts is to provide information on which
organizations can be evaluated in relation to industry norms and regulation or
professional values and expectations. Promoting as a media strategy, on the other
hand, is used by corporations that seek to change, challenge, or criticize the pre-
vailing context in which they conduct their activities. Promoting includes well-
orchestrated formal as well as informal media efforts that aim to introduce novel
ideas, norms, products, or technologies through dramaturgically appealing texts,
messages, and formats, often in forms of pseudo-news (see also Fredriksson 2008;
Suddaby 2011).
The corporations also seek to integrate their interests with needs of other socie-
tal actors. Co-opting as media strategy has as a goal the creation of strong collabo-
rative contexts where long-term societal effects and consequences are brought to
the fore (i.e. in dealing with health and energy issues). Thus media activities of
corporations are here focused on communicating collective good rather than per-
suading about own interests. Such media efforts are often based on co-operation
432 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

with intermediaries such as public relations consultants or a variety of expert

groups (Larsson 2005).
Having stated the different aims and strategies of corporate media work, what
are the tools PR-practitioners employ in their efforts to influence media coverage?
In a previous section, the use of corporate pseudo-news was mentioned. This type
of news is based on artificially created events that only exist to create publicity –
so-called pseudo-events (Boorstin 1962/1992). Boorstin saw the flourishing of such
events as marking a shift in American culture: everything was now staged, “pack-
aged” and scripted for publicity. Instead of changing the product as such, a compe-
tition or a celebration will be announced to get media coverage. According to
Boorstin, the question “Does this have news value?” has replaced “Is this correct?”
Thus, Boorstin argued, the pseudo-events created images or illusions that bore
little to no relationship with reality. The creation of pseudo-events is still a com-
mon practice among corporations, along with the use of press releases, press meet-
ings/conferences, and exclusive interviews (Bland, Theaker and Wragg 2005;
Young 2012).
Public relations and media relations are often practiced by former journalists
who have excellent knowledge about how the media operates and what is of inter-
est to journalists. This has also been shown to have a positive impact on the
trustworthiness of the public relations practitioner and leads to shared evaluations
(Sinaga and Callison 2008). Several studies point out that the success of strategic
media work is dependent on the ability of practitioners to exploit journalistic news
conventions (e.g. Dunwoody and Griffin 1993; Hertog and McLeod 2001; Ihlen and
Allern 2008). This means that practitioners will adjust their communications to
meet the news media’s demand for conflicts, faces, and feelings. The more news
values, the greater the chance that the story will attract media attention (Carragee
and Roefs 2004; Ihlen and Nitz 2008; Sheafer and Gabay 2009). Moreover, practi-
cally oriented texts are full of advice about the value of visuals and how to target
different media (Bland, Theaker and Wragg 2005).
Additionally, textbooks and trade magazines urge practitioners to respect jour-
nalists’ deadlines and be responsive if they want to succeed (e.g. Cutlip, Broom
and Center 2002; Desiere and Sha 2007; Grabowski 1992). Relational principles like
honesty, openness, and accuracy are also singled out as important to build good
relations with journalists. Journalists for their part indicate that they appreciate
media relations staff who have a realistic perception of the newsworthiness of the
story they are trying to pitch (Desiere and Sha 2007; Gandy 1982; Palmer 2000;
Zoch and Molleda 2006). Making the programs of media relations more profes-
sional typically involves taking a long-term perspective looking beyond the pitch
of individual stories and publicity, in order to cultivate good relationships with
journalists. Many public relations practitioners are eager to overcome the tradi-
tional journalistic skepticism by emphasizing honesty and the sometimes shared
interests. At the same time, they make appeals to how the two professions fulfill
different roles that should be respected.
 Mediatization of corporations 433

As pointed out, it is necessary for corporations to present frames that are

favorable to a particular corporate position. Thus, framing of issues is a particu-
larly important task of the public relations staff. The hope is also that the frame
is adopted by the media and, in the ultimate instance, by the public (Hallahan
1999). The potency of frames can be enhanced by actor-bound elements like status,
resources (Carragee and Roefs 2004; Entman 2004; Sheafer and Gabay 2009), indi-
vidual/organizational strengths and vulnerabilities (Ryan 1991), strategic alliances
(Pan and Kosicki 2001; Ryan 1991), and not least a stock of knowledge and skills
(Pan and Kosicki 2001). The latter could be called framing expertise (Dan and Ihlen
2011).
Framing expertise includes that ability to construct frames that are resonant
with the underlying culture and draws on widely accepted beliefs, codes, myths,
stereotypes, values, or norms (Bennett 1993; Entman 2004; Gamson 1992). Thus,
framing expertise also involves drawing on and appealing to culture (van Gorp
2007). In short, “public relations practitioners stand good chances to succeed with
their framing when they are able to conceive a message in a way that: is resonant
with the underlying culture; appeals to psychological biases; and conforms to
journalistic needs” (Dan and Ihlen 2011: 372).
The ability to be proactive is lauded as a hallmark of professionalism by many
observers (Johnston 2008; Zoch and Molleda 2006). The goal is to make the often
unpredictable days more predictable, and successful adaptations of the news
rhythm include establishing archives and databases for media requests. Active
scanning of media coverage is also part of what is called issues management
(Heath and Palenchar 2008) and, in times of crisis, crisis communication (Coombs
and Holladay 2009). The assumption goes that issues that will have importance
for the corporation will surface in the media and that by being proactive, it is
possible to avoid that such issues turn into crises that are costly for the corporation
in terms of attention and other resources. When an issue has turned into a crisis
or something unexpected has caused a crisis, corporations can also monitor the
media to evaluate the effectiveness of their crisis response. For instance, a strategy
of “stealing thunder”, of proactive disclosure of information before a third party
like the media has the information, increases credibility (Arpan and Roskos-Ewold-
sen 2005).
The active and skillful involvement of corporations in the way media (logic)
shapes their social reality is also related to the importance of how corporations
are presented and re-presented at the more general level. The concept of the edited
corporation (originally suggested by Engwall and Sahlin-Andersson 2007) points
in this context to the activities of corporations and the media that are geared to
editing of texts that are intended for corporate stakeholders – both internal and
external. Such efforts include more or less clearly established procedures and day-
to-day routines that enable both parties to partake in the creation of the images
and texts about the corporations and their activities (Pallas 2007). Thereby the
434 Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas

term captures activities in which the corporations and the media interact with one
another with intention of managing the external assessment and perceptions of
the corporations. Underlying the notion of edited corporation is the existence of
corporate legitimacy and reputation that requires active protection from the pres-
sures to which corporations are exposed by various actors and developments in
their surroundings. Thus corporate media activities not only protect the corpora-
tions from different pressures and requirements, they also channel those demands
and expectations to corporate managers. Likewise, the media edit presentations of
corporations by, for example, emphasizing, combining, or downplaying prevailing
or future demands and expectations.
The edited corporation is a corporation in which a great many activities are
devoted to managing and organizing for its embeddedness and dependence on the
context in which it is operating. The edited corporation is thus a corporation in
which the very core of the corporate business is its brand, with the result that any
presentation and report in the media has a direct and profound impact on the
corporate business (Engwall and Sahlin-Andersson 2007; Pallas, Jonsson and
Strannegård 2014).
To reiterate, the tools of media relations involve developing good relations to
the media in order to present and proliferate stories and frames in which corpora-
tions appear newsworthy, legitimate, and relevant. The tools of media relations
are themselves examples of mediatization as they are not only adapted to the logic
of the news media. They are also designed with an ambition to become a natural
part of all aspects of corporate activities.

5 Conclusion
This theoretical essay has discussed the history of the relationship between the
media and the corporate institution and whether the notion of mediatization
describes the present day corporation in a fitting way. In what ways is the corpo-
rate sector mediatized? We have pointed to a number of observable effects of this
phenomenon, but also indicated how the corporation tries to take advantage of
the media through use of public relations. Indeed, many observers would like to
talk about corporate domination, also of the media (Carey 1995; Dinan and Miller
2009). This then, turns our opening question around. Perhaps the corporate insti-
tution more than any other institution is able to turn the news logic to its own
advantage. The resource issue has already been mentioned and we could argue
that this puts the corporation in the driving seat.
The corporation has economic rationality as its overriding logic. In the mediati-
zation processes, this logic is pitted against the news logic; the media’s preferences
and practices. Negative news coverage can hamper the profitability of a corpora-
tion and steal attention and human resources. On the other side, positive media
 Mediatization of corporations 435

coverage can yield a number of positive results for the corporation; it can be a
platform for promotion, legitimacy, reputation, and influence on policy and knowl-
edge. Still, media coverage is only of interest if it can serve such instrumental
purposes for corporations. Thus, many large corporations thrive outside of the
media spotlight and, indeed, wish to stay out of this spotlight. They are still doing
brisk business. Several business-to-business corporations seem to fall into this
category (Ihlen and Karlsen 2009).
On the other hand, the argument can be made that it is impossible to totally
escape the “iron cage of mediatization”.1 When other parts of society are mediat-
ized, this will have an effect for all corporations depending on how embedded the
corporation is in mediatized environments. Again, however, it is difficult to find
corporations that do not have a designated communication function. And while
social media is welcomed by corporations as a way of bypassing journalists in
order to communicate directly with the public, traditional mass media has not
vanished. Nor is the element of control more prominent. Still, this offers up excit-
ing research opportunities into the mediatization of corporations. Another fruitful
avenue for research that has not been touched upon in this chapter is the question
that is raised by the fact that media outlets are also corporations: Are we facing
corporatization or mediatization? Perhaps it could be said that it is the economic
logic that is prevailing in society? This also ties into the question of how corpora-
tions influence the media generally. As always, more research is needed.

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Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg
19 Law in the age of media logic
Abstract: Ostensibly, the many institutional and ideological barriers that protect
the law from the scrutiny and intervention of the media, and the many differences
between legal and media logic, should provide some immunity to the mediatiza-
tion of the legal sphere. Nevertheless, it appears that like other social institutions,
the law too has undergone a process of mediatization. This paper examines the
impact of increased media presence and media logic on legal decision-making and
on the legal process itself as experienced and articulated by Israeli legal and media
professionals. Combining Strömbäck’s (2008) criteria for the basic prerequisites of
mediatization, and Schulz’s (2004) detailed description of the four elements that
identify the adoption of media logic, we demonstrate how the mediatization of the
legal realm has changed the nature of legal procedures, legal decision-making,
and the coverage of legal affairs. We found that in the Israeli common law system,
both legal and media actors have actively adopted media logic in all aspects of
the legal process, but at the same time seek to restrain the mediatization of the
legal sphere. The commitment of both legal and media actors to preserving the
legitimacy of the legal sphere appears to inhibit the wholesale embrace of media
logic.

Keywords: mediatization, legal logic, media logic, legal journalists, legal profes-
sion and the media, judicial independence and the media, media effects

1 Introduction
The legal sphere displays many of those features that are said to resist mediatiza-
tion forces (Strömbäck 2008; Schrott and Spranger 2006; Schulz 2004). It is a
highly formal hierarchical system, for which in many cases there are no societal
alternatives.1 Its decisions are binding, and do not require public approval, nor
are there official ramifications for unpopular decisions. Judicial deliberations are
conducted away from public scrutiny, and judicial norms reinforce discretion and
confidentiality regarding differences of opinion among the judges. Moreover, legal
actors, especially judges, are not obliged to be responsive to citizens and in fact
the ideal of judicial independence demands that judges should ignore public opin-
ion and base their decisions solely on the law. Yet the legal system in many coun-
tries has been affected by the process of mediatization, and the practices and

1 Despite the growing availability of alternative dispute resolution services, mostly in civil cases,
there is no alternative to the legal system in most criminal cases.
444 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

policies of legal actors have changed as a result of the pressures of media logic.
The tension between the fear of the encroachment of the media into the legal
sphere, and the belief in the immunity of the law to media pressures was expressed
by the former Israeli Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch in her last public address before
retirement to the Jerusalem members of the Israeli Bar Association:

Law has spread out of the courts … lawyers and public relations professionals are trying to
mold public opinion in order to influence judicial discretion …These are dangerous attempts
that might infect the purity of the judicial process. I have full confidence in Israeli judges. They
are loyal to both their conscience and to the values of justice, and they refuse to surrender to
populism. They shut their ears to the artificial noise that surrounds them which is meant to
affect their decisions.2

In this speech, Chief Justice Beinisch acknowledges the increasing use of the media
by legal actors and her fears about the danger this poses to the legal process, as
well as her confidence that the traditional view of judicial independence and the
immunity of professional judges to outside pressures still prevail (Davis 1994;
Bybee 2007). These themes have emerged in many discussions about the media
and the legal system (e.g. Schulz 2010: 109–110; 216–220; Bybee 2007) and reflect
the unique questions that arise in analyzing the mediatization of legal institutions.
This paper will present the results of our study of the impact of increased media
presence and media logic on legal decision-making and on the legal process itself
as experienced and articulated by Israeli legal and media professionals (Peleg and
Bogoch 2012). It will re-examine these results within the framework of recent devel-
opments in the media and legal scenes in Israel, using theoretical insights about
the mediatization process, particularly in the works of Schulz (2004) and Ström-
bäck (2008). We will discuss the Israeli results with reference to other legal sys-
tems, where there is a constant interplay between the barriers to mediatization
and the forces compelling it forward.

2 The mediatization process

Whatever the differences in the conceptual definition of mediatization, media
scholars agree that mediatization is a process of social change brought on by
the increasing dependence of social institutions on the communications media
(Kepplinger 2002; Mazzoleni 2008; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Schulz 2004;
Strömbäck 2008; Hjarvard 2008). Scholars of mediatization have discussed the
accommodation by individuals and institutions to a commercial media logic and
the adaptation of their behavior to its production routines and presentation for-

2 Dorit Beinisch, public speech at the Israeli Bar Association, Jerusalem Branch, September 2010
(our translation from the original Hebrew).
 Law in the age of media logic 445

mats. In addition, they have analyzed the changes in power relations that occur
as a consequence of the entry of the commercial, cynical, and critical media to the
public sphere (Lundby 2009; Strömbäck 2008; Hjarvard 2008; Schulz 2004).
A number of schemes have been suggested to identify the stages in the mediat-
ization process, particularly in the political sphere. Strömbäck (2008) describes a
process of increasing dependence on the media and the media’s independence
from political control, from the first stage when the media become the most impor-
tant source of information about politics; through the stage when the media
become independent of the political sphere; followed by the stage in which media
content reflects media rather than political logic; and the fourth stage when politi-
cal and other social actors not only adapt to media logic, but also adopt it, and
“accept the media logic and its consequences as an empirical reality” (p. 240).
Schulz (2004) describes four processes of change that comprise mediatization:
extension, in which the media extend the limits of human communication capaci-
ties; substitution, whereby the media change the character of social institutions
by substituting social activities and institutions; amalgamation, in which the
media are woven into the fabric of everyday life and institutional activities; and
accommodation, that focuses on the way actors and organizations accommodate
to the way the media operate (i.e. media logic). We suggest that the first two stages
of Strömbäck’s scheme are actually preconditions for Schulz’s process. In other
words, Schulz details the various institutional, interpersonal, and media content
changes that occur when media logic replaces the logic of the political sphere,
and takes for granted the dependence on the media and its relative independence
from political control.
Both Strömbäck (2008) and Schulz (2004) emphasize the fact that the mediati-
zation process is not unidirectional and inevitable, and that there may be differen-
ces and back and forth movements along the way.

3 Legal traditions and legal systems3

One of the factors that may affect the mediatization of the legal sphere is related
to the system of law in a particular society. In the Western world, there are basi-
cally two legal traditions: the common law used by Britain and former British
colonies such as the United States, India, and Israel; and the civil law of continen-
tal Europe, its former colonies, and some other nations who reformed their distinc-
tive systems according to the civil law tradition, such as Russia and Japan. While
judicial decisions form the basis of common law, legislative decisions are the basis
of civil law, so that judges have a greater role in shaping the law in common law
countries. However, in the inquisitorial system of trials in the civil law system, the

3 This section is based on three sources: Barak (1992); Asimow (2004); and Shachar (2007).
446 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

judge has much greater control of the proceedings and the lawyers play subordi-
nate roles.
In the inquisitorial system, the judge plays an active role in gathering the
evidence prior to the trial, and prepares a record of the evidence that is available
to the prosecution and defense in advance of the trial. The judge determines the
order in which evidence is taken and the credibility and relative weight of each
piece of evidence without being constrained by strict rules. The judge also decides
which witnesses to call, including expert witnesses, and it is the judge who ques-
tions the witnesses (or might allow them to testify in narrative form). The lawyers
are allowed to question witnesses after the judge is finished. Asimow (2004) and
Shachar (2007) claim that because the trial phase is essentially a continuation of
previous meetings there is little drama or suspense in the inquisitory trial.
In common law countries, an adversarial system is used in the conduct of
trials. Here, lawyers are zealous representatives of each side, and basically control
the proceedings. They decide which witnesses to call, what evidence to amass,
and conduct the examination of witnesses, using cross examination to undermine
the evidence and credibility of the witnesses of the opposing side. In this system,
the judge’s role is confined to overseeing the process within which evidence is
given to ensure that the rules are maintained, and to either decide the case and/
or the sentence (as in the Israeli system) or to instruct the jury before it decides,
and hand down the sentence (as in the American system). Thus although the
adversary system is used in Israel, there are no juries in the Israeli system. At each
level of the three-tiered system, consisting of the Magistrate’s Courts, the District
Courts, and the Supreme Court, professional judges decide both the outcome and
sentences.4 In the Magistrate’s Court, cases are heard by one judge, while in the
higher courts, panels of three or more judges decide. In some cases, as many as
fifteen justices of the Supreme Court may sit on a panel.
Despite the differences between the civil and common law traditions, both are
inherently governed by legal logic and a commitment to the rationality of the law.

3.1 Media logic and legal logic

As Peleg and Bogoch (2012) have pointed out, there is a distinct difference between
media logic and legal logic. While the law requires in-depth rational analysis of
each piece of evidence, so that procedures may be long and drawn out, media
rhythms, grammars, and formats favor quick and skeptical reports issued under
strict deadlines, that are often characterized by superficial results-oriented “horse-
race” style coverage (Brants and van Praag 2006; Strömbäck 2008). Legal language
is often convoluted, “highly coded, jargon-laden and obscure to all but a special-

4 In some specialized courts, like the Labor Court, professional judges sit in panels with two lay
members of the public.
 Law in the age of media logic 447

ized audience” (Greenhouse, 2001: 120), while the mass-market press demands
simplicity, drama, and easily identifiable issues, heroes, and villains. Whereas the
law seeks to resolve conflicts, the media seek to accentuate conflicts; judges con-
duct deliberations behind closed doors, sometimes using gag orders to limit public
knowledge whereas the media favor transparency and seek to reveal and expose;
judges have traditionally downplayed their own persona, using clothing and lan-
guage to divert attention from themselves as individuals whereas media logic
demands the personalization of events in order to tell a dramatic story (Rosen-Zvi
2005; Wolfsfeld 2011). These differences would seem to undermine the possibility
of the mediatization of the legal sphere.

4 Media and the legal sphere

Ostensibly, the ethos of judicial independence and the traditional view that outside
influences are inherently detrimental to the ideal functioning of the legal system
(Bybee 2010; Karpin 2002) would preclude the necessity of any media involvement
in the judicial process. In most systems, judges are not subject to recurrent elec-
tions, and legal actors who have traditionally been regarded as different and often
superior to politicians (e.g. Baird and Gangl 2006; Haltom 1998) would seemingly
have no particular interest in ensuring positive media coverage. However, many
studies have pointed out that the perceived institutional legitimacy of the Court
and the public support of the judicial system are extremely important for the
branch that has “neither purse nor sword” (Bybee 2007; Gibson and Caldeira 2011;
Gies 2008). Moreover, the basic requirement that judicial proceedings be open and
public has long been translated into media access to the courts (Moran 2014; Mal-
leson 1999). Indeed, with time, the public’s dependence on the media has
increased as live participation has declined, partly as a result of the shrinking
courtroom space allotted to lay observers (Moran 2014). Thus, Strömbäck’s (2008)
initial phase of the mediatization process, that the media are the most importance
source of information for the citizen, has long been an integral part of the judicial
process, with the consequent implications for the public’s knowledge and under-
standing of the legal system.
Nevertheless, a number of changes in the late 20th century have increased the
media’s role in the legal sphere, and the response of the legal establishment to
these changes. One is the demand for greater scrutiny, transparency, and account-
ability that marks current democratic processes (Gies 2008; Greenhouse 2001). This
is particularly true in light of the more activist role of the Supreme Court in many
modern democracies, and the consequent judicialization of all aspects of social
life (Galnoor 2004; Malleson 1999), as well as the greater use of the power of
judicial review that allows a “group of unelected, unaccountable, life-tenured
judges to trump the majority’s will” (Greenhouse 2001: 121) by invalidating legisla-
448 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

tion passed by the representatives of the democratically elected majority. These

have enhanced the centrality and power of the legal sphere (Hirschl 2004; Mal-
leson 1999), and have resulted in greater interest by the press in legal matters,
over and above a long-standing interest in criminal cases, along with greater
demands for transparency and explanation (Greenhouse 2001; Gies 2005; Mal-
leson, 1999). Thus, courts began changing their policy of “allowing the decisions
to speak for themselves”, not responding to media criticism, and distancing them-
selves from the press as a strategy to maintain their neutral, professional, non-
political image (Davis 1994; Rosen-Zvi 2005; Schulz 2010; Gies 2008). Public rela-
tions departments and/or press judges have been set up in many modern democra-
cies, with the goal of promoting positive and accurate coverage of legal decisions
(Davis 2011; Gies 2005; Schulz 2010; Staton 2004), and many jurisdictions now
provide judicial decisions on Internet sites, especially those from appellate courts.5
Against this background of the unique nature of the institution of the law, and
the literature about the mediatization process, we examined the mediatization of
the legal sphere in Israel. The original research (Peleg and Bogoch 2012) was based
on interviews with current and retired legal and media actors, analyses of judicial
decisions, and content analysis of eight highly popular trials in the media over a
period of four decades.6 These allowed us to evaluate the changes that had taken
place over time, as witnessed by the professionals, and as evidenced by the cover-
age. Here, we also refer to some updated material from the court authority, and
from newspaper reports and various legal decisions.

5 Changes in the Israeli media scene

Within the period of about forty years, the Israeli media scene has changed from
a single channel public broadcasting system and a mix of party and commercial
newspapers, to a multi-channel, commercial broadcasting system alongside the
public one, and a fiercely competitive, largely commercial press (Lehman-Wilzig
2007; Gilboa 2012; Caspi and Limor 1999). In addition to the Internet revolution
that has affected the media scene in many countries, in Israel, policies specifically
directed at expanding media sources and limiting formal restrictions on journalis-
tic practices have resulted in a diversified, dynamic, and basically free press.7 The

5 Some courts in the United States provide other documents related to the case as well. There is
substantial variation between jurisdictions regarding the completeness, access and ease of conduct-
ing searches of these sites. (Bogoch, Halperin-Kaddari and Katvan 2012).
6 See Peleg and Bogoch (2012) for a full description of the research methods.
7 Military censorship still exists in Israel, and prevents the publication of information deemed to
threaten national security (Gilboa 2012). However, freedom of the press has been guaranteed by
binding precedential decisions of the Supreme Court (High Court of Justice), and in recent years,
the military censor has challenged the Ministry of Defense’s demand for withholding information
and has refused to suppress items (Limor and Nossek 2011). Moreover, as Gilboa (2008) has noted,
 Law in the age of media logic 449

Supreme Court, the Court of last resort in a three-tiered system, has over time
supported the freedom of the press in many precedential, binding decisions, and
there has been a relaxation or removal of formal restrictions on journalistic practi-
ces. In the legal sphere, the Attorney General issued guidelines in 1992 that
severely limited the enforcement of sub judice laws (Peleg 2012; Segev 2001),8 so
that journalists no longer restricted their coverage of legal affairs to reports of the
proceedings but included commentary as well. In fact, since 1992, there has been
no instance in which a journalist was charged with violating sub judice provisions.
There are still a number of limitations on media access to the Courts, such as the
ban on cameras or photography in the courtroom during trial, court ordered short-
term restrictions initiated by prosecutors or the police on the publication of details
during investigations, as well as prohibitions that stem from privacy laws on the
identification of minors and victims of sexual offenses. However, there are now
relatively few restrictions on Israeli journalists covering the courts, and the value
of a press that is independent of political and legal intervention (Strömbäck’s sec-
ond criteria) is an integral element of the current media scene in Israel.
In order to analyze the third and fourth elements of Strömbäck’s (2008)
scheme, i.e. the extent to which media logic governs media content and media
actors, we turn to Schulz’s model, for a detailed account of the process of social
change that occurs when media logic comes to dominate social relations and insti-
tutional activities.

5.1 Adopting media logic: effect of expansion and substitution

on media content and legal reporting
Schulz (2004) describes how mediatization derives from the expansion of media
technologies and the substitution of the media for other social activities. In the
legal sphere, these processes emerged as changes in the nature of the reporting of
legal affairs and in the content of the coverage.
The expansion of the media industry in Israel, as well as the enhanced role of
the Israeli Supreme Court in society as a consequence of judicial activism, have
led to a notable increase in the space devoted to the coverage of courts in the
Israeli press (Bogoch and Holtzman-Gazit 2008). Not only do law-related stories
appear in all sections of the newspaper, but there are also special law columns

in the new media world, censorship can be circumvented. For example, Israeli reporters have
leaked information to colleagues abroad, and once it was published abroad, the local press could
report it as well.
8 Like similar restrictions in other countries, the sub judice law in Israel is an effort to address the
conflicting interests of a fair trial and a free press. The law states that a person shall not publish
anything about a matter under adjudication if it is published in order to influence the outcome or
the proceedings (Segev 2001).
450 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

and sections in all the major daily newspapers (Peleg 2012). This has enhanced
the status of legal reporters. As one reporter said: “Once the political reporter, the
parliamentary reporter and the military reporter were regarded as the top positions
in the newsroom; now the legal reporter belongs there too” (Current legal reporter,
Interview, September 5, 2007).
Moreover, the entrance of Internet news as an additional competitor to the
traditional media covering the courts is said to have made legal reporting more
innovative. In order to compete with Internet reporters who have the advantage
of immediacy in publishing mainly formal legal information, other reporters must
look for additional information and are obliged to cultivate new news-sources and
to offer alternative narratives.
On the other hand, the expansion of the media has also changed the work
routines of journalists covering the courts. Today, reporters are often not present
in the courtroom, but rely on legal documents they obtain by email or fax, and
the partisan descriptions provided by lawyers or public relations firms (Peleg and
Bogoch 2012). Often, the time pressures of an increasingly competitive press make
the ready-made stories provided by these sources too tempting for journalists to
resist.
Despite the greater exposure given to legal issues, the content of coverage has
increasingly evidenced the adoption of media rather than legal logic. Thus, veteran
journalists claim that whereas in the past, reports of trials led to discussions of
legal issues and social problems, today the dramatic, personal, and sensationalist
aspects of the case are highlighted (Peleg and Bogoch 2012). Even when journalists
themselves try to restrain their coverage, the editors and owners of newspapers
who are faced with increasing commercial competition urge them to produce
reports of sensationalized victories and defeats by legal actors, rather than profes-
sional discussions of legal disputes resolved by the courts. “I have to stop and
calm down my editors, to explain that critical headlines in a case when the prose-
cution backed down from pressing charges in the form of ‘fiasco’ ‘blow’ ‘the prose-
cution trounced’ are not correct. The criticism against the court is growing because
of the competition with other media” (Interview with current reporter, April 21,
2007).
Many observers of the Israeli media scene have claimed that the media cover-
age of particularly dramatic cases has become a virtual trial that not only reports
on the events of the trial itself but includes information and interpretations that
are constructed by the media. For example, newspapers adopt court-like proce-
dures, such as having a witness reconstruct the crime at the crime site, or use
polygraph tests to seemingly prove the guilt or innocence of the defendant or the
truth of the testimony by witnesses (Peleg and Bogoch 2012). Unlike the legal logic
of courtroom procedures, these media representations are not constrained by rules
of evidence or subject to court scrutiny or examination. Thus newspapers construct
a case either in favor of or against the defendant, giving particular prominence to
 Law in the age of media logic 451

the claims of the side they support and reporting their own investigations, with
little basis in legal procedure or evidence.
Judges in particular have been highly critical of this type of media coverage,
because they believe that it presents a distorted picture of the workings of the law.
They blame the press for its detrimental effect on the public’s understanding and
support of the court.9 “The most dangerous thing in the coverage of trials in the
media is the inaccuracies. It is a disaster that the public doesn’t know what the
judge is doing … the judiciary didn’t change the press did … The sensationalism
is part of the physiology of the media, the inaccuracies are its pathology” (Inter-
view, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak December 11, 2007).
While judges accepted the sensational aspects of the media coverage of trials,
they resented the factual errors, bias, and what they viewed as “targeted and
malicious” reports (Presiding Judge, Interview, April 8, 2005).
Notwithstanding their displeasure with the media trials, both judges and law-
yers objected to restricting the freedom of the press by legal means. None of the
legal professionals agreed to reviving the sub judice prohibition which has not
been used since 1992, or to imposing other limitations on the coverage of the
courts in the Israeli media.
Surprisingly, and contrary to our expectations of the extremely competitive
and aggressive journalists who today typify the profession (Peri 2004), some jour-
nalists favored limiting the coverage of court cases by law, whether by the revival
of the sub judice rules or the indictment of journalists for contempt of court or for
violating gag-orders (Peleg and Bogoch 2012). In general, journalists covering the
courts today felt that the now diluted code of professional ethics was no longer
an effective constraint on the behavior of legal or media actors. However, contrary
to legal professionals, they suggested using the legal system to inhibit the inter-
vention of the media in the legal process, and to put a brake on the mediatization
of the legal sphere in Israel.
Thus, the expansion phase of mediatization was marked by the growth in the
coverage of legal affairs, the increased status of legal reporters and more innova-
tive, but also more dramatic, sensational, and sometimes inaccurate legal report-
ing. In the “trials by media” that denote the substitution phase, newspapers
adopted quasi-legal devices, and reporting was often one-sided, judgmental and
critical of the legal establishment. Within this framework, the professional practi-
ces and decisions of legal actors were increasingly ruled by media logic.

9 Yearly surveys by the Israel Democracy Institute and a large scale study by Rattner (2009) have
found a constant decline in the trust by Israelis in the Supreme Court, as well as in other public
institutions.
452 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

5.2 Adopting media logic: amalgamation and accommodation

by legal practitioners.
“The degree to which … actors are governed by a … media logic” (Strömbäck 2008:
234) can be examined by way media use becomes an integral part of social life so
that “the media definition of reality amalgamates with the social definition”
(Schulz 2004: 89), and the manner in which social actors adapt to the production
routines and presentation formats of the media. The process of mediatization has
changed the practices of both judges and lawyers, and has brought new players
into the interaction between legal and media professionals.

5.2.1 The judiciary and the media

Despite its reluctance to admit that the media have a place within the legal sphere,
the judiciary in Israel has made institutional changes to facilitate media coverage
and individual judges have adopted various strategies to accommodate to media
demands.
Abandoning a policy in which distance from the media was advocated and
silence and passivity were seen as the appropriate response to media criticism, in
1995 the first spokesperson of the Judicial Authority was appointed and in 1996,
the Judicial Authority set up a public relations department. Like similar institu-
tions in other Western countries (e.g. Schulz 2010; Staton 2004), the public rela-
tions department of the Judicial Authority provides copies of court rulings on a
daily basis on the Court website10 in an effort to safeguard against the media
distortion of judicial decisions, and to alert journalists to important decisions and
cases. Occasionally, the Chief Justice gives interviews to the press, although these
are never in direct response to critiques of particular opinions.11
Although the public relations department provides additional information for
journalists, currently serving judges (aside from the Chief Justice) are not officially
permitted to address the press, either in interviews or through comments and
statements. Judges have in fact at times consented to give off-the-record interviews

10 The Court website has been criticized for being difficult to navigate, and its search engine is
considered unsophisticated. A number of commercial databases are now available that claim to
provide all Supreme Court decisions, and decisions from other Courts. These databases have better
search engines than the one the Judicial Authority provides, but have also been found to be incom-
plete (Bogoch, Halperin-Kaddari and Katvan 2012).
11 In addition the Judicial Authority has begun debating the utility of using Facebook as part of
its public relations policy, but at present, it has only used Facebook to recruit security personnel.
In anticipation of the potential future use of these media, the Judicial Authority has begun collect-
ing talkbacks on judicial matters from various social networks (pers. comm., Ayelet Philo, spokes-
person, the Judicial Authority, April 15, 2012).
 Law in the age of media logic 453

and have called meetings to give the press background information about compli-
cated cases. However, these are contrary to official guidelines and the Code of
Judicial Conduct that require the confirmation by the public relations officer of the
Judicial Authority for any contact with the media. Our interviews revealed that
judges were very dissatisfied with the public relations department and claimed
that it was inadequate in coping with the current media environment: “The court
is not accustomed to the spins that politicians instigate. When politicians attack
the judicial system, the court responds like a helpless giant, heavy and awkward,
that can’t move its hand. There are so many restrictions on judges, they don’t
succeed in transmitting the correct message” (Current judge, Interview, October 9,
2007). They complained that the public relations department did not appropriately
handle criticism of individual judges, and that they were powerless and vulnerable
to attacks by a cynical and sensational media (Peleg and Bogoch 2012).12 While no
judge proposed that judges hold press conferences or that all the ethical restric-
tions on judicial–journalist relations be removed, there was a feeling that more
proactive media strategies and greater responsiveness to critical media coverage
of individual judges in lower courts were in order.
The lack of faith in the effectiveness of the Judicial Authority public relations
department has prompted several judges to unofficially initiate contact with the
press, and to use their own public relations channels. Both judges and journalists
gave examples of leaks about personal and professional conflicts within judicial
circles, a phenomenon that was virtually unheard of in earlier times. One judge
said that “today there is a trade-off: the judge gives information to the journalist
and in exchange receives positive coverage” (Interview, August 12, 2007). The
appearance of several supportive profile reports of judges in daily newspapers was
apparently the outcome of such give and take, and stirred intense debate and
criticism within judicial circles (Peleg 2012). More recently, a currently serving
judge at the district court of Beer-Sheva apparently hired a public relations profes-
sional who sent a press release describing the judge’s qualifications and suitability
for promotion to the Supreme Court (Haaretz, November 28, 2011). This step was
described as the “crossing of lines” by a member of the nominating committee,13
and the public relations person claimed that he was hired by the judge’s relative
and not by the judge himself.

12 While some research has indicated that there has been little increase in the criticism of the
Supreme Court of Israel (Bogoch and Holzman-Gazit 2008), judges feel that the media have in
recent years mounted attacks against the courts as an institution, and against judges personally
(Peleg and Bogoch 2012). It should be noted that there have been similar claims by judges else-
where, e.g. Hall (2010), in the context of judicial elections in the US; Schulz (2010), in Australia,
particularly in the context of sentencing.
13 Israeli judges are appointed by a nominating committee consisting of the Minister of Justice
(chair), an additional Minister selected by the government, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
and two other Justices, two practicing lawyers elected by the Israeli Bar, and two Knesset Members
(one of whom is from the parliamentary opposition).
454 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

This was not the first time that the nomination and promotion of judges were
regarded as due in part, at least, to their coverage by the media. For example, a
journalist claimed that his coverage “helped create a positive image for one of the
judges that I respected [and was thus] responsible for his promotion to the
Supreme Court” (Interview, September 5, 2007). Apparently, the monopoly of the
contact between the press and the judiciary that was held by the Judicial Author-
ity’s public relations department is being challenged by unofficial moves by indi-
vidual judges, who have adopted various media strategies for publicizing their
views and for self-promotion.
Thus, despite the goals of the Judicial Authority to foster more accurate cover-
age of the Courts, the pressures from an increasingly competitive media, that now
also have to vie with the Internet as well as expanding media sources, the adoption
of an aggressive, adversary model of journalism (Peri 2004), and the perceived
failure of the Judicial Authority’s public relations department in meeting the needs
of the current judiciary, have undermined the media management goals of the
Judicial Authority and led to strategic, unofficial contacts between judges and the
media.

5.3 The mediatization of judges’ work

The opening quote of this paper by former Chief Justice Beinisch stressed the
importance of judicial independence and the danger of extra-legal influences, and
specifically, the fear of the media “infecting” the legal process. A number of ways
in which the media have influenced the legal process were mentioned by both
legal and media professionals in our study. Journalists, judges, and lawyers all
maintained that the media influenced the level of sentencing through their role as
creators and purveyors of public opinion. Lawyers and journalists suggested that
increased media attention to specific cases led to higher levels of punishment.
Judges, on the other hand, tended to phrase this effect as an example of their
attentiveness to public needs and concerns, rather than as a response to media
pressures. Retired Justice Dahlia Dorner gave the following example: “The media
supported the plea of women’s organizations for stricter punishment of abusive
husbands and the level of punishment in these cases increased” (Interview, April
26, 2005). Here, media reality became legal reality.
Journalists pointed to media effects on judicial behavior in the courtroom
(“more patient and attentive”, Current Reporter, Interview, April 19, 2007) and
believed that Supreme Court justices prioritized appeals that had previously been
the subject of media attention. Moshe Goraly, current reporter and legal analyst
claimed that “The Court never postponed a hearing in a high-profile case regard-
less of [its] actual urgency” (Interview, May 22, 2007). Judges, for their part, also
acknowledged some media effects, such as their effect on judicial writing style.
For example, retired Judge David Bar-Offir of the Tel Aviv District Court explained
 Law in the age of media logic 455

that “there are paragraphs in some of the court rulings that I intentionally wrote
in a more journalistic style to catch the media’s attention” (Interview, April 26,
2005). Adapting at least some parts of their decisions to a media-friendly format
is both evidence of the address to a wider, non-legal audience within their opinion
writing, as well as an attempt to control the nature of the media coverage of their
decisions (Davis 1994).
However, virtually all media and legal professionals believed that the media
did not affect the core of judicial decision-making, and maintained a belief in the
autonomy and impartiality of judges, and the basic fairness of the legal system.
They shared former Chief Justice Barak’s claim that “judges operate according to
an ethical and normative set of values that balance the influence of extra-legal
factors” (Interview, December 11, 2007). Judges repeatedly stated their commitment
to the law and legal factors as the sole determinants of their decisions, and in
both written opinions and in the interviews, decried attempts by legal actors to
use the media to influence their decisions.

5.4 Lawyers and the media

Nevertheless, lawyers in Israel as in other common law countries now generally
regard it as necessary to present their case to the public as well as to the court
(Hantler, Schwartz and Goldberg 2004) and view managing the media in order to
win legal battles as an accepted feature of lawyering. The ideal lawyer was now
“an ‘all around player’ who masters media skills and cultivates a pro-media
approach in all phases of the trial” (Interview, Adv. Zeri Hazan, August 8, 2007).
The amalgamation of these media-management goals into professional legal
behavior was spurred by a variety of factors in addition to the changes in both the
media and legal arena we discussed previously. These include: changes in the
ethical rules regarding advertising for lawyers that radically reduced restrictions
on appearances by lawyers in the media, and allowed limited forms of advertising;
the growing number of law graduates as a result of the opening of nine colleges
offering law degrees, so that Israel has the highest ratio of lawyers to population
in the world (Dobrovitsky 2010); and the establishment and growth in the number
of public relations firms specializing in legal representation (Darr and Zer-Gutman
2007).14
All currently practicing lawyers described ways in which they had accommo-
dated their work to the demands, formats, and logic of the media. Prosecutors

14 Dar and Zer-Gutman (2007) noted that the number of lawyers doubled in Israel from 1995 to
2004 as a result of the opening of six private law colleges. Since their study, three additional
colleges grant law degrees. Moreover, the number of public relations firms representing lawyers
has also increased: two years following their study, a total of thirty public relations firms repre-
sented lawyers, up from ten at the time of their study.
456 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

claimed that the District Attorney assigned prosecutors to high profile cases
according to their media skills, rather than their legal expertise. Lawyers described
how they made special efforts to avoid clichés and consciously used provocative
“soundbites” to attract media attention (Interview, Moshe Meroz, August 13, 2007).
Defense attorneys described how they synchronized their legal moves with the
media time-table. “I managed to receive a good plea bargain for my client. I was
afraid of media criticism that would affect the judge. So I asked for a court hearing
in the late afternoon when there were no reporters and it wasn’t reported” (David
Yiftach, veteran defense lawyer, Interview, April 28, 2007).
The fear of the media’s reaction has had a direct impact on decision-making
by legal actors. Both prosecutors and defense attorneys described how they
refrained from concluding plea bargains in high profile cases, because of potential
media critique. “Years ago we refrained from plea bargains because we were afraid
of the criticism of the Supreme Court. Now the Supreme Court seems far away.
We’re afraid of the media’s immediate criticism” (Veteran prosecutor, Interview,
June 18, 2007).
Thus, whereas in the past, prosecutors were basically concerned about the
strength of their evidence for conviction in the negotiation of plea bargains, today
they also take into account potential media criticism of the cessation of the trial
process. This finding reflects the shift in the status of the media in the legal sphere
from an observer and commentator to a deterring factor in the decision-making of
key players. This is precisely the claim of the theory of mediatization.
Sometimes the strategic steps taken by lawyers to further their case in the
media clearly violated ethical guidelines of the Israeli Bar Association. Defense
attorneys reported that there was competition among the lawyers in high profile
cases to provide the press with protocols from the police investigation, because
“you cannot allow yourself to stay still and lose a chance to strengthen your ties
with the media” (Interview, April 29, 2007). Veteran defense attorneys tended to
be critical of this strategy, not only because it was unethical but because it was
against the best interests of the client to be exposed to the humiliation of a police
interrogation. However, it seems that media logic took precedence over legal logic
in these cases, and even veteran attorneys were drawn into the competition for
media attention: “Young attorneys are hungry to become celebs and have to fight.
Veteran lawyers are drawn into this struggle too, so they won’t disappear. It’s like
in the criminal sphere. Veteran criminals must commit a crime in order to stay in
business” (Adv. Yair Golan, Interview, June 8, 2007).
Journalists were skeptical about the strategies and motives of both prosecutors
and defense attorneys, and despite their dependence on these legal sources, they
tended to distrust their moves and claims. “Let me be blunt. Some of the defense
lawyers don’t give a damn for their clients. All they want is to maximize their
media coverage” (Rivka Noiman, former legal reporter, Interview, May 14, 2007).
But by their own admission, legal journalists were also driven by their own
professional goals, and abandoned standards of service to the public good and
 Law in the age of media logic 457

providing necessary information to the public when confronted with the chance
for a scoop.

I had an exclusive interview with a business man who was arrested and still under police
investigation. The editors gave it a huge amount of space. Frankly, I don’t know what it
contributed to public discourse and [understanding of the] essence of the affair, aside from
obstructing the investigation and exposing what the suspect told the police to his partners in
the crime. This was what they were trying to avoid by the arrest. It had no value for the
public, only for my desire to publish an exclusive interview that apparently suited the pub-
lisher’s agenda (Interview, May 7, 2007).

Nonetheless, despite the manipulation of the media, and their own efforts to har-
ness the media to their cause, lawyers still had faith in the basic integrity of the
judiciary. As a young defense lawyer put it: “After all, there’s no alternative to the
judiciary in our society and I believe that trials in Israel are mostly fair and just”
(Interview, Yaacob Sklar, April 29, 2007). Similarly, with all their competitiveness,
cynicism, and occasional willingness to forgo journalistic ethics in the coverage of
legal matters, reporters believed in the integrity of the judiciary and the impor-
tance of providing the public with an image of an untainted, fundamentally fair
legal system. In fact, these same journalists who fought so hard to obtain exclusive
interviews and scoops also advocated the reintroduction of sub judice constraints
to restrain the zealousness fostered by the competitive media system.
Thus, although most of the participants in our study regarded the legal sphere
as permeated by the media at all levels, no one claimed that the judicial process
had been overtaken by the media. Both law and media professionals share an
ethos regarding the independence and the autonomy of the judiciary in Israel, and
this common ideology seems to suggest a more innocuous form of mediatization
than that feared by both professional communities.

6 Summary and conclusion

Despite the myth of judicial immunity and the incompatibility of media and legal
logic, our analysis has shown ample evidence of the mediatization of the legal
sphere in Israel. Combining Strömbäck’s (2008) criteria for the basic prerequisites
of mediatization, and Schulz’s (2004) detailed description of the four elements that
identify the adoption of media logic, we demonstrated how the mediatization of
the legal realm has changed the nature of legal procedures, legal decision-making,
and the coverage of legal affairs. Media logic determined decisions by lawyers
about plea bargains, the timing of legal moves, and even the choice of lawyers to
prosecute cases, as well as decisions about the nature of the exposure given the
case in the media. Both lawyers and journalists regarded the media strategies of
the lawyers as sometimes serving the lawyer’s desire for publicity, rather than the
458 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

good of the client. Judges, too, were influenced by media logic: judges were said
to behave differently in media-covered courtrooms, to tailor their decision writing
to attract the press, and even to decide on the severity of sentencing according to
pressures by the media.
There is no doubt that the increasing mediatization of the legal process has
benefited both the public and the professionals. Not only is the public exposed to
more information about the legal system, but there is greater transparency about
judicial procedures, decisions, and nominations, and thus greater accountability,
which “in a modern democracy are necessary prerequisites of judicial legitimacy”
(Loth 2007: 16). The media provide lawyers and judges with an avenue for self-
promotion, and have increased the status of journalists working in the legal realm
as well as spurred innovations in legal reporting in order to compete with other
press and digital sources.
However, like early scholars of the mediatization of the political sphere (see
Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999), both legal and media professionals in Israel tend to
view the media intrusion into the legal sphere as a basically negative phenom-
enon, potentially threatening the judicial process, the legal profession, and the
rule of law. Judges regard the simplified, sensationalist, and consequently inaccu-
rate coverage of trials by journalists who may not even be present in the courtroom
but rely on one-sided descriptions by lawyers and public relations firms, as largely
responsible for the decline in public support of the court, and a potential threat
to the legitimacy that is so necessary for a legal system in a democratic society. The
attempts by the Court’s public relations department that has a virtual monopoly
on official court-media interaction to rectify the inaccuracies in the coverage were
regarded as unwieldy and ineffective, especially when individual judges are criti-
cized, and led to leaks and other unofficial encounters with the press that chal-
lenged judicial ethics. The professional unity that marked the judiciary has been
undermined as judges criticized their colleagues for unethical uses of the media
and became concerned about their own image in the media. Lawyers decried the
fact that the fear of media critique now governs their decision making, and that
over the years, professional ethics and the best interests of the client are being
disregarded in the competition for positive media coverage. The dilution of the
constraining power of the code of ethics is regarded as a threat to the integrity of
the legal profession. Journalists also noted the difficulty of abiding by professional
ethics when pressured by their editors to sensationalize their coverage and adopt
trial-like procedures in covering the courts, and found themselves undermining
the work of the legal system in their race for ratings. In fact, the feeling that the
mediatization process had gotten out of hand and that they were unable to restrain
themselves or their editors was expressed by journalists who urged the use of the
sub judice provisions and other legal sanctions to reign in some of the excesses of
the media coverage.
However, none of the professionals suggested that the media coverage of legal
affairs had become a replica of the mediatized political process, or that the strate-
 Law in the age of media logic 459

gies used by politicians be adopted by judges or even lawyers. Although there are
demands for greater transparency and camera access to the courts, no one sug-
gested, for example, that all judicial deliberations be open to the public. The basic
belief in the integrity and independence of judges and the fairness of the Israeli
legal system was common to both legal and media professionals, and all were
committed to preserving a just legal process. Despite their skepticism of legal
actors and their ethical lapses, journalists, more than other sectors of the popula-
tion, continued to have greater trust in the Supreme Court than any other Israeli
institution (Israeli Democracy Institute, 2005), and were more restrained in their
coverage of judges and the Court than they were of political figures. There is still
an element of distance and even deference that seems to indicate a more moderate
form of mediatization than is prevalent in the political sphere.
Still, there is an inherent paradox in the lawyers’ use of media strategies and
their belief, shared by journalists and judges, that judges’ decisions are basically
determined by the formal dictates of the law. Why is so much money and effort
being invested in media strategies if they believe that judges are not influenced
by press reports or the public opinion generated by this coverage. Is it all directed
to influencing the sentence, the main media effect on judicial decisions that even
judges acknowledge? Or have the benefits of increased media coverage and greater
public exposure of the legal sphere become too attractive for all professionals?
Has victory in the “court of public opinion” become almost as important as the
victory in the actual court of law?
This chapter has explored the process of mediatization in the legal sphere, a
powerful social institution that has both ideologically and strategically had very
little to do with the media in all legal traditions. We found that in the Israeli
common law system, both legal and media actors have actively adopted media
logic in all aspects of the legal process, but at the same time fear and seek to
restrain the mediatization of the legal sphere, even as they enjoy its benefits.
Despite the more moderate role of lawyers in the civil law tradition, there is evi-
dence that here too, the mediatization process has affected aspects of the legal
process. For example, in France and Holland, judges are increasingly concerned
with their image and have begun writing more media-friendly decisions and using
media professionals to explain their decisions (Gies 2008).
The mediatization of law, like the mediatization of other fields, is not a linear
process (Strömbäck 2008), and the commitment of both legal and media actors to
preserving the legitimacy of the legal sphere inhibits the wholesale embrace of
media logic. Whether the nature of the mediatization that appears among legal
and media actors in Israel also defines other legal traditions or other spheres, and
what form it takes, is a question for continuing research.
460 Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg

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VII. Art and the popular
Jürgen Wilke
20 Art: multiplied mediatization

“I believe media is art.”

(Andy Warhol)

Abstract: Mediatization relates to art in a multiplied manner. Three different areas

can be discerned. (1) The production of art or the media as the subject matter and
material of art. Although earlier art works made use of the printed press, only later
media like radio, television, new media, and the Internet generated specific forms
of art. (2) The dissemination of art involves certain institutions or media, which
allow for (public) access to art. Mediatization concerns primary institutions (galler-
ies, museums, and festivals, etc.) and secondary media (press, radio, television,
Internet, etc.). (3) The reception of art refers to the perception and processing of
art by individual spectators and the audience. Digitalization transforms the passive
spectator into an interactive participant. While mediatization generally means that
social systems or institutions adapt to the media’s logic, art works are often critical
towards this logic and try to undermine it.

Keywords: art, digital art, interaction, marketing/PR, mass media, media logic,
mediatization, museum, press art, sound art, video art

1 Introduction
The quote by Andy Warhol, the famous 20th-century Pop-artist, may be a good
starting point for this chapter. His words imply that for him there exists a deep
connection if not an identity between media and art. To talk of mediatization in
this respect could hence seem tautological. At any rate we can expect that art is
subjected to mediatization in a manifold and diverse manner. For art adds not
only to aesthetic products but represents a social system with diverse constituents.
The term “mediatization”, today a keyword in communication science, has
been used for “the meta process by which everyday practices and social relations
are historically shaped by mediating technologies and media organizations” (Liv-
ingstone 2009b: X). Meanwhile, numerous studies and analyses on the subject
have been conducted. These are mostly concerned with a clear definition of the
term, identifying its origins and dimensions, as well as the different stages that
the process has undergone so far (Hjarvard 2008; Livingstone 2009a; Lundby
2009a; Meyen 2009; Schulz 2004; Strömbäck 2008). On the other hand, mediatiza-
tion has been examined in different areas of social reality, especially in politics,
sports, education, etc. Livingstone spoke of a “mediatization of everything”
466 Jürgen Wilke

(2009a), which is exemplified, debated and elaborated over the course of the other
contributions to this volume.
Mediatization can be examined on different levels: the micro-level (individu-
als), the meso-level (institutions), and the macro-level (systems). One fraction of
the societal subsystems in which mediatization can be observed consists of culture
and therefore the fine arts with their classic fields: painting, sculpture, and graphic
arts. Other genres have been added over the course of more recent developments
in media. The rather normative understanding of art, which has established the
classic aesthetic differentiation between the codes of “beautiful” and “ugly”, has
been largely dissolved (Luhmann 2000). Art is no longer understood as an ontolog-
ical category, but rather as something that exists only through perception and
attribution. This makes differentiating between art and non-art quite difficult now-
adays.
When focusing on the mediatization of art, at first we have to consider how
mediatization should be defined. Among the existing definitions, the one by Meyen
seems to be most relevant to our purposes as it allows for the broadest possible
understanding of the term (even if he uses the variant medialization). According
to him, it comprises “reactions in other societal subsystems, which either relate to
the structural changes in the media system or to the general increase in importance
of public communication conveyed by the media” (2009: 23, translated by the
author). One of these subsystems is the arts. Usually, the growth and increased
significance of the media and (mass-) communication, i.e. press, film, radio, televi-
sion, and lately the Internet and social media, are viewed as the roots of this long-
term process. This focus is not an obvious choice, however, since the understand-
ing of media is rather broad these days and sometimes gets out of hand. Art also
remains separated from other areas of mediatization by the fact that its individual
genres are considered as “medium” or “media” (i.e. paintings, drawings, sculp-
tures, even buildings). This usage of the term has become quite established; how-
ever, it was not always the norm, but was only introduced by the generalization
of the term “media”.
Three separate subsystems can be identified with regards to the mediatization
of art, and these can be further differentiated. In each of these subsystems, indica-
tors of mediatization can be observed.
1. The production of art or media as the subject matter and material of art. Indi-
viduals, as in the artists themselves, are the agents in this respect, which
raises the question as to how the media permeate their work, and how they
are influenced by the media.
2. The dissemination of art. This involves certain institutions or media, which
allow for (public) access to art. Here, we have to differentiate between primary
institutions (galleries, museums, festivals, etc.) and secondary media (press,
radio, television, Internet, etc.). The agents consist mostly of art dealers,
museum staff, curators, etc. as well as journalists and other media figures.
 Art: multiplied mediatization 467

3. The reception of art. This refers to the perception and processing of art by
individual spectators and the audience, which work as a collective agent in
this case.

Because of the differentiation between these subsystems, in the case of art, it

would be justifiable to speak of a “multiplied mediatization”. In the following
section, this perspective will define the structure of our presentation, and how
media have shaped and changed art.

2 Mediatization of art production: media as subject

matter and material of art
First, we must consider the mediatization of art production. The media in this case
are the object and material of artistic expression. Over the course of art history,
all media of (mass-)communication have been discovered and processed by artists
from print media to the Internet. While the “old” print media became a subject of
art rather late in the history of art, and never really comprised a singular area of
artistic work, the case of the “new” electronic media is quite different. Artists have
reacted quite quickly to them, creating individual, specifically media-based, art
forms.

2.1 Press art

The printed newspaper is the oldest (mass-)medium created to inform people of
current events around the world. This was only made possible due to the invention
of the printing technique by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. At first,
there were only single editions of newspapers; they only began to appear at regular
intervals from the early 17th century onwards. Newspapers thus became an every-
day object, but were not accepted in the classic motif catalogue of art, especially
historical painting. Only when objects of everyday life became worthy of presenta-
tion would newspapers sometimes be incorporated into paintings. Examples of
this are the Dutch still life paintings of the 17th century, in which objects were
pinned to a wall or a piece of furniture in a trompe l’oeil-manner. Newspaper pages
were also displayed in this artistic means of expression. In addition, newspapers
have increasingly appeared in satirical graphics, which denounce for example an
addiction to reading.
When genre painting gained importance in the 19th century, the newspaper
became a recurring and legitimate motif of paintings, lithography, etc. This phe-
nomenon was also caused by the expansion of the press at the time. The number
of newspapers in circulation increased exponentially, the number of editions grew,
468 Jürgen Wilke

more people began to read newspapers, and the modern mass media came into
being. This growth had an impact on painting as well, leading to many everyday
scenes depicting newspaper readers in their private interior space as well as in
public. Such scenes appeared not only in the work of painters of realism, but also
of the French impressionists (Manet, Monet, Renoir, not to forget Cézanne). Since
the 1870s, many painters have included newspaper readers and newspapers in
their paintings, sometimes even connected with a political message because cer-
tain titles were shown.
Another improvement in the relations between press and art took place at the
beginning of the 20th century. In the span of several years, modern art established
itself in numerous groupings and directions, i.e. the “-isms”. This artistic explosion
was accompanied by strategies of self-promotionalism among the artists (Weiss
1994: 52–73). In this context, advertising and propaganda activities played an
important role, since everybody was on the lookout for publicity in many different
ways. With the help of press articles, manifestos, brochures, proclamations, pro-
spectuses, etc., attention was directed to the avant-garde. As one critic wrote in
1912, “Painting is one art, and publicity another” (Weiss 1994: 61). One of the most
prominent cases therefore was the publication of the futuristic manifesto by Fil-
ippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20 February 1909 on the front page of the Parisian
newspaper Le Figaro. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began only two years later
to include newspaper clippings in their paintings as a form of aesthetic material
(Baldassari 2000). They created the “papiers collés” as an independent art form.
This practice was adopted by other artists in other countries with a more documen-
tary or more critical stance, for example by the Dada movement in different places
as well as by Kurt Schwitters in Germany.
Since the 1960s, newspapers have mostly found their way into Pop Art as
motifs and material. Andy Warhol referred to newspaper headlines in a series of
works, painting entire title pages in enlarged form (Donovan 2011). This was done
to critically highlight the journalistic make-up of star-cult, violence, and catastro-
phes in the media. The intense employment of visual means in the modern mass
press must have seemed like an invitation to the artists. This in turn led many
artists to engage with the subject matter; in particular, reportage photographs have
been reprocessed artistically in many ways (Fischer 2005). They were reproduced
in painting, painted over, or transformed (Gerhard Richter), while others used
means of design that were typical to the press, such as screening (Sigmar Polke).
Even though the newspaper has had to relinquish its former role as a leading
medium, contemporary artists have not stopped processing the medium with their
means. Different stances have been taken on this topic. While some have referred
to its serial character, others have created newspaper-sculptures or different kinds
of installations (Doswald 2010; Smerling 2012).
 Art: multiplied mediatization 469

2.2 Sound/audio/radio art

Since the end of the 19th century, new technological media, which immensely
expanded the spectrum of human communications, have emerged in rapid succes-
sion. Except for film, which is excluded here as a separate art form, these included
auditory media beginning with the gramophone and record, followed in the 1920s
by the radio and the tape recorder. These media have also been used in different
modes as the subject matter for artistic appropriation. Records, which were made
of shellac or vinyl, were processed in different ways, broken into pieces and
included in assemblages (Celant 1973). In addition to the hardware, the software
of sounds was developed further. Apart from experimental modern music, which
adhered to new aesthetic paradigms, a new art form emerged which is now known
as “sound art” (Licht 2007).

“Sound art is an evolving historical art form whose material is sound in all of its ramifications.
Sound art unites silence, tones, sound and noise, and at the same time resonates beyond the
solely sonic dimension through its intimate links with other sensory and intellectual worlds
as expressed in the visual arts, literature and media art. The themes of sound art frequently
involve people’s listening habits as well as hearing itself […] To this extent, sound art is both
audio culture (dealing with sound) and aural culture (dealing with hearing) […]” (Gerlach
2012)

At the beginning of sound art, there was again the involvement of a representative
of the Italian futurism movement, i.e. Luigi Russolo, with his manifesto “L’arte dei
rumori” (1913). It was followed by later movements such as Dada and Fluxus.
Using musical instruments and sonar devices, sculptures were made and acoustic
spaces were created. “The loudspeaker has made the evolutionary leap to become
the media art symbol par excellence for (reproduced) sound” (ibid.). John Cage
was one of the most imaginative sound artists. For example, he assembled a couple
of radio sets that were tuned to a score, and attempted in another case to make
complete silence audible. Images were also frequently combined with acoustic
signals. With the help of new instruments, sounds, which until then remained
inaudible, could be heard. While some artists explored the noise of real rooms,
others synthesized phony sounds.

2.3 Video/new media art

Television emerged in the second half of the 20th century as another medium of
mass communication. It would soon take a dominant position in this respect. Press
and radio eventually lost some of their significance, but not altogether. Because
of its bi-channel audio-visual presentation, television was more predestined for
visual art than print and press. Artistic utopias of television can be witnessed as
early as the 19th century (Herzogenrath et al. 1997). In its early phase in the 1930s,
television remained – with a few exceptions – irrelevant to visual artists, playing
470 Jürgen Wilke

only a role in commercial genres. This did not change until television became the
leading medium in western societies and thus exerted palpable influence on poli-
tics, society, and culture. At this point, artists felt compelled to engage with this
medium, and its specific effects and modes of presentation. The Argentinian
painter Lucio Fontana had welcomed television in his “Manifesto of the Movimento
spaziale” (1952), as “a long expected artistic resource” (cit. Decker and Weibel
1990, 66, translated by the author). In an earlier manifesto (1947) he had already
written: “With the help of radio and television we will be able to transmit com-
pletely new forms of artistic expression”.
Since the 1960s, a growing number of artists have made television the motif
and material of their creative process in many ways. Under the moniker of “video
art”, a new and diversified sector of art emerged (Schneider and Korot 1976; Gruber
and Vedder 1983; Lampalzer 1992; Popper 1993; Hanstein 2003; Michalka 2010;
Rush 2011). While in some cases it only composed a fraction of the oeuvre, others
(almost) exclusively focused their attention on it. This development has led them
to be referred to as “media artists”. Among these artists were Nam June Paik, Bruce
Nauman, Dara Birnbaum, Davis Douglas, Ken Feingold, Joan Jonas, Rober Lepage,
Pipilotti Rist, Ulrike Rosenbach, Steina and Woody Valuska, Bill Viola, and others.
Andy Warhol and Josef Beuys also made substantial contributions to video art.
The visual resources used by the artists were very different from each other.
Sculptures were created out of television sets, or the latter were deconstructed or
manipulated (Herzogenrath and Decker 1989). The artists also began to produce
video scenes of their own and to screen them in galleries or museums. This was
made possible by the invention of easily transportable video cameras, as well as
video recorders and videotape. On account of this technique and medium, the
term “video art” was established. Nam June Paik, perhaps the most famous protag-
onist of such art works, also relied on satellite TV to step into its global dissemina-
tion (Kim 2010).
The relation between artists and the emerging medium was complex and
ambivalent at times. In many actions they expressed their opposition to television,
as it was produced for mass consumption in western societies. This attitude was
why television sets were displaced, demolished, or reconfigured with the aim of
deconstructing the entire medium. In video sequences, the general content of
(commercial) television as well as the “bourgeois” usage of television were lam-
pooned, treated ironically or distortedly, and undermined, by questioning authen-
ticity and subverting the notion of reality. Others attempted to develop a new
aesthetic potential for the medium, alternative forms of documentation or an indi-
vidual style of video production. It was about exploring visual character, new
combinations of image, sound, and text, as well as the relation between image
and reality.
Video was thus not only the subject but also the means of analysis. The camera
was not only directed reflectively on the artist, but also steered the focus “to per-
 Art: multiplied mediatization 471

sonal narratives that reflect a quest for identity (particularly cultural or sexual)
and political freedom” (Rush 2011: 111). Works of video art were typically displayed
in the form of installations and performances. As a part of the ambivalence in
their relationship, the artists used television itself in order to present themselves
in public, and to employ its attention for their self-expression. “With video, the
artist’s gesture could be recorded and his or her body could be observed in the
act of creation” (ibid.: 90).

2.4 Digital art/Internet art

Since the final decade of the 20th century, yet another wave of adopting media in
art has taken place. Again, this was triggered by innovations in media technology.
On the one hand, the analogue encryption of signals was replaced by digital forms
of encryption, which allowed for entirely new facilities of expression and combina-
tion. On top of that, digital data can be compressed very effectively, thus reducing
the need for a large amount of storage space. In addition, the Internet was brought
into being as an electronic network connecting thousands of smaller networks
worldwide. Its beginnings can be traced to the 1960s when computers were con-
nected to each other both locally and over large distances in the United States.
Until the 1980s, the Internet was dominated by military interests and the emerging
computer science. The technology was then used for scientific purposes before it
was available to the general public. The Internet is often erroneously labeled as a
“medium”. It would be more exact to speak of it as a communication space in
which many different modalities of communication (or media) have their place:
email, chats, newsgroups, and especially the World Wide Web. The latter collects
documents that have been written in a certain and specific programming language.
The WWW is very useful for multimodal applications. The Web 2.0 further
expanded this potential, enabling additional forms of interactivity between users
and the net.
Digitalization and the Internet have also expanded the spectrum of media art
in remarkable ways. Consequently, one speaks of “digital art”, “internet art”,
“net.art” and “online art”. Digital art refers to “artworks in which artists have used
the computer as a primary tool, medium and/or creative partner” (Wands 2006:
11). Therefore, all kinds of art forms can be created and connected to each other:
“imaging; sculpture; installation and virtual reality; performance, music and
sound art; animation and video, software, database and game art, and net art”
(ibid.: 14).
In the early stage of net art in the 1990s, there were six formats: email, web
sites, graphics, audio, video, and animation (Greene 2004: 31–71). One of the
famous early projects was the collaborative platform Jordi.org (ibid.: 40–41; Tribe,
Jana and Grosenick 2009: 6), which showed that the Internet could enable the
creation of artwork like paintings, photography, and video. Collaborations by
472 Jürgen Wilke

online communities were not an exceptional root of net art production, but there
were those who did it individually, e.g. Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Vuk Cosic,
Allan Kaprow, Heath Bunting, Natalie Jeremijenko, etc.

3 Mediatization of the dissemination of art

With respect to art, it would be justifiable to speak of multiplied mediatization
because media are not only increasingly included in the production of art as sub-
ject matter and material, but also because they have gained increasing relevance
to the dissemination of art. The latter can be differentiated into levels, dimensions,
and tools.

3.1 Dissemination of art by primary institutions: galleries,

museums, festivals, etc.
For centuries, art was primarily at the service of church and political power. It
was used to spread a certain faith or to serve a desire for reputation and represen-
tation. This changed over the course of modernization, and the general public
became the addressee of art. With this shift, institutions became necessary, among
which the gallery and museum were the most prominent. Galleries emerged rather
early in order to sell artworks and present them to potential customers. Earlier
paintings depicted what some of these galleries looked like. Over the course of the
commercialization of art dealing, auctioneers created their own salerooms. Such
companies (like Christie’s or Sotheby’s) would usually announce their offers in
catalogues. Meanwhile, they also began to use the Internet for this purpose.
Recently, online auction houses (like Paddle8 in the United States and Auctionata
in Germany) have been developed to connect buyers and sellers of fine art across
the world. Live auctions are broadcast in television quality to computers, tablets,
and mobile devices. As the demand for guaranteed valuation and quality of the
offered artworks remain precarious, many experts are consulted and involved to
secure the quality of the objects for the buyers.
Compared to this development, museums are ordinarily non-commercial insti-
tutions. They came into being in the western world in the 17th century and have
passed through several developmental stages (Drechsler 1996; Sheehan 2000;
McClellan 2008). They often grew out of aristocratic collections, which were made
accessible to the public. Universal cabinets of wonder were increasingly split into
more specialized museums.
The museum is thus the primary institution through which art is presented to
the public. Because of this communicative function, it has been dubbed a
“medium” in its own right. This function becomes even more prominent with the
 Art: multiplied mediatization 473

design of museum rooms as artistic spaces themselves. Examples for such a role
of the museum from recent years come to mind in this context (Putnam 2009).
Basically, museums have come to serve the purpose of “exhibiting” works of art
(or other objects). Until a few years ago, this could only be achieved in real rooms
in which visitors would have to physically visit.
The emergence of electronic image media and its integration into art has
changed the outlook of museums and the presentation of works of art in several
respects (Parry 2010; Schwarz 1997). Three outcomes are especially obvious. Works
of media art in existing galleries and museums have been included and presented
apart from the regular stock. This also occurred in the form of large comprehensive
projects such as the documenta in Kassel, which was perhaps the most significant
exhibition of contemporary art (since 1955). As far as its program was concerned,
the documenta 6 (1977) first included a sector on art and media (Wilke and Schülke
2011). Some museums have established specific departments for media art. As long
as they embraced works of traditional genres (paintings, sculptures), they could
still be exhibited alongside classic works of art. However, art forms such as longer
video sequences demanded a different method of presentation (Ammann 2009).
For this purpose, box-like rooms were created in galleries and museums alike, into
which the audience had to enter through a curtain or corridor to witness the mov-
ing images. There emerged a “metamorphosis of gallery rooms into black boxes
for the display of works in new media” (Klonk 2009: 215).
The second consequence of the spreading of media art was the creation of
special “media museums”, i.e. museums that are exclusively devoted to the pre-
sentation of media art. In 1968, a television gallery was opened in Berlin. Others
were created at the centers of modern art all over the globe. While such galleries
are (often) still maintained by a commercial interest, i.e. to sell the exhibited art-
work, museums on the other hand focus on the documentation, preservation, and
archiving of works of art, in addition to their presentation. An institute of this kind
focused on media art and renowned far beyond the borders of Germany is the
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) [Center for Art and Media Tech-
nology], established in 1997 in Karlsruhe. Before that, other forums and contests
especially geared toward such kinds of art were also created. In 1979, the Ars
Electronica (Linz/Austria) took place for the first time and has been reappearing
yearly with changing mottos. Since 1984, the biennial Videonale has been taking
place as an international festival and contest for artistically relevant video produc-
tions (in cooperation with the Museum of Art in Bonn). Moreover, the European
Media Art Festival (EMAF) has been taking place since 1988 in Osnabrück while
in Karlsruhe, the Multimediale has been happening since 1989. In Wrocław
(Poland), a Media Art Biennale was established in 2012. Other institutions that
serve the media arts include the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) (Syd-
ney/Australia), which organized its first symposium in 1988, the Inter Communica-
tion Center (Tokyo/Japan, since 1997), the FILE Electronic Language International
474 Jürgen Wilke

Festival (São Paolo/Brazil) and the Inter Media Art Institute (IMAI), which was
created in Düsseldorf as a foundation. It consists of a video art distribution, or
a “hybrid mediation institution between gallery and film distribution” (http://
imaionline.de/content/view/26/51/lang,de/ [25. 7. 2013]). In IMAI’s online cata-
logue, an international program of 120 significant artists including 100 works as
well as additional documents can be searched and viewed.
A third consequence of the mediatization of art dissemination can be observed.
According to Boris Groys, “seemingly, these days art seems to be internally pre-
pared to give into the temptations of the media age, to move out of the museum
and to be spread through new channels” (1997: 7, translated by the author). Cyber-
space has created unfathomable possibilities for this occurrence. Media have
increasingly taken to making parts of their inventory accessible online. But this
does not happen only through museums, which in this case play the role of an
additional channel of distribution. Moreover, portals and platforms of another
provenance have emerged alongside such possibilities. It is thus hardly surprising
that the search engine Google, which is geared toward online-predominance in
several ways, also became active in this area. In 2011, the Google Art Project
(www.googleartproject.com) was established online, which allows for a virtual tour
of significant museums all over the globe, with a selection of more than a thousand
works of art. Audience members can select their favorite pieces and create a virtual
collection of their own (quasi a “domestic pinacoteca” Huhtamo 2010: 128). Some
exhibitions even go beyond such web applications, only displaying and organizing
their exhibitions online. It can thus be justified to speak of virtual or digital muse-
ums, i.e. “museum cyberspace” (Schwarz 1997: 19). There are several specific
online communities for digital art and Internet art (e.g. rhizome.org, artnet-
web.com, www.medienkunstnetz.de, www.mediaartnet.org, the.thing.net, varia-
blemedia.net). A website search for “virtual museum” would reveal a huge and
growing amount of entries (Huhtamo 2010: 121).
Art museums are currently using all innovations in media technology to win
over media users. At least with the larger museums, these include apps, which
can be downloaded on one’s iPod, tablet, or mobile phone (Rieser 2011). The San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) was a pioneer in introducing podcast-
ing to its activities (Maculan 2007). This museum began to produce monthly Art-
Casts by which new groups of visitors who are interested in its collections could
learn through a method of dissemination that is more creative and less didactical.

3.2 Dissemination of art by secondary media

Traditionally, artists create single pieces, such as buildings, paintings, sculptures,
graphics, etc., i.e. originals that only exist in one copy. This of course limited
access to the works. In order to overcome this limitation, a way of reproducing
these artworks and distributing the reproductions had to be found. However, it
 Art: multiplied mediatization 475

became possible to do this with the invention of graphic reproduction techniques

(wood- and copperplate engraving) in the 15th and 16th centuries. These techniques
were necessary for the mass distribution of the reproductions of artwork. In combi-
nation, these techniques led to the creation of the art book. Its creation proved to
be complicated; after some initial attempts in the 17th century, more followed dur-
ing the 18th century in the reproduction shops in Rome and Paris (Haskell 1987).
Over the course of this period, catalogues of works were organized and conse-
quently published.
Later on, such catalogues were prepared as companion volumes to exhibitions.
At the beginning, these directories were in most cases little more than flimsy and
inconspicuous brochures. At present, they have grown – at least in the case of
intricate exhibitions in large art museums – into comprehensive directories, often
adorned with scientific treatises and richly illustrated. Thus, the permanent and
temporary exhibitions are stored and made accessible for those who have no
chance to see them. These catalogues are now produced in large editions with
high circulations, and sold not only in museums but also in bookstores.
Until the end of the 19th century, dissemination of art had to depend on graphic
reproduction techniques, which also included lithography starting from the 1830s.
At about the same time, the first photographic images emerged, but of course were
only available as originals. Only after the creation of halftone printing and the
stereotype procedure could photographs (including of artworks) be used in repro-
duction print. In this respect, one might consider Walter Benjamin’s renowned
statement that “what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced
by technical means is its aura” (Benjamin 2008: 7 [originally published in 1936]).
In the 18th century, the magazine expanded in Europe as a medium that was
customized for specific topics and interests. It was in this context that the first art
magazines were created. Until 1830, there were several hundred titles in circula-
tion in the German Reich. When art production was boosted in the second half of
the 19th century, the significance of journals and newspapers increased for the
public perception of artists and especially for art critics. A more recent indicator
of the mediatization of art is the growing amount of art journalism. The share of
items devoted to the visual arts increased in two national newspapers from four
countries over the period from 1955 to 2005, from 28.5 to 48.2 %. In France, this
rose from 14.5 to 43.6 %, while in Germany it went from 37.3 to 59.3 %, in the
Netherlands from 37.0 to 48.1 %, and only in the US did it remain stable around
30 % (with a slight increase and again decrease over the 50 years) (Janssen, Kui-
pers and Verboord 2008). The authors found a clear internationalization in art
journalism in the European countries but not in the US.
The modern audio and visual media were not less suitable for the dissemina-
tion of art compared to printed media. Radio could serve as a transmitter of sound/
audio art but lacked visual aids, whereas television was able to add this compo-
nent. Nevertheless, there was much that depended on the organization of these
476 Jürgen Wilke

media. In a totally commercial system, classical art gets little space while public
service systems may pay more attention to it; however, even then, only famous
artists (“stars”) make news and are featured in mass attractive exhibitions.
Enhanced possibilities for dissemination came with the later development of stor-
age media like the CD-ROM and the DVD. Both technologies were adopted for
presenting artworks or expositions by museums and independent authorities.
Reconstructing expositions on such storage media represents another stage in the
mediatization process (Wilke and Schülke 2011: 255–256).

3.3 Dissemination of art by marketing and public relations (PR)

With regard to the mediatization of art, the significance of marketing and PR merits
a special emphasis. For a long time, museums have been institutes that were
turned inwards, and did not really pay much attention to their visitors, the “cus-
tomers”. This was especially true for the so-called “non-profit” sector, which
assumed that no active marketing was required at all. However, this perspective
has changed dramatically. The institutions for art dissemination have become
aware of the fact that they have to actively offer their products to the audiences.
Therefore, a professional PR has become essential (Belcher 1991; French and Run-
yard 2011). PR and press offices have been created in many museums with the
specific task of gaining the interest of the media and audiences alike. A variety of
tools can be used for the museum’s PR: advertising, posters, flyers, press releases,
organization of events, etc. The extent of their application depends on the size of
the museum, its financial resources, and the degree of professionalization.
Correspondingly, there are two target audiences for the museums’ PR activi-
ties. Firstly, it must address the media that cover art events. In the past, this would
include several special print media, mostly geared toward society’s elite. Today, it
is also important to connect with the less exclusive mass media. This is especially
true in the case of large-scale recurring exhibitions and events like the documenta
in Kassel or the Biennale in Venice. The documenta is a good example of how PR
work has been institutionalized and extended (Wilke and Schülke 2011). The press
conference at the first ever documenta in 1955 had 35 journalist attendees; at the
documenta 5 (1972), this number had already grown to 2,000. For the documenta
12 (2007), a total of 15,537 journalists were accredited (ibid.: 250–251). This number
alone points to the fact that the most significant exhibition of contemporary art
has grown into a media event. The media representatives are invited for a prelimi-
nary visit before the doors are opened to the public.
The second (and most important) target group of a museum’s PR is the audi-
ence. They can be reached directly with the help of the media, but also by individ-
ual and manifold advertising campaigns. If possible, these would be included in
the local marketing and advertising strategies of the exhibition locations and their
tourism departments.
 Art: multiplied mediatization 477

A leap in museum-PR resulted from the creation of the Internet. It offers many
and diverse possibilities for effectively presenting oneself and for connecting with
the audience. Museums have taken advantage of these possibilities to very differ-
ent degrees, however. Their actions depend on the resources at hand, their general
significance, their technical facilities, as well as the intensity of their public mind-
edness and pedagogics. Several basic models are apparent from an analysis of
museums’ homepages (Kurtz 2006). In the model of online-promotion, self-por-
trayal is mostly based on the offered information of the museum and its exhibi-
tions, and is aimed at increasing the museum’s appeal and spreading information.
Other museums follow the so-called service-model, which offers their target audi-
ence additional information as well as materials (teacher kits, download sheets for
journalists and students, etc.) The collaboration model is a special case with a
main focus on cooperation, which leads to an added value for the museums and
online visitors. Finally, there are also more commercial cases, which can be
dubbed as shopping-models.
In principle, the Internet can be used by museums in three different stages.
At the bottom, the net is only used as a mass medium for one-way communication
with a low rate of integration with the recipient. At the second stage, it is used to
address a target audience with standardized response facilities, and at the third,
the Internet can also be used for individual communication, which is strongly
geared toward interaction and leads to intense recipient integration.

4 The mediatization of art perception: from the

passive viewer to the (inter)active producer
According to the above discussion, the reception of art is also subject to an increas-
ing mediatization. Since art production and dissemination are characterized by
this process, it also affects the recipients of art. The more the recipient uses the
media tools through which art is offered, the more mediatized the experience of
art becomes. This is not limited to the indirect observation of works of art by the
media; it is set in motion with direct observation.
A good example of this is the audio guide. This is a device that has been
increasingly employed by museums to accompany their exhibitions (Popp 2013).
The audio guide in a way replaces the personal guide, which was previously (and
still is) serving the function of guiding visitors through exhibitions. With the help
of headphones, the visitor receives information on the exhibits that she or he
is currently observing. Individual (art)works are described, interpreted, and
amended by background material (partly by music as well). The audio guide trans-
lates the visual into language and in a way also guides the visitors’ perception. It
is supposed to help them see more than they would when they depend only on
478 Jürgen Wilke

their own eyes. Such audio guides have become rather popular now, and are
already sold separately. An extension of this guidance becomes possible with the
inclusion of visual material. eGuides have been used for the presentation of art
monuments. Furthermore, even recent technical devices have been used in muse-
ums’ attempts to interact with their spectators, e.g. through iPods and social
media. Artworks are advertised on Facebook and tweetups may make a museum
accessible to people who are interested in art from anywhere in the world. They
could join as followers and participate in performances and react in real-time on
the Twitter wall.
Works of art can be received not only on displays or in three-dimensional
rooms, but also via screens. In 1991, the National Gallery (London) was the first
to establish a so-called microgallery. The visitor can view catalogued works on
computers, and also print them out. Other large museums have followed this
example since then. Here, artworks that are currently not on display, and are not
often taken from the depots, can also be viewed.
The mediatization of museums has also led to problems for the visitor’s per-
ception. The “black boxes” for video presentation have already been mentioned.
The length of the videos displayed there often results in a longer period of percep-
tion than would be the case for other works of art. As Klonk argues, the visitor has
to choose between two “modes of seeing: one that is selective and concentrated
on a few chosen works, and one that is comprehensive and surveys all exhibits in
the show but remains by nature superficial” (2009: 216).
While audio guides can be used in all sorts of exhibitions and constitute a
resource for one-way communication, the modalities of reception with new media
art have transformed fundamentally (Mangold, Weibel and Woletz 2007). In some
works of video art, the audience is actively included. This effect has even been
taken further by works of interactive art (Dinkla 1997). The possibilities have been
expanded considerably by Internet art and the interactive possibilities of the Web
2.0. Just as these instances have produced active recipients in the area of everyday
communication, they have also liberated the audience from their passive role in
the realm of art and encouraged them to actively participate. The Web 2.0 made
“user generated content” possible with the consequence that “for the first time,
the content originates from users. In art up to this point, artworks were created
by artists for the use of spectators. Now, the spectators have come so far that they
can publish their own art online, which others can then behold” (Weibel 2011:
238). Weibel talks of the Performative Museum which is no longer tied to time
(opening hours) and limited by walls (the museum’s buildings). The possibility of
putting one’s own artworks online makes everybody a potential curator: “Virtual
and real spheres permeate one another. Dispersed beholders participate in the
exhibition online and also in the real exhibition space, since the online content is
projected into the real exhibition space” (ibid.: 240).
This development can even be seen among a still broader political perspective
of democratization, no longer serving a “media aristocracy”, but “giving all citi-
 Art: multiplied mediatization 479

zens the opportunity to have their own artworks, their portraits, in the museum …
” (ibid.: 241). “In the age of Web 2.0, the art system and the artists have lost their
monopoly on creativity […] The Web is the museum for the creativity of everybody”
(ibid.: 242).

5 Art and media logic

The theories of mediatization assume that this process has the effect that more
and more areas of social life are determined by a media logic. Altheide and Snow
(1979) first introduced this concept, and others have picked it up and developed
it further. On the one hand, the question of whether or not a single and coherent
media logic exists at all has been debated. On the other hand, the definition of
this term and the elements that it includes have been discussed. Hjarvard defined
media logic as follows: “The term ‘media logic’ refers to the institutional and tech-
nological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distrib-
ute material and symbolic resources and operate with the help of formal and
informal rules” (2008: 113).
Elsewhere, the author adds the aesthetic aspect of mediality to the definition
(cit. Lundby 2009b: 105). Other theorists primarily feature forms or formats as
important elements of media logic, “how material is organized, the style in which
it is presented” or the “grammar of media communication” (Altheide and Snow
1979: 10). Such expressions seem to imply that the term “media logic” refers (at
least primarily) to the media of mass communication, i.e.

media logic can be taken to mean the dominance in societal processes of the news values and
the storytelling techniques the media make use of to take advantage of their own medium
and its format, and to be competitive in the ongoing struggle to capture people’s attention.
These storytelling techniques include simplification, polarization, intensification, personaliza-
tion …, visualization and stereotypization … (Strömbäck 2008: 233).

If one tries to review whether or not the mediatization of art is determined by

media logic and its elements, a paradoxical indication could be found. Of course,
art is subjected to media logic in a multiplied sense. Artworks, which are inher-
ently characterized by media as the object and material of their components, are
subject to the technical and formal capacities and attributes of these media. But
the rules of media logic are not only valid in art production. Moreover, the submis-
sion and reception of art are determined by these rules. This can be illustrated by
the criteria that are relevant to the selection of reporting methods by the media.
They have to be taken into account to draw public attention to artists and their
work.
But when the theory of mediatization presumes that all areas of social life
like politics, sports, religion, etc. align themselves with the media logic, it would
480 Jürgen Wilke

inaccurately reflect the case for art. Many works of media art intend, on the con-
trary, to question the ordinary media logic, to deconstruct commonly accepted
ways of representing, to dissociate oneself from them and to replace them with
new hitherto unseen configurations. Producers of media art have of course
invented new aesthetic formats, which have immensely enlarged the classical
media. Artists have more creative leeway than media producers who have to sell
their products to mass audiences. It is particularly the logic of commercialized
media that has been critically and provocatively stirred up by works of media art.
This does not mean that innovations of media or digital art could not be made
useful in everyday media practice. Instead, they (referring to the innovations men-
tioned) amend via the concept – to use a medical term – an antidromic mediatiza-
tion, where media can function as an antidote to what ordinary media do. This
confirms again, and finally, that art is a field of a multiplied mediatization.

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Johan Fornäs
21 Mediatization of popular culture
Abstract: Popular culture is often understood as being linked to mass media and
therefore also implicated in the idea of mediatization. Here this is discussed in four
main steps. (1) First, key problems in the concept of mediatization are illuminated,
with popular culture as a testing ground: if there is always such a mediatization pro-
cess going on; when (in which periods) this process is particularly intense and how it
develops over time (gradually or in leaps); where (in which world regions) it can be
located; how it has any effects (if it follows a relatively fixed logic or is more diffuse);
and what it affects in terms of societal spheres and levels of practice. (2) Second, four
main dimensions of the concept of culture are distinguished – cultivation, life forms,
aesthetics, and signifying practice – all of which are found relevant to mediatization.
As media are cultural technologies of communication, there is a close link between
mediatization and culturalization. (3) Third, popular culture is similarly divided into
four main meanings, defining it as mass culture, people’s culture, low culture, or ille-
gitimized culture. (4) On this basis, examples illustrate how mediatization processes
affect popular culture through four main phases, each linked to a new demarcation
of popular culture itself: graphic mediatization of common culture, print mediatiza-
tion of low culture, audiovisual mediatization of media culture, and digital mediatiza-
tion of what again is becoming a more or less indistinguishable common culture.
Popular culture frequently appears to be one of the most media-saturated
spheres or fields of modern societies. It is sometimes even identified with media
culture, for instance when contrasted with fine arts and folk handicrafts, and
defined through its reliance on mass mediated texts disseminated by cultural
industries to dispersed polymorphous audiences all over the globe. This closeness
between popular culture and media processes poses a challenge for any effort to
more precisely scrutinize whether there is any escalating increase in this kind of
media presence, which would deserve to be labeled mediatization.
In order to bring some clarity to this slightly paradoxical situation, it is helpful
to first make some conceptual groundwork. This chapter will first analyze how the
concepts of media and mediatization relate to culture and culturalization. Then, a
similar discussion follows of popular culture, leading up to an effort to draft a
provisional sketch of key steps in the mediatization history of popular culture.
This will finally also make it possible to return to the initial definition of mediatiza-
tion and reconsider its very basis.1

Keywords: communication history, culturalization, culture, digitalization, mass

culture, media history, mediatization, popular culture, print, taste

1 Some arguments in this chapter have previously been explored in Fornäs (1995, 2012, 2014),
Fornäs and Kaun (2011), Fornäs et al. (2007a, 2007b) and in an unpublished paper at the Crossroads
484 Johan Fornäs

1 Mediatization
Mediation is when something functions as a linking device between different enti-
ties, for instance between human subjects or between social worlds across a dis-
tance in space or time. Media are socially organized technologies made for use in
such mediating communication practices. Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan
([1964] 1987) were interested in all the ways in which people made use of any tools
to extend their range of action and imagination, from material artifacts to symbolic
codes. Words, numbers, clothes, houses, vehicles, weapons, and games all are
inventions by which humans reinforce and expand their reach into the world and
onto each other. In a wide sense, all human communication is mediated in two
respects: through material carriers of meaning (things, sounds, light-waves) and
through socially and historically constructed codes of interpretation (languages,
music, visual modes of understanding). Martín-Barbero ([1987] 1993), Silverstone
(1999), and Hepp ([2011] 2013: 31–38) belong to those who have theorized media
communication as a process of mediation.
In the more commonly used narrow sense of the term that will be followed
here, media are socially organized technologies for communication, and mediated
communication is that kind of intercourse that makes use of such institutionalized
tools that are primarily intended for communication. The media concept remains
hard to delimit since it is more a matter of social convention than of logical neces-
sity whether any specific phenomenon is regarded as a communication medium
or something else, and one may always make use of anything in that function,
whatever its original purpose was.
Mediatization is often understood as an historical process whereby communi-
cation media become in some respect more “important” in expanding areas of life
and society, as media technologies, texts, and/or institutions are experienced to
become involved and influential in increasingly many spheres and contexts.
Depending on which definition of medium is used, this again can take on different
meanings. When Jürgen Habermas ([1981] 1987) in the early 1980s or Ernest Man-
heim ([1933] 1979) half a century earlier spoke of a mediatization of society, this
was meant in the wide sense of social institutions and technologies increasingly
intervening in social life (Hepp 2013: 29–31). However, current discussions build
on a more narrow definition of mediatization that focuses on how institutionalized
technologies of communication expand in extension and power. Still, the concept
remains a tricky one to define. By applying it to the field of popular culture, it will

in Cultural Studies international conference in Paris 2–6 July 2012. The author is grateful for inspira-
tion and feedback to Knut Lundby, to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s (The Bank of Sweden Tercente-
nary Foundation) Sector Committee for the Mediatization of Culture and Everyday Life, to the
ECREA Temporary Working Group on Mediatization, and to Ph.D. Candidates and colleagues in
Media and Communication Studies and in the Critical and Cultural Theory Graduate School at
Södertörn University.
 Mediatization of popular culture 485

at the end of this chapter be possible to cast new light on its problems and limita-
tions, but first some more general reflections should be made to qualify its applica-
tion.
Though the number of media steadily grows, quantity does not automatically
imply qualitative importance. Scarce media texts or technologies can sometimes
get an aura that makes them more central to people than those that are abundant
and routinized (Löfgren 2009). Mobile devices, Facebook, and Twitter have not
made face-to-face meetings at home or on streets redundant, and media forms like
pamphlets and posters were crucial far back in history. Yet, it is hard to deny that
culture, politics, and everyday life are increasingly saturated by media practices
and texts, making mediatization a useful concept, though it needs some qualifica-
tion.
1. When does mediatization arise or peak, and along which historical contour
does it develop? Which are the key decades, and is there a gradual transforma-
tion or a datable historical shift from a pre-mediatized to a mediatized world?
Some see mediatization as a relatively recent phenomenon of the recent
“media age” (Hjarvard 2008). Others regard it as an old and basic metaprocess
linked to modernization and civilization at large (Krotz 2001 and 2009; Lundby
2009; Hepp 2013). Historical research needs to balance continuities with
breaks – not least when it comes to popular culture, which is itself historically
transformed over the centuries. The main phases of this development will be
roughly drafted below, though systematic longitudinal research and compari-
sons are needed in order to reach a better understanding of these composite
processes.
2. Where is mediatization: is it global or regionally specific? Is a basic script
followed everywhere or are there national variants? It is often assumed to be
primarily a Western phenomenon, but new media sometimes are even more
influential in societies where people are unused to extensive media use. Geo-
graphical comparisons are needed to develop a more complex map of the
world’s main co-existing routes through mediatization, especially in relation
to popular culture that in itself has different meanings not only in different
epochs but also in different world regions. Lacking comparable sources and
analysis from other areas, the following outline will focus on European and
more generally Western experiences.
3. How does mediatization work: by which causes and effects? Following
Altheide and Snow (1979), Asp (1990) and Hjarvard (2008) talk of a “media
logic” that spreads like a virus across society. Others, like Lundby (2009: 117)
and Hepp (2009: 244, 2013), have instead argued that media are highly diversi-
fied and deeply embedded in social relations, and therefore do not follow or
prescribe any distinct unitary logic. The more forms and facets of mediatiza-
tion are distinguished, the more the concept itself dissolves, so that the gen-
eral idea of one mediatization process loses ground. Here, a balance is needed
486 Johan Fornäs

between generalization and differentiation, respecting the specificity of differ-

ent media and the plurality of mediatizations while still seeing the trans-media
impacts of certain communication processes. This will be further exemplified
and discussed in the second half of this chapter, summed up in the concluding
thoughts.
4. What does mediatization mainly affect: which areas, aspects, or levels of soci-
ety? Empirical and historical investigations are again needed to specify how
mediatization affects different societal processes, and this chapter focuses on
popular culture. It is quite easy to see how several social spheres have under-
gone such a transformation, particularly intensified in the last half-century.
There is for instance considerable research on the mediatization of politics,
showing how politics is becoming increasingly dependent on media practices,
technologies, institutions, and texts, but much more sparse and dispersed
insights exist of how cultural practices in general and popular culture in par-
ticular are affected. It may by extension be possible to look for similar proc-
esses in this field too, not least since it seems so closely linked to the workings
of mass media. However, applying the concept of mediatization to popular
culture gives rise to unexpected problems. One problem is that media and
popular culture are by definition closely interrelated, and the overlap between
mediatization, culturalization, and popularization makes it hard to disentangle
them sufficiently enough to make them applicable to each other and present
convincing definitions and examples of such mediatization of popular culture.
It therefore seems necessary to work through the concepts of culture and popu-
lar culture, before being able to map out the most important historical phases
in the mediatization of popular culture. Such a historical overview will finally
help, further highlighting the advantages and limitations of the concept of
mediatization in general.

2 Culture
Culture has been described by Raymond Williams ([1976] 1988: 87) as “one of the
two or three most complicated words in the English language”, with hundreds of
distinct but overlapping definitions. Four main spheres of meaning may be dis-
cerned, each of which invokes a particular interpretation of “the mediatization
of culture”. Each concept further also offers a way to conceive of a process of
culturalization, whereby culture in some sense gains weight in social life (Fornäs
et al. 2007a; Fornäs 2012). Depending on how culture is defined, the interrelation
between mediatization and culturalization changes. Instead of a total but over-
whelming systematization of all possible conceptual combinations, the aim here
is rather to point at some interesting aspects of relevance to the mediatization of
popular culture.
 Mediatization of popular culture 487

1. In an ontological sense, culture as cultivation stands in opposition to nature

and denotes everything made by humans. This is the oldest definition, which
gradually moved from gardening to self-cultivation of the human mind and of
social communities. In this sense, culturalization is a process whereby human-
ity expands its sphere of influence in the world, from space explorations to
genetic engineering. The mediatization of culture here implies an increasing
media-saturation of anything specifically human, while mediatization of any-
thing other than culture is a form of de-naturalizing culturalization, as the
media are the specific technologies of culture (Hannerz 1990, 1992).
2. German Romanticism developed a sociological or anthropological concept of
culture as lifeform or “a whole way of life” (Williams [1958] 1968: 18). This
made it possible to differentiate between plural cultures. In this interpretation,
culturalization could for example mean that cultural categorizations become
more influential in social and political spheres. Culture in this sense is mediat-
ized when specific ways of life are increasingly media-dependent. On this level
mediatization and culturalization thus seem rather separate.
3. In the late 19th century this relativistic definition contrasted with an aesthetic
interpretation of culture as the arts (later including popular culture and every-
day aesthetics). This underpins the “institutional” concept of culture defining
cultural politics and the cultural sector. It is universal in being regarded as
belonging to all of humanity, but while the anthropological concept encom-
passed everything in a particular community, culture in the aesthetic sense
constitutes a distinct and rather exceptional sphere of activities and institu-
tions within any society. Culturalization in this sense means that aesthetic
modes of experience become more widespread and important in widening
social spheres. If this type of culture is mediatized, the arts make increasing
use of media technologies. These two processes here seem distinct, mutually
interlinked within a dialectics where the mediatization of the arts interacts
with the aestheticization of everyday life, confronting media logics with art
logics.
4. Since the 1960s, a semiotic or hermeneutic concept of culture as signifying
practices of meaning-making has gained ground. In a late text, Williams (1981:
12–13) abandoned his older “whole way of life” concept as untenable for mod-
ern complex societies, and preferred the hermeneutic one that was suggested
by Stuart Hall and the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973) who in turn
got it from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s ([1965] 1970) work on Freud and
psychoanalysis from the mid 1960s (Fornäs 1995, 2012; Fornäs et al. 2007a,
2007b). The three first definitions are hard to avoid since they circulate and
serve useful functions in shifting discourses, but they are all limited and partly
contradict each other (particularly the anthropological and the aesthetic ones).
The hermeneutic concept has the advantage of being able to explain the oth-
ers. In contrast to nature, ontological culture is thus characterized by its foun-
488 Johan Fornäs

dation in meaning-making practices, as a defining characteristic of homo sapi-

ens; the basis of a social lifeform is how it understands and symbolically
orders its universe; and the arts are institutionalized spheres of activities spe-
cialized in exploring modes of meaning-making.

In one sense culture is always mediated, as culture is the mediation of intersubjec-

tive relations through constructing, sharing, and interpreting materialized mean-
ings. Hannerz (1990: 7, 1992: 26–30) sees media as the specific technology of cul-
ture, i.e. of communicating meaning across distances in time and space,
combining three levels: textual meaning contents, technological modes of exter-
nalization, and the interactional relations in which they circulate. If communica-
tion media are the technologies of signifying practices, they are in fact in one
sense always at the core of culture and society and cannot be seen as something
separate that later comes to intervene. In the hermeneutic sense of culture, mediat-
ization is closely related to culturalization – a process of expansion of the universe
of meanings: an overflow that multiplies the inherent surplus of meaning in all
textual practice, from everyday life and popular culture to the cultural turn in
many fields of research (Fornäs et al. 2007a). “Late modernity is saturated by
communication media, which increasingly put culture in focus”, resulting in a
double process of mediatization of culture and culturalization of the media (Fornäs
1995: 1). Mediatization and culturalization are here two facets of the same compos-
ite historical process.
Mediatization may be seen as one component or facet of culturalization, with
the latter as the more general term and the former as a specific mode that relates
to the institutional technologies of culture rather than its other aspects (contents
etc.). Every mediatization of anything would then per definition also be a culturali-
zation, since media are tools for signifying practices. If media become more central
to some kind of social practice, then also processes of meaning-making expand
there, since this is what media are used for. At the same time, culture in a more
narrow, aesthetic sense is but one of the particular areas which mediatization
affects, besides politics, economy, etc. Each of these two processes can affect the
other. The media are in some sense culturalized when design and performance
aspects become more important for the dissemination of information or when
entertainment gains terrain from news coverage. In the reverse direction, cultural
practices are mediatized when communication technologies increasingly affect tra-
ditional art forms or everyday signifying practices linked to self-stylization or
interior design.

3 Popular culture
The concept of popular culture is equally evasive as that of culture. Four main
definitions are partly parallel to those of culture.
 Mediatization of popular culture 489

1. First, the popular may be differentiated from other forms of culture in terms
of scale – of production, of distribution, and/or of reception. Such mass culture
implies a combination of organized cultural industries capable of mass pro-
duction and broad popularity among mass audiences. The strong links
between popular culture, mass culture, and media culture make mediatization
almost synonymous with popularization. When Walter Benjamin ([1936] 1999)
spoke of the “loss of aura” of the work of art in the age of reproduction, this
linked mediatization to a reduction of fine culture into popular culture. Popu-
lar culture in this definition necessitates mass mediation and tends to be
already mediated from the beginning, making it difficult to talk of its further
mediatization, except as a merely quantitative acceleration of its inherent
traits. However, this definition does not cover what most people today mean
by popular culture. After all, the Bible or works by Shakespeare or Mozart are
more widespread on a mass basis than subcultural Black Metal, yet it feels
more relevant to speak of the latter as an example of popular culture. Today
virtually all arts forms are dependent on media practices, without necessarily
being classified as popular culture. Avant-garde experiments with media tech-
nologies deconstruct such simple dichotomies. Also, some popular culture has
always thrived well also without the use of media technologies – think of
jokes, drinking songs, sun bathing, or children’s games! Popular culture may
mostly be mediatized, but so are the high arts, and there is thus no precise
match between popular and mass or media culture.
2. Another way to approach popular culture is based on its linguistic origin in
the Latin populus for people, as people’s culture – culture of or for the people.
Here, it is the social location – either origin or address – in the lower, working
classes that is the defining trait, and these cultural forms and practices are
certainly increasingly permeated by media. This definition seems useful for
many older, traditional forms of popular culture, anchored in the working-
class while despised by the wealthy and educated. However, CEO’s, ministers,
royalties, and other upper class groups also often enjoy popular culture like
sport events or the Eurovision Song Contest. Whereas “folk culture” is
assumed to derive from unprivileged people, modern industrialized popular
culture is generally produced and disseminated by capitalist cultural indus-
tries that cannot simply be defined as “of the people”.
3. A third definition sees the popular as formally or morally less advanced than
the high arts: as low culture for entertainment and pleasure – trash or junk
culture of lesser quality or complexity than “serious” culture. In this sense,
mediatization of popular culture is when media are increasingly entangled in
the popular aesthetic. However, this definition is as equally problematic as the
preceding ones. What is low quality? Shakespeare or Beckett can surely also
entertain, while popular films may well take the fate of humanity quite seri-
ously. High and low culture can equally well be either morally exemplary or
490 Johan Fornäs

ethically suspect, and high culture can celebrate classical simplicity whereas
low subcultural works can indeed be very complex. A minimalist painting or
musical piece is hardly more complex than a most vulgar TV show. Many
postmodern artists deliberately play with kitsch and camp, while popular cul-
ture integrates inherited art elements and tools. There is no consensus on what
constitutes good or bad culture. This definition is again common in practice
but untenable for analytical purposes.
4. The most promising solution is to accept the plurality of definitions and regard
popular culture not as any fixed and logically bounded essence or set of works
and genres, but rather as a dynamic sociocultural construct. In this sense,
popular culture is that culture which is by dominant taste authorities and
institutions classified as low in some of these previous (or any other) senses.
Again, this fourth definition is the most generalizable and therefore useful one.
The others are all used in various widespread discourses, but they sometimes
contradict each other and lead to problematic contradictions. The rest of this
chapter will stick to the hermeneutical concept of culture and the taste-socio-
logical concept of popular culture.

Processes of mediatization of popular culture were different in different historical

epochs, in a complex interplay between media changes and phases of popular
culture. The following provisional draft of key transformations in four main steps
is valid mainly for Europe, as the timing varied in other parts of the world, though
with comparable main contours (see also Thompson 1995; Hepp 2013).

4 Graphic mediatization
The earliest forms of mediatization, in the period up until the 16th century, were
based on the invention and use of methods for inscription, in the form of graphical
technologies of writing and image production (manuscripts, letters, visual arts,
etc.). Before the advent of print technologies, these were the main modes of media-
tion available in Europe.
The making of images dates back very long, at least to the prehistoric cave
cultures. It originated before the rise of class societies and therefore before it was
possible even retrospectively to speak of any popular culture except in a very
general sense of culture for all. However, when it was applied in ancient river-
based high cultures, in classical city-states or in feudal societies, its most advanced
forms tended to be monopolized by the power elites who hired specialists for
services of pictorial documentation and decoration. Rudimentary pictorial tech-
niques were also employed in lower folk culture, but it was the ecclesial and
governing elites that had access to more sophisticated such methods and compe-
 Mediatization of popular culture 491

tencies and prevented non-legitimized visual traces from surviving for a longer
time.
It was different with written words from hieroglyphs to alphabetic inscriptions,
and later, with key steps taken in Europe in the 9th and 11th centuries, also of
musical notes. They demanded a higher degree of specialized expertise and were
therefore initially confined to the social elites and mainly used for high culture of
the educated, wealthy, and powerful elites.
Graphic mediatization in general made possible a transmission of first pictorial
(visual), and later scriptural (verbal) and finally also notational (musical) mes-
sages across distances in time (with fixation on durable materials such as stone,
wood, textile, or paper) and space (with mobile materials that tend to be more
fragile and thus mostly soon vanished with few traces remaining until today). The
effect was a de- and re-contextualizing distanciation between the artifact and the
original author, audience, and context (Ricoeur 1981: 131–144). With pictures, writ-
ing, and musical notes, a cultural work or text could be divorced from its time and
place of production. It could then also be used and interpreted much later and at
a distant location by people with radically different backgrounds and experiences,
opening up a previously unthinkably wide range of meanings. This made certain
traits of communication obvious and explicit that before tended to be hidden by
the mutual face-to-face interaction in specific contexts of all partners in a dialogue,
even though the germs of such distanciation was in fact inherent already in “non-
mediated” co-present interaction as well (Derrida [1967] 1976). Speech and live
singing also in principle enable different participants to make contrasting readings
and understandings of what is communicated, but with writing, this inherent trait
becomes much more acute and conscious for all actors.
This first kind of mediatization was thus a transition from a situation where
most interpersonal communication took place through direct gestures and sounds
to where material artifacts were made and used to interact across temporal or
spatial distances. Pictorial modes of expression have a particularly long history
back several tens of thousands years in time, and had effects on common low
culture too, even if more elaborate techniques were reserved for the ruling social
strata. Graphic communication based on images and visual designs has thus been
highly present also in popular cultural practices, and it is doubtful if they can be
understood as having ever been unaffected by this kind of mediatization. It is at
least very hard to find any kind of pure and innocent origin where popular culture
would have been totally free from any kind of distancing mediation of the kind
that externalized visual images enable.
Since early class societies rarely allowed common, uneducated working people
to handle more complex devices for writing and notation, the initial impact of
graphic mediatization in those expressive domains was mainly limited to higher
social strata. Where popular genres were affected by graphic mediatization in these
domains, they thus tended to be transformed from popular to high culture, and
492 Johan Fornäs

simultaneously translated from living vernacular practices to elevated script forms.

All this implied that graphic mediatization before the 16th century had a feeble
direct impact on popular culture as such, but only indirectly through how the
high cultural elites related to its vernacular and bodily oriented practices such as
decorating, dancing, singing, oral storytelling, jesting, or other forms of impro-
vised (epic or comic) performance without written support. Since ages back, pic-
tures had their role in common culture as well, but it does not seem obvious that
there was any decisive growth in this presence, while written words and musical
notes had little direct impact on those cultural levels until later, with the advent
of print.
Until the late 16th century, cultural life was largely divided into a common
culture shared by everybody within an everyday setting or in rituals in which
whole societies took part, and a set of more elaborate cultures reserved for either
the aristocratic or the clerical power elites. A fascinating example of early popular
culture was the medieval carnival, in which all social strata initially participated.
It was primarily an oral face-to-face ritual event, though it fed into literate culture
with authors such as Rabelais in the 16th century (Bakhtin [1965] 1984).
Besides a rather constant presence of visual imagery, popular culture thus long
remained relatively non-mediated in the domains of language and music, since
scripture and musical notes were long reserved for the secular and religious elites,
and thus had more impact on high arts than on popular culture. The historical
changes were slow in this area and period. Even though the early forms of graphic
mediatization may be discerned also in this sphere, it was yet relatively weak and
had only few direct effects on popular culture, which was still mostly a form of
common culture, based on oral and bodily interaction and only marginally affected
by the then existing media technologies, particularly the drawing of pictures, while
the writing of words and musical notes largely remained out of reach for early
popular culture.

5 Print mediatization
From the mid 16th century, the transition to the age of print media interacted with
a parallel qualitative shift in popular culture. Gutenberg’s invention from the mid
15th century led to a gradual expansion of printing press culture. This made pos-
sible the reproduction of previously unique works and an increasingly massive
mass distribution of those forms of expression. The accelerating alphabetization of
the masses ensued with regionally shifting speeds (particularly early in Protestant
Scandinavia), making it possible for increasing numbers of people to take part in
the literary sphere.
British historian Peter Burke (1978) has described how a radical shift appeared
in European popular culture around 1600, in the wake of Reformation and Coun-
 Mediatization of popular culture 493

ter-Reformation. The elites then withdrew from the formerly common culture, in a
growing distaste and contempt for the cultural practices of the lower social strata.
Carnival was one such social ritual that gathered a set of practices into annual
events whose traditional forms built mainly on face-to-face and co-present interac-
tion. Other similar examples were religious rites, child play, social games, and
sports, but also aesthetic experiences such as music or theatre. More integrated
into everyday life, the making of war, love, and interpersonal relations likewise
were for centuries mainly based on face-to-face interaction. Beginning with printed
images and words, institutionalized technologies became more involved in such
practices, deeply affecting their dynamics. Carnivals as well as sermons and thea-
tre plays started using written or otherwise fixed manuscripts, so that textualized
works became used as tools for ritual behaviors. One example is how the Bible
and other sacred texts were inserted in religious communions, forming a node of
collective acts and symbolizing an abstract link from these congregations to some
form of higher (divine) wisdom: the word of God.
Print mediatization thus affected low culture considerably more than scripture
(and hand-written musical notes) had before, but still mainly by serving as trans-
mitter between high and low culture, after they had been polarized against each
other than prior to 1600. Manuscripts translated oral practices into texts with sym-
bolic contents, storing them in archives over time and spreading them across social
and spatial contexts. Textualizing mechanisms froze living practices into coded
and reproducible artifacts. Written words and images could be placed on materials
like paper, and mechanical print techniques could copy them many times, so that
they could be shared by many, survive the death of those who once made them,
and (with a certain delay) be transported anywhere else on the globe. John B.
Thompson (1995: 180) describes how traditional cultures were mediatized, freeing
lived oral tradition from the constraints of face-to-face interaction and transform-
ing them into symbolic content of mediated texts. Paul Ricoeur (1976, 1981) analy-
zes the effects of writing in similar terms, leading to a multiple distanciation of
textual meanings from their authors as well as their original addressees and con-
texts. The print mediatization led to a growing proportion of such practices involv-
ing texts than in the previous phase. There was a more general transition from oral
to written culture, where the latter was first tightly controlled and monopolized
by the ruling classes, but with alphabetization harder and harder to confine and
therefore also affecting popular culture. This process has in shifting ways been
thematized by Innis (1950), McLuhan ([1964] 1987), Ong (1982), and Goody (1986).

6 Audiovisual mediatization
In the previous phase, popular culture developed from a shared common culture
to a low culture of the ordinary non-elite people. But from the early 19th century,
494 Johan Fornäs

industrialized forms of mass media culture and media or cultural industries took
over, separating popular culture from traditional folk culture and giving a strong
impetus to mediatization of the former. The transformation from a feudal to a
capitalist mode of production had far-reaching implications for mediatization, both
by changing the class structure and by installing capital accumulation as a power-
ful motor for technological innovation in media and communications. The whole
dichotomy between traditional folk culture for the masses and high arts for the
social elites changed, as modern, industrialized and commercialized popular cul-
ture developed. This gave rise to a triangular constellation of culture comprising
high culture of the fine arts, traditional crafts-based folk culture, and commercial-
ized and mediatized popular culture as its three main nodes.
The bourgeois middle classes formed a growing public for journals and books,
and increasing numbers of workers did not lag far behind (Habermas [1962] 1989;
Thompson 1995). New forms of publicness appeared, in which media events could
interact with political and social events in a wide-ranging number of ways. Modern
industrial capitalism installed a deepening divide of high and low within the
expanding print genres. The emergent bourgeois public sphere was dichotomized,
as modern mass culture offered a growing toolbox of reproduction technologies
(Bürger, Bürger and Schulte-Sasse 1982; Benjamin 1999). Centuries after the print-
ing press made it possible to mass reproduce texts and images, a whole series of
new techniques gave rise to a spectrum of mass-reproduced cultural forms. Parallel
to this process, bourgeois authors and artists started to regard modern mass cul-
ture with increasing contempt, responding to its growth and mediatization with a
process of dichotomization that led up to the fully developed polarity between
modernism and mass culture around 1900 (Huyssen 1986; Modleski 1986).
The media inventions of the 19th and early 20th centuries initiated a new shift.
Cameras improved the capacity to visually represent what eyewitnesses could see
for themselves. Sound recording added the aural component and broadcasting
made possible simultaneous participation on distance. Not just written words and
pictures could then be mass mediated, but also spoken words and music, leading
into what has been described as a second orality which differed from the first by
combining audiovisual interaction with distant co-presence (Ong 1982). A series of
reproduction technologies thus widened the scope of mediatization considerably,
with photography, phonography, and telegraphy going far beyond the previous
forms and reaching much deeper into the central realms of popular culture, while
simultaneously creating wholly new forms and genres aimed at growing mass
audiences. Twentieth-century cinema as well as radio and television broadcasting
went even further in this same direction.
Early mediatization relied on graphical coding into writing, images, or musical
notes, thus fixing oral and musical expressions and forcing interpreters to “resur-
rect” them by for instance setting up a theater play or performing a musical piece
from a printed manuscript. This demanded special skills that limited the effects
 Mediatization of popular culture 495

of mediatization to the elites. With audiovisual mediatization, this translation

between codes was done by automatic machines such as record players, film pro-
jectors, radios, or television sets. They were also based on modes of graphic
inscription, for instance etching tracks on vinyl discs, but that step in the media-
tion process was hidden and did not demand any particular reading competence
in the listener or viewer – no need for learning to read print words or musical
notes so as to be able to transform graphical representations back to talk or musi-
cal sounds. This was a key change for cultural consumption, and film, radio, and
in particular television did transform everyday life all over the world (Williams
1974).
Each new stream of media technologies and institutions remediates previously
existing media (Bolter and Grusin 1999). When popular culture was mediatized
before the 19th century, it was through print genres that textualized and froze
cultural forms that previously were predominantly oral and dynamic. For instance
folk songs and tales had to be given a fixed and static shape to be transcribed and
published, even though the oral tradition too had its own means of fixation
through formulaic mnemonics.
Audiovisual mediatization still involved a kind of reification, in that musical
flows had to be frozen and delimited to fit the record format, and radio, film, and
television also demanded the gatekeeping activity of a growing number of new
experts and officials within the cultural industries, from journalists to other kinds
of content producers and mediators. But the use of these mediated forms
demanded less or no formal training or specialized skills and could easily be inte-
grated into various physical and social settings and forms of social interaction that
previously were bound to face-to-face exchange, whether in staged rituals sepa-
rated from ordinary everyday life or seamlessly integrated within it: what Danish
media scholar Klaus Bruhn Jensen (2002: 5) has referred to as “time-out” and
“time-in” culture. Mechanical pianos and gramophones for instance widened the
scope of music in cafés and restaurants.
It should be remembered that some forms of popular culture have for ages
been dependent on mediation, and the new technologies just offered new modes
of basically similar processes of mediation. For instance, knowledge of the past or
the distant – of old times or foreign places – have for very long time been based
on tales, travel reports, and other forms of mediated communication. While new
channels and new formats of fixation and presentation are available today for
such purposes, there was in those cases no clear jump from a non-mediatized to
a mediatized phase. Many fields of aesthetic production have likewise always been
mediatized. Since books constitute media themselves, this is true for literature.
Modes of mediation change, but there has not in this respect been any qualitative
leap from a pre- to a mediatized era.
It is also crucial to distinguish between quantitative and qualitative aspects.
In medieval Europe, so much of people’s worldviews and understandings were
496 Johan Fornäs

dependent on one particular mediated text – the Bible – that it is difficult to

judge whether media came to influence people more or perhaps less in the age of
audiovisual mediatization. There are doubtlessly lots more media in place today
than ever, and their specific use fills a larger proportion of everyday life for most
people, but there is no direct line between such hard facts and the actual signifi-
cance of media texts or technologies in various levels of social, cultural, or per-
sonal life. The repeatedly multiplied number of TV channels may for instance not
always or necessarily increase the actual role of television in people’s lives, but
can equally well contribute to de-mystify or relativize that particular medium. To
take another example, vinyl records were sometimes enormously important to
teenagers in the 1950s – not in spite of but rather because of their scarcity, whereas
today when almost all music can easily be downloaded, this does not automatically
imply that it has a more central role for identity formation in everyday life.
Whether this is the case remains an open question to be empirically investigated
by historically comparative research.
One important facet of mediatization is the discursive shift of conceptual his-
tory by which it became common to understand and talk of media as separate but
central sociocultural phenomena. This developed in the early 20th century, when
“mass culture” started to be discussed not just in terms of social relations but as
interaction based on media technologies. “The media” came to be recognized as a
collective agency in society, based on a combination of expanding audiovisual
technologies and cultural industries, with institutionalized professions such as
journalists, editors, and producers. Since discursive shifts have social and material
effects, in that the signifying practices of culture affects how people understand
and act in the world, this was an important step in the history of mediatization in
popular culture.

7 Digital mediatization
The current mediatization debate mostly focuses on changes due to the digitaliza-
tion of communication in the last half-century, i.e. long after the processes dis-
cussed here so far. There is again a combination of remediation and innovation,
as traditional genres of popular culture are translated into digital formats at the
same time as new branches are invented. Popular literature, music, films, and
games are now circulating in print-based, analogue as well as digital versions, but
the interactive and intertextual potentials of new media also make it possible to
develop modes of popular culture that certainly build on previous ones but com-
bine and restructure them and may therefore be seen as new cultural forms as
well. There are for instance many models for YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter, but
what they offer is still something sufficiently different to qualify as new.
 Mediatization of popular culture 497

Just like once in the print phase of mediatization books and journals inter-
vened in previously face-to-face activities, interaction among peers has become
more media-dependent with the advent of mobile phones and other “new”,
“social” media for interpersonal interaction, as digital resources such as FaceBook
or online games are inserted to facilitate and restructure older forms of social
relations among peers or colleagues.
Digitalization of the media, which has accelerated stepwise during the last
decades, has two main effects: compression and convergence (Fornäs et al. 2002:
9–15; on space-time compression, see also Meyrowitz 1985; Hepp 2013: 53). First,
the unprecedented compression of information makes it possible both to concen-
trate enormous amounts of texts, images, and sounds in small spaces and to trans-
fer complex data sets across great distances in very short time. This gives people
access to a wealth of cultural resources, both in their own media machines and
especially when connected to global networks. The compression of information
results in a compression of time and space, making media permanently available
at virtually all locations.
Second, the reduction of information to digital sequences puts all symbolic
modes on the same material and technical platform, and tendentially makes it
possible to combine them much more easily than before. Combining shifting algo-
rithms, the same machines (computers, phones etc.) can work equally well with
words, music, and moving visuals. This in turn gives rise to new forms of conver-
gence in production and distribution as well as in reception and use of the media.
Late modern popular culture is thus full of hybrids that combine genres and modes
of expression that were previously organized separately from each others.
Digital networking has enabled various forms of interactivity, which change
the ways in which production is differentiated from reception or consumption.
McLuhan and Nevitt (1972: 4) predicted that electric technologies would make
media consumers more and more like producers, and Alvin Toffler ([1980] 1990)
coined the term “prosumer”, predicting the results of “mass customization” of
consumer markets. That concept (or the related one of “produser”, i.e. a mix of
producer and user of media contents) has been increasingly common in literature
on digital media economy since the late 1990s, as new social media sites and
mixtures between professional and amateur activities have blurred borders that
seemed much more fixed in the previous era of mass reproduction (Tapscott and
Williams [2006] 2010; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010).
This seems to confirm Walter Benjamin’s ideas, though in distorted forms. To
Benjamin (1999), the art of mechanical reproduction would make the quasi-sacral
aura of the artwork wane away, making it possible for citizens to take a more
active part in cultural consumption as well as production. There was thus a demo-
cratic potential in this development. Some utopians have continued also in later
times to regard the development of digital technologies as a democratic emancipa-
tion of the people and a dethronization of elitist authorities. Others have pointed
at new forms of capitalist accumulation, commercialization, and surveillance.
498 Johan Fornäs

Late modernity is characterized by several forms of reflexivity (Fornäs 1995:

210–221). The whole of modern society is now forced to deal not only with external
threats but with the problems it has itself created. There is also a growing media-
reflexivity or self-referentiality in media texts, which tend increasingly to link
intertextually and intermedially to each other. And the digital mediatization of
popular culture is thirdly also linked to an increasing self-reflexivity in the con-
struction of subjective identities. Already in earlier historical phases, media genres
such as romantic novels or glossy journals were used by readers to compare with
their own selves and get inspiration for how to improve one’s personal image.
Popular music, cinema, and television offered a widening spectrum of tools for
such self-mirroring, with reality shows and makeover programs putting such proc-
esses even more in focus. This is an aspect of what the German youth researcher
Thomas Ziehe has discussed in terms of “cultural expropriation”, through which
media images tend to colonize people’s lifeworlds, offering tools for reflexivity but
also forcing subjects to identify with positions constructed and disseminated by
increasingly sophisticated media genres (Ziehe and Stubenrauch 1982; Ziehe 1991;
see also Fornäs 1995: 43–47).
This is in turn linked to processes of celebrification, whereby private persons
are transformed into media personas and audiences simultaneously get involved
in co-producing this celebrity (Rojek 2001; Couldry 2003; Jerslev 2010). Together,
they are linked to the development of the prosumer/produser. Television formats
such as Big Brother is one example, public gossip about famous people another.
This means that recent forms of mediatization seem to deconstruct or at least
destabilize traditional distinctions between various kinds and levels of actors
involved, which is different from earlier stages of media development, but was
heralded already by Benjamin (1999) in his ideas about the loss of aura in the age
of mechanical reproduction.
New digital and network media offer new means for popular culture, but also
tend to destabilize the integrity of popular culture itself, by further blurring the
boundaries between high and low. This need not to be just an effect of technologi-
cal changes, as it also relates to deep-seated social and cultural transformations.
There is a complex interplay between new digital media techniques, economic
market structures, patterns of social stratification, and cultural genres that
together form the basis for such an at least partial erosion of the inherited high/
low divides. Since around 1600, the upper classes have tended to withdraw from
popular culture, there has been a deep mutual distance between modernism and
popularity, and elite tastes have tended to be based on a contempt and distaste
for the popular (Burke 1978; Bourdieu [1979] 1984; Huyssen 1986). Heralded by
1960s’ pop art and 1980s’ postmodern styles of mixture, it has become possible to
discern in at least some countries a gradual shift in taste patterns, so that the
young elites no longer shun popular culture but tend to embrace it, making omniv-
orous diversity and combinatory capacities (rather than any pure and exclusive
 Mediatization of popular culture 499

taste for the high arts) the most important marks of distinction (Peterson and Kern
1996; Bjurström 1997).
A result of such changes is that it seems increasingly hard to define and
delimit popular culture as different from other cultural strata. The era of a thor-
oughly dichotomized cultural sphere with one upper elite circuit and a lower popu-
lar one may possibly have been limited to the 19th and 20th centuries, or at least
one can now discern increasingly many hybrid and unclassifiable forms that call
for new models to understand cultural differentiation.
A complication thus results from a the combination of two contemporary proc-
esses: one of digitalization, which partly bridges borders between cultural genres
and media forms, and one of hybridization that has simultaneously tended to blur
the borders between high and popular culture. It is too early to yet draw any firm
conclusions, but popular culture may possibly again evolve into a kind of common
culture, only now fully mediatized. This means that the mediatization effects on
popular culture may actually be diminishing today, so that the audiovisual era can
in this field be seen as the most important phase of mediatization.

8 Concluding remarks
In sum, the mediatization of popular culture has gone through a series of stages,
where new technologies, institutions, and genres of mediated communication have
stepwise affected the forms and modes in which popular culture developed. Com-
bining primarily the “when” and the “how” of mediatization, the focus has been
on its phases and effects on popular culture. These are just tentative proposals,
and more extensive research and systematic analysis must be done to clarify the
precise dimensions and phases of this development.
In the beginning of this chapter, mediatization was heuristically defined as an
historical process whereby communication media become in some respect more
“important” in expanding areas of life and society. The basic suggestion was that
media technologies, texts, and institutions seem to become present and prominent
in increasingly many contexts. This is an idea that dominates much of the recent
discourse on mediatization, which then tries to identify in which precise ways that
the growing pool of communication media become more and more influential in
a series of societal spheres and forms of activity, including popular culture.
However, looking closer at these processes makes the picture more compli-
cated and less linear.
In the first phase, popular culture was a shared common culture that was only
marginally affected by graphic mediatization. This first phase seems to confirm the
idea of an accelerating process, in the sense that it implies that previously direct
modes of communication become dependent on new modes of mediation. This can
be reasonably well understood in terms of a decisive step from immediacy to indi-
500 Johan Fornäs

rect chains of interaction through texts. However, this phase and kind of change
only has the disadvantage of being hardly discernible in relation to popular culture
as such, as this cultural subsphere – the set of signifying practices shared by all,
including common people outside the social elites – was only marginally and
mostly only indirectly affected in that phase. Pictures had a relatively constant
presence in common culture, while scripture and musical notes had little impact
outside elite culture until much later. Limited examples may surely be found of a
slow development of graphic mediatization, but still hardly any of striking speed
or intensity.
Next, from the late 15th to the early 19th century, print mediatization started to
have an impact on popular culture, being seen as a low culture of the non-elite
people and thus more distinctly separated from high culture and abandoned by
the leading elites. Yet this effect of print media on popular culture still remained
rather marginal, since its most corporeal and social forms could not really be fully
integrated in the existing print media genres. Popular culture made occasional use
of posters, books, and the periodic press, but this did not yet fully affect its key
forms, until new technologies of reproducing images and sounds had been intro-
duced in the following phase.
It was then the third phase of audiovisual mediatization that most decisively
pulled popular culture in and defined it as modern mass media culture. It is there-
fore in the 19th century and up until the early 20th century that a progressive
tendency emerged for popular culture to become increasingly identified as intrinsi-
cally a kind of media culture. At the same time, this linear image of a transition
from unmediated to mediated forms of popular pleasures is problematized by the
insight that also graphic and print mediatization had already previously had at
least some impact here as well. This means that even if some genres of popular
culture had been unaffected by earlier modes of mediatization, at least several
other aspects of mass culture were already mediatized before this third period. In
these respects, there was thus no simple move from unmediated to mediated prac-
tices, but rather a transition from one form of mediation to another: from print to
photographs, phonograms, radio, film, or television. If for instance a fictional nar-
rative was translated from a print novel to a movie, this can be understood as part
of a growing media world, but not in contrast to a non-media saturated past. It is
then more appropriate to talk of a more dense network of different media resour-
ces, a remediation which results in an ever more complex web of media forms. As
it does then not replace a direct and unmediated past, it seems to partly undermine
some aspects of how the concept of mediatization itself was defined in the begin-
ning of this chapter.
Much mediatization discourse seems to focus on the most recent forms of digi-
tal mediatization. This also cannot be described as a sudden introduction of media
into a previously immediate mode of experience and interaction, as the new digital
technologies again rather remediated earlier media genres and thus can better be
 Mediatization of popular culture 501

described in terms of an increasing reflexivity and complexity of mediation. There

may be other social phenomena where digitalization has made possible a fresh
introduction to mediated interaction, but for popular culture, that was already
long since true. Since the early 19th century at least, the very definition of popular
culture as mass media culture points at the impossibility to conceive of it as mov-
ing from immediacy to mediation. The conclusion must therefore here be that
either it is misleading to at all talk of mediatization of popular culture in this late
phase, or else the very concept of mediatization must be redefined so as to not
imply any decisive transformation in quality, but perhaps just a gradual quantita-
tive growth (in terms of numbers, value, or time-use) or internal complexity (inter-
mediality and intertextuality) of media practices. Also, when it comes to popular
culture, this is also a phase that starts to question the whole basis of this discourse,
since it coincides with a partial dissolution of previous high/low boundaries and
a partial return to a shared common culture, now in fully mediatized forms, thus
closing the circle or rather opening a new spiral in the historical dynamics of
mediated popular culture.
The transitions between these phases of popular culture formations cannot be
explained as simple media effects, but communication processes were certainly
involved in the developing processes of modernization that lay behind these tran-
sitions. It was the Reformation and Counterreformation, as stages of secularization,
which made the elites withdraw from common culture, but the Reformation could
hardly have happened without the Gutenberg invention that made it possible for
ordinary people to get access to the Holy Scripture and thus partly emancipate
religion from the ecclesial hierarchies. The following move to audiovisual media
was related to technical media innovations but also presupposed the economic
establishment of modern industrial capitalism and its associated new class forma-
tions that provided the new media with a sufficiently large mass market for media
consumption. Digital media would also have had marginal effects if it did not also
correspond to more general “postindustrial” or “post-Fordist” network models of
labor and social relations, which in turn also mutually interacted with new subject
formations that gave rise to new forms of habitus, identity, and community.
In all phases, media uses are closely intertwined with social changes in the
formation of popular culture, but it is hard to discern any clear causal direction
between the two. Media changes always constantly interact with other social, eco-
nomic, political, and cultural changes, and it makes little sense to always define
one of these interacting factors – the media – as the prime mover. However, it still
does make sense to regard these processes in terms of mediatization: not as the
ultimate cause of all these historical shifts but as a striking feature of them. What-
ever may have in each phase caused these transitions, they did also involve a
change in the dominant modes of mediation available and used in society. While
it may thus be discussed whether it is a cause or an effect of social change, it
appears to be sensible to trace the process of mediatization also in the historically
different stages of popular culture.
502 Johan Fornäs

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Philip Auslander
22 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and
mediatization in the 21st century
Abstract: Although mediatization is a permanent condition of modern societies the
particular forms it takes on are historically contingent. The processes of mediatiza-
tion derive from the workings of the culturally dominant media forms of a particu-
lar time. Over two decades ago, I felt comfortable in positing the televisual, defined
in terms of Raymond Williams’s concept of flow, as central to mediatized culture.
This is no longer the case, as the televisual has clearly yielded sway to the digital
in all its forms. In seeking to understand the implications of this transition for
performers navigating this new cultural terrain I focus on two currently successful
pop music artists, Nicki Minaj and Lady Gaga. Whereas the performers I chose as
my original examples, performance artists Spalding Gray and Laurie Anderson,
each developed a single, largely consistent persona that proved adaptable to differ-
ent media and cultural contexts, both Minaj and Gaga create multiple personae
that morph with astounding velocity. Gaga, in particular, takes this strategy so far
that she seems to have no stable performance persona or brand image at all. Her
constantly changing appearance and image suggests instead the urgency and fre-
quency with which we must adjust our self-presentations to the multiple platforms
on which we continuously perform them.

Keywords: Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Raymond Williams, flow, mash-up, multi-self-
ing, persona, character, on demand, JIT (just in time)

In the late 1980s, I took up the question of how performers were negotiating a
postmodern cultural environment in which a number of previously established
givens, such as the dichotomies between art and commerce, high and low culture,
artist and entertainer, live and recorded performance, artistic integrity and “selling
out” could no longer be taken for granted. I focused on two performers, Spalding
Gray and Laurie Anderson, each of whom could be described as a performance
artist while also having clear ties to other forms (Gray to theater and literature,
Anderson to music and visual art). I defined postmodern culture primarily as medi-
atized culture, by which I meant a cultural formation completely saturated by
media information, imagery, and epistemologies. Following Dana Polan (1986), I
argued that postmodern culture could be understood on a model derived from
Raymond Williams’s concept of flow (Auslander 1989, 1992: 53–81).
The Ur-narrative of flow is Williams’s experience of American television in
1973 while in a somewhat altered state of consciousness, as described in his book
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (2003: 92).
506 Philip Auslander

One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and
at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial ‘breaks’.
Yet this was a minor problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films, which
were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers.
A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary
counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris
and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste New York. … [T]he transitions from
film to commercial and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked. There is in any
case enough similarity between certain kinds of films, and between several kinds of film and
the ‘situation’ commercials which often consciously imitate them, to make a sequence of this
kind a very difficult experience to interpret. I can still not be sure what I took from that whole
flow. I believe I registered some incidents as happening in the wrong film, and some characters
in the commercials as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem – for all the
occasional bizarre disparities – a single irresponsible flow of images and feelings.

I took Williams’s description of the “single, irresponsible flow of images and feel-
ings” produced by television as both a model for understanding the cultural flows
of postmodernism and an index of the degree to which postmodern culture was
mediatized by the televisual. In this cultural condition, no single expression, work,
or text stands on its own: anything can show up at any point in the flow, every-
thing is always already in relation to (overlapping, repeating, interrupting) other
things, and the meaning of each thing emerges relationally rather than autono-
mously.
Discussing performers like Gray and Anderson, I developed the concept of
persona to describe their central mechanism for negotiating postmodern mediat-
ized culture. Persona is a term I have continued to use to describe a performed
identity that mediates between the “real” person (that is, the performer as a spe-
cific human being) and the audience. Unlike characters (in the dramatic sense)
personae are not defined by specific narrative contexts, though performance perso-
nae can embody characters. For example, when I extended this schema to musi-
cians I posited that the primary figures musicians portray in performance are their
musical personae, the individual’s presentation of self in the role of musician
(Auslander 2006). In this context, I use the term character to refer to entities per-
formed by the persona that exist within specific narrative contexts, usually in the
lyrics of songs. In schematic terms, I see performing musicians as tripartite: there
is a person performing a socially defined role of musician, the persona, which, in
turn, may portray a character as the protagonist or narrator of a song narrative
(Auslander 2004).
In the 1980s, performers like Anderson and Gray consciously or unconsciously
developed a strategy to traverse the flow of postmodern culture by developing
highly mobile performance personae that could function in multiple contexts and
discourses both simultaneously and sequentially. These personae were not charac-
ters in that they were not anchored in specific narratives or fictions but appeared
across multiple scenarios. In Gray’s case, his persona emerged from the autobio-
graphical monologues he performed first on stage then on film and television but
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 507

served also as an actor (Gray’s conventional film and theater performances seemed
as if they were undertaken by his persona), a fiction writer (the main character of
Gray’s novel Impossible Vacation is his persona, who is also the author of the first-
person narrative), a critic (Gray wrote for the New York Times Book Review in the
voice of his persona), and so on.

The Spalding persona, which began as the [semi-]fictional conceit of his performances, has
become “real” by virtue of its continual reappearance in the cultural arena. … The blending
of real and fabricated personae and situations that occurs when performance personae assume
the same functions as ‘real’ people in the media has much the same effect as the flowing
together of various levels and types of meanings on television, but on a larger scale. (Auslan-
der 1992: 77–78)

By developing personae that could take up positions in multiple cultural dis-

courses, performers could engage productively with the information flow of post-
modern culture without being wholly absorbed into it and equally without pre-
tending it was possible to step outside of it to more stable and traditionally defined
positions.
My analysis of the use these performers made of personae harmonizes with
Stig Hjarvard’s somewhat later work on mediatization. Hjarvard (2008: 113) defines
the mediatization of society as “the process whereby society to an increasing
degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic”. He
distinguishes two kinds of mediatization: direct and indirect. Direct mediatization
refers to situations where formerly non-mediated activity converts to a mediated
form, i.e., the activity is performed through interaction with a medium. A sim-
ple example of direct mediatization is “the successive transformation of chess from
physical chessboard to computer game” (Hjarvard 2008: 114). As a further exam-
ple, popular music has been mediatized in this sense since the late 19th century
as first sound recordings, then radio broadcasts, then television and music video
replaced live performances as the primary forms in which audiences consume
music. The work of performers like Anderson and Gray, which originated in live
performance but was translated into media forms, underwent a parallel mediatiza-
tion.
Hjarvard (2008: 115) defines indirect mediatization as occurring “when a given
activity is increasingly influenced with respect to form, content, or organization
by mediagenic symbols or mechanisms”. If the appearance of performances by
Anderson, Gray, or any performer not only as live performances but also on audio
recordings, video, film, and so on exemplifies direct mediatization, the ways in
which media influences and has infiltrated not just the means by which audiences
access performances but also the form of the performances and the nature of the
performing in them exemplifies indirect mediatization. One example concerning
form comes directly from Williams’s discussion of television, where he notes that
commercial television programs are not autonomous texts that are artificially seg-
mented and interrupted by commercial breaks. Rather, the programs are designed
508 Philip Auslander

to accommodate segmentation and interruption; they are designed to accommo-

date these characteristics of the broadcast flow (Williams 2003: 92–93). The con-
struction of personae designed to function within a particular media environment
epitomizes indirect mediatization at the level of performing. As Hjarvard (2008:
115) indicates, this is the more subtle of the two processes because “indirect medi-
atization does not necessarily affect the ways in which people perform a given
activity”. To the extent that performing itself can reflect the internalization of
mediatization, one may be watching mediatization at work even in a live perform-
ance that involves no use of media technology.
Current examples of both the use of persona as a way of navigating mediatized
culture and the indirect mediatization of performance can be found in the work of
Nicki Minaj. Minaj is an American popular musician, primarily a rapper, noted for
spectacular, highly theatrical, often provocative performances and for portraying
multiple characters in her recordings, onstage, and in other public appearances.
Some of her songs are understood to be in the voices of the characters she embod-
ies in performance through costume, wigs, physical comportment, voice, accent,
and even language, such as Roman Zolanski and Harajuku Barbie, while others
are sung by the persona Nicki Minaj (not the artist’s name at birth). Some of
Minaj’s characters, such as the Spanish-speaking Rosa, do not perform music but
appear in other parts of Minaj’s life as a celebrity: Rosa, for example, has given
interviews in Minaj’s place (Rosa). It is nothing new for a popular music performer
to employ persona as a performance tool and a means of constructing dramatic
narratives; Simon Reynolds (2013) has suggested that Minaj is connected, genea-
logically if not by direct lines of influence, to such other performers who exploited
the possibilities of persona as David Bowie and Madonna. But Minaj has pushed
this possibility to extremes, almost to the point of implying that she is driven by
a dissociative identity disorder.
When Minaj appeared in person at a Macy’s department store in New York
City as Barbie for the launch of her signature perfume, Pink Friday, in 2012 she
was available to a live audience in the way that is traditional for events of this
kind (Nicki Minaj). Nevertheless, Minaj’s presence as Barbie reflects the impact of
mediatization on her performing, even in live appearances, and reflects the contin-
uing influence of television. Minaj’s Barbie is, after all, a character based on a
mass-produced doll created in 1959, at the end of the Golden Age of Television
during which the medium established itself as an indispensable part of American
culture. Barbie herself is mediatized in ways that go beyond her immediate life as
an object. Her ever-evolving identity derives as much from the television commer-
cials in which she appears as from the changing appearance of the dolls them-
selves (Tennery 2009) and the fact that there are multiple Barbies at any given
time (at present, Barbie is available in a fashionista version, an African-American
version identified as a future US President, a pop star version, and many others).
Minaj identifies closely with Barbie – she encourages her fans to call themselves
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 509

Barbies (or Barbs), and she has reenacted scenes from the life of Barbie as both
an object (Minaj has appeared as a doll in a life-size box of the kind Barbies are
sold in [Get Up]) and a character in a series of lifestyle narratives. The story of
Barbie in television commercials frequently leads up her marriage, which Minaj’s
Barbie has also performed (The Harajuku Barbie). Even when Minaj appears live
as Barbie, her performance is mediatized by all of the televisual, advertising, and
commercial referents that are intrinsic to the character. Mattel, the manufacturer
of the Barbie Doll, produced one in Minaj’s likeness to raise money for charity
(Kattalia 2011), thus closing the circle: Minaj modeled her character on the Barbie
Doll, which in turn is now modeled on her character.
Minaj is different from Spalding Gray in that she enacts multiple characters
rather than a single persona, but each of her characters functions culturally the
way Gray’s persona did. For example, when Minaj is interviewed, it is distinctly
possible that the entity responding to the interviewer’s questions will be a charac-
ter like Rosa, functioning for the occasion as a stand-in for Minaj herself. In addi-
tion to appearing at the store in her Barbie character to launch Pink Friday, she
portrayed the same character in the online commercial for the perfume in a more
benign version of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (Nicki Minaj-Pink Friday). Not con-
fined to any particular song or performance text, Minaj’s characters are free to
roam the earth, showing up in commercials and music videos, on the concert
stage, as the subject of interviews, at product launches, and so on.
I believe my perception of postmodern culture as mediatized culture made
sense twenty-five years ago and is still valid. It is evident that our society and
culture have continued to move ever more rapidly in the direction of mediatization
since then. Although mediatization is a permanent condition of modern societies
the particular forms it takes on are historically contingent. Mediatization is not an
abstraction but the concrete social and cultural impact media has on other dis-
courses and activities. The processes of mediatization derive from the workings of
the culturally dominant media forms of a particular time, and it is quite clear that
in the quarter century since I first started formulating these ideas there has been
a significant shift. Television is no longer what it was and no longer occupies a
position of uncontested cultural dominance. Although it remains commercially
important as an advertising medium and a source of news, information, and enter-
tainment, it has largely ceded its position as the dominant medium in the cultural
imaginary (at least from a US perspective) to the far more ubiquitous digital media
that are now intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives. The question is,
what difference does this difference make?
In 1973, Williams ([1973] 2003: 21) envisioned broadcast technologies – first
radio, then television – as windows on the world situated in the private home
through which inhabitants could receive “news from ‘outside’”. This news came
in the form of flow, a figure that connotes a system William Uricchio (2009: 32)
describes as “a temporally sequenced stream of program units [that] constantly
510 Philip Auslander

issues forth from the programmer, and audiences may dip in and out as they
choose”. Turn off the television and you are no longer connected to the outside,
though you can reconnect at any time since the flow is continuous. As Uricchio
(2004: 166–167) points out, the stream Williams experienced in 1973 and which
formed the basis of this theorization of televisual flow probably consisted of pro-
gramming generated by at most six channels, a mere trickle when compared with
the amount of material made available today by television in its various forms
(broadcast, cable, satellite, online) alongside of and interlaced with the material
available through such other devices as computers (both desktop and portable)
and smart phones.
Whereas broadcast technologies originally offered experiences that were
largely confined to a single location (usually, though not necessarily, the private
home) and a fairly limited flow, the technologies we use for information, entertain-
ment, and productivity today are with us all the time and offer many times the
amount of material anyone can actually handle. Television itself participates in
this ubiquity – no longer confined to the home or places of leisure activity, televi-
sion is now regularly present in bars and restaurants, medical waiting rooms,
airports, subway stations (I have seen giant screens on the platforms of the Milan
Metro, for instance) and many other places (McCarthy 2004: 183–184). Obviously,
other technologies are even more ubiquitous: the smart phone in your pocket or
purse is potentially a communications center from which to make calls, do email,
send faxes, and surf the web; an entertainment center that incorporates the func-
tions of television, radio, cinema, stereo system, and game console; an office
where you can write, run numbers, maintain contacts, and so on; a navigator; a
personal assistant, and too many other things to enumerate. Rather than a discrete
flow, the information made available and the functions performed by these tech-
nologies constitutes “an immersive sea” in Lynn Spigel’s (2004: 11) well-chosen
phrase from which it is far more difficult to extricate yourself.
The changes that have come about over the past twenty-five years through the
growth of digital technologies are both quantitative and qualitative. The transla-
tion of every cultural form and function into digital information makes it possible
for us to own, do, and experience more of everything more easily than ever before.
The qualitative dimensions of these changes pertain both to our uses of these
technologies and our sense of our relationship to them. The degree to which we
feel ourselves to be in control of the media we use is one of the primary vectors of
change over the last twenty-five years. Williams’s experience represents an initial
moment in which broadcasters structured televisual flow and viewers experienced
it as something with which they could choose to engage or not, but over which
they had very little direct control. But this picture changed with the arrival of the
remote control and the videocassette recorder, both of which became standard
equipment in the US television home in the course of the 1980s. By zipping, zap-
ping, and moving between broadcast and recorded materials, viewers constructed
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 511

their own flows, even if they were limited to the materials offered by broadcasters
(Uricchio 2004: 168–170).
Although television itself remains essentially in this situation today, albeit
with a far larger menu of offerings from which viewers can put together their own
flows, the Internet and social media offer us ways of being present in the flow that
television never did. In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1969: 231–232) observed,

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This
changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press … an
increasing number of readers became writers – at first, occasional ones. It began with the
daily press opening to its readers space for ‘letters to the editor’. And today there is hardly a
gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish
somewhere or other …. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its
basic character … At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer ….

All this can easily be applied to the film, where transitions that in literature took centuries
have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over
has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films
are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own
work process.

I don’t know if Benjamin could have anticipated the opportunities afforded by the
Internet and social media, but they certainly justify his claims. Now more than
ever, anyone can publish by starting a blog, posting comments on any of the
seemingly infinite number of websites that provide space for such feedback, or by
tweeting, or posting on Facebook or any number of other social media sites and
feeds. If you want to appear in a film, you can make one yourself (you don’t even
need a camera – use your phone!) and post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or other similar
sites. Readers and viewers are no longer just consumers but potentially writers,
producers, and critics as well, as expressed by the term prosumer (Toffler 1980:
265–288).
The blurring of the distinction between production and consumption this term
implies is something we enact every day in the multiple uses we make of our
devices. As Spigel and Dawson (2008: 283) point out, “Mobile technologies con-
flate activities of leisure and labour so that, for example, the cell phone watcher
may at any moment receive a business call or the PC user can switch between
watching a Buffy rerun and figuring out earnings on the latest stock reports”.
Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer (2011: 282) have proposed to extend the con-
cept of flow to the trajectories we construct among the many screens we use,
arguing “the traditional accounts of what television did continue, but across more
devices”.

In our conception, flow is the process by which subjects and attendant data move seamlessly
through the world in unison. Numerous and varied screens (television, computer, tablets,
mobile phones) work in concert to network and extend the self in whatever ways are necessary
512 Philip Auslander

to link and guide the constant flow of the self’s social, governmental, economic, and biopoliti-
cal data in ever-present and in ever-useful means. (Oswald and Packer 2011: 277)

While Oswald and Packer’s rehabilitation of Williams’s concept for the digital age
is salutary, it raises the question of whether our ongoing negotiations with various
devices for varied uses that often conflate work and leisure, production and con-
sumption actually extend the self in various directions to accommodate it to this
environment as they suggest. Oswald and Packer seem to assume that while our
screens have multiplied, the self remains singular as it traverses the flow it negoti-
ates across many screens. But Spigel and Dawson’s description of the multitasker
who must switch between roles and activities at a moment’s notice implies a differ-
ent analysis. The multitasker they describe is a television viewer until the business
call comes in, at which point he or she must become a businessperson. Perhaps,
then, the environment created by digital media does not so much extend the self
as demand that the self morph continuously to assume the different social roles
necessary to respond to the different demands negotiated between us and our
screens. Employing Erving Goffman’s (1959) notion of self-presentation as perform-
ance, Corinne Weisgerber (2011) points out that we present ourselves differently,
perform different roles, in different digital contexts:

Facebook Corinne and Twitter Corinne are not the same persona. And they’re also slightly
different from Corinne, the blogger. I’m a lot pickier about who I let join my Facebook network
and I rarely let mere acquaintances in. If you want to connect with me on Facebook, I have
to know you fairly well. As a result, you’d probably get to see a much more unfiltered version
of Corinne than you would on Twitter. Twitter Corinne is an engaged professor and researcher,
tweets in a number of languages and aside from the occasional (but justified) rant about AT&
T’s dismal phone service, tries to present a very professional image.

It is historically appropriate that the concept of flow suggests analog systems in

which bits of information succeed one another smoothly. By contrast, Weisberger’s
description suggests digital systems in which the switching of identities according
to platform (Facebook Corinne versus Twitter Corinne) does not represent the
extension of the self envisioned by Oswald and Packer so much as the necessity
of enacting a series of different, perhaps even mutually exclusive selves that evoke
the on/off logic of the digital. The multitasker does not move from Buffy to busi-
ness and back again in a smooth flow but is pulled from one task and one identity
to another (and sometimes from one screen to another) in series of discrete engage-
ments that require not just multitasking but multiselfing: morphing and switching
among identities to fulfill the multiple social roles demanded of us by our screens.
Multiselfing is nothing new; it is fundamental to Goffman’s analysis of self-presen-
tation that we always present ourselves in different guises in different contexts
(Meier 2010). What is perhaps new is the frequency and velocity of the changes
we are called upon to make in order to navigate the “immersive sea” of digital
information that surrounds us without drowning in it.
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 513

Oswald and Packer (2011: 283) nominate the “on demand model” as the best
description of our current mediatized situation “and a new model of flow” to
update Williams’s. I agree, as long as it’s understood that demand flows in both
directions: the world is available to the prosumer on demand, but we as subjects
must also be available – on demand and in a suitable identity – to the myriad of
opportunities for communication and interaction that hail us through our screens.
Direct mediatization is basic to this on-demand culture: online shopping, e-books,
and digital library research are but three examples of activities and artifacts with
which we now engage by means of technologies that have replaced, or nearly so,
traditional means and that often make things available more rapidly than before.
Indirect mediatization is manifest at one level in the assumptions that govern our
behavior. We now tend to assume, for example, that everyone is available to every-
one else pretty much all the time, whether by cell phone or text or email or instant
messaging, and we become impatient when we can’t get in touch with someone
instantly or an email goes unanswered for several days. Not only is our communi-
cative behavior mediatized, but the social expectations surrounding interpersonal
communication are as well.
For Williams, one of the primary functions of television was to serve as a
window on the outside world. Now, we carry such windows with us as we move
through the world. The small windows of our cell phones can show us what’s
going on in the places we’re not; relative to any position we assume, there are still
a “here” and an “elsewhere”, but there are no longer an inside and an outside in
the sense Williams had in mind. Similarly, there is no longer a limited and con-
trolled flow of information emanating from a small number of sources into which
we can tap or from which we can withdraw at will. Rather, we are now immersed
in an overwhelming sea of data originating from an astronomical number of points
known and unknown from which it is far more difficult to withdraw. Communica-
tion within this flow is no longer primarily one-way from the media and cultural
workers to their audiences. Now, anyone can participate in the media and the
making of culture and respond directly to those in dominant positions. Whereas
it seemed twenty-five years ago that performers could engage productively with a
culture understood in terms of flow by creating mobile but essentially stable perso-
nae that could take up multiple positions and perform multiple functions within
the flow, performers today must address the terms of an on-demand culture that
requires all of us to morph ourselves continually (and discontinuously) to respond
to the demands we wish to make and those that are made of us.
In the music video for the song Va Va Voom (2012) Minaj enacts this kind of
morphing on demand by portraying four distinct characters all based on female
archetypes found in fairy tales or fantasy novels, including a blonde coquette who
cavorts with unicorns, a red-haired Snow White (who still sings while asleep; there
is also a second red-haired but masked character who may or may not be different
from Snow White), an Evil Queen dressed in a high-collared black dress and
514 Philip Auslander

adorned with a black pageboy haircut, and a figure who may be the Evil Queen’s
opposite number who appears in white. It is important, however, that all of Minaj’s
characters ultimately are visually assimilated to a single persona. Although each
has a different color and style of hair, is costumed in a different extravagant outfit,
and appears in a different setting and scenario, they all conspicuously have the
same face, adorned with the exaggerated false eyelashes and the Pink Friday lip-
stick Minaj favors. Different as they are, all are readily recognizable as variants
on Minaj’s primary performance persona and it is that persona’s appearance that
provides Minaj’s parade of characters with continuity, as does the fact that they
all come from fairytales or similar stories. The song itself reinforces this continuity
since it is a continuous narrative of the protagonist’s attempt to seduce a man
rapped and sung in a consistent voice. The relationship between the song’s struc-
ture and that of the video also suggests a pattern underlying Minaj’s multiple
guises in that each character appears as the protagonist of a particular verse and,
until the end, the same character (the white-clad figure) appears to articulate the
chorus.
By contrast, Lady Gaga, another pop music artist to emerge in the late 2000s
who is noteworthy for her constantly shifting appearance, lavish performances,
and connections to the world of fashion, seems to disappear behind her costumes
and make-up, in large part because her face – her eyes in particular – is often
at least partially hidden. So different from one another are the multiple visual
manifestations of Lady Gaga in performance and the media it is possible to imag-
ine that many of her fans do not know what she really looks like. Both Minaj and
Gaga are adept at navigating our mediatized cultural landscape in ways that go
beyond simply producing and performing music. For example, Minaj’s characters
are defined as much by statements she makes through her Twitter feed as by her
music, stage performances, and videos. Gaga, too, is often cited as an example of
an artist who uses the web and social media very cannily in building her fan
following and brand (see Hampp 2010). But whereas Minaj arguably follows an
established approach in carving out a presence in mediatized culture by construct-
ing a versatile persona as a base from which to morph into different identities,
Gaga seems to be charting new territory by constructing a chameleon-like presence
that never resolves into a stable image or identity.
As a performer, Lady Gaga makes use of a very broad range of platforms,
including live performances, sound recordings, television appearances, music vid-
eos, fashion shows, museum events, websites, and social media. Like many celeb-
rities, she is active on Twitter. Inevitably, she also appears in a vast number of
contexts over which she has little control such as gossipy television programs like
TMZ and videos concocted by fans and posted on YouTube. She juxtaposes an
enigmatic, always changing public persona with ostensibly more personal commu-
nications, particularly in the form of home videos aimed primarily at her fans who
she calls “little monsters”.
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 515

Gaga acknowledges and encourages her fans’ prosumerism. Richard Hanna,

Andrew Rohm and Victoria Crittenden (2011: 265) write, “consumers are no longer
merely passive recipients in the marketing exchange process. Today, they are tak-
ing an increasingly active role in co-creating everything from product design to
promotional messages”. As an example, a small, inexpensive-looking toy plastic
unicorn with an illuminated horn given to Gaga by a fan appears in Gagavision
No. 44 (April 28, 2011), one of the home videos Gaga makes for her fans, where
she claims to seek inspiration from it and names it Gagacorn. According to Gagape-
dia, “Lady Gaga also has a tattoo of a unicorn on her left outer thigh with a banner
reading ‘Born This Way,’ a tribute to her album. Gagacorn is known to be the
mascot of Gaga’s third studio album, titled Born This Way” (Gagapedia). Four dif-
ferent versions of Gagacorn appear on key chains for sale on Lady Gaga’s official
website. Each reflects one of Gaga’s many guises by sporting different blond hair
styles and, in one case, what appears to be a steak on its head, a reference to the
notorious “meat dress” designed by Franc Fernandez that Gaga wore to the 2010
MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Gaga creates a feedback loop whereby her
fans are treated not just as passive consumers of her music and product lines but
as potential co-creators of her mythology (in which Gagacorn is now totemic), her
merchandise, her music (inasmuch as Gagacorn was Gaga’s mascot during the
making of an album), and even, possibly, her body (depending on when she got
her unicorn tattoo).
Lady Gaga is often accused of lacking originality. In a virulently anti-Gaga
screed, Camille Paglia (2010) describes her as “a ruthless recycler of other people’s
work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated from performers
like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and Pink, as well as from fash-
ion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness.” Even pro-Gaga commentators
agree. Nicole Sia (2010), writing for an MTV.com blog, states that while she is
“definitely an innovator, Lady Gaga is maybe not always the most original”. Alex-
ander Cavaluzzo (2011), writing in the online journal Gaga Stigmata, a publication
described by its founders as “the first mover in Gaga studies”, calls her an “editrix”
whose art consists in selecting and combining things that already exist rather than
original creation. This is observable in her music, which draws extensively both
on today’s electronic dance music and the dance music of the 1980s and 1990s
exemplified by Madonna and Britney Spears, as well as big-voiced pop divas as
various as Cher and Carly Simon. It has also been noted that the infamous “meat
dress” revisits Canadian artist Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino
Anorectic of 1987.
I suggest that Gaga’s practice of appropriation and recombination positions
her as a cultural prosumer, a knowledgeable consumer of contemporary popular
music, art, and fashion whose production as an artist derives largely from her
ability to cull from what has gone before and recombine the things that interest
her. Francesco Bonami (2012) argues that this aspect of Gaga’s work reflects her
516 Philip Auslander

generational affiliation (she turned 27 in March of 2013): “Lady Gaga belongs to a

generation of mutatis mutandis, that is to say those who build their own identity
by changing things that already existed but that needed to be changed in order to
continue to exist”. One of the chief strategies and forms that has emerged from
this generation is the mash-up, both an artistic practice and a way of thinking
about culture as “configurable” (Sinnreich 2010). The term mash-up is used pri-
marily in reference to either music, in which case it denotes the practice of combin-
ing two or more recordings, usually quite different stylistically, into a new work,
or web pages, in which case it refers to a page that juxtaposes material from
several sources (e.g. a Google map and a YouTube video). Lady Gaga’s fans are
creators of mash-ups; one, for example, combined Blondie’s Call Me with Gaga’s
Electric Chapel to make Call Me to the Electric Chapel (DEADgamer 2012). Arguably,
the song Electric Chapel is a kind of mash-up to begin with, since it must be a
reference to Jimi Hendrix’s description of his music as being an “electric church.”
The music video for Gaga’s song Bad Romance, discussed further below, is a differ-
ent sort of mash-up since it re-presented all of the outfits seen on the catwalk
during Alexander McQueen’s runway show for Paris Fashion Week in 2010; it is
thus a mash-up of a music video and a fashion show. Gaga’s aesthetic as bricoleuse
or editrix is perhaps better described as a mash-up aesthetic in which she appropri-
ates materials from a broad range of cultural contexts and combines them into
new expression.
Since 2008, Gaga has made a spate of web videos, first under the rubric Trans-
mission Gagavision and later called Monstervision. The Gagavision/Monstervision
videos are circulated through the Littlemonsters.com website Gaga maintains as a
fan community site (through which she offers lengthier messages to her fans than
is possible on Twitter) and through YouTube and other video sites. They purport
to provide a “backstage” view of Gaga as she rehearses, travels, plays with her
dog, talks with various people, engages with her fans, works on recording her
music, cavorts with her entourage, and so on. The backstage quality of these vid-
eos is emphasized by their common title sequence. It shows Lady Gaga being made
up; only fragments of her face appear. This sequence suggests that the construc-
tion of Lady Gaga, the stage persona, is taking place before our eyes while the rest
of the video will show us what lies behind this construction. The videos typically
appear to be shot with a somewhat shaky handheld camera (Gaga is sometimes
seen holding a camera and shooting members of her staff) and are informal,
grainy, and low resolution. They contrast sharply with Gaga’s music videos, which
are immaculate state-of-the-art productions.
This bifurcation of the slick and the amateurish in Gaga’s use of media points
first of all to the way she adjusts her identity to the setting and audience. There
is no singular Lady Gaga whose presence is extended across these many platforms;
indeed, the only continuity between Gaga, the young, hard working woman pre-
sented on Gagavision, who seems accessible if sometimes a bit overwrought, and
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 517

the carefully constructed versions of Lady Gaga that appear in her music videos
is that they are different manifestations of the same human being. Gaga thus man-
ages the trick of presenting herself in some contexts as not that different from her
fans – she, like so many others, seemingly makes low quality, somewhat dis-
jointed, overly chatty home videos of her everyday life and posts them on You-
Tube – and in other contexts as an otherworldly being whom the same fans admire
for her audacity, outrageousness, and alterity.
Like Minaj, Gaga pushes the idea of discontinuous identity to extremes in the
visual manifestations of her identities as musician and celebrity. When offstage
but in public, her appearance can vary so much that she does not appear to be
the same person from one time to another. The color and style of her hair change
continuously, and she frequently wears hats, make-up, sunglasses, or prosthetics
that occlude her eyes, sometimes her entire face. Even the shape of her head
appears to change, sometimes seeming vertical and ovoid while at other times
appearing to be round. In one of her most dramatic transformations, she appeared
at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony for 2011 in male drag as a character
called Jo Calderone who claimed to be Gaga’s lover. Calderone actually made his
debut the year before as a cover model for the September 2010 issue of Vogue
Hommes Japan. At that time, Gaga did not admit to being Jo but it was widely
rumored (Gagapedia). At the awards ceremony, Gaga created a moment of self-
reflexive meta-theatricality through this portrayal as Calderone applauded Gaga
for having achieved stardom while simultaneously accusing her of never being out
of the spotlight and never acting “real” (Mitchell 2011). In short, a clearly artificial
entity created and enacted by Gaga accused her of being an artificial entity created
by fame. He also revealed that she refuses to look at him when she’s having an
orgasm; perhaps this was a covert way for Gaga to suggest that her tendency to
hide or radically alter her face and features symbolically marks the limits of the
intimacy she is willing to offer her public. Even in the Gagavision videos, she often
(though not always) appears in dark glasses or shrouded in shadow.
One of Gaga’s logos is an image of a headless female body. When she appeared
on the cover of V Magazine’s issue for the summer of 2011, she portrayed a kind
of three-headed human Cerberus. These images would seem to be two sides of the
same coin: three heads are the same as none. The proliferation of identities in
which Gaga is engaged is tantamount to having no identity at all – Bonami (2012)
describes Gaga’s body as “a stage on which you can set up a new scenography
each time”. Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager, discusses their strategy for partnering
with other businesses by saying that she will not engage in traditional endorse-
ment deals: “You won’t see her face plastered on any packaging or anything”
(quoted in Hampp 2010). Of course not: which face would it be? That Gaga’s strat-
egy in this area contrasts strongly with Minaj’s is apparent from the way each
markets her signature scent. Pink Friday, Minaj’s perfume, comes in a bottle mod-
eled as a bust of Minaj in full Barbie regalia. The box also features a stylized
518 Philip Auslander

illustration of Minaj. Lady Gaga’s perfume, The Fame, comes in an elegant egg-
shaped bottle with a designer cap that recalls Art Deco. The box is black and bears
only an image of the bottle. Whereas Minaj follows a more traditional strategy of
marketing an image based on her own in which her fans can participate through
consumption, Gaga serves much more as an éminence grise for her brand than as
its cover girl.
Gaga has emerged as a champion of LGBT causes and the rights of the disen-
franchised generally, especially through her Born This Way Foundation. The song
for which the foundation is named is a rousing anthemic declaration that it’s
perfectly all right to be whoever you are regardless of what anyone else thinks –
the line “I was born this way” is the key line of the chorus. Ironically, Gaga’s whole
approach to self-presentation seems at odds with the essentialism she embraces
in the song. Whatever way she was born (there is no mystery surrounding this
since one can trace Gaga’s entire life from when she was a little Italian-American
girl in New York named Stefani Germanotta who exhibited a talent for playing the
piano up to the present day via photos and videos readily accessible on the Inter-
net) has no bearing on the multiple, shifting identities she assumes at an ever-
more frenetic pace.
One of the identity issues surrounding Lady Gaga concerns the cultural sphere
to which she properly belongs. She has strong presences in the worlds of music,
fashion, and art and the question of whether she should be considered a pop
musician or a performance artist comes up regularly (see D’Addario 2011).
Although Gaga sometimes bridges the gap by referring to herself as a “pop per-
formance artist” (Lady Gaga Talks) she works this dichotomy by constructing dif-
ferent personae for each context. The launch party for her perfume The Fame took
place in the fall of 2012 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Gaga pre-
pared a performance piece called “Sleeping with Gaga” for which she was seen to
be sleeping inside a giant replica of the perfume’s signature bottle next to a large
digital clock that seemed to be counting down fifteen minutes. People could come
up and touch her hand. In the second part of the performance, she received a
tattoo of a cherub on the back of her neck (Anru 2012; Lynch 2012). Although Gaga
gained the opportunity to market a perfume because of her fame as a pop musi-
cian, there was no direct connection between this event and the music that made
it possible. Gaga did not perform as a musician at the Guggenheim and seems, in
fact, to have remained silent. The recorded music that played during the perform-
ance was not hers. Even though the event treated the museum primarily as a site
of commerce rather than art, the performance was framed by appropriate art world
references, including the obviously Warholian clock and a possible reference to
Ron Athey in the tattooing section. Gaga’s stillness and relative vulnerability may
have been her rendering of qualities she perceives in the work of Marina Abram-
ovic, for whom she has expressed great admiration (Lady Gaga Talks). Lady Gaga,
performance artist, was present at the Guggenheim, not Lady Gaga, pop musician.
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 519

Gaga’s music video for her song Bad Romance from 2009 offers a striking
dramatization of her strategy of shifting appearances and identities. In the first
minute of a video that runs slightly less than four minutes, Gaga appears in four
different guises, each keyed to a particular setting. In the first scene, which corre-
sponds with the song’s harpsichord-like introduction, she is seated at the center
of a tableau of eerie masked and otherwise disguised figures in a blonde wig, gold
dress, and opaque eyeglasses with lenses that suggest bullet holes. In the second
scene, a group of mysterious figures dressed in skintight white latex emerges from
clamshell coffins. All but one have their faces hidden but their legs exposed; the
remaining one’s legs are covered but the lower part of her face, including very red
lips, is visible. The figure that is singled out may be Lady Gaga – it’s actually
impossible to tell. Two other figures placed in other settings are intercut with
these: a wide-eyed naïf with disheveled light orange hair in a white bathtub and
a black-clad evil queen-like figure in a darkened room who is gazing at herself in
a mirror with a heavy ornate frame. As attendants torment the woman in the
bathtub, a blonde woman with very pale skin shot in tight close-up who looks like
a glamorous movie star playing a woman in distress appears. As if to emphasize
the fragmentary nature of these identities, normal rules of cinematic continuity
are ignored. In one shot, for example, the orange-haired innocent is conspicuously
wearing ear buds. The next time we see her, they have disappeared only to return
in a subsequent shot.
In the remainder of the video, nine more versions of Gaga appear and two of
the earlier ones reappear. Although specific images (a twisted hand, a pair of
bizarre shoes, a distinctively shaped bottle) are repeated in different scenes and
settings these repetitions do not create narrative links between them. Each action,
setting, and the version of Lady Gaga that goes with them is discrete – each exists
in its own context that does not overlap or connect to the others. They are unified
solely by the song, as the characters move and dance to its rhythm, which also
defines the rhythm of the video’s editing, and lip-synch its lines.
Ronnie Lippens (1998: 24) describes our “hypermodern everyday life” as “JIT-
life,” where JIT stands for Just In Time. In JIT-life, everything is immediate and
provisional, constantly in flux, and incoherent, including our JIT-identities: “Indi-
vidual selves are being splintered and are splintering themselves reflexively, look-
ing for fitting identities/differences, trying them out, abandoning them in dissatis-
faction, reaching out for alternative identities, ever rhizomatically” (Lippens 1998:
28). Lippens’s concept of JIT harmonizes with other terms I have nominated here
as key descriptors of our present cultural condition, including “on demand”, “mul-
tiselfing”, and mash-up. Together, they suggest the urgency and frequency with
which we must adjust our self-presentations to the multiple platforms on which
we continuously perform them. JIT alludes to both the immediacy with which we
must respond to the demands made upon us (the instant switch from leisure to
business demanded of the cell phone multitasker, for instance) and the temporary
520 Philip Auslander

quality of the resulting self-presentations whose utility is completely limited to

their contexts.
It is well known that Gaga’s enterprise is conducted with the help of the crea-
tive team known collectively as The Haus of Gaga, which includes choreographer
Laurie-Ann Gibson; several fashion designers, including Hussein Chalayan and
the late Alexander McQueen; high fashion milliners Philip Treacy and Nasir Naz-
har; eyewear designer Kerin Rose; and photographer Nick Knight, Gaga’s co-con-
spirator in the creation of Jo Calderone (Residents of the Haus). It is crucial in the
present context that the key figure in the Haus of Gaga is Nicola Formichetti, who
is a stylist and fashion director, not a designer (working for Gaga is but one of his
many positions – he is also fashion director of both Vogue Hommes Japan and
Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing line, and artistic director for the DIESEL brand.) As
described by Jennifer Anyan and Philip Clarke (2011: 3, 6–7) stylists don’t design:
they stage the designs of others, “construct[ing] a fictitious scene using available
resources”, “sourcing, collecting and combining predesigned objects”, a process
that often involves “making fast-paced, often spontaneous, last-minute” decisions.
In other words, the stylist is a mash-up artist who brings together the work of
fashion designers and photographers: the perfect associate for a performer noted
for her own commitment to bricolage and who is taking the JIT world by the horns.
The density, velocity, and incoherence of Gaga’s abrupt changes of identity in
the Bad Romance video are both products and an image of this cultural condition.
Commenting on the way “Gaga is always clad in apparel usually seen only on
Fashion Week runways”, Victor Corona (2011: 8) notes that her “aesthetic challen-
ges the potency of [vestimentary] regimes” that tell us what we should wear when
“and affirms the hypermodern imperative of individual self-expression …”. Pace
Corona, I argue that Gaga’s aesthetic challenges the very notion that there is an
individual self to express by distributing multiple selves across a field of infinite
and unpredictable variations.
In this respect, Gaga confounds the schema for analyzing musical performance
I mentioned earlier: how can one sustain an analytical distinction between per-
sona and character when an artist’s persona is manifest only as a seemingly infi-
nite proliferation of characters? To quote Gilliam Schutte (2013), “Gaga, it seems,
is indefinable”. Schutte goes on to pose the provocative question, “Could it be
then, that Lady Gaga is an avatar and not a human being – at least in the collective
imaginary of her huge fan-base?” Schutte is referring to the way Gaga seems to
function as a projection screen for her fans to whom she can mean what they want
her to mean and “allowing many to believe that they have some hand in her
creation”. This is a valid point. In fact, “Lady Gaga” is not a human being, though
she is played by one. Lady Gaga is every bit as much a product of the Haus of
Gaga as her perfume, The Fame, is a product of Gaga Laboratories, Paris. But Lady
Gaga is neither a persona nor an avatar. Gaga asks her fans to identify not with
an identity but with the ability to produce ever-changing identities in response to
 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 521

different settings and circumstances. Lady Gaga is a randomized algorithm (Karp

1991) that continuously generates, on demand and just in time, the personae Ste-
fani Germanotta portrays.

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Kirsten Frandsen
23 Mediatization of sports
Abstract: Sport and media have for many years been closely related and in particu-
lar the television–sport relationship has often been considered an example sine
qua non of mediatization.
The primary focus in this chapter is on the role of television, but as the relation
is historically rooted it also touches briefly upon the role of previous and present
digital media. The argument is that mediatization of sport is a matter of specificity
where interrelatedness, globalization, and commercialization have come to play a
significant role due to the communicative features of both television and sports.
The relation is not just a matter of sport adjusting to the needs of the media. Sport
is a communicative form with distinct cultural and social meanings and powerful
inherent logics that needs to be reflected in an analysis of mediatization as well.
It is demonstrated how television has contributed to a polarization of the field of
sport in general. In a brief historical outline the chapter shows how mediatization
has contributed to the evolution of sports in many of the same ways across cul-
tures, but in a North European context it has also developed through two phases
shaped by changes in the surrounding sport and media systems.

Keywords: sport, sports/media complex, globalization, commercialization, individ-

ualization, communicative form, game, exposure, partnership, polarization

Media have always played an active role in sports. Mass media’s coverage of sports
events and activities has in general been considered important for the recruitment
of new participants and encouragement of spectators to attend live events, while
the coverage also helped secure broad audiences and market share for the media.
But from a historical perspective one particular medium stands out, namely televi-
sion. This medium has for more than 50 years had an exceptionally profound
influence on sports both in terms of economy and culture. Accordingly, this chap-
ter will mainly address the role of television as an agent of change in relation to
the social and cultural field of sport. However, television’s role in relation to sports
needs to be seen in a broader perspective, both historically and currently. There-
fore, the chapter will also briefly touch upon the significant role of media before
the advent of television and the present-day role of digital media as challengers
of the long-established powerful status of television.

1 A matter of specificity
The sport–television relationship seems to be considered an example sine qua non
of what among many scholars is perceived of as a historical period marked by a
526 Kirsten Frandsen

“growing importance of media power” (Livingstone 2009: ix) or a new “omnipres-

ence of media” (Hjarvard 2008: 106) – often referred to as mediatization (a term I
will address in more detail later). Sport is often cited as a good example of how
media have become increasingly powerful, in the sense that they have actively
contributed to social and cultural changes (Hepp 2011; Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby
2010). Perhaps this is a point inspired by the earlier reference by Altheide and
Snow (1979), who paid special attention to sports, providing an entire chapter
about American sports and media in their book, Media Logics, and whose concept
of media logic has been a key metaphor in several contributions to the discussions
of mediatization.
The primary aim of this chapter is to look more closely at the relationship
between sports and television; a relationship in which the media seem to wield
unquestioned and undifferentiated power. The general issue of sport’s autonomy
and the hegemony of media culture is in many respects a far more complex matter
than it may initially appear. First of all, television’s influence as an agent for
cultural change is not uniform across cultures, media systems, and sports cultures,
and the power of television may also be displayed in more indirect ways. Second,
sport is a specific cultural field and therefore actualizes a different set of dynamics
in relation to media than what is found in politics, religion, and family – and
everyday life (Donges 2008; Lundby 2009a; Hjarvard and Lövheim 2012), which
have been the focal point of much of the research and discussions that inform the
mediatization perspective. This chapter, therefore, starts with the premise that the
role of the media and the way they – and in particular television – contribute to
changes can take various forms.
Although a primary focus of the article is the relationship between television
and sport, at the time of writing it is also important to acknowledge that televi-
sion’s primacy in the sport–media relationship is under attack from emerging digi-
tal media. Several scholars have begun to question whether it will be possible for
television to maintain its economic and cultural power (Billings 2011; Hutchins
and Rowe 2009). One point raised in recent literature on sports and media is
whether, when, and how the spread of digital media will erode television’s hege-
monic status and what changes can be expected. So, even though the television–
sport relationship still holds its power and deserves the further exploration
detailed in this chapter (Boyle and Whannel 2010; Gantz 2011; Rowe 2011), the text
will also address the digital media that are beginning to transform sport and the
sport–media relationship, and have the potential to bring about greater change in
the future.

2 Approaches to the sport – television relationship

Since media and communications scholars started showing a more persistent inter-
est in the field of mediated sports communication in the late 1980s, the role of
 Mediatization of sports 527

television has been high up on the research agenda. In particular, there has been
an interest in scrutinizing how the distinctive symbiotic relationship, that has
always existed between modern mass media and sport, changed with the advent
of television into something which has been termed a “sports/media complex”
(Jhally 1989: 77). From its outset, this term was used to encapsulate two basic –
and still valid – observations regarding the role of media in relation to sport,
namely that:

(1) Most people do the vast majority of their sports spectating via the media (largely through
television), so that the cultural experience is hugely mediated; and (2) from a financial point
of view, professional, and increasingly, college sports are dependent upon media money for
their very survival and their present organizational structure. (Jhally 1989: 77–78)

This approach to media and sport originated in North America where both the
media- and sports systems have been distinctively different from their counterparts
in Europe and Scandinavia, for example. From the outset the North American
model emphasized the material and economic aspects of the relationship between
media and sports. In recent years economic and commercial interests have also
come to influence sports in Europe, where media-revenues are playing an ever
bigger role in the development of several sports. On both sides of the Atlantic
television has impacted sports revenues and so acted as a particularly strong agent
for historical changes (Klatell and Marcus 1988; Barnett 1990; Helland 2007). This
has lead to Jhally’s concept being widely used and researchers have scrutinized
the nature of certain types of collaboration and relationships between sports and
television. In particular there has been a focus on the development of close part-
nerships between a relatively small number of major and highly professionalized
sports organizations and big broadcast organizations. The relationships in these
cases have been characterized by the presence of contractually-sanctioned mutual
obligations, the strong economic power of television, and shared commercial ori-
entations and mutual understandings. Together these have lead to countless
adjustments and changes of rules in the games, league and tournament structures,
and business models (Klatell and Marcus 1988; Bellamy 1989; Spa, Rivenburg, and
Larson 1995; Whitson 1998; Fortunato 2001; Bellamy and Walker 2004). It has also
lead to entertainment-oriented selection processes and narrative strategies in the
production of programmes, and to pro-active initiatives from the sports organiza-
tions, that seek both to influence the television partner’s portrayal of their sport
and personalities and to secure their commercial partners’ maximum exposure
(Gruneau 1989; Fortunato 2001). This type of collaboration between television and
sport has resulted in programmes and events where former boundaries between
the sports event, the mediated representation of this event and third-party com-
mercial interests have been blurred.
The relationship between sport and television as outlined above resonates well
with the basic conceptions formulated within the framework of mediatization. The
528 Kirsten Frandsen

empirical work that has been done is pertinent to mediatization theory and it
provides information on various aspects of television’s transformative role. One of
the all-important points in most contributions is that it is made extremely clear
how the economic element in the field of sport is a particularly significant engine
for changes. So, in the field of sport, mediatization is a process that has been
particularly closely linked with commercialization.
The observations behind many discussions of mediatization involve both a
qualitative and a quantitative view (Hepp 2009). Regarding the latter it is argued
that the significance of media is increasing to such a degree that a new theoretical
framework is needed. Therefore it is highly relevant to reflect on the scope of these
changes in relation to the field of sports on a more general level. But here studies
from the dominant “sport/media complex” perspective to some extent fall short.
The studies on offer are not exhaustive and somehow seem skewed when used to
analyse the role of media and television in relation to sports from a broad perspec-
tive. First of all, most contributions are case-based studies that use a, more or less,
implicit media centric point of departure. These cases often illustrate the many
qualitative facets of a new type of relationship in which programmes hold a domi-
nant position in terms of media output and media consumption. In this way they
confirm and illustrate (quantitatively) dominant and explicit (qualitative) aspects
of media culture. Unfortunately, this may leave the reader with the general impres-
sion that the field of sport as a whole is totally penetrated and governed by logics
(Altheide and Snow 1979; Jhally 1989) stemming from commercially based broad-
cast organizations – which is not really the case. Second, the media/sports com-
plex perspective is highly informed by events of the 1980s and 1990s, when market
powers gained strength in both a European and North American context. At this
time certain critical voices were raised and scholars turned their attention to cases
that demonstrated how these powers were enacted in certain practices. But it some-
how has also left us with a blind spot with regard to some of the more indirect
and paradoxical aspects of change facilitated by the sport/media/television rela-
tionship. These are changes that may not at first be conceptualized as effects of
mediatization – but nevertheless are important in our analysis, as they prepare
the ground for a new and much more pervasive phase of mediatization provided
by digital media.

3 Common ground for analysis

The sport/media complex approach has highlighted, through a case oriented focus
on complexity, interrelatedness, and blurred boundaries, domain specific exam-
ples of processes, which today are recognized as more general social and cultural
trends. A condition that is now coined in the concept of mediatization and used
to characterize a more general situation where media have become “semi-autono-
 Mediatization of sports 529

mous institutions in society” and at the same time become “integrated into the
very fabric of human interaction in various social institutions” (Hjarvard 2012: 30).
The intent of leading scholars in this field is to “develop a social and cultural
theory of the media” (Krotz 2009: 23). Several contributors (Hjarvard 2008; Krotz
2009; Lundby 2009b; Hepp 2009, 2011) to the field have addressed more general
ontological and epistemological questions regarding media as agents for social
and cultural change that provide a good basis for a more specific discussion of
the television–sport relationship. Despite rival approaches and heated discussions
of terms and concepts there seems to have developed a sort of common ground in
the field, explicating some very basic ideas about the object of study and
approach – ideas that are partly applicable but somehow also need to be read-
dressed and expanded for the specific case of sports.
First of all, there is the idea that mediatization is a social process, where media
exert a growing influence on society to the extent that they seem to play a role in
the transformation of social and cultural fields. Nevertheless, the focus of research
is supposed to be on interrelation processes (Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby 2010).
Thus the approach in principle constitutes a scholarly move away from a purely
media-centric or media deterministic perspective, seeking instead to encourage an
analytical practice and a more interdisciplinary approach that may deepen our
understanding of how media can contribute to cultural and social change (Hjar-
vard 2012). In our case this offers the opportunity for the inclusion of an important
alternative perspective on television’s influence on sports. This less media centric
approach allows us to take into consideration how the development of strong
partnerships between certain broadcasters and certain sports has had wider struc-
tural implications for sport as a whole.
Exactly how the relations between media and other domains have been con-
ceptualized also differ. They have been seen as reciprocal, as one-way, or as multi-
level processes that are difficult to analyse on an empirical level. But generally
there has been a move away from linear one-way models towards a more complex,
open, and dialectical understanding of this relation (Hepp 2011: 6). The overall
aim of this chapter is to push further in this direction, first because sport has its
own distinctive interest in media. Sports also have their own cultures, which in a
few cases are so strong that they have been able to set up certain limitations
regarding the degree of transformation and regain certain aspects of control over
television coverage (Boyle and Haynes 2004; Helland 2007).
Second, there seems to be a common understanding of mediatization as a
historical process characterized by both continuity and change and sometimes
even contradictions. For instance digital media presently provide some opportu-
nities for change and challenges, but they may also be seen as “hybrid versions
or reconfigurations of conventional media” (Schultz 2004: 97). And the paradoxi-
cal reason why digital media are challenging the hegemonic status of television is
that sports content has become of critical importance for an evolving digital media
530 Kirsten Frandsen

market due to broadcast television’s historical ability to provide “vast expansions

in audiences and capital injections into sport” (Hutchins and Rowe 2009: 355).
And what may be even more important in our case: digital media do not displace
old media or existing communicative forms but may for instance build up televi-
sion audiences (Rowe 2011: 97) or contribute to changes of the social interaction
in sports in new ways, such as when they provide a “radical growth in communica-
tion about communication” (Rothenbuhler 2009: 290). They also enable people to
organize their own sporting practices in new ways and to form new types of social
groups that actually challenge traditional organizational and economic structures
in sports. This pattern of continuity and change may unfold in various ways with
regards to the interrelations at work in production, representation, and consump-
tion.
Mediatization is for these reasons not at all a uniform socio-cultural change
following the same paths across different fields, but may manifest itself through
quite diverse processes, as it is highly influenced by both the cultural or social
fields in question and the social and cultural contexts (Hjarvard 2008; Hepp 2009;
Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby 2010). Profound reflections on the specificities of the
field of sport, on television, and on differences and historical changes in terms of
media systemic and sports systemic contexts are thus informative musts if we want
to understand the role of media in relation to sports in more general terms.
Third, mediatization is seen as a process that is related to other socio-historical
processes like globalization, individualization, and commercialization (Hjarvard
2008; Livingstone 2009). These social processes also shape mediatization (Lundby
2009a: 4) and we “cannot always be certain that observed media impacts imply
submission to media logic alone” (Hjarvard 2008: 126). Lied (2012), whose research
includes empirical studies of the mediatization of religion, concurs saying that the
perspective may make us blind to other cultural and social dynamics – of which
some may be unique to the domain in question. In the case of sport these reserva-
tions become key. In particular there seems to be a very strong connection between
globalizing and commercializing factors at play in this field. The international
spread of sport and the establishment of international sports organizations along
with the worldwide acceptance of rules governing specific sport forms in the late
19th and 20th centuries were significant globalizing processes, which opened the
way for global media distribution and later global sports equipment industries
(Maguire 1999; Helland 2007). In turn the medium of television has come to accel-
erate and amplify these globalizing and commercializing forces’ influence on
sports. But there also seems to be inherent unique dynamics at play in the field
that prime sports for letting in some of these forces.
 Mediatization of sports 531

4 Historical roots of the relationship

The interrelation between television and sports per se needs to be understood from
a historical perspective – which also encompasses the relation between sport and
other media.
As mentioned above one of the more implicit premises behind the discussion
of mediatization seems to be that social activities and practices have been con-
ducted according to a kind of internal logic – without attention to the needs of
media. To some extent this falls short in the case of sport.
First, sport has historically had a very close relationship with modern mass
media. It could even be claimed that the two have grown up together and to a
certain degree have been dependent on each other. Many of the pioneers in the
modern sports movement were, for example, also involved in the development of
sports journalism. Coverage in the newspapers attracted new practitioners at the
same time as it attracted audiences willing to pay the entrance fees. The coverage
also both educated and initiated its audiences in the virtues and technicalities of
sports. Sport was a new kind of content for the newspapers that could serve to
attract larger readerships – and at the same time attach the newspaper institution’s
image to a modern cultural phenomenon that was also on the rise. Newspapers
would organize sports events in order to both build up interest in the sports and
consumption of the papers. The Tour de France cycling race is a well-known exam-
ple of a sports event that was invented by a newspaper, L’Auto, in order to increase
circulation and readership. And football’s European Cup, today known as the
Champions League, was initiated in 1955 by the French newspaper L’Equipe.
The basic point here is that from the outset it seems quite difficult to establish
a clear distinction between the two fields, as media and sports have had mutual
interests throughout their recent development (Helland 2007). Media interest
played a role in the formation of sports as social activities that engaged broader
social groups – and for this reason media professionals have had quite an influ-
ence in the sports movement for decades. Some media professionals have become
directly involved in boards, others as coaches, and some have been appointed
members of committees taking care of public relations. The exact implication of
this kind of influence is difficult to judge in general and complicates a more precise
historical account of the mediatization of sports. Helland (2003: 27) has pointed
to the fact that the standardization of rules within sports and the establishment of
leagues within football, for example, have been a prerequisite for attracting large
audiences and at the same time have become key content for media. According to
him this type of standardization made football and modern newspapers a good
match for each other. And according to McChesney (1989) early American sports-
writers took part in the development of standardizing rules and statistics in base-
ball, which he considers the basis for the ensuing years of expansive and continual
coverage in the newspapers.
532 Kirsten Frandsen

A last example of what may be termed more circuitous influences is the early
development of sports sections in the newspapers with their images of sports peo-
ple and, later on, interviews. Together with the rise of the press photo this has
“helped to establish the beginnings of an individualisation in sport” (Whannel
2002: 31): an aspect that radio and later television came to support, as they pro-
vided audiences with a new sense of intimacy and immediacy with the individual
athletes. But it was the print media that lay the ground for this more general
change, sometimes referred to as the “social production of stardom” (Whannel
2002: 30). In sports this change has not only influenced the imagination of sports
by the audience but also brought about certain hierarchies, inequalities, and pat-
terns of moral pressures on individuals within the milieu.
An important, fundamental point to be taken from this historical digression
about the roots of the media–sport relationship is that the interrelation between
media and this particular field is much more than a matter of other institutions
subordinating themselves to the needs and formats of the media due to commercial
interests. The reason why it made sense for sports to orient themselves to the
media – and for instance establish press boxes at stadiums – is that in the same
period as sport evolved into a cultural domain of its own, media attained a certain
type of function in modern society, namely “to produce public communication for
a social and cultural self-understanding-discourse” (Hepp 2011: 6). Media therefore
also served to provide sports with a sort of societal, “institutionalised recognition”
(Birrell 1981: 373), something which at that time was important and actively
worked to “legitimate sport as a cultural institution” (McChesney 1989: 52).
This is a social function, which is still powerful, even though it tends to be
missed in many analyses of the television–sport relationship, which tend to focus
on commercialization. Sport is long established as a cultural institution, but social
recognition is still key, and broadcast television still provides the largest simulta-
neous audience for events. For the impressive number of sports in which athletes
and managers do not have the luxury of regular contracts and high salaries this
function of television is still important, and so ensures that the sport–television
relationship continues even though other media may today serve certain interests
better.

5 Sport as a communicative form with inherent

logics
Another highly relevant approach that throws light on the relationship between
the media and sports is that offered by Rothenbuhler (2009). He reflects on mediat-
ization from a communication perspective. The underlying basis for inclusion of
this perspective is the basic observation that sports in the media – and in particu-
 Mediatization of sports 533

lar when it comes to television – is coverage of events. Staged as an event sport

can be said to constitute a communicative form of its own with a particular narra-
tive and dramaturgic structure. This narrative structure has fitted very well with
the increasing priority that has been given to news values and topicality in modern
mass media, and it has in particular possessed a strong entertainment potential
in live-coverage in broadcast media (Stiehler 2003; Frandsen 2008; Real 2011). It
is television’s unique ability to convey this in a certain mediated form and to
influence it in an adjustment of rules, clothing, scheduling of events etc. in order
to accommodate the needs of the broadcast institutions and sponsors, which has
most often been emphasized in the analysis of media’s influence on sports. Even
the large screens at stadiums have been used to exemplify how the media plays a
part in live sport. These are all important and relevant observations when we
discuss mediatization and mirror what Schulz has reflected upon as processes of
“accommodation” and “amalgamation” (Schulz 2004: 89–90). But they seem to
leave out a more basic observation about the relationship.
Television has had an influence on sport both due to its internal technological
nature and the differing external social functions and organizational contexts that
have formed the social use of the medium. This composite of varying formative
forces has often been by coined by Altheide and Snow’s (1979) concept of media
logic. Their concept – or the use of it – has been criticized for causing both impre-
cise, simplistic, and too linear understandings of the processes at work and for
this reason it is not used as a leading concept in this chapter. Nevertheless part
of their conceptualization still catches an important point that is valid for our
framework. Their basic idea is that the power of media is not absolute but has a
moderating counterpart in the logics of the varying social and cultural domains
with which they deal. This is allowed for in their analysis of media and sport,
where they emphasize that sport has its own logic and that this is different from
the logic of television, as it is action and activities, which are “meaningful and
rewarding in their own right” (Altheide and Snow 1979: 219). Unfortunately they
do not elaborate on this and therefore end up with a biased analysis illustrating
primarily the powers of media. But they give us an important clue for the develop-
ment of our framework, as they actually point to the fact that one of the inherent
logics in sport originates from its communicative characteristics as a game phe-
nomenon, and this establishes a crux in our search for a more nuanced under-
standing of the basic social and cultural forces behind the relationship between
sport and media. Rothenbuhler argues along similar lines, when he states: “Per-
haps the logic is not in the medium but in the communication” (Rothenbuhler
2009: 288). As staged events sports games are forms that communicate certain
meanings, which are powerful forces in the relationship. They have their own
cultural value, and historically the games and some of the sporting bodies have
proven so strong that they recurrently have set their own media agenda in relation
to traditional journalistic norms and traditional patterns of scheduling in televi-
534 Kirsten Frandsen

sion, for example. Dayan and Katz (1992) pick up on this point in their conceptuali-
zation of sports events as media events.
The French philosopher Roger Caillois ([1958] 2001) has recognized and con-
tributed substantially to our understanding of the cultural and social value of sport
as a game. He has labelled sport as a specific type of game phenomenon, which
is characterized by a strong focus on competition and social recognition. Accord-
ingly the ultimate goal of every event is to point out a winner and to recognize
the superiority and skill of this winner. This recognition is at first offered by the
spectators, but is evidently augmented by media coverage. So, again, if we want
to understand why sports in general are disposed to adjust to media through these
processes, it may be more than a matter of money and of sport purely subordinat-
ing itself to the needs of the media.
This said, sport is for several reasons also very much about money – and so
is the relation between media and sports. Sport is providing experiences that are
entertaining, and which people therefore are willing to pay for. So, there has
always been a material aspect in the relation between sports and media (Jhally
1989). This in particular applies to the North American case, where the relationship
has been significantly influenced by the search for profits, not only by those
engaged in the organization of sports but also by the media, and to some extent
by the states which have legislation that supports the “commodity structure” of
this relationship (Jhally 1989: 81). In Europe, although perhaps not to the same
extent historically as in North America, sports have also become professionalized.
For instance, early on in football’s development clubs in large cities became a
profit-making entertainment industry oriented towards the needs and resources of
the working class (Andreff and Staudohar 2002; Helland 2003, 2007).
In the Scandinavian countries civil society movements rather than financial
entrepreneurs have been the drivers behind sports development. In these coun-
tries, sport as entertainment is a smaller concern that developed later than in
many neighbouring European countries and North America. But, although the
commercial dynamics and interests were not that strong – there nevertheless was
concern about money. Financing of the amateur organizations was not focused on
profit making for individual entrepreneurs and the athletes were amateurs, but
still, like in the North American case and in European professional sports, the
whole existence of the organization and activities relied on revenues – which for
a long time almost solely came from membership fees/subscriptions and entrance
fees (Andreff and Staudohar 2002).
A report on the status and condition of Danish top sports from 1982 points to
an inherent logic in sport itself that means its relationship with the media could
be described as pragmatic and why at a certain stage in history even Danish sports
became more prone to take a clear-cut commercial direction. The competitive logic
of sports implies an incessant focus on expansion, which is encapsulated in the
Olympic motto: “Citius, altius, fortius”. This drive has led to sport transcending
 Mediatization of sports 535

national borders and has resulted in strong international organization and regula-
tion of most sports. At the same time internationalization has meant a growing
need for resources as athletes compete at increasingly high levels on the global
stage. From this perspective, the inherent logic of sport itself seems to make it
susceptible to erosion of amateur ideals and the onward march of commercializa-
tion, especially during the second half of the 20th century to the present.
Summing up so far, one can say that this brief outline of the history and logic
of sport itself provides us with a more multi-faceted understanding of the factors
and dynamics influencing the interrelation between media and sport. And in par-
ticular it is worth noticing that in this cultural and social field we find a relation-
ship, which from the outset has been characterized by a specific but varying inter-
twinement of both social and economic dynamics.

6 Televisual specificities as agents for changes

in sports
The advent of television brought new dynamics into the sport–media relationship
as the technology itself constituted a particularly good match with sport as a com-
municative form, and therefore on a long-term basis contributed to changes not
only in sport, but also the mass media predating television.
The early reactions of sports organizations and discussions between television
pioneers and people involved in sports on both sides of the Atlantic in the late
1940s and early 1950s show how quickly those working in sport recognized televi-
sion’s communicative potential (Barnett 1990; Whannel 1992; Bellamy and Walker
2004; Frandsen 2013b).
First television’s audio-visual format offers an obvious communicative advan-
tage for sport, which is basically the performance of bodily actions. Though sports
events can be multi-sensory, the visual signs representing moving bodies are the
dominant elements of the sports experience (Frandsen 2008). Television’s use of
both pictures and sound provided a medium with a unique ability to convey the
sports experience. It was a medium with an expressive and presentational bias
(Meyrowitz 1985), and as such it could represent the sporting experience in new
ways, conveying more information about the people, the emotions, and the whole
sports event as a complex mix of “gestures, signs, vocalisations, marks and move-
ments produced by the mere presence of a person in an environment” (Meyrowitz
1985: 93–94). Due to these communicative characteristics television in the long
run came to change sports. The ability to visualize and bring the mass audience
much closer to the individuals partaking in sports, and to their feelings, has con-
tributed to the trend for top athletes to be lauded as stars and celebrities. And
what is even more important from a mediatization perspective is that television’s
536 Kirsten Frandsen

audio-visual format offers the opportunity for viewers, whether athletes or specta-
tors, to learn how to perform both in a sporting environment and the television
studio. This kind of stylistic behavioural influence can be observed when boys
imitate the performances of their idols known from television when they celebrate
a goal in football, and when athletes are interviewed and their stories, answers,
and attitudes somehow look very similar. As Rowe discussed this currently seems
to imply that top athletes on television are increasingly expected to comply with
both the conventions and well-known practices seen in sports coverage, as well as
an increasing number of “representational conventions familiar in other popular
televisual genres” (Rowe 2011: 101).
Second, the ability to distribute this audio-visual representation of sports
events directly into people’s homes and to do this live means there is a unique
match with a game-phenomenon like sports, where uncertainty about the result
of a competition is a basic attraction. Television could distribute the experience
immediately, and what is even more important: It could be done on a much larger
scale than in previous media. The distribution networks crossed local, regional,
and international contexts at a very early stage in the medium’s development. So,
television also contributed to changes in sports as it provided sport with a new
audience – both in terms of quantity and quality. Across cultures television pio-
neers therefore considered sport to be key content in order to sell television sets
and establish television as a new programme activity – both for the first commer-
cial channels in North America (Bellamy and Walker 2004: 7–8) and for European
public service channels that needed popular content of national interest and had
an obligation to cover “all events of interest to the public” (Barnett 1990: 15).
Television’s unique communicative features and early interest in sports as con-
tent gave rise to ambivalent discussions in the field of sports – at first a troubled
relationship took form. For the sports organizations a key concern was whether
live transmissions from sports events would make people stay at home instead of
attending live events and paying entrance fees. This would cause economic prob-
lems for both professional enterprises and amateur organizations whose events
were transmitted. But transmissions from sports events on television were also
considered to present a problem on a much larger scale, as those clubs, who had
less prominent events taking place either at the same time or in the same weekend,
were in danger of decreasing audiences and a subsequent loss of revenue (Klatell
and Marcus 1988; Barnett 1990). So, initially television was for several reasons
considered a potential threat to sport’s position as a central provider of recrea-
tional activities and entertainment in people’s spare time.
The medium and the challenges it represented were not met concordantly by
all the sports, however, and here internal differences in terms of culture and organ-
izational strength seem to have played a crucial role. Even in the very early days
television was welcomed by some organizations. However, in countries including
both the United Kingdom and Denmark, with their different models for sports
 Mediatization of sports 537

development, some national sports organizations were so worried about the threat
from the new medium, that boycotts were suggested (Barnett 1990; Frandsen
2013b) and in Denmark even put into action for a very short while in 1957.

7 Mediatization as asynchronous processes

A general view may be that television has contributed to the evolution of sport in
the same way across cultures due to its communicative characteristics. This is
partially true and is grounded in the global diffusion of sports and a strengthening
of sport’s own organizational structures, where the “constitutive” rules of the
games and the increasingly important big international events are strictly gov-
erned and sanctioned by international sports organizations. And it is also partially
true, as we today face the result of a long historical process, where some sports
organizations and some broadcast institutions gradually have evolved into having
the same interests as their two domains both have been subject to commercializa-
tion. Even though this process has followed asynchronous paths in for instance
the European and the North American sports and media systems, we can observe
many similarities, as present adjustments stem from the same type of strategic
partnerships with merging interests.
How this end was achieved, however, differed, as hinted at above. The rela-
tionship between television and sport in Northern Europe, for example, could be
described as having developed in two distinct phases. In the first phase broadcast
institutions were subject to strong public and political control, and their interest
in covering sports were primarily motivated by their public service obligations to
serve content of interest to the public. In that sense the institutions were not
independent from the outset – they saw their role as one of serving the interests
of other social institutions. But television’s distribution technology and the estab-
lishment of international networks and organizations for distribution of content
facilitated important changes in sports.
Right from the launch of the European Broadcasting Union in the summer of
1954, it was discovered that distribution of transmissions from big national and
international sports events in the members’ respective national territories were
particularly popular among the audiences. This ability to cross borders and visu-
ally expose arenas and games to much larger and very often international audien-
ces quickly aroused commercial interest in sports and its events. In a European
context this meant that television’s influence on sport, putting aside for a moment
how the medium changed athletes into personalities and celebrities, was more
indirect and to some degree ambivalent. Television contributed to the commerciali-
zation of sport, and it thus changed sport because it provided some sports with
new commercial partners. This phase has been described as a stage of moderniza-
tion, where television was not just an active agent of change – but also subject to
changes, as it was “transformed into a channel for commercial exposure” (Helland
538 Kirsten Frandsen

2007: 111). As described above, the Scandinavian model was slightly different to
that described for other European countries and the changes that occurred with
the development of the sport–television relationship in these countries can be
described as a phase of paradoxes. In the Scandinavian countries the broadcasters
expressed strong concern and even resisted the commercialization of sport. They
were not allowed to carry advertising and were covering sports on cultural and
ideological grounds. But as broadcasters with small national audiences and limited
economic resources, their sports coverage also relied heavily on transmissions
from the European Broadcasting Union’s network. In Denmark, for instance, such
transmissions made up the majority of hours of sports programming. These trans-
missions, which focused on international sports and had an increasingly commer-
cial orientation, began to affect Danish sports and their events, which began to
have problems getting coverage (Frandsen 2013b).
From early on television’s “function as a conveyor of exposure and exhibition”
(Helland 2007: 106) opened the way for sport’s move away from the amateur ethos,
a movement that accelerated throughout the 1970s and 1980s. And some of the
new commercial partners’ engagements with sports were motivated by interna-
tional marketing ambitions and thus very directly related to television coverage
and distribution and sometimes even requested that the sports make some speci-
fied changes. When the Danish brewery, Carlsberg, and the Danish Football Associ-
ation signed their first sponsorship deal in 1978, Carlsberg actually specified that
the football organization should spend the money on the men’s national team and
that it needed to hire a new type of internationally oriented coach for the team.
In the second phase television came to play a much more direct role as an
agent of change, as television itself was commercialized, and needed certain kinds
of sport content to secure ratings, which again served to secure revenues from
television’s commercial partners. Television’s motivation for covering sports was
altered by new conditions in the media system. Revenues from broadcasting rights
became an increasingly important element in the business models for sports and
competition between broadcasters began to drive up the prices. This dynamic has
affected the business models and structure in sport as a whole. The relationship
between sport and television has for a few selected sports gradually developed
into a new type of strategic partnership based on mutual understanding and the
creation of a shared product (Fortunato 2001). Such partnerships are characterized
by a merging of interests revolving around two different types of mutual adjust-
ments. First, we find structural changes on both sides that aim to secure a whole
product understood as a complex of both partners’ products (events and pro-
grammes), as well as the respective commercial partners’ best possible exposure
to the largest possible audience. This is about frequency, placement, and amounts
of time and space spent on an issue and therefore relatively easy to observe for
outsiders (Fortunato 2001: 35). Changes in leagues, tournaments, and games and
changes in television schedules, programme elements, priorities, and staging of
 Mediatization of sports 539

interviews in certain settings illustrate the many ways that this strategic ambition
is unfolding and results in changes on both sides. The second type of adjustment
is less easy to observe for an outsider, as it is about more qualitative aspects in
the presentation of the content – the portrayal. This can be seen in adjustments
in focus, framing, and thematizing of events as well as clothing, flooring, and
lighting in the arenas – the production values as such. The second kind of adjust-
ment illustrates a strategic interest in how the audience thinks about the product
and what kind of values they associate it with. In practice this changes sports on
an organizational and managerial level and can be seen as an increase in the
recruitment of a new type of employee, namely communication experts, and an
increasing organizational concern with athletes’ and coaches’ communicative per-
formance in relation to media in general and in relation to specific broadcast-
partners.
An important consequence of mediatization in this second phase is that as
competition in the television markets became increasingly fierce television’s inter-
est became focused on a few sports, namely those that have quickly proved able
to attract desirable high ratings within certain target groups on a very regular
basis. During the last decade the broadcasting rights for a few selected sports
have even become so important, that they have been a factor in reformatting the
broadcasting structure in several markets and have altered selection processes in
sports journalistic practices in general (Boyle and Haynes 2004; Helland 2007).
The partnerships have almost monopolized the content output, as the broadcasters
have sought to maximize the outcome of their investment. So, in the second phase
mediatization has not been a general or uniform condition in sport as such and it
has produced different patterns of polarization within the field. For a few, often
major, sports television has become a constant, permeating many aspects of their
activities and organization and involving huge revenues from both television and
sponsors. But for the majority of sports and in particular for many women’s sports,
which in general have not been able to attract as high ratings as male sports,
television contracts are more out of reach than ever and accordingly limit financial
and performance opportunities. This development is not as such mediatization,
but it is a long-term effect on the macro level in the field of sport caused specifi-
cally by the emergence and presence of television that could have long-term impli-
cations.

8 Starting up a new phase?

Seen from a media consumption perspective, television represents a strong force
of continuity, as it is still “king”. But in a Danish context the Internet has got a
prominent status as the second most used sports medium among audiences under
fifty (Toft 2012). This is supported by the acquisition of wireless networks in homes,
540 Kirsten Frandsen

smartphones, and tablets. So, the sports audience is increasingly engaging with
sports in new ways through different types of digital platforms, and broadcast
television is in a phase of adjustment to the new media environment, for instance
by adopting different types of cross media strategies when covering big sports
events (Gantz 2011; Frandsen 2012).
Seen from the perspective of those sports organizations that have not been
able to get television contracts on a more regular and profitable basis, digital
media represent a historical shift, offering a new and very alluring opportunity to
bypass the agenda-setting power of television and perhaps create new types of
revenues. So, the polarizing forces of television may have prepared the ground
extremely well for digital media in such a way that they must be expected to
change the orientations, behaviours, and organizational structures within sports
organizations in completely new ways. An example of this is the Danish Badmin-
ton Federation. As part of a new strategic focus on using the global scope of the
Internet to attract new sponsors with business interests in Asia, where the top
players in Danish badminton are well-known and frequent guests, this organiza-
tion has changed its name to Badminton Denmark. It has also given priority to the
production of audio-visual material exposing the stars in Danish badminton, the
establishment of a separate Badminton Denmark channel on YouTube, and it has
developed its website in such a way that it better meets the interests of an interna-
tional audience (Interview with Trine Bay, Head of Communications, Badminton
Denmark).
In a small market like Denmark, the new environment has put television’s
resources under new pressures. A strong demand for content for an increasing
number of supplemental channels and websites seems to pave the way for new
influences from sports. User-generated content from individual athletes in different
sports and audio-visual material produced by communication professionals in
sports organizations is increasingly used directly by broadcasters in both tradi-
tional news programmes and on their websites. And even though much of this is
produced by employees who are specifically skilled to meet the qualitative norms
of professional broadcast organizations and as such is a good example of mediati-
zation taking place on an organizational level, it also represents a new proactive
orientation and potential for influencing the agenda of mainstream media.
Despite the many opportunities offered by digital media, for a group of major
and very powerful sports organizations broadcast television still holds the position
as the all-powerful focal point in their business models providing the majority of
revenues. Digital media’s ability to provide the audience with competing live
audio-visual representations and uncontrolled narratives about events and stars
does mean that these sports organizations and their television partners consider
them as a threat (Marshall, Walker and Russo 2010; Rowe 2011; Sanderson 2011).
Their strategies and attitudes towards digital media therefore take a different direc-
tion, and so will mediatization.
 Mediatization of sports 541

Analyses of different cases have already accounted for how digital media in
many respects makes the whole question about mediatization of sports much more
complex. Digital media permeate everyday practices to a much larger degree than
television. Thus mediated communication moves much closer to the core of social
processes in sport and may for this reason bring the relationship between sport
and media into a new phase. For instance digital media in the form of social media
and tracking technologies have made it possible for people to relate to each other,
find training partners and organize and experience their sporting practices in new
ways – very often independent from and outside the traditional organizations. And
for fans it has become possible to organize themselves in new ways. The Internet
has even facilitated the establishment of an Internet based community, MyFoot-
ballClub, whose goal has been to organize both funding, take-over, and fan-based
management of professional football clubs.
In relation to existing major sports, digital media have speeded up and multi-
plied the amount of communication about events and in particular about sports
celebrities, and thus have created a vortex of uncontrollable and unpredictable
content around big televised sports events (Whannel 2002). And new types of
social interaction between sports stars, the fans, and media professionals pose
new challenges for individuals and organizations concerned with the management
of communication, as well as for sports journalists (Sanderson 2011; Steensen 2012;
Frandsen 2012).
So, in many ways digital media appear to have a significant role to play in the
future of sport and will undoubtedly challenge existing business models and shape
the internal and external organizational structure of the field as a whole.

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VIII. Faith and knowledge
Mia Lövheim
24 Mediatization and religion
Abstract: The latest decades have seen a growing recognition of the importance of
media for contemporary religious life within studies of religion. This is connected
to recent debates about the value of secularization theory for explaining changes
in individual religiosity and in the public role of religion in modern society, and a
broader interest in popular religious practices and material forms. Within the
growing literature on religion and media, a more specific debate has developed
concerning the theory of mediatization and religion. This debate was initiated in
2008 by Stig Hjarvard’s work on the mediatization of religion. This chapter sets
out the background for the debate and presents the arguments and different
approaches expressed in it, as well as some empirical applications of the theory.
By highlighting distinctions between the categories “religion” and “media” and
the relation between religion and processes of modernization, this debate brings
up key issues in the fields of media and religion alike. The article closes with a
discussion on how the mediatization of religion theory might be developing to
better account for patterns and complexities in contemporary interactions between
religion and media.

Keywords: religion, secularization, mediation, Nordic, Stig Hjarvard, agency, so-

ciology of religion

The interplay between media and religion is an intriguing topic. If, as stated in
the introduction to the volume, mediatization is a concept connected to societal
and technological development, religion has in contrast often been conceived as
the epitome of tradition or “authentic” human lifestyles and beliefs preserved from
the transforming powers of modernity. However, as expressed by Charles Ess when
reflecting on the revolutionary powers ascribed to computer technology in the mid-
1990s, religion as humanity’s oldest expression of values and community is as
likely as other forms of human life and culture both to impact and to be impacted
by changes in modes of communication technology (1996: 9).
Mediatization as a theory aspires to describe and explain the long-term out-
comes of how mediation, conceived as the performance of social and cultural activ-
ities through technical media, increasingly come to saturate everyday life and thus
have become “part of the very fabric” of society and culture (Hepp et al. 2010).
The use of the concept mediatization to theorize changes in religion as a social
and cultural activity needs to be discussed against the background of changes in
the presence of religion in contemporary society. These changes have generated a
rethinking of theories and methods within studies of religion and, furthermore, an
increased interest in the interplay between media and religion.
548 Mia Lövheim

1 Mediatization and the “resurgence” of religion

in the public sphere
The latest decades have seen what has been termed the global “resurgence” of
religion (Toft, Philpott and Shah 2011). While early accounts linked the phenom-
enon to expressions of fundamentalism, particularly in the Middle East region,
and to international terrorist attacks the concept has broadened to concern the
rise of religion as a topic in political discourse in the Western world. With the
publication of Jürgen Habermas’ article on Religion in the public sphere in 2006,
an event that timed with protests against the publication of the Mohammed car-
toons by the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, this issue became estab-
lished in broader academic circles.
At the heart of this situation is the presence of religion as an issue of concern
not only for the private life of the individual but also in the public sphere of
politics, law, and even economy. The dominant story of modernity, as foretold by
Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, predicted that religion would disap-
pear with the scientific, economic, social, and rational development of modern
society. The process of secularization would mean the separation of religion from
other social spheres, primarily the political sphere, but also the privatization and
decline of religious beliefs and practices. As pointed out by José Casanova, already
in 1994 empirical evidence of the continued presence of religion in the public
spheres of civil society and politics questions this thesis. In particular this con-
cerned the presumed casual relation between societal differentiation and the priva-
tization and decline of religion (1994: 19, 35).
Following this critique a reconsideration of the dominant secularization para-
digm has become the major discussion within sociology of religion (Davie 2007).
This discussion seeks to connect the heightened attention to religion, not least
Islam, in the political discourse to a number of interconnected tendencies in con-
temporary society:
– Survey data, for example from the World Value Survey, points to a slow but
steady decline in adherence to traditional religious dogmas, attendance to reli-
gious services, and importance of religion in daily life since the late 1980s,
particularly among populations in north-western Europe (Inglehart 2007).
– Religion appears on new arenas, and in new forms, outside of formal religious
institutions, forms of authority and control, discourses and practices. Majority
churches as well as new “styles” of religion connected through temporal
events and social networks still have a strong presence not least in the growing
health care and wellbeing sectors (Woodhead and Cato 2012).
– The profuse use and mix of symbols, narratives, and practices drawn from a
variety of religious traditions in entertainment media and culture.

The combination of these tendencies suggests that although some forms of religion
seem to be declining other forms of religion, in public and private contexts,
 Mediatization and religion 549

develop rather than disappear through social and cultural modernization. How-
ever, it is also clear that religion now becomes defined and used not only by
religious institutions but also by political, juridical, health service, educational,
and not least media institutions according to their practices and purposes. James
Beckford in his discussion of religion in highly modernized societies concludes
that religion “… has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but is no less
potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent cultural resource or form
which may act as the vehicle of change, challenge or conservation. Consequently,
religion has become less predictable.” (Beckford 1989: 170).
In all of the tendencies expressed above media plays a crucial role. There is
increasing empirical evidence to support the idea of a heightened and more diver-
sified interest in religion in modern mass media (Taira, Poole and Knott 2011; PEW
2011), and that modern mass media are the prime arenas where people in general
encounter religion in daily life (Lövheim 2012b; Hjarvard 2008b; Lundby 2010).

2 The field of studies in media, religion,

and culture
Despite growing awareness of the importance of media for contemporary religious
life the inclusion of insights, concepts, and methods from media studies among
scholars of religion, particularly in European context, is a recent phenomenon
(Davie 2000: 104). On the other side of the turf, religion has been a marginal topic
in studies of the media in contemporary society. This situation can be attributed
to the limitations of dominant disciplinary conceptualizations of “religion” and
“media” in religious studies and media studies respectively, as pointed out by
Knut Lundby and Stewart Hoover in Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture. This
volume, published in 1997, marked the starting point of a sub-field of research
about the interplay of media and religion. The initiation of this field coincided with
a first wave of a “resurgence of religion” following the rise of neo-evangelicalism
in American politics in 1976 and of Islam in global politics through the 1979 revolu-
tion in Iran (cf. Hoover 2009: 124). The international research field “Media, Reli-
gion and Culture” was established in Uppsala 1993 and has through sequent con-
ferences provided fertile ground for interdisciplinary research. The publications
that have emerged from this research show the exponential growth of work in the
area (Hoover and Lundby 1997; Hoover and Clark 2002; Mitchell and Marriage
2003; Sumiala-Seppänen, Lundby and Salokangas 2006; Hoover 2006; Morgan
2008; Lynch, Mitchell and Strhan 2011; Campbell 2012; Hjarvard and Lövheim 2012;
Lövheim 2013).
An important basis for the research field was the shift in media studies from
a focus on institutions and the symbolic production of messages toward processes
550 Mia Lövheim

of consumption and interpretation (Hoover and Lundby 1997: 6, 9). This shows
how the new field emerged alongside the “culturalist turn” in media studies in
the 1980s (Hoover 2002). A clear example is the change from using theories and
methods focusing the “effects” of media power for shaping values and relations
for example in studies of the phenomenon of televangelism (Hadden and Shupe
1988) to a focus on the complexity of the meaning of media texts, the agency of
the audience, and on situating the significance of media use in the context of
everyday lived experiences (see Clark 2003; Hoover, Clark and Alters 2004; Hoover
2006).
As important has been the tendency in studies of religion to move away from
a strong focus on the forms and doctrines of institutional religion to the meaning
making practices of everyday life (Hoover and Lundby 1997: 8). Influences from
research on “lived religion” (Orsi 2002; Ammerman 2007) has contributed to an
analysis of religious meaning as constructed in the practices of media use rather
than encoded in texts. This has also meant that an instrumentalist approach to
media as a channel for the transmission of religious messages has been comple-
mented with studies of how media construct and form temporal “sacred spaces”
for the negotiation of meaning, identities, and social relationships (Lynch 2012).
This approach has also paved the way for a broader variety of expressions of
religion, such as embodied, affective, and aesthetic aspects to be included in the
analysis (Lynch, Mitchell and Strhan 2011: 3), including religion and consumer
culture (Einstein 2008).
This development perhaps makes it justifiable to talk about a “media turn”
within religious studies during the latest decade (Engelke 2010). However,
although theories focusing on the media as the agent of social and religious
change have been represented, the concept of mediation has been dominating
research in this field since the late 1990s. Also within the envisioned media turn,
mediation remains a key concept along with a strong focus on the material and
practice oriented aspects of religion, not least in the US context.
With the publication of the Danish media scholar Stig Hjarvard’s application
of mediatization theory on religion in 2008 a more specific debate concerning
mediatization and religion has developed within the field. The following section
will give a short introduction of Hjarvard’s application of mediatization as a con-
cept for theorizing changes and tendencies in contemporary religion. This will be
followed by a review of the discussion that followed from Hjarvard’s introduction
of this theory. This section presents various standpoints regarding the usefulness
of the concept of mediatization starting from a critique against Hjarvard’s thesis:
the historical context of mediatization, the need for contextualization, a culturalist
approach to mediatization, the discussion of mediation and mediatization, and the
question of (religious) agency in mediatization theory. This section will end with
a brief presentation of different empirical applications of the concept that bring
out important insights concerning the relevance and shortcomings of the concept
 Mediatization and religion 551

mediatization for studies of contemporary religion. The final section will summa-
rize points of discussion raised in the debate as well as issues that call for particu-
lar attention in further developments of mediatization theory as applied to religion.

3 The mediatization of religion theory

Stig Hjarvard’s approach to mediatization as theory (2013, 2008a) focuses on the
interplay between media and other social institutions. Mediatization is the result
of two interrelated processes of social change, the first of which is the development
of the media into a more autonomous, independent institution in society during
the 20th century. The second process concerns the degree to which the media have
become integrated in the workings of other institutions.
Mediatization of religion thus concerns how the processes described above
affect religion, as institution as well as a social and cultural activity. Hjarvard
argues that mediatization generally implies the transformation of three aspects of
religion (2008b, 2011, 2013: 78–102). Firstly, the media become the primary source
of information about religious issues in society. Secondly, the media also become
producers of religious experiences, as religious symbols, practices, and beliefs
become raw material for media’s own purposes and shaped according to the proce-
dures of popular media genres. Thirdly, through their position in society media
develop into social and cultural environments that take over many of the functions
of institutionalized religions, such as providing moral and spiritual guidance and
a sense of community.
These processes are connected to a number of proposals about changes in the
institutional structures, symbolic content, and individual and social practices of
religion. This means that mediatization does not only imply a change in the forms
for mediating religion but also affects its “core elements”. When media institutions
become the prime mediators of religion this challenges the authority and function
of religious institutions in society. The media takes over the power to define and
frame what religion is, and what parts of religion are considered significant. Even
though the media cannot be said to have certain religious intentions, their increas-
ing dependence on the consumer market makes them produce religious informa-
tion and experiences that are in accordance with these demands. Thus, media
produce what Hjarvard refers to as “banal religion” (2008b: 14–16); a mix of texts
and practices of institutionalized religion merges with elements from folk religion
and popular conceptions, emotions, and practices referring to a supernatural or
spiritual dimension of life. Here, the media contributes to a process where the
meaning of religious symbols and practices becomes disembedded from their insti-
tutionalized context and circulated and reinterpreted through institutions and pur-
poses other than those controlled by formal religious authorities. Hjarvard also
claims that mediatization changes the ways in which most people in modern soci-
552 Mia Lövheim

ety engage with religion. When the media increasingly become sites for narratives
and rituals of enchantment, celebration, and disaster this also means that new
forms of social integration, recognition, and control emerge which to a larger
extent than earlier are based on the individual’s needs and ability to monitor and
adapt to an extended and more complicated social world (Hjarvard 2009).
Hjarvard points out that mediatization of religion is a process that takes vari-
ous directions and has different consequences depending on the particular reli-
gious and media context. His focus is on highly modernized societies in the
Western world, particularly the Nordic Countries, and on “weak religions” charac-
terized by a low degree of institutional commitment and a high degree of individu-
alized belief (cf. Kelley 1972). Nevertheless, as will be further discussed below,
there is in the initial presentation of the theory a strong emphasis on the connec-
tion between mediatization of religion and the secularization of society (cf. Hjar-
vard 2008b: 10).
In later publications Hjarvard (2012) has, in response to some of the criticism
presented below, developed his theory to include various forms of mediatized reli-
gion. Religious media refer to media organizations and practices that are primarily
controlled and performed by religious actors, collectively or individually. The pur-
pose of this form of communication is primarily persuasion and the strengthening
of religious community. Journalism on religion refers to how primarily news media
brings religion to the political public sphere. Finally, banal religion refers to when
primarily entertainment media makes religion visible in the cultural public sphere.
Hjarvard concludes that, due to mediatization processes, religious media play only
a marginal role in the construction of public religion. Journalism on religion and
banal religion, which to a larger extent constructs religion in accordance with the
institutional, technological, and aesthetic considerations of the media in question,
dominates the public presence of religion and may both stimulate criticism
towards institutional religion and strengthen individualized and more bricolage-
like forms of religion.

4 The mediatization of religion debate

The publication of Hjarvard’s theory of the mediatization of religion initiated a
discussion on the problems and possibilities of this approach for researching reli-
gion and media in contemporary society. One of the reasons for this debate was
probably that the publication of Hjarvard’s theory coincided with a renewed inter-
est in theories of mediatization in media and communication studies (Livingstone
2009). Another reason had to do with the development of the field of media, reli-
gion, and culture. One of the objectives behind Hjarvard’s theory (cf. 2008b) was
a concern that much research lacked a broader theoretical framework of the role
of the media in social change in which micro- or meso-level case studies could be
 Mediatization and religion 553

situated. As described above the field has been strongly influenced by the cultural-
ist approach developed among researchers in the US context. The concept of medi-
atization and the discussion around its application for religion found a base in
the Nordic network for the mediatization of religion and culture, founded in 2006.1
Seminars conducted within this network and the international network Mediating
religion,2 as well as panels organized at international conferences, have provided
arenas for discussions by scholars from various disciplines from Europe and the
US, and contributed to deepen theorization of mediatization as a concept for
understanding the interplay between religion and media (see further Lövheim and
Lynch 2011).
The discussion has been more focused on certain issues than others. There is
a broad agreement that religion does not disappear with the introduction of and
increased use of media technology in society. This process does, however, not only
mean that secular media mediate religion but also increasing access to and use of
media by religious actors. Thus, contemporary religion as articulated by religious
and secular actors cannot be grasped without understanding the media and how
it influences society and culture.
The elements of Hjarvard’s theory that concern the media’s position as the
prime arena for the circulation of religious symbols in highly modernized societies
as well as for public engagement with religion; the weakening of the authority of
religious institutions to control the use and meaning of their symbols and the role
of the media in extending opportunities for a “banal” (although the term has been
widely criticized, cf. Lied 2012) or implicit, diffuse religion to emerge are more or
less agreed on by participants in the discussion (cf. Lynch 2011). The issues for
debate have primarily centered around the applicability of the theory across social
and cultural contexts and the implications or outcomes of mediatization for the
character of religion. This latter debate concerns in particular whether the molding
of religion by the logic of the media is contributing to a weakening of religion
expressed through increasingly subjective mixed and diffuse forms, or if the appro-
priation of media forms by religious actors is an integral part of how religion
develops and even thrives in late modern society. In essence this debate thus
concerns the understanding of religion, the media, and modernity that underpin
the theory.

4.1 Mediatization in a historical context

One strand of the debate on the validity of Hjarvard’s claims about the processes
and implications of mediatization on religion centers on the argument that mediat-

1 The network was funded by NordForsk for an initial period of 2006–2008, coordinated by Stig
Hjarvard, and for an additional period 2008–2010 coordinated by Mia Lövheim. It still operates as
the Nordic Network for Media and Religion.
2 Based at the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manches-
ter/Open University http://www.cresc.ac.uk/home.
554 Mia Lövheim

ization is a phenomenon specific for the later decades of the 20th century where
the media came to serve a different role in relation to religion than was previously
the case. This critique has, perhaps, been expressed most poignantly by David
Morgan, professor in religion and art history. Morgan (2011) in his critique challen-
ges, first, the independence of media institutions from religious institutions as
something particular to late modern society and, secondly, Hjarvard’s claim that
media institutions take over or replace social functions previously fulfilled by reli-
gious institutions (2011: 139). Drawing on the case of Evangelical ephemeral print
in 19th-century Britain, he shows that the production of tracts and books at this
time were conducted not primarily by official religious institutions but by media
entrepreneurs in the marketplace, such as various religious tract and bible socie-
ties. The development of Evangelical print culture in the late 18th century also
shows a much more complex relation between religion and media, where religious
actors and beliefs played an active part in the development of these media forms.
Thus, religious actors did not need to incorporate the logic of print media or give
up control of the communication of the sacred to secular media producers, because
much of the modus operandi of these new media practices were already integrated
with their beliefs about the religious message (2011: 148). Thus, Morgan argues,
this mediation of religion did privatize religion in the sense that it introduced a
form for the direct relation between God and the receiver beyond the channels
controlled by formal authorities and institutions. To characterize this as a form of
mediatization that secularized religion is, however, a too simplistic interpretation
of historical change as well as of religion.
On a similar note communication scholar Peter Horsfield (2013) argues that
contemporary changes in the position of religion in society and their connection
to new media developments are not unprecedented or exclusively “modern”. He
does not explicitly use the concept of mediatization but argues that issues raised
by contemporary media developments can provide a valuable lens for reexamining
religious history, both to better understand interactions between media and reli-
gion in the past and to nuance a discussion of new trends. His example is how the
adoption and systematic use of literacy and written texts in 1st-century Christianity
enabled what he terms the “Catholic Orthodox Party” to gain a position of domi-
nance in contemporary Roman culture and society as well as in subsequent narra-
tives of early Christianity. In this process religious actors played an active part
through creating a form of Christian literate culture that could market its message
through the institutionalization of publishing and dissemination of particular texts
and the use of censorship and control of other oral and written alternatives.

4.2. Mediatization and its contextualization

The arguments emphasizing how religious actors throughout history have actively
used various media forms in order to further their message and position is, per-
 Mediatization and religion 555

haps, more valid than the critique against Hjarvard’s argument that this process
changes in a fundamental way with the development of the media into a more
autonomous, independent institution in society during the 20th century. However,
the critique towards the claims of mediatization theory from scholars working with
historical material on media and religion underlines problems in the theory con-
cerning media as the agent of social change (cf. Couldry 2008). A closer analysis
of historical events often shows that change can seldom be ascribed to shifts in
one domain such as media technology but is the outcome of the interaction
between various cultural and social processes in a particular context. An adjacent
issue is the relationship between modernization and historical or pre-modern cul-
tural forms – in this case of religion.
These issues are in focus for approaches to mediatization that emphasize the
need for contextualization. As pointed out above Hjarvard describes the conse-
quences of mediatization for religion primarily in terms of secularization, meaning
a weakening of the public and collective role of religion as a social institution
(Hjarvard 2011; cf. Dobbelære 2002). Mediatization can enhance a certain kind of
religion in modern society, but it is a volatile religion that has limited power to
define, maintain, and reproduce a plausible world-view for individuals as well as
in society. The critique against this understanding of the relation between mediati-
zation and religion is primarily expressed from a sociological perspective of reli-
gion (Lövheim 2011; Lynch 2011; Herbert 2011). One of the main arguments has
been that Hjarvard primarily draws on one strand of secularization theory (cf.
Bruce 2006; Berger 1967), and does not sufficiently acknowledge critique against
this approach or alternative perspectives on the relation between religion and
modernity presented within recent research (Davie 2007: 52). Here, the religious
situation in the Nordic countries and indeed Northern Europe has increasingly
become seen as a particular case rather than as a general model for the relation
between religion and modernity (Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). These approaches
question the idea that cultural and social characteristics of modernization, such
as pluralism, individualism, and rationality, would necessarily represent a threat
to religion. Research in sociology of religion during the latest decade (Davie 2007;
Woodhead and Cato 2012; Botvar and Schmidt 2010) provides examples of how
religion, also in Europe, has found ways to co-exist with modernity. This research
takes as its starting point a multiple understanding of modernity (Eisenstadt 2002)
in which religion is not seen as its antithesis but as an active part in the shaping
and reshaping of its core characteristics and outcomes. Thus, religion is not neces-
sarily weakened by modernity but rather transforms into new forms, which in a
variety of ways continue to be significant in individual as well as public life.
Gordon Lynch (2011: 205) in this evaluation and summary of the mediatization
of religion debate lists some conditions that characterize the kind of social contexts
where Hjarvard’s claims seem particularly relevant. Among these are a) that main-
stream media institutions are non-confessional on grounds of institutional history,
funding, or media regulations and the use of public media with a strong confes-
556 Mia Lövheim

sional orientation is marginal, b) the reliance on these public media as a structure

for engaging with religious symbols and narratives is high in comparison with the
level of direct public engagement with religious institutions and c) that here is a
clearly identifiable and established religious institution (e.g. State Church) that
has historically acted as the prime authority for the representation and perform-
ance of religious symbols and rituals.
Lynch concludes that Hjarvard’s thesis can be valuable for understanding how
media institutions may work as a secularizing force for particular groups in these
circumstances but does not qualify as a more general theoretical framework for
religion and society in late modernity (2011: 206). This can explain why the theory
seems more fitting to post-Protestant societies of Northern and Western Europe
than the US or the Middle-East where confessional media and religious suppliers
are organized according to other models than a limited range of secular, state-
endorsed institutions. Lynch lists (2011: 207) a number of elements needed to clar-
ify the interaction between religion and media in specific contexts, which the
mediatization of religion debate has helped to clarify: the nature and relationships
of institutional structures, the particular media technologies used, the range of
audiences and publics present and their connection to power structures, sacred
forms that might be shared across publics, particular agents who exercise influ-
ence, and the specific history of these factors in a given context. Although the task
of exploring all of these elements might seem daunting, Lynch argues that it
should be possible to identify common patterns between different elements across
different societies, which share certain institutional, technological, economic, cul-
tural, and professional factors.
An example of an approach to mediatization that attempts to develop this
contextual approach is David Herbert’s (2011a, 2011b) theory of the “re-publiciza-
tion of religion”. Herbert argues (2011a: 640) for an understanding of mediatization
where the outcome of changes in the media domain are related to wider social
structures and processes in a particular context that affects both media and reli-
gion. Re-publicization of religion means a heightened public presence of religion
both in the form of distinct beliefs and practices and as discourse that emerges
from changes in a) the rapid growth in media technologies b) the liberalization of
media economies and c) the establishing of transnational media spheres. While
these changes might be similar on a structural level their articulation and conse-
quences for religion will differ in different societal contexts. Herbert (2011a) dis-
cusses three types of such contexts: “post-colonial”, “post-communist”, and
“Western” societies. He furthermore (2011b: 645) suggests that the public presence
of religious symbols and discourses is likely to increase when certain conditions
are present. These concern, for example, when the dissemination of religious sym-
bols and discourses enabled by media technologies resonate with existing cultural
practices of visuality and aurality; when the liberalization of media economies
means access for religious groups to resources enabling them to enter media mar-
kets, and when the disruption of established forms of secularism through, for
 Mediatization and religion 557

example, reflexive deconstruction or mass migration produce a public discourse

on religion in society.
Herbert’s theory addresses several of the aspects listed by Lynch, such as the
influence of global capitalism on both media and religion and also the change in
audiences following globalization (for example transnational diasporic communi-
ties). In accordance with Hjarvard he argues that religion changes as symbols and
discourses become articulated in various ways across other social systems. This
happens, for example, in post-colonial situations in the form of “functionalization”
(2011: 90, cf. Starrett 1998) of religion, or in the form of religious authority becom-
ing more dependent on performance and marketability than tradition and formal
training (Herbert 2011: 93). However, Herbert also points out that religious actors
make active and adaptive transformations of modernity through mediatization.
Furthermore, the theory explicitly considers the role of existing cultural practices
and discourses of religious mediation outside of the mass media institutions in a
particular context. Thus, the reproduction and circulation of religious symbols
through mediatization can also intensify their power in mediating the divine to
individuals and publics (2011: 96).

4.3 Mediatization and culture

A strong emphasis on mediatization as embedded within wider processes of cul-
tural change in late modern society is also noticeable in Stewart Hoover’s (2009)
approach to mediatization. In accordance with Morgan’s critical assessment of
Hjarvard’s theory he argues that in order to understand contemporary mediatiza-
tion of religion we need to question “received categories of the natural constitution
of the essentially ‘religious’” (2009: 129) and acknowledge the integration of reli-
gion and media, as well as the commodification of religion, throughout history. In
contemporary culture this means that media and religion have become so inter-
mingled that it is not possible to understand one of them without reference to the
other. Thus, he argues that we need to approach mediatization of religion as a
process that is conditioned by certain “realities in the worlds of media and religion
and the practices of each” (2009: 130). One of these is increased reflexivity, another
is changes in resources and practices of associations, a third factor is conceptions
of “other” cultures not least between western and Islamic countries, and a fourth
factor is “public scripts” of self-understanding (identities) in relation to media,
rooted in established cultural value hierarchies and social and class sensibilities.
This final point also shows the significance of differences in age, gender, sexual
preference, and ethnicity for the outcome of mediatization of religion. In sum
Hoover argues that the mediatization of religion is shaped by the role that the
media play in the formation and maintenance of shared social and cultural identi-
ties. This is a process, in turn, shaped by the market, the “‘invisible’ hand of the
cultural economy” (2009: 134). From this standpoint Hoover argues for theories of
558 Mia Lövheim

the mediatization of religion to move beyond the focus on large institutional con-
texts and scales and pay attention to the complex, nuanced, and layered way this
process plays out in particular “geographies” and to the complexities of contempo-
rary religion (2009: 133, 136).
Hoover’s approach can be interpreted as a claim that religion has a particular
dynamic of meaning making that cannot be subsumed to the forms of media repre-
sentation and interpretation augmented by particular media cultures (Hoover
2009: 124; cf. Herbert and Gillespie 2011: 603). This dynamic has to do with how
religious meaning making refers to something transcendent which, in Hoover’s
understanding, is articulated in shared cultural “scripts” and symbols rather than
particular religious discourses or dogmas (2006: 23). Hoover’s position is articu-
lated from the US context, where the influence of any media format cannot be
understood without relation to a popular culture in which core values, symbols,
and narratives from Evangelical Christian culture play an important part. Drawing
on the dissemination and transformation of religious material in contemporary
Norwegian popular culture Liv Ingeborg Lied articulates a similar critique (2012:
187). Mediatization theories fit some religious discourses better than others, she
argues, depending on how they resonate with dominant cultural values and sensi-
bilities in this context.
Another approach that starts out from mediatization of religion as part of a
broader cultural context is Andreas Hepp’s theory of “cultures of mediatization”
(2013, this volume). Cultures of mediatization are cultures “whose primary meaning
resources are mediated through technical communication media, and which are
‘moulded’ by these processes in specifically different ways” (2013: 70, italics in origi-
nal). This approach is broader than Hjarvard’s focus on relations between the
media and other social institutions generated by increased mediation in late mod-
ern European society (2013: 42). In Hepp’s approach mediatization is used as a
meta-process or “panorama” that relates to culture and society as a whole – micro
processes of individual action as well as institutions. However, the particular forms
of this process must always be specified to a particular form and culture (2013:
51). Along these lines Hepp focuses on mediatization in the construction and main-
tenance of religion as a form of “deterritorialized communitization”. Such forms
of religion differ from earlier forms in that they are characterized by “the position-
ing of a mediatized construction of tradition” (2013: 120), meaning that the primary
sources for religious beliefs and belonging are mediated through technical commu-
nication media. Hepp’s understanding of how the “moulding” of these communi-
cative forms shapes human agency is, however, modeled on Latour’s actor-net-
work theory (2007) rather than the relation between institutions. Thus, technical
media imply a certain “pressure” on communication, conceived of in terms of “a
particular potential for action” and the changes this implies have to be articulated
within a framework of actors within a specific context (2013: 57, 69).
Hepp describes mediatized religion as the popular-religious spiritual sphere
and fundamentalist movements (2013: 119), which are both characterized by the
 Mediatization and religion 559

extent to which they articulate in particular religious belonging within the frame-
work of a mediatized common culture (2013: 121). However, this process also con-
cerns large and historically established religious institutions as the Catholic
Church. In their analysis of the Catholic World Youth Day 2005 in Cologne, Hepp
and Krönert (2010: 266) describe it as a “hybrid event” that includes moments of
locally based traditional religion but also aspects of “popular media events”
shaped by consumer culture. Mediatization in this case is analyzed through look-
ing at the interplay between these “sacred” and “popular” moments or aspects in
the production, representation, and appropriation of the media event. In this pro-
cess the Catholic Church officials, media companies, and individual participants
all play a part. Hepp and Krönert (2010: 274) conclude that the use of the Pope
Benedict XVI as a “brand symbol” was crucial for linking these different aspects
into one media event. The outcome of this process of mediatization for religion is,
in accordance with Hjarvard’s theory, interpreted in terms of increased pluralism
and individualization of belief but also incorporates aspects of controlling and
preserving religious values and of establishing a form of “deterritorial religious
community” for young Catholics that offers a resource for articulating individual,
collective, and traditional aspects. This means, in contrast to Hjarvard’s thesis,
that the mediatization of religion does not necessarily imply that the particular
character of religion – its “transcendent” or “sacred” claims – become “subsumed”
and thereby weakened by the media logic.

4.4 Mediatization or mediation

The question of how the outcome of mediatization affects the particular character-
istics of religion as a social and cultural phenomenon comes to the fore in the
discussion concerning the relation between mediatization and the concept of medi-
ation. The German anthropologist Birgit Meyer clearly grounds her critique of the
mediatization of religion theory from an epistemological starting point of media-
tion (2013). In line with Morgan (2011) and Stolow (2005) she argues that mediation
is a better term to study historical and contemporary interactions between religion
and media since it recognizes more of the dynamic interplay between them. She
proposes an understanding of religion as “practices of mediation” that “claims to
mediate the transcendent, spiritual, or supernatural and make these accessible for
believers” (Meyer and Moors 2006: 7). If the core of religion is communication
between the human and the transcendent, and the connection of meanings, val-
ues, identities, and actions between people, religion cannot be understood outside
of the media. Furthermore, this means that increased mediation and subsequent
transformations in beliefs and forms of belonging among believers cannot be seen
as a loss of religion’s core values and forms. Religion cannot be equated with
particular institutions, social functions, and belief systems but takes various forms
to communicate the transcendent in various contexts. Meyer recognizes that when
560 Mia Lövheim

new forms of mediation become introduced into existing communication practices

this changes religious values and forms. In comparison to Hjarvard she puts less
focus on developing an analysis of the characteristics of the medium, and rather
emphasizes the social negotiations and adjustments that happen in the process of
incorporation. Thus the implications of transitions to new forms of mediation must
be analyzed as the interplay between the affordances given by a particular reli-
gious context as well as a particular media form. Her concept of “sensational
forms” (Meyer 2008) – transmitted through religious theology and practice as well
as within particular forms of community – holds the potential to analyze how these
affordances shape dispositions and practices for interacting with the transcendent.
Based on this understanding Meyer prefers seeing new practices of mediation as
“… remediations that ‘transcode’ earlier and other media and the possibilities for
sensation and experience to which they give rise” (2013: 11).
Central to Meyer and other scholars’ preference for the concept mediation are
two things: first the background of current debates over the post-Enlightenment
Protestant bias of an understanding of religion as a matter of the mind and the
subsequent call for a recognition of the materiality of religion – a critique rooted
in anthropological and post-colonial research and debates. The second thing is
that mediation better fits an analysis of media and religion that incorporates trans-
formation as well as sustaining and adjustment of religious values, practices, and
identities, and that allows for varieties across time and space.

4.5 Mediatization and (religious) agency

The last point of critique against Hjarvard’s theory to be raised in this chapter
addresses attention to the role of religion as an active agent in interactions with
media. As pointed out above Hjarvard’s theory relies on an institutional perspec-
tive on mediatization where aspects of individual agency are primarily discussed
in terms of how social structure and institutional contexts condition as well as
enable agency (cf. Hjarvard 2009; Hepp 2013: 42). This is also evident in his
approach to religion and to the relationship between religion and modernity (cf.
Lövheim 2011).
The concept of agency in the theory of mediatization of religion is perhaps
most articulated in research that has applied the concept to new digital media
technology. Lynn Schofield Clark develops this in her application of mediatization
to analyze a viral wedding video (2011) and online discussions of supernatural and
religious elements in the TV series Lost (2008). Her starting point is in theories
of how digital and mobile media are contributing to social change by enabling
participation, remediation, and bricolage (Deuze 2006, Jenkins 2006). Drawing on
actor-network theory as a methodological approach to study mediatization and
religion (Latour 1993), she suggests a definition of mediatization as “… the process
by which collective uses of communication media extend the development of inde-
 Mediatization and religion 561

pendent media industries and their circulation of narratives, contribute to new

forms of action and interaction in the social world, and give shape to how we
think of humanity and our place in the world” (Clark 2011: 170).
Clark’s definition opens up for an understanding of agency, and social change,
within mediatization as an outcome of how various constellations of media tech-
nology, institutional and cultural practice, and individual actions come together
in particular situations. With regard to religion this implies that changes in the
position of media institutions within this constellation rather augment processes
of religious change than cause them – in particular a personalization of religiosity
(2011: 169; cf. Lynch 2011: 206). It also means that the outcomes of these processes
in terms of religious change are not linear or predictable. The focus on the mutu-
ally constitutive dynamics of the interplay between, in this case, media as institu-
tion, religion as culture, and human actors and actions in a particular situation
opens up possibilities for a wider range of interactions between media and religion
than those coordinated by religious institutions or – in the case of “banal reli-
gion” – by commercial media institutions. In particular it leaves room for the ways
in which religious meanings become embedded in, and shapes, the conceptions
and practices of everyday life – including uses of media (Clark 2011: 178). This
aspect of the interplay between religion and the media is also the focus of Heidi
Campbell’s (2010) work on how religious groups shape uses and discourses of new
digital media technology in ways that can be integrated with the traditions and
core values of the religious life of their communities; what she refers to the “reli-
gious social shaping of technology”.
Hjarvard’s institutional perspective on mediatization and religion directs atten-
tion primarily to the question of how media influences the presence of religion in
the public and political discourse of society. Clark’s discussion of mediatization,
agency, and religious change aligns with research on how new digital media calls
for a rethinking of “the public” (boyd 2007) and with feminist critique of the notion
of the public sphere (Fraser 1992). This directs our attention to aspects of social
and political change through mediatization that happen outside of formalized pub-
lic discourses, and to how mediatization plays a part in shaping such spaces. A
salient example is the way new digital technologies extend articulations of
women’s religiosity beyond their location in what has traditionally been conceived
as the “private” sphere, and thereby introduce new themes and actors in public
discourse on religion (Lövheim 2012a, 2013). Using Clark’s definition, this is an
example of how mediatization can contribute to change ways of understanding
“ourselves and our place in the world”. With an understanding of religion as more
than institutions and particular forms of beliefs, mediatization can thus be seen
as contributing to a continuation and renewal rather than weakening of religion
in culture and society.
562 Mia Lövheim

4.6. Empirical applications and insights

Besides the theoretical debate on the concept, mediatization theory – particularly
as presented by Hjarvard – has also come to be applied in several empirical studies
since 2008. These studies have not to the same extent as the ones presented above
engaged in theoretical aspects but still greatly contribute to further development
of the theory. A number of studies have focused on the public presence of religion,
in particular the communication strategies of Nordic Lutheran majority churches,
in a mediatized culture. These studies show how mediatization involves a complex
process where religious organizations incorporate various media technologies in
order to communicate within a public sphere dominated by a secular discourse,
but also find ways to adapt these to fit their purposes and practices. Peter Fischer-
Nielsen (2012: 58) describes how “Church space” and “media space” seem to
“amalgamate” to form new practices at the local level of current activities in the
Danish Church. Marcus Moberg and Sofia Sjö (2012) use the concept of “self-medi-
atization” to account for how the Evangelical Lutheran church in Finland seeks
new ways to communicate in a “post-secular” public sphere. Henrik Reintoft Chris-
tensen (2012) expresses a more critical view of how mediatization inhibits the pos-
sibilities of religious institutions to assert their standpoints in debates on homo-
sexuality and the national church in the Danish press and rather sharpens polari-
zation between “secular” and “religious” values. This tendency is also salient in
Mia Lövheim and Marta Axner’s (2011) analysis of the mediated debates following
the TV series Halal-tv in Sweden 2008 and Knut Lundby and Kjersti Thorbjørn-
srud’s (2012) study of media’s handling of Muslim protests against the publication
of a cartoon depicting Muhammad as a pig in Norway 2010. Johanna Sumiala’s
(2012) study of the ritualization of death in the media following two school shoot-
ings in Finland illustrates how this process enhances the role of the media to stage
a “sacred center” in society (cf. Couldry 2003) as well as a frame of “this-worldli-
ness” to interpret the events.
Another area where the concept of mediatization has been applied is in studies
of popular culture and entertainment media such as film and TV series. Line Nybro
Petersen (2012) analyzes the reception of the Twilight Saga books and films among
Danish teenage girls. Her discussion illustrates how the circulation of religious
symbols and narratives in popular culture can promote engagement with religion
in a largely secular youth culture but also how this process transforms ways of
engaging with religion. Diane Winston (2011) uses mediatization to analyze how
the commercial logic of secular news and entertainment media formed representa-
tions of female members of the Salvation Army during the 1900s and contributed
to a new vision of the Army’s mission and identity.
The majority of these studies are located in Northern Europe or the US. Ehab
Galal has, however, used the concept in a case study of how Islamic satellite
television stages a particular form of Muslim identity as belonging through per-
forming individual achievements of belief (2012). Furthermore, Alexandra Boutros’
 Mediatization and religion 563

discussion of the mediatization of Voodoo (2011) shows the limitations of Hjar-

vard’s theory for studying non-institutional religions and also for addressing reli-
gious change in contexts shaped by post-colonial and transcultural social and
political processes. Luis Mauro Sa Martino has in a recent book (2013) applied
mediatization theory to an analysis of contemporary Church practices in a South
American context.
In sum, these studies show that the mediatization of religion thesis provides
a useful tool to analyze the interplay between particularly religious institutions
and the media. However, the studies also bring out how the theory needs to take
into account the dynamics within and between levels such as the policies of differ-
ent media actors, the logics of different media genres, and the tension between
various narratives. Finally, these studies reveal the diversity and ambiguity of the
outcomes of mediatization for religion with regard to differences in socio-cultural
and historical contexts as well as gender, ethnicity, age, and economic and cultural
capital (cf. Lövheim and Lundby 2013).

5 Mediatization and religion – towards an

integrated approach
As this chapter has shown the introduction of mediatization theory to understand
religious change has been a challenging encounter for the research field of media,
religion, and culture (cf. Herbert and Gillespie 2011: 603). The various arguments
in the debate presented above reveal different and sometimes conflicting epistemo-
logical and ontological points of departure. This means that the debate and the
various applications of the concept that have been published have come to actual-
ize and renew significant discussions within the field about the relation between
religion and social and cultural processes of modernization, the relation between
the categories “religion” and “media”, and the very nature of religion. This debate
makes clear both the need to situate research and theory of contemporary religion
and media in sustained cross-disciplinary conversations, and the benefits and the
problems of this endeavor. Thus, the introduction of mediatization as a concept
alongside mediation has contributed to a further explication of standpoints and
conceptions in disciplines of religious studies, anthropology, history, and media
studies, which is a crucial step for continued development of the theory. Further-
more, questions raised in this particular debate, such as how mediation in highly
modernized societies differs from previous forms of mediation, how these process
differ across various national and cultural contexts, and the role of the media in
social and cultural change, clearly intersect with the broader discussion of the
relevance and use of mediatization addressed in this volume, not least the ques-
tion of agency, of mediatization and conceptions of modernity, the relation
564 Mia Lövheim

between mediation and mediatization, and how to identify and connect various
modes or parameters and levels in an analysis of mediatization in contemporary
society.
One of the clearest contributions of mediatization theory to research on media
and religion has been to push for a more general theory that can capture tenden-
cies in contemporary religion as connected to the increased mediation of culture
and society. Here, the theory of mediatization complements and challenges earlier
research concerning its alleged bias of mainly focusing on media through the per-
spective and interests of religious groups and institutions, and through addressing
some of the weak points of the culturalist perspective. This concerns for example
the risk of over-emphasizing the agency and intentionality of individual users and
of an empirical confusion of what is actually studied through conflating religious
and other forms of meaning making (cf. Clark and Hoover 1997: 17; Hoover 2006:
23).
The critical assessments of Hjarvard’s mediatization of religion theory pre-
sented above shows, however, that there is still some way to go in developing a
more general theoretical framework of the relationship between media, religion,
and culture in modern society. The critique against the historical and socio-cultural
contingency of the theory is a claim that Hjarvard acknowledges and has
addressed in his writings. The disagreement concerning the understanding of reli-
gion, and the outcomes of mediatization for its core values as well as continued
public presence and influence, seem to be a more persistent debate between dis-
ciplinary standpoints. As Lundby puts it (2013: 200), a mediation perspective
approaches transformations of religion from inside the mediation practices of reli-
gion, while a mediatization perspective analyzes transformations of religion from
changes in the media towards a more media-saturated environment.
For scholars of religion in contemporary society the crucial issues emerge in
the complex variations of modern forms of religion beyond traditional institutions,
and how articulations of religious continue to play a part not just for individual
but also public life. A theory for analyzing the role of the media in these processes
is urgently needed. In a previous discussion of Hjarvard’s theory (Lövheim 2011),
I pointed out the need of developing particularly the claim to take seriously “the
specificities of religious phenomena and their cultural, social and cognitive origins
and characteristics …” (Hjarvard 2008b: 5). For this to happen the theory needs
an understanding of religion that is broader than the cognitive and institutional
perspective. This goes together with acknowledging the rich and dynamic history
of religious interactions with various media, and how particular communication
practices have developed that, in turn, shape the encounter with mediatization
processes in contemporary society. Finally, the theory needs to develop the under-
standing of agency to acknowledge the potential of religious actors to navigate
mediatization processes in order to increase the vitality and significance of their
beliefs, values, and practices.
 Mediatization and religion 565

The debate reviewed in this chapter shows how a theory of mediatization of

religion that addresses these issues is beginning to take form, through theoretical
debate and empirical applications in various contexts. I see two important themes
that undergird this development. First, the focus on mediatization as a process of
change set within an interconnected network or “world” where several actors and
processes take part. Scholars such as Hepp and Clark draw on actor-network
theory to see how mediatization restructures the social as a field with various
potentials for action. In Clark’s work such potentials for social change are an out-
come of how various constellations of media technology, institutional and cultural
practice, and individual actions come together in particular situations, and how
these constellations change over time. Andreas Hepp refers to these theories as
a “social constructivist” approach in contrast to Hjarvard’s more “institutional”
approach to mediatization. He envisages that they can meet in their focus on how
media transforms social interaction (Hepp, in press; Lundby 2013: 196). This means
an approach to mediatization of religion that places neither religion nor media in
“the driver’s seat” but looks at the dynamic interplay between the two.
Applied to the area of religion, this “social constructivist” approach can
present a framework for analyzing under what contexts that various constellations
of media technology, institutional and cultural practice, and individual actions
produce certain outcomes – including when they intersect in particular ways with
other processes of globalization, capitalism, and cultural change such as individu-
alization and reflexivity. The focus on these changes as dynamic, non-linear and
to a large extent relative to time and place opens up for a larger variety of out-
comes. This is for example expressed in Herbert’s studies that seek to map when
these constellations intersect to increase the public visibility of religion, with out-
comes such as individualization, instrumentalization, or intensification of the pub-
lic and political role of religion. The challenge for such an approach will still be
to clarify in what ways current transformations of religion through technical media
are different from earlier forms, by identifying changes in the constellation of
media technology, institutional and cultural practice, and what this means for
particular forms of actions, over time.
Whether mediatization or mediation is the best concept to capture these proc-
esses and their outcomes is probably a debate that will go on within research on
media and religion. In his introduction to the book Religion across Media (2013)
Knut Lundby makes an admirable effort to connect the two strands of the debate.
Drawing on a distinction of embedded and disembedded media, which operate
over larger distances and reach a greater number of people he argues that media-
tions in a context saturated by disembedded technical means for communication
and interaction produce a change in “life horizons” that means something more
and different than earlier forms of mediations (Lundby 2013: 197). Mediatization,
then, is a particular form of mediation that occurs when embedded and disembed-
ded media provide a horizon for communication and interaction within a certain
566 Mia Lövheim

area, thus becoming a “mediatized world”. This includes also that part of these
communications and interactions that concern religion.
The second theme in the developments of a theory on mediatization of religion
is the articulation of an understanding of religion that focuses on religion as,
throughout history, not only formed by but also playing an active part in processes
of mediation. The critical assessments by Morgan, Meyer, Clark, Lynch, Lied, and
Lövheim share an understanding of religion as not confined to particular institu-
tions and functions. The call for a broader variety of mediatized religion is
addressed in Hjarvard’s recent writings with the inclusion of the category of reli-
gious media. However, in order to account for the role of religion as a part in the
interrelated network of mediatization as a social and cultural process a better
understanding of previous practices of mediating religion needs to be developed.
As pointed out by Lied (2012: 196) this requires an understanding of religion as a
cultural form with a continuum of expressions, ranging from explicit and reflective
to more implicit and intuitive, and including a wider range of aspects and func-
tions – ritual, emotional, material. This kind of approach would enable an analysis
of mediatization of religion as a dynamic process where religion is molded by the
logic of particular media, but also – in a process of use and negotiation – molds
these media to fit its particular dynamic of meaning making. In combination with
the focus on transformation as a network process in which particular world views
are articulated and negotiated this approach leave more room for religious actors
as active agents in the shaping of society and cultures (cf. Mahmood 2005).
This approach to mediatization addresses Beckford’s description of religion in
highly modernized societies as a cultural resource and social force that still plays
a significant role but that to a larger degree than in pre-modern societies is defined
and structured by other institutions. The focus on how particular constellations
produce various outcomes also promises to better explain varieties in growth and
decline of religion’s public presence and vitality through mediatization. A theory
of the mediatization of religion that continues to develop along these lines can be
helpful in addressing some of the contemporary challenges in studies of religion,
such as the interplay between religion and media in the Arab world and the Global
South, how mediatization shapes the relations between these countries and the
Western world, the role of media in the negotiation of secularity, democracy, and
multicultural policies in the European countries, and how mediatization may
enhance the possibilities of religious actors to handle everyday life challenges and
take an active part in the shaping of modern, democratic societies.
 Mediatization and religion 567

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Mike S. Schäfer
25 The media in the labs, and the labs
in the media: what we know about
the mediatization of science1
Abstract: Media of various kinds have always played a role in science, where they
have been used to conduct, document, and communicate research. The role and
the impact of these media – from laboratory instruments and the use of Internet
communication to the influence of mass media on scientific work – can be seen
as a “mediatization” of science. This review presents an overview of the respective
scholarship. It distinguishes three kinds of media communication that can be
found within science (communication with mass media, interpersonal communica-
tion, and the use of media as scientific instruments) and three facets of mediatiza-
tion (an extension of scientific capabilities, an amalgamation or substitution of
established scientific activities with new ones, and an accommodation of science
towards the media logic). It shows that a considerable number of studies have
analyzed the mediatization of science. They have demonstrated, for example, that
scientists are rather open towards the mass media, that online media have
extended scientific collaboration temporally and spatially, and that media play a
crucial role within scientific laboratories. In turn, the review also demonstrates a
large number of gaps in current scholarship, and highlights relevant and poten-
tially fertile fields for future research.

Keywords: mediatization, science, research, mass media, social media, Internet,

laboratory studies, medialization, Internet research

1 Introduction
Science – the systematic, methodologically controlled production of new knowl-
edge – is a rather particular enterprise. In its modern form, it took shape in the
early 19th century (e.g. Felt, Nowotny and Taschwer 1995: 30–48) and for a long
time has increasingly distanced itself from the outside world. It moved from ama-
teur, “gentleman” science into specific institutions, such as academies and univer-
sities, which had their individual codes of conduct (Merton 1973) and educational
degrees as entry barriers (Felt, Nowotny and Taschwer 1995: 33–43). Specialists
replaced generalists and an extensive differentiation into disciplines, sub-disci-

1 I would like to thank Lea Borgmann for her assistance in researching relevant literature for this
article, and her and Julian Szenogrady for proof-reading it.
572 Mike S. Schäfer

plines, research fields etc. was set in motion (e.g. Stichweh 1988). In the process,
the scientific community successfully fought against previously strong outside
influences such as politics or religion. It started to keep many of its inner workings
from public view, relied on internal quality control, and did not perceive the soci-
ety at large as a relevant audience (Weingart 2005a).
Over the years, however, different types of media have always had their place
within science. Laboratory notebooks, computers, and entire generations of imag-
ing technologies were, and still are, used to conduct, document, and communicate
research (cf. Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981). Scientific journals and
books, and more recently blogs and tweets, serve(d) for the communication
amongst scientists (e.g. King, McDonald and Roderer 1981). And at many times,
mass media were seen and used as educational or promotional bridges between
science and the public (Gregory and Miller 1998).
The presence and role of these different media within science can be inter-
preted as a “mediatization” of science. The aim of the article at hand is to present
an overview of the scholarship on this matter. It includes both studies which
explicitly position themselves as mediatization analyses (cf. Valiverronen 2001;
Rawolle 2005; Peters et al. 2008c; Schäfer 2009; Rödder, Weingart and Franzen
2011),2 as well as scholarship dealing with similar questions under different labels,
such as “mode 2” science (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001),
the “triple helix” model (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000), “cyberscience” (Nen-
twich 2003, 2005, 2009), “e-research” (e.g. Meyer and Schroeder 2009 and others).

2 Conceptualizing the mediatization of science:

organizing the existing scholarship
Different understandings of mediatization have been advanced (e.g. Livingstone
2009a, 2009b). These have been used to analyze the mediatization of politics (e.g.

2 Among German-speaking mediatization scholars, and particularly with regards to a potential

mediatization of science, a debate is still going on between proponents of the term “mediatization”
and their opponents, who favor “medialization”. Both camps differ somewhat in terms of their
theoretical foundations and empirical paradigms, with “medialization” scholars mostly relying on
macro-theory such as general social systems theory, and “mediatization” proponents using inter-
pretative, micro-sociological theory and methods (cf. Meyen 2009). And while proponents of “medi-
alization” tend to analyze the influences of mass media on diverse social spheres (e.g. Peters et al.
2008c), users of the “mediatization” term emphasize the importance of other (non-mass) media
such as smartphones, tablet PCs, etc. (e.g. Hartmann and Hepp 2010). It is impossible to decide
this terminological, theoretical, and at times paradigmatic debate en passant in this article. After
all, proposed compromises such as the one proposed by Franzen et al. (Franzen, Weingart and
Rödder 2011) – who argue that “mediatization” should be used as a broader term whereas “mediali-
zation” should refer to the mass media-relations of science – have not (yet) found a large following.
And in both camps, scholars can be found who do not see substantial differences between the
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 573

Kepplinger 2002), religion (e.g. Hjarvard 2008), law (e.g. Kepplinger and Zerback
2009), or sports (Dohle and Vowe 2006), and stem from a wide range of theoretical
backgrounds from cultural studies and symbolic interactionism (e.g. Krotz 2007,
2009) to general systems and differentiation theory (e.g. Rödder, Weingart and
Franzen 2011).
Their smallest common denominator is that they claim media communication
has worked its way into various professional and private spheres, having all kinds
of effects within these spheres. In other words: Mediatization describes “why and
how media develop, and [what] consequences this has for people, identity, culture,
and human cohabitation” (Krotz 2007: 12).3 When this understanding is applied to
the mediatization of science, a wide range of different phenomena and a multitude
of studies come into view, which I will organize around two taxonomies borrowed
from general mediatization theory.

The first taxonomy was introduced by Krotz (Krotz 2007, cf. 2009). Lamenting the
long-standing obsession of communication sciences with mass communication
(e.g. Krotz 2007: 47), he argues that three different kinds of communication ought
to be analyzed with regards to mediatization:
1. “Communication with media”, i.e. the communication of “standardized content
addressed to a broad, general public” (Krotz 2007: 17), as is the case in televi-
sion or newspaper coverage. This is largely identical to mass communication.
2. “Communication with other people via media such as letters, telephone, or
chats” (Krotz 2007: 17), which refers to forms of mediated interpersonal com-
munication.
3. “Interactive communication with robots or computer games” (Krotz 2007: 17),
i.e. communication and interaction with non-human, yet human-made agents.

A second taxonomy which intersects with these kinds of communication are the
sub-processes of mediatization outlined by Schulz (2004). He argues that mediati-
zation consists of:
1. Extension, i.e. of media “extend[ing] the limits of human communication”,
which can be done “in terms of space, time and expressiveness”. The latter
refers to an improved transmission and encoding of “the fidelity, vividness,
sensory complexity and aesthetic appeal of messages” (Schulz 2004: 88).
2. Substitution, which means that “media [may] partly or completely substitute
social activities and social institutions and thus change their character”
(Schulz 2004: 88–89), e.g. when watching TV replaces family gatherings or
when text messaging replaces face-to-face conversation.

terms anyway (e.g. Krotz 2008). I will use “mediatization” in this article simply because it seems
to be the more common term in English-speaking scholarship.
3 This quote has been translated into English for this publication, as have been several other
quotes from German books and articles.
574 Mike S. Schäfer

Tab. 1: Overview of different claims about the mediatization of science that can be found in the
literature.

Mass Communication Communication Interactive

within Science Communication

Extension Science communication Research collaborations Media make better mea-

increasingly addresses expand in size, space, surements and documen-
the mass media, broad- across disciplines and tation as well as entirely
ening and extending its beyond science. new research fields pos-
audience. sible.

Amalgamation Mass media becomes a Informal communication Science (increasingly)

and relevance source of infor-
Substitution mation for scientists. Sci-
entists might increas-
ingly publish in mass
media instead of scien-
tific journals. Media
prominence might inter-
fere with the scientific
gratification system.
within science amal-
gamates with new media,
resulting in publication
and literature research
going online, and also in
more and more scholarly
communication being
semi-public.
analyzes purified and/or
simulated versions of
reality, increasing the
presence and importance
of scientific “machinery”
in the laboratory.

Accommo- Scientists and scientific
dation institutions might
increasingly adapt their
thinking and behavior
to the (perceived) mass
media logic.
Digital literacy becomes New professional skills
necessary. “Webomet- are required to deal with
rics” have repercussions and adequately interpret
on science. Scientists’ media in the labs.
self-presentation online is
becoming more impor-
tant.

3. Amalgamation, where “[m]edia activities not only extend and (partly) substi-
tute non-media activities [but] also merge and mingle” (Schulz 2004: 89).
4. Accommodation, in which media “induce social change”, and where “actors
have to accommodate to the way the media operate” (Schulz 2004: 89).

To organize what is known about the mediatization of science, I will combine

Krotz’s and Schulz’s taxonomies in a three-by-three matrix (see Table 1, for a simi-
lar matrix see Lüthje 2012, 2014). The only deviation from the introduced taxono-
mies is that Schulz’s “substitution” and “amalgamation” dimensions will be
merged into one here, as they seem to indicate a difference in degree (does media-
induced change substitute pre-existing social forms entirely, or do they continue
to exist side by side in some form of amalgamation?) rather than in principle. The
created matrix establishes a heuristic space in which different facets of mediatiza-
tion can be mapped, and which is able to capture the overwhelming majority of
observations, results, assumptions, and hypotheses that have been presented in
the literature on the mediatization of science.
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 575

Before organizing existing studies in this way, some features of this body of
literature and corresponding caveats have to be mentioned: Most importantly, it
has to be said that there are many gaps in the respective literature. While a rela-
tively large amount of research has analyzed the relation between science and the
mass media (for a recent overview see Rödder, Weingart and Franzen 2011), many
other fields and questions that will be outlined are thoroughly under-researched as
of yet (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 7). For many, existing evidence is largely
anecdotal (Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 222) – meaning that although certain phe-
nomena have been documented at some place and time within science, it is diffi-
cult to assess how representative they are for science as such or for some (and
which) scientific disciplines, and under which conditions they occur. Due to the
limited amount of research on some aspects, it is also likely that current scholar-
ship has not yet been able to identify all instances of a mediatization of science,
and that future studies might discover other, novel facets of this phenomenon.

3 Mass communication and the mediatization of

science
The mediatization of science is most often analyzed with a focus on mass commu-
nication, i.e. with regards to the relevance and impact of mass media for science.
Most scholars assume that science is being increasingly closer connected to other
realms of society, particularly the mass media, which results in a mutual adapta-
tion of both sides (Weingart 2001: 124, 2002: 703; Schäfer 2008; Rödder 2011; Röd-
der, Weingart and Franzen 2011; see also Bucchi 1998; Felt 1993; Felt, Nowotny
and Taschwer 1995; Lewenstein 1995b; Neidhardt 2002, 2004; Nelkin 1992, 1995b,
1995a; Peters 1994, 2000).4 These (alleged) developments can be described using
the dimensions proposed by Schulz (2004).

Extension: One of the most widespread, fundamental, and powerful assumptions

of a change in the science-mass media-relationship was triggered by the develop-
ment of “Public Understanding of Science” initiatives, which successfully called
for an extension of sciences’ outwards communication efforts using the mass media.
In 1985, a Royal Society (1985) report and subsequent surveys (e.g., Bodmer 1986;
Eurobarometer 1991; Miller 1991) documented that the public’s “scientific literacy”
(Durant 1993; Miller 1996) was deficient: Obviously, it was not very interested in
science, knew little about it, and saw it rather critical (for an overview see Gregory

4 It has to be noted here that some of the respective authors have decided to use the term “mediali-
zation” specifically for such media-related changes within science, whereas they propose using
“mediatization” in a broader sense for all media-related changes in science (see Franzen, Weingart
and Rödder 2011: esp. 4–5; Rödder 2011).
576 Mike S. Schäfer

and Miller 1998: 86–99). As a response, “Public Understanding of Science” pro-

grams were developed in Great Britain and, subsequently, in other countries to
promote science. These programs imagined that this would be achieved by simply
transmitting information from science (the sender) to the public (the receiver) via
mass media (Gregory and Miller 1998: 86; cf. Bucchi 1998: 3; Lewenstein 1995b:
348). The mass media were not supposed to change or question the scientific con-
tent, but merely to “transport” or, at best, adequately “translate” it (MacDonald
1996). The underlying assumption was that once citizens were adequately
informed about science, they would inevitably support it because “the public
[only] opposed technologies like nuclear power because they misunderstood the
‘real’ risks as known to science” (Wynne 1995: 363).
Although this model can be, and has quite extensively been, criticized on
terminological, theoretical, and empirical grounds (e.g. Wynne 1992, 1995; Irwin
and Wynne 1996; Miller 2001), it is still widely spread within the scientific commu-
nity and has been an important driver of communication efforts both of individual
scientists and scientific institutions (although little is known about the latter
empirically). The concept has recently emerged, for example, as a leading motif
of scientists’ online communication (Schäfer 2012: 528–530). And it has certainly,
although to an unclear extent, contributed to a number of current developments
within science which can be seen as an extension of (outwards) science communi-
cation. Such developments are, for example, that the communication efforts of
scientific institutions have both expanded and professionalized (Marcinkowski et
al. 2013; Peters 2011), that individual scientists see the media as an important
channel to communicate their work to the public, and that they engage in media
interactions quite extensively – at least in research fields such as climate science
(Ivanova et al. 2013), stem cell research or epidemiology (Peters et al. 2008a;
2008b).
It has also coincided with – and to some extent possibly caused – a rise in
public attention for science (Bauer 2011, Bauer et al. 2006). Scholars have shown
that there is a quantitative increase in science coverage in the mass media and an
increasing proliferation of science-related publications and broadcasting formats
(from the “MIT Technology Review” over science documentaries to “CSI”, [e.g.
Long, Boiarsky and Thayer 2001; Milde and Ruhrmann 2006]), and that science
has become a major media issue over the last decade (Felt, Nowotny and Taschwer
1995: 244–248.) – even though debates about science have also become more con-
troversial (Nelkin 1992: ix, 1995b: viii–ix) and often involve non-scientific actors
and viewpoints (Weingart 2005b: 25; Schäfer 2009).

Amalgamation and substitution: Many scholars assume that the described “loss
of distance” (Weingart 2001: 124, 2002: 703) between science and the mass media
has triggered a number of accommodation or substitution processes. However, the
evidence for most of these claims is anecdotal and it is not clear whether these
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 577

processes indicate a substitution of scientific behavior by mass media-oriented

behavior, or whether they rather amalgamate. Mostly, the respective claims refer
to three different phenomena:
First, scholars argue that internal science communication and mass media
communication are increasingly amalgamated when scientists inform themselves
about their research fields. To do this, scientists do not restrict themselves (any-
more) to traditional means of scientific communication such as conferences, work-
shops, or journals. Corresponding with an increase in scientific content in mass
media, surveys show that scientists also inform themselves about their research
fields in newspapers, radio, television, and other news outlets (Peters 2009; Schä-
fer et al. 2012). This might explain why, after a research article by sociologist Laurel
Walum was published by the New York Times, 300 colleagues contacted the author
and caused her to voice concerns about a media-induced distortion of her peers’
attention (Walum 1975; for other examples see Phillips et al. 1991; Parthasarathy
2006).
Second, an amalgamation and potential substitution is seen – and quite often
feared – in scientists’ outwards communication, i.e. when “[s]cientists turn to the
public” (Bucchi 1998: 15), instead of using established channels of inner-scientific
communication. On the one hand, there are a number of high-profile cases docu-
menting the existence of such practices. The case of the 47 million-year-old pri-
mate fossil “Ida” is an example: After paleontologist Jorn Hurum bought “Ida”
and assembled a team of researchers, he offered various mass media to cover the
research, launched an elaborate website, published a book, and later presented
“Ida” to the public as the “first link between ape and men” (Mäder 2009: 8). When
the first scientific paper on “Ida” appeared, it was downloaded some 100,000
times; very likely making it the most popular paleontology paper ever published.
Similar incidents of scientists “turning public” are the presentation of a “draft
version” of the human genome sequence (Rödder 2009a), or the media publication
of the “cold fusion” technology (Lewenstein 1995a). In these cases, scientific find-
ings were presented and exaggerated in the media before being properly assessed
within science (cf. Bucchi 1998: 33–81) – a phenomenon which has become easier,
and maybe more widespread, with the opportunities of the Internet and particu-
larly of social media such as blogs and Twitter (e.g. Pielke Jnr 2012).
On the other hand, however, it seems inappropriate to see “turning public” as
a general trend – and thus a “substitution” – instead of just an “amalgamation”.
For once, it seems rather rare. It is still a “non-routine” action (Bucchi 1998: 15)
that occurs during “crisis situations which cannot be managed within the scientific
community” (Bucchi 1998: 15), for example, when new scientific research fields
have to prove their relevance. In addition, there seem to be some indications that
only scientists with specific socio- and psychographic characteristics and attitudes
engage in it (Tsfati, Cohen and Gunther 2011; Besley, Oh and Nisbet 2013; Dudo
2012; Ivanova et al. 2013). Moreover, if such non-routine actions occur before the
578 Mike S. Schäfer

respective results have been reviewed by scientific peers, they are still very widely
seen as problematic deviations from established scientific behavior (Bucchi 1998:
15; Peters 2009; Schäfer et al. 2012: 242–243) and have often received strong-
worded criticisms from the scientific community (e.g. Nature 2009).
A third (alleged) amalgamation or substitution is seen when scientific gratifica-
tion systems are interfered with, or replaced by, media-related practices. This was
feared to be the case, for example, when international media debates about Daniel
Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners provided him with “tremendous
public prominence” which, however, “differed markedly” and “competed” with
“the judgment by the historical community” (Weingart and Pansegrau 1999: 1).
But again, far-reaching claims of a broader change within science should not be
made prematurely, based on such singular cases. Scholars concluded that the
Goldhagen incident was “certainly not a normal case” (Weingart and Pansegrau
1999: 2), a conclusion further underlined by the fact that Harvard University
decided not to award a chair to Goldhagen even though third-party funding for it
had been available (Weingart 2005b: 185–186).

Accommodation: Finally, many authors see a growing orientation of science

towards the mass media – this facet of the (mass) mediatization of science has
triggered most research activity so far (cf. Gregory and Miller 1998: 1–2; Weingart
2003: 118–119). Many scholars claim that scientists and scientific institutions have
become more media-oriented, caused, for example, by the need to legitimize their
usefulness to society via the media (cf. Limoges 1993: 274; Gregory and Miller 1998:
1–2; Weingart 2003: 118–119).
Studies have shown a number of developments that indicate such an accom-
modation of science towards (perceived) media demands: On the institutional
level, most universities and research institutes nowadays employ professional pub-
lic relations staff to handle media requests (e.g. Weigold 2001: 171; Peters 2011).
On the individual level, scientists adapt to a (perceived) media logic semantically
by proactively initiating “catastrophe discourse”, as in the case of climate science
(Weingart, Engels and Pansegrau 2000), or using “promotional metaphors”, for
example in biotechnology (Nelkin 1994). In some instances, they have also been
shown to integrate political arguments and what they themselves see as “misinfor-
mation” and “spinning” in their rhetorical strategies (Rödder and Schäfer 2010:
258).
Also, media-related attitudes and values of scientists seem to have changed
(Weingart 2001: 245). Nowadays, many of them see mass media communication
as a necessary part of their work, and are willing to communicate with the media
and, thereby, with the public (Peters et al. 2008c; Peters 2009). In addition, many
have already had experiences with talking to journalists (Bray and Storch 2007,
2010; Peters et al. 2008c: 75; Ivanova et al. 2013), and even contact them proact-
ively at times (Rödder 2009b: 216).
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 579

There are even some indications for an accommodation in the “core of knowl-
edge production” (Weingart 2001: 249), i.e. in scientific decision making. Roughly
two thirds of stem cell researchers and epidemiologists say they have seen col-
leagues adapt to media demands in selecting their topics, methods, partners, fund-
ing sources, and so on (Peters et al. 2009: 32). For climate science, it has been
shown that particularly less-experienced, junior scientists seem to be willing to
take potential media interest into account when making such decisions (Ivanova
et al. 2013).
Again, however, claims of a fundamental change within science should not be
made easily on this empirical basis. Phases of intense (mass) mediatization, such
as the peak years of human genome research in 2000 and 2001, have been
described by the respective bio-scientists themselves “as an ‘anomaly,’ ‘a real
exception,’ and ‘an extreme case’” (Rödder and Schäfer 2010: 257). Also, Peters et
al. (2008a, 2008b) demonstrate, for example, that scientific institutions’ PR at large
prioritizes scientific criteria over media demands, and that they respect the author-
ity of scientific experts.

4 The mediatization of communication within

science
The second kind of potentially mediatized communication within science is “com-
munication with other people via media” (Krotz 2007: 17). As the communication
of novel findings is paramount to the ongoing production of knowledge within the
scientific community (cf. Knorr Cetina 1981: 6), this type of scholarly communica-
tion appears in multiple and diverse forms: informal talks, scientific conferences
and workshops, talks and presentations with subsequent discussions, e-mail ex-
changes, blog debates, and so on. Accordingly, it would seem like an ideal area
for communications research. But so far, most of the respective analyses stem from
outside the discipline, from Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Nentwich 2003,
2005; Heimeriks and Leydesdorff 2012), the Sociology of Science (e.g. Gläser 2003;
Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008), “Internet Research” (e.g. Hine 2005), and other
fields; with most focusing on the Internet and social media.
Even though “[m]uch of what is known about access to online knowledge
remains anecdotal” (Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 222), it has been shown that these
media are widely used within science. German climate scientists, for example, use
the Internet and social media heavily for both professional and private purposes
(Schäfer et al. 2012: 243). “Email is becoming the most common communication
medium for scientists” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 7; cf. Nentwich 2003;
Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and Frenken 2008). And some scientists use online
media, weblogs, or Twitter extensively (e.g. Bonetta 2007, 2009, Pscheida 2014).
580 Mike S. Schäfer

Most scholars assume that this has considerable consequences, that the “use of
information and communication technologies (ICT) is changing science and
research” and “affecting practically every aspect of how research is done” (Nen-
twich 2005: 543–544; cf. Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and Frenken 2008).

Extension: Online media and ICTs have been shown to play an important role
in extending the communication between scientists. Many scholars describe that
research collaborations have expanded in different ways due to these new channels
of communication. Firstly, new research groups have developed, or increased in
size, due to the simplicity of online communication (Walsh 1996: 346; Gläser 2003:
43; cf. Genoni, Merrick and Willson 2006). Mathematics is an example, where
scientists used to be rather isolated (“Sometimes, you’re the only one at your
university who does your kind of work,” [Walsh 1996: 346]), but where e-mail use
and online cooperation have led to more collaboration and, for example, “a dra-
matic increase in joint-authored papers” (Walsh 1996: 346–347). The social-scien-
tific “Association of Internet Researchers” (AoIR) is another example – a commu-
nity originally “not based on the journal system but organized around an emailing
list” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 17), which has since developed its own
conferences, book series, and so on.
Secondly, new media have made long-distance and international collaboration
easier and more common and distances “less relevant in the collaboration” (Heim-
eriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 13; Schroeder 2008: 132). Accordingly, scientists state
that the availability of computers and the Internet “definitely knocks down geo-
graphic barriers,” and that “it’s been a gift,” and “done a lot” for extending collab-
orations (Walsh 1996: 348). Fittingly, joint authorship of scientific publications has
become significantly transnationalized in recent decades (e.g. Walsh 1996: 347;
Engels and Ruschenburg 2008).
Furthermore, it has been argued that online media and ICTs further collabora-
tions between disciplines (Nentwich 2003: 447–448), as the above-mentioned
“Association of Internet Researchers” from political science, anthropology, infor-
mation sciences, and other fields illustrates (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 17).
Additionally, online media are also said to make communication between science
and external parties, such as politics or the economy, more likely (Heimeriks and
Vasileiadou 2008: 19–20; Vasileiadou and Vliegenthart 2009: 1260).5 And while
the advent of new media is hardly the only, or even primary, cause of these devel-
opments – which have been described repeatedly as “mode 2” science (Gibbons
et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons 2001) or a “triple helix” in which science

5 These collaborations seem to be even more diverse in online communication itself – the interlink-
ages in “hyperlink networks between departments, compared to co-authorships and project cooper-
ations, are much more diverse both in audiences that were addressed and in the communicated
content” (Heimeriks et al. 2008: 1605).
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 581

is intermingled with the economy and politics (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000) –
they may indeed have catalyzed and reinforced them (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou
2008: 20).
Media, and particularly online media, are also seen to increase scientific pro-
ductivity, i.e. extending its processing capacity and output. They do that, it is
assumed, “by providing access to resources and information and by facilitating
sharing of files, data and creative ideas[,] by providing means to process, store
and exchange information and by increasing the pace of research[,] by providing
a variety of new maps, models and tools to be generated and thus a wider variety
of ideas and concepts” (Vasileiadou and Vliegenthart 2009: 1261). Yet, while most
of these developments cannot be denied – the extension of data storage capacities,
the increase of online databases, or of “remote access to experimental equipment”
(Gläser 2003: 43; cf. Schroeder 2008: 141–142; Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 223–224;
Vasileiadou and Vliegenthart 2009) – their effects on productivity are not that well
established. Instead of increasing it, they also “may reduce scientific productivity
[…] because of information overload[,] unsolicited email or time loss because of
viruses or technical problems [or due to] learning costs in time and energy” (Vasil-
eiadou and Vliegenthart 2009: 1261). So far, studies indeed show media-related
increases in productivity, even though their degree differs strongly. While some
analyses document considerable productivity gains (e.g. Walsh and Maloney 2002;
Barjak 2006), others only find weak, “not very important” improvements (Vasileia-
dou and Vliegenthart 2009: 1266).

Amalgamation and substitution: Apart from extending scientific communica-

tion, online media might also amalgamate or substitute old ways of carrying out
science with new ones (e.g. Walsh 1996). Several examples are discussed in the
literature.
One is that traditional forms of informal inner-scientific communication might
be intermingled with or replaced by virtual equivalents. For some specific modes of
communication, this argument can well be made – snail mail, by and large, has
indeed been replaced by email in the communication between scientists (Meyer
and Schroeder 2009: 222). But most ongoing changes in the informal communica-
tion amongst scientists seem to be amalgamations rather than substitutions. Chats
on departmental floors, chance meetings at conferences, after-work discussions in
pubs etc. still play an important role in science. But social media communication
in blogs, via Twitter, in fora etc. is “now being added to existing informal modes
of academic communication, which include e-mail, e-mail lists, conferences and
professional newsletters” (Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 222; cf. Krauss 2012). And
they can be used for new purposes, too. Some scientists use new and online media
specifically to disseminate new ideas and research findings, and to brainstorm and
generate new ideas in a broader community involving external colleagues.6 They

6 A related substitution described in the literature is that some scientists increasingly use the
Internet, and in particular social media, for outreach, educational or PR purposes – although it is
582 Mike S. Schäfer

do not turn to online media exclusively, of course, but treat the (social) web as an
“alternative mechanism for gaining feedback in the early stages of a research
project [and] for publicizing and interpreting peer-reviewed literature” (Ashlin and
Ladle 2006: 201; cf. Bentley 2008; Schäfer 2012: 529).7
A second assumption is that the “formal communication system based on peer
reviewed journals and face-to-face conferences” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008:
7; Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and Frenken 2008: 1604–1605) might be amalga-
mated with or substituted by new forms of communication. Regarding scientific
meetings, claims of a substitution by new and virtual forms have been made in
the past, but they can hardly be substantiated as of now. And even talk of an
amalgamation might overestimate the relevance of such virtual equivalents. So
far, virtual participation via videolinks can only be found at selected, and still few
conferences (cf. Basque, Dao and Contamines 2005), and it is certainly not the
case that these meetings are being entirely replaced by “virtual conferences”
(Schäfer 2012; cf. Walsh 1996). In written formal communication, however, such
as in the scientific publication system, indications for a more pronounced amalga-
mation can indeed be found. In some fields, new manuscripts are disseminated
online before the texts have been reviewed by the scientific community. Particle
physics is an example, where scientists “contribute draft articles to an electronic
working paper server at the time of submission of the article to a paper journal.
While the paper journals are still important for archiving and for prestige and
reward allocation, these electronic working paper servers are frequently the pri-
mary means of formal communication” (Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and Frenken
2008: 1606; see also Walsh 1996: 356). These developments, however, are debated
within science, with opponents pointing to the lack of institutional control that
online dissemination brings about, and proponents embracing them as forms of
“open” or “extended peer review” that might circumvent institutional restraints
(cf. Nentwich 2009: 3) and eventually make science more transparent or even more
“democratic” (cf. Ravetz 2012).
In a third area, some scholars seem to make out a substitution process in the
“marked shift to scholars accessing material online” (Meyer and Schroeder 2009:
221). At least in some scientific fields, finding relevant publications for one’s
research has become an online activity to an extent that essentially substitutes the
search in libraries or journal hardcopies. Studies show such changes in the earth
sciences and chemistry (Hallmark 2004) as well as amongst younger scholars
(Sathe, Grady and Giuse 2002; cf. Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 221).

unclear whether they are just adding a new channel to these efforts or whether they actually
substitute their visits to schools, having open days, or talking to journalists by going online. In
any case, if scientists blog or tweet, “the most important aim seems to be to provide information
to educate the broader public” (Schäfer 2012: 529) and to tell “people about your work” (Bonetta
2009: 453).
7 Fittingly, studies show that online content provided by scientists is significantly more informal
than scholarly publications (for an overview of several studies see Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 222).
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 583

Accommodation: The described changes in media environments within and

around science are likely to lead to an accommodation, i.e. to an adaptation of
scientists to these developments. The exact nature and degree of this accommoda-
tion, however, is not clear yet.
A number of scholars argue that researchers require new skills to be success-
ful. For one, they should be able to use the available media properly and to their
advantage, from using a computer and writing e-mail (Nentwich 2003) to research-
ing scientific literature or data online (cf. Meyer and Schroeder 2009), to being
able to use the opportunities of online communication by integrating modalities
like text, movies, and sounds into their research and its documentation (Nentwich
2005: 551). Scientists, in other words, need to have “digital literacy and e-skills”
(Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 18). At the same time, they are still required to
be well-versed in the established ways of scientific work. There “are potential
pitfalls”, for example, “for younger scholars who rely on electronic resources” in
that they may in turn “have difficulties using libraries and other resources” (Meyer
and Schroeder 2009: 221)
Furthermore, it is certainly helpful for scientists to understand the workings
and implications of web-based assessments of scientific performance, the “webo-
metrics” (Thelwall, Vaughan and Björneborn 2005) or altmetrics (Piwowar 2013).
The characteristics of journals in which scientific results might be published –
their inclusion in citation databases like the Science Citation Index, their Impact
Factors, and their presentation as open or closed access – all influence how visible
and influential a published article might become (Schroeder 2007; see also Heime-
riks and Vasileiadou 2008; Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 225–226). Accordingly, sci-
entists will keep these characteristics in mind when choosing journals to publish
their work.
A similar kind of accommodation is imaginable with regard to scientists’ self-
presentation online. Nowadays, the visibility of a scientist “does not rely exclu-
sively on the number of publications and their peer citations” anymore, “but can
increasingly result from a well-designed and well-linked homepage providing sci-
entific content” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 18). The strategic management
of a scientists’ self-presentation online – including the integration of social media
such as blogs, micro-blogging, and social network sites – is another skill scientists
might (have to) develop.
Heimeriks and Vasileiadou (2008: 18) also point out that the change in com-
munication media requires scientists to develop certain “tacit skills of reflexivity”.
It is useful for researchers to be “reflexive about the value of information, how it
can be recombined with other information, in which context the information is
meaningful and how it could be processed, stored, communicated and analysed”
(Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 18). Furthermore, scientists have to be more
reflexive socially: As “ICTs allow for less geographically bounded, and potentially
international, collaborations” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 18), scientists
584 Mike S. Schäfer

should be able to keep contact to colleagues over larger distances, but at the same
time to carefully screen out less preferred contacts, and so on.

5 The mediatization of the lab: interactive

communication
Krotz emphasizes that “interactive communication with robots or computer games”
(Krotz 2007: 17) also constitutes a relevant kind of communication for mediatiza-
tion analyses. In modern science, such interactive communication is highly preva-
lent – with the counterparts not being computer games, but scientific instruments
and laboratory equipment such as computers, electronic microscopes, or imaging
technology (Knorr Cetina 1998: 30). Essentially, a laboratory is nothing more than
“a local accumulation of instruments and devices” (Knorr Cetina 1981: 3), and
quite a few of these (and increasingly more) are media of some kind, i.e. “sign-
processing machinery” which “mechanically, electrically, and electronically pro-
duce[s] images of the world” (Knorr Cetina 1998: 46).
But even though these kinds of media are omnipresent in modern laboratories,
very little research analyzes how they are used and how and to what extent they
influence the scientific work in which they are used. Some such insights can be
found in the tradition of the “laboratory studies” (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr
Cetina 1981, 1993, 1998). These do not focus on media in particular, however, but
rather mention them in passing. But even so, they hint at a potential wealth of
information and a relevant field for future study.

Extension: The availability of more and better instruments in scientific laborato-

ries has extended the opportunities and scope of scientific research significantly.
They have made better measurements possible and enabled scientists to look
deeper and further into their research matter. A number of historical examples can
be found for this; with the most prominent being the use of the telescope by
Galileo Galilei and others in medieval astronomy, or the introduction of the micro-
scope into modern biology (cf. Wade and Finger 2001). More recent examples from
these disciplines are autoradiographs which enabled biologists to locate previously
“invisible” radioactive substances in human tissue (Knorr Cetina 1998: e.g. 84–88,
101), or the use of large radio telescopes in astronomy which deliver much better
visualization of spaces further out (Pickering 1995: 7–8). The Internet, in addition,
has made entirely new kinds of “instruments” possible, in which networked com-
puters provide large storage spaces for particle physics (Meyer and Schroeder
2009: 221) or the search of extraterrestrial life in the SETI@home project (Korpela
et al. 2001).
In addition, lab technology has led to a better and more precise documentation
of data, thereby extending the memory of scientists (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 585

2008: 12). In the social sciences, for example, video technology has allowed for
“greater precision” in recording optical and acoustic data (Knorr Cetina 1981: 18),
and thereby limited the problem of prematurely summarizing data in field notes
(cf. Knorr Cetina 1981: 34). The same can be said about the use of data tapes in
physics or the use of moving images for documentation in biology (Knorr Cetina
1998: 101–108).
Both of these developments resulted in another extension: They made entirely
new scientific analyses possible. First, the role of new media themselves became a
topic for the social sciences, for information sciences, etc. (e.g. Hine 2005; Maclin
2010). But additionally, computer technologies and online media in science labs
resulted in “new models, maps and tools to be generated: simulated experimenta-
tion in silico, algorithms for pattern identification in biomedicine, visualization
tools, modelling and simulations” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 11). They have
“enabled the ‘mapping’ of vast quantities of information and data on an unprece-
dented scale, for instance in the Human Genome Project” (Heimeriks and Vasileia-
dou 2008: 11), allowed anthropologists to do their research off-site (Hine 2000),
and have “radically transformed” biology (Lenoir 2002: 115). Moreover, they “have
enabled types of results and scientific output that were not feasible before, given
the vast amount of data: output and results based on mapping vast amounts of
digitized data and identifying patterns in those data” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou
2008: 11), and have made large-scale simulations of complex matters possible,
such as models of climate developments (Heffernan 2010).

Amalgamation and substitution: Newly developed media in laboratories have

resulted in one obvious substitution: They have replaced older instruments and
measuring devices, like in astronomy where radio telescopes or large “virtual
observatories” are set up instead of smaller, on-site instruments which have in
turn been relegated to the instruments of amateur astronomers (Schroeder 2008:
145–146). Yet, they have also brought about at least two other, more subtle changes
which might be seen as either amalgamations or even substitutions.
Firstly, they made it possible, and at times necessary, to analyze a purified or
entirely simulated version of reality in scientific laboratories. According to Knorr
Cetina, it has been a basic and fundamental aspect of many modern sciences from
early on that laboratories used purified, idealized versions of matter which cannot
actually be found in the “real” outside world (Knorr Cetina 1988). Furthermore,
many objects of research are no longer observable without media of some kind,
meaning they can only be experienced in a mediatized, transmitted and to some
extent “staged” way (Knorr Cetina 1998: 33–45); wherein only “machinery” is able
to capture the characteristics of the research matter (Pickering 1995: 7–8).
Secondly, the increased presence of scientific “machinery” in laboratories and
the changing nature of their objects also mean that their role in scientific work and
interactions has increased considerably. Many research steps – the preparation of
586 Mike S. Schäfer

data, samples, or experimental setting, the systematic and tightly monitored reali-
zation of an experiment, and the analysis of the acquired data – are not possible
without them. As a result, there are indications that they are treated accordingly
by scientists, and, at times, even being given human characteristics – for example,
when physicists discuss how the CERN particle detector “behaves” or if it “sees”
things right (Knorr Cetina 1998: 113–119).8

Accommodation: The described changes in scientific laboratories very likely

cause scientists to adapt to them in various ways. Obviously, they require new
professional skills in order to work with them properly – learning programming
languages, setting up large-scale machines (or at least understanding their set up),
being able to interpret statistical outputs, and so on (Knorr Cetina 1998: 59).
But for all the opportunities they provide, they also force themselves upon
scientists, as it is no longer an option not to use them. The documentation of scien-
tific practice, for example, has changed as it has become possible, and at the
same time necessary, to translate previously implicit knowledge into standardized
documentation, which often requires knowledge to be transferred into pre-deter-
mined data formats. “For example in engineering, a number of experience-based
‘rules of thumb’ needed to be translated into mathematical equations to be used
within mathematical models that form the basis for computer simulations” (Heim-
eriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 14). But this translation is not always easy and often
involves subtle (and analytically interesting) processes of fact-finding or fact-con-
structing: Several illustrations can be found in Knorr Cetina’s study on The Manu-
facture of Knowledge, for example when she describes the difficulties of a biologist
to translate an unclear observation (“the stuff has gone white”) into the adequate
scientific nomenclature (Knorr Cetina 1981: 144).

6 Conclusion and outlook

The mediatization of science, as this review has shown, is a relevant field for
the communication sciences. Communication is paramount within science, and
different kinds of media can be found in scientific institutions, are used in and
have an impact on scientific work – from networked computers and visualizing
devices over online journals and the “Web 2.0”, to science magazines or the sci-
ence pages of national broadsheets.
As this review has shown, quite a number of studies have analyzed these
media’s role and effects within science, with some explicitly interpreting this as a

8 They play such an important role in the research situation that approaches such as Actor Net-
work Theory (e.g. Prout 1996; Latour 1996) see them as relevant knots in interaction networks
whose role is equal to those of human ‘actants’.
 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media 587

“mediatization” of science (for overviews see Rödder 2011; Schäfer 2011). They can
show, for example, how open contemporary scientists are towards the mass media
and to what extent some of them interact with journalists (e.g. Peters et al. 2008a;
2008b; Ivanova et al. 2013). They illustrate how online media enable scientific
collaboration over time and space (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 13; Schroeder
2008: 132), and how this results in a transnationalization of project work and
joint authorship (e.g. Walsh 1996: 347; Engels and Ruschenburg 2008). They also
demonstrate how pervasive media are within labs, where they appear as measur-
ing, documenting, and communicating devices that are becoming more and more
important (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981, 1993, 1998).
These studies make clear that the mediatization of science is without doubt a
worthwhile subject for analyses from communications sciences. They also suggest
that a wealth of information about it could be unearthed that would be relevant
both for a better understanding of the inner mechanics of science and also for
basic questions of communications science. In their sum, however, they also illus-
trate that many aspects of this phenomenon and process are still thoroughly
under-researched. This is particularly true for those facets of the mediatization of
science that are not mass media-related. For example, “[t]he ways in which ICTs
have conditioned changes in the knowledge-production system have hardly been
understood or theorized” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 7).
On the one hand, finding such gaps in the respective scholarship is worthwhile
in itself, because it identifies relevant and potentially fertile fields for future
research. On the other hand, knowing about these gaps also has to led to some
caution in interpreting the studies that were presented here, as well as their
results. It makes clear that in many areas, research on the mediatization of science
does not yet stand on firm ground. Sometimes, studies put forward bold assump-
tions without empirical data, or present a wealth of data without interpreting them
as a potential mediatization. They sometimes select cases such as stem cell
research (Yoon 2005), or climate science (Ivanova et al. 2013), or specific groups
of scientists such as professors (Post 2009) or Nobel laureates (Goodell 1977) for
analyses specifically because they have intensive media interactions, but fail to
compare them with other fields of science. This means that on some questions,
the assembled studies amount to not much more than anecdotal evidence, and it
is rather difficult on these grounds to assess whether, and to what extent, the
mediatization of science can be seen as a general phenomenon (cf. Rödder and
Schäfer 2010). It is quite likely that these anecdotal findings from individual
research groups or fields are not representative for all research fields within sci-
ence, as disciplinary differences with regards to mediatization have been shown
repeatedly (Nentwich 2005; Schäfer 2007, 2009; Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and
Frenken 2008; Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 225; Schroeder 2008: 141–142). They
might still be indications for a general trend, but that remains to be shown in the
future through longitudinal, comparative studies in various fields of science.
588 Mike S. Schäfer

These studies should also aim to better establish the causality of mediatiza-
tion, if there is any, more clearly. On many aspects of mediatization, it is hard to
know whether the media cause changes within science, or whether changes in
science have made the use of certain media necessary. Some of these observations
may also be co-occurrences (Heimeriks, van den Besselaar and Frenken 2008),
indicating that “[media] and the sciences co-evolve and shape each other in a
system of mutual influence” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 8). This, as well,
remains to be seen.

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Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard
26 Mediatization and education:
a sociological account
Abstract: This chapter presents an account of the mediatization of education policy
through a focus on the development and uptake of the knowledge economy dis-
course in national education policy and research settings. During the late 20th and
early part of the 21st century, Australia, like other nation states around the globe,
came to adopt the knowledge economy discourse as a kind of meta-policy that
would help connect a variety of statistical indicators and provide direction for a
number of policy areas, including education, science, and research funding. In
Australia the adoption of a knowledge economy discourse was preceded by cover-
age from specialized sections of the quality print media, discussed broadly as a
debate about the social contract that was afforded to fields charged with develop-
ing and producing national capacities for knowledge production. Such a debate
mirrored similar claims by Michael Gibbons in the late 1990s, where he argued
for a new social contract between science and society. Given the media coverage
surrounding the uptake of the knowledge economy discourse and the promotion
of the concept by the OECD, this chapter presents an account of the emergence of
the knowledge economy discourse through a focus on the mediatization of the
concept. The broad argument presented in this account is that what could be
called “mediatization effects”, related to the promotion and adoption of policy
concepts, are variable, and reach the broader public in inconsistent, time-bound,
and sporadic patterns. In order to understand mediatization effects in respect of
policy, the paper draws on a broad Bourdieuian informed conceptual framework
to understand different kinds of fields, their logics of practice, and importantly
here, cross-field effects. Specifically, the focus is on those cross-field effects related
to the impact of practices within both national and global fields of journalism on
national and global fields of education policy. While the case is an Australian one,
the account explores general and more broadly applicable ways to understand
links between the globalization and the mediatization of policy.

Keywords: mediatization, Bourdieu, field theory, social spaces, cross-field effects,

globalization, global fields, respatialization, new technologies

1 Introduction
Mediatization is emerging as a concept with considerable promise for research in
education. In its broadest sense, mediatization refers to processes of change
involving media that entail struggles for social power. There are ongoing debates
596 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

about how to theorize and research mediatization. The understanding and research
use of mediatization in education, as in other fields, is somewhat fractured as a
result of divergent entry points to its study from different disciplines and national
traditions, and their seeming disconnection from one another. However, we think
there is more promise in mediatization than these divergent disciplinary starting
points might suggest. We need, though, to conceptualize the objects or topics
suitable for further research on mediatization of education.
On the face of it, the idea that media have profound ongoing impacts on edu-
cation seems self-evident. Indeed, fundamental changes in education have re-
sulted from the emergence of new communication technologies, and from the
selection and promotion of technological platforms in schools, universities, and
other places of learning (Friesen and Hug 2011). This is the first reference point
for the media. The selection of particular technologies in classrooms, lecture thea-
tres, and other sites of learning is a stake that normalizes future generations of
technology users, and one that has cascading effects on the education of teachers
and their students, including different dispositions required to be a part of an
education system.
In English the media also implies a second referent point, in the sense of
different fields of journalism, such as print journalism, online journalism, televi-
sion and radio journalism (Bourdieu 1996/1998; Benson and Neveau 2005), and
even today, citizen journalism. Journalism of different kinds has also had profound
ongoing impact on education, and in particular through its influence on public
debate, which increasingly frames the terms and parameters in which education
policy emerges, and the patterns of communication that comprise public debate
specifically about education policy (Blackmore and Thorpe 2003; Franklin 1999,
2004; Blackmore and Thomson 2004; Gewirtz, Dickson and Power 2004; Levin,
Sohn and Maharaj 2013). This sense of media involvement with education high-
lights what representations of problems in education are newsworthy, the limits
of arguments that can be publicly maintained about the education within nations
and which representations of problems in education are capable of travelling
between national contexts in different modes. The mediatization of education
involves processes of educational change involving both of these two meanings of
the media.
Both of these accounts of the mediatization of education – involving communi-
cation technology and journalism – also imply an increasing influence linked to
globalization, implying the impact of changes in the media in some countries may
have connected or flow on effects in geographically distant nations. We see the
effects of globalization in the spread of technology leading to innovations in class-
rooms, such as the growth of the iPad, tablet computers, and smart boards, and
in the borrowing of kinds of stories about education policy, such as the spread
of coverage about school choice in education or test-based forms of educational
accountability. This chapter assumes that mediatization refers to both of these
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 597

processes, but in ways that imply the growing dependence of education and educa-
tion policy on the media (new technologies and journalism), and the reduced
autonomy of education from changes in the media and from the impact of the
logics of the field of journalism (Lingard and Rawolle 2004; Rawolle and Lingard
2010). In a later section of the chapter, we introduce an additional meaning of
mediatization of education involving representations and images.
Hence, the solidity of meaning implied by the singular term mediatization
collects together a plurality of overlapping processes, and suggests a complex
interplay of media forces on and in education. The coherence of mediatization as
a process and a concept lies in its scope for research, and as a way to connect and
make meaning of seemingly disparate changes.
In this chapter we link our understanding of mediatization with a focus on the
field of journalism and its effects on education policy, to the theories of practice
and field of Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1990, 1993), a tradition that has been influential
in one strand of research in communications studies (Benson and Nevue 2005;
Couldry 2003, 2012)1 and research concerned with the role of the media in educa-
tion (Blackmore and Thorpe 2003). Our own position is that the mediatization of
education should be conceptualized as the combination of two sub-processes that
are fundamentally concerned with the way changes in the media influence social
power in other fields. The two sub-processes that we outline in this chapter are (1)
the shaping and changing of education policy to meet the needs of different forms
of journalism, and (2) the shaping and changing of education policy by the emer-
gence of new forms of communication technologies. We are led to this representa-
tion of the process through our adoption of a Bourdieuian approach to research,
in which processes need to be considered and represented in terms of social fields
and practices (see Rawolle and Lingard 2013 here). As our own research focuses
on the effects of journalism on education policy, our focus for the later sections of
the chapter will be on mediatization as the first process. More specifically, the
focus will be on the cross-field effects of the field of journalism on the field of
education policy, nationally and globally (Lingard and Rawolle 2004; Rawolle and
Lingard 2010).
In what follows, we first provide an overview of different kinds of mediatiza-
tion in education research and of the possibilities that these different kinds hold
for education research. We then expand on our own account (Rawolle and Lingard
2010) which engages with Bourdieu’s theories, and in particular his accounts of
social fields and practice (Bourdieu 1990, 1993). We draw on one distinction
implied by Bourdieu’s use of mediatization, in which the term implies the dual
impact of specific fields of journalism and fields of media technology production
on other fields, here specifically on the education policy field. This chapter takes
as one example of this complexity, the impact of mediatization on a particular

1 See also Couldry’s chapter in this Handbook.

598 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

education policy, and represented in a particular discourse and practices associ-

ated with that policy, namely the Australian knowledge economic policy, The
Chance to Change (2000). The broad argument that we develop is that for mediati-
zation to be useful as a concept, some precision needs to be proffered about spe-
cific effects that can be attributed to the process, and that assumptions about the
stages of mediatization (Strömbäck 2008) require some scrutiny for their applica-
tion to different fields; that is, can different stages of mediatization be understood
by the patterns of effects that are attributed to the concept? In order to develop
an account of these mediatization effects, we will need to consider the different
accounts offered of effects in education. The intent is that this discussion of medi-
atization effects and cross-field effects (Rawolle 2005) might be useful to the study
of the process in other fields where the logics of practice of one field have effects
in other fields, though we do not assume a complete homology with other fields.
We also consider briefly the impact of globalization on the journalistic field and
the field of education policy.

2 Kinds of mediatization of education

We can distinguish between three different kinds of the mediatization of education
that have emerged in education research. While elsewhere we have discussed dif-
ferent applications of mediatization to education research (Rawolle 2010a, 2010b;
Rawolle and Lingard 2010), here we talk briefly about these three different kinds
to highlight the alternative ways that mediatization allows research to represent
significant changes involving education in and across nations that are enabled
through changes in the media and by the logics of practice of the fields of journal-
ism. In education these kinds have parallel histories that have not always been
interrelated, and research that has drawn on mediatization has adapted the con-
cept to the central research problems and traditions within subfields of education.
An important distinction that is elaborated in these debates lies in understanding
the relationship and differences between mediation and mediatization (and allied
terms: see Couldry 2008).2 Although later we will focus on one of these kinds of
the mediatization of education, namely the impact of the field of journalism upon
the education policy field, other kinds are important to note as they can lead to
different reference points in subsequent discussions of the mediatization of educa-
tion policy.

2 Couldry’s own position on these debates has shifted and he now advocates the use of mediatiza-
tion in his own work. See Couldry (2012) and also his chapter in this Handbook, Mediatization and
the Future of Field Theory. However, Couldry uses mediatization well beyond media studies; rather,
he sees the saturation of the social by media of various kinds (including digital media) meaning
that mediatization should contribute more broadly to social theory.
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 599

The first use of mediatization emerged from research into the development,
use, and effects of computer technologies in education (ICT). This literature gener-
ated an initial, though somewhat disconnected, discussion about the expression
“technical mediatization”, referring to changing modes in the transmission of
information, in contrast with mediation (Linard 1995). The subsequent develop-
ment of literature relating to ICTs lay in understanding the patterns of emergence,
normalization and residualization of new forms of media in education. This branch
of research involved critical engagements with the embedding of new media in
everyday life, drawing on the original work of McLuhan and Postman (Friesen
and Hug 2009). The possibilities of mediatization for education research from this
literature relate to the exploration of the emergence, embedding, and effects of
new technologies in education. These include discussions about new means of
organizing teaching, and learning, and challenges to and effects on multiple prac-
tices in education, including pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.
Broader questions that relate to this ongoing change involve a rethinking
about the central beliefs and values of education, of what counts as teaching and
learning, and of the necessary elements of education as a system. An allied con-
cern that follows involves questions of provision of media technologies in educa-
tion and educational systems. Given the global spread of policy and approaches
to educational systems, there are different kinds of effects that relate to the scale
and cycle of production and consumption of learning media, and the economics,
distribution, and maintenance of these at various scales. As systems require stand-
ardization of technology, this scale consequently leads to schools, universities,
students, teachers, and lecturers becoming important, lucrative, and competitive
markets for businesses supplying new learning media technology, both to individ-
ual schools, systems of schools, universities, and to governments. Due to the
increasing pressure on governments to ensure that education systems are competi-
tive internationally, new computer technology in education provides both ongoing
and new forms of pressure on education systems, politicians, and policymakers
on how to fund, embed, resist, and regulate the use of new forms of media. The
counterpart to this view of the way ICTs affect education is the social impact of
these new forms of learning and teaching media, including their effects on equity
in education and access of new technologies to schools in different circumstances;
this is the debate about the “digital divide” and the information rich and informa-
tion poor as a new manifestation of inequalities generally and also in and through
education (see Rizvi and Lingard 2010: 153–156).
The second use of mediatization relates to the politics of education, and the
effects of journalism on education, and its practices (e.g. Pina 2007; Goldstein and
Chesky 2011; Thompson and Lasic 2011). In this sense, mediatization describes the
ongoing changes and effects that can be attributed to the interactions between
journalism and education and the struggle for social power. These interactions in
turn link to practices within both journalism and education. The development and/
600 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

or promotion of league tables of performance and other instruments of compari-

son, by which individual schools, groups of schools, or even whole school systems
are compared, has provided an ongoing source of content for journalists in multi-
media outlets. Indeed, journalists and the media have played a strong and influen-
tial role here in demanding access to government held data and other accountabil-
ity measures about system and school performance. In Australia, for example,
the federal government under the rubrics of transparency and accountability has
introduced the My School public website that lists and compares the performance
of every school in Australia against averages and against statistically similar
school performance on national literacy and numeracy tests taken at Years 3, 5, 7,
and 9 by all students in all schools. Subsequent developments in Australia applied
a similar rationale and logic to the development of a university comparison website
(My University). Newspapers repackage these data as part of their sales pitch and
circulation drives. The daily Murdoch paper in Queensland, the Courier-Mail, for
example, advertises several times a year lift-outs on the “quality” of all Queens-
land schools, which utilizes publicly available data. This basically entails a repack-
aging of My School data and thus involves what we might see as the “privatiza-
tion” of publicly funded data and analysis.
In relation to international comparative performance data such as on the
OECD’s PISA, the OECD has a media strategy to release all the comparative
national performance data at a single moment in various global cities. This might
be seen as the mediatization of dissemination of policy data. The OECD packages
these data in a media friendly fashion, which enables journalists and the media
to construct league tables of performance along the dimensions of quality and
equity (Wiseman 2013). The evidence would also suggest that it is this first media
release of PISA results that gets most media coverage globally, rather than more
detailed, comprehensive, and useful subsequent secondary analysis of PISA data
(Wiseman 2013). Some argue that media coverage of these comparisons has
impacted on the nature and kind of competition that schools, students, and teach-
ers are located within, which has an effect of skewing or distorting the provision
of education and the focus of teaching in schools (Lingard and Sellar 2013; Lin-
gard, Sellar and Savage forthcoming). The media representations of these perform-
ance data have certainly had political and policy effects. For example, in the state
of Queensland in Australia following the poor state performance on the national
tests in 2008, the Premier instigated a review and subsequently implemented a
range of policy changes, including moving Year 7 into secondary school, in
response to the heavy and critical media coverage of the state’s performance (Lin-
gard and Sellar 2013).
Another effect of journalism on education in some national contexts relates to
the direct challenge to the technical and professional language and jargon used
by teachers, teacher educators, and education departments, which ultimately chal-
lenges the autonomy of education to develop its own specialized language and
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 601

legitimacy as a discipline. Allied with the specific practices of journalists are the
borrowing of familiar themes, framing, and stories about education across nation-
states, either through wire publications, the direct lifting of stories related to one
national or regional education system and inserted in news outlet in other nations
and regions, or syndication. Sometimes it might be an issue that circulates in this
mediatized fashion, for example, issues to do with the education of boys. The
counterparts to practices of journalists in their reporting of education are the
changes of practices of people in education that are based around counteracting
or controlling the access journalists have to education institutions. Examples of
this include the growing need for people in schools to market, be media savvy,
and on message in public engagements in which journalists may be in attendance,
and to restrict who can speak to journalists officially in relation to an education
institution. When applied to policy and politics, the idea of managing journalists’
coverage of education is connected with spin by politicians about policy and the
strategic release of media releases in line with 24-hour media cycles. Furthermore,
as we will go on to show, policy releases now in education are often synonymous
with media release. The “glossification” of policy texts reframes them as political,
mediatized documents, aimed at the media and the general public, rather than as
documents to be considered by professionals (here teachers and principals) for
implementation or enactment in schools. In addition, media coverage of educa-
tional issues sometimes acts to represent and create social problems, which precip-
itates new policy developments, while in a policy vacuum in respect of such social
problems such coverage can almost function as de facto policy for teachers. Fur-
thermore, elements of the policy process in education are being impacted by new
technologies and the visualization of policy (Koh 2009). Koh (2009) analyses, for
example, the development of a documentary by the Ministry of Education in Singa-
pore that was aired on television that took the public into classrooms and schools
in an account of policy enactment. He locates this analysis within Fairclough’s
(2000) argument about the mediatization of politics and government. In so doing,
he also proffers a methodology for analysing the “visualization” of education pol-
icy. This example also overlaps with the third account of mediatization dealt with
next.
A third account of mediatization focused on the impact of image and represen-
tations on the practices of education. Though there is direct overlap with the first
two kinds of mediatization considered above, the focus on images and representa-
tions connects to a separate set of debates and theorizations in communications
studies and other fields. For example, the increasing access to digital recording
devices and means of sharing images and video online include their location
within educational spaces, leading to the publishing of a variety of images, videos,
and representations by and of young people with various degrees of oversight from
adults. The products of these devices, the images and representations that they
allow, place increased pressure on education for the protection of young people
602 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

with respect to institutions, online environments, other students, adults, and peo-
ple outside schools. One consequence of this move is the push for more skills to
be considered in the education of young people and people in education institu-
tions more broadly, including new forms of literacy demands (for example techno-
logical literacy, digital literacies, and multi-literacy). Hence, there is also a push
for the inclusion of skills in the education of teachers that relate to images and
representations. The representation and images of young people impact in a vari-
ety of ways on the practices of teachers, principals and education policy. On-line
bullying, for example, has become a major issue for many schools (Campbell
2005). Media representations of school shootings and other violent events are also
a cause of concern for educators and policy makers (Kellner 2013).
In a separate sense, the managing of the public image of education has
become an increasingly important stake in schools and universities, as this affects
competition for desired students, teachers, academics, and leaders within educa-
tional markets. This is often linked to the marketing of the school in a new policy
context of competition between schools and media representations of the out-
comes of test-based accountabilities. As the images of students, academic staff,
and leaders become attached to the brand of an institution, categories of desirable
people that enhance educational image and brands also emerge. This includes
categories of people who enhance school performance, such as high achieving and
productive academics and students and cohorts of students that emphasize other
qualities desired by institutions and demanded by policy, such as diversity, equity,
and inclusion.

3 The mediatization of education policy as cross-

field effects: a Bourdieuian account
There are a variety of research objects that have been connected to the mediatiza-
tion of education, but little coherence in terms of methodological or theoretical
approaches. Here we expand on one account that was originally developed to
provide a methodological approach to the study of the mediatization of education
policy (Rawolle 2007). We argue that this approach may provide a broad coherence
to research involving the mediatization of education policy, focused in particular
on developing an account that allows both an understanding of patterns of interac-
tions and also broader cross-field effects of the process, specifically between the
field of print journalism and the education policy field (Rawolle and Lingard 2010).
The approach here involves an engagement with Bourdieu’s field theory and prac-
tice theory (Bourdieu 1990, 1993), with the addition of concepts to name, focus
on, and explore the effects of one field (journalism) on other fields (education
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 603

policy). These additions are cross-field effects, temporary social fields,3 and incom-
mensurate logics of practice. (The latter is a way of thinking about infidelity in
policy implementation: basically the logics of policy text production inside the
state are incommensurate with the logics of teacher classroom practices, with the
former assuming a universalistic application and the latter being more contingent
and specific). In this section, discussion is limited to cross-fields effects related to
national fields, whereas in the next section the impact and emergence of cross-
fields effects related to global fields are briefly considered.
There have been some problems and concerns raised in applying Bourdieu’s
theories to research in communication studies that relate to mediatization. One of
the most directly relevant is offered by Couldry (2003), and represents part of an
ongoing and sustained engagement with the premises, theorization, and applica-
tion of field theory. We note, though, that Couldry in his recent book (2012), Media
Society World, and in his chapter in this Handbook, has expanded on his concerns
about the usefulness of field theory to understand mediatization. In his 2003
paper, Couldry argued that there were inherent limits in the adoption of field
theory for media research, and that the field specific forms of capital described for
other fields seemed to miss something important about the engagement of people
with the media, both those inside and beyond fields of journalism. In pursuing this
argument, Couldry argued that a new kind of capital was needed to understand
the effects of agents in the media on other fields, what he called “media meta-
capital”. This argument provided an explanation for specific cross-field effects
associated with particular agents’ practices in the media. Couldry’s insights align
with our own arguments about policy fields, and the language necessary to under-
stand policy effects in fields beyond the policy field. The conceptualization that
we work with as the basis for research is that cross-field effects are connected to
practices in one field, that are linked in chains to practices in fields beyond their
original site of production (Rawolle 2010a, 2010b). Hence, education policy practi-
ces may impact on the reporting of results, formation of governing boards or coun-
cils or articles written in newspapers. In keeping with Bourdieu’s (1991) broad
approach, these may be connected in the form of games, with a variety of strate-
gies and tactics adopted by those inside and outside the field of journalism. Policy
texts, and articles that cover these policies, provide an example of cross-field
effects.
The basis of the account presented here, and the research problems that led
to a Bourdieuian approach, was an empirical Australian case relating to education

3 The concept “temporary social fields” is advanced here to cater specifically for fields that emerge
around policy and whose parameters span political and policy fields and field/s of journalism and
whose emergence is short term. Temporary social fields could be considered as a combination of
different cross-field effects resulting in a relative autonomous space for debate around that policy.
We also note here Champagne’s (1990) talk of a hybrid “journalistic-politics field”; by analogy we
might talk of a “journalistic-education policy field”.
604 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

policy and the knowledge economy, in the form of a review of Australia’s science,
engineering, and technology capability, which involved close consideration of edu-
cation and research (Batterham 2000). This review resulted in Australia’s accep-
tance of a knowledge economy policy as a way to orient funding and government
involvement in research and education (Rawolle 2005). How this case relates to
mediatization then lies in the wide ranging media-coverage of the review, and the
role played by the Chief Scientist, Professor Robyn Batterham, who led the review,
but also engaged journalists in the debate in what appeared to be a much more
sustained manner than previous reviews of this kind. In short, this particular pol-
icy became something of a media event (Dayan and Katz 1992; Cottle 2006), which
sustained coverage over its duration. The research interest in this media event lay
in the patterns of interactions between journalists, policy makers, politicians, and
experts, to understand the degree to which this interaction was dominated by
agents in one field, such as journalists and editors, or another, such as policy
makers or politicians. This raised an allied question of how sustained media events
of this kind might be understood as an ongoing process of interaction and struggle
for social power between education policy and the media, that is, as an example
of mediatization of education policy. Notably, in this case the media was a site of
social struggle for stakes and for people outside the field. We also note that the
effects of the practices of journalists and policy makers may not be unidirectional,
that is, cross-field effects can go in either direction. We also note that today educa-
tion systems employ journalists as media advisors, but also in their media sections,
both of which are manifestations of the mediatization of education and education
policy.
Approaching this research problem using Bourdieu required a broad engage-
ment with his theoretical framework, and in particular his account of social fields
as a way of nominating and researching spheres of competition within which prac-
tice takes place, with each social field underpinned by a distinctive logic of prac-
tice (for more discussion see Rawolle and Lingard 2013). For Bourdieu, society
(both national and postnational) is a social space, consisting of multiple social
fields with their own logics and varying degrees of autonomy from the field of
power, which overarches all fields. This is in recognition of the differentiation of
contemporary societies and the way power is present in all aspects of societal
practices. Each field is a contested space with a competition over goods or capitals,
specific to that field and the competition takes the forms of distinctive practices.
Within the field, which is a relational space, there are dominant and dominated
agents. Given that Bourdieu’s account of fields is spatial and relational rather than
geographical, we are able today to speak of global fields and fields operating at
other scales.
Bourdieu’s broad approach to research requires that processes be represented
in terms of changes involving one or more social fields. In this research, two major
fields were considered important, in the form of the field of print journalism and
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 605

the field of education policy. While Bourdieu emphasized underlying connections

between fields, and fields that overlaid all others (including the field of power and
field of gender relations) the research required a more direct way of identifying,
naming, and grouping the connections between social fields. Hence, the focus of
the research was on understanding practices in both fields and some of the pro-
ducts of these practices, in the form of policy texts and media texts. The analysis
was on the patterns of production of these texts, and on tracing the flow of themes
contained within these texts between policy texts and media texts. These flows of
interaction were identified as one kind of cross-field effect, and led to some inter-
esting findings about different kinds of cross-field effects (see Lingard and Rawolle
2004; Rawolle 2005, 2010a, 2010b; Rawolle and Lingard 2010).
Based on the study of Batterham’s review, we suggest that there may be a
range of effects that relate to mediatization (mediatization effects), and that these
relate to patterns of change within the field of print journalism, patterns of
changes within the field of education policy, and effects related to the pattern of
interactions between these two fields. The first two groups are within-field effects,
while the third group are cross-field effects. Though interrelated, the differences
are important as they highlight the point of comparison when researching mediati-
zation effects. In keeping with Bourdieu’s theorization, these effects can be consid-
ered in relation to practice and habitus, or capital and field position.
In the field of print journalism, the patterns of publishing of articles related
to Batterham’s review were analysed as a way of exploring different aspects of the
investment of the field in this review. Within the field of print journalism, 249
separate articles and 147,000 words were written between May 1999 and January
2001 that directly covered the review, representing a wide variety of Australian
newspapers. These articles were analysed in four ways: as a time-series in relation
to the numbers of newspaper articles published within monthly time periods over
the course of the review; in relation to the coverage of particular authors over the
review; in relation to the overall contribution of different newspapers during the
review; and in relation to overall publishing companies who own multiple newspa-
pers. We also suggest that the impact of policy makers’ practices on the field of
journalism in some ways is determined by the amount of “media capital” pos-
sessed by the policy maker (Champagne 1990). The within-field effects of mediati-
zation of policy over the course of Batterham’s review relate principally to the
strategies of specific newspapers, and key journalists, who invested in this review,
and were dominant agents in the flow of the review. In particular, this review
became a signature policy covered by one newspaper and a number of specialist
journalists, but another journalist from a different newspaper contributed a large
number of articles at the time of the beginning of the review, then did not contrib-
ute any further. Despite this large investment, the vast majority of individual arti-
cles did little more than restate media releases that were produced by the policy
maker, with little extended coverage or investigation of the claims. In Bourdieu’s
606 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

terms, these articles contributed to the “circular circulation” of ideas about Batter-
ham’s Review. This pattern of coverage of media releases illustrated the success
of the tactic of “media release as policy release” (see below for details).
In the field of policy, four iterations of the policy texts published over the
course of the review were analysed as a way of exploring changes in the represen-
tation and approach to the Policy Review. As discussed in more detail elsewhere
(Lingard and Rawolle 2004), one of the changes in the representation of the text
was the increasingly aphoristic representation of problems dealt with by the review
(mediatization of the text), and glossification of the text, with media grabs of key
quotes selected and emphasized in the margins of the policy text. In addition, the
latter policy texts provided direct links to other allied policy developments.
In the broadest sense, the cross-field effects were first initiated through the
production of a media release announcing Batterham as the new Chief Scientist,
and foreshadowing a possible review of Australia’s science capability as one of his
main goals. The vast majority of cross-field effects related to media coverage of
these media releases, or of the four iterations of policy texts produced. In a variety
of ways, media releases acted as a policy and political mechanism within the
review, allowing the hijacking of other events that could have diverted attention
from Batterham’s Review or key messages, and allowing quick publishing of copy
in times when there were few other sources for stories for specialized journalists
covering the Review. Though these media releases could be broadly considered a
trigger for journalist practices, the uptake of these triggers did highlight patterns,
related to the newsworthiness for specific kinds of journalists or their newspapers.
We have defined elsewhere these effects that relate to homologies in structure –
as “structural effects”, in which the specialization of journalists helps to under-
stand the specific interest that they had in Batterham’s Review, such as different
higher education and science reporters’ interest in the Review. Thus we define
structural effects as a kind of cross-field effect as the patterns of publishing practi-
ces that result from links between specialist journalists and policy makers. Other
cross-field effects relate to specific events that may have been hijacked by a media
release, diverting journalists’ attention and articles to the connection between the
event and Batterham’s Review (event effects). Event effects as a kind of cross-field
effect refer to patterns of publishing practices that follow specific newsworthy
events, with hijacking as one important sub-category of event effects. One final
cross-field effect was the different patterns of coverage in different newspapers,
highlighting that despite the strong coverage, it was quite limited in terms of the
number of people who could possibly have read the coverage (knowledge effects).
Knowledge effects refer to patterns of publishing practices that result from the
different engagements of different newspapers with policy reviews and their differ-
ent readership demographics.
We have argued in this section that using Bourdieu’s theories of fields and
practice provides a useful basis for researching the mediatization of education
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 607

policy, though the effects of mediatization require additional language to talk

about effects that cross fields. The adoption of a Bourdieuian framework entails
thinking about the effects of mediatization on practices, habitus, capitals, and
fields. In the analysis of the mediatization of education policy related to the knowl-
edge economy, the focus led to an examination of both within field effects on
practices in the field of print journalism and education policy, as well as cross-
field effects that are related to the interactions between practices in each of these
fields. The limits of this approach relate to the bounding of the case, which was
necessary to the research, but potentially limited connected practices in other
nations, and those related to the OECD.

4 Mediatization, rescaling, the topological turn,

and global fields
This section briefly considers the rescaling (Brenner 2004) and respatialization
(Allen 2011; Lury, Parisi and Terranova 2012; Ruppert 2012) of politics, economy,
and culture that constitute, accompany, and are effects of globalization. We see
both the fields of journalism and of education policy having been affected by
globalization. For example, globalization in the era following the end of the Cold
War has witnessed the emergence of a global economic field. As Bourdieu (2003)
has argued, just as the creation of national economic fields resulted from a particu-
lar politics and strategies, so too did this more recent emergence of the global
economic field in the post-Cold War era of neo-liberal, global capitalism. Here Peck
and Tickell (2002) speak of “roll-back” and “roll-out” neo-liberal globalization that
picks up on the agency involved in the creation of the global economy framed by
neo-liberal precepts. This is not to say that the nation-state is no longer important,
but rather to recognize that the globalization of the economy has seen a reconstitu-
tion of the political workings of the national political field, which now has to
work strategically in relation to the global economy, underpinned by neo-liberal
discourses. Here we might see the processes of globalization reconstituting the
work of the nation and the nation in turn helping to constitute the global field.
This account of globalization and its spatial effects has relevance to studies of
mediatization. As Krotz (2009: 27) argues, “we, of course, must understand mediat-
ization as a process that takes place under the condition that there are further
meta-processes such as globalization, individualization and commercialization”.4
In respect of media, Rantanen (2005) speaks of “global mediagraphies” to pick up
on the concept of a global media field. A very interesting question here is: how do

4 Here Krotz’s account of mediatization is one that affects all of the social arrangement. This is
somewhat akin to Couldry’s position as argued in his chapter in this Handbook.
608 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

the global and national economic fields, global and national journalism fields and
also the global and national educational policy fields relate? It is here that we have
extended the concept of cross-field effects (Lingard and Rawolle 2004; Rawolle
and Lingard 2008), which is useful to think about flows from global to national
fields. Such effects today work across global and national fields, including in pol-
icy and the media.
Brenner (2004) writes about these matters as the rescaling of politics with
political authority being stretched and transformed across global, regional, and
national fields, with enhanced political significance of international, regional, and
supranational agencies. This might be seen as a new geography of state power
and as a multi-site, hierarchical respatialization associated with globalization. In
education policy, think of the enhanced global significance of the OECD (Sellar
and Lingard 2013) or think of the EU as an emergent educational policy space
(Lawn and Grek 2012). This is part of the rescaling of education policy.
There is another way, however, to think of the respatialization associated with
the processes of globalization. Lury and colleagues (2012) have written about the
“topological turn” or the “becoming topological” of contemporary cultural, politi-
cal, and economic life. This topological turn is part of new spatializations associ-
ated with globalization and refers to a new post-Euclidian geometry of spatial
relations, a single surface created across the globe, helping to constitute a new
culture through metrics, models, measures, and comparisons. New data infrastruc-
tures and new technologies (new media if you like) are central here. Lury, Parisi
and Terranova (2012: 4) speak of “a new order of spatio-temporal continuity for
forms of economic, political and cultural life”. This is different from Brenner’s
rescaling, which is a vertical set of processes that involves relationships between
various sites (national, regional, and international organizations) and is also differ-
ent from new network accounts that Brenner has also written about (Sassen 2007
too) to pick up on networks that stretch out across global space horizontally. New
technologies and computer capacities are central to all these new spatial relation-
ships. The topological, in contrast to Brenner’s new vertical scales of relationships,
refers to new spaces as relational rather than territorial, topological rather than
topographical, changing our conceptions of what is near and far, what is con-
nected and disconnected. As Allen (2011: 284) suggests, with the topological
“power relationships are not so much positioned in space or extended across it, as
compose the spaces of which they are a part”. We would argue that international
comparative performance testing such as PISA is topological in this way, creating
new relational constructions of space as part of an emergent global educational
policy field that is topological in character (Lingard and Rawolle 2011). This is also
why we see Bourdieu’s concept of field as topological in character and constituted
through relationships and thus useful for understanding this emergent global edu-
cational policy field (as well as for understanding the emergent global media
field). Newspaper coverage of international performance data is a central element
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 609

in the creation of this global educational policy field, as is the OECD’s own media
strategy for disseminating the first take on PISA data in each cycle. OECD media
releases on PISA help create global league tables of PISA performance in relation
to both quality and equity (Wiseman 2013).
Here we are using Bourdieu’s concept of field, which is also a relational rather
than geographical or topographical space and can thus be seen to be topological
in character. National testing in Australia, where schooling in the federal political
structure remains the constitutional responsibility of the states and territories, also
helps to constitute a topological or relational space and a national field of school-
ing (see Lingard 2010, 2011). This is achieved by constituting statistical neighbours
of like schools across the nation, linking them topologically, and suggesting they
are located in the same contexts. Likewise, with PISA and other international tests,
we can see an emergent global educational policy field that is topological in char-
acter. The media’s policy role in respect of both national testing and international
testing also contribute to the construction of national and global policy fields in
education. We might also see rescaled relationships between the offices of multina-
tional media corporations such as Murdoch’s and also their contribution to the
emergence as well of a global field of journalism.
In respect of media and processes of mediatization, we thus would argue that
rescaling and the topological turn need recognition of what we might analogously,
or homologously in Bourdieu’s terms, see as an emergent global field of journal-
ism. Multinational and cross-national control of media (e.g. the Murdoch Press
ownership of a cross-section of media in the US, Australia, and Europe) fosters
such a global journalistic field. Here we see the global circulation of stories and
story stances across the field, what we might see as a globalized version of Bour-
dieu’s descriptor of one logic of practice of the journalistic field, namely “circular
circulation” (Bourdieu 1996/1998), where stories and story lines circulate across
the global media field. This is in addition to the circular circulation of stories
across various arms of the media and within each of the print media, TV, and so
on within nation journalistic fields and across the global one.
In terms of our empirical case of the mediatization of a policy and policy
processes, our analysis needs to recognize the emergent global education policy
field in respect of knowledge economy and human capital discourses, as well as
the ways mediatization also has another level, notably the global. The global field
of journalism helps to construct the emergent global education policy field through
the coverage given to global comparative measures of performance of national
schooling systems and in so doing connects different nations in relational ways.
From PISA 2009, for instance, Shanghai became an important comparator for many
national schooling systems.
Bourdieu’s concept of field then needs to be stretched out, as it were, to take
in the global and reject the notion that society or the social is simply or necessarily
homologous with nation. Such a conceptual stretching is expedited by the recogni-
610 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

tion that Bourdieu’s concept of social fields refers to relations within deterritorial-
ized space with particular logics of practice – this is a topological account; such
relations do not necessarily function within national or specific geographical pla-
ces. Our last point in relation to the need to recognize rescaling is that such proc-
esses have been expedited by the new communication technologies, which in a
hyperbolic sense can be seen to annihilate time and space.

5 Conclusion: implications of mediatization for

research in education and about education policy
Given the previous discussion, mediatization then can be seen to present a range
of implications for research involving education and education policy. As both
globalization and mediatization are connected in a variety of ways with changes
in education and education policy, there are important effects to consider in rela-
tion to national, global, and topological variations in the effect of mediatization.
This implication reinforces Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) broad ranging study about
differences in the links between journalism and politics in different nations. But
it also raises questions about how to research questions about the purposes and
roles played by the media, and whether the broad social contract played by the
media is altered as a result of globalization, such as its claimed role as a fourth
estate and allied press freedom to pursue this role (Schultz 1998). If, as a growing
number of researchers have argued, there is a changing relationship between the
media and government (Fairclough 2000; Kepplinger 2002), then scrutiny should
be placed on the way that these changes impact on the role played by the media,
for example, in relation to education. The media are assumed to play an important
role in contributing to the public scrutiny of institutions such as education, and
of subjecting public policies related to these fields to public debate and considera-
tion. We have earlier, for example, given the example of media publication of
league tables of school and national comparative performance and media pressure
for the public availability of such data. The challenge to traditional forms of jour-
nalism raised by the growth of new media and on-line journalism also raises ques-
tions about whether these functions and roles can be realised.
For example in countries that that share what Hallin and Mancini (2004) out-
line as a normative “liberal model” of the role and function of the media, how is
the “social contract” between the media and education negotiated, contested, and
enacted? While there are individual studies of mediatization that relate to and
connect with this role, very little research on the mediatization of education policy
actively provides this kind of comparative work between nations. In Australia,
providing an account of this comparison is important because the concentration
of media ownership is unique. Indeed, Cunningham and Turner (2006) reported
 Mediatization and education: a sociological account 611

an estimate of 88 % of the total print media in Australia was controlled by two

companies (Fairfax Media and Murdoch’s News Limited). They suggested that this
is possibly the highest level of concentration of any comparable democratic
nations – in other, comparable nations, laws preventing such concentration are
in effect (Dwyer and Martin 2010; Pusey and McCutcheon 2010). Whether such
concentration of media ownership is a problem for democratic politics and public
debate depends on the effects of concentration, in symbolic, material, or practice
forms. Yet the effects of this concentration on education have not been addressed
in previous research.
Comparative research on mediatization of education is also important because
the media and journalism are connected to broader changes in education globally,
such as the increasingly global circulation of ideas about education in different
media forms (Steiner-Khamsi 2004; Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Lingard and Rawolle
2011; Wiseman 2013), and of the media’s global influence on the selection and
framing of education policy debates (Gopinathan 1996). These changes connect
together the media’s role in the globalization of education policies and of the
circulation of ideas about the role that education plays or should play in national
concerns about education, such as promoting equitable and fair societies, improv-
ing international competitiveness, and increasing productivity. (See Wiseman
[2013] for a review of different national responses to PISA results and the common
“shock” response constituted by the media when nations have done badly.) As
suggested earlier, this circulation of ideas about education can be linked to the
emergence of a global field of journalism, in which competition between journal-
ists, editors, and media companies increasingly revolves around global stakes and
pickup of stories across different nations (Markham 2009; Rawolle and Lingard
2010). This global field in turn, is associated with multinational media companies.
In relation to the broader claims that mediatization of education and education
policy represents a slow adaptation of education to the central logics of journalism,
more needs to be done to systematically explore this claim over a long duration
in different nations. Studies of changes in policy development and media coverage
of different kinds over long durations are important to provide a base point of
comparisons of individual media events involving policy. More also needs to be
done to test other aspects of the effects of the mediatization of education policy,
such as identifying whether dominance in fields like education policy is attached
to specific practices involving the media, and as a result, if there is something like
a mediatized habitus that accompanies these positions.
In conclusion, this chapter has provided an overview of the usefulness of
mediatization for research in education and education policy, with a specific focus
on its application to education policy. Mediatization of education policy is a broad
process, but we have argued that it should also be examined in specific empirical
cases. As one of the broad social processes affecting education as a field, there is
scope to theorize its relationships to other processes. Here we have discussed its
612 Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard

links to globalization, but more research and discussion are needed concerning
the links to other processes such as individualization, economization, and com-
mercialization within education.

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IX. To be or not to be
Charles M. Ess
27 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life
in mediatized worlds? Perspectives from
medium theory and philosophy

In the electric age, we wear all mankind as our skin.

M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Abstract: I use virtue ethics to pose the question, what is the good life in mediat-
ized societies? I show that the good life in high modernity entails the cultivation of
strongly individual notions of selfhood as rational autonomies and as inextricably
entwined with democratic polities. Medium theory emphasizes that such selves
are fostered by the technologies of literacy-print. By contrast, both primary orality
and the secondary orality of electric media correlate with more relational and emo-
tional selves. Historically, however, such selves are more dependent upon direc-
tion and domination by others in frankly hierarchical social structures. The rise of
secondary orality thus threatens to undermine the sorts of individual selfhood
required for democratic societies and their core norms of individual privacy, equal-
ity, gender equality, justice, and fairness – and thereby threatens high modern
notions of the good life. Internet Studies provides empirical findings confirming
the shift towards more relational selves and away from modern core norms. These
findings argue, finally, that to sustain a good life in a mediatized age will require
the guidance of a virtue ethics focused on cultivating both individual and rela-
tional selves through informed and careful use of the technologies of literacy-print
and secondary orality.

Keywords: virtue ethics, medium theory, mediatization, privacy, democracy, auton-

omy, Kant, Plato, Bildung, Nissenbaum.

1 Introduction
I begin with an introduction to medium theory, as initially developed by Harold
Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Elisabeth Eisenstein, so as to highlight
a series of correlations between our primary communication technologies (begin-
ning with primary orality) and conceptions of selfhood and identity (as initially
more relational and then eventually more individual). I will expand this framework
with additional insight and argument from ethical and political philosophy and
the empirical findings of Internet Studies; but first I explore the overlap between
the resulting framework with mediatization research. My framework shares in the
618 Charles M. Ess

broad focus of mediatization research on the interrelations between media and

communication, on the one hand, and culture and society, on the other (Hepp and
Krotz 2014). I argue that this framework avoids important critiques from mediatiza-
tion research of medium theory – namely of technological determinism and an
excessive “media-centric” approach. Most importantly: I take up virtue ethics and
thereby our possible choices of self-cultivation as informed but manifestly not
determined by medium theory.
I then turn to examine selfhood in high modernity more closely, beginning
with the affiliation between individual autonomy and the communication technolo-
gies of literacy-print. Such individual autonomy roots modern ethical frameworks
of deontology and utilitarianism, and thereby justifies modern liberal-democratic
polities. The shift to electric media (so McLuhan) correlates with a move towards
more relational emphases of selfhood – what Ong calls the secondary orality of
electronic media. This relationality is further apparent in sociological theory over
the past century as well as recent philosophical accounts of selfhood, identity, and
the turn to a number of ethical systems rooted in relational identity – most espe-
cially virtue ethics.
This framework then brings us to the core question of the chapter: what might
be the political implications of these broad shifts? In both contemporary virtue
ethics as well as in the polities of primarily orality, relational selves are required
to submit to recognized authorities who exemplify mastery of a given practice.
Such defining submission to hierarchical authority structures forces the question:
will the shift from more individual towards more relational conceptions of selfhood
weaken our commitments to the democratic practices of high modernity – includ-
ing the foundational norms of justice, equality, and gender equality?
Unhappily, a number of initial observations offer affirmative answers to this
question. But I also chart out the possibility of our developing hybrid selves –
selves that retain strong emphases on individual autonomy alongside relationality.
The conjunction I develop here between medium theory and virtue ethics in fact
elevates this point to the level of a conscious ethical choice: how far do we decide
to cultivate individual emphases (via literacy-print) and how far do we decide to
foster more relational emphases (via secondary orality)? The possibility of this
choice directly contradicts concerns with technological determinism in this frame-
work. Moreover, conscious attention to such cultivation of selfhood is at the core
of Enlightenment notions of Bildung and liberal arts education – the forms of
education seen to be necessary if “the many” are to become capable of the individ-
ual autonomy required for democratic polity. Indeed, Foucault highlights for us
how such care of self – made possible precisely through writing as a technology
of the self (what medium theory calls literacy) – begins precisely with Socratic and
then Aristotelian virtue ethics. Such a virtue ethics – as cultivating first of all the
practical wisdom (phronesis) of reflective ethical judgment – thereby coheres with
this long tradition affiliated with literacy in “the West”. Moreover, such a virtue
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 619

ethics is a globally shared tradition: it thus emerges as a prime candidate for a

global ethics shared across the cultures and traditions increasingly interwoven
with electric and electronic media.
I support these possibilities further by examining the resilience of individual
identity alongside shifts towards relationality in contemporary practices and
expectations regarding privacy, and in contemporary philosophical notions of rela-
tional autonomy, distributed morality, and distributed responsibility. These notions
are further at work in Helen Nissenbaum’s recent theory of privacy. Indeed, these
conceptions may already be at work in the language and enculturated practices of
Denmark and Norway – where “privacy”, we argue, is primarily taken up in the
strongly relational terms of privatlivet ‘private life’ and intimsfære (Ess and Fos-
sheim 2013).
I close with worries, however, that late modernity nonetheless threatens a shift
away from the emancipatory politics of high modernity, including its commitments
to justice, fairness, equality, and gender equality. In broadest terms – the philo-
sophical quarrels between the Ancients and the Moderns – my glum conclusion is
that, absent continued attention to the cultivation of individual autonomy by way
of literacy-print, it will turn out that Plato, not Kant, will be correct: “the many”
will no longer be able to sustain high modern democracy – and the “democracy”
that results will rather serve as the last stage before tyranny.

2 Medium theory and mediatization

2.1 Medium theory: a brief introduction
Medium theory is affiliated with Elizabeth Eisenstein ([1983] 2005), Harold Innis
(1951, 1972), Marshall McLuhan (1964), Neil Postman (1985), Walter Ong (1988),
Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), and, more recently, Naomi Baron (2008) and Zsuzsanna
Kondor (2009). A core claim of medium theory is that our primary communication
technologies correlate with different emphases within our conceptions of selfhood
and identity – most broadly, with more relational vis-à-vis more individual empha-
ses. To begin with, human communication in the form of orality is affiliated with
the earliest human societies – what Meyrowitz calls “traditional” societies (1997:
63). As Walter Ong (1988) makes clear, the sense of selfhood in such societies is
resolutely relational. This is to say, our sense of selfhood is extensively defined by
the relationships within which we are inextricably interwoven, beginning with the
family. To use the classic Chinese form of introduction as an example, I am the
son of …, the grandson of …, the husband of …, the father of …, the uncle of …,
and so on. These relationships extend further into the community and, indeed,
into the natural and, in some contexts, what might be called supernatural orders
as well.
620 Charles M. Ess

A striking feature – as least for “Western” moderns – of such relational identity

is that it has great difficulty in articulating a sense of selfhood apart from these
relationships. Taking up A. R. Luria’s psychological investigations of preliterate
and literate peoples in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the early 1930s, Ong cites the
response of a 36-year-old peasant to the question of what sort of person he was:
“What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask
others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything”. As Ong (1988:
54) summarizes it, for such relational selves, “Judgement bears in on the individ-
ual from outside, not from within”. None of this is to say that such sense of self-
hood is devoid of any sense of individuality, in the sense of understanding that I
as such a relational self am at the same time distinct from others. It is to say that
the primary emphases within this sense of selfhood are on relationality and the
importance of establishing, sustaining, and enhancing one’s defining relation-
ships.
A stronger sense of selfhood as individual – including a self-reflective capacity
that allows for a sense and experience of identity as emphasizing independence
from others – appears to arise, however, only with the advent of literacy. As a
start, this correlation between the emergence of writing and a more individual
sense of self is documented and discussed extensively in McLuhan (1964) and Ong
(1988). It is elaborated further in the late work of Michel Foucault (1987, 1988),
who traces the role of writing as a “technology of the self”, as driven by an “ethic
of self-care” (epimelēsthai sautou: Foucault 1988: 19) beginning with Socrates and
the Stoics, and extending from 1st-century Roman uses of diaries and letters,
through Puritan prayer journals, to Freudian psychoanalysis, to use but a few
examples. As we will explore more fully below: more precisely, from a medium
theory perspective it is literacy as ever more widely distributed across whole cul-
tures via print – referred to simply as literacy-print – that correlates with especially
high modern conceptions of individual selfhood.
Lastly, the rise of “electric media” – namely, those communication technolo-
gies that begin with the telegraph and then extend from radio to movies and televi-
sion (McLuhan includes the press as well – 1964: 391) – entail for McLuhan and
Ong a marked shift from strongly individual conceptions of identity to more rela-
tional forms.
Briefly, for McLuhan, all technologies – most especially our communication
technologies – represent extensions of our senses and our body. Broadly, the shifts
across orality, literacy, and then literacy-print thereby represent ever more dra-
matic extensions of self and senses – an extension that culminates in the various
communication technologies made by possible by electricity. Most dramatically,
McLuhan sees in electric technology the possibility of an instantaneous extension
of the totality of the individual into a global collective:

Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous
system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 621

concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological
simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and
corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our
senses and our nerves by the various media (McLuhan 1964: 5)

In fact, McLuhan presciently anticipates the possibility that, as more and more of
our lives and being are transformed into information that can thereby be processed
and stored by computers and computer networks, “might not our current transla-
tion of our entire lives into this spiritual form of information seem to make of the
entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?” (1964: 73). As he
characterizes it later, for the ancient Greeks, the discovery of individual identity
and thereby private identity, as made possible by the rise of literacy, was “a terrify-
ing and horrible thing”; by contrast, the rise of electric media returns us to the
earlier forms of relationality – a process that McLuhan describes as a “reverse
course, from an extreme individual fragmentary state back into a condition of
corporate involvement with all mankind. Paradoxically, this new involvement is
experienced as alienation and loss of private selfhood” (McLuhan [1968] 1995: 339)
For his part, Ong affiliates what he prefers to call “electronic media” with a
secondary orality, in contrast with the primary orality of preliterate peoples. Ong’s
description is worth reviewing in full:

This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering
of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas …
But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use
of writing and print, which are essential for the manufacture and operation of the equipment
and for its use as well.

Secondary orality is both remarkably like and remarkably unlike primary orality. Like primary
orality, secondary orality has generated a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words
forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns
individuals in on themselves. But secondary orality generates a sense for groups immeasura-
bly larger than those of primary oral culture – McLuhan’s ‘global village’. Moreover, before
writing, oral folk were group-minded because no feasible alternative had presented itself. In
our age of secondary orality, we are group-minded self-consciously and programmatically. The
individual feels that he or she, as an individual, must be socially sensitive. Unlike members
of a primary oral culture, who are turned outward because they have had little occasion to
turn inward, we are turned outward because we have turned inward (Ong 1988: 133; emphasis
added, CE).

This passage is further significant as it highlights a core point of medium theory:

transitions, say, from orality to literacy do not mean the abandonment of the one
through a full replacement of the other. On the contrary, succeeding communica-
tion technologies both supplement and incorporate previous ones.
With this broad framework from medium theory as my primary background, I
will turn below to a more detailed examination of these shifts from high to late
modernity – meaning from a primary emphasis on literacy-print as the dominant
622 Charles M. Ess

communication modality of high modernity, to the rise of electric media, specifi-

cally, the secondary orality/secondary textuality of digital media and networked
communication. Before doing so, however, I seek to clarify the relationship
between medium theory and mediatization.

2.2 Medium theory and mediatization

In their overview of mediatization as a concept, Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz
point to two traditions of mediatization research, namely, an institutionalist tradi-
tion and a social-constructivist tradition. Out of these traditions, they argue,

a shared fundamental understanding of mediatization has developed … 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 (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 3).

On their account, medium theory (represented for them primarily by Meyrowitz)

shares with mediatization research first of all a focus on “the role media as such
play in altering communication” (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 4). As well, both medium
theory and mediatization research understand “their respective approaches as
being inclusive the micro, meso and macro levels” (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 4, with
reference to Meyrowitz 1994, 2009).
At the same time, however, there are important differences – beginning with
the critique of medium theory as assuming a “narration of change” as “based on
the idea that each culture and society is dominated by a single medium, which is
more or less stable over time” (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 4). Suffice it to say that I
would share this critique of medium theory (or any other mono-causal theory, for
that matter). For my part, I seek to avoid this sort of problem first of all by empha-
sizing that what is at stake here are correlations, not simply causal relationships
between, for example, orality and primarily relational senses of selfhood. This
emphasis recognizes early critiques of medium theory as presuming an all-too-
simple – and thereby, all-too-easily refuted – technological determinism (e.g. Carey
1981). Moreover, my incorporation of virtue ethics, as we will see, brings to the
foreground precisely the critical role of our choices regarding our uses of diverse
media and communication technologies – choices driven in large measure by con-
siderations of the sorts of selves we seek to cultivate through such usages, most
especially in light of the larger social and political structures we judge to be most
conducive to good lives. This emphasis on choice, as informed not only by medium
theory but further by larger ethical and political philosophical considerations
clearly runs counter to technological (as well as other kinds of) determinism.
In addition, to claim solely that there are correlations between the “macro-
level” of orality, literacy, and so forth means precisely that I take on board what
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 623

Hepp and Krotz characterize as the “transmedial perspective of mediatization

research” – namely, “the necessity to focus … on the interrelation of various media
and not solely on a single medium” (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 4–5). Indeed, the pas-
sage we reviewed from Ong makes clear that at least at such macro-levels as oral-
ity, literacy, and electric and electronic media, there is in fact the emphasis on
their interrelation.
Where we may hold different views – or, possibly, simply different understand-
ings of what is meant by “media” – has to do with a last difference, namely,
mediatization research as a “non-media-centric” 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 (Hepp and Krotz 2014: 5).

It appears to me that my use of medium theory coheres with much of this. This is
in part because “media” seems to me to be used here in more than one sense. To
return to the distinction between macro-, meso-, and micro-level – again, I focus
on correlations, not causation, at the macro-level: this is precisely for the sake of
considering interrelations between media, communication, society, and culture, as
we will see. At the same time, of course, it is certainly true that “new media” –
which in this passage I take to refer to meso- and/or micro-level media technolo-
gies – can rise and fall with little to no impact on larger social and cultural proc-
esses. And insofar as medium theory, as I use it, demonstrates correlations at the
macro-level between modalities of communication and conceptions of selfhood,
this commits me to the view that such modalities are necessary conditions of social
change – but certainly not sufficient conditions. This may remain – though solely
at the macro-level – more “media-centric” than most mediatization researchers
would prefer. At the same time, however, I believe that my incorporation of philo-
sophical perspectives as well as empirical findings from Internet Studies comple-
ments and counterbalances the use of medium theory, so as to avoid at least the
most serious critiques of “non-media-centric” mediatization research and perspec-
tives. Again, this shows up most sharply in the focus on the ethical and political
choices before us as seen through the lenses of virtue ethics and affiliated philo-
sophical perspectives.
With this as background, I now turn to more careful exploration of these corre-
lations in high and late modernity.

3 Selfhood in high modernity: the ethics and

politics of autonomous individuals
As we have started to see, medium theory lays great weight on the shift from
Medieval cultural worlds still dominated more by orality than literacy (what Ong
624 Charles M. Ess

[1988: 130–131] characterizes as “oral manuscript cultures”) to the rise of printing

and thereby the spread of literacy-print. The correlative transformations in selfhood
become startlingly apparent in the Protestant Reformation, which depends on the
technologies of print for both the development and then increasing distribution of
“standard” editions and vernacular translations of the Bible. To be sure, a multi-
tude of economic, social, and political factors come into play here – not simply
the availability of the printing press. Nonetheless, the printing press and the
expanding skills and facilities affiliated with literacy-print are clearly necessary
conditions for one of the Protestant Reformation’s most radical claims: sola scrip-
tura – the only authority and vehicle between God and the individual is the Bible.
Such theology clearly overturns the sense of selfhood in an earlier oral culture –
i.e. a relational self entirely dependent, especially in questions of religion, upon a
ring of hierarchical relationships that extend from the local religious community
through the hierarchy of the Church to the Pope as God’s representative on earth.
Par contra, sola scriptura strips away these multiple layers and hierarchies, leaving
the individual to discern and determine his or her religious fate – primarily
through his or her direct access to the Bible as a now standardized and printed
text (Eisenstein 2005: 181, 184; Chesebro and Bertelsen 1996; Baron 2008: 196–
197).
Consonant with the continued expansion of literacy-print, these more individ-
ual emphases in selfhood and identity culminate most prominently in the philo-
sophical theories of René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. Especially
Locke and Kant emphasize and articulate high modern emphases on the individual
as a moral and political agent – in Kant’s well-known definition, as a rational
autonomy, a being capable of rational self-rule. Moreover, these conceptions of
a self as an individual moral agent interrelated with larger ethical and political
implications.
To begin with, the individual rational moral agent is the grounding assumption
of both deontology and utilitarianism as the ethical theories prevailing in high
modernity. Again, Kant is well known for his founding articulation of deontology,
an ethical framework that stresses duties that are absolute – precisely because
such duties turn on nothing less than human autonomy or freedom. Ideally, that
is, our freedom, as defining our humanity, along with the duties and rights that
derive from that freedom, are never to be compromised, much less bargained and
sold in the marketplace. So his Categorical Imperative states (in its second formula-
tion) that we are always to treat free beings as “ends-in-themselves” – i.e. with an
absolute respect for their own ability, as autonomies, to determine their own ends
and goals – never as “means only”, i.e. as inferiors or even things that can be
used solely according to our own wishes, desires, and goals (cf. Ess 2013a: 206–
210). For Kant, the rational autonomy constituting the core of the moral agent is
thereby emphatically individual: that is, each individual is solely responsible for
taking up and resolving the multiple ethical issues we all encounter as human
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 625

beings. At the same time, it is important to note that for Kant, the reason defining
this individual autonomy is, in contemporary terms, a social or communicative
reason (so Habermas) – i.e. a facility shared amongst all rational beings, thereby
making shared intersubjective ethical and scientific worlds possible.
Utilitarianism is the primary alternative ethical framework of high modernity.
Developed initially by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and then especially by John
Stuart Mill (1806–1873), utilitarianism seeks to analyze and resolve ethical and
political choices with the goal of maximizing the good, as in the catch-phrase “the
greatest good for the greatest number”. If we can agree upon how we define the
good – whether in terms of solely physical pleasures (Bentham) and/or in terms
of intellectual pleasures (Mill); and upon how the resulting goods and their deficits
or opposites can be quantified; we could then examine our choices in terms of a
kind of ethical cost-benefit analysis – the utilitarian calculus – and, ideally, show
that one course of action will result in greater pleasure and less pain than another.
Again, utilitarianism is clearly socially oriented – i.e. towards the greatest good
for the greatest number. At the same time, however, within utilitarian ethics each
individual takes on the primary responsibility for analyzing and resolving his or
her specific moral choices (Ess 2013a: 201–206).
For all their important contrasts and differences, then, these two ethical sys-
tems share a common assumption that the modern moral agent is primarily a
solitary individual with all-but-sole responsibility for the analyses and resolutions
of the ethical choices she or he encounters. As Charles Taylor characterizes it,
these are radically reflexive and disengaged rational agents. Such an agent thereby
enjoys a radical independence and self-responsibility – one that means it is “free
from established custom and locally dominant authority” (Taylor 1989: 167). The
political consequences and requirements of such a self are immediate and revolu-
tionary: such a self thus requires and justifies the establishment of the modern
democratic and liberal state. In particular, these emphases on the self as primarily
a singular or individual freedom and moral agent are at the core of what Anthony
Giddens identifies as the “emancipatory politics” of high modernity: such a politics
aims at reducing or eliminating “exploitation, inequality and oppression” by “the
imperatives of justice, equality and participation” (Giddens 1991: 211–212; cited in
Wong 2012: 86). Especially in Kantian terms, our always treating human autonomy
as an end-in-itself, never as a means only, implies precisely equality, equality of
participation, and justice in the form of fair and equal treatment.
626 Charles M. Ess

4 Selfhood and mediatization: from individual to

relational selfhood
4.1 Medium theory
As we have seen, medium theory argues that such strongly rational autonomous
selves emerge in conjunction with literacy-print – with the emergence of the skills
and abilities of literacy as fostered and dramatically amplified through the technol-
ogies of print. Again, this correlation is reinforced in Foucault’s last works on
writing as a “technology of the self”: writing (literacy), as emerging as culturally
significant with philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, issues in the Stoic imper-
ative to take “care of self” – a care made possible, Foucault argues, only through
the technology of writing.
By contrast, the rise of “electric media” – beginning with the telegraph, radio,
and then movies and TV – correlates with an apparent shift towards more strongly
relational – and, almost certainly, more emotive – senses of selfhood. Briefly, these
media facilitate the (re)introduction of sound, and thereby voice, and image, and
thereby the body in all its expressiveness and immediacy (think of a YouTube
video or a Skype call). Again, Ong characterizes this as the secondary orality of
electric media: echoing orality as the first stage of human communication, second-
ary orality signals the return of the immediacy, fluidity, but also ephemerality of
oral communication – now also manifest in a “secondary textuality” that empha-
sizes text as instantaneous, short, and ephemeral (cf. Kondor 2009; Baron 2008).
And, where (primary) orality correlates with an emphasis on the relational sense
of selfhood – i.e. a sense of selfhood and identity defined primarily by the multiple
relationships (familial, tribal, social, natural, and, in some cases, “supernatural”)
taken to constitute such a self – so secondary orality likewise signals the (re)turn
to a strongly relational sense of selfhood. As we will explore more fully below: the
emergence of, and now, in developed countries, our saturation within the multiple
networks facilitating computer-mediated communication – and increasingly so by
way of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones – appears to have dramati-
cally amplified our sense of relationality.

4.2 Relational selfhood in social sciences and philosophy:

the (re)turn to virtue ethics
Indeed, relational conceptions of selfhood are manifest and indexed in multiple
ways over the past sixty years (or more). For example, such social and relational
senses of selfhood are articulated in foundational accounts within psychology and
the social sciences, beginning with George Herbert Mead’s “social theory of con-
sciousness” ([1934] 1967: 171) and Georg Simmel’s account of the self as a “sociable
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 627

self” (1955, 1971. Similarly, Erving Goffman’s account of selfhood as defined by the
roles and relationships that it then performs and manages in different ways (1959)
is an account especially prominent in contemporary Internet Studies (IS).
We can also note here the widely used conception of the self as a “networked
individual” (Wellman and Haythornethwaite 2002; Papacharissi 2010; Rainie and
Wellman 2012). On the one hand, such an individual is clearly networked – specifi-
cally, he or she is adept at developing and fostering a wide range of relationships
by way of the multiple communication networks that seem to grow daily. At the
same time, however, this conception appears to remain committed to a strictly
individual – i.e. high modern – conception identity. So, for example, Wellman’s
account of the networked self features a singular “Ego” at the center of a diagram
of networked relationships (Rainie and Wellman 2012: 122).1 This contrasts with
other recent work that, in effect, sees our communication networks as both facili-
tating and thereby directly mapping the relationships that define a more relational
sense of self (e.g. Gergen 2011; Harper 2010).
By the same token, there are noticeable shifts over the past several decades
within philosophy and ethics towards more relational understandings of selfhood
and identity, beginning within phenomenology (Natanson 1970), feminist ethics
(e.g. Gilligan 1982), and the ethics of communicative rationality (McCarthy 1978).
At the same time, these transformations are further accompanied by the renais-
sance of virtue ethics. Most briefly, in both their ancient and contemporary expres-
sions, relational selves evoke a virtue ethics that focuses on the very common-
sensical question: “What must I (learn to) do – what abilities, practices, habits
(virtues) are required – in order for me to achieve a life marked by contentment,
well-being and flourishing (eudaimonia for the ancient Greeks), where this sense
of flourishing is inextricably bound up with sustaining harmony with my larger
society (precisely because I am first and foremost a relational self)?” Rosalind
Hursthouse suggests that virtue ethics have begun to flourish again as we have
come to recognize that for all of their advantages, neither utilitarianism nor deon-
tology take up what we recognize as desirable, if not simply necessary, for a com-
plete moral life: these include “moral wisdom or discernment, friendship and fam-
ily relationships, a deep concept of happiness, the role of the emotions in our
moral life, and the questions of what sort of person I should be” (1999: 3; cf. Ess

1 At the same time, it is notable that Rainie and Wellman take up the jargon of virtue ethics, so
as to devote an entire chapter to “Thriving as a Networked Individual” (2012: 255–274). On the one
hand, this includes an ”ethical literacy”, one focused on building “trust and value … by being
accurate and thoughtful” with whatever information one distributes through one’s networks (2012:
274). On the other hand, this thriving again appears to remain within high modern frameworks of
individual senses of selfhood and identity, e.g., as they endorse acting as “autonomous agents” as
part of such thriving (2012: 266–267). For our part, however, a more explicit focus on virtue ethics –
including our attention to matters of trust online – rather depends on a more relational sense of
selfhood.
628 Charles M. Ess

2013a: 238–243). Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (Ess 2014), virtue ethics
allows us to come to grips with distinctively new ethical challenges posed by
online environments, where utilitarianism and deontology remain relatively lim-
ited in their capacity to offer needed ethical guidance.
Somewhat more darkly – at least from the perspective of high modern empha-
ses on individual autonomy and moral agency – Alisdair MacIntyre points out that
the virtue ethics affiliated with relational selves specifically entails a submission
to the larger authorities and hierarchies that define such relational selves. That is,
if we are to acquire and practice various virtues – whether those required for
excellence in music, sport, and our professions, and/or those necessary for harmo-
nious relationships with the larger society: what MacIntyre calls practices – we
must “… accept the authority of those standards [defined for a given practice] and
the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them”. I as a relational self,
that is, especially as the beginning stages of my entering into any such practice,
am thus required “to subject my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to
the standards which currently and partially define the practice” (MacIntyre 1994:
190; cf. Ess and Fossheim 2013: 48–49).
Most broadly, then, these philosophical and ethical shifts towards more rela-
tional senses of selfhood and thereby the renaissance of virtue ethics cohere with
the correlations demarcated in medium theory between the relational self fostered
by primary orality, and relational selves fostered by secondary orality. In both
cases, that is, virtue ethics appears at the foreground, in contrast with the high
modern focus on deontology and utilitarianism as ethical frameworks rooted in
notions of the self as strongly individual – rational – a self fostered by literacy-
print. At the same time, however, MacIntyre’s observation of how relational selves
are required to submit to authorities for the sake of pursuing virtues points us
towards a key question also posed by the correlations mapped out by medium
theory.

5 Social and political dimensions of relational

selfhood
5.1 A key question
These shifts towards more relational senses of selfhood bring in their train a num-
ber of undeniable benefits and advantages; but at the same time, their social, and
political implications demand close attention. Most darkly – as MacIntyre starkly
reminds us – the relational selves of primary orality correlate with social and
political structures marked by strong hierarchies and, at best, non-democratic
forms of polity. Such selves, that is, appear to be consistently and necessarily
bound within concentric rings of relationships and obligations that inextricably
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 629

tie them within the webs of unquestionable authority spun by, for example, the
demands of family honor and “face”; the requirements of conformity – in the name
of harmony – with the larger society; the worldview and norms of dogmatic reli-
gious traditions; and the unshakeable momentum of tradition and custom. To
recall: it was precisely emancipation from the constraints of such hierarchical
social structures and non-democratic regimes that the radical autonomies of high
modernity sought through the cultivation of individual selfhood and correlative
democratic and liberal regimes. Hence a key question posed by the correlations
articulated in medium theory is: will the shift from more individual (and rational)
conceptions of selfhood towards more relational (and emotive) conceptions bring
in its train a weakening of our commitments to the democratic practices of high
modernity – including the foundational norms of justice, fairness, equality, and
gender equality?

5.2 Possible responses

There are multiple reasons and forms of evidence suggesting that the answer to
this last question is, sadly, yes. To mention but the strongest examples: the demo-
cratic promises of the Arab Springs of 2011 appear to have been shattered in the
ensuing “Arab Winters” as manifest in the current triumph of the Egyptian military
(2013) and the ongoing civil war in Syria. And while some notably and importantly
defend the joys and benefits of a “voluntary surveillance” (Albrechtslund 2008) as
practiced through wildly popular social media sites – the familiar counter of the
Bentham–Foucault panopticon (simply knowing that one might be surveilled by
an authority is sufficient to inspire obedience) has been profoundly reinforced at
a literally global and foundational level by recent revelations of the US National
Security Agency’s staggering reach and capacity to break most forms of encryption
long trusted by industries and consumers alike. Somewhat more gently, but no
less destructively for emancipatory politics and its norms – the Internet and World
Wide Web have been characterized as “weapons of mass distraction”. This genial
turn of phrase highlights the multiple ways in which these new media technologies
foster practices of entertainment and consumption alongside our working very
hard to perform our various identities through various relationships via various
online venues (whether email, social networking sites, blogging, and micro-blog-
ging such as Twitter, Instagram, etc.). To paraphrase Neil Postman, the risk is that
we thereby amuse ourselves to death (1985). That is, in conjunction with the Orwel-
lian dystopia of a Big Brother now equipped with staggering powers of surveil-
lance – we happily cooperate with a Huxleyan dystopia, the Brave New World in
which we fall in love with the very pleasant and convenient technologies of our
enslavement.
630 Charles M. Ess

5.3 Hybrid selves and the virtues of virtue ethics

For all of that, the shift towards more relational senses of selfhood may not inevita-
bly end with the complete loss of high modern democracy, rational autonomy, and
affiliated norms of equality, including gender equality, justice, and participation.
Rather, we may be seeing a transformation towards a hybrid sense of selfhood –
one that may be capable of sustaining strongly individual-rational capacities
alongside more relational-emotive capacities. And with this, we have begun to see,
there is a correlative shift to virtue ethics – a shift that brings to the foreground
precisely the question: what might the good life be for (embodied) relational
autonomies as citizens in and co-constructors of mediatized societies?
A key virtue of such ethics is that it thereby underlines precisely the core
importance of cultivating the self in specific ways. Such conscious cultivation
would include careful attention to the media technologies – i.e. both literacy-print
and electric media – that we use and as these thereby foster either more individual-
rational and/or relational-emotive senses of selfhood, respectively. By raising our
media uses to the level of an ethical choice regarding the aspects of selfhood we
seek to cultivate – a choice, moreover, that would appear to have direct social and
political implications as well – virtue ethics may offer a first antidote to the Hux-
leyan dystopia of unreflective consumption and thereby happy enslavement. More
broadly, virtue ethics should thereby help us to keep in the foreground the impor-
tance of cultivating both the sort of individual-rational selfhood and affiliated civic
virtues requisite for sustaining high modern commitments to democracy and its
norms of equality.
To some degree, this is not an entirely novel suggestion. Rather, the rise of
the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment (explored more fully below) was
accompanied by an acute recognition of the need to cultivate the sense of individ-
ual autonomy that roots modern democracy and the liberal state. Very briefly,
following Kant’s injunction, “sapere aude!” – think for yourself! – as the motto of
the Enlightenment, there emerged in high modernity the focus on education as
cultivating such autonomy, and with it the affiliated virtues of free human beings.
In German-language traditions, this is expressed in terms of Bildung as conceptual-
ized by Alexander von Humboldt. Bildung (or dannelse in Danish and Norwegian)
and its counterpart in the United States, namely liberal arts education, draw
directly from the Medieval traditions of the liberal arts, i.e. the arts of free (liber)
human beings. Especially as Bildung brings the liberal art of philosophy into the
center of education, it thereby brings forward precisely the Socratic (and then
Platonic and then Aristotelian) focus on care of self that includes cultivating pru-
dential or practical wisdom (phronesis) as the core virtue of a virtue ethics oriented
exactly to the pursuit of the good life (cf. Jordheim et. al. 2011: 63–73).
In this light, the contemporary potential of virtue ethics – as developed here,
in conjunction with medium theory – is first of all a restoration of Enlightenment
humanism and its emphasis on cultivation of the self as an autonomy as the key
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 631

requirement for modern democracies. Secondly, the conjunction with medium

theory thereby helps us recognize the central role of specific media technologies –
literacy-print and electric/electronic media – in cultivating either more individual
(and autonomous) or more relational specific emphases of selfhood. Stated differ-
ently, this conjunction elevates our choices regarding which media technologies
we pursue, and in what balance, to one of the foremost elements for us to consider
in the task of self-cultivation as part of an emerging virtue ethics that seeks to
sustain individual autonomy (as fostered primarily by literacy-print) alongside rela-
tional emphases of identity.

5.4 The resiliency of the individual? “Privacy” and recent

philosophical perspectives on selfhood and identity
At the same time, there are two important ways in which it appears that “the
individual” – along with its high modern norms and commitments – is not going
away, at least not quickly. To begin with, it is apparent in multiple ways how the
rise of networked computer-mediated communication, especially as convergent
with such (analog) digital technologies as cameras and audio- and video-recording
technologies, correlate with an apparent shift from high modern notions of privacy.
As a first example: the “pocketfilm” (i.e. a digital video- and audio-recording made
from a smartphone) festival winner of 2007, Porte de Choisy, portrays some of the
most intimate details of ca. 15 minutes in a young French couple’s life: in doing
so, it violates the paradigm private spaces of high modernity, namely the bathroom
and the bedroom (David 2009). More broadly, by 2007 Patricia Lange introduced
the terms “publicly private” and “privately public” to describe the “group priva-
cies” practiced by young people on social networking sites as middle grounds
between strongly individual privacy and its complete absence in an open public.
On the other hand, at least one young interviewee in the US insists that “Every
teenager wants privacy. Every single last one of them, whether they tell you or
not, wants privacy” (Boyd and Marwick 2011: 1).
At the same time, recent philosophical reflections, especially as informed by
the empirical findings of Internet Studies, suggest the resilience of strongly indi-
vidual conceptions of selfhood and identity. As a first example, a focus on the
basic social phenomenon of trust in both offline and online environments has
issued in a philosophical anthropology highlighting the core importance of a Kant-
ian autonomy, coupled with especially phenomenological attention to the role of
embodiment in our sense of selfhood and knowledge of the world and how to
navigate therein (Ess 2010b; Ess and Thorseth 2011). First of all, as our sense of
identity and engagement with the world is so rooted within our individual bodies,
so we remain irreducibly individual and distinct from one another. At the same
time, as we have seen, Kantian rational autonomy is not exclusively individual in,
for example, a Hobbesian, atomistic fashion, but simultaneously relational – what
632 Charles M. Ess

Habermas later develops precisely in terms of communicative rationality

(McCarthy 1978). As perhaps will be clear by now, this emphasis on a “relational
individual,” as rooted in both Kant and phenomenology, likewise foregrounds the
role of virtue ethics.
As a second example, recent philosophical exploration of our practices and
experiences of identity online likewise reinforces the apparently incorrigible sense
of identity and selfhood as individual, precisely in the thick and mediated middle
of our most intensive online experiences (Ess 2012).

5.5 Hybrid selves, virtue ethics, and new “privacies”

At the same time, contemporary philosophers are developing new conceptions of,
first, relational forms of moral agency and responsibility, beginning with notions
of “relational autonomy” as articulated by recent feminist philosophers (e.g. Mack-
enzie 2008). Part of the core insight here is that our autonomy and practices of
freedom are inextricably interwoven with and, ideally, enhanced through our mul-
tiple relationships with others rather than necessarily in conflict with such rela-
tionships (as, for example, must be the case for early atomistic thinkers such as
Hobbes). In these directions, Information Philosopher Luciano Floridi (2013) has
developed notions of “distributed morality” and “distributed responsibility”. These
notions highlight the ways in which – especially in developed societies in which
we are inextricably interconnected with one another precisely through our net-
worked communications – our ostensibly individual choices inevitably interact
with, affect, and are affected by others throughout the network. Such distributed
responsibility can be manifest in beneficent ways – for example, the choice to pay
more for a “red” product (such as a PC) in the knowledge that such a purchase
benefits others (specifically, those infected with AIDS in developing countries).
More broadly, as we have begun to see, the shift towards more relational
senses of selfhood appears to strongly correlate with the renaissance of virtue
ethics in Western ethics over the past few decades. Indeed, directly alongside the
explosive rise of the popularity of social networking sites, philosophical attention
to the virtues both fostered and hindered in such online venues has expanded
dramatically – first and foremost in the work of virtue ethicist Shannon Vallor
(2009, 2011, 2012).
Consonant with these shifts, philosopher Helen Nissenbaum (2010, 2011) has
developed a new – and clearly relational – theory of privacy, one that is thereby
better suited to contemporary practices of “privacy” as ranging from the squarely
(high modern) individual and into the continuum of group privacies familiar to us
not only in social networking sites, but also, for example, in the interactions
between a popular blogger and her audience (Lomborg 2012). For our purposes it
will suffice to notice first that Nissenbaum builds her theory on the earlier work
of James Rachels (1975), whose account of privacy begins with the recognition
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 633

that – consonant with the psychological and social theories we have seen also
emerge in the mid-20th century – we are primarily relational beings. This means,
secondly, that “privacy” is a matter of what Nissenbaum identifies as “contextual
integrity”: that is, what counts as information to be protected is often information
shared within contexts defined by specific relationships, for example, between a
doctor and her patient.

5.6 Dano-Norwegian interlude: not just theory but enculturated

practice.
In fact, we have recently argued that such a relational sense of “privacy” appears
to already be articulate and found in praxis in Norway and Denmark, where “pri-
vacy” is discussed first and foremost in terms of privatlivet (private life) and the
intimsfære (intimate sphere) (Ess and Fossheim 2013). While private life can cer-
tainly include some strongly individual dimensions – private life circles precisely
around the intimsfære, the sphere of closest friends and family members. It is these
contexts, to use Nissenbaum’s term, that thereby define our expectations for what
may be shared appropriately within a given circle of relationships – and what
should not be so shared in different circles of relationship.
Insofar as this is accurate, it suggests that these robustly democratic socie-
ties – societies further marked by exceptionally high literacy rates as well as use
of digital media; by the most stringent individual and group privacy protections
in the world (cf. NESH 2006); and by the strongest realization of both income and
gender equalities in the world – can indeed survive and flourish precisely through
the cultivation of both literacy-print and secondary orality-textuality of electric
media (Ess and Fossheim 2013).

6 Concluding affirmations and final worries

These theoretical developments and enculturated practices together suggest that
a late modern, hybrid individual-relational/rational-emotional self – one that
thereby conjoins and thus is cultivated by the skills and abilities of both literacy-
print and secondary orality – may thereby sustain some of the core notions of
individual identity, as correlative with high modern notions of individual privacy,
as well as of democratic practices and norms, including equality and gender equal-
ity. Indeed, especially the contributions of Mackenzie, Floridi, Nissenbaum, and
others (e.g. Simon 2013) point towards new, philosophically robust theories of such
identity and privacy that can help us articulate these hybrid notions of selfhood
and their ongoing requirement for individual rights (including privacy) and demo-
cratic practices and norms (including equality), alongside more relational notions
634 Charles M. Ess

as contextual privacies or privatlivet. More broadly, as these emerge alongside a

renewed attention to virtue ethics as the primary ethical framework for relational
selves, it is an easy but vital step to urgently recommend a new virtue ethics that
includes attention to privacy and privatlivet as states and practices to be cultivated
through such basic virtues and habits as consistent care for both self and the
Other, alongside more traditional virtues vital for communication and long-term
relationships such as patience, perseverance, and empathy (Vallor 2009). To say
this differently: it should be clear by now – from medium theory as well as from
philosophy and Internet Studies – that the rational autonomy of high modernity
is not somehow a given, something we are born with and take for granted. Rather,
it is cultivated – specifically through the practices and skills affiliated with liter-
acy-print. Again, such practices and cultivation are thus vital if high modern
senses of rational autonomy, democratic polity, and their attendant rights (includ-
ing individual privacy) and norms of equality and gender equality are to be sus-
tained alongside more relational senses of selfhood and its attendant virtues.
At the same time, however, these remnants of high modern conceptions may
be transforming into more of what Charles Taylor has identified as “the expressive
self”, as fostered by Romanticism and now apparent in what Giddens calls “life-
style politics”. It is a worry that such lifestyle politics apparently abandons the
commitment of high modern emancipatory politics to the norms of autonomy, jus-
tice, equality, and participation. Rather, as paraphrased by Wong, once these
forms of emancipation have been achieved, we “are propelled to consider the
questions concerning [our] self-actualisation. As such, life politics represents an
increasing emphasis on values such as authenticity, individuality and diversity”
(Wong 2012: 86–87). That is, in our contemporary interests in self-expression and
authenticity, what happens to earlier commitments to justice and equality?
Indeed, especially in the social-welfare democracies of Scandinavia and Euro-
pean countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, a new kind of individual
identity – what Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) characterize as
“institutionalized individualization” may likewise weaken, if not eliminate, the
role of high modern norms and practices of individual autonomy, privacy, equality,
and democracy. That is, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that the social-welfare
societies once entrusted to protect and enhance these high modern practices and
norms are increasingly eroded by neoliberal pressures towards deregulation and
decentralization. At the same time, as the computer networks and services pro-
vided us by the Googles, Facebooks, Apples, and Microsofts of the world increas-
ingly evolve beyond both national and supranational control, more and more of
our lives are lived in and through online environments privately owned and con-
trolled by corporate rather than civil interests. This leaves us as individuals forced
to make decisions vis-à-vis various risks and challenges – for example, to our
individual privacy and shared privatlivet – previously taken to be the responsibility
of the social-welfare state (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; cf. Mansell and Raboy
2011; Staksrud 2013).
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 635

One of the chief advantages of virtue ethics is just that it is a strong candidate
for a genuinely global ethics. As I have argued elsewhere, and is, I take it, obvious,
a globally shared ethics – one that at the same time is pluralistic, i.e. capable of
sustaining and fostering irreducible differences among “local” cultures and tradi-
tions – is urgently needed for a world in which ever more of us are inextricably
interwoven with one another through global communication networks (Ess 2010a).
At the same time, it is an understatement to say: it will be of considerable interest
to see how far a new virtue ethics may fare in sustaining high modern norms and
practices in light of these countervailing pressures and developments.

7 Unconcluding Platonic postscript: the quarrel

between the Ancients and the Moderns
Indeed, if the large frameworks, findings, and arguments cobbled together in this
paper are more or less correct, then the success or failure of such a new virtue
ethics may well decide what philosophers have characterized as the quarrel
between the Ancients and the Moderns. That is, the beginnings of Western concep-
tions of rationality as a source of moral agency and authority alternative to tradi-
tion and religious dogma come to the fore, as we have seen, in the figure of
Socrates and the philosophical reflections of Plato and then Aristotle. To reiterate,
these conceptions of rationality were at once relational and thereby foregrounded
precisely a Socratic virtue ethics that unfolds in watershed articulation in Aristotle.
(And, from a medium theory perspective, such developments are consistent with
the shift also at work here from Socrates as a strictly oral teacher to his first
student Plato and then Aristotle as the first philosophers to write.) But Plato
famously argues, most notably in The Republic, that the capacity for such rational
moral agency is “by nature” restricted to the very few – precisely those whose
“souls” (psyche) are dominated by reason, in contrast with those whose souls are
dominated by “spirit” and appetite. Plato further argues that the spirited ones are
best suited to, and thus most content with, a life of military discipline and use of
force that is requisite for defending the city-state against its enemies both without
and within. By the same token, those whose souls are dominated by appetite are
best suited to, and thus most content with, a life of production and consumption.
In contemporary terms, they – Plato’s “the many” – thus constitute the economic
foundations and processes that enable the material life of the city-state.
This account of human nature then leads to a rigorously hierarchical social
and political structure: the ideal city in which the philosopher-kings, as the only
ones capable of rational insight into how things really are, are thus best suited to
rule over the guardian and consumer-producer classes. To be fair to Plato’s argu-
ment, this hierarchy is not intended to be what moderns would categorize as a
636 Charles M. Ess

repressive or exploitive one. On the contrary, it is precisely reason’s insight into

the mathematical structures of harmony – not self-interest – that is to guide the
philosopher-kings in their efforts to establish and sustain the proper balances
between the three classes and their activities, each according to its nature and
thus what makes the members of these classes most content. The goal is to thereby
achieve the maximum harmony and thus well-being of both the individual citizens
and the city-state as a whole. (It can also be pointed out that the philosopher-
kings are only the most reluctant of rulers: it is only their duty to the larger whole
that drags them down from the sunlight of reason back into the cave of unenlight-
ened society and the polis.)
Nonetheless, this ancient view issues in a scathing critique of especially what
we would call plebiscite democracy. Given that “the many” do not have the reason
needed to distinguish between salutary and unsalutary desires; and given that
“democracy” thereby devolves into an utter ethical relativism in the name of the
ostensible equality of all desires; so “the many” in a democracy thereby become
slaves of their desires in the name of the ostensible freedom to pursue their desires.
Worse still, the resulting chaos – both within the individual souls of the many and
thereby in their city – invites the tyrant, the one who first appeals to the desires
of the many and is thereby “democratically” elected. But the tyrant, of course, is
only interested in pursuing his desires, by way of the power he thereby acquires
over the many others (The Republic, Book VIII).
In contrast with this ancient suspicion of “the many” and thereby democracy,
the Moderns – including figures we have seen such as Locke and Kant – argue in
effect that, at least with the careful cultivation of the self through Bildung (and
liberal arts education), “the many” may indeed be capable of acquiring the rational
autonomy required first of all for self-rule; such self-rule, in turn, thereby justifies
and indeed requires the modern democratic-liberal state.
The quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, then, is a quarrel over
who is correct about whether human beings – the many, not simply the few – are
indeed capable of rational self-rule. In this light, the Enlightenment, as suggested
in Kant’s famous essay ([1970] 1991), amounts to a bet: if we can build societies
that include precisely the cultivation of rationality and critical reflection among
“the many”, not just the few – for example, through institutions of public educa-
tion, Public Service Broadcasting, and the like – then we can demonstrate that
Plato was wrong about “the many” and the inevitable slide of democracy into
tyranny.
In this light, a new virtue ethics – one that begins with the questions of how
we may pursue and foster good lives in a media age (as already articulated, for
example, by Nick Couldry [2013]) – may well prove key to this quarrel between
the Ancients and the Moderns. Granted, nothing positive can be predicted with
confidence about the possible outcomes of pursuing such an ethics. But it seems
safe to say that without such a virtue ethics, and with a correspondingly unreflect-
 Selfhood, moral agency, and the good life in mediatized worlds? 637

ive embrace of the affordances of new media, as these seem to work especially
well to cultivate our appetites and desires for consumption and entertainment –
it seems likely that Plato, contra Kant, will be proven correct.

Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Dr Shannon Vallor (Philosophy Department, Santa Clara Uni-
versity, California) for critical advice and corrections to an earlier draft of this
paper.

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Maren Hartmann
28 Home is where the heart is? Ontological
security and the mediatization of
homelessness
Abstract: This chapter starts from the widespread assumption that mediatization
and domestication frameworks fit well together, but also that the notion of the
everyday needs to be extended to further strengthen this combination. Rather than
looking at the fairly abstract notion of the everyday, however, this contribution
focuses on questions of ontological security and the home as more concrete exam-
ples thereof. Both are key concepts of the original domestication framework as
well as good examples of what makes the everyday. In this chapter, these two
concepts are explored through looking at their opposite extremes and their interre-
lationship: i.e. ontological insecurity and homelessness. Bringing the different
strands together, the concept of “homing” will be introduced at the end. It com-
bines media use and home-making (in an ontological sense) and develops these
as sensitizing concepts for research into domestication and mediatization.

Keywords: mediatization, domestication, everyday, ontological (in-)security, home-

lessness, notion of home, homing

1 Introduction
A widespread assumption in the mediatization literature (e.g. Krotz and Thomas
2007; Hartmann 2009; Krotz 2009: 25) is that domestication processes (Silverstone
and Haddon 1996), both empirically and theoretically, fit well with the mediatiza-
tion framework.1 Another, related assumption is that both approaches might need
to be extended. In this context, Friedrich Krotz and Tanja Thomas suggest a
renewed emphasis on the notion of the everyday within the domestication frame-
work in order to strengthen the link to the mediatization concept. This is taken as
the starting point for this contribution. Rather than simply adopting the idea, how-
ever, it is argued here that the notion of the everyday is still too abstract and that
concrete sub-concepts are more useful for the aspired combination of mediatiza-
tion and domestication. The chosen concepts are ontological security and the
home – both key concepts of the original domestication framework as well as

1 I argue elsewhere that domestication processes are an important pre-condition for mediatization
to take place (Hartmann 2009), but this does not directly affect the line of argument in this contri-
bution.
642 Maren Hartmann

good examples of what makes the everyday the everyday, but also not extensively
developed in the domestication literature. These two concepts are explored here
through looking at their opposite extremes, i.e. ontological insecurity and home-
lessness. Not only are these two phenomena empirically linked, but they provide
an entry-point into a more subtle understanding of the notions of ontological secu-
rity and home. On top of that, recent research underlines the importance of digital
media use in the everyday lives of (young) homeless people and hence offers an
opening to the question of the provision of ontological security (and maybe even
a feeling of home) through such media.
The text begins with a very brief sketch of the mediatization framework and
another brief sketch of the domestication framework. It will then highlight the
critical issues in the combination of domestication and mediatization, i.e. the limi-
tations of their possible combination. The article will then turn to the concept of
ontological (in-)security as a core element of the domestication framework as well
as in the creation and sustenance of the everyday. In the following section the
question of ontological security will be linked to the concept of home and the state
of homelessness. Homelessness will further be regarded in terms of the homeless
and their (social) media use. Last, but not least, the article will conclude by sug-
gesting a new concept, called homing, which is meant to bind the above men-
tioned concepts and outcomes together. Homing combines media use and home-
making (in an ontological sense), sensitizing us (hopefully) for these aspects in
the processes of domestication and mediatization.

2 A (very brief) sketch on mediatization

“The mediatization meta-process in particular makes it clear that lifeworld-specific
communication remains the basis of communication and media in general” (Krotz
2009, 28).2 Therefore specific potentially mediatized lifeworlds need to be analysed
in more detail. Mediatization, in Krotz’s view, is the interconnection (or triangle)
between media technological change, communicative change, and sociocultural
change, i.e. it encompasses a rather complex matrix of changes and processes,
wherefore it has been labelled a meta-process. This is, simply put, “a comprehen-
sive development process similar to globalization and individualization, namely
the increasing influence media communication has on culture and society”.3 As a

2 Krotz’s further starting point is that we need to differentiate between three forms of mediated
communication: (a) mediated dialogical communication, (b) mediated monological communica-
tion, and (c) mediated interactive communication (Krotz 2007: 17; Krotz and Thomas 2007: 33).
All these kinds of communication are seen as communicative encounters similar to face-to-face
encounters.
3 See: http://mediatisiertewelten.de/en/concept.html (accessed 10/09/2013).
 Home is where the heart is? 643

meta-process, it combines quantitative and qualitative changes in a range of areas.

The above-mentioned interconnection is never a simple one.
Hence mediatization in Krotz’s definition is an all-encompassing concept
(there are other approaches that define it slightly differently, e.g. Sarcinelli 2002;
Meyen 2009; and others’ contributions in this book). This makes the concept
attractive but also in some ways problematic, because it remains rather general.
Several different foci have therefore been developed to research mediatization,
ranging from sport to politics or to religion.4 The combination with the domestica-
tion concept was also meant to question the generality, using the everyday as the
focus. This, it is argued below, needs to be focused even further.
Krotz himself used case studies to illustrate his ideas: in his later work they
range from robots (and especially the robotic “dog” AIBO) to computer games,
mobile phones, web chats, and more. In his earlier formulation of the mediatiza-
tion approach, however, it is one kind of media use in particular that he uses to
make his point: television viewing in public. One of the questions he thereby aims
to pursue is whether television changes the social situation that it is entering (and
if yes, how) (Krotz 2001: 188–212). Based on research in the late 1990s in both
Germany and the US, Krotz describes TV viewing in public as a new social phe-
nomenon in the sense that it is based on a specific, newly emerging consumer
attitude as well as a general move towards the information society (Krotz 2001:
168–169). The new TV sets are implemented for economic reasons (making places
more attractive and getting people to buy more) rather than to recreate the private
viewing situation in public. Nonetheless, TV use in public is clearly connected to,
and part of, everyday life. There are some differences between watching TV in
these public places and watching at home though: a) in public, there are new
audience constellations, b) motivations and contexts differ in different viewing
situations, wherefore reception processes also differ, and c) public spaces are dif-
ferently socially controlled (cf. Krotz 2001: 171).
Overall, media research needs to refocus, if it were to take this kind of media
use (in public, but also on the move) on board. Despite the time that has passed
since Krotz’s early formulation, only parts of this message seem to have been
received. Media use in public has since become even more prominent, as mobile
media are also personalized, individual media that are taken (almost) anywhere
anytime. Hence the relationship between public spaces and media use remains a
crucial question. In the following sections, this question will be slightly twisted.

4 The largest research network on mediatization yet (www.mediatisiertewelten.de) mentions the

following as explicit research projects within the network: security policy, politics (deliberation
and positioning), TV series, translocal communication, business models, music, social relations,
and sports betting. Typical questions are, for example, in what manner the transformation of media
takes course in these worlds and whereby the mediatized experience is characterized (cf. http://
mediatisiertewelten.de/en/projects/2nd-funding-period-2012-2014/mediatization-of-sports-betting.
html). The projects are often interested in the relationship between online and offline actions.
644 Maren Hartmann

The focus will not be general media use in public places, but the media use of
those people for whom the public space is at the same time their private space:
the homeless. This is tied to the question of ontological security, already hinted at
above. The link between ontological security and media research is primarily made
through the domestication framework. This framework will therefore be briefly
introduced in the next section.

3 A brief sketch of domestication5

The domestication approach was first developed and used by a research team from
Brunel University in the late 1980s.6 It was concerned with media use in everyday
life, i.e. the integration of media technologies and their content into daily routines
and the related spaces (e.g. Morley and Silverstone 1990; Silverstone, Hirsch and
Morley 1992). The team found a particular focus for these concerns in household
environments. For their time (the early 1990s) the researchers assumed that the
most crucial negotiations between public and private lives were taking place in
the home. They developed the concept of the moral economy, which consisted of
the household members’ experiences, values, and related negotiations. This was
supposed to have a crucial influence on the adoption process, i.e. on the integra-
tion of new media technologies into existing household cultures. Part of the moral
economy was the notion of ontological security, as will be explained below.
The process of adopting the technology into everyday life was further
described in the domestication framework as having several dimensions: the
domestication process begins with the development of the technology, its design,
its marketing, and therefore also the users’ first imaginary contact (the related
dimensions are called imagination and commodification). Another dimension,
called appropriation, refers to the actual adoption of a technology into the house-
hold, including its spatial arrangement (objectification) and its ritual and time
integration (incorporation). Last, but not least, the conversion dimension refers to
the presentation of the media technology and its uses to the outside world, or, as
Shaun Moores (1993: 14) calls it “a ‘trading in’ of competencies, meanings and
pleasure cultivated in the private domain”. Overall, the domestication process
refers to a taming of wild technologies (Silverstone 1994: 11). These technologies

5 More detailed descriptions of the domestication approach can be found, for example, in Berker
et al. (2006), Röser (2007), and Hartmann (2007, 2008, 2013a).
6 While the publications are mostly in the name of Roger Silverstone and David Morley, Sonia
Livingstone and Andrea Dahlberg were also part of the original team (see Silverstone et al. 1989).
When Dahlberg left, Eric Hirsch replaced her and conducted most of the empirical work of the first
phase. Leslie Haddon took on this role in the second major project (when both Livingstone and
Morley had moved elsewhere).
 Home is where the heart is? 645

are mostly integrated into existing everyday life practices (sometimes the practices
are adapted, sometimes the technologies ignored and discarded). Domestication
research follows the biographies that these technologies develop in the hands of
their users, it analyses the way they become familiar, even indispensable.
Methodologically, the domestication framework used ethnographically in-
spired research methods. In the beginning, this meant an attempt to conduct par-
ticipant observations in the chosen households, plus additional methods to engage
with the household members’ media use.7 Later, the studies were changed to quali-
tative interviews (over a longer period of time), again plus additional methods.8
Next to the moral economy, a second major concept within the domestication
approach is that of the double articulation of media and technologies. It emphasizes
the nature of the media as objects as well as content. These are products that users
take on board as technological, potentially desirable objects, but also as a wide
range of services and contents. This notion has elsewhere been broadened to the
idea of a triple articulation (see Hartmann 2006; Livingstone 2007; Courtois et al.
2012), helping to underline the importance of context for our understanding of
appropriation processes.9 The general processes of appropriation are at the core
of the domestication framework (see also Helle-Valle 2010). Media appropriation
processes become increasingly important the more contexts become media-satu-
rated. This again provides a clear link to the concept of mediatization. However,
since the main context within the original domestication research was the domes-
tic environment, the concept overall needs to be developed further.10
One helpful emphasis is the discussion on everyday life as the crucial element
in domestication research, which is particularly visible in the Norwegian differen-
tiation between household and the everyday: “To us, everyday life is not the same
as the household or the reproductive sphere. […] Generally, the everyday is associ-
ated with what we do over and over again, today the same as yesterday, thus
signifying stability and the reproduction of social patterns” (Lie and Sørensen
1996: 2–3). In the context of this paper, the notion of ontological security best
expresses what is so important about the everyday – and what makes the domesti-

7 These included discussions of photo-albums, psychological tests, maps of social networks out-
side of the home, maps of the domestic space (with indications of where the media were located),
lists of the technologies that existed in the households, and the discussion of household budgets.
8 The additional methods included time use diaries, observations from the interviews, drawings,
etc.
9 Next to the triple articulation quite a few other changes and/or additions to the original frame-
work have been introduced in diverse directions (see Hartmann 2013a). These range from new
studies in domestic environments (albeit with different theoretical frameworks) to studies in other
contexts or locales as well as studies that move into much less media-centric realms.
10 There are several exceptions to this rule even early on, however, the general perception was
that the domestication framework was primarily used to study (and relevant for the study of)
household uses of information and communication technologies (which was also the name of the
first funded project – HICT).
646 Maren Hartmann

cation of media and technologies possible – even where there is no house to go

to (and no home to begin with). Before turning to this topic, however, the follow-
ing section presents a brief summary of one of the few more explicit accounts of
thinking domestication and mediatization together (and not just as fitting each
other). This serves as a basis for the new focus.

4 Mediatization and domestication thought

together
One reason for the unquestioned acceptance of the combination of domestication
and mediatization is that many of the empirical projects using the mediatization
concept are studies on the mediatization of everyday life (see Lüthje in press) –
and everyday life is also at the centre of domestication research. Hence it is not
surprising that Friedrich Krotz and Tanja Thomas describe the everyday as the
mediator between the processes of domestication and mediatization (Krotz and
Thomas 2007: 39) in one of the only explicit comparisons of the two frameworks.
Krotz and Thomas see the domestication concept as containing useful theoretical
hints and as a relevant empirical tool to analyse mediatization processes. They
criticize the domestication framework, however, for not adequately addressing the
notion of the everyday – although it is the mediator between domestication and
mediatization in their eyes. They also claim that only in using the mediatization
approach (in the version introduced above) can the domestication concept come
to full fruition. The authors therefore offer a more fundamental view on everyday
life concepts, which should broaden our understanding of domestication proc-
esses.
Krotz and Thomas call the domestication idea a “contextualization concept”
(Krotz and Thomas 2007: 32), emphasizing the procedural nature of the move from
the technology to the social reality of everyday life. Next to the assumed lack of a
theoretical grounding of the everyday life conceptualization within the framework
(see above and below), they also criticize that the longer-term transformation of
everyday life is not necessarily regarded in domestication research.11 This is mostly
due to the fact of what I have also criticized elsewhere as the lack of an engage-
ment with the different forms of media content and its uses (see Hartmann 2006).
A further criticism concerns a lack of reflection of the changes that people go
through in the domestication processes. This, however, is disputable, since these
changes were at the forefront of the empirical questions asked in many domestica-

11 While some of the early research was longer-term (or was picked up again years later – see
Hirsch 1998), more recent research does indeed rarely regard developments over time (except e.g
Karl 2009).
 Home is where the heart is? 647

tion projects. The fourth criticism (as hinted at above) asks domestication research
to include wider social processes (such as mediatization) in their considerations.
This is a valid reminder of the need to update the concept to the more complex
media developments taking place today. This is also the route taken here, albeit
with some hesitance to see mediatization as the framework that provides all this.
In the following, the hint concerning the relevance of the everyday as the
binding concept between the two frameworks remains to be explored. The every-
day has been an important topic in both philosophy and social sciences (e.g. Lefeb-
vre 1991), but remains nonetheless slightly elusive. The way to explore this binding
element in the context of this paper is therefore slightly different: two concepts
prominent in the domestication framework that are highly relevant for the explora-
tion of the everyday have been chosen as a focus: ontological security and home.
Both are particularly interesting in terms of their linkage to each other.

5 Ontological (in-)security12
One of the concepts dominant in the domestication framework is the notion of
ontological security. It was originally formulated by Robert David Laing in the con-
text of his work on schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. He formulated the
core of ontological security as follows:

A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal
sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world
and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. Such a basically onto-
logically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biologi-
cal, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity. (Laing 1960:
39)

Ontological security is therefore a basis for a socially accepted and somewhat

content life. Or rather: “If a position of primary ontological security has been
reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to
one’s own existence” (Laing 1960: 42). Instead, the ontologically secure person
has an integral identity, has the ability to believe in a certain permanency in life
(concerning natural processes, things, others – Laing 1960). Laing goes on to con-
trast this ontologically secure person with an ontologically insecure one, “an indi-
vidual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-vali-
dating certainties” (Laing 1960: 39). This person has no “parents, home, wife,

12 Indeed, one line of attack of the domestication framework, which consists of a critique of its
conservatism (see Hartmann 2013), can be better explained when we take this notion of ontological
security seriously, since this is generally tied to the habitual, to routines, which tend to be about
maintaining the existing circumstances.
648 Maren Hartmann

child, commitment, or appetite; He has no connexion with power, beauty, love,

wit, courage, loyalty, or fame, and the pride that may be taken in these” (Laing
1960: 39). Ultimately, the lack of ontological security potentially leads to mental
illnesses (such as schizophrenia), according to Laing.
The link to everyday life is potentially obvious, but nonetheless needs to be
made. Especially the “everyday happenings” are those elements that are turned
into signifiers of such stability – or instability. Many of these are not even noticed,
they have become so normal, so taken-for-granted. This background-nature of
everyday life and all its signifiers is often not granted to people with ontological
insecurity. For them, these everyday things have a life of their own, a significance
that is not necessarily helpful in the sustenance of ontological security (cf. Laing
1960: 43).
The idea of ontological security has been taken on board and developed fur-
ther by Anthony Giddens (1984, 1991). He emphasizes the importance of stability
in day-to-day life, which involves both the autonomy of bodily control as well as
predictable routines (Giddens 1984: 50). This gives the actor the autonomy of
action (an important aspect of his structuration idea). Ontological security is based
on an affective involvement with the routines that characterize the everyday, it is
linked to the social rules that govern these routines, but ontological security is
also related to a sense of place. Ontological security hence consists of a mixture
of autonomy (of the body, of the self) and routines (based in space and time and
expressed through repeated actions).
Another academic use of the ontological security framework has been domesti-
cation framework in media studies (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992).13 In the
original research, the concept of ontological security was used to underline the
importance of the household as an important (or the most important) locus for the
creation of this “sense of confidence or trust in the world as it appears to be”
(Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992: 19). At the same time, Silverstone and his
colleagues also emphasized that information and communication technologies
pose a challenge for this creation of ontological security (and therefore also for
the household in question). This is because action and meaning-creation increas-
ingly take place outside of the immediate place of experience. At the same time,
the world system is more visible and more intensely experienced through these
ICTs. There is therefore a tension between the household being a highly important
element in the creation of ontological security as well as being the main place for
media use (especially at the time of the original formulation) and media offering
both a potential threat to as well as a potential building block for ontological
security.

13 Additionally, international relations and other academic fields have also further developed the
notion of ontological security. A general assumption is that ontological insecurity is growing (e.g.
Kinnvall 2004). This is not only related to the individual level, but more broadly.
 Home is where the heart is? 649

Silverstone develops the last point further and defines television as creating
ontological security because it manages to become a transitional object in Donald
Winnicott’s sense: an object which serves to replace the real need, a security blan-
ket as it is often called. Television is thus always present (even for those who do
not use it) and it thereby comes to stand for acceptance and trust. In this sense,
the media are not just destroying social reality (a common theme at the time of
Silverstone’s early writings), but also at sustaining it. In the beginning, Silverstone
and his colleagues clearly linked ontological security to the primary site of the
home, based mostly in households. This was later softened to not necessarily refer
to the household. Home, however, was (and is) still deemed necessary.

6 Ontological security, the home and

homelessness
Households, within the domestication enterprise, were defined as social, economic and politi-
cal units, within which a certain stability of transactional culture in each of these domains
enabled the days to pass without trauma, and enabled values, however provisional and frag-
ile, to be created, sustained and transmitted. (Silverstone 2006: 241)

Home, then, is no longer singular, no longer static, no longer, in an increasingly mobile and
disrupted world, capable of being taken for granted. But if the human condition requires a
modicum of ontological security for its continuing possibility and its development, home –
technologically enhanced as well as technologically disrupted – is a sine qua non. We cannot
do without it, within or without the household. To be homeless is to be beyond reach, and to
be without identity. (Silverstone 2006: 242–243)14

This question of home, its relation to a household and to ontological security

(defined as a necessary precondition for media adoption in everyday life) is what
concerns us here. One of the starting points is simply that the notion of ontological
security remains crucial even today – the question is only how it is being created
nowadays. As hinted at above, already early on Silverstone and his colleagues
emphasized that ICTs “make the project of creating ontological security particu-
larly problematic, for media disengage the location of action and meaning from
experience …” (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992: 20). Later on, this problem
was seen to have shifted: media were now seen to also “help the individual and
the collectivity to define and sustain their own ontological security wherever they
happen to be” (Silverstone 2006: 233), while also allowing the “domestication of
elsewhere” (Morley 2006: 23). Andre Jansson (2010) similarly underlines that
online media can indeed provide the basis for ontological security on an individual

14 It is not surprising then that quite a few of the homeless are officially described as mentally
ill.
650 Maren Hartmann

level, albeit coupled with a sense of connectivity to both the global and the local.
Ritualized social practices, based in everyday life and performed online (in a form
of network sociality) are part of this formation of ontological security.
Media increasingly help to create ontological security, but also challenge it
repeatedly. The shift with digital media is, however, more towards the enabling
than the threatening function. This highlights another point: in the original frame-
work, ontological security was closely linked to the question of the household –
and to the notion of home. While these are related, they are not necessarily congru-
ent all the time (the notion of home is highly contested in itself). Nonetheless, they
are the basis for the early domestication research – and also for their theoretical
assumptions. The moral economy, crucial for domestication processes, is based on
the upkeep of the ontological security – which again is based here on a notion
of home. Mediatization processes, however, pose a challenge to this (and other)
notion(s):

… family members may be physically present in the home, yet be mentally attuned to other
institutions entirely … Virtualization of social institutions goes hand in hand with a domestica-
tion of those institutions. … The virtualization of institutions implies that the home loses some
of its ability to regulate family members’ behavior, … these places and buildings now interplay
with virtual places and spaces, and the reality and forms of interaction that take place in the
virtual world will also have consequences for social praxis in the physical locality. (Hjarvard
2008: 129)

Hence the boundary between social institutions and households has become even
more porous thanks to mediatization processes. While it was already difficult to
define home beforehand, it is becoming even more difficult now. Since home
played such a crucial role in the original definition of ontological security, however
(and therefore of domestication), we will turn to the seemingly opposite: to the
homeless and their understanding of home in relation to their notion of ontological
security. Last, but not least, this will be related to the question of media use.
Silverstone and colleagues mention homelessness only in a footnote, pointing
to a possible link between homelessness and moral (economy): “The term ‘home-
less’ or ‘without fixed abode’ is not, in our society, simply a descriptive one. It is, of
course, powerfully evaluative. Being without a home comes to mean being without
morality” (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley 1992: 28 – footnote 7). This social con-
struction of homelessness is indeed one of the key problems in terms of its impact
on the homeless.15 Homelessness has even been described as an “ideology” (Som-
erville 1992). Parts of this construction process are the differences posed with
regard to the hierarchy of dimensions of stratification (reflected, for example, in
the debate on “housing first” or “treatment first”). Though many authors agree

15 A very powerful portrayal of this problematic can be found in the project “Invisible People”,
which shows a whole range of people being homeless (see http://invisiblepeople.tv/ (accessed 11/
09/2013)).
 Home is where the heart is? 651

that being without housing is only one aspect of being without a home or, as
Padgett states, “Having a ‘home’ is much more than shelter from the elements”
(Padgett 2007). However, the most dominant tendency is still that “having a house
is viewed as a normative base from which to achieve ontological security and
stability […] because it is a place where tensions that build up from constant sur-
veillance in other settings can be relieved […]” (Brueckner, Green and Saggers
2011: 3).
Ontological security though is so much more than having four walls, but it is
also more than simply daily routines. It underlines rather that we need to differen-
tiate more clearly between “rooflessness or rootlessness” (Somerville 1992).16 Home
can imply either – or both. And while I agree that “our homes are a crucial site
through which ontological security is established and sustained”, and that they
are environments “where we entertain friends and family, where we relax, play
and argue, where we do mundane and routine things and where we escape from
the stresses of everyday life”, I am less convinced that “they are a place” (Johnson
and Wylie 2010: 4). Instead, research – even on homelessness – seems to at least
open up the possibility to think of media as home. This should not be misunder-
stood as a denial of the need for housing support for the homeless – research
clearly shows, too, that ontological security can only be properly built when this
is given. However, both as a first step away from homelessness and as a kind of
constant back-up, a version of “mediated home” is a useful practice. Plus it is
important to keep in mind that home is indeed primarily a process, a dynamic
construction that is kept up in order to maintain security. All this is well summa-
rized in the

Four Markers of Ontological Security Related to Housing:

(1) home is a place of constancy in the material and social environment

(2) home is a place in which the day-to-day routines of human existence are performed
(3) home is where people feel in control of their lives because they feel free from the surveil-
lance that characterizes life elsewhere
(4) home is a secure base around which identities are constructed. (Dupuis and Thorns 1998)

16 Exact numbers are not easy to get in relation to the question of homelessness. In Germany,
their representative body, the “Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft Wohnungslosenhilfe” (BAGW 2013 –
http://www.bagw.de/de/presse/index~81.html), claims that there are more than 284,000 homeless
in 2013 (or more than three per 1000 inhabitants – see also Edgar 2009: 75), while Hans Joachim
Gottberg (2009) speaks of 860,000 homeless people. This partly depends on the definition: the
BAGW, for example, states that homeless are all those people who neither own nor rent property
of some sort. Living in the streets is less than a tenth of these, but this phenomenon is growing as
well. Others differentiate further and define homeless as those “who lack a fixed, regular, and
adequate nighttime residence” as well as those whose nighttime residence is an institution of sorts
or not suited for sleeping (Roberson and Nardi 2010: 445). A very useful and differentiated Euro-
pean research overview differentiates between rooflessness, houselessness, living in insecure hous-
ing and living in inadequate housing (Edgar 2009: 73).
652 Maren Hartmann

If one takes the markers two to four, however, the materiality is not necessarily
the most prominent signifier. Empirical work on the topic emphasizes this point.
In Tobias Wesselmann’s recent study on media use of the homeless, for example,
he received rather similar answers concerning the question of the participants’
meaning of home: they mostly mentioned a) the possibility to retreat and b) quiet-
ness. For these homeless, the possibility to be on one’s own, not to share and/or
fight is rather important. On top of this is the aspect of comfort, of feeling at home.
Some would like to share this with their families, others emphasize the importance
of a regular life (Wesselmann 2012: 53). Hence the markers of ontological security
(e.g. in terms of feeling in control, secure base, regular day-to-day activities) are
clearly at play here. The physical aspects feature much less clearly.
Elsewhere, it has been argued that the relationship between homes and onto-
logical security is rather complex. The researchers followed up on the assumption
that tenure (in terms of housing) could increase ontological security (a very cultur-
ally specific assumption to begin with). They concluded that the role of tenure is
not that important after all and that instead other factors play an important role
in this construction of ontological security. These other factors include work, rela-
tionships, wealth, opportunities (for travel, activities, etc.). Hence housing is just
one aspect therein (Hiscock et al. 2001).17
A hint of further complexities in the relationship between housing, home, and
ontological security can be found in work on homeless women and their under-
standing of home and housing. For them, the house they called their home was
in some cases a place they “want to escape from” (Tomas and Dittmar 1998: 496,
italics in the original). Many of the homeless women experienced home as a place
of abuse and violence.18 For some, housing does therefore become the problem
rather than the solution. In this study, home was therefore defined not in relation
to housing, but described as the general feeling of independence from others
(Tomas and Dittmar 1998). It is therefore important to see homelessness as some-
times a question of choice – often, because the situation that people fled from was

17 While we are trying to look at a specific sub-set of questions concerning homelessness here
and are framing it within an empowerment discourse (which has its own problems), this should
not be misunderstood as a denial of the fundamental problems associated with homelessness: it
often damages people’s self-esteem and self-confidence, homeless people are often sick and social
isolation is also a widespread problem within this particular population.
18 There is a lot of research being conducted on the reasons for people turning homeless (more
so in the USA, however, as well as in countries such as Australia or Canada than in Europe with
the exception of the UK). Turning points or reasons often named are substance misuse, relationship
breakdowns or escaping violent relationships, health problems (physical and/or mental), leaving
an institution (prison, hospital etc.). Obviously, general social problems play a role in the number
of people turning homeless: when affordable housing is decreasing, when poverty and unemploy-
ment rates are rising, when the social system changes. Next to the already mentioned substance
abuse, another often mentioned problem that is more widespread in the homeless population than
elsewhere is the question of mental illnesses.
 Home is where the heart is? 653

much worse (e.g. an abusive relationship) and this can make the lack of housing
seem a less problematic issue than other aspects in life. This underlines yet again
that home is a crucial point that has many ideas and emotions attached. While
this is not necessarily a new claim, the idea of finding some of these aspects in
digital media has not been explored extensively. The research on the homeless
and their media use, however, suggests that this can at least partly be found there.
Hence the four markers of ontological security mentioned above might need
to be found outside of the (physical) house – and one of those other (safe) environ-
ments could be online, especially in social networking sites. The key elements that
remain are the secure base for identity-constructions, the freedom from surveil-
lance experienced in life, daily routines, and constancy. Whether this can indeed
be related to media use will now be addressed via research on homelessness and
(social) media use.

7 Homelessness and (social) media use

Despite all claims to a massive growth in mobility, media use still takes place
primarily at home (see Reitze and Ridder 2011). But media use outside of the home
is growing as well. The contexts touched by this include, amongst others, work
environments, public spaces, as well as public transport. This applies even more
so to the media use of the homeless. While studies on homelessness and media use
are still few and far in between (though growing in number), the link to ontological
security is not usually made. Interestingly, however, the domestication framework
in sometimes used in these studies (e.g. Bure 2005; Wesselmann 2012). Generally,
the research interest on homelessness and media use has risen since social media
have become more widespread in the general population (and since homelessness
has grown in Western countries in recent years).
Studies on young homeless people’s social media use often state that these
young homeless are indeed very active online. This has since been used to think
about the potential implications or, as Jahmeilah Roberson and Bonnie Nardi
(2010: 445) state: “Many questions remain regarding whether … the use and owner-
ship of these technologies put homeless at an advantage or disadvantage”. Claire
Bure in her study based in Scotland in 2005 still claimed that ICT use allowed only
a small increase in social inclusion. She did, however, emphasize that it is impor-
tant for everyday life. In 2013 though, with social media use having massively
increased, social inclusion might be differently affected.
This change can be seen in yet other studies: while research on the information
needs and sources of homeless parents in 2001 still underlined that (non-technical)
social network connections were seen as more useful than media sources (Hersber-
ger 2001), the trend now points to another direction. Many homeless indeed seem
to use social media not dissimilar to the rest of the population: as extensions of
654 Maren Hartmann

existing social networks, reinforcing ties with people who would otherwise not be
easily reachable. Already in 2010, one study on homeless and Internet use under-
lined that most homeless adolescents (84 %) used the Internet once a week or
more (Rice et al. 2010). This often cited study also underlines that access takes
place mostly through and in public places (such as libraries and youth service
agencies). The adolescents in this study used these media to connect with different
peers online and offline as well as with their families – they “used social network-
ing technology to access a variety of home and street-based social network ties”
(Rice et al. 2010). While the research question concerned Internet use of these
youngsters in relation to sexual health, the overall numbers underline what is also
stated elsewhere: this social group of young people does not differ substantially
in their social media use from, for example, college students of the same age.
Other studies support these findings: at least the young homeless are con-
nected in many ways. Researchers interpret the high rate of technology access in
relation to the “effort required to access the Internet in public settings” as an
indication of the high value that these young homeless place on that use (Pollio
et al. 2013: 174). Roberson and Nardi show that their participants “developed ways
to use digital technologies to find food and shelter, to secure their safety, and to
make money” (2010: 446), i.e. that these media are not only used for social net-
working, but to organize their particular kind of everyday life.
Another study explores more deeply, what the motivations of homeless users
are and how they perform (Woelfer and Hendry 2012). The authors begin with the
assumption that they might find ambivalent tendencies: that social network media
might help the young homeless to keep up with and strengthen supportive ties,
but also help to quickly build up a new, street-wise network with more disruptive
tendencies. Next to providing eight portraits of young homeless people, they
explain their findings with the following headers: Exploring Identity; Cultivating
and Exploiting Social Ties; Interpersonal Tensions, Brought Online and Amplified;
Managing Audiences, Adjusting Profiles; Shifting Affiliations and Transitions
(Woelfer and Hendry 2012: 7–9). Many of these topics could be used to describe
the behaviour of other young people online. There are a few differences though,
as the term amplification hints at. Therefore, while “the social networks of home-
less young people can be exploited for opportunity but, even more, for human
well-being” (Woelfer and Hendry 2012: 7), Jill Palzkill Woelfer and David G. Hendry
also show that more work needs to be done on the supply side. They therefore
end with both social and technical recommendations or challenges. One of them
they name “Tenuous connections” and ask “when a person is not connected with
everyday institutions (e.g. home, school, workplace), has a group identification
(sic!) which is stigmatized, yet lives spatially, in the built world, and makes contact
with service agencies, how might the person’s living circumstances be represented
in social network sites?” They also express a need for pseudonymity – partly to
let people live a set of different identities if they choose to.
 Home is where the heart is? 655

Hence, homeless young people – at least in the USA, where most of these
studies were conducted – tend to use digital media, in particular social networking
sites.19 There seems to be a tendency that this increasingly applies to older home-
less as well. On top of the general tendency to use these media, the content
accessed is similar to that accessed by other populations and similar kinds of
communication and networking take place. Certain aspects thereof are obviously
more specific (such as, for example, keeping in touch with family is a different
kind of social action for many homeless as is using the web for finding work).
Hence the above mentioned policy implications are important. The idea of ontolog-
ical security is only implicitly addressed, but nonetheless present, as will be
explored in the next section.

8 Homing
The somewhat implicit connection between ontological security, homelessness,
and media use can be found more explicitly in the possibility to differentiate social
spaces (and related contacts) as outlined below:

The third and final theme that emerged from this research is that Facebook is a safe space for
people experiencing homelessness to share their ideas. Respondent #6 said that because users
must accept a ‘friend request’ in order for someone to view their profile, Facebook provides a
relaxing and safe environment for people to share their ideas. ‘No one can get in unless they’re
invited,’ Respondent #6 said. Therefore, Facebook provides privacy and a space where people
experiencing homelessness are in control of how they are perceived by other people. (Yost
2013: 25)

Mary Yost therefore called this a “Safe Environment”. This again is a good term
for what is needed for ontological security to emerge – and this process is what I
would like to call “homing”: the gradual creation of a safe environment.20 The term
homing is usually used to signify a process of people re-locating their social
actions into the home, making it their main social space. The process is similar to
the better-known cocooning, but includes more social interactions. Here, however,
homing is meant to describe something else: it is the process of creating a home
in the sense of a “safe environment” as a basis for ontological security. This pro-
cess can take place anywhere and does not necessarily need the material house

19 A caveat has to be added here in the sense that these studies often concentrate on social media
sites. The idea of researching the whole media ensemble is unfortunately not widespread.
20 This goes hand in hand with the notion of “mobilism” that I have introduced elsewhere in order
to underline the importance of mobility in domestication processes nowadays, while emphasizing
a more ambivalent development thereof, implying different levels of development taking place
(and contradicting each other) congruently (Hartmann 2013b). Both can be seen to extend and
develop the domestication framework.
656 Maren Hartmann

as a basis. Parts of this process can take place in the media. Social networking is
only one example thereof – homeless magazines, for example, can be a very differ-
ently structured other example.21
The concept of homing is not necessarily only related to homeless people and
their media use – but for these, the notion of a safe environment is possibly more
explicitly on their mind. As could be seen above, this is also the population that
most clearly shows that the implicit link between house and home is definitely
not a clear-cut and/or easy one. On top of that the research thus far underlines
that mediatization processes can be seen here, since media use is going through
a process of normalization in the homeless population, it is becoming taken-for-
granted – although it is far from that for most people who were interviewed or
otherwise part of the research. Especially this attitude of “against all odds”, how-
ever, underlines the everydayness of media use.
If homing in animals refers to them returning to the place they were displaced
from and if it is generally a term that implies orientation and the ability to guide
oneself, to determine the location of something and moving towards it, then hom-
ing as part of media use is definitely an important building block in the establish-
ment of ontological security. Ontological security, as has been outlined above, is
the basis for stability in life, for a sense of identity and belonging. Therefore,
mediatization research should include the question of homing. Overall, it is a more
concrete version of the everyday than discussed in Krotz and Thomas. It continues
the thought that the everyday does indeed fulfil a mediating function as both
structure and agency (or rather: something in between) and as both social and
individual, as Krotz and Thomas suggest. Ontological security and the process of
homing that leads to it have a similar mediating function. Homing as a concept
has the advantage of including both concrete questions (how, where, with whom,
with what media, and through what kind of communicative mode do people create
safe environments?) as well as individually diverse answers.
The phenomenological foundation of the everyday is an interpersonal con-
struction of taken-for-grantedness. As has been outlined above, when the everyday
cannot be taken for granted, as in the case of mental illnesses, everyday life
becomes a threat and ontological security cannot be achieved. Homelessness
(often coupled with mental illness, at least in its discursive construction) is a
similar threat to the taken-for-granted nature of the everyday. It is instead a life
full of diverse risks. To create safe environments is therefore even more crucial for
the homeless than for other populations. And social media as well as other online
communication forms can play an important role in that creation. Domestication

21 One online article about homeless magazines was therefore entitled “Lieber die Zeitung in der
Hand als ganz ohne Dach” – roughly translates as “I’d rather have the magazine in my hand than
no roof at all over my head”. http://jugendundwirtschaft.de/schuelerartikel/archiv/donnerstag-05.-
febuar-2004/lieber-die-zeitung-in-der-hand-als-ganz-ohne-dach (accessed 12/09/2013).
 Home is where the heart is? 657

processes are appropriation processes, attempting to make something fit into the
specificity of one’s needs and everyday life. While media originally threatened this
safe environment, they have become more and more part of the actual construction
thereof (while still posing a threat as well).
For the homeless, this implies more concretely the need for recognition of
issues related to ontological security: “So you need to have a cell phone. Most
people can’t afford it. People go out and pick up cans just so they can have some-
thing to eat, but these other things are necessities too” (Jackie, a 61-year-old home-
less woman, quoted in Roberson and Nardi 2010: 447). Thus far, while there has
been a long debate on the need to provide media access and skills for socially
excluded groups, the homeless are rarely included in these policies. However, if
media use in general and social media use in particular is becoming more and
more “everyday-ish”22 in a mediatized world, playing a crucial role in the question
of building and sustaining ontological security, then this needs to be part of the
agendas concerning the homeless.
All of this poses a challenge to researchers, but also to designers of the tech-
nologies in question. An interesting reply to this challenge can be found in Jennifer
Thom-Santelli’s (2007) proposal to develop a different kind of mobile social soft-
ware, which actually disrupts existing networking and thinking patterns rather
than reinforcing them and thereby narrowing them down. One example mentioned
therein is the idea of letting users add their personal stories and meanings to
places they choose within urban environments (those places could include areas
that do not usually appear on any map). This kind of project has already been
implemented in several cities. In terms of the homeless, this could become a useful
tool for homing processes that go beyond the virtual – letting them add hints for
finding shelter, for food and other resources etc. Or they could simply add their
experiences and rewrite other, more “official” histories of places.
In this area of study then, researchers, policy makers, designers, and obviously
the homeless and those working closely with them all need to work together on
developing both media content that is suitable (in the sense of, for example, the
possibility for a set of social media profiles) as well as media access and use
possibilities that fit the lives of homeless people. The hope is that homes can be
at least partly built online and the increase in ontological security attached to
these may help to increase social inclusion – and maybe the subsequent creation
of new physical houses as well as homes allow another kind of media domestica-
tion within an increasingly mediatized world. Already now the use of social media
by young homeless as summarized above underlines that mediatization is taking
place in many areas of life.

22 There is a German phrase “alltäglich” which implies not only that something takes place more
or less every day, but that it is mundane rather than special.
658 Maren Hartmann

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Andrew Hoskins
29 The mediatization of memory
Abstract: This chapter takes “mediatization” as the process by which everyday life
is increasingly embedded in and penetrated by connectivity: the process of shifting
interconnected individual, social, and cultural dependency on media, for mainte-
nance, survival, and growth.
I take the emergent sociotechnical flux as the principal shaper of 21st-century
remembering through the medial gathering and splintering of individual, social,
and cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portable and pervasive
digital media and communication devices so that a new “living archive” is becom-
ing the organizing and habitual condition of memory. So, memory’s biological,
social, and cultural divisions and distinctions seem increasingly blurred if not
collapsed under the key active dynamic of the emergent media-memorial relation-
ship: hyperconnectivity.
And although counter-trajectories of a mainstream media still persist to chal-
lenge the fragmentary and diffused character of memory in post-scarcity culture,
the openness of mediatized memory offers an alternative memory boom: an unfin-
ished past and a vitalized future.

Keywords: memory, connectivity, hyperconnectivity, two phases of mediatization,

temporality, emergence, living archive, diffused war

1 Forever pre-paradigmatic
Tara Brabazon, in her review of Andreas Hepp’s Cultures of Mediatization, takes
issue with the very term “mediatization”. Her principal objection appears to be its
abstraction and also its awkwardness in English: “It is a Frankenstein’s monster
of a word, with the bolts, blood and stitching of language left visible, dripping
and decaying” (2012). I am not sure I would go as far as Brabazon in terms of the
limited potential traction of mediatization to Anglophone readers (other -izations –
e.g. globalization – have become standardized in public, political, and academic
discourses). But I do find her caution is well-placed in reflecting the difficulty in
navigating the excess of emergent and re-emergent concepts employed to charac-
terize the nature and relationship between (and within) contemporary media and
everything else.
There are a number of challenges here. A central one is in the nature of the
idea of “the media” itself that has become (only in relatively recent history) a
“placeholder” or “linguistic gloss” (Boyer 2007: 8) in everyday discourses so that
its meaning often remains unarticulated. Rather, “we find consensus and certainty
662 Andrew Hoskins

in the existence of the category itself – such categories, are, if you will, the
medium of our culture” (Boyer 2007: 10).
And the term “memory” appears to have a similar trajectory, as Henry L. Roedi-
ger III and James V. Wertsch (2008: 10) argue: “The problem is that the subject is
a singular noun, as though memory is one thing or one type, when in actuality,
the term is almost always most useful when accompanied by a modifier”.
This chapter, in addressing the relationship between media and memory, pro-
poses that they have a shared locus in their categorical instantiation in the every-
day. And yet, at the same time, they both have a somewhat paradoxical genesis
in their related emergent pervasiveness and availability, which has in itself
spawned a new messy lexicon of terms. The glut of media is also a glut of memory;
the past is everywhere.
Rather than getting a conceptual and analytical grip on the medial transforma-
tions of the past decade or so, instead another “linguistic gloss” for all that is new
and digital has become defining of much debate, namely “the Internet”. Of course,
this is a useful placeholder, as Christine Hine argues: given its diffused prolificacy,
the Internet is in a perpetually “preparadigmatic” state insofar as there is no stable
object around which a research paradigm could cohere (Hine 2005; cf. Awan, Hos-
kins and O’Loughlin 2011). Moreover, the Internet can hardly be conceived of as a
single medium and its transformations are more staccato rather than smoothly
evolutionary. Indeed, as David Karpf (2012: 640) argues: “The Internet is unique
among Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) specifically because
the Internet of 2002 has important differences from the Internet of 2005, or 2009,
or 2012. It is a suite of overlapping, interrelated technologies. The medium is simul-
taneously undergoing a social diffusion process and an ongoing series of code-
based modifications”.
This sociotechnical flux is precisely the principal shaper of 21st-century remem-
bering through the medial gathering and splintering of individual, social, and
cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portable and pervasive digi-
tal media and communication devices so that a new living archive is becoming
the organizing and habitual condition of memory. Indeed, memory’s biological,
social, and cultural divisions and distinctions seem increasingly blurred if not
collapsed under the key active dynamic of the emergent media–memorial relation-
ship: hyperconnectivity. And it is via hyperconnectivity that I define mediatization
as: the process of shifting interconnected individual, social, and cultural depend-
ency on media, for maintenance, survival, and growth.
The idea of media pervasiveness and saturation as constituting a new environ-
ment or ecology of individual, social, and cultural dependency has a long tradi-
tion. For instance, “media ecology” is the idea that media technologies can be
seen as organic life-forms, in a complex set of interrelationships within a specific
balanced environment. Technological developments, it is argued, change all these
interrelationships, transforming the existing balance and so potentially impacting
 The mediatization of memory 663

upon the entire “ecology”. Many associate “media ecology” with the early work of
Neil Postman. For Postman, it is “the matter of how media of communication
affect human perception, understanding, feeling and value” (1970: 161). But he
acknowledges the media ecologists – George Orwell, Harold Innis, and Marshall
McLuhan – that came before him, with McLuhan’s work being the constellation of
ideas that form the basis for a theory of media ecology (cf. Hoskins and Merrin
forthcoming).
But it is hyperconnectivity that gives the “new media ecology” (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin 2010; Awan, Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2011) its shape: that which drives
mediatization, and the mediatization of memory. Certainly in the tradition of media
pervasiveness and saturation there is a new body of work that attempts to charac-
terize the contemporary condition in these terms. For example, Todd Gitlin, argues,
“the experience of immediacy is what media immersion is largely for: to swell up
the present, to give us a sense of connection to others through an experience we
share” (2001: 128). Scott Lash makes a distinction between the traditional media
of “representation” and the contemporary media of “presentation”: Once you …
reflected on the medium of representation. But the newer media of presentation
come to you. They turn up in your house and present themselves … in real time,
not in “time out” (2002: 71); Mark Deuze defines a “media life” perspective: “to
recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of con-
temporary life” (2011: 137); Roger Silverstone (2007: 5) observes that, “media …
define a space that is increasingly mutually referential and reinforcive, and
increasingly integrated into the fabric of everyday life”, and Norm Friesen and
Theo Hug (2009: 5) see survival itself as inextricable from media: “Just as water
constitutes an a priori condition for the fish, so do media for humans”.
However, hyperconnectivity transforms memory through media insinuating
itself into the remembering and forgetting process: memory is a kind of circuit that
extends from individual cognition out into the world and back again. Just as the
Internet “is simultaneously undergoing a social diffusion process and an ongoing
series of code-based modifications” (Karpf 2012: 640), so is memory itself. And this
point – of the impact of the mediatization of human memory – is well made out-
side of media theory.
For instance, in a very influential work, the psychologist Merlin Donald sets
out the influences of external memory systems of the power of the brain: “The
external memory field is really a sort of cultural Trojan Horse into the brain …
Temporarily it translates all the advantages of external storage media – perma-
nence, accessibility, refinement – directly to the brain … This magnifies the mind’s
cognitive power and amplifies the impact of representational objects” (2002: 316).
Now to place this in the context of today’s new media ecology that is “new” in its
reflexive intensity, complexity, and scale, “memory” can be said to be “net-
worked”, and as I stated above, part of a living archive in which media and cogni-
tion offer constantly renewed prospects for remembering and forgetting.
664 Andrew Hoskins

And so, in the sciences-of-the-mind a tradition that seems particularly in-

vogue of late is to see cognition – the mental process of awareness, perception,
remembering – as extended, scattered, and distributed outside of the head and
across social and cultural worlds. And it is here that there is scope for a multi-
dimensional theory of the mediatization of memory that illuminates the radical
hyperconnectivity of memory today, namely to say that that which we used to call
“memory” has become strange. In these circumstances, remembering becomes less
a matter of patchy reimaginations and reconstructions drawn from the traces of
declining lives and decaying objects and media, and more a matter of personal
and public hyperconnectivity strung out in multiple and mobile real-times.

2 Memory “on-the-fly”
The media metaphors of memory are as seductive in their apparent longevity as
they are plentiful. They have a history of their own, from Plato’s “wax tablet” (as
though perceptions and thoughts are like imprints in the wax and subject to the
wearing away of time – although he later rejected this same model) and other
versions of memory as writing, through photography, “flashbulb”, and the physi-
cality and fixity of film and magnetic tape, to the mobility and instantaneity of
“flash memory”. The metaphorical tension at least appears through the frequent
treatment of memory as either indelible and immovable or as something that is
not available to the human or machinic processes of capture, storage, and
retrieval. Douwe Draaisma (2000: 230) for example, states: “One metaphor turns
our recollections into fluttering birds which we can only catch at the risk of grab-
bing the wrong one, the next one reduces memories to static and latent traces”. Is
it then that this disjuncture has become more pronounced and our understanding
of memory has become more obscured with the rapid advance of digital media
and technologies and their associated memory discourses and practices? For, as
Draaisma (2000: 230) continues: “With each new metaphor we place a different
filter in front of our perception of memory’”. In taking “network” as a metaphor
for the highly mediated and mediatized memory of today, however, I do not seek
merely another “filter” to our perception of memory, rather, it is crucial to make
visible the paradigmatic shift needed (and underway in places) in the study of
media and communications. For instance, Mizuko Ito (2008: 2–3) takes the notion
of “networked publics” to refer to a “linked set of social, cultural, and technologi-
cal developments” and thus replacing the passive and the consumptive connota-
tions of “audience” and “consumer”. In other words, as the individual as con-
sumer of media is complemented if not challenged by the individual as producer
and user (thus, “pro-sumer”, see William Merrin 2014) then the relationship
between media and memory is similarly transformed. Contemporary memory is
not principally constituted either through retrieval or through the representation
 The mediatization of memory 665

of some content of the past in the present, but, rather, it is mediatized via socio-
technical practices (cf. Bowker 2005; Van House and Churchill 2008; Grusin 2010).
Networked communications in themselves dynamically add, alter, and erase, a
living archival memory. For example, the minute-by-minute use of hyperconnected
sites and services such as Facebook and Twitter allow users to continually display
and to shape biographical information, post commentaries on their unfolding lives
and to interact publicly or semi-publicly with one another through messaging ser-
vices including in real-time or near real-time. Other “dynamic” platforms include
file sharing systems, such as Flickr and YouTube, which mesh the private and the
public into an immediate and intensely visual and auditory present past. Through
these services, mediatized memory has become something created when needed
“on-the-fly”.
The actual and potential transformative power of media and their associated
technologies to render memory (in all its apparently isolated or collective and
cultural configurations) static and enduring has been both acclaimed and
bemoaned. The neurobiologist, Steven Rose, for example, contrasts the memory-
keeping of early human societies with the memorial processes of today. In the oral
cultures of the former, memories needed to be constantly trained and renewed,
with select individuals afforded the considerable responsibility of “retelling” the
stories which preserved the common culture. Rose (1993: 60) argues that: “People’s
memories, internal records of their own experiences, must have been their most
treasured – but also fragile – possessions”. But also, the moment of each storytel-
ling was unrepeatable: “Then, each time a tale was told it was unique, the product
of a particular interaction of the teller, his or her memories of past stories told, and
the present audience” (Rose 1993: 61). In contrast, Rose argues, new technologies
challenge both the uniqueness and dynamics of human memory: “A videotape or
audiotape, a written record, do more than just reinforce memory; they freeze it,
and in imposing a fixed, linear sequence upon it, they simultaneously preserve it
and prevent it from evolving and transforming itself with time” (Rose 1993: 61).
By extension, the same technologies and media shape (and shape our under-
standing of) the nature, function, and potential of the “archive”. Here, the idea of
the archive as a “repository” or “store” is influential in contemporary media-mem-
ory discourses. Diana Taylor, for example, outlines the presumed fixity of the
archive: “‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters,
archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly
resistant to change” (Taylor 2003: 19). So, the very forms of many traditional media
evoke a permanency in their storage potential as “available” to future times.
One response to the acclaimed “fixing” potential of media is that this idea is
too easily embroiled in the association of the apparent permanence of a given
medium with that of the durability of the memory. Uric Neisser, for instance cau-
tions over the metaphorical comparing of memory with a “permanent medium of
storage”. He argues: “Such a comparison seems harmless enough, but once the
666 Andrew Hoskins

metaphor is in play we tend to endow memory itself with properties that only the
medium really has: permanence, detail, incorruptibility” (Neisser 2008: 81).
And, more specifically, as archival, media also present a totalizing function in
their blanketing of the prospects for and of the past, in the present and future. Jan
Assmann hints at (or even reinforces) this problem in defining two modes of “cul-
tural memory” so that memory operates: “first in the mode of potentiality of the
archive whose accumulated texts, images, and rules of conduct act as a total hori-
zon, and second in the mode of actuality, whereby each contemporary context
puts the objectivized meaning into its own perspective, giving it its own relevance”
(Assmann 1995: 130). A similar binary is more concretely evident in Rose’s (1993)
distinction between the fallible and dynamic “organic” or “human” memory and
the “artificial” memory of media.
The distinctions between the totalizing and the contextual, the permanent and
the ephemeral, the archive and narrative, are less effectual in the embedding of
memory in networks that blur these characteristics. The digital media of most
interest here are principally the Internet and the array of technological advances
that have transformed the temporality, spatiality, and indeed the mobility of mem-
ories to an extent that even the dynamics of the emergent field of memory studies
seem unable to keep pace with what I propose here is part of a mediatization of
memory that mediatizes time itself.
The very condition of remembering is not only increasingly networked but also
actively and re-actively constructed on-the-fly, notably memory is characterized by
its mediatized emergence through a range of everyday digital media.
The metaphor “on-the-fly” is also found in the field of computing. To provide
one example from the area of programming computer audio and electro-acoustic
music, being developed at Princeton: “On-the-fly programming (or live coding) is
a style of programming in which the programmer/performer/composer augments
and modifies the program while it is running, without stopping or restarting, in
order to assert expressive, programmable control for performance, composition,
and experimentation at run-time” (Wang and Cook 2004: 1). On-the-fly memory is
not just a constructive version of memory that builds on and indeed requires previ-
ous moments out of which it emerges, accumulates and which also acquires new
characteristics with and in each passing moment. For instance, one of the pioneers
of the psychology of memory, Frederic Bartlett writing over three-quarters of a
century ago used the metaphor of the playing of a skilled game to illustrate the
“constructive character of remembering”:

We may fancy that we are repeating a series of movements learned a long time before from a
text-book or from a teacher. But motion study shows that in fact we build up the stroke afresh
on a basis of the immediately preceding balance of postures and the momentary needs of the
game. Every time we make it, it has its own characteristics (Bartlett 1932: 204).

The treating of memory (and forgetting) as forged through a momentum of chang-

ing times, of both the relationship between the now and the most recently con-
 The mediatization of memory 667

nected moment, is an important starting point in the seeking of a more temporally-

adequate account of human memory. However, memory on-the-fly is more than a
cumulative trajectory of past moments which feeds into shape each present anew.
For instance, personal biography intersects with history in an implicit way, locat-
ing the unfolding details of everyday life in terms of the events of the larger soci-
ety – history in the making. The unfolding details of daily life have a “once
through” quality, in which the mundane and momentous actions and events of
people’s lives carry them forward even as the continuous present seems to slide
relentlessly into the past. Each moment is lived and experienced as what Harold
Garfinkel (1992: 186) calls “another next first time”, namely a recognizable and
sequentially located new moment, a patterned new moment that can be under-
stood because of its similarity to previous moments and because of its place in the
joint unfolding of biography and history (Boden and Hoskins 1995).
One can begin to realize just how instructive Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology is
in accounting for the relationship between media and memory in terms of the shift
in focus from media content to that of sociotechnical practices. This is part of a
wider shift underway between “two phases of mediatization” which I develop
below. The first phase of mediatization involves the forms, practices, and experien-
ces associated with the dominant media and institutions of the broadcast era,
and particularly television. The second phase does interconnect and overlap with
elements of the first, but it is distinctive in that it requires a shift in how we
approach and formulate the very relationship we have with media. Notably, this
is owing to its much more immediate and extensive interpenetration with the
everyday on an individual, social, and continual basis (Hoskins and O’Loughlin
2010).
Indeed, Garfinkel’s “another next first time” is similar to the title of Lisa Gitel-
man’s excellent book on how media function simultaneously as subjects and
instruments of inquiry: Always Already New (2006). How then to best characterize
and interrogate memory that is continually affected (and expressed through) digi-
tal media in that there is an ongoing negotiation of the self and culture through
and interplay with the emergent technologies of the day to shape a past that is
“always already new”?
The tension with all investigations into the nature and influences on memory
of the traces of the past versus the contingencies of the present is even more
profound with the onset of digital media. This is because of the ways in which
digital networks simultaneously enable a massively increased availability of all-
things-past (which Anderson [2006] calls “the long tail”) and the heightened con-
nectivity of, and in, the present. Furthermore, the construction of memory in every-
day life is “imbricated” not only in digital recording technologies and media but
also in the standards and classifications resulting from their growth that inevitably
and often invisibly regulate our sociotechnical practices (see Bowker and Star
2000: 2). To go further, technological advances have provoked a re-evaluation of
the relationship between media and consciousness.
668 Andrew Hoskins

There is a history to these developments. Grusin (2010) for example, observes

that: “even media and cultural theorists have begun to argue that humans have
historically co-evolved with technology, distributing their cognitive and other func-
tions across an increasingly complex network of technical artifacts”. And, one of
the driving features of the transformation of these relationships is a “technological
unconscious” (Clough 2000; Taylor 2002; Thrift 2004; Hayles 2006; Grusin 2007).
Hayles (drawing on Thrift) defines this as “the everyday habits initiated, regulated,
and disciplined by multiple strata of technological devices and inventions” (2006:
138). Once, the relationship between the broadcast media and “mass audiences”
of the first phase of mediatization was theorized in terms of linear models of com-
munication (and “influence” and the legacy of “effects” research unfortunately
still clings to the teaching of and scholarship in the discipline of Media and Com-
munication Studies in places). (And, a corollary in memory studies is a long legacy
of the term “collective”, although this issue is beyond the parameters of this
essay). Today, however, digital technologies and media penetrate and “mesh” with
our everyday.
So, contemporary memory is thoroughly interpenetrated by a technological
unconscious in that there occurs a “co-evolution” or rather a revolution of memory
and technology. Memory is readily and dynamically configured through our digital
practices and the connectivity of digital networks. There is a kind of ambient qual-
ity to this shaping of memory in the present through the “very basic sendings and
receivings of sociotechnical life – and the modest but constant hum of connection
and interconnection that they make possible” (Thrift 2004: 175). The increasingly
digital networking of memory not only functions in a continuous present but is
also a distinctive shaper of a new mediatized age of memory. Hayles (2006: 138),
for instance, argues “the unconscious has a historical dimension, changing in
relation to the artefactual environment with which it interacts”, and Bowker (2005:
26) suggests that: “Each new medium imprints its own special flavor to the memo-
ries of that epoch”. And here the two phases of mediatization are useful in illumi-
nating this relationship.

3 Two phases of mediatization

The current (second) phase of mediatization is defined by the staccato transforma-
tions of the Internet, but is preceded by a phase which ironically has defined much
of the work of Media Studies, struggling to make sense of the second (Merrin
2008). The first phase is characterized by the traditional organization of “Big
Media” (Gillmor 2006) and elite institutions which were seen by some commenta-
tors on cultural memory, for example, as proliferating overbearing and hierarchi-
cally-organized archives. For instance, Nora (1989: 14) argues that such archival
accumulations produced a “terrorism of historicized memory”.
 The mediatization of memory 669

Tab. 1: The two phases of the mediatization of warfare (reproduced from Hoskins and O’Loughlin
2010: 19)

Phase of Characteristics Central questions in this phase

mediati-
zation

First Discrete, large organizations, mass How do media make war visible? How do
media, mass audiences, international media deliver war to audiences? How do
news coverage dominated by a small media shape public opinion, and how
number of Western media organiza- does public opinion shape how war is
tions and driven by satellite television. conducted?
Mass warfare enabled by mostly distan-
ciated and temporally-limited military
strikes. Actions and effects largely
predictable and measurable.

Second Intense international competition for
provision of news beyond and onto the
West. Continuous connectivity creates
diffuse audiences and messages and
media itself is weaponized. Temporal
horizons and geopolitics of warfare
transformed. Overlapping systems
characterized by emergence, chaos
and flux. Unknowable risk. Actors
must learn to manage unexpected
feedback and live with ambiguity.
Now that actors in war anticipate and
shape media coverage of their actions,
how do they design war for media, and
how is media designed for war? Now that
audiences know these symbolic/represen-
tational games are being played, how do
they find credible and authoritative infor-
mation and analysis about war? How do
the new “affective networks” connecting
media forms, technologies and practices
promote and/or contain warfare?

In War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (2010) Ben O’Loughlin and
I develop our theory of the mediatization of warfare over two phases, summarized
in Table 1, reproduced above.
One of the defining features of the second phase of mediatization for both
warfare and for memory is that the living archive delivers a “long tail” (Anderson
2006) of the past (images, video, etc.) whose “emergence” into future presents is
contingent in terms of the when, but also in terms of its access by whom. “Emer-
gence” is the massively increased potential for media data to literally “emerge”:
to be “discovered” and/or disseminated at an unprescribed and unpredictable time
after the moment of recording, and so to transcend and transform that which is
known, or thought to be known, about an event.
In terms of warfare this creates significant new uncertainties for all actors
involved in the conduct of warfare. In War and Media, we identify the emergence
of “diffused war”: a new paradigm of war in which (i) the mediatization of war
(ii) makes possible more diffuse causal relations between action and effect, (iii)
creating greater uncertainty for policymakers in the conduct of war (Hoskins and
O’Loughlin 2010: 3). As with the mediatization of memory, we take “connectivity”
670 Andrew Hoskins

as the key dynamic in being the key modulator of insecurity and security today,
amplifying awareness of distant conflicts or close-to-home threats, yet containing
these insecurities in comforting news packages. Media, we argue, is weaponized –
made a tool of warfare – through this connectivity. And it is this connectivity
which ushers in a world of “effects without causes” in which risk and danger seem
impossible to calculate and thus makes order and security less easy to achieve
(Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010: 2).
But the second phase of the mediatization also shapes the memory of warfare
in apparently contradictory ways. In “post-scarcity culture” (Hoskins 2011, 2014,
forthcoming) the flux of the digital ushers in a frenzy of seeing and imagining past
and present; what was once scarce and relatively inaccessible from the past in the
past is suddenly and inexorably visible, searchable, and mineable. For some, this
has fuelled the contemporary memory boom(s) (Huyssen 2003; Winter 2006) or
“turn to memory” with increasing power afforded to the prism of the traumas and
triumphs of particularly modern conflicts and catastrophes, through which those
unfolding are seen (or not seen), interpreted, managed, assimilated into mediat-
ized collective consciousness. Indeed, the very legitimacy of contemporary warfare
is both increasingly reinforced and contested through a mainstream ravaging of
the archive with “media templates” (Kitzinger 2000; Hoskins 2004a; cf. “schema”
(Brown and Hoskins 2010)) instantly and powerfully imposed from post-scarcity’s
database. In so doing 20th-century wars are held in a perpetual effervescent mem-
ory. For example, Clément Chéroux considers how media coverage of 9/11 was
defined by an “essential topos” of the World War II Japanese attack on Pearl Har-
bor in 1941 both through image comparisons and through iconographic rhetoric
(2012: 263). So, rather than the second phase of mediatization determining only an
almighty diffusion and fragmentation of the memory of warfare, it also entrenches
trajectories of past images, icons, interpretations.
But the mediatization of warfare and the weaponization of media converge
around new visioning technologies and what some refer to as “cyberwarfare”. As
the contemporary battlefield is mediatized through the increasing use of drones
and computer viruses, the journalistic capacity to represent modern warfare is
compromised. For instance, as the award-winning landscape (battlefield) photog-
rapher Simon Norfolk (2012) asks:

How do you photograph a drone flying over Yemen at 40,000 feet and firing a missile into a
car in the middle of nowhere? You can’t photograph it. How do you photograph satellite
warfare or submarine systems, or cyberwarfare? That’s how the war of the future is being
fought, that is where the money is being spent … I don’t know how to photograph any of that
stuff.

Meanwhile, the mainstream representational void is filled with the deepening tra-
jectories of icons of 20th-century war. For example, as Michael Shaw (2011) has
shown, the 20th century is alive and well in photojournalistic work from 21st-cen-
tury Afghanistan, with the image of wounded US marines in the rear of a military
 The mediatization of memory 671

“medevac” helicopter being airlifted out of the warzone to safety, re-envisioning

images made iconic in David C. Turnley’s World Press Photo of the Year in 1991,
and notably a “re-shoot” of the Larry Burrows’ Vietnam photograph which made
the cover of Life magazine in April 1965 (Norfolk 2012; Hoskins 2014).
These examples then suggest that mediatization narrows as well as widens the
aperture of war memory, consolidating some mainstream media trajectories and
keeping the memory boom – premised upon 20th-century wars – alive amidst post-
scarcity culture. I now turn to explore the impact of mediatization and connectivity
on the engine of post-scarcity culture – the living archive.

4 Time of the archive?

As I have suggested, the second phase of mediatization ushers in a range of para-
doxical uncertainties and certainties of memory. At one level at least, the relatively
stable institutional and archival basis for remembering is made contingent on
emergence. For example, David Weinberger (2007) calls this the “third order” of
information, involving the removal of the limitations previously assumed inevita-
ble in the ways information is organized. (The “first order” is the actual physical
placing or storage of an item and the “second order” is that which separates infor-
mation about the first order objects from the objects themselves such as the card
catalogue.).
Weinberger (2007: 22) argues that “the miscellanizing” of information not only
breaks it out of its traditional organizational categories but also removes the
implicit authority granted by being published in the paper world. Thus, under
these conditions, the archive appears to have new potential, liberated from its
former inherently spatial and to some extent institutional constraints. Indeed, the
traditional materiality associated with the artefactual archive has been challenged
with the fluidity, reproducibility, and transferability of digital data. In this way
archives as they have become increasingly networked have become a key stratum
of our technological unconscious, transcending the social and the technological.
For instance, as Van House and Churchill (2008: 306) observe: “Archives sit at the
boundary between public and private. Current archives extend well beyond a per-
son, a space, an institution, a nation state. They are socio-technical systems, nei-
ther entirely social nor technical”.
A key trend in this regard is the ways in which archives have become net-
worked – part of a new accessible and hyperconnected memory. Thus, the archive
can even be seen as a medium in its own right as it has been liberated “from
archival space into archival time” (Ernst 2004: 52). That is to say, the idea of the
static archive as a permanent place of storage, is being replaced by the much more
fluid temporalities and dynamics of “permanent data transfer” (Ernst 2004: 52)
Whereas, the archives of the first phase of mediatization were stored in the archi-
672 Andrew Hoskins

val space of the vault or library subject to the material conditions of order, classifi-
cation, and retrieval (i.e. access), it is hyperconnectivity that becomes of primary
significance to the living archive in the second phase.
Elsewhere, I have written on the “collapse of memory” (Hoskins 2004b), which
was a condition brought on by the “emerging new structures of temporality gener-
ated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by the accelera-
tion of media images and information on the other” (Huyssen, 1995: 253). The mass
media effaced the past through the imposition of (visual and aural) immediacy in
their mediation of events and particularly through the real-time lens of television
news. This describes one consequence of the first phase of mediatization, in which
the broadcast media ushered in a perpetual and pervasive present, but one that
included the recycling of past images, sounds, and events, through a prism of the
instantaneity of real-time or at least the televisual stylistics and discourse of
pseudo real-time reporting. Although television has been characterized as possess-
ing an embedded “liveness” as a property of the medium itself (i.e. television is
always “on”), the second phase of mediatization sees the emergence of the Inter-
net as a temporally dynamic networked archival infrastructure which makes it a
qualitatively different mechanism of memory. Ernst (2004: 52) for example, argues:
“Within the digital regime, all data become subject to realtime processing. Under
data processing conditions in realtime, the past itself becomes a delusion; the
residual time delay of archival information shrinks to null”. Although Ernst sees
the memory cultures of the material archive-centre European cultural memory co-
existing with the emergence of a “transfer-based” trans-Atlantic media (Ernst
2004: 52) the inevitable advance of the latter both over and into the former produ-
ces a fissuring of cultural-media memory. I now develop a key transformation of
the second phase to consider if time itself has been mediatized.
One of the key emergent binaries in the theorization of cultural memory, that
I wish to argue is only partially useful as an explanatory model of the new dynam-
ics of mediatized memory, is that of active versus passive remembering (and forget-
ting). Aleida Assmann (2008: 98) proposes two modes of cultural memory in that:
“The institutions of active memory preserve the past as present while the institu-
tions of passive memory preserve the past as past” (original italics). Assmann uses
the different spaces of the museum to illustrate this position; the former actively
circulated memory is represented by that which is on show and visible to public
visitors she terms the “canon”, whereas the latter “passively stored memory” com-
prises those objects stored and currently not on display Assmann calls the
“archive” (Assmann 2008). This model, however, is most applicable to a highly
material form of cultural memory, and does not adequately account for the dynam-
ics of digital data (including database technologies and the Web) in challenging
public spatial display (and material existence) as a signifier of canonicity.
The fissuring of cultural-media memory then is intensifying as the modus oper-
andi of history of the second phase of mediatization is increasingly digital. The
 The mediatization of memory 673

productions of memory and the data used to forge history are made in an ongoing
present. And it is the World Wide Web that has ushered in a temporality in its
production of events that mediatizes memory in new ways.
Despite its archival promise, the Web does not merely produce an interweav-
ing of past and present, but a new networked “coevalness”, of connectivity and
data transfer. For example, Gitelman (2006: 147), envisages the Web involving: “a
public variously engaged in reading, selecting, excerpting, linking, citing, pasting,
writing, designing, revising, updating, and deleting, all within a context where
the datedness of these heterogeneous interpretive acts remains inconsistently per-
ceived or certain” (original italics). The temporality of the Web is emergent and
continuous as opposed to the temporality of other media, which render our experi-
ences of events as “punctual” (cf. Michael Warner 2002). Compare with, for exam-
ple, the circulations of publications and broadcast media – and even “24-hour”
news which, paradoxically, is highly punctuated around the cycle of clock-time
and which is often incorporated into its semiotic display.
This is not just an issue of web pages, for example, being vulnerable to contin-
ual updating and permanent disconnection from the network and/or deletion, and
thus not available for discovery and restoration to their original state, or any one
of their former states. But digital and digitized data as with the content of any
emergent media is ultimately vulnerable to obsolescence, beyond recovery without
the availability of the technological tools compatible with its creation.
The changes in temporality associated with the Internet are illuminated
through attempts to capture and preserve it. The Wayback Machine (www.
archive.org) attempts to perform such an operation in attempting to provide an
archive of the Internet on the Internet. On its home (search) page it announces
“Welcome to the Archive” and it is labelled as a “non-profit” venture that is “build-
ing a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form”.
However, the Wayback Machine fails to deliver the punctual logic of the archives
of other media even though it presents pages according to the date of their capture.
So, whereas the media of television, film, and print are rendered relatively punc-
tual in their datedness of production, publication, and circulation, and which is
embodied in the cultures of their reproduction and archiving (including remedi-
ated on the Internet) there is not a universal and reliable temporally-located
“shared sense of Web publication as an event” (Gitelman 2006: 137). Indeed, this
is made apparent with the seeming presentness of the past that the Wayback
Machine seeks to capture and to recover, in that: “there is something oddly and
unidentifiably present about the past to which the Wayback Machine promises to
transport its users” (Gitelman 2006: 137).
However, in addition to the difficulties inherent in capturing, storing, and
reproducing the instantaneity of the real-time effects of Web pages, Gitelman
points to the “cultural logic of timelessness” associated with online publication
projects such as the William Blake Archive which is: “helping to make a new
674 Andrew Hoskins

medium authoritative in a sense by co-opting cultural authority, by entwining the

new means and existing subjects of public memory” (Gitelman 2006: 141). Indeed
the Blake Archive is promoted as “a hybrid all-in-one edition, catalogue, database,
and set of scholarly tools capable of taking full advantage of the opportunities
offered by new information technology” (The William Blake Archive). So, when
such projects aim to incorporate, for example: “as much of Blake’s pictorial and
literary canon as possible” (The William Blake Archive), what are the prospects
for a greater transference between or even a blurring of Aleida Assmann’s modes
of “active” (canon) and “passive” (archive) memory? It is the case that the develop-
ment of the Internet represents a huge accumulation of archival memory, in Ass-
mann’s terms, in that its storage capacity “has by far exceeded that which can be
translated back into active human memory” (Assmann 2008: 104). Yet, at the very
least the temporality of the Web and other communications technologies and the
fluidity of digital content, are transforming the archival properties and cultures in
which individual, social, and cultural memories are invested. Thus, the idea of
active memory equating to the preservation of the “past as present” and passive
memory as the preservation of the “past as past”, fails to address the function of
the continuous networked present of the Web and other digital media through
which memory and technology co-evolve, including the co-existing of previously
more distinct modes of cultural memory, for instance: the “private” and the “pub-
lic”.
More broadly, the significance of the archive in shaping the potential for
“memory work” is evident in the field of contemporary journalism that for Barbie
Zelizer (2008: 84), “tends to produce mnemonic work through those news organi-
zations with the most extensive archives”. The digital is at the very least an accel-
erant of this process and one can extend this argument to archives in general and
point to the blurring of amateur and professional journalism and the rise of the
so-called “citizen journalist” (see Gillmor 2006).

5 Memory as unfinished
The future of both active and passive memory, to the extent that one finds these
categories usable, is also being determined with the massive shift to personal
expression ushered in by the Internet and via other means of digital recording and
communication. The nature and potential for the representation and historiciza-
tion of people’s lives has been transformed. For example, much of the information
that biographers have conventionally accessed, and displayed and/or stored in
archives and museums was in the form of hard copy, whereas today the traces of
people’s lives are increasingly found in their digital communications. There are a
number of potential consequences of our emergent and everyday sociotechnical
practices on the voracity, preservation, and circulation of such data and thus on
 The mediatization of memory 675

remembering and forgetting. Not only does the unprecedented accessibility of this
digital data make it more vulnerable to manipulation, but the converse is also the
case in the diminished potential for its rediscovery in future times in comparison
with the materiality of its hard-copy predecessors. So, emails, text-messages, and
social networking sites, for example, holding the content of a great mass of private
and semi-public communications, may seem readily-accessible today, but what are
the prospects for the survival of such data in a form and to an extent that is usable
in memory? Paul Arthur (2009: 54–5) for example, argues:

the correspondence between people is increasingly distributed, impermanent and complexly

interlinked. One person’s social networking web page on a networking service is likely to be
characterised by short, code-laden communications from ‘friends’, and the idea of ‘corre-
spondence’ – with the to and fro of information between people – has been lost and replaced
by an unpredictable kind of multiple commentary … The future historian may be confronted
with an apparent void of information on lives that were in fact richly documented, but only
through fleeting digital entries on security encrypted online services.

The instantaneity and simultaneity of some forms of digital communication and

the systemic deletion of many (i.e. email programs set to permanently delete mail
messages after a fixed period) contribute to the diminishment in the number of
unintentional textual traces we leave behind, notably those which were once much
more material, storable (although open to different types of degradation), recovera-
ble, and open to future interpretations and reinterpretations. The temporality, flu-
idity, and availability of digital data more generally – from text messages to emails,
photographs, and video, through to web pages – has facilitated a much more
revocable (and some would argue chaotic) basis for the building of future memory.
For instance, the temporality of images themselves are changing and as
research by Van House has shown, photos are actually becoming less archival:
“while people do still make archival images, many are treated as ephemeral and
transitory, including being used for image-based communication, in effect visual
or multimodal messaging” (Van House and Churchill 2008: 298). Thus the images
made of and in everyday life that will shape tomorrow’s personal and public mem-
ory, are vulnerable to the shifts in today’s sociotechnical practices enabled through
the highly fluid, transferable, and erasable memory-matter of digital data.
It may be that the very prospects for the deletion and disconnection of the
mediatization of memory will actually afford the material objects (and metaphors)
of memory, of photographs, magnetic tape, letters, monuments, etc. greater signifi-
cance. Can then the immateriality of this memory and an investment in and preser-
vation of a materially-authentic past co-exist? Will the “tagging” of images in Flickr
ultimately shape what will become the equivalent of “canon” and “archive” for
those we share our photographs with?
To conclude, it is necessary to take a more radical view of mediatization and
its consequences to illuminate how the very condition of “memory” has trans-
formed and to its emergent possibilities. For example, as Shelia Brown (2003: 22)
676 Andrew Hoskins

argues: “Above all, mediatization in the contemporary sense refers to a universe

in which the meaning of ontological divisions is collapsing: divisions between fact
and fiction, nature and culture, global and local, science and art, technology and
humanity” (original emphasis, cited in Hjarvard 2008: 111). So, whereas the value
of memory was seen through its relationship to a stability, continuity, and rever-
ence of the past, the value of the mediatization of memory is in its potential for
transformation. This is not to deny the paradoxical persistence of the mainstream
icons of the memory boom, that churn 20th-century – and more recent conflicts
and catastrophes – seemingly ever closer to the present through templates and
obsessive commemoration. But hyperconnectivity offers a different kind of mem-
ory, a future-oriented memory boom with new opportunities and uncertainties. So,
as Peter Lunenfeld (2011: 36) suggests: “One metric for the success of a technology,
especially a digital one, is to look at how open it is to unanticipated uses. How
unfinished is it?” Hence, the openness of mediatized memory as it turns on and
in the present, offers an alternative memory boom: an unfinished past and a vital-
ized future.

Acknowledgement
This chapter is developed from Hoskins 2009. Elements reproduced here with kind
permission.

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Johanna Sumiala
30 Mediatization of public death
Abstract: Death is a prism that casts light in many ways on the theme of mediatiza-
tion in the contemporary society of high media-saturation. In this chapter, the
mediatization of death is first discussed by examining the idea and history of
public death in and via the media. This is followed by a detailed examination of
the different dynamics of mediatization (e.g. how it is carried out in different con-
texts and in different cases). The article draws on Winfried Schulz’s (2004) typol-
ogy of the four dimensions of mediatization – the media as extending, substi-
tuting, amalgamating, and accommodating communication on public death
according to their own logic. Special emphasis is placed on the issue of violent,
tragic, and unexpected death of a high symbolic value. Empirical examples are
used to illustrate theoretical reflection, with cases including the death of John F.
Kennedy, the Utøya killings, and the Colorado cinema massacre. The chapter
argues that mediatization can make a significant difference to the outcome and
change the perception of public death in society as it shapes the social and cultural
categories and hierarchies associated with life and death.

Keywords: public death, Schulz, media logic, ritual, Hanusch, Krotz, Kennedy,
cinema massacre, Utøya, media

1 Introduction
Death is a prism that casts light in many ways on the theme of mediatization in
our contemporary society of high media-saturation. Today, many of the themes
surrounding death are mediatized into various media-related practices, recurring
events, and spectacles. We find the performance of public death in a variety of
different media genres, ranging from news to popular media such as fiction. In
the media we watch people die all the time, participate in their funerals, and
empathize with the loss of human life, be it real or fictional death. Using social
media we may participate in new practices of collective mourning, such as making
and posting YouTube videos to pay tribute to the deceased.
A debate on mediatization suggests a more detailed examination of the inter-
play between media and death (e.g. Hepp 2013; Hjarvard 2008; Lundby 2009a;
Muschert and Sumiala 2012). In this chapter, the concept of mediatization refers
to the idea that the media in its different forms has shaped death as a cultural
and social condition. Friedrich Krotz defines mediatization as follows:

Mediatization thus should be defined as a historical, ongoing, long-term process in which

more and more media emerge and are institutionalized. Mediatization describes the process
682 Johanna Sumiala

whereby communication refers to media and uses media so that media in the long run increas-
ingly become relevant for the social construction of everyday life, society and culture as a
whole. (Krotz 2009: 24, [emphasis original])

According to Krotz (2009: 27), mediatization is a process with several preconditions

and which requires other metaprocesses, such as globalization, individualization,
urbanization, and commercialization (see also Giddens 1990; Beck 1997). There-
fore, it is a historical concept, relevant specifically for the analysis of contemporary
media-related social and cultural practices. In today’s world, mediatization means
that our social and cultural life has become heavily influenced and shaped by the
media on private, social, and public levels. The media impacts our everyday life,
shapes our work and leisure, affects how we form and maintain our social rela-
tions, how we establish groups and construct individual and social identities, and
how our organizations and institutions function in private and on the public level
in politics and economics (see also Krotz 2009: 24).
In this article, mediatization refers to the idea that we experience public death
to a greater extent through and in the media. The logic of mediatized communica-
tion – media logic – also has the power to influence us as individuals communicat-
ing about public death as victims, witnesses, or bystanders (cf. Frosh and Pinchev-
ski 2009; Lundby 2009b). In the process of mediatization the role of the media (as
a context, content, and technology) is manifold. The media transforms a tragic
news event into a public death through adopting a certain logic and mode of
reporting (cf. Liebes 1998; Liebes and Blondheim 2005). The mediatized death
demands personal, dramatic, and shocking stories, while new angles, images, and
people are required to keep what we may call the death-reporting mode alive.
Additionally, the technology matters as a context and a means of communication.
In recent years, the Internet has become a significant platform and a social actor
in the mediatization of public death. In addition, mediatization shapes social and
cultural practices activated in public death, such as rituals of mourning (see e.g.
Pantti and Sumiala 2009). Consequently, mediatization has the power to force
official institutions and non-governmental organizations to adjust to and accom-
modate the media logic as they try to manage public death (see e.g. Cottle 2009;
Sumiala and Hakala 2010). In this sense, mediatization can make a significant
difference to the outcome and change the perception of public death in society. In
the words of Hanusch (2010: 3), mediatization affects what we consider normal
and exceptional death, or whose death we find important and thus worth public
mourning. To simplify, when discussing the mediatization of death we have to
take into account at least the following aspects:
1. The type of news event that thrusts the mediatization process forward (acci-
dent, natural catastrophe, violent attack causing public death)
2. The source that begins to mediatize the message of loss of human life (institu-
tional media organization, officials, social media, people)
 Mediatization of public death 683

3. The type of audience affected by the mediatized death (local, national, global,
glocal)

In this chapter, I will examine the mediatization of death by first discussing the
idea and history of public death in and via the media. Elsewhere in this volume
Knut Lundby underlines that mediatization is primarily about transformation.
Thus, in studying the interplay between media and public death it is necessary to
look into the historical processes of this interaction and the related intensification
of the visual display of public death. This is followed by a detailed examination
of the different dynamics of mediatization (e.g. how it is carried out in different
contexts and in different cases). The article draws on Winfried Schulz’s (2004: 87–
101) typology of the four dimensions of mediatization – the media as extending,
substituting, amalgamating, and accommodating communication on public death
according to their own logic. Special emphasis is placed on the issue of violent,
tragic, and unexpected death of a high symbolic value. The focus is on public
death in the news and the related ritualization in and via the media. Different
empirical examples of the mediatization of death, from the assassination of John
F. Kennedy in 1963 to the Utøya killings in Norway in 2011 and the cinema massa-
cre in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, are used to illustrate Schulz’s theoretical reflec-
tion. The assassination of Kennedy stands out as a paradigmatic historical example
of a mediatized public death. The other two cases represent recent high-profile
public deaths of intense international public interest. Media representations ana-
lyzed in this chapter are collected by applying a media ethnographic approach to
a range of different online media sites (on media ethnography see e.g. Peterson
2005). This work on media representations consists of ongoing fieldwork, includ-
ing sites such as YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Helsingin Sanomat, Aftenposten, the
Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times and CNN.1

2 A short prehistory of public death

Death as the end of biological life represents one of the crucial constituents in
every society. As many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of death point
out, communities and societies have over thousands of years developed various,
and often highly elaborate, ritual practices to manage and deal with the loss of
human life (see e.g. Kellehear 2007; Robben 2006). In the course of history the
human experience of death has changed in many ways. Historian Philippe Ariès
(1974) argues that there are four overlapping periods identifiable in the social and

1 The empirical material collected is part of the larger research project Mediatized Death. Expanded
Field of Death Rituals in the Contemporary Society (2012–2015), carried out by the author at the
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
684 Johanna Sumiala

cultural history of death: the eras of “tame death”, “death of the self”, “death of
the other”, and “invisible death”.
The era that characterizes the first millennium, “tame death”, describes the
condition of a natural acceptance of death as the end of life. In this period, death
was considered too common to be frightened about, and people felt an explicit
connection between the afterlife or otherworld and the earthly life. During the era
of “death of the self”, said by Ariès to last until the 18th century, people started to
play a more reflexive and active role in their perception of death. In this era, death
no longer meant merely the weakening of life, but rather the destruction of self.
Hence, the role of the church and institutional religion was crucial in controlling
the authority over death during this period. Later, after the development of natural
science and the related secularization, the authority over death was transferred to
medicine and medical doctors. In this era, death became a social problem that
demanded scientific and professional control.
By the 19th century, death came to be viewed as a staging post for reunion in
the hereafter. There was a shift from the demise of the self to that of the loved one
(family members and kin). Finally, in the parlance of Ariès, the 20th century is
characterized by “invisible death”, a historical condition in which death is
removed from public display to the private sphere, from homes to hospitals and
nursing homes. It is argued that during this period, religious and social rituals
have declined in collective importance (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 195–196).

3 Death and the media

In recent years, many scholars of death and dying have challenged Ariès’ theory
of “invisible death” in the modern age. According to Hanusch (2010), Walter (1991,
1994, 1999), Howarth (2007) and others, modern society has identified a return of
death to the public sphere, arguing that the role of the mass media, journalism,
and entertainment media has been crucial in this movement. Ariès (1974) notes
that from the late 19th century onwards, people began to have less personal, first-
hand experience of death, as it was transferred from private homes to nursing
homes. At the same time, there was an emergence of mass media (first press and
then electronic media), and consequently people began to be exposed to death to
a greater extent through and via the media.
Vicky Goldberg compares the simultaneous disappearance of physical death
from the public sphere and into the realm of the private (e.g. nursing homes) to
the vivid appearance of death in the media, and argues that as fewer people had
actual experiences with death they were looking for new ways to manage their
fears and thoughts related to dying. The illustration of death gained new signifi-
cance as it became more distant in the real-life worlds of people (Goldberg 1998:
29).
 Mediatization of public death 685

The arrival of mass-circulation newspapers, called the penny press in the

United States, provided readers with an increasing number of images and stories
of death and destruction (Stephens 2007; Thompson 2004). Hanusch (2010)
explains this historical media development in the following manner:

Technological advances in printing, the arrival of machine-manufactured paper and, impor-

tantly, the invention of the steam engine, allowed newspapers to be produced much more
cheaply and in a much better quality. In addition, literacy rates in the general public improved.
All these factors enabled newspapers to quickly develop from providing (mostly political)
information to the privileged few to reaching mass audiences. (Hanusch 2010: 25)

… Here, a new form of popular journalism developed, aimed at working-class audiences, and
one whose mix of crime and human interest stories was not unlike that provided in the early
newsbooks centuries before. (Stephens 2007, in Hanusch 2010: 26)

In addition to the development of the penny press, the rise of illustrated magazines
and later photojournalism in Europe and the United States played a key role in
making death visible in the public eye. In her study of the French news weekly
L’Illustration, Christina Staudt (2001) argues that images of death were quite com-
monly published in the 19th century. In obituaries, typically relating to famous
people, there was often an explicit emphasis on the actual death, and it was com-
mon practice to publish close-up photographs of the deceased in their deathbed.
Images of death were also used to endorse certain political goals, such as patriot-
ism and the idea of the Republic. In the Anglo-American world, weeklies such as
Harper’s Weekly and the Illustrated London News reported quite extensively on
deaths resulting from murders and other violent crimes from the mid-19th century
onwards. However, scholars like Goldberg (1998) note that by the end of the cen-
tury these gory images seem to disappear almost entirely. One explanation is that
the penny press (i.e. the cheap tabloids in the United States) started to cover
death in increasingly graphic detail, thus conquering the market from the weeklies
(Hanusch 2010: 28).
Another key aspect in the rise of representations of death in the news media
was the development of photography and photojournalism as a profession. After
the American Civil War (1861–1865), photographs of death appeared in newspapers
and weeklies with some regularity (Hanusch 2010: 31). Their significance has been
explained by the so-called reality affect, the idea that the camera does not lie.
Photographs claim to depict reality as it is, hence their power as the vivid visual
evidence of the reality (see e.g. Zelizer 1995, 2010). According to Zelizer (1995:
136), photojournalism has claimed to legitimize its position by offering “a visual
expansion” of journalistic practice, thus enforcing journalistic authority over “tell-
ing the truth” about the world. However, as rightly pointed out by Zelizer (1995,
2010), Sontag (2003), and others, photos in newspapers are always framed in cer-
tain ways, and typically supported by the written word.
686 Johanna Sumiala

Since the mid-20th century, the emergence of television and live images has
only intensified the vivid representation of death in news media accessible to large
audiences. In the words of Hanusch (2010):

… indeed, we can all easily recall seminal events in terms of the photographs which went
around the world, from Capa’s image of the Falling Soldier, the photos of the corpses in the
Nazi concentration camps, Eddie Adams’ iconic image of General Loan’s execution of a Viet-
cong suspect, to footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the subsequent shooting
of Lee Harvey Oswald … (Hanusch 2010: 32)

Barbie Zelizer (1992, 1998) makes a similar point, as in her famous studies on the
visual representation of the Holocaust and the assassination of John F. Kennedy
she discusses the interplay between the visual display of death in the news and
the collective memory. Another landmark in the recent history of the visual repre-
sentation of death in the news is 9/11 and the numerous studies related to it (see
e.g. Altheide 2003; Liebes and Blondheim 2005; Kitch 2003). To continue the list
of seminal events marking the history of the present in the visual representation
of death in the news, the images and videos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein in
2006 and the deceased Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 have become displays of death
of high, and controversial, iconic value.
The latest developments in media history, including the 20th-century globaliza-
tion of communication through digitalization and the Internet, and the emergence
of social media in the 21st century, have contributed to the public display of death
in the media in several ways. We now live in a world in which anyone with an
Internet connection can publish news about death, and consequently the tradi-
tional mainstream mass media outlets are no longer the only actors to broadcast
news about public death. As a result, Hanusch (2010) notes that:

… old barriers to publishing graphic imagery are being eroded by a medium that allows users,
on the one hand, to publish all kinds of photos without the media’s usual checks and balan-
ces. On the other hand, audiences are empowered to make a conscious decision about whether
they want to see a certain image, and should therefore have less reason to complain. (Hanusch
2010: 145)

Hence, many agree we are now saturated with news and images of death and
horror like never before in human history, as the images and news travel rapidly
from one media and context to another locally, nationally, and globally (Sumiala
2013). In the lexicon of Walter and his colleagues (1995: 582, cited in Hanusch
2010: 19), “a smaller proportion of the population of contemporary Western socie-
ties dies in any one day than in any society at any time in the history of human-
kind, yet through the news media death is now extremely visible”.
It is fair to claim that our experience of death has become mediatized in the
modern world. The media, ranging from the mainstream media to social media,
affect our understanding of death; shape how we perceive it and manage it individ-
ually and collectively; affect the formation and maintenance of social relations
 Mediatization of public death 687

established and maintained around death; influence the construction of individual

and collective identities in the face of death; and affect how organizations and
institutions dealing with death function at private, public, political, and economic
levels (cf. Krotz 2009: 24). In the logic of mediatization, publicity means more than
visibility; it means significance (Altheide and Snow 1979; see also Couldry 2003).

4 Mediatization of death
I will now turn to examine the mediatization of death by elaborating on an analyti-
cal framework developed by Winfried Schulz (2004). In this typology, media sour-
ces are analyzed as extending, substituting, amalgamating, and accommodating
communication on public death according to their own logic. The premises
advanced by Schulz (2004: 87–101) are as follows:
1. Media extend the natural limits of human communication capacities on public
death
2. Media provide a substitute for social activities and social institutions related
to public death
3. Media amalgamate with various non-media activities in social life dealing with
public death
4. Actors and organizations of all sectors of society dealing with death accommo-
date the logic of contemporary media

Schulz’s (2004) theory is a useful tool in studying the mediatization of death in the
contemporary society of high media-saturation as the four dimensions (extension,
substitution, amalgamation, and accommodation) help to illustrate how mediatiza-
tion works in different media-related contexts and settings. However, it is impor-
tant to acknowledge that the examples and cases given here are limited, thus their
role is mainly illustrative. Many other logics and functions exist, and one should
look for the counter-logics and cases of non-mediatized public death in today’s
society.

4.1 Extension
There are several different angles from which to approach the power of the media
to extend the natural limits of human communication capacities on public death.
For one, this extension is dependent on the development of media technology. In
the era of mass media (e.g. print, radio, and television), news of public death was
broadcast based on the principle of mass communication – that is, from one to
many. Professional news organizations played a key role in circulating, and
orchestrating, death news. Public death was constituted as either a local, national,
688 Johanna Sumiala

or global media event, depending on the case in point, in the newsrooms of main-
stream broadcasting media.
In the history of the mediatization of death, the assassination of John F. Ken-
nedy is one of the most widely known and thus serves to illustrate the idea of
extension. The event is perceived as a major turning point not only in American
but wider media and journalistic history. The assassination occurred at a time
when television was on the cusp of becoming the most influential news medium.
Stewart Hoover (2006) offers the following analysis of the meaning of this tragic
death:

A young, popular, charismatic president, known to the public because of television, was killed
so unexpectedly and publicly. The shooting occurred on a Friday. The American (and indeed,
the world) public thus had a whole weekend to watch and to try to come to terms with the
events. And, as they unfolded, there was continuing drama. The search for the killer, his
eventual arrest and then killing. The hurried inauguration of the new president. The return of
the body to Washington the same night with live images from the tarmac as the casket and
the young widow, still wearing her blood-soaked clothing, entered the hearse. The statement
from President Johnson attempting to reassure the public of a stable transition. And then
later, the lying-in-state, the state funeral, and the burial. Few who were alive at the time can
forget the images and the emotions. (Hoover 2006: 243)

Interestingly enough, in today’s world of networked communication, this idea of

extension is far from being limited to the actual historical time of the Kennedy
assassination in the 1960s, but can be relived today via social media. The live
footage of the assassination in Dallas, seen in the Zapruder film, has become iconic
evidence of this extension in time and space. Today, this material is easily acces-
sible through YouTube and other social networking sites. By watching the shooting
of President Kennedy we have the opportunity to become immersed in political
history as part of a new generation of media witnesses to this historic moment (cf.
Frosh and Pinchevski 2009). Thus, mediatization as an extension has the power to
influence individuals communicating about Kennedy’s death at different historical
times and locations, and thereby vicariously experiencing his death as witnesses
and/or bystanders (see e.g. Sumiala 2013: 57).
Another paradigmatic example of mediatized communication as an extension
is 9/11, a terrorist attack carefully scripted and choreographed for maximum media
attention (see Altheide 2003). After the first plane crashed into the South Tower,
the area around the World Trade Centre was immediately swamped by photogra-
phers and film crews from New York-based media houses – ensuring that when
the second plane flew into the North Tower, the cameras were there to witness the
atrocity. In an instant, the material spread from the world’s leading media houses
across the world, onto the Internet and people’s television sets.
To follow the logic of Lundby (2009b) and Cottle (2006), this was an instance
not only of the mediatization of public death, but the mediatization of terrorism
(see also Sumiala and Tikka 2010). It was a conscious attempt by terrorists to adapt
 Mediatization of public death 689

their actions to fit the logic of contemporary media, and in this way to use the
prevailing media system to further their cause. In so doing, modern-day terrorism
challenges the machinery of media production and the logic of its operation. This
means media outlets have to ask themselves how to reach a balance in the news
coverage of a catastrophe between the forces in power and those sharply critical
of the forces in power (cf. Katz and Liebes 2007).

4.2 Substitution
The second aspect of the mediatization of public death is substitution, in other
words the media takeover of social activities and social institutions associated with
public death, where the media and journalists construct meaning from the event
through discussion. Journalists take a role as authoritative storytellers in society
through the way in which they help society overcome the tragic loss and shape its
collective memory (Hanusch 2010: 125). This form of journalism is sometimes
referred to as “commemorative journalism” or “memorializing discourse” (see e.g.
Kitch 2003; Carlson 2007). At the moment of the violent public death the media
takes over and constructs a ritualized time-out for a disaster, during which time
journalists, editors, producers, directors, photographers, and the audience follow
a familiar, highly ritualized script in which all have a part (Nossek 2008: 314, 317;
see also Becker 1995; Kitch 2003; Coman 2005; Pantti and Sumiala 2009). Accord-
ing to Liebes (1998: 76), clearing space for a disaster creates enormous pressure
in the media for repetition, the anticipation of developments and the creation of
news. The orchestration of the tragic public death demands a script that must be
instantly recognizable.
Nossek (2008: 318) reminds us that myth is a form of communication publicly
produced and circulated within a culture. According to Drummond’s (1984: 27)
famous definition, myth is thus “primarily a metaphorical device for telling people
about themselves, about other people and about the complex world of natural and
mechanical objects which they inhabit”. In today’s mediatized condition, the
media, journalists, producers, and ordinary users all contribute to mythologizing
death in and via the media by narrating a plot and setting up the key characters
in this myth and a genre of the mythical performance. A characteristic of a mythi-
cal public death plot narrated by the media is that it needs to be fluid and complex
in its relationship to specific events; the plot can “linger” on a particular event,
and it can flashback to past events or flash-forward to future events (Alexander
and Jacobs 1998: 31; Eco 1994). Furthermore, the mythical plot must be typified
into other core codes and symbols of a culture, often formulated as binary opposi-
tions or contrasts between sacred and profane actions, purifying and polluting
motives, relations, etc. (Alexander and Jacobs, 1998: 30–31).
A recent instance of the mythical plot being activated in and by the media
was the cinema massacre in Colorado in the summer of 2012. The myth of violent
690 Johanna Sumiala

masculinity (constructed out of the binary oppositions of female–male, pure–pol-

luted and weak–strong) was attached to the spree killer and his violent act in the
movie theatre. The main characters of this tragic story were the perpetrator, the
victims, witnesses, and officials. In his cultural analysis of the event, Douglas
Kellner (2012) explores the role of the media, guns, and violence in the social
construction and maintenance of the myth of masculinity, and how it is mediatized
in today’s culture. He frames the myth in the following manner:

In the early morning of July 21, 2012 at a local premiere of the latest Batman movie The Dark
Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, a young man entered through the emergency exit, moved
into the movie theater showing the film dressed from head-to-toe in military protective gear
and body armor, threw canisters of what was described as tear gas or smoke bombs, and
began firing at movie spectators … Within hours, media reports indicated that 12 spectators
in the theater had been killed and approximately 70 wounded (many critically), making the
assault one of the deadliest mass murders in recent US history. Police named the suspect as
24-year-old James Eagan Holmes, who had reportedly told the police that he was the “Joker,”
a nihilistic killer in the Batman mythology. When pictures were released of Holmes a couple
of days later, he had apparently dyed his hair reddish-orange and attempted to look like the
Joker, a character of extreme anarchy and destruction in the Batman mythos … Initial internet
searches and interviews with fellow students, and those who occasionally saw Holmes coming
out of his apartment, turned up little cyberinformation or stories from acquaintances which
shed any light on the suspect, his motivations, and what trajectory had led him to the movie
theater massacre. Hence he appeared more like the Invisible Man than the publicity-seeking
Joker in the Batman mythologies. (Kellner 2012: 311–312)

The role of the media is central in the construction of the myth and its narrativiza-
tion at many levels. Hence, the media substitutes other social institutions and
activities in culturally making sense of the tragic death in public. The media breaks
the news of the killing, the killer is identified in the narrative with the “Joker”, a
nihilistic killer-figure in the movie, and a mise-en-scène created for his actions.
This mythical image of the killer is further enforced by cyberinformation gathered
in and via the media during the days following the tragedy.

4.3 Amalgamation
In this world of mediatized death, we are constantly exposed in the media to
what is considered exceptional death – that is, to the death of famous politicians,
sportspeople, celebrities, or victims of violence. Very few of us have ever met these
people in real life, but when they pass away we grieve for and mourn them, and
publicly perform elaborate and collective media rituals of death and mourning
(see also Sumiala 2013). Carolyn Kitch and Janice Hume (2008: xvii) even claim
“the mediated sharing of the stories of strangers’ deaths may be the most common
death experience in modern culture”.
Ritualization is the cultural practice of making these experiences common and
shared. According to anthropologists and social theorists such as Becker (1973),
 Mediatization of public death 691

Lifton and Olson (1974), and Bauman (1992), a prime motivation for the ritualiza-
tion of death is the fear of death itself. In her important work Death in Due Time:
Construction of Self and Culture in Ritual Drama, Barbara Myerhoff (1984) makes
the same point as she describes the complex interplay between belief, practice,
ritual, and death (in response to our fundamental uncertainty in the face of death).
Myerhoff (1984: 151) underlines the importance of ritual in “all areas of uncertainty,
anxiety, impotence, and disorder”. In her view, the repetitive character of ritual
provides “a message of pattern and predictability”. Ritual invites us to engage
with symbols and symbolic communication, thus bidding us to participate in
spreading its messages that we might not otherwise even conceive of or believe.
Consequently, our “actions lull our critical faculties, persuading us with evidence
from our own physiological experience until we are conceived” (Myerhoff 1984:
151). In these moments, rational order gives room to the symbolic, mythical, and
spiritual (see e.g. Coman 2005). The rituals generated by tragic public deaths are
relatively complex phenomena, and so is their relationship with the media. In the
following analysis I will focus on rituals of public mourning in particular.
In this mediatized condition, rituals of public mourning are typically orches-
trated by the media that contribute to shaping the mourning rituals of death in
many ways. We may call this amalgamation, and in this process the media merges
with various non-media activities in social life dealing with public death, ritual
being the case in point here. The rituals of mourning occur today more frequently
in and through the media, as they are circulated from one media to another and
often overlap. Viewers, too, are drawn into the public mourning via the ritualiza-
tion taking place in and via the media. It is argued that television played a critical
role in the evolution of mediatized rituals of mourning (cf. Dayan and Katz 1992).
However, in Finland for example, it was only with the mainstreaming of television
in the late 1960s that it became technologically, socially, and culturally possible
for people to observe and participate simultaneously in mourning rituals taking
place at a physical distance. The previously mentioned assassination of John F.
Kennedy stands as an example here. His funeral was widely televised around the
world, thus millions of people were able to participate in the public ritual regard-
less of their physical time and location.
However, as pointed out by Hanusch (2010), the ritualization of public mourn-
ing in and via the media did take place in the pre-television era, when people
relied on newspapers, radio news, and newsreels. Obituaries are one example of
a ritual practice typical of newspapers; therefore, we need to acknowledge that
not only television but all media contribute to the interpretation and development
of mourning rituals and negotiating views of reality through these ritual perform-
ances (e.g. Pantti and Sumiala 2009).
In the case of the Utøya massacre in Norway, elaborate mourning practices
were performed and circulated in different media at a local, national, and global
level. For example, ordinary people made YouTube videos to pay tribute to and
692 Johanna Sumiala

commemorate the young victims. All media, including mainstream TV, print
media, and social media and networking sites, broadcast, distributed, and shared
the ritualized mourning material of people gathering in public in Oslo to pay trib-
ute to the victims of the massacre and mourn together. People brought flowers,
candles, and stuffed animals, posted notes on public sites and sang and gathered
in memorial services. All of this activity was largely mediatized, while details of a
number of memorial ceremonies were circulated in and via the media. On 25 July
2011, around 200,000 people took part in a “rose march” to the City Hall Square
in Oslo. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) broadcast a memorial
concert, entitled Mitt lille land (My Little Country), and the song of the same name
came to symbolize the sense of collective mourning. A memorial service took place
in Oslo Cathedral, and in September the Norwegian People’s Aid and Sony Music
released the memorial album Mitt lille land, which became the best selling album
that year. Overall, the key components of mediatized ritualization in public mourn-
ing in the Utøya case can be identified as follows (cf. Grimes 2006: 109):

Ritualized Action Patterned mediation: Screening, broadcasting, up- and

downloading, remediating. A special role is given to
the public mourning of the people, political leaders
and symbolic figures
Ritual Place Newsrooms, different media platforms (e.g. newsreels
and TV), websites, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twit-
ter, YouTube), screening public sites such as Squares
Ritual Time Extra newscasts, constant updating of news material,
remediation, commentaries and postings on social
media
Ritual Objects Symbols, icons (e.g. national flags, flowers (rose), can-
dles, notes, portraits of the victims)
Ritual Participants Journalists, professional and amateur media users, offi-
cial society (e.g. police, clergymen, politicians, experts,
the Royal family), media audience
Figures and Roles Victims, witnesses, orchestrators of public mourning
(the media, politicians, e.g. Prime Minister)
Qualities and Quantities Massive circulation of visual representations of mourn-
ing and grief
Language Mythological (national, ideological)
Sounds Funeral music, opening sounds/theme (news media/
social media)
Beliefs and Emotions Creation of a sense of togetherness in the nation
through the collective mourning of a loss of human life
and human suffering
 Mediatization of public death 693

The power of the media in the public ritualization of mourning in the Utøya case
relates closely to the style of performance, which emphasizes emotions and collec-
tive sentiments. This was an increasingly prominent trend throughout the 1990s
and 2000s (see e.g. Pantti and Sumiala 2009). We may argue that the mediatized
shared emotions capable of producing collective action are powerful means with
which to constitute the idea of a common experience and thus create a sense of
togetherness. The present-day impulses of fragmentation and multiple public
spheres challenge the sense of togetherness and collective imagination vital for
social cohesion, especially at times of great public distress. Thus, we can claim
that, in the media, there is a market for public death and the dramatization of
social cohesion. The performance of mediatized mourning rituals plays a crucial
role in this task. Since the evolution of the Internet and social media, the mediat-
ized ritualization of death has assumed new forms and practices (e.g. Sumiala and
Tikka 2010) and the picture has become more fragmented. Public rituals typically
circulate between traditional mass media and social media and, because of the
increasing number of mediated sites of ritualization, ritualization in and via the
media has intensified.
In this amalgamation, the media merges with ritual practices carried out by the
people and religious and political institutions, allowing it to shape the meaning
of different mourning activities and manage public emotions and the key actors
in this public mourning. By doing this, the media also establishes the way in
which mourning rituals are connected to the sacred centre(s) of society, and which
actors play crucial roles in this mediatized ritualization (see e.g. Couldry 2003;
Sumiala 2013).

4.4 Accommodation
In Schulz’s typology, the fourth condition of mediatization is accommodation, in
which actors and organizations from a range of different sectors of society are
taken into consideration (e.g. in adapting to the logic of contemporary media). In
the case of high-profile public death, this poses new challenges to the official
society. According to Hakala (2012), in the case of tragic public death, crisis man-
agement teams at different levels – police, Red Cross, church, and other authori-
ties – have to organize communication in and via the media while simultaneously
managing the problems in the field. To accommodate the media logic in the case
of public death means organizing press conferences and sending out press releases
and e-mails. In addition, it includes updating different websites (extra, intra, and
Internet), acquiring extra mobile phones for the media, arranging food and lodging
for journalists, and providing volunteers at the command centre. In recent years,
this process of accommodation has been characterized by an increase in Internet-
based communication (see e.g. Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle 2012).
694 Johanna Sumiala

In the case of the Finnish school shootings in Jokela (2007) and Kauhajoki
(2008), we can identify certain elements of accommodation in relation to the reli-
gious representation of public death. The case in point here is the official religious
institution, such as the Lutheran Church of Finland, the main religion in the coun-
try. Stig Hjarvard (2012) argues for the connection between mediatization and secu-
larization in modern society, as in his view mediatization supports secularization.
In the aftermath of the Finnish school shootings, the Church of Finland played a
media role in communicating about public death, and in doing so had to adapt to
a certain logic of secular discourse. When the church leaders used the media to
give a voice to the public mourning, the communicative emphasis on explicit reli-
gious content was rather implicit. At these moments, I claim, religious symbols
and language provided therapeutic tools to communicate emotions and ideas
evoked by the public death. Religious material was used to a much lesser extent
for explicitly theological or existentialist purposes such as interpreting and under-
standing death as the end of life and/or a gate to the afterlife. It is also important
to note that the funerals of the killers and the victims remained private, hidden
from the public eye, which again could be interpreted as underlining the secular
nature of mediatized public death. Christian funeral ceremonies, with their explicit
references to God and heaven, were absent from the media coverage (Sumiala
2012).
Similarly, in the Utøya case, the Prime Minister and the Royal Family played
a key role in communication, whether political, symbolic, or religious, achieving
this by managing public emotions and creating a sense of security and continuity.
The tears and comforting words of the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, Crown
Princess Mette-Marit, and King Harald V were circulated widely in the media to
rouse global compassion based on human suffering. Later, criticism emerged in
Norway of the official society (the police in particular) and their inability to man-
age a crisis on that scale. The role of symbolic communication and leadership is
of crucial importance to the attempts of official society to accommodate communi-
cation on public death into the logic of mediatization.

5 Mediatization shapes value of life

One of the underlying issues related to the mediatization of public death is the
social and cultural implications embedded in it. Many studies point out that the
media, and particularly the mainstream media, value certain deaths over others.
As stated earlier in this chapter, mediatization affects how we perceive death
today, what we consider “normal” and “exceptional” death, what practices of
mourning are considered appropriate and whose death is worth public mourning
and grief (Hanusch 2010: 3). These questions are empirical, but have theoretical
implications.
 Mediatization of public death 695

In a public death, mediatization affects all the key actors and parties involved:
the deceased, victims, witnesses, and bystanders. In addition, the mediatization
takes slightly different forms depending on the type of death, whether caused by
violence or natural causes, and different types of explanations, accusations, and
speculations affect the mediatization process depending on the type of public
death (see e.g. Sumiala and Hakala 2010). In the mediatization of John F. Ken-
nedy’s death, the mystery surrounding the perpetrator was of crucial significance.
In the Colorado cinema massacre and the case of Utøya, the perpetrators were
apprehended immediately after committing their criminal acts, and hence received
a great deal of attention.
Not all deaths transform into mediatized death. To qualify as a mediatized
death, the news event must have strong visual, affective, or dramatic implications,
as the mode of reporting demands dramatic details as fuel for the mediatization
fire. The role of the deceased as visual evidence and a reference point to identifica-
tion is crucial in this sense, as is the role of the victimizer, if there is one. The
general rule can be formulated in the following manner: the greater the number
of victims, the stronger the media’s interest. The seriousness of the death is thus
dependent on the number of deaths. Almost a hundred people were killed in Nor-
way, which is exceptional in the Nordic, or almost any other, context. In many
cases, the significance of public death is understandable not only through the
number of victims but also through their symbolic value. In school shootings, for
example, victims are often young people, as was the case in the shootings in
Connecticut in December 2012. The death of young people is not expected in mod-
ern society, and therefore it is usually mediatized and ritualized to a greater extent
than other deaths (Walter 1991). The Utøya massacre followed similar dynamics.
From the audience point of view, also important is the possibility of establish-
ing an attachment to the death, and identifying with the suffering and loss. The
history, place, and context shape the process of identification (see e.g. Butler
2003). Birgit Höjer (2004) argues that in applying present-day media logic, certain
victims are considered “better” than others. Chris Greer (2004) discusses idealized
victims, that is, victims more appropriate than others to become subjects of public
mourning. For Höjer (2004) and Moeller (1999), women, old people, and young-
sters make better victims than men, as they are considered weaker and more inno-
cent and hence more worthy of collective compassion (see also Hakala 2012). In
the media logic, what matters is the cultural and social closeness of the tragedy,
the victims’ symbolic value, and the unexpected nature of the death. Thus, the
famous, or infamous, American formula states: “One dead fireman in Brooklyn is
worth five English bobbies, who are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans”
(Moeller 1999: 22, cited in Hanusch 2010: 42). Following this logic, from an Ameri-
can perspective the news value of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
is incomparable with the news value of the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister
Olof Palme. However, as many acknowledge, closeness is chiefly a cultural and
696 Johanna Sumiala

social construction. For this reason, many Europeans perceived 9/11 as something
happening to “us”, despite the geographical distance.
The type and site of death also matter. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the
media focuses on what is considered unusual, despite the statistical insignificance.
Ordinary deaths, that is, people dying of heart disease or cancer, are typically
under-represented, whereas deaths caused by drug overdose or homicide tend to
be over-represented (Hanusch 2010: 39–40). Celebrity death is one prominent cat-
egory of public death, and the more tragic the circumstances (e.g. drug overdose
or suicide) the more attention the media pay. The deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Jim
Morrison, Michael Jackson or, more recently, British pop singer Amy Winehouse,
stand as examples of tragic celebrity deaths (see e.g. Sumiala 2013). Similarly, in
the foreign news section there is a tendency to over-emphasize violent death over
other causes, and massive natural disasters such as the Asian Tsunami in 2004 or
Haiti earthquake in 2010 provide examples of intensive media coverage of public
death. The death of world leaders and well-known politicians forms another cat-
egory, with the most recent example being the death of Margret Thatcher, the
former Prime Minister of Great Britain, in April 2013.
Sites and places, such as shopping malls, schools, and offices – public places
that people visit every day – are considered exceptional sites of public death. The
Colorado massacre provided an explicit example that violent death is not expected
in a movie theatre in Western society. Thus, these locations receive more media
interest than other sites of death, such as the hospitals or hospices where we
expect death to occur. In addition, other types of cultural and social hierarchies are
present in public death. Interesting research on obituaries has shown the common
tendency to reflect the social and cultural values of the society in question, and
some individuals, typically white men of high societal status (e.g. elites), receive
more attention in obituaries than people of colour (Starck 2008; Fowler 2007).
Overall, we can argue that mediatization is a process with the power to trans-
form the categories related to the existing public perception of death. What follows
is that mediatization shapes our understanding of death as a cultural and social
phenomenon. Following Schulz’s typology, public death is shaped by mediatiza-
tion as an extension, substitution, amalgamation, and accommodation of commu-
nication on public death. Finally, the logic of mediatization may be perceived as
being circular. We read about and watch public death, and mourn people we
already know typically through the media. Alternatively, we may not know the
people but we recognize the phenomenon in the media, be it terrorist attacks,
school shootings, the assassination of a public figure in a public space, or other
types of spectacular violence. These are high-profile public deaths, the most com-
mon material in and for the mediatization of death. Through the process of mediat-
ization, these deaths strengthen the cultural and social categories already estab-
lished and maintained in and by the media. These categories create and maintain
social order in society as they structure the world around such fundamental
 Mediatization of public death 697

elements as life and death. In this way, the mediatization of death as a process
enforces the media power over life and death in present-day society.

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X. Critical afterthought
Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
31 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for
media and communication research?
Abstract: Mediatization research draws on the history of media and the history of
mediation within diverse fields of society to develop a scholarly and empirically
grounded account of the mediation of history. It is first argued that mediatization
is characterized by two crucial features: it concerns the effects of the media on a
field of society that is historically separate from the media; and it recognizes that
these effects work in a complex manner over a considerable period of time. The
chapter then contrasts three ideal typical accounts of mediatization, each with a
different focus and timescale, namely: the many and varied roles of mediation
throughout the longue durée of cultural evolution; the institutionalized forces of
high modernity converging to produce a dominant corporate media sector in recent
centuries; and the still uncertain yet potentially radical socio-technological trans-
formations in digital networks over recent decades. It is concluded, first, that the
second, institutional perspective makes the strongest case for a theory of mediati-
zation, but that all perspectives could be mutually compatible with further theo-
retical and empirical work. This latter should include questions of critique, should
be developed in partnership with experts in the various fields being mediatized,
and could usefully be collected together under a single hashtag to permit further
synthesis.

Keywords: mediatization, mediation, history of mediation, mediation of history,

field theory (Bourdieu), institutional power, “the media” (singular), the place of
critique, modernity (high, late, post), publicity and rationalization (Habermas),
mediatization as hashtag

1 Why a handbook on mediatization now?

In earlier societies, social institutions like family, school and church were the most important
providers of information, tradition and moral orientation for the individual member of society.
Today, these institutions have lost some of their former authority, and the media have to some
extent taken over their role as providers of information and moral orientation, at the same
time as the media have become society’s most important storyteller about society itself (Hjar-
vard 2008: 13).

In the past decade or two, an international group of researchers has sought to tell
not simply the history of media or, even, the history of mediation within diverse
fields of society, but, even more ambitiously, they have sought to investigate the
mediation of history. It seems that the effort to understand the so-called new media
704 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

has stimulated media and communications researchers to think more deeply about
history.1 The seemingly unstoppable flow of “new media” is leading researchers
to look back over the history of previously new media (Marvin 1988), embracing a
longer timeframe than is common in a field that tends towards presentism. Equally,
it seems that the study of new media is demanding that research becomes more
interdisciplinary. Media and communications researchers increasingly look across
the diverse fields of society in which these are proving significant, even influential,
working with political scientists to examine the mediation of politics, with psychol-
ogists to understand the mediation of the family, with theologians to understand
the mediation of religion, and so forth.
All this adds to our grasp of the history of “the media” and, more broadly, of
processes of mediation. In telling these interlinked histories, we have long recog-
nized that the societal shaping of media and mediation has been as strong if not
stronger than any influence of the media on society. Indeed, we have often fought
shy of theorizing, let alone articulating the latter process, preferring to accumulate
detailed empirical accounts of the history of mediation in particular fields. We
have learned from the critique of media effects, we are wary of accusations of
technological determinism, and we do not wish to produce a crude and overly
media-centric periodization of history that historians would not recognize or
respect. But the difficulty of the task should not make us avoid it or leave it to
those outside the field of media and communications. Mediatization research, we
suggest, is precisely concerned to bring together our knowledge of the history of
media and the history of mediation across diverse fields so as to attempt a distinct
account of the changing role and significance of the media in society, even while
recognizing that such an account will be far from simple, linear, or self-sufficient.
Mediatization, we therefore suggest further, refers to the (hypothesized) processes
by which social change in particular (or all) fields of society has been shaped by
media (defined broadly). While this hypothesized mediation of history cannot be
analysed separately from the histories of media and of mediation, the paucity of
theoretical or empirical investigation of the former compared with the latter is
surely worth rectifying; and this, as we see it, is the self-appointed task of mediati-
zation research.2
As Couldry (this volume) notes, it is time to open up debates about media
and communications to a wider, multidisciplinary lens, if we are collectively to

1 Indeed, we have debated what’s new about the new media for a couple of decades, we have
grasped the point that even old media were once new (Marvin 1988), and we have witnessed the
emergence of so many media technologies, platforms and services that it is no longer helpful to
label each further arrival as “new”, especially as this obscures the fact that established media also
continue to change (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006).
2 This Handbook is one of several recent volumes – consider also Hjarvard (2013), Hepp (2013),
works edited by Hepp and Krotz (2014), Esser and Strömbäck (2014) and Lundby (2009), a recent
special issue of Communication Theory (Couldry and Hepp 2013) and doubtless more published or
in the pipeline.
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 705

understand “the space of social action in an age when everyday life has become
supersaturated with media flows”. While positioning the media within multidisci-
plinary analyses of modernity (Thompson 1995) promises that the insights of media
and communications research could be more recognized across the academy, there
are many views of how this can be done. To help clear the way for the realization
of the promise of mediatization research, in this chapter we first clarify the object
of mediatization, arguing that mediatization is best understood as the influence of
media institutions and practices on other fields of social and institutional practice.
We then contrast the three main themes underlying mediatization research, which
focus on the institutional, technological, and cultural dimensions of societal
change. Third and most importantly, we disentangle the often-confused timescales
of mediatization research, arguing that, although each theme is relevant across
the entirety of human history, each bears a particular relation to the analysis of
social change.
Mapping themes onto timescales allows us to contrast three ideal typical
accounts of mediatization: the longue durée of cultural evolution; the institutional-
ized forces of high modernity in recent centuries; and the socio-technological
transformations of recent decades. From the present Handbook authors, and other
research, we conclude that the strongest support mustered so far is for the second
account, namely that during the period of high modernity, the institutional and
practical logics of the mass media distinctively reshaped many fields of human
activity. This is not to forget, as stated above, that these fields also shaped the
histories of media and of mediation and, further, that each field has its own par-
ticularities that complicate the telling of a tidy, overarching story. More interest-
ingly, one must also recognize that the institutional focus of mediatization research
in high modernity is historically particular. On the one hand, we can discern the
multiple and nonlinear processes of mediation that predate this period, whether
just as pre-history or as a genuine extension of the timeline of mediatization (viz.
mediatization as cultural evolution). On the other hand, the signs are accumulat-
ing that the dominance of mass media is unravelling in the emerging digital age,
undermining or complicating the operation of the simultaneously unravelling for-
ces of high modernity (viz. mediatization as socio-technological transformation).3
Let us unpack these arguments one by one. Along the way, we will pinpoint
a series of challenges for future research, including the task of working with an
ever-changing specification of “the media”, of working across multiple disciplines,
and of ensuring a place for critique.

3 Analysed by Lash and Urry (1991), for instance, in terms of disorganized capitalism.
706 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

2 The mediatization of what?

The ambition of mediatization research is not, primarily, to understand the chang-
ing media in their own right, nor to chart forms of mediation in different places
and times. Rather, as for globalization or urbanization or individualization – the
claim is that something which always existed in one form or another (the world,
towns, individuals – and media) has come to constitute an organizing principle
for other spheres of life. Urbanization not only changes what a town is but it
changes the countryside, the role of the state, the operation of commerce, the
texture of the lifeworld. Individualization not only changes the role of the individ-
ual but also the nature of social groups, institutions, and the public sphere. And
so with mediatization – the claim is that not only are the media changing but so
too, in tandem, are their wider effects on institutions and practices across society.
While mediatization research is, therefore, media-centred, it need not be
media-centric, because the main object of attention lies elsewhere, in domains
such as politics or religion or education. But where, or on what? Can anything be
mediatized? To clarify the terms of debate, we start from the position that mediati-
zation is characterized by two crucial features: it concerns the effects of the media
on a domain of society that is historically separate from the media, and it recog-
nizes that these effects work in a complex manner over a considerable period of
time, usually decades or centuries. Thus, to “count” as a study of mediatization,
one should expect a focus on a particular domain of human action distinguishable
from but potentially affected by the media, along with an analysis of historical
change in both the media and the domain of interest over a defined timescale.4
In other words, we are most convinced by those in this Handbook who assert
that mediatization works on domains of society, for these have their own institu-
tional logics or cultural order, their own entrenched governance regimes, rules
and norms, resources and expertise (Hjarvard this volume). Politics or religion or
education or science are all, therefore, domains about which it may be claimed
that they have been mediatized. But one cannot make the same claim of any object
or concept – so it does not make sense to say that football, the royal birth, a
political event, or a particular celebrity has been mediatized.5 To illustrate, when
Hjarvard examines how Lego developed from wooden bricks into a multiplayer

4 To be sure, many studies of media institutions, texts, processes, and effects conducted by
researchers who have never heard of “mediatization” may be useful for mediatization research.
But if they are not be concerned with a domain beyond the media or a timescale other than the
present, they cannot be central to its project, however valuable or fascinating their research may
be in its own right.
5 Indeed, if we talk too easily of anything being mediatized, the term is evacuated of interest,
leaving behind just the shorthand implication that the media have affected this or that, with little
insight into which the institutional, technological, and/or cultural dimensions of a domain are
altered by the media in a long-term, complex, and contingent manner.
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 707

computer game over the 20th century, his claim is that this is one way in which
children’s play, rather than Lego in particular – has become mediatized, the logics
of the media having affected the social domain of play as a whole.
Couldry (this volume) draws on Bourdieu’s field theory (1993) to elaborate how
and where mediatization has its effects. In contrast to social theories which ana-
lyse how complex modern societies encode power in terms of the institutionalized
arrangements of social class (Durkheim 1984), Bourdieu emphasizes forms of asso-
ciation or order based upon the more informal or flexible workings of social status.
His concept of the field captures how and where such informal orderings of society
are constituted, as illustrated in the way that markets enable the development of
power based on financial capital.6 However, the media are powerful insofar as
they have transversal more than localized effects – they exercise power as a meta-
process, through what Couldry calls their media meta-capital, and he likens them
more to the State than to the school or the church, which are primarily powerful
within their own fields of education and religion respectively.
In this Handbook, Rawolle and Lingard analyse how the media have influ-
enced the field of education (Bourdieu and Passeron 2011). Any observer walking
into a classroom today will observe the host of new educational technologies
therein, from smart board to tablet computer to school information management
system. Over time this has had profound effects, for the technologies afford “new
means of organizing teaching and learning, and challenges to and effects on multi-
ple practices in education, including pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment”. But
the introduction of technologies is far from the simple or sole cause of such trans-
formations. Rawolle and Lingard contextualize the evolution of the education field
in a longer history of modernity, whose key processes include standardization
(consider the growing internal competition over status, as evidenced in the rise of
league tables, standard testing and metrics for external audits) and commercializa-
tion (witness the now-endemic language of consumerism within education, with
schools as service providers and students as consumers).7 Rather than advocating

6 Fields, for Bourdieu, represent social arenas of struggle over capital, notably social capital
(understood as elaborations of status emulation), cultural capital (understood as social status
derived from claims to knowledge), and symbolic capital (the symbolic forms by which all varieties
of capital are recognized). Power may be accrued by gaining a certain position in a field on the
basis of one or more forms of capital; or it may accrue by exerting influence from one field to
another.
7 Some of these mediatization effects have been unfolding over half a century or more, with the
recent arrival of personal digital devices for students adding a further twist to the tale by introduc-
ing into the classroom new forms of student expertise in information access, textual creativity, and
communication skills. These challenge teachers’ authority and stimulate the development of new
curricula and teaching methods for digital literacies. All these changes in the field of education
are partly a response and adjustment to changes in other domains of society; together, they are
sufficiently fundamental to affect how education, as a system and as it contributes to individuals
lives, is valued in the broader society.
708 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

for a single linear process of historical change, Rawolle and Lingard conclude that
“the solidity of meaning implied by the singular term mediatization collects
together a plurality of overlapping processes, and suggests a complex interplay of
media forces on and in education”.
Another case is that of sport. Frandsen (this volume) also eschews a technolog-
ically-determinist approach, taking from mediatization theory an insistence on rec-
ognizing the complexity of the interacting social processes and meta-processes of
which media influence is but one. Although the fields of media and sport have
long been intertwined, Frandsen focuses on the past half century to recognize how
television has mediatized sport by taking over some of its authority (cf. Hjarvard
2008) and reshaping it to fit the demands of mediated spectatorship, transnational
scheduling, celebrity players and, of course, the financial demands of corporate
media ownership. How this has occurred has depended in part on developments
within the media – such as the stimulation of a transnational market for broadcast
content in the European Union in the late 20th century, along with efforts to dereg-
ulate media ownership rules. In all, this has been a process of co-evolution. On
the one hand, the power of television has resulted in “countless adjustments and
changes of rules in the games, league and tournament structures, and business
models”. On the other hand, the coverage of sport has spurred some significant
changes in the media: for instance, outside broadcasting facilities were first devel-
oped to cover sport and, more recently, the commercial development of media
systems has been closely connected to the potential for sport to generate huge
subscription revenues.

3 Mediatization when and how?

While mediatization research stops short of demanding that we all become histori-
ans, it does demand that we develop a more nuanced historical sensibility and
adopt an explicitly comparative frame. There should be no more unexamined
assumptions that “things are changing” or that the “new” is different from the
”old”, and no more vague hand waving at how things were “before”, “in the past”.
While there are many claims to historical change in this Handbook, there are few
detailed histories and, as Bolin (this volume) rightly criticizes, the lack of clarity
over timescales is frustrating for a theory defined by its historical vision. The field
of politics is the most carefully examined in terms of the workings of mediatization
(see Asp; Strömbäck and Esser, this volume), and it is no accident that the very
term mediatization was introduced into media studies to understand historical
transformations of politics over the past century or more (Altheide and Snow 1979;
Schulz 2004; Strömbäck 2008).
We suggest that mediatization research makes claims on three distinct time
scales – decades, centuries, and millennia. Usefully, Bolin (this volume) maps
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 709

these onto the three distinct perspectives on mediatization advocated within this
Handbook – that concerned with the recent impact of digital networked technolo-
gies on society, that concerned with rising power of media as institutions in rela-
tion to the other societal institutions of modernity, and what he calls the media
world perspective, concerned with a broader theorizing of the media’s role in soci-
ety throughout history. While of course, any and every period in history is charac-
terized by technological, institutional, and cultural processes, it is plausible to
map the perspectives onto the time scales in the sense that each perspective is
particularly noteworthy or contested at particular times.
Most obviously, and most recently, technology has come into focus within
media and communications research. Thus the technological perspective espe-
cially emphasizes the socio-technological innovations in recent decades associated
with globalized, digital, networked, convergent media in late (or reflexive or post)
modernity. Influenced by the medium theorists, theories of post-structuralism or
the knowledge of network society, this perspective is examining social, semiotic,
and digital transformations in the wider media ecology to grasp how these are or
may be shaping other societal fields (in this volume, see Auslander; Finneman;
Bolin; Jansson; Madianou). Possibly because the complex and rapidly unfolding
interplay between social, political, economic, and technological transformations
is generating considerable public and policy interest, this perspective on mediati-
zation is attracting much excitement. But while few scholars have devoted their
attentions to unpacking the growing role of the media across society over past
centuries, many are now exercised about the role of new digital technologies in
the past few decades, and in the social sciences and humanities writ large, alterna-
tives to mediatization theory abound (consider new media studies, actor network
theory, social studies of science, and information studies, to name but a few).
Second, and coming through most strongly in this Handbook, the institutional
perspective examines the growing concentration in media power across the Global
North in high modernity – roughly, the mid-18th to mid-20th centuries, arguing that
almost all fields of societal power have been gradually transformed by the pres-
ence of media institutions in their midst. Particularly, mass media organizations
(print, cinema, broadcasting) have increasingly set agendas, normalized dis-
courses, and disseminated ideas to shape publicity and the public sphere and,
thereby, to influence politics, religion, science, education, and more. This influ-
ence is conceived as set of forceful, directional forces of change and theorized in
terms of media logics or the “modus operandi of the media, i.e., their institutional,
aesthetic, and technological affordances” (Hjarvard 2012: 30). But it also recog-
nizes that mediatization depends upon the deeper processes of modernity (ration-
alization, specialization, institutionalization, urbanization, etc.) that, in combina-
tion, have brought into existence the very societal fields on which mediatization
has had its effects (witness the centuries-long evolution of today’s taken-for-
granted market economy, civil society, nuclear family, education system, labour
relations, social class, and nation state).
710 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

Third, and simultaneously most broadly yet least clearly, the cultural perspec-
tive takes a social constructivist perspective on historical changes in all forms of
mediation – implicitly across centuries, even millennia. Hepp and Krotz (2014) talk
of mediatized worlds, Deuze (2012) of media life – or living in media. While the
institutional and technological approaches position media as separate from and
thus an external influence on societal processes (hence concerns about technologi-
cal determinism), the cultural perspective sees the media as fundamentally of soci-
ety. There are resonances here with Williams’ (1974) assertion that technology/
media is a human invention created to serve human purposes, to Carey’s (1989)
emphasis on how ritual processes of communication construct identity and belong-
ing, and to other foundational approaches to human communication.
Confusing these perspectives and their different concepts and timescales has
caused some misunderstandings in debates over mediatization. For example, the
notion of media logics works particularly well in characterizing the societal influ-
ence of the dominant mass media of high modernity. But across the often unpre-
dictable and non-linear paths of human history, the notion of figurations (Hepp
and Hasebrink, this volume) may do better at capturing the diverse mediations of
culture across different fields. Meanwhile, Veron (this volume) suggests that sys-
tems theory can account for the long history of differing mediated forms of interre-
lation between individuals and society. On the one hand, it would be misleading
to extend the specific analysis of the former to the expanded timescale of the
latter. On the other hand, it would be misleading to refuse to recognize what is
particular about the converging, conglomerated power of the mass media in high
modernity (or, indeed, what is specific about the affordances of digital networks
in late modernity), even though mediation has worked differently at other times
and in other places. Or again, the emphasis on media’s ubiquity – bringing con-
nectivity (for better and for worse) to every field of society is appropriately media-
centric when applied to the digitalized network society of late modernity, but can-
not be generalized to earlier times.
More generally, it is surely clear from this Handbook that considerable care is
required in reading across perspectives, fields, and historical periods. It appears
that the institutional approach has gathered the most theoretical and empirical
support thus far. However, its key focus is historical, on the analysis of mass media
power in high modernity. The technological perspective has an exciting new toolkit
to examine the present, digital age of late modernity. But not only are the contours
of “the digital age” as yet unclear; so too are the benefits of adopting a mediatiza-
tion approach to their analysis. Given its unlimited span across space and time,
the cultural perspective is the most ambitious yet also the weakest, for it is often
unclear what is being said specifically about mediatization rather than, say, about
the analysis of mediation or communication or culture more widely.
Equally challenging is the changing nature of what counts as “the media” in
mediatization research. Many Handbook authors were trained at a time when a
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 711

particular medium dominated (the press or cinema or, most commonly, television);
but the interesting challenges now centre on conceptualizing the wider media
ecology, and this can be grasped not only for the present and the future but also
for the past.8 Mediatization research gains strength from conceiving of the media
holistically, eschewing the temptation to examine just one medium or form of
mediation divorced from the wider media ecology. It is particularly attuned to the
innovative or hybrid or cross-media or trans-media phenomena associated with
digitalization and the network society, many of which are still to be researched
and understood.9 Despite being dubbed the age of convergent media, the present
is strongly characterized by divergence: “the media” – operating as a media sys-
tem, defined by distinctive media logics, institutionalized through transnational
corporations, employing equipment and expertise accessible to very few – are
perhaps already past. As diverse fields become more publicity conscious, each
developing communication strategies and norms, even establishing distinct media
forms and technologies largely separate from the established mass media, the
claim that “the media” operate with a degree of autonomy, with their own rules
and resources, becomes harder to sustain.10 Even for the traditional mass media,
their modus operandi is ever less coherent, with the main institutions in mutual
tension, business models unsettled, distribution networks ever less predictable,
and unintended consequences multiplying.
So is the story of mediatization, at core, centred on the institutional perspec-
tive above? The 20th century saw an extraordinary confluence of global mass audi-
ences, dominant cultural narratives and the consolidation of media ownership

8 This includes the way in which changes in one medium has implications for, or remediates,
others (Bolter and Grusin 1999), as well as the many lively discussions of cross-media or multi-
media, or convergent media phenomena (e.g. Jenkins 2006; Evans 2011; Madianou and Miller 2012;
Schrøder and Larsen 2010). More radically, today’s media are no longer only or simply mass
media – and the requirement on researchers to look across “the media” has forced a rapprochement
between the long-separate study of mass communication and interpersonal communication, scoop-
ing up experts on many other once-fringe topics along the way (telecommunications, books,
music), and, then, approaching if not, yet, successfully integrating with the cognate fields of infor-
mation, library, and computer sciences. Such interdisciplinarity, a necessary consequence of our
changing subject matter, has certainly led to a rethinking of terms. Mediatization research proffers
one answer.
9 As Krotz (this volume) notes, the list of these is ever-expanding, from rolling news, cyberwar,
blogs, data surveillance, mobile phones, flashmobs, multiplayer games, wikis, ubiquitous music
to what might be termed e-everything (e-government, e-learning, e-health, etc.).
10 As Hartley (2009: 70) observes, “the emergent ‘creative industries’ are taking over in this cen-
tury the position that ‘the media’ held in the last”. He points to the many organizations, large and
small – including ordinary people – that are now or could be producers and distributors of mes-
sages. Relatedly, Blumler (2014) lists the abundant sources of political communication over and
above those originating in “the media” – consider the public dissemination of reports and research,
the campaigning materials of single issue groups and grassroots activism, and the array of messag-
ing originating directly with politicians and associated experts or think tanks.
712 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

structures. “The media” were triumphant even though any closer look revealed
the complexity, even the fragility of their seeming dominance – what Couldry
(2009) called the “myth” of the mediated centre, a myth promulgated not least by
the media themselves. Interestingly, Handbook authors who deal with fields (e.g.
sport, politics, religion, financial markets, public bureaucracies, and corporations)
whose histories are primarily located in the 20th century are uncertain about what
the 21st will bring. Meanwhile, Handbook authors whose accounts of mediatization
are primarily located in the 21st century tend not to offer a grounded history of
how we got here (e.g. science, education, climate change, digitization). To link the
two, mediatization research now needs to strengthen its media history. Especially,
it needs to determine whether the media, however defined, continue to be suffi-
ciently autonomous, or to have sufficiently coherent institutions and practices, to
influence other fields.11

4 Mediatization and modernity

We have distinguished the case for mediatization according to three overlapping
timescales. Over the longue durée of human history, cultures have variously shaped
and been shaped by the particular ways in which human communication is medi-
ated, both symbolically and materially. No simple or single process of mediation
can capture the diversity and complexity of communicative forms that the world
has seen, and the processes of mutual influence have often been unpredictable
and far from linear. But, with modernity’s particular intertwining of political, eco-
nomic, and social rationalization (sustained by meta-processes of democratization,
commercialization, individualization, and globalization), societies have been dis-
tinctively and deliberately reshaped by the institutional and cultural logics of the
media. In this second narrative, mediatization is conceived not simply as a conse-
quence of modernity but, rather, as a core meta-process that drives modernity
(Krotz 2007). Third, in the past few decades a tipping point was reached whereby
the unintended consequences and unpredictable counter-flows of modernity led
to a radical break, a reflexive and recursive refashioning of traditional values and

11 Notably, the signs are that while media companies will continue to dominate the 21st century,
their individual success is more fragile (how long will Facebook last?), their business models more
uncertain (consider the attack on Amazon’s tax strategy) and their effects more short-lived (online
memes may travel the world in a flash but they are forgotten equally rapidly). The dominance of
national or global media texts (from The Times of London to Dallas) or global media events (Dayan
and Katz 1992), for which as Gitlin (1980) said, The Whole World is Watching, is waning. From the
vantage point of the emerging digital network society of late, even post-modernity, we can now
see how the media have profoundly shaped the institutions of high modernity, moulding the insti-
tutions and structures of state, politics, religion, family, education, etc. that are now being trans-
formed in ways we cannot yet clearly grasp.
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 713

practices which first made possible and then became underpinned by the (ubiqui-
tous, infrastructural) digital networked age in which we now live.
We have suggested that the first of these accounts – mediatization as cultural
evolution through human history – offers a relatively weak history, primarily map-
ping historically and culturally diverse processes of mediation. Then, mediatiza-
tion as socio-technological transformations in the digital age seems, at best, a
history-in-the-making, being too recent to offer a reflective account of change or
even to secure the claims of a radical break with the past. Unsurprisingly then,
the strongest support for mediatization research comes from the analysis of medi-
atization as the exercise of institutional power in high modernity; this asserts a
clear historical narrative of media in modernity – that mediatization is the “dou-
ble-sided development in which media emerge as semi-autonomous institutions in
society at the same time as they become integrated into the very fabric of human
interaction in various social institutions like politics, business, or family” (Hjar-
vard 2012: 30). But must we choose one perspective over another? Might a general
theory of mediatization embrace transformations in institutions, technologies, and
culture simultaneously, over differing yet compatible timescales?
Social theorists argue that the relations between societal institutions, culture,
and technology during modernity should be seen in terms of continual flux and
tension, rather than in terms of periodic upheavals that disrupt otherwise stable
social structures (Giddens 1991; see Averbeck-Lietz; Krotz, this volume). Thus,
dynamism is characteristic of mediatization (and the other meta-processes of mod-
ernity12). Wittgenstein’s (1958) powerful image of the twisted rope is helpful: any
moment in time is like a cut through the rope, revealing multiple strands of differ-
ent lengths – some very long, some much shorter – stretching both into the past
and the future. Working out what any particular cut through the rope represents,
in terms of continuities and discontinuities, influences and consequences, challen-
ges the study of the present as well as that of the past. So, while each meta-process
has its own dynamics and historical trajectory, each intersects with the others, and
any moment in history must be understood as a cross-sectional cut through the
rope.13

12 While Krotz positions mediatization along with the meta-processes of globalization, individuali-
zation, and commercialization, Averbeck-Lietz reminds us of the broader range of dynamic and
intersecting processes that, together, constitute what we understand as modernity: hence we may
think also of industrialization, urbanization, secularization, rationalization, and democratization.
13 In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens (1991) cautions that when we cut the rope
in a particular place, certain strands will be more salient than others. Just as commercialization
was particularly salient for social theorists in the 1980s, as was globalization in the 1990s, it seems
that “the digital age” makes mediatization particularly salient at the start of the 21st century. But
we should not make the mistake of reifying any currently salient process as more fundamental
than the others, and nor does the salience of certain changes justify claims of a radical break in
modernity itself. Rather, discontinuities are part of the story of modernity (hence he describes the
present as late or reflexive modernity rather than post-modernity).
714 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

However, if mediatization, as Krotz (2007) suggests, is to be added to the list

of modernity’s meta-processes, what shall we say are its distinctive features? We
have already noted, with Couldry, that mediatization operates transversally, not so
much within a single field but, instead, across all fields. We have also argued that
while it may be claimed to operate across human history, the strongest case for
the influence of the media field on other fields is to be found in high modernity,
with the reshaping of core fields of power by the logics of dominant mass media
organizations. One further strand of argumentation may be discerned – we will
label this a concern with publicity. Consider Rawolle and Lingard’s interest in how
mediatization influenced the field of education through the effect of journalism on
discourses of education policy. Or recall Frandsen’s argument that the fields of
sport and media co-evolved in part because, on any scale beyond that of the village
cricket match, mass communication is vital to draw an audience. In one way or
another, the different fields of societal activity must connect individuals and insti-
tutions (the polity to the government, the consumer to the market, the congrega-
tion to the church).
In complex, democratic societies, one important means of connecting individu-
als and institutions is through mediated (first mass, then also networked) commu-
nication. To enable this on any scale, publicity is required, and publicity can be
read in two ways – democratizing or critical.14 In relation to the civic and political
field, for instance (and parallel arguments may be made for other fields), the media
underpin democratization by enabling public inclusion and citizen engagement,
also enhancing public accountability on the part of institutions. Yet as the media’s
promotion of publicity brings with it public relations, lobbying, branding, and
corporate management (Lunt and Livingstone 2012, 2013), thus the bureaucratic
logics of the state and the market logic of the commercial world together threaten
the autonomy of the public sphere and the lifeworld.
The difficulty in finding a term that integrates the benefits of democratization
with the dangers of publicity reveals a further challenge for mediatization
research, namely the place of critique. The prospects for individual autonomy and

14 To recognize the fundamental role of the media in modernity, one must give a positive as well
as a critical reading to the growing importance of publicity (we might even suggest a meta-process
of publicization). Habermas (1987a) himself would claim that the fundamental meta-process of
modernity at stake is rationalization, meaning the spread of rationality. He argues that modernity
has enabled the public to gain access to the benefits of science (partaking in truth), law (the
foundation of ethics), and criticism (the foundation of critical thought and reflection). But since
“rationalization” sounds oppressive in English, “democratization” might be a better term. Which-
ever terms are used, the value of Habermas’ account is that he examines the interrelations among
rationalization, marketization, and democratization in such a way that we can see how the media
enable an environment in which publicity becomes a critical currency of modern life, either as the
enlightened dispersal of knowledge that can be appropriated to human interests or the spread of
instrumental logics to the lifeworld, doubtless depending on the composition of the rope in any
given historical moment.
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 715

democratic politics have long been at the centre of thinking about modernity. Per-
sonal freedoms, along with the capacity of the people to govern or to affect those
who govern them, are hard won and fragile. The media have been at the heart of
these debates for many years, with scholars asking whether the media support
autonomy and democratic engagement or, instead, adversely extend the power of
commerce and the (neoliberal) state (e.g. Couldry 2008; Lunt and Livingstone 2012;
Blumler 2014). Yet few Handbook authors – including, surprisingly, those who
make the strongest claims about the growing dominance of media logics – offer
an explicitly critical reading of mediatization or refer to its resonance with ideology
critique in media studies (contrast Raymond Williams’ [1983] writings on media-
tion, for instance). This may reflect a deliberately neutral stance, on the part of
mediatization researchers, or it may indicate the relative immaturity of the field.15

5 How does mediatization work?

Throughout this Handbook, there is a running debate about how mediatization
works, and a clear desire to bring some order to the assorted processes of media
influence generated by media and communications research, often although not
only in relation to political communication. These include theories of diffusion,
agenda setting, framing, priming, cultivation, personalization, source theories,
media events, gate-keeping, two step flow, and more.
Two authors offer an integrative account. Strömbäck (2008) argues that, over
the past two centuries, the relations between the systems of media and of politics
shifted from one of the mere influence of mediated (compared with interpersonal)
communication on politics, towards the growing autonomy of media institutions
(as corporate actors but also as a cultural good) from politics. A subsequent phase
saw the increasing imposition of media logics on politics (“the point of no return”,
as Averback-Lietz puts it, this volume). And the third phase saw the thorough
going “internalization of media logic(s) by political actors” (Strömbäck and Esser,
this volume). Independently, Schulz (2004) sets out four dimensions of mediatiza-
tion (and these are put to work more heavily in this Handbook). As he defines it,
mediatization extends human capacities for communication through time and
space, it substitutes prior or direct social activities or experiences with mediated
ones, it amalgamates primary and secondary (or interpersonal and mass mediated)

15 Hepp (2013: 143) concludes in favour of “a multiperspectival critique of today’s cultures of

mediatization”, inviting critical attention to whatever is publicly hailed as “central” (the media,
the nation, whatever is popular) and calling for a “transcultural comparative” approach to reveal
inconsistencies in such powerful claims to cultural prominence. But this falls short of explicit
social justice concerns regarding the role of the media in political struggle or oppression that has
long occupied critical scholars.
716 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

activities; and it ensures the accommodation of social activities and institutions to

the media logic.16
The resonances between the two are worth developing further. Assuming that
before the existence of dominant mass media, the various fields of society relied
primarily on interpersonal communication, the media would first have both
extended the reach and altered the manner in which those fields operated. As
mass media grew in significance, one may further suppose that they simulta-
neously grew in institutional autonomy and came more to substitute for (or at
least supplement) previous forms of interaction. In proposing, next, the imposition
of media logics followed by the internalization of those logics, Strömbäck gives a
more negative reading of a development that, nonetheless, resembles Schulz’s
claim of amalgamation between and then accommodation to the media on the part
of the field being mediatizated. One can argue about the terms, but the homologies
seem sufficient to work with. It would now be interesting to examine how such
ideas might apply to other fields than that of politics.
But should one expect mediatization to work the same way in each field? Since
the system world, civil society, and lifeworld operate with different logics, their
relation to mediatization is likely to differ.17 Particularly, the above-discussed fac-
tor of publicity may make the difference, since each “world” bears a different
relation to the populace and, therefore, makes differing calls on the media. For
instance, the fields of law, science, art, and business, as revealed by Handbook
authors, represent long-established and highly rationalized systems of specialist
expertise with established institutions keen to protect their autonomy. However,
the developments in high modernity for public-facing bodies that not only dissemi-
nate to but which are also accountable to an increasingly literate and educated
public is one way in which the door was opened to mediatization. On the other
hand, in these fields mediatization has generated considerable tension, with
clashes of values and argumentation leading to a range of complex strategic
actions on behalf of both media and other institutions, as the case studies in this
volume indicate.
By contrast, civil society, sport, politics, religion, and education, as analysed
by other Handbook authors, illustrate fields which, while protective of their profes-

16 Both accounts are intended to be examined historically, although this does not always occur.
For example, Schafer (this volume) uses Schulz’s processes of extension, substitution, amalgama-
tion, and accommodation to uncover scientists’ address to the public, revealing their concern with
publicity and how they manage their professional interactions internally and externally. But his
focus is more to reveal how science is mediated today, than to compare with how science was
organized “before”, in previous decades or centuries.
17 Averbeck-Lietz maps the German terms medialization and mediatization onto the media’s influ-
ence on the institutions of established power (Habermas’ [1987b] system world) and the processes
or cultures of everyday life (the lifeworld) respectively, and others would further distinguish civil
society (Cohen and Arato 1992).
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 717

sional norms and values, have always depended on establishing a close relation
to the public – as consumers, as voting citizens, as a congregation, as students –
and thus the door to mediatization could hardly be closed, publicity being core to
their success. Here, however, we see some of the most strongly contested clashes
between the values of the public or civil society and the logics of mediatization.
Then, other Handbook authors have examined the lifeworld – for example, phe-
nomena of popular culture, memory, domestic space, gender, migration, and
death. In these, the role of media varies, but insofar as the media of representation,
communication, and distribution have changed (increasingly commercial, global,
individualized), mediatization can be seen as also rewriting the history of the
lifeworld. In these, mediatization has resulted in fewer outright clashes, since the
lifeworld has fewer organizations speaking for its interests, but strong tensions are
discernible in the many public anxieties about how everyday life is increasingly
embedded in media (or lived in media; Deuze 2012). In short, we suggest both that
mediatization might work differently in different fields, and it might also work
in multiple ways within any one field: this is an interesting agenda for future
research.

6 Everything is mediated but not mediatized

This volume abounds with definitions, with a common concern being the at-times
contested relation between mediation and mediatization. As we have argued,
mediatization research claims the media play an increasing role in societal change
across multiple fields, instilling their logics in those other fields even while they
are also shaped by them. We see this fundamentally-historical claim as different
from the analysis of mediation as the situated dynamics of structure and agency
playing out in particular symbolic and material contexts (Silverstone 2005).18 In
other words, while all forms of human interaction are mediated in one way or
another, not all interaction involves communication, and nor is all communication
mediated by institutionally-organized, technologically-enabled forms of media.
Moreover, not everything that is mediated by institutionally-organized, technologi-
cally-enabled forms of media is changing in significant ways over time. In short,
everything is mediated but not everything is (yet) mediatized (Livingstone 2009).

18 Fornas puts it well when he says, in this volume: “media are socially organized technologies
for communication, … mediated communication is that kind of intercourse that makes use of such
institutionalized tools that are primarily intended for communication [and] mediatization is … an
historical process whereby communication media become in some respect more ‘important’ in
expanding areas of life and society [and, specifically, ...] how institutionalized technologies of
communication expand in extension and power”.
718 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

On the other hand, not all forms of mediation are of direct interest to media and
communications research, but all forms of mediatization certainly are.19
Mediation research, then, is very broad in its scope, encompassing all the ways
in which human interaction is mediated by the cultural forms and practices of
human beings (the conciliators, diplomats, and wise women of a society), tools
and machines (the technologies to manage time, space, and the environment –
for example, transport, timekeeping, maps, telecommunications, or weaponry), all
forms of language (verbal, nonverbal, and visual), diverse modes of exchange
(including trade, distribution and, especially money) and, not least, the media of
human communication (from cave paintings and rune stones to the Internet). By
comparison with mediatization research, mediation research’s focus on what is
“in-between” makes for detailed contextual research more than grand narratives
of modernity; it also makes for more critical research, recognizing that mediation
matters most at the sites in which power is exercised, struggled over, or concili-
ated.
In his analysis of popular culture, Fornas (this volume) reveals the distinct
but complementary relations between mediation and mediatization. His chapter
outlines a periodization of European popular culture as follows: (1) Graphic medi-
atization – in which the development of early human tools for recording speech
(writing), image (drawing), and music (notation) permitted the transmission of
meanings across time and space. Access to these tools and associated literacies
was highly restricted, creating a break between the elite culture, which saw “a de-
and re-contextualizing distanciation between the artefact and the original author,
audience, and context” and the popular arts (e.g. singing, dance, storytelling),
which remained relatively unmarked by the developing tools and literacies to
which they had little access. (2) Print mediatization (from the mid-16th century) –
in which the elites increasingly withdrew from the common culture, developing
printed works (often religious) which, gradually, and from a low starting point,
came to influence, and be incorporated in, the plays, performances, and other
practices of popular (now, low) culture. (3) Audiovisual mediatization (from the
early 19th century) – in which the rise of capitalist, industrialized society gave rise
to a commercialized popular culture for the bourgeois middle classes and upper

19 At the most fundamental level, this Handbook is concerned with human interaction, all of
which is mediated – at a minimum, by the human body and the material context. However, a
(large) subset of human interaction is mediated by language or other communicative forms and so
constitutes communication of one kind or another. Then, a (growing) subset of communication is
mediated by institutionally-organized, technologically-enabled forms of media. Mediatization, we
suggest, is the claim that these institutionally-organized, technologically-enabled forms of media
are increasing in the scope or scale of their influence (a simple, quantitative claim) and/or in the
nature of their influence (a more complex, qualitative claim). Note that this influence is not con-
ceived in terms of the direct causal effects long studied by media effects research but, rather, in
terms of environmental or ecological influences working in interaction with many other sources of
influence.
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 719

working class (drawing on the technological innovations of audiovisual media –

photography, cinema, phonography, telegraphy, then broadcasting). (4) Digital
mediatization (late 20th century) – which has accelerated and intensified the con-
vergence and divergence of social and cultural forms and practices, complicating
the relations between production and consumption, releasing and yet commodify-
ing the democratic potential of popular culture and, in a historical reversal, draw-
ing the cultural elites back into engaging with popular culture by “making omnivo-
rous diversity and combinatory capacities (rather than any pure and exclusive
taste for the high arts) the most important marks of distinction”.20
In terms of our three narratives, his period of graphic mediatization illustrates
the multi-located, non-linear shifts in cultural mediations that ebb and flow over
millennia. His period of print mediatization and, especially that of audiovisual
mediatization traces the centuries-long process of establishing media institutions
whose rising dominance drove forward the imposition of a capitalist logic on hith-
erto messy and diverse cultural practices. His period of digital mediatization
sketches the shifting contours of popular culture over recent decades, simulta-
neously intensifying yet undoing the capitalist logic as subaltern and alternative
processes of mediation gain some purchase. In this integrative approach – which
may, of course, work differently in different fields, Fornas allows for diverse proc-
esses of mediatization at different times, neither claiming a single overarching
process or a cumulative linear effect. To achieve such breadth, he draws on what
is already known, from decades of in-depth empirical work on mediation, rather
than hazarding a new story yet to be tested against the evidence. We will end this
chapter by suggesting that mediatization research might usefully re-interpret the
many existing findings of mediation research by re-locating and integrating them
within a historical frame.

7 Hashtag mediatization
A considerable, and at times problematically diverse, body of work has been
brought together under the banner of “mediatization research”. Some have under-

20 Thus his analysis of the mediatization of popular culture in the 20th century (the audiovisual
phase) centres on the gradual standardization of formats, the emergence of systems of reproduction
and distribution, and the management of required forms of expertise (for production and consump-
tion). Specifically, as media institutions gained autonomy and power in their own right, popular
culture was transformed from common lived culture into modern mass media culture. But he then
concludes that, since popular culture was already transformed into mass media culture by the late
20th century, there was, strictly speaking, little popular culture left to be further mediatized through
the digital, networked media of the 21st. We would disagree, for surely the advent of social media
marks a new phase in the mediatization of popular culture, as all kinds of interpersonal practices
not yet incorporated into mass culture (think of chat, jokes, rumour, photo-sharing, bullying even)
are being mediatized in new ways yet to be understood.
720 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt

taken detailed empirical studies of institutions or practices as they were influenced

by the media in particular cultural contexts or historical periods. Some have hailed
the study of mediatization as the integrating concept needed to guide media and
communication research in the future. The diverse chapters of this Handbook rep-
resent a response to the “call to develop an empirically founded theorization of
the manner in which our cultures are changing with the advance of mediatization”
(Hepp 2013: 14). Yet they also testify to the many and lively debates about con-
cepts, methods, and claims surrounding mediatization research. Since the contrib-
utors to this Handbook take various positions on these debates, we as discussants
and you as readers have been faced with the task of drawing overall conclusions.
Clark (2014) likens mediatization research to that of the medium theorists half
a century before (e.g. McLuhan and Fiore 1967), when television seemingly
wrought dramatic changes to society in the mid-20th century. Today, the rapid
introduction of the Internet – again reaching most western homes in just a decade
or so – is generating widespread analysis and re-evaluation of societal institutions
and practices. But to capture the zeitgeist, as she puts it, McLuhan and his col-
leagues wrote for a popular audience, offering not only an analysis but also a
diagnosis of the society being transformed. A parallel diagnosis of mediatized soci-
ety today would undoubtedly be welcomed by many, and plenty of media studies
scholars are stepping forward for this purpose. But this is not the path taken by
contributors to this Handbook.
Rather than combining a synthetic account of what is happening with a predic-
tion of the future and a judgement of what is good or bad, what is to be hoped
for or feared – even some recommendations for what should be done, they aim
for the intellectual prize of establishing the role of the media (and hence the poten-
tial of media and communications research) for the academic disciplines that
study the different fields that constitute society. In other words, given the rise of
mediatization as a meta-process of modernity, media and communication research
might have a theory of value to the other social scientists seeking to explain poli-
tics, religion, education, sport, science, culture, and more. We are therefore temp-
ted to refer to Thomas Kuhn’s tests for a new paradigm (1962). To paraphrase,
one might ask: does mediatization answer unsolved puzzles? Does it support a
community of practice with a new vision of researchable questions? Does it
embrace a wider array of empirical phenomena in a more parsimonious manner
than competing concepts or theories? We are inclined to answer “yes” to the first
two questions but suggest that more research is needed before concluding that
mediatization improves on the explanatory power of its rivals, for which a short
list would include the media ecology tradition, actor network theory, mediation
theory, media/digital anthropology, critical theory of technology, and digital cul-
ture studies.
Our proposal, therefore, is to conceive of mediatization research as a second-
order investigation. Media and communication researchers, as well as those in
 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication research? 721

other disciplines, will continue to examine media texts, practices, influences, insti-
tutions, and flows. To be grist to the mill of mediatization research, such work
must occur across multiple fields, and on multiple timescales, and this means that
media scholars must collaborate with a range of disciplinary expertise regarding
the different fields under investigation, while also combining present and histori-
cal methods of analysis. The mediatization researcher can then collate what are,
typically, snapshots in time and place so as to map the dynamics that reveal the
relations between the history of media, the mediation of society, and the analysis
of social change.
Thus, without in the least meaning to denigrate mediatization research, we
would reframe it in terms of the hashtag (#) – in other words, as a way of tagging,
collating and comparing ideas, claims, and evidence so that those specifically
interested in what can be learned by grouping such phenomena together can more
easily do so. Studies can be tagged whether or not they were explicitly intended
to advance the cause of mediatizion.
As this volume attests, there is already a rapidly growing and fascinating body
of research to be found at #mediatization. What it will become, however, we wait
to see. This chapter has argued that, to understand the mediation of history, we
must not only understand the history of media and the histories of mediation
within diverse societal fields, but we must also grasp whether, when, and how
these have distinctively influenced society in and across fields. To progress this
task, three directions have been developed thus far – mediatization as socio-tech-
nological transformations in the digital age, mediatization as the exercise of insti-
tutional power in high modernity, and mediatization as cultural evolution through
human history. Each invites further research, but only by unravelling their interre-
lations can a truly compelling case be made for mediatization as a meta-process
in modernity.

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Biographical sketches

Kent Asp is Professor of Journalism at the University of Gothenburg, and Director

of the Swedish Media Election Studies (SMES). His research is focused on journal-
ism, power, and democracy. Asp first presented his theory on the mediatization of
politics in Mäktiga massmedier (1986) [Powerful Mass Media], and the theory has
since then been the foundation to Asp’s research on how the power of the media
and the emergence of the media as independent institutions have changed the
political system and the functioning of democracy.

Philip Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communica-

tion of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He writes on performance, popular
music, media, and visual art. His publications include: Presence and Resistance:
Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1992), From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism
and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1997), and Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized
Culture (Routledge, 1999), for which he received the prestigious Callaway Prize for
the Best Book in Theatre or Drama. Most recently published books are Performing
Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006), also for the Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, and a second, updated and expanded edition of Liveness
published by Routledge in 2008. Auslander is the founding editor of The Art Sec-
tion: An Online Journal of Art and Cultural Commentary (www.theartsection.com)
and a working film actor.

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz is a Professor for Media Change at the Institute for Media,
Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen (ZeMKI),
Germany. She has had visiting professorships at the Universities of Zurich and
of Münster. She participates in the research group “Communicative Figurations”
(Excellence-Initiative-Program supported by the German Government) at the Uni-
versity of Bremen. Her habilitation project at the University of Leipzig was on
Communication Theories in France (monograph in 2010); her Ph.D. Project at the
University of Münster was on German Newspaper Science during the Weimar
Republic (monograph in 2000). She is co-editor of Studies in Communication and
Media (SC/M) and Speaker of the “International and Intercultural Communica-
tion”-section in the German Association for Communication Researchers (DGPuK).

Bryna Bogoch is an Associate Professor at the School of Communication and the

Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies at Bar Ilan University, and
co-chair of the Center for Media and Law. She has conducted research and written
extensively in the fields of media and the law, and gender, language, and the law,
including a large-scale project on gender bias in the Israeli Courts. Her work has
appeared in communications, discourse and socio-legal journals.
726 Biographical sketches

Göran Bolin is Professor in Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn Univer-

sity, Stockholm, Sweden. His research covers media production studies as well as
audience studies, and his latest work is focused on how media production and
consumption are interrelated in the wake of digitization. He is the author of Value
and the Media. Production and Consumption in Digital Markets (Ashgate, 2011),
and editor of Cultural Technologies. The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society
(Routledge, 2012).
Karin Knorr Cetina is Principal Investigator of the research project “Scopic Media”,
University of Konstanz, a founding member of the Institute for Global Society Stud-
ies at the University of Bielefeld, and a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at
the University of Chicago. Major publications include the books Epistemic Cultures
(Harvard UP, 3rd printing 2003), Handbook of the Sociology of Financial Markets
(ed. with Alex Preda, Oxford University Press, 2012) and Maverick Markets: The
Global Currency Market as a Cultural Form (forthcoming).
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the Lon-
don School of Economics. He is the author or editor of eleven books including Eth-
ics of Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013, co-edited with Mirca Madianou and Amit
Pinchevski), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity,
2012) and Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage, 2010).
Charles M. Ess is Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Communi-
cation, University of Oslo, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion,
Drury University. Ess has received awards for excellence in teaching and scholar-
ship; he has also held several guest professorships in Europe and Scandinavia –
most recently as Professor MSO, Media Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
(2009–2012). Ess has published extensively in Information and Computing Ethics
(e.g. Digital Media Ethics, 2nd edition, Polity Press, 2013) and in Internet Studies
(e.g. with William Dutton, The Rise of Internet Studies, New Media and Society 15
(5), 2013). Ess emphasizes cross-cultural approaches to media, communication,
and ethics, focusing especially on virtue ethics and its illuminations of being
human in an (analogue-)digital age.
Frank Esser is Professor of International & Comparative Media Research at the
University of Zurich. There he also co-directs an 80-person strong National
Research Center on the Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century (NCCR Democ-
racy). After studying in Mainz and London, he was assistant professor at the Uni-
versity of Missouri and visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma, of Texas
(Austin) and of California (San Diego). His research focuses on cross-national stud-
ies of news journalism and political communication. His books include Comparing
Political Communication (2004, with Barbara Pfetsch), Handbook of Comparative
Communication Research (2012, with Thomas Hanitzsch), Democracy in the Age of
Globalization and Mediatization (2013, with Hanspeter Kriesi), and Mediatization
of Politics (2014, with Jesper Strömbäck).
 Biographical sketches 727

Tine Ustad Figenschou is a Postdoctoral Candidate at the Department of Media

and Communication, University of Oslo. She has written articles and chapters on
international journalism, and her research emphasizes the strategic relations and
conflicts between the news media and political, military, and administrative elites.
Her latest book is Al Jazeera and the Global Media Landscape: The South is Talking
Back (2013, New York: Routledge). Figenschou is currently a postdoctoral candi-
date on the “Mediation of Migration” project (University of Oslo, 2011–14).
Niels Ole Finnemann is Professor of Media Studies with special reference to Digital
Media and Internet Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is head of NetLab,
within the national Danish Digital Humanities Lab, and former Head of the Center
for Internet Studies at Aarhus University. He has authored books, articles, chap-
ters, and reviews related to communication, cognition, media theories, and the
history of digital media. He has been a member of the Norwegian Research Coun-
cil’s Committee for the Social Sciences and is member of the advisory Board for
the EU FP7 funded coordinating committee for research infrastructure initiatives,
DASISH and participates in EU COST actions on Internet and Web studies. He is
currently concerned with notion of digital media and the relations between digital
materials and methods aiming at the development of a research infrastructure for
the study of web materials and archived web materials.
Johan Fornäs is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn Uni-
versity, Sweden and Editor-in-Chief of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural
Research. Having initiated the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation’s (Riks-
bankens Jubileumsfond) Sector Committee for the Mediatization of Culture and
Everyday Life, his research interests concern media culture, intermediality, popu-
lar music, and intersectional identity discourses, most recently focusing on sym-
bols and narratives of European identity. His English books include Cultural Theory
and Late Modernity (Sage, 1995); Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity
and Interactivity on the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002); Consuming Media: Communica-
tion, Shopping and Everyday Life (Berg, 2007); Signifying Europe (Intellect, 2012);
and Capitalism: A Companion to Marx’s Economy Critique (Routledge, 2013).
Kirsten Frandsen is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the Department of
Aesthetics and Communication, Arts, Aarhus University. She has published on
varying aspects of sports in the media including both theoretical contributions,
empirical studies of production of televised sports, globalization, historical devel-
opments of sportsbroadcasting and sportsjournalism in general, audience studies,
and sports broadcasters’ use of digital platforms. Lately she has been director
of the collective research project “Television Entertainment: Crossmediality and
Knowledge” (2006–2009) and currently she is participating in the collective
research project “Mediatization of Culture: The Challenge of New Media” (2011–
2014), where she is making empirical studies of the social integration of digital
media by individual and organizational agents in sports.
728 Biographical sketches

Maren Hartmann is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Arts (UdK) Ber-
lin. She received her PhD from the University of Westminster and has worked at
several universities in the UK, Belgium, and Germany in both research and teach-
ing positions. Until recently, she was a member of the Executive Board of ECREA
as well as (Vice-)Chair of the media sociology section of the DGPuK. She also
founded (and led for some time) the digital culture and communication section of
ECREA. Her research focuses mostly on media appropriation processes and con-
cepts (esp. domestication), on digital media cultures, on the relationship between
media and space(s), on the question of the materiality of media, and on mobility.
She has published widely in these fields. A recent article appeared in the first
issue of Mobile Media and Communication.

Uwe Hasebrink is Director of the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research and
Professor for Empirical Communication Research at the University of Hamburg,
Germany. He has been involved in a number of international research networks,
e.g. EU Kids Online, the International Radio Research Network (IREN), and the
COST Action “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”; in 2010 he
chaired the organizing committee of ECREA’s 3rd European Communication Con-
ference in Hamburg. His main research interests are related to patterns of media
use in converging media environments, children’s and young people’s online expe-
riences, and the information-related foundations of today’s public spheres. Cur-
rently he acts as co-coordinator of the research network “Communicative Figura-
tions” (see www. kommunikative-figurationen.de).

Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the ZeMKI,

Centre for Communications, Media and Information Research, University of Bre-
men, Germany. He is co-initiator and principal investigator of the DFG priority
program “Mediatized Worlds” and the Creative Unit “Communicative Figurations”
(a research network with the University of Hamburg). Hepp’s main research areas
are media and communication theory, media sociology, mediatization research,
transnational and transcultural communication, media change, and methods of
media culture research. His publications include Media Events in a Global Age (ed.
with N. Couldry and F. Krotz; Routledge, 2010), Cultures of Mediatization (Polity
Press, 2013), and Mediatized Worlds (edited with F. Krotz; Palgrave 2014).

Stig Hjarvard is Professor of Media Studies and Vice-Chair at the Department of

Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. His research
interests include journalism, media history, media and globalization, media and
religion, and mediatization theory. He is chief editor of the journals Northern Lights
(Intellect Press) and Journal of Media, Cognition and Communication (Royal Danish
Library). His most recent books in English are Mediatization and Religion: Nordic
Perspectives (co-edited with Mia Lövheim, Nordicom, 2012) and The Mediatization
of Culture and Society (Routledge, 2013).
 Biographical sketches 729

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in Global Security at the

University of Glasgow, UK. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal
of Memory Studies, Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Stud-
ies, and Co-Editor of the Routledge book series Media, War & Security. He leads
the ESRC Google Data Analytics Project: “The Role of Internet Search in Elections
in Established and Challenged Democracies” (http://voterecology.com) and he
holds an AHRC Fellowship (2014–15) entitled: “Technologies of memory and archi-
val regimes: War diaries before and after the connective turn”. His current book
project (co-authored with John Tulloch) is: Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media,
Memory, Uncertainty (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
Twitter @andrewhoskins.
Øyvind Ihlen is a Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, Uni-
versity of Oslo. He has published over sixty journal articles and book chapters,
and written or edited eight books, including Public Relations and Social Theory:
Key Figures and Concepts (2009) and the award winning Handbook of Communica-
tion and Corporate Social Responsibility (2011). His research focuses on strategic
communication and journalism, using theories of rhetoric and sociology on issues
such as the environment, immigration and corporate social responsibility.
André Jansson is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Karlstad
University, Sweden. His research mainly concerns media, identity, and globaliza-
tion processes, bridging the disciplinary divides between media studies, human
geography, and cultural sociology. Jansson’s most recent work has been published
in journals such as Space and Culture, International Journal of Cultural Studies and
Communication Theory. His most recent book in English is the co-edited volume
Media, Surveillance and Identity: Social Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2014, with C.
Christensen).
Friedrich Krotz is Professor for Media and Communication Studies at ZeMKI, Centre
for Communications, Media and Information Research, University of Bremen, Ger-
many. He is coordinator of the DFG priority program “Mediatized World” and leads
the project “A qualitative longitudinal study about the mediatization of social rela-
tionships” (with Andreas Hepp). His research interests are media change and
mediatization, social communication theory, cultural studies, and methodology.
His publications include Mediatisierung: Fallstudien zum Wandel von Kommunika-
tion (VS, 2007), Mediatization: A Concept to Grasp Media and Societal Change (in
K. Lundby; Peter Lang, 2009), and Mediatized Worlds (edited with A. Hepp; Pal-
grave, 2014).
Risto Kunelius is Professor of Journalism, School of Media, Communication and
Theatre and Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at University
of Tampere. His research interests range from mediatization of political decision-
making and changing journalistic professionalism to transnational and compara-
tive study of journalism. He has authored several books on media and communica-
730 Biographical sketches

tion studies in Finland, edited a number of international volumes on global media

events and published articles in various internationaljournalism and media studies
journals. He is a co-director of the MediaClimate network that conducts ongoing
research on global coverage of climate change, most recently resulting in two a co-
edited books: Global Climate, Local Journalisms (Projekt Verlag) and Media Meets
Climate. The Global Challenge for Journalism (NORDICOM).

Bob Lingard works in the School of Education at the University of Queensland,

Australia. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He previ-
ously held the Andrew Bell Chair in Education at the University of Edinburgh. His
most recent books include: Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education (Rout-
ledge, 2014), Globalizing Education Policy (Routledge, 2010), co-authored with
Fazal Rizvi, and Educating Boys (Palgrave, 2009), co-authored with Wayne Martino
and Martin Mills. He is editor of the journal, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural
Politics of a Education and of the Routledge (New York) book series, Key Ideas and
Education with Greg Dimitriadis.

Sonia Livingstone teaches and researches in the Department of Media and Commu-
nications at LSE. She is author or editor of eighteen books and many academic
articles and chapters, including Media Regulation (2012, with Peter Lunt), Children,
Risk and Safety Online (2012, edited with Leslie Haddon and Anke Goerzig), Mean-
ings of Audiences (2013, edited with Richard Butsch), and Digital Technologies in
the Lives of Young People (2014, edited with Chris Davies and John Coleman). She
has held visiting professor positions at the Universities of Bergen, Copenhagen,
Harvard, Illinois, Milan, Paris II, and Stockholm, and is on the editorial board
of several leading journals. She was President of the International Communica-
tion Association in 2007–8. Taking a comparative, critical, and contextualized
approach, Sonia’s research asks why and how the changing conditions of media-
tion are reshaping everyday practices and possibilities for action and identity in
public and private spheres.

Knut Lundby is Professor at the Department of Media and Communication, Univer-

sity of Oslo, Norway. He has background in sociology and wrote his doctoral disser-
tation in sociology of religion. Lundby was among the founding members of the
international research community on Media, Religion and Culture and edited
Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture (Sage, 1997) with Stewart M. Hoover.
Lundby was founding director of the research centre InterMedia, University of
Oslo, working on communication, learning, and design in digital environments.
He directed the international research project “Mediatized Stories. Mediation per-
spectives on digital storytelling among youth” (2006–11). Lundby has edited Digital
Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Self-representations in New Media (2008) and Medi-
atization: Concept, Changes, Consequences (2009), and Religion Across Media. From
Early Antiquity to Late Modernity (2013), all with Peter Lang in New York.
 Biographical sketches 731

Peter Lunt is Professor and Head of the Department of Media and Communication
at the University of Leicester, UK. Trained as a social psychologist, his main areas
of research have been in the psychology of consumption, media audiences (partic-
ularly public participation in and through popular culture) and, more recently,
media regulation. His recent books are Stanley Milgram (Palgrave, 2011) and Media
Regulation (Sage, 2012) with Sonia Livingstone. He is currently writing a book
Goffman and the Media for Polity with Espen Ytreberg and conducting a project
on media portrayals of the relation between moral and political discourse in dis-
cussions of social justice with David Scott.
Mia Lövheim is Professor in Sociology of Religion at the Faculty of Theology,
Uppsala University. Her research focuses on performances of religious and gender
identity among youth, particularly on the Internet, and on representations of reli-
gion in Swedish daily press. She has published several articles engaging with the
theme of religion and mediatization in the journals Nordicom Review; Information,
Communication and Society; Feminist Media Studies; Culture and Religion and Nor-
dic Journal of Society and Religion. She is the editor of Media, Religion and Gender:
Key Issues and New Challenges (Routledge, 2013) and with Stig Hjarvard Mediatiza-
tion and Religion: Nordic Perspectives (Nordicom, 2012).
Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communica-
tions, Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published extensively on the
social consequences of new media especially in relation to processes of transna-
tionalism and migration. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: News, Audien-
ces and the Politics of Identity (2005) and Migration and New Media: Transnational
Families and Polymedia (2012 with D. Miller) as well as editor of Ethics of Media
(2013 with N. Couldry and A. Pinchevski).
Josef Pallas is Associate Professor at the Department of Business Studies and the
Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. His research mainly
concerns the increased mediatization of the Western societies and the implications
this has for the way modern organizations are governed. He is especially interested
in public sector organizations such as governmental agencies and universities. He
is co-author and co-editor of number of books/book chapters as well as journal
articles and reports dealing with the topics of mediatization, corporate communi-
cation, and corporate governance.
Anat Peleg is a lecturer at the School of Law at The College of Management and
director of the Center for Media and Law at Bar Ilan University. She was the senior
legal-reporter of the Israeli National Radio for 17 years. Her main research interest
is the effect of the media on the legal community and the judicial process. She
has published in media and law journals, including the book Open Court (2012,
Tel Aviv: Matar).
Shaun Rawolle is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and a member of the
Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation at Deakin University,
732 Biographical sketches

Australia. Shaun has published in the areas of communications, new contractual-

ism, sociology of education, and education policy. Shaun is completing a book for
Routledge with Professor Bob Lingard, Bourdieu and the Fields of Education Policy.
Mike S. Schäfer is Professor for Science, Crisis and Risk Communication at the
Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research (IPMZ) at the University of
Zurich, and speaker of the “Communication and Politics” division of the German
Society for Communications Research. He holds a PhD from the Free University of
Berlin and has worked at universities in Leipzig and Hamburg. Schäfer’s research
focuses on science communication, political communication, environmental and
particularly climate change communication as well as public sphere theory, com-
bining the analysis of mass communication with a focus on online communication.
He has authored a number of books and articles on these topics including, for
example, Online Communication about Climate Change and Climate Politics. A Lit-
erature Review (2012, in Wiley’s Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change), Taking
Stock: a Meta-Analysis of Studies on the Media’s Coverage of Science (2012, in Public
Understanding of Science) and Is There a Medialization of Climate Science? (2013,
in Science Communication, with Ana Ivanova, Inga Schlichting, and Andreas
Schmidt). Twitter @mss7676
Jesper Strömbäck is Professor in Political Communication and Ludvig Nordström
Professor and Chair in Journalism at Mid Sweden University, where he is also
research director at the research institute DEMICOM. He has published more than
150 books, book chapters and journal articles on political communication, political
news journalism, political public relations and political marketing, public opinion
formation, and the mediatization of politics. Among his most recent books are the
Mediatization of Politics. Understanding the Transformation of Western Democra-
cies, edited together with Frank Esser (2014), Opinion Polls and the Media. Reflect-
ing and Shaping Public Opinion, edited together with Christina Holtz-Bacha (2012)
and Political Public Relations. Principles and Applications, edited together with
Spiro Kiousis (2011).
Johanna Sumiala is Adjunct Professor (Docent) in the Department of Social
Research/Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
Currently she works at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as Kone Foun-
dation Senior Fellow. She has authored books, articles, and chapters related to
public death, religion, ritual, social media, and virtual ethnography. She is co-
editor of School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age (Emerald, 2013) and
author of Media and Ritual. Death, Community and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2013).
Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at China Research Centre,
University of Technology Sydney. She researches in a number of areas, including
Chinese media and cultural studies, migration and social change in China, and
diasporic Chinese media. Her current projects include China's communication
practices, public diplomacy, and lifestyle media. Wanning is the author of two
 Biographical sketches 733

single-authored monographs Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational

Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and Maid in China: Media, Morality and
the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (Routledge, 2009). Together with Michael Keane,
she just recently edited a four-volume reader Chinese Media: Critical Concepts in
Media and Cultural Studies (Routledge 2013).
Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud is Senior Researcher and Project Leader at the University
of Oslo, Department of Media and Communication. She heads an international
multidisciplinary research project on media and migration (2011–14). Her research
interests include strategic communication, elite studies, news ethnography, and
comparative analysis. She has published on the mediatization of politics, religion,
and bureaucracies and the effects of different media systems.
Eliseo Verón (1935–2014) was Professor at the University of San Andrés, Argentina,
and Honorary President of the International Center of Semiotics and Communica-
tion Studies in Brazil (Japaratinga, Alagoas). He published more than twenty books
and around a hundred articles on communication theory, discourse analysis, and
mass media research. After graduate studies in philosophy at the University of
Buenos Aires, he undertook post-graduate studies at the Laboratory of Social
Anthropology of the Collège de France, in Paris, under the direction of Claude
Lévi-Strauss. In 1985, he obtained his Ph.D. (Doctorat d’Etat) in Linguistics at the
University of Paris VIII, where he became Director of the Department of Informa-
tion and Communication Sciences. After 24 years living in France, he returned to
Argentina, where he became a full professor at the University of San Andrés, lead-
ing the post-graduate program in Journalism and the graduate program in Commu-
nication. He was a Guggenheim Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation.
Jürgen Wilke is Professor Emeritus for communication research at the Institut für
Publizistik, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz (Germany). He studied also art
history and has published several books and numerous articles, particularly within
the fields of media history and media structure, news selection, political communi-
cation, and international communication. He taught as Visiting Scholar at the Uni-
versity of Washington (Seattle/USA), at the Universitá della Svizzera Italiana
(Lugano/Switzerland) and the Lomonosov University (Moscow/Russian Federa-
tion) where he was nominated Prof. h.c. in 2004. He has been a corresponding
member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna) since 2005.
Index
agency 203, 207–209, 560–561, 564
archive
– living archive 661–663, 669, 671
art 466–467
– digital art 471; see also digital media
– press art 467–468
– sound art 469
– video art 470–471
authoritarianism 87
autonomy 618–619, 624–625, 630
auto-poietic systems 171
Baudrillard, Jean 179–185
belonging 263, 265
Bildung 618, 630, 636
Bourdieu, Pierre 227, 231–237, 241, 595, 597,
602–610, 707; see also fields
brands 427, 429
bureaucracy
– bureaucratic logic 405, 418
– public bureaucracies 405–410, 413–418
censorship 88, 90, 99–103
change 3, 6–8, 10–11, 18–19, 22, 25–26, 30,
32
– cultural change 153, 155
– media change see media
– social change 325–326
– societal change 363–365
character 506, 508–509, 513–514, 520
communication 3, 5, 7, 32
– communication history 110, 483
– communication studies 131, 139–141
– history of communication research 109
– interpersonal communication 323, 341
– political communication 354, 364
communicative
– communicative constructivism 251, 257
– communicative figurations 249–250, 258–
267; see also figurations
– communicative form 525, 532–533, 535
commercialization 530, 535, 537–538
connectivity 669–670
– hyperconnectivity 662–664, 676
contention 5, 23–29
convergence 325, 328–330
corporations 423–435
Couldry, Nick 6, 10–11, 17, 178, 211, 222, 598,
603, 704, 707, 712, 714
culture 483, 486–488
– cultural change see change
– cultural technologies 188
– culturalization 486–488
– popular culture 483, 485–486, 488–501
death
– public death 682–684
definitions 12, 14–19
democracy 410, 417, 619, 630, 634, 636
development
– long term development 133, 137
digital media 304; see also art; see also
grammar; see also technology
– digital materials and genres 297
– digitization and mediatization see
mediatization
– grammar of digital media 297
– networked digital media, notion of 308–309
domestication 641–642, 644–647, 649–650,
653, 656–657
edited corporation 433–434
effects, see media
emergence 666, 669
Esser, Frank, see Strömbäck, Jesper
ethnography 324, 342
– media anthropology see media
everyday 641–642
– everyday life 273, 276–277, 288, 290–292,
644–646
exposure 527, 537, 538
face-to-face situation see situation
family
– family relationships 342
– transnational families 323, 326, 331, 334
fatefulness 39, 42, 53, 58–59
fields 231–238, 241–243; see also Bourdieu
– cross field-effects 595, 597–598, 602–606,
608
– field theory 602–603, 707
– global fields 595, 603–604, 607
figurations 227, 238–239, 243; see also
communicative figurations
736 Index
flow 505–513
framing expertise 433
game 525, 533–534
grammar
– grammar of digital media see digital media
– production grammars 170–171
– reconnaissance grammars 170–171
globalization 525, 596, 607–608, 610–612
government 227, 241–243
Habermas, Jürgen 109–119, 714; see also
theory
– publicity 709, 711, 714, 716–717
– rationalization 709, 712
Hanusch, Folker 682, 684–686
Hepp, Andreas 10, 17, 19, 186, 205, 316, 558–
559, 565, 622–623, 661, 715
history
– communication history see communication
– history of mediation see mediation
– history of mediatization research see
mediatization
– media history see media
– mediation of history see mediation
– mediatization as a historical process see
mediatization
Hjarvard, Stig 7, 11–13, 15, 17, 24–25, 27–28,
77, 163, 177, 179–180, 255, 507–508, 547,
550–566
home
– homelessness 642, 649–655
– homing 641–642, 655–657
– notion of home 650
individualization 525, 530
information 39, 40, 49–59
institution 199, 202–208; see also power; see
also media; see also theory
– institutional logics 199, 203, 210, 212–219
– institutional power see power
interaction 266–267, 465
Internet 297, 571, 584; see also digital media
– Internet and mass media 297
– Internet research 571, 579–580
JIT (just in time), 519–520
journalism
– global journalism 63, 79
journalists
– legal journalists 443
jurisprudence
– judicial independence and the media 443–
444, 447, 454–455
– legal journalists see journalists
– legal logic 446, 450, 457
– legal profession and the media 443, 458
Kant, Immanuel 624–625, 631–632, 636–637
Kennedy, John F. 683, 686, 688, 691, 695
Kepplinger, Hans Matthias 257, 384–385
Krotz, Friedrich 15, 17, 19, 22, 24–25, 29–30,
110, 114–115, 178, 186, 211–212, 298–299,
349–350, 573–574, 584, 607, 622–623,
641–643, 681–682
Lady Gaga 514–521
laboratory studies 571, 584
legitimacy 425–427, 434–435
– political legitimacy 87
literacy 166–168
logic
– bureaucratic logic see bureaucracy
– institutional logics see institution
– legal logic see jurisprudence
– media logic see media
– news logic 406–408, 418
– political logic 375, 378–379, 381, 383, 390
Manheim, Ernest 111–112, 117, 119–123, 125
marketing 476–477
mash-up 516, 519–520
massacre
– cinema massacre 681, 689–690, 695
materiality 273
Mazzoleni, Gianpetro 14, 89, 151–153, 364,
372
media 3, 8, 681, 704–705, 710–712; see also
communication; see also digital media;
see also theory
– institutionalization of media 297; see also
institution
– judicial independence and the media see
jurisprudence
– legal profession and the media see
jurisprudence
– mass media 465, 571–572, 575–579; see
also Internet
– materializations of media 297
– media anthropology 325, 334
 Index 737

– media change 132–133, 137–139, 141, 144– – operationalization 406–408

145, 149–155 – phases of mediatization 116, 667–671
– media effects 454–455 – self-mediatization 385–386
– media environments 323 – scopic mediatization 39, 60; see also media
– media events 70, 90–94, 96–97, 102 medium
– media dependency 351–352, 368 – medium concept 144–145
– media history 109, 483 – medium theory see theory
– media influence 384–385, 392–396 memory 662–663
– media institutions 375; see also institution meso-level 202, 204, 207
– media interventionism 390–392 Meyen, Michael 18, 110, 466, 572, 643
– media logic 229–230, 238, 355–357, 366– migration 323–328
367, 375–376, 378–379, 381–382, 384– modernity 175, 209–211, 712–715
386, 390–392, 443–447, 449, 452, 457– – modernization 136–137
459, 479–480, 682, 693, 695 – second modernity 179, 193–194
– media meta-capital 235–237, 241, 243 multi-selfing 505
– media power see power museum 472–474
– media relations 424–425, 427, 429, 431–434
– media technologies see technology new institutionalism see theory
– news media 406–408, 410–413 news
– polymedia 328–331, 341 – news logic see logic
– scopic media 40, 42–45, 53, 56–57, 60; see – news media see media
also mediatization Nicki Minaj 508–509
– social media 579, 581, 583 Nissenbaum, Helen 632–633
– sports/media complex see sport Nordic 552, 555, 562
mediality
– transmediality 257 on demand 513, 519
medialization 114, 572 ontological (in-)security 641–642, 647–649
mediatic phenomenon 163–165, 166–167 operationalization see mediatization
mediation 6–10, 547, 550, 557, 559–560, 563–
566, 717–719; see also mediatization partnership 527, 538–539
– history of mediation 703–704 persona 506–509, 514, 520
– mediation of history 703–704, 724 phenomenology 273, 280
mediatization place of critique 714
– conceptualization of mediatization 5, 14–19, Plato 635–637
63–67, 131, 133–134, 156–158, 163–165, polarization 525, 539
175–176, 227–228, 249–250, 273–276, political
349, 351–352, 406–408, 444–445, 465– – political communication see communication
467, 483–486, 572–575, 596–597, 622– – political legitimicacy see legitimacy
623, 642–644, 704–705 – political logic see logic
– digitization and mediatization 297 politics
– history of mediatization research 13–14, 109 – climate politics 74, 79
– mediatization as a historical process 23–25, – mediatization of politics see mediatization
109 power 264–265
– mediatization as hashtag 719–721 – institutional power 713, 721
– mediatization by the government 87, 93–98 – media power 351–352, 365–367
– mediatization of politics 349, 351–352, 375– – soft power 92, 97
379 privacy 631–634
– mediatization with Chinese process
characteristics 87 – mediatization as a historical process see
– modes of mediatization 314 mediatization
738 Index

– meta process 135–137 space-time alterations 163

– non-linear processes 165–166 sport 527–528
production grammars see grammar – sports/media complex 527
professionalism 77–80 structuralism 188
propaganda 87, 101–104 Strömbäck, Jesper 12, 17, 27, 111, 116–117,
pseudo events 432 177–178, 186, 350, 443–447, 457, 715–716
public diplomacy 88–90
public bureaucracies see bureaucracy taste 490, 498–499
public relations 424–428, 476–477 technology 280–282; see also media
publicity see Habermas – cultural technologies see culture
– media technologies 189–190
rationalization see Habermas – new communication technologies 323
regimes 219–221 – new technologies 595; see also digital
religion 547–549 media
reputation 427–429 temporality 666, 672–674
research 5, 574 theory 4–5, 17–18
respatialization 607–608 – exchange theory 349
response presence 45, 47–48, 51–52 – field theory see fields
risk 72 – media theories, modern or general 297
ritual 683–684, 690–693 – medium theory 141–145, 315–318, 619–623
rules 253, 263–264 – middle-range theory 205
– rules and resources 204, 206–207 – new institutional theory 407–408
– new institutionalism 357
Schulz, Winfried 14, 25–26, 109, 116–119, 122, – public sphere theory 114
125, 151–153, 223, 284, 308, 352–353, – social theory 227–231
364–369, 377, 384, 443–445, 449, 457– – structuration theory 206–209
458, 533, 573–575, 681, 683, 687, 693, timing 430–431
696, 715–716 transformation 7–8, 202, 211, 216, 220
science 571–572 translocality 249
– post-normal science 73 trust 56–57, 535
secularization 548, 555
segmentation 264–265 Utøya 683, 691–692, 695
semiosis 164
situation virtue ethics 618–619, 626–628, 630–634
– face-to-face situation 39, 45, 47, 49, 60
– synthetic situation 45–49 war
social space 227–228, 278, 285, 291–292, – diffused war 669
595, 604 Weber, Max 123–125
social world 131 Williams, Raymond 505–507, 510–511, 513
society 175–178 writing 166–168