Mediatization and cultural change (original) (raw)
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Mediatization and Cultural Change by Stig Hjarvard and Line Nybro Petersen
In his 1958 essay 'Culture is Ordinary', Raymond Williams gave a condensed statement of his view on culture, one that came to inspire a new way of studying culture in society: "We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life -the common meanings, to mean the arts and learning -the special processes of discovery and creative effort" (Williams, 1958, p. 4). Williams not only combined an anthropological notion of culture as everyday life with an artistic view of culture as distinct representational and knowledgebuilding artifacts and practices; he also insisted on their mutual interdependency. In doing so, he pointed to the necessity of understanding all cultural artifacts and practices -from popular media to the finest art, from everyday rituals to scientific endeavors -in their social and material contexts, without lessening their creative and intellectual dimensions.
Contemporary subjects, mediatization and socio-cultural practices
International Journal for Innovation Education and Research, 2019
This paper relies on digital ethnography as a methodological frame and addresses the cyberspace as a context for the research of social and discursive interactions. Mediatization is taken as a key concept for the investigation of cultural practices that involve digital technologies. The assumptions are supported by the study of the case of “Know your meme”, a website dedicated to find and document memes and viral phenomena. Grounded on a critical view of the interrelations between digital media, communication and society, it pinpoints remix and multimodality as two of the main stylistic resources employed in meaning-making processes. The analysis suggests that the contemporary subject resorts to digital media affordances and the immediateness of internet communication to create/share memes in response to offline events. It also considers that featuring memes as objects in a curator’s page turn these texts into social-cultural artifacts. Assuming a dialogic point of view, the discuss...
Media History and the Mediatization of Everyday Life
Media History, 2016
Mediatization became a central concept in media studies in the 2000s, and it has also attracted critical discussion among media scholars. One part of the criticism of the concept concerns its relevance in relation to the history of media. In this article, I discuss the concept of mediatization in media history studies, especially when it comes to everyday life. I am predominantly interested in its 'weak form'-particularly the idea that mediatization is a historical process that depends strongly on the historical context. The article suggests that mediatization should be located in specific historical situations and in the meanings of history. Firstly, the concept should be seen as a process that is realized inside the meta-processes of globalization, individualization and commercialization-not as its own meta-process. Secondly, when adapting the concept to the socio-cultural factors of media history, it should be placed in the creation of world views. The article suggests that mediatization as a concept is most useful in media history studies when it is applied in studying the role of media in the history of everyday life.
The Mediatization of Society. A Theory of the Media as Agents of Social and Cultural Change
Using mediatization as the key concept, this article presents a theory of the influence media exert on society and culture. After reviewing existing discussions of mediatization by Krotz (2007), Schulz (2004), Thompson (1995), and others, an institutional approach to the medi-atization process is suggested. Mediatization is to be considered a double-sided process of high modernity in which the media on the one hand emerge as an independent institution with a logic of its own that other social institutions have to accommodate to. On the other hand, media simultaneously become an integrated part of other institutions like politics, work, family, and religion as more and more of these institutional activities are performed through both interactive and mass media. The logic of the media refers to the institutional and technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic resources and make use of formal and informal rules.
Mediatization: Theorizing the Interplay between Media, Culture and Society
In response to Deacon and Stanyer's article 'Mediatization: Key Concept or Conceptual Bandwagon?', we argue that they build their criticism on a simplified methodology. They mistake a media-centered approach for a media-centric one, and they do not capture how mediatization research engages with the complex relationship between changes in media and communication on the one hand and changes in various fields of culture and society on the other. We conclude that the emergence of the concept of mediatization is part of a paradigmatic shift within media and communication research.
This article provides an overview of the mediatisation approach, which for the last two decades has gradually become a systematic concept for understanding and theorising the transformation of everyday life, culture and society in the context of the ongoing transformation of media. The article is divided into four sections. The first section addresses the ongoing transformation of media and the emergence of a computer-controlled digital infrastructure for all symbolic operations in a society; some of the new types of media are also presented. In the second section, the development of the mediatisation approach as a reaction to media changes is explained, and the central assumptions and conditions of this approach are discussed. This section also shows why, in addition to actual mediatisation research, historical mediatisation research is also necessary to understand the developments occurring today. The third section clarifies this and discusses how the transformation of media produces a transformation of everyday life, culture and society; this section also presents some results of empirical studies. The fourth and final section provides some preliminary ideas about how to establish a necessary third branch of mediatisation research, which offers a critical view with reference to civil society, besides actual and historical mediatisation research. KEYWORDS transformation of media; media change; digital infrastructure; symbolic operations; transformation of everyday life; mediatisation; historical research; critical research; civil society
Questioning (Deep) Mediatization: A Historical and Anthropological Critique
International Journal of Communication, 2021
The mediatization thesis maintains that media technologies, beginning with print, have profoundly changed human experience. One of its major claims is that media have allowed a new "disembedding," or "distanciation," from the here and now, in a process which now culminates as a so-called deep mediatization. Relying on cultural history and anthropology, this article questions this claim. It contends that mediatization theory is premised on a modern/naturalist, human-centered view of the world as a homogeneous physical nature, dominated by human beings who must resort to technologies to communicate at a distance. This outlook disregards ancient and/or peripheral non-Western ontologies, and cultural practices such as correspondence, theater, religion, and human language itself, which have long enabled rich forms of distanciation. Such neglected ontologies and practices now combine with modern technology, and could be fruitfully incorporated into mediatization research, both historical and contemporary.
Media, Culture & Society, 2016
In responding to the debate about the theory of mediatization, we reject criticisms that foreclose prematurely on this set of new ideas potentially worthy of further exploration, and we give more attention to the fundamental questions that critics have asked about mediatization. We note that controversy centres on the claim that mediatization is a societal metaprocess of the order of globalization, individualization and commercialization. Substantiating this claim would require an ambitious, evidenced account of socio-historical change over centuries, along with recognition of mediatization research as a valuable contribution to the analysis of modernity on which scholars of other supposedly mediatized domains now draw. We invite sceptics of mediatization to articulate their critique by reference to the now sizeable body of writing on this concept. We call on proponents of mediatization – along with others keen to understand social and media change within the history of modernity – ...
Three tasks for mediatization research: contributions to an open agenda
Based on the interdisciplinary experience of a Swedish research committee, this article discusses critical conceptual issues raised by the current debate on mediatization -a concept that holds great potential to constitute a space for synthesized understandings of media-related social transformations. In contrast to other, more metaphorical constructions, mediatization can be studied empirically in systematic ways through various sub-processes that together provide a complex picture of how culture and everyday life evolve in times of media saturation. The first part of this article argues that mediatization researchers have sometimes formulated too grand claims as to mediatization's status as a unitary approach, a meta-theory or a paradigm. Such claims have led to problematic confusions around the concept and should be abandoned in favour of a more open agenda. In line with such a call for openness, the second part of the article introduces historicity, specificity and measurability as three transdisciplinary and transparadigmatic tasks for the contemporary mediatization research agenda.