Mediatization of Communication 9783110272215, 9783110271935

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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

The publication of this series has been partly funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano.

ISBN 978-3-11-027193-5 e-ISBN (ePub) 978-3-11-039345-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-027221-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Oliver Rossi/Photographer’s Choice RF/Gettyimages Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

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, linguistics, 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 Encyclopedia 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 communication 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 coming-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 extensive 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, methodology, organisational communication – but none so far has tried to comprehensively cover the discipline as a whole.

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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 intellectual 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 multifaceted or fragmented, it also recognizes two very general approaches to communication which can be distinguished as: a) the semiotic or linguistic approach associated particularly with the humanities and developed especially where the Romance languages have been dominant and b) a quantitative approach associated 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 undergraduates, 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 promise 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.

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Note: administration on this series has been funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano. Thanks go to the president of the university, 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 Konwitschny 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 mediatization 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 Acknowledgements

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ix

I.

Introduction

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Knut Lundby Mediatization of Communication

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II. Global changes

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Karin Knorr Cetina Scopic media and global coordination: the mediatization of face-to-face encounters 39

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

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

III. The long history

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

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

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Eliseo Verón Mediatization theory: a semio-anthropological perspective

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IV. Media in society

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

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

Nick Couldry 10 Mediatization and the future of field theory

V.

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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 Niels Ole Finnemann 13 Digitization: new trajectories of mediatization?

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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

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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

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Øyvind Ihlen and Josef Pallas 18 Mediatization of corporations

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Bryna Bogoch and Anat Peleg 19 Law in the age of media logic

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VII. Art and the popular Jürgen Wilke 20 Art: multiplied mediatization

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Johan Fornäs 21 Mediatization of popular culture

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Philip Auslander 22 Barbie in a meat dress: performance and mediatization in the 21st century 505 Kirsten Frandsen 23 Mediatization of sports

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VIII. Faith and knowledge Mia Lövheim 24 Mediatization and religion

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Mike S. Schäfer 25 The media in the labs, and the labs in the media: what we know about the 571 mediatization of science Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingard 26 Mediatization and education: a sociological account

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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 617

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Maren Hartmann 28 Home is where the heart is? Ontological security and the mediatization of 641 homelessness Andrew Hoskins 29 The mediatization of memory

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Johanna Sumiala 30 Mediatization of public death

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X. Critical afterthought Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt 31 Mediatization: an emerging paradigm for media and communication 703 research? Biographical sketches Index

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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 sciences 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 ambitious 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 practices, cultures, and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations 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 communication 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 environment. 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.

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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 mediatization is part of large, global processes. The third section deals with The long history of mediatization and of mediatization research. Mediatization may be understood to follow the “social construction of everyday life, society and culture as a whole” by any medium in human communication (Krotz 2009: 24; Couldry 2012: 136–137). This takes the history of mediatization way back, at least to the invention of printing and even writing, depending on the definition of “media” that is applied. Mediatization intensifies with modernity, as technical media become more and more prominent in communication processes 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 mediatization 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 processes, 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,

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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 preceding chapters in this volume Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt distinguish between three “ideal typical accounts of mediatization”, namely “the longue durée of cultural 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 categories 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 origin of human history or recent digital decades

Media-saturated in high/late modernity

Technology

Media as tools in communication

Characteristics of various media

Media logic in institutions

Theory

Social-constructivist, symbolic-interactionist

Medium theory, theories of materiality and space

Structuration, new institutionalism

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

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2 Mediatization versus mediation The difference or possible overlap between the concepts of “mediation” and “mediatization” has, for a long time, created lively debates. There are two aspects of this discussion: First, what is the distinction between ongoing mediated communication 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 “mediazation 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 “mediatization” 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” (Silverstone 2005: 189). His use of “mediation”, then, is quite close to the use of “mediatization” in this volume. Silverstone had a great impact on fellow British researchers (for example Couldry 2008). However, in time, many of them have come to favour the term “mediatization”. 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” (Couldry 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.

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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 “conductors” 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 communication, 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 communication into “mediated communication”. The particular medium impacts the outcome of the communication as it formats the content. Radio sets other requirements 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 longterm 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 mediatization considers the long-term structural transformations of media’s role in contemporary culture and society.” Mediated communication turns into a process of mediatization 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”.

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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. However, 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 mediatization” (Agha 2011: 163). And within the regular processes of mediated communication 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 captures sociocultural transformations related to such media-based communication. The media, then, act as agents of cultural and social change. The core of mediatization 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 moulding 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 conditions 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

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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 rotundus) as the cause. From the beginning, the indigenous members of the team focused on pre-mediatizing their work – for instance, by asking Briggs to photograph 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 mediatization. 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 American 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: Comunicación, 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 technology 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

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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 processes 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 opinion” 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 mediatization. My own take is a sociological perspective on media and communication. However, the field of media and communication studies is in itself multidisciplinary, drawing upon various scientific traditions from the humanities and social sciences, as well as research on the workings and uses of information and communication 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 “Conceptualizing Mediatization”, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp (2013) point to a “socialconstructivist” 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 reality 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.

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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 transformations 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 institutions as developed by Anthony Giddens (1984) with his thinking about the duality between structure and agency. This perspective also draws on “new institutionalism” 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 perspective 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 communication 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 “textures” 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 perspectives 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 volume that there are tensions between the different approaches to the study of mediatization. There are nuances and more specific theoretical approaches within each of the three ideal types – the cultural, the material, and the institutional. The reader

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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 chapters (Nick Couldry’s as well as Shaun Rawolle and Bob Lingaard’s). Several contributors 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 predominance of sociologically influenced media and communication perspectives.

4 Defining mediatization Mediatization research explores the transforming potential of mediated communication 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 conceptualized, 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 “society-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

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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 understand 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 practices 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 meaning it is understood in this volume. However, the bulk of specific German mediatization 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, crucially, 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.” Hjarvard, himself one of the leading thinkers in contemporary Scandinavian research on mediatization, trace the Scandinavian history of mediatization research back

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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 postmodern 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 conclude 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). Definitions 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.

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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 historical 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 historical 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 mediatization, yet with reference to Krotz’ definition of mediatization as an all-encompassing 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 Livingstone 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 perspective on digitization could be mutually compatible with the institutional perspective, 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 position, arguing that digital media make a new “matrix” – constellation of media –

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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 ‘important’ 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 mediatization”, and “audiovisual mediatization.” Fornäs identifies problems in the concept of mediatization with popular culture as a testing ground: if there is mediatization, when, where, and how does it appear, and what practices and spheres does it affect? Mediatization of popular culture is “when media are increasingly entangled in the popular aesthetic”, making mediatization “almost synonymous with popularization”. The institutional technologies of culture are the keys to mediatization, 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 institutions to have peaked on the systems level, while the mediatization of the lifeworld – 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 second 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-toface 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 science. 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 contrasting the new “relational self” to the “literacy-print” that the “individual self” leans on.

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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 concrete 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 theoretical 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 alternative 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 education 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 interaction 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 domestication with the theory of mediatization (Hartmann this volume). Hepp and Hasebrink (in this volume) understand mediatization with symbolic interaction in the interre-

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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 particular 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 reactions 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.

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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 mediatization (Couldry and Hepp 2013: 197). This is formulated within a cultural perspective but encompasses three components that are acknowledged among scholars across the range of perspectives. First, mediatization is a long-term process. Second, mediatization implies transformations 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 operationalization 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 mediatization as a long-term process? This section will not offer solutions to all these challenges 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 functions in society (cf. Hjarvard this volume) or “fields” in Bourdieu’s sense (cf. Coul-

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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 mediatization 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 Hartmann, 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 mediatization. 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 interaction and “communicative figurations” (Chapter 11). Kent Asp rethinks the question 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 contribution to the handbook on digitization (Chapter 13) that so far, “it seems that digitization should be seen as a particular mode of mediatization or rather a set of particular 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.

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Sometimes news stories on public death get as much media attention as performances 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 communication” 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 operationalization 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 bureaucracies 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 operationalization: “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 organization.” 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 interpersonal communication. The second dimension regards the degree to which media operate with autonomy in relation to political institutions. The third dimension

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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 individual 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 general transformations of culture and society. Of course, there are connections between the levels. For example, individuals have to adapt to mediatized environments within institutions and the larger setting, and the other way round: individuals act, contribute, and change such mediatized environments. As put by Friedrich 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 environments” 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 transform 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

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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 phenomenon 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, Technology, and Theory, as indicated with Figure 1 above. In each of these three dimensions 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 History. 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 contemporary advanced phase of modernity).

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The tension over Time in mediatization research has its roots in different definitions of this process of transformation. The outcome is a totally different conception 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 volume). 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 phenomenon: “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 differentiated 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 modernization.” Other handbook authors who think of mediatization as a cultural process following 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 consider “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).

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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 considered by Göran Bolin (in Chapter 8) to emphasize the technological aspect. In contrast, when Friedrich Krotz (in Chapter 6) terms mediatization “a mover in modernity”, 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 historical 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 digitized. The distinction is rather between the distributed, user-directed “new” media and the centralized, producer-directed “old” media. The issues of contention centre 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 activities and social institutions that assume media form; third, in the amalgamation of mediated and non-mediated activities; and finally, accommodation, that communication 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-

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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, amalgamate with pre-existing socio-material patterns in increasingly flexible and openended 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 demonstrates 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 process 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 misleading to continue to talk about “popular culture” as something separate, however, 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 mediatization 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 integrated in the concept of media”. However, he admits that that the concept of mediatization is still relevant to the study of digital media.

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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 mediatization. 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 important, 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-constructivist 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. Hjarvard 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).

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“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 criticism 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 consciousness” 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 mediatization (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 institutions and culture and society in general as they become dependent on the resources 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 networked 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 –

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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 – touchscreens – 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 Friedrich 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 reference 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

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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 endless combinations of bits and bytes. This demands digital competence. Digital literacy 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 identity” 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 domestication. However, she rather works with the concrete concepts of “home” and people’s feeling of “ontological security” than “the fairly abstract notion of the everyday”. 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 Chapter 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. Mediatization 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 connectivity (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.

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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 mediatization 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 relevant 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 (Averbeck-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) advocates. Mediatization studies, in general, turn to the wider patterns of transformations 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 communication 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 consequences 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-

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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 characteristics as key to changes; and an Institutional perspective that studies how the media and various institutions in society change according to different institutional logics. These are ideal types, as researchers may apply more than one perspective 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 institutional interactions is the focus. All three perspectives have strengths and weaknesses, 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 developments of the mediated communication in society and changes in the social, political, 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 keywords 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 mediatization involving screen-based electronic media. The technologies involved differ, but in all cases they “present” and make available to participants what lies spatially and temporally beyond their reach. The inclusion of screen-based technologies 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 attentional 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 mediate 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

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participants, thereby sustaining and bringing liquidity to the market. Foreign exchange deals through these channels start in the order of several hundred thousand 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 acquisitions). 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 market 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 displays to which traders are attached (see figure 1).1 How can we conceptualize the assemblage of hardware, software, and information 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 questions: 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 onscreen 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.

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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 relationships 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 technologies 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 – underwater 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

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requires us to take into account the assemblage of screens, and the screen projections, 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 fashioned and integrated. It also identifies monitoring and observation – an audience’s visual attention and the spatial and temporal structures that sustain it – as important components of this type of coordination. The notion of information technology, as we tend to understand it, invokes the image of pipes through which something 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 contrast, 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 instances. Cooperation, strategic alliances, exchange, emotional bonds, kinship ties, personal 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 “periscope”. 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 directions. 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 centering 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 embodied, pre-reflexive occurrences. This furnishes a different type of coordination than

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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 relational 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 everyone 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 perceived together, scopic media expand and augment local situations (i.e., situations 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 situations (as measured by participants’ physical togetherness in a common space) can at the same time be global, when non-present others and territorially dis-

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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 particular television channels that presented identical, sensory rich records of leaders’ speeches along with gory images of casualties, attacks, and symbolically laden calls to arms and support. One assumes that for those who had become Al Qaeda members and who regularly drew on such scoped presentations, 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 expansion 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 computer itself is an algorithm in its core. Algorithms are simply sets of instructions 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 advantage of them by enhancing their speed, creating interfaces (e.g. trading platforms), 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 volume. What this means is that algorithms are now functionally equivalent and operationally superior parties in trading interactions – they can act with super-

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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 reconfigure the situation. In addition, “synthetic” agents, the algorithms and software 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 physically 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 software’s) functioning.

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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 “witnessable” through sight or hearing, as opposed to imputation or inference.3 Anthropologists 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 hypothesis 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, shopping (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 communication, 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 transaction chain.

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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 collectively. 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 admirably 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 situation 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 arrangement 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 components – 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 symbolic 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 boundary 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 situation 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

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can distinguish four types of synthetic situations. In the markets studied, the environment 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 background section of the physical trading floor: that section of the floor to which traders are sensorily attuned and over which they command some auditory attention 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 argument: 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 synthetic 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

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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 everything 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 interaction 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 synthetic 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 contrast, is a composite of information bits that may arise from many areas around the world and feature the most diverse and fragmented content. Synthetic situations are always in the process of being assembled: from automatic and less automatic information feeds, from real-life reporting, and from the interactions themselves 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 selfdescribed as particular speech acts, and transaction challenges. Synthetic situations also have to be created specifically and delivered reliably to the interaction.

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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 relevant 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 information 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 continuous updating – with patients, this includes new daily measurements of temperature, blood pressure, and so forth, new test results, the response to treatment, and perhaps caretakers’ observations of mood and body function. A synthetic situation’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 continuous 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 prices, transaction records, trading conversations, headline and financial news, commentary and analysis, bulletin board entries, newly published indicators and statistics, 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 headline 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:

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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 environment 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 information, 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 flickering, 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 onscreen) 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 monitoring – 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

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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 responders 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 traders 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. Traders 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 conversation 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 interaction. 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 situation’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 instruments). 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-

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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 aggregate 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 particular 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 aggregate supply and demand. The reality also includes contextual information participants see on-screen. For traders “the market is everything” that occurs at a particular 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 portion of the context may become relevant to responses. Thus, when the screen projects an “other” for participants, with whom these participants interact, it projects 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 reciprocity, are key elements in a well-functioning social system. In the last few decades social scientists have associated these elements with networks of social relationships. In a network, participants monitor each other’s’ behavior and sanction it if necessary. Thus a network can deter its members from opportunism and malfeasance through internal self-regulation – which may simply be more effective and efficient than the use of hierarchy in organizations, or the use of legal sanctions (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 alternative 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 simultaneously, 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.

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To take these arguments up in turn, let us look again at the example of currency 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 transactions. 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 mediatization – 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 “conversational 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 referential whole of “everything” to which traders point when they talk about the market. Thomson Reuters prides itself on having 200 bureaus and 2700 full-time journalists 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.

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heavily on these services. They come as close as one can get to delivering a standalone 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 values – 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 development 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 communication technologies have made the network notion salient, strengthened preexisting 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 organized 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 question 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, projecting 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 transaction 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-historicizing properties (for example, price histories are displayed and a multiplicity of

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other histories can be called up). The electronic programs and circuits supporting this screen-world assemble and implement on one platform the previously dispersed 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 continuously, synchronously, and immediately. Attention to the screens is mandatory and coercive – the equivalent of a scopic mechanism on the human side and a behavioral pattern that identifies professional market participants. Coordination results from the simultaneous injection of bursts of content onto a collective of observers – 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 contemporary term for what Hayek described in 1945. We can also visualize this attentional integration and the emotions and talk carried along with it as a social membrane 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 managers 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 auction. The technical infrastructure for these events is “secured” by multiple means. For example, there are two separate auction management teams in case one team

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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 predetermined 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 transmit and implement trust management practices. Moreover, because of the transparency 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 existence 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 happening, 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 eliminating delay associated with physical distance or absence, through exhibiting reliability and straightforwardness at the expense of heightened profit, and through conspicuously 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.

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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 gamble’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 consequences but also from unexpected consequential matters that may become foregrounded in a situation. Think of a plane in flight – many of the formal rules regulating passenger conduct and the informal conventions of behavior passengers 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 configured; 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).

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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 encounters. 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. Algorithms 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).

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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 involving 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 coordination 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 highenergy 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 severalstory 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 projects and are located all over the globe, but also to project and monitor the institutional rules such projects require. More generally speaking, the synthetic components 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.

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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 futureoriented political imagination, and challenges the very material base that our modern, 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 technological shifts in attention dynamics and interactional affordances to the politics of representation – shapes the mutual interaction of social actors. It also means avoiding being abstracted from particular, historical subject matters and taking seriously 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 climate news agenda, representing the real (climate science and media logic), political representation (climate change, media, and the political field) and journalistic professionalism. As a conclusion, the chapter briefly tackles mediatization as a discourse, and the normative dimensions mediatization research. Keywords: climate politics, post-normal science, risk, global journalism, professionalism, 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 powerful 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.

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At the same time climate change is a global problem construction that surpasses 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 challenges 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 symbol 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, particular practices – and certain level of autonomy. It is the borders of these differentiated 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 important media actors and institutions (e.g. Do all public actors need media training?) Because an unspoken assumption about a “healthy” degree of differentiation (a

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desirable diversity of rationalities) is deeply rooted in our modern social imagination, 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, teachers, 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 mediatization 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 boundaries, climate change by its “nature” challenges the modern imagination of institutional 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 particular 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 institutions – “the media” – too. It means that despite the irritating tautology, it makes sense to talk about “mediatization of the media” (for instance journalism) (Kunelius 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) recognized in a particular domain, and takes the shape of a claim of “media” affecting someone (journalism influencing political practice, television shaping family rou-

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tines and rituals, mobile phones transforming parent–children relations, social networking reworking privacy, etc.). However, such pressures are never just signaled into institutional domains as pure “stimulus” (of, say new media technologies) 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, complexity 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 “institution” 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 Bangladesh 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 institutional relations are shaped by concrete issues and interests is particularly interesting. 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 “mediatized 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

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and discourses (cf. Ekecrantz 2007; Krotz 2009), and any talk about the “mediatized 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 imagination, in media studies, perhaps in social theory more generally). Recognizing that mediatization always is about mediating not only between actors and institutions 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 mediatization 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 discourse, and in particular, the normative dimensions of this discourse.

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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 Reunanen 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 interesting 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

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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 differentiation 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 convergence 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 symbolic 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. Rödder 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, Kunelius 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-

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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 meager 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 “supernova” kind of media event (star quality participants from Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger, 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 contradictory 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 multiplied 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

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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 applications 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 assessments. 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 “scientists 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.

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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 scientists 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 “mediatization 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.

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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 Climategate 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 contemporary 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, watchdog-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 illustrates 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 unimaginable 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 solutions. 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-

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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 relationship 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 longreaching 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 “bystander” logic as a contrast to this see Kumpu and Rhaman 2012.

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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 economy 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 signifiers 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 exporting 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 examples 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, September 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 problem? 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.

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terrorism, where substantial policy, investment and cultural change was implemented to minimise 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 emphasis)

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 internationally. This is also true of other issues than climate change. But for mediatization research one lesson is at least an important one: even if there might be something 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 Journal 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 background 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 parallelism of the party press and the professional, objective, public service news journalism – 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-

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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 technology has additionally shaken the taken-for-granted (often virtually monopolized) 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 mediatized 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 profiling (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 development 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 commentators” (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 institutions (in constantly reproducing collective identities) and their diminishing centrality (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 “professionalization” 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 journalism 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,

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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 Bourdieu (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 “mediatization” 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 Waisbord 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 industries 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 (climate 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,

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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 journalists 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 consequences 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-thinking 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 imaginaries 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 climate 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 “professionally 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 interpretations 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-

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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 innovation 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 “mediatization” 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 profession. 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 includes 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 contradictory forms or logics of more or less institutionalized communication. This is problematic, 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 imagination 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.

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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-century 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 ideology has for decades been under severe critical scrutiny from media researchers. Recently, this neutral objectivity-paradigm has eroded and perhaps is in the process of being increasingly replaced by a role of emphasizing transparency, exposure 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 institutional 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. “Mediatization” 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 decentering, in my mind, has two aspects that also have consequences for the normative 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 mediatization 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 particular 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.

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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 positions 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 mediatization research.7 Rather we need mediatization research in which different stakeholder positions are built into the research designs and conceptualization of mediatization. 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 studying 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 mediatization 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”, “accountability”, “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.

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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 conflicted, 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 mediated 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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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 communication 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 consumption of foreign audiences, this chapter argues that capacity of the Chinese state to harness mediatization is crucial to its soft power objectives. This discussion adds a cross-cultural dimension to its theorization, and at the same time facilitates a much needed rethinking of the propaganda practices pursued by Chinese media. Keywords: mediatization with Chinese characteristics, mediatization by the government, 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 decades. 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

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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 politics 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 political 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 government to government diplomacy therefore must be supplemented by a range of other forms of diplomacy, including public diplomacy, media diplomacy, and people-to-people diplomacy. In the domain of China’s communication and media practices, 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.

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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 mediatization 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 technologies 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 audience”. The implication of this process is clear. On the one hand, the boundary is becoming increasingly deterritorialized and cannot be fixed to geographic demarcations separating guonei (inside China) and guowai (outside China). On the other hand, domestic audiences and global audiences continue to exist in vastly different 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 (Strömbäck 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-Western societies, which, though still under authoritarian or even totalitarian rule, are nevertheless equally caught up in the “meta-processes” (Krotz 2009) of urbanization and globalization, as well as mediatization? “Media logic” has been conceptualized 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. Nevertheless, 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 mediatization (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-

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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 mediatization 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 concerned 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 chapter 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 government 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 undesirable consequences of mediatization from the perspective of the Chinese government. 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, covering and interpreting social, cultural and political phenomena” (Strömbäck and Esser 2009: 212), the concept of media logic draws our attention to the form and

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formats in which information and experience is selected, organized, and presented (Snow 1983; Altheide 1995). Exploiting media logic, media events effectively harness 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 exponentially from early modernity to late modernity (Lundby 2009). Given the phenomenal 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 mediatization. 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 experimented 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 conference at Beijing University. Questions to Clinton from journalists and Chinese students, 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 community 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 military parade on October 1, 1999 marking the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic 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 platforms, 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

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signalled post-Olympics China’s emergence as a “world power” that has reasserted its deep commitment to a return to national glory (Finlay 2008). If the Olympic Games was the most spectacular, the annual Chinese Spring Festival Television Gala is arguably the most innovative media event format on Chinese television. 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 astonishing 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 ceremonial media events not only refuse to decline; they have actually gained a heightened 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-massification of media audience, live transmission of national ceremonies, rituals, and events, particularly via satellite, is still a significant nation-building media strategy

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and practice in the political communication in China. In fact, two factors – technological 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 temporality 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 centrality. 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” (Liebes 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 politicians 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, mediatizations 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 “coproductions” between broadcasters and establishments, whereas disruptive events

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are characterized by “co-productions” between broadcasters and anti-establishment 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. Wellknown 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 artefacts 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 network” 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 identifying the culprit. The second phase of the coverage featured mainly media events, whereby funerals and the memorial ceremonies were televised on national television. 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 inadequacies and blind spots in the media’s own coverage of the event.

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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 disasters 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 rescuing 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 developments, 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 reporting 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 themselves to be caring, strong, yet vulnerable individuals (Sun 2010). Premier Wen gained a reputation as “Premier Warmth”, and stories of heroic but human individuals – 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 backdrop 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-

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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 disaster 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 represented 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 manner 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 reporting of the event, provided a regular summary of foreign national leaders’ favourable assessments of the Chinese government and its people during the relief and rescue efforts. It also summarized or cited verbatim the foreign media’s acknowledgement 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 (targeting 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

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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 blogosphere. 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 audiences 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 performance 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 discourse 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

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universally intelligible symbolic actions such as death, survival, human resilience, and the triumph of the human spirit. It also has a pre-determined narrative structure, 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 alternative 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 symbolic space in which the government, without revealing the workings of the political 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 Province, 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 transparency, 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 evasive and dismissive of journalists’ questions, sparking further outrage. Following orders from above, the state mainstream media fell silent on a number of questions, 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

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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 proceeded 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 wreckage 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 explanation 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 privilege political expediency over the livelihoods of ordinary Chinese.

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Chinese social media also treated as newsworthy any attempt on the part of the Chinese propaganda department to cover up the incident. A considerable number 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 incident sent a signal to the foreign media that it was an incident well worth scrutinizing. 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 agencies 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 foreign 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 Chinese 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,

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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 government 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 partystate 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 responsible 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 discourses 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

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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 demonstrate 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 “metaprocesses”, mediatization has not weakened state power. In fact, these meta-processes have been steered and harnessed by the party-state to travel a distinct pathway at every juncture, and have come to bear the distinct imprimatur of the Chinese 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 propaganda. Indeed they are. However, it is important to acknowledge that propaganda would not be effective unless it exploited the technological, cultural, and commercial logic of media events. This discussion advances a new framework for understanding propaganda, which is perhaps best described as “mediatization with Chi-

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nese characteristics,” invoking the familiar Chinese expression that has been appropriated by the West to make sense of various Chinese practices – as in “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” (Huang 2008) and “neoliberalism with Chinese 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 mediatization 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 politics 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 fragmented approach to political processes (Mazzoleni and Schultz 1999). These tendencies 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 alternative. 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 democracy. 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 willingness 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.

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In other words, mediatization and censorship, as practiced in China, are different 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 technologies. 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 government’s credibility.

References Altheide, David L. 1995. An Ecology of Communication: Cultural Formats of Control, New York: Aldine de Bruyter. Bandurski, David. 2011. China’s High-Speed Politics, New York Times, 28 July, accessed in June 2013, from http://nytimes.com/2011/07/29/opinion/29iht-edbandurski29.html?_r=0 Brady, Anne-Marie. 2008. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Branigan, Tania. 2011. Chinese anger over alleged cover-up of high-speed rail crash, The Guardian, 25 July, accessed in July 2013 from http://ibtimes.com/china-propagandaministry-censors-news-wenzhou-train-crash-anniversary-730189 Chen, Ni. 2004. From propaganda to public relations: Evolutionary change in the Chinese government. Asian Journal of Communication 13(12): 96–121. Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. d’Hooghe, Ingrid. 2008. Into high gear: China’s public diplomacy. The Hague Journal of Diplomacy 3: 37–61. Finlay, Christopher J. 2008. Toward the future: The new Olympic internationalism. In: Monroe E. Price and Daniel Dayan (eds.), Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China, 375–390. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Huang, Yasheng. 2008. Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunter, Alan. 2009. Soft power: China on the global stage. The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2(3): 373–398. Hu, Zhengrong and Ji Deqiang. 2012. Ambiguities in communicating with the world: The “goingout” policy of China’s media and its multilayered contexts. Chinese Journal of Communication 5(1): 32–37. Katz, Elihu and Tamar Liebes. 2007. “No more peace!”: How disaster, terror and war have upstaged media events. International Journal of Communication 1: 157–166. Ketcat. 2008. Blog entry, May 20. http://ketcat.com/blog/post/earthquake-report.html. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 21–40. New York: Peter Lang.

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Liebes, Tamar. 1998. Personal tragedy and public space in television’s disaster marathons. Assaf 4(1): 59–69. Lundby, Knut (ed.). 2009. Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2012. Mediatization of Evil and the Role of Religion, Paper presented at the Seminar on Media, Religion and Evil. OIKOSNET Europe, Trondheim, 13 September. Lu, Xinyu. 2009. Ritual, television, and state ideology: Rereading CCTV’s 2006 Spring Festival Gala. In: Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (eds.), TV China, 111–125. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ma, Limin, and He, Jun. 2008. Zaiqu guer de jingcha mama (The police mum for children orphaned during the earthquake), Fazhi Ribao (Law and Order Daily), accessed in April 2013 from http://news.xinhuanet.com/legal/2008–05/19/content_8206435.htm. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. 2008. Media logic. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication, 2930–2932. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro and Winfried Schultz. 1999. “Mediatization” of politics: A challenge for democracy? Political Communication 16(3): 247–261. Martinsen, Joel. 2005. “Spring Festival on TV”. Danwei, http://danwei.org/archives/001300.html (accessed January 16, 2006). People’s Daily. 2004. The 10th conference of Chinese diplomatic envoys stationed abroad held in Beijing. August 30. www1.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx/t155418.htm. Rothenbuhler, Eric. 2010. Media events in the age of terrorism and the internet. Journalism si communicare, 5(2): 34–41. Snow, Robert P. 1983. Creating Media Culture. Beverly Hills: CA: Sage Publications. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics 13(3): 228–246. Strömbäck, Jesper and Frank Esser. 2009. Shaping politics: Mediatization and media interventionism. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 205–223. New York: Peter Lang. Sun, Wanning. 2010. Mission impossible: Soft power, communication capacity, and the globalization of Chinese media. International Journal of Communication 4: 19–26. Sun, Wanning and Yuezhi Zhao. 2009. Television culture with “Chinese Characteristics”: The politics of compassion and education. In: Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay (eds.), Television Studies After TV: Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era, 96–104. London: Routledge. Tovrov, Daniel. 2011. China Propaganda Ministry Censors News Of Wenzhou Train Crash Anniversary, International Business Times, July 23. Accessed in July 2013 from http:// ibtimes.com/china-propaganda-ministry-censors-news-wenzhou-train-crash-anniversary730189 Wang, Yiwei. 2008. Public diplomacy and the rise of Chinese soft power. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616: 257. Wu, Changchang. 2012. Micro-blog and the speech act of China’s middle class: The 7.23 train accident case. Javnost: The Public 19(2): 43–62. Yang, Chuanmei. 2011. Dazao guojia xingxiang shige changqi xitong gongcheng [Building the national image is a long and systematic process]. Zhongguo Jingji Daobao [Chinese Economic Herald], January 22, accessed July 2013, from http://ceh.com.cn/ceh/xwpd/2011/ 1/22/74444.shtml. Zhao, Bin. 1998. Popular family television and party ideology: The Spring Festival Eve happy gathering. Media, Culture & Society 20(1): 43–58. Zhao, Yuezhi. 1998. Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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 communication. 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 century 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 culturally pessimistic as it first seems. The frameworks of mediatization research by Winfried Schulz and Jesper Strömbäck explain which (historical) stages of mediatization 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 Manheim, Max Weber, communication history, media history, history of communication 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

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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 processes (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 understand social changes and media shifts as well as the tradition of thought in which we are embedded and involved in Western communication sociology while “standing 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), Ferdinand 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 German newspaper research such as the Munich scholar Otto Groth (1875–1965, concerning 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

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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) institutionalized and headed the Institute for Newspaper Research at the University of Heidelberg 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 communication scholars with his thinking about “The Public Sphere” in historical and systematical 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 Averbeck 2002).2 Jesper Strömbäck (2008) also mentions mediatization and mediation as concepts worth looking back at, taking into account the history of ideas of communication. 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 communication (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 conformity 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 newspaper studies.

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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” (“Medialisierung”), meaning inter- and transactions between the media and the media system on one side, and politics, policies, and the political system on the other. Communication 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 system since the 18th century.3 This goes along with the similar notion of “Medialisierung” 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 terminological 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 communication research – the representation of the people’s sovereignty by their elected parliaments. As Gerhard Vowe has shown, Jürgen Habermas uses the term “Mediatisierung” (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 (Manheim 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 nega3 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.

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tive hypothesis of a cultural industry overwhelming and destroying the bourgeois public sphere since the late 19th century. That means the substitution of face-toface semi-public discourses of scientific societies, of privately organized intellectual 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 Wendelin 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 (Habermas 1998: 429; see also Lingenberg 2010: 25–30). Mediatization is thought of positively 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 “medialization”). Lundby (2009: 4) and also Krotz (2009: 33) mention the negative side of mediatization 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 mediatization 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 Wendelin) 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 narrowly focused on the side of the system and its rationalization processes. For Saxer, himself a system theorist, in the process of medialization/digitalization/

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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 lifeworldcommunication 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 peripheral 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 organizations of sense-making with political impact, which are deeply embedded in society after long and ongoing institutionaliziation processes (Saxer 2012). This concept 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

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social action). Krotz’s empirical approach is embedded in a general theory of social action, symbolic interactionism, and social constructivism (Krotz 2008, 2012; Hartmann 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 “mediatization” as follows: We defined mediatization as a meta-process that is grounded in the modification of communication 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 Habermas, namely to start with “the problem of communicative action” (Krotz 2009: 29). My suggestions on terminological differences in mediatization and medialization, 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 predecessors – twofold: they look on organized public communication, its role in society and politics and − as well – on social and cultural change via media and communication. 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 perspective of second modernity and be aware not to overstress the paradigm of mediatization: – 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 uprising democracy processes of Western societies – entertainment or soft power processes had been not yet in focus.

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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 background. 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 information 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 completely 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 Democratic 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

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“Sozialistengesetz”, including censorship and interdictions of press titles). The Social Democratic Party and the social democratic press intermingled on the micromeso 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 processes, the distinctions between the phases are less clear in reality than in theory” (Strömbäck 2008: 241).

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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 professional 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 (newspaper 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 Vierkandt (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” (“medialization”), see Schulz 2006.

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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 metaprocess mediatization into smaller processes. He perceives these processes as heuristic conceptions, which are also applicable to communication eras before digitalization. As examples for the extension of time and space he named Werner Sombart’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 dissertation 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, personal 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 mediatization 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-

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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 Kansas 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 translation from the late 1930s).7 Today, Manheim’s book, re-edited by Norbert Schindler 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 sociologists 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 Kecskemeti 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 criticized 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 charisma: 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.

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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 epistemology 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). Manheim analyzed early civic communities (literary round tables, clubs, the often nationalistic German and language societies; the mediation of their ideas by different 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

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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 (bourgeoisie in a very broad sense, including some parts of the nobility and of the officialdom) became politically aware and addressed a broader public or “the” public (Manheim 1979 [1933]: 71–122, also Manheim 1964). For an empirically based typology 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” (discoursivity) 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 relations 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 amalgamate. (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 socialization (“publizistische Vergesellschaftung”, see Manheim 1979 [1933]: 20–26). Mediatized communication processes were leading to new social realities and identities. At this point, Manheim’s theory of the public sphere becomes highly relevant. It

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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), dominating 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 Averbeck 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 expression). (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

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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 departments – 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 dysfunctions 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 internationalization 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 mankind. 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 Manheim − 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 procedure: 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

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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 specified in Weber’s, Tönnies’, and Manheim’s works and we may call this extension and accommodation in Winfried Schulz’s terminology an approach on mediatization. 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, institutions, organizations, and structures is not a one-way-process induced by the media, it occurs only in contexts of action/communication, institutions/organizations, 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 people socially, culturally, and politically is not thinkable any longer without regarding the interconnections between people and ideas via the mass media.

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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 consequences for traditional communication studies. Mediatization is understood as a historical and actual development similar to globalization and modernization. In the second part, by identifying sub-processes, more complex characteristics are presented: 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, cultural 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 everything 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

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1990s.1 Today, increasing numbers of academic researchers are discussing the concept 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 growing 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 “mediatization”, the need to think in processes, the core questions of the concept, and some resulting concepts for the future of communication studies. Then further possibilities 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.

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occurred since the beginning of human communication. We will discuss the complexity 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 postmodernity.

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 development “digitalization”, others spoke about the rise of a network, information, or knowledge society, but besides mediatization there were also labels like “mediation”, “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 theoretical 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 “information 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.

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Secondly, with reference to dynamic concepts, we must decide whether digitalization or a media-related concept like mediatization, medialization, or mediatation 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 possible. 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 computerization 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 normal – websites, organized by single people, wikis, Wikipedia and wikileaks, online games, flashmobs, and so on. Thus, a label that refers to these media developments 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 increasingly 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 mediatization, 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

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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 understanding of what is meant by process and how we can study and think academically 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 encyclopedia 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).

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Russell pointed out, in which quantitative social research understands and describes the world. He once said that on the basis of formal logic and mathematical 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 continuously 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. Evidently, 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 example 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 experiencing 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, globalization, enlightenment, individualization, or civilization are of different type: concepts 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 example, 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.

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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 directions 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, globalization, 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 different 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 globalization, 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.

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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 political parties, political organizations, or the lobby. This is what researchers in political 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 communication 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 participation 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 control 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 newspapers, the Clinton hearing via the Internet in Europe, virtual political groups and online discussions, cyber war, data surveillance and so on. All this together created 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 analyze 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 communication takes place with media like TV or computer games or by using telephone,

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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: Communication under such conditions is what we might call mediatized communication, which is much more than mediated communication. The socially and communicatively 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 developments 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 –

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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, Meyrowitz 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 science, 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 studies 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 understanding 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

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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 academia 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 development and to avoid misunderstandings.

3 Further features of mediatization While in section 2 of this chapter we have developed the basic features and characteristics 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 Meyrowitz (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

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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 difference between men and women, or group building processes would disappear. It is well known that the researchers of medium theory, with the exception of Meyrowitz, did not try to test their hypotheses empirically and that they mostly took a technologically based argumentation. A further common feature of those medium 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 disciplines 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 communication 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 communication 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 direction.

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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 organization 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 mediatization. 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 relevant 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 activities 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 determines 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.

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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 content, 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 example, 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 religious 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

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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. Understanding 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?

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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 subprocesses 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 Kingdoms 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 emphasizes 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

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than how to participate actively in democracy and society by writing good arguments and ideas. This did not change until the Internet. Thus, we can conclude that the long-term process of a society becoming literate 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 memorizing 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.

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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 happened 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 transformation 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 development 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 consequences of different ways of media change. Above, we defined media as consisting of four “dimensions”: structurally a technology and an embedded social institu-

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tion, situationally a machine for producing and distributing content in specific forms and a space for experiences (see also Williams 1958, 1990; Krotz 2012). Having 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 technological developments. Complex and expensive innovations take place there, as 3Dmovies, 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 confine 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

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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 centered way. As a consequence, in the context of the analysis of media change further conceptual 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-andwhite 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 ebook 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 different 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, blackboards 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-

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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 instructions, 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 typewriters that really could represent all possible signs). Even computer games on the Internet 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-processes 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

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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 following. The Extension sub-process obviously refers to McLuhan’s media concept, for whom a medium was everything that enhanced human perception and action possibilities. 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 development 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 society, 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

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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 elaborated 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 segmentation 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 mediatization 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 mediatization 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 concerned with a positive answer about how mediatization works. This gives us the possibility to avoid all those problems and to integrate the given historical examples 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

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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 disseminate content, which is set in scene for that technology. But only if this technology is used as a space of experience and becomes integrated into society by social institutions, norms, rules, individual and collective expectations, then this technology 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 experiences, 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 consequences. They communicate differently, they change the media system, and they enhance their personal media environment. They for example manage their personal 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 understand what they communicate. This for example is the process that Joshua Meyrowitz (1990) showed empirically 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 technical 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 production of cultural meaning. All this is concerned with the new forms of communication and is constantly producing new realities. This all together then is the complex background for people reproducing culture and society henceforth differently if new media come up or under the condition 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.

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cultural and social life thus is communication. We do not need media logic, technological 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 differentiation 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 perspectives 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 consequence, 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 consequence of media development and construct a different social and cultural reality. This is the reason why the mediatization approach must understand communication as the central connecting link between media change and changes in culture 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 mediated forms of communication and this generates different social and cultural relations 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.

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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 mediatization is a meta process like Individualization, Globalization, and Commercialization, a complex process of processes. In more detail, new media come into existence as technologies for communication, 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 developments 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 democracy, 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 multiplicity 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

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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 cultures 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 ongoing 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 relevance 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 developments 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 software, and new questions like augmented reality and so called intelligent software (Krotz 2012). Mediatization may, for example, then serve to bind research in different 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, selection 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

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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 observations, 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 postmodernity 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.

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References Altheide, David L. and Peter R. Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage. Benjamin, Walter. 1980. Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften (Illuminations. Selected Writings). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bösch, Frank. 2011. Mediengeschichte. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2005. Die verborgenen Mechanismen der Macht (The Hidden Mechanisms of Power). Hamburg: VSA. Couldry, Nick. 2008. Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media and Society 10: 373–391. Degele, Nina. 2002. Einführung in die Techniksoziologie. (Introduction to a Sociology of Technology). München: Fink. Elias, Norbert. 1998. Soziale Prozesse (Social processes). In: Schäfers, Bernhard (ed.), Grundbegriffe der Soziologie (Basic concepts of Sociology), 271–277. 5th edition. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Finneman, Niels Ole. 2011. Mediatization theory and digital media. The European Journal of Communication Research 36: 67–90. Fuchs, Werner, Rolf Klima, Ruediger Lautmann, Othein Rammstedt and Hanns Wienhold (eds.). 1978. Lexikon zur Soziologie, (Dictionary for Sociology). 2nd edition, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Goody, Jack, Ian Watt and Kathleen Gough. 1986. Entstehung und Folgen der Schriftkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hartmann, Maren and Andreas Hepp (eds.). 2010. Die Mediatisierung der Alltagswelt. Wiesbaden: VS. Havelock, Eric A. 1990. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet als kulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora. Hepp, Andreas. 2012. Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge: Polity. Hepp, Andreas, Stig Hjavard and Knut Lundby (eds.). 2010. Mediatization. The European Journal of Communication Research 3. Hjarvard, Stig. 2009. Soft individualism: Media and the changing social character. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 159–178. New York: Lang. Illich, Ivan. 2010. Im Weinberg des Textes (In the Vineyard of Texts). München: C. H. Beck. Innis, Harold A. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Innis, Harold A. 2007. Empire and Communications. Lanham: Rowman&Littlefield. Krotz, Friedrich. 1995. Elektronisch mediatisierte Kommunikation (Electornically mediatized Communication). Rundfunk und Fernsehen 43(4): 445–462. Krotz, Friedrich. 2001. Die Mediatisierung kommunikativen Handelns. Wie sich Alltag und soziale Beziehungen, Kultur und Gesellschaft durch die Medien wandeln. (The Mediatization of Communicative Action. How Everyday Life and Social Relations, Culture and Society are Changing in the Context of Media Development). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Krotz, Friedrich. 2003. Metaprozesse sozialen und kulturellen Wandels und die Medien (Meta processes in culture and society and the media). Medien Journal 27: 7–19. Krotz, Friedrich. 2007. Mediatisierung von Kommunikation: Fallstudien zum Wandel von Kommunikation (The Mediatization of Communication. Case Studies of Changes in Communiation). Wiesbaden: VS. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009a. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 21–40. New York: Lang. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009b. Bridging the gap between sociology and communication theory. In: Ruben Koenig, Paul Nelissen and Frank Huysmans (eds.), Meaningful Media, 22–35. Nijmegen: Tandem Felix Uitgeverij.

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Riepl, Wolfgang. 1913. Das Nachrichtenwesen des Altertums, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Römer. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Rogers, Everett. 1996. Diffusion of Innovation. 4th edition. New York, The Free Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1975. Einführung in die mathematische Philosophie (Introduction into the Philosophy of Mathematics). Wiesbaden: Vollmer. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1998. Grundfragen der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. In: Dieter Mersch (ed.), Zeichen über Zeichen: Texte zur Semiotik von Peirce bis Eco und Derrida, 193– 215. München: DTV. Schiller, Herbert I. 1989. Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford University Press. Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconstructing Mediatization as an Analytical Concept. European Journal of Communication 19: 87–101. Schulz, Winfried. 2008. Politische Kommunikation (Political Communication). 2nd edition. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Silverstone, Roger. 2007. Media and Morality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Silverstone, Roger and Leslie Haddon. 1996. Design and the domestication of information and communication technologies. In: Robin Mansell and Roger Silverstone (eds.), Communication by Design, 44–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stein, Peter. 2010. Schriftkultur. Eine Geschichte des Schreibens und Lesens. (The Culture of Writing: A History of Writing and Reading). 2nd edition. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft. Steinmaurer, Thomas. 2013. Mobile Individuen im Netz der Konnektivitaet. Zur Theorie und Geschichte mediatisierter Kommunikation. Habilitationsschrift (Paper for Habilitation). University of Salzburg, Austria. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society. New York: Chattu and Windus. Williams, Raymond. 1990. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London and New York: Routledge.

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 technical device, and mediatization as the long historical sequence of mediatic phenomena. 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 phenomena 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 “mediatization”. As “mediatization” is, linguistically speaking, a noun-naming process, the entities considered as being subject to such a process are in most cases the societies 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 modernity, as for example in Hjarvard’s use of the concept: “Mediatization is no universal 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

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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 capability of semiosis. This capability has been progressively activated, for different reasons, 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 activation of a semiotic process, properly speaking: backwards, towards the sequence of technical behavior leading to its fabrication; forwards, towards its use as an instrument to obtain food. Both mental movements are – following the dimensions of a Peirce triad – indexical sequences (secondness) contained in the iconic configuration (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 instrument (a thirdness) would probably also be activated.2 The ongoing vigorous discussion 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).

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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 “unacknowledged revolution” of printing, in the happy expression of Elizabeth Eisenstein (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 indexical 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 institutionalized in a particular place and time around a communication device (configuration 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 different intensities. Secondly, these transversal, radial “effects” of mediatic phenomena are the result of their systemic nature, implying an enormous network of feedback relationships: mediatic phenomena are clearly non-linear processes, typically far from equilibrium (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Kauffman 2000). Within the frame

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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 multidimensional 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 possible to scrutinize discourse in a different kind of way by giving oral communication a semipermanent 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 structural gap between production and reception (reconnaissance). The conceptual development of these points exceeds the limits of the present paper; see Verón 1987, 2013.

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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 material 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 communication is itself transformed. In relation with what Goody calls the “decontextualization” 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 feedback 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

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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 difficult 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 individual 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 individual 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 representation of time and history; reshaped conversation and interpersonal exchanges; made possible the operation of new economic and political mechanisms 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 Gutenberg’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 scientific 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,

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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 invention 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 centuries (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, safeguard, 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-contextualization, and made it available to all. From this point of view, the history of mediatization 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 communication processes mediated by a technical device. In my view, human communication is entirely non-linear at all levels of its functioning, because it is a self-organizing system far from equilibrium. The specificity of “face-to-face” communication is not its supposed linearity, but the absence of mediatic phenomena. As a consequence, in interpersonal exchanges the enunciation positions (enunciator, discourse, 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 communication? 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 behavior formalizes the distance between problem and solution: a given tool behavior

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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 definitively 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. Mediatic 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 construction, 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 reconnaissance 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).

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the re-orientation of the debate on mass media power. The clearly different reconnaissance 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 production grammars); (2) the complexity of the reconnaissance pole within a given society 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-individual 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 “consciousness” 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 “communication” and “consciousness”, but from the simple fact that the social and the socioindividual are different auto-poietic systems – the socio-individual being organic systems, which the social systems are not. In other words, the qualitative difference 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 conversation of Homo sapiens with himself.

References Dayan, Daniel. 2000. Télévision, le presque-public. Réseaux 100: 429–456. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1983. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 2011. Divine Art, Infernal Machine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Goody, Jack. 1968. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 1995. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published [1977] Goody, Jack and Ian Watt. 1963. The consequences of literacy. In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 5: 304–345. Haidle, Miriam Noël. 2009. How to think a simple spear. In: Sophie A. de Beaune, Frederick L. Coolidge and Thomas Wynn (eds.), Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, 57–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29(2): 105–134. Katz, Elihu and Daniel Dayan. 1992. Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kauffman, Stuart. 2000. Investigations. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Leakey, Richard. 1994. The Origin of Humankind. New York: Perseus Books Group. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon. Liebes, Tamar and James Curran (eds.). 1998. Media, Ritual and Identity. London: Routledge. Livingstone, Sonia. 1990. Making Sense of Television. London: Routledge. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. First published [1984]. Morley, David. 1980. The Nationwide Audience. London: Routledge. Morley, David. 1986. Family Television. London: Comedia/Routledge. Morley, David. 1992. La réception des travaux sur la reception. Retour sur le public de Nationwide. Hermès, Cognition, communication, politique 11–12: 31–46. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1998. The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. First published [1894]. Philip, Robert. 2004. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Bantam Books. Silverstone, Roger. 1994. Television and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Thompson, John. 1995. The Media and Modernity: The Social Theory of the Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Verón, Eliseo. 1983. Il est là, je le voit, il me parle. Communications 38: 98–120. Verón, Eliseo. 1987. La sémiosis sociale. Fragments d’une théorie de la discursivité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes. Verón, Eliseo. 1995. Semiosis de lo ideológico y del poder. La mediatización. Buenos Aires: CBC, Universidad de Buenos Aires. First published [1986]. Verón, Eliseo. 1994. De l’image sémiologique aux discursivités. Le temps d’une photo. Hermès, Paris 13–14: 45–64. Verón, Eliseo. 2001. El cuerpo de las imágenes. Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma. Veron, Eliseo. 2004. Fragmentos de un tejido. Barcelona: Gedisa. Verón, Eliseo. 2013. La semiosis social, 2. Ideas, momentos, interpretantes, Buenos Aires: Paidós-Planeta.

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 institutional, the technological, and the media as world. Each of these has a different ontological and epistemological background, and it is argued that this has consequences 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, cultural 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, interpretations, 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 mediatization 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.

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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 phenomenological 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 presuppositions 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

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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 important question involving the independence of the media from politics and society concludes with the independence of politics and society from the media” (Strömbäck 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 article, 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 institutions” operated without the influence of “the media”, while today these institutions 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 institution 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 Mediatization 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 cultural 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 relationship, 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 operationalized into the analysis of powerful media institutions affecting or influencing

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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 relationship is not between institutions but between institutions and individual subjects (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 perspective. For example, this approach seemingly presupposes that politics at one point in history was independent of the media in society, while at a certain historical 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 discussions 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.

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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 institution “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 autonomy of the subfield of journalistic production, within the framework of Bourdieuian field theory (Bolin 2007). However, it can also be analysed as a process of professionalization (e.g. Petersson 2006) or as one of institutionalization (Ekecrantz 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 societal 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 reason. 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 message” (McLuhan 1964) indeed suggests that it is the technology and not the institutional 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

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“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 photography and film in the age of mechanical reproduction as well as Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) analysis of the impact of television, discusses the idea of “l’information 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, “proclaims the disappearance of reality”, and has too-grand theoretical claims (Hjarvard 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 technologies to provide for symbolic exchange and communication, and that they provide for simulations of communication, that is, to make us believe we are communicating 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 managed 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 consumption, 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

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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 commodities 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 contrary). 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 functionality 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).

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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 attributed 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 structure 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, produced 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 commodities 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 distinctive commodity (one that distinguishes the consumer from his or her fellow consumers 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

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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 process of material production” (Baudrillard 1975: 130), which was rooted in his early critique of Marx whom he argued was only useful for analysing “material production” (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 material or tangible base. At his best, using examples from fashion and the abovementioned 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 follows 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 computers, and software services such as social networking sites, Spotify, iTunes, Voddler), 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 oppositions” 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 differentiates the consumer from other consumers. It therefore also has a relatively autonomous relation to exchange value, and circulates in a different economy, determined by a different logic: that of differentiation. If use value, as theorized by

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Baudrillard, is coupled with a functional logic, and exchange value with an economic or commercial logic, sign value is coupled with a differential logic (Baudrillard 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 carriers. 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 example, 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 quality 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 programmes are all examples of non-tangible commodities that existed in the analogue era. But digitization radicalizes the non-tangible sign commodity, if not by

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quality then by scale, reach, and transformability. As non-tangible objects, however, 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–consumption circuit. As tangible commodities wear down with use, non-tangible commodities 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 corporations, 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 produced 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 physical reality, but the increased presence of what could be called self-directed signifiers, 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 consumers 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 technologies on the one hand and culture and society on the other, and in the next section I will introduce a third position.

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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 background is more heterogeneous. Furthermore, although the concept of mediatization 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 postulates 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 system 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 politics 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 transmission, 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

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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 (political 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 Durkheim ([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 (Williams 1966: 19).

It is quite clear from the quoted passage that Williams opposes a view that separates mediated communication from reality, and is especially opposed to denigrating 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 question “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 mediatization, however, seem to be less interested in this aspect (but see Hjarvard 2013: 137 ff.).

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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 structures 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 interpretations 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 worldviews 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 previous 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 conjunction with each other. However, the ritual view need not necessarily encompass a linear historical explanation, but is rather open to alternative historical understandings, 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 succession 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 literature, early forms of communication and cultural formation, cultural practices, the assemblage of cultural technologies at our disposal in the form of both technological 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 Gilgamesh 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

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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 technology, 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 communication, this is indeed an increasingly technified – mediatized – form of communication. 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 dismissed as not having to do with reality. And in this sense, we should acknowledge some mediated phenomena produced in an increasingly mediatized communication environment as important instances of late modern media life. Let me conclude 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 phenomenon. 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 technologies. 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.

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ated account of a social reality outside the institution of the media, but nonetheless 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 communication 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 journalism) 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 technology (Bolin 2012) to communify the European countries through a common entertainment 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 revenues 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 audience in countries all over Europe (Bolin 2006: 202).

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Most media commodities today also have the characteristic of being sign commodities.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 nothing 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. Broadcasting 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 digitization, 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 adaptation. 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 quoting 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 marketing 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 mathematical calculation, estimations and probability theory through a range of datagenerating 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.).

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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 agreement 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 economy 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 networks 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 patterns 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 constructed 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 producing 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

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production of tangible commodities, brand differentiation was adopted as a strategy 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, gradually took command over the functional use values of objects and commodities, and the sign value itself became the most important object of consumption (Baudrillard 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 information 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 construction of Apple’s iPhone. These four kinds of sign commodities arguably are indicative of how contemporary 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 signification 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 consider the institutional power relations in conjunction with the specificities of both technological and communicative form, and if these cannot be related to the subjective apprehensions of media users and producers, we have little chance of capturing 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, mediatization 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/.

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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 practices. 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 forefronted 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 individual 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 phenomenology and social constructionism, and with a clearer, integrative approach to the relationship between media, culture, and society. It shares with the second perspective an emphasis on the production and sharing of meaning, but is less poststructural 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, individual–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.

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Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1970. Economics as a system of belief. American Economic Review 602: 469–478. Habermas, Jürgen. 1972. Knowledge and Human Interest. London: Heinemann. First published [1968]. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published [1962]. Hall, Stuart. 1973. Encoding/Decoding in the Television Discourse. Stencilled occasional paper from CCCS no. 7. Birmingham: Birmingham University/CCCS. Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. Genomsyrade av medier. (Saturated by media). In: Ulf Hannerz (ed.), Medier och kulturer (Media and Culture), 7–28. Stockholm: Carlssons. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge: Polity. First published [2011]. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29: 105–134. Hjarvard, Stig. 2013. The Mediatization of Culture and Society. London & New York: Routledge. Hjarvard, Stig and Mia Lövheim (eds.). 2012. Mediatization and Religion. Nordic Perspectives. Göteborg: Nordicom. Krotz, Friedrich. 2001. Die Mediatisierung kommunikativen Handelns. Der Wandel von Alltag und sozialen Beziehungen, Kultur und Gesellschaft durch die Medien. Wiesbaden: Westdeutcher Verlag. Krotz, Friedrich. 2007. The meta-process of “mediatization” as a conceptual frame. Global Media and Communication 33: 256–260. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concept, Changes, Consequences, 21–40. New York: Peter Lang. Krotz, Friedrich and Andreas Hepp. 2011. A concretization of mediatization: How mediatization works and why “mediatized worlds” are a helpful concept for empirical mediatization research. Empedocies: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 32: 119–134. Lash, Scott. 2005. Intensive media – modernity and algorithm. Roundtable. Research Architecture. London: Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://roundtable.kein.org/node/125. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1941. Remarks on administrative and critical communications research. Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 91: 2–16. Lundby, Knut. 2008. Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Self-Representations in New Media. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2009a. Introduction: “Mediatization” as a key. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concept, Changes, Consequences, 1–18. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2009b. Media logic: looking for social interaction. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concept, Changes, Consequences, 101–119. New York: Peter Lang. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. London: Penguin Books. First published [1867]. Marx, Karl. 1995. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Retrieved January 21, 2013, from http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/. First published [1852]. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro and Winfried Schulz. 1999. “Mediatization” of politics: A challenge for democracy? Political Communication 163: 247–261. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. McQuail, Denis. 2006. On the mediatization of war. A review article. The International Communication Gazette 748: 104–118. Merrin, William. 2005. Baudrillard and the Media. Cambridge: Polity. Merton, Robert K. 1957. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencloe/London: The Free Press/ Collier-Macmillan. First published [1949].

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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 institutions, including the media, are dependent on a variety of other institutions, and cultural and social change may emerge through new configurations of relationships 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 discussed the news about the upcoming court case in France against Madame Caillaux, who had shot the editor of the journal Le Figaro, which had been campaigning 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

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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 illinformed and prejudiced stereotypes and political manipulation. Despite the discrepancy between media representation and reality, news media and public opinion 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 perceptions 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 significant 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 advantage of new communication media to influence public opinion. This was accompanied by public concern over the media’s harmful influences on political and cultural 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 communication 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 communication studies and contemporary mediatization research but also make evident the profound historical differences between the media–society relationship of the early 20th century and that of today, which should be reflected in our conceptualizations 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-

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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 integrated 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, however, also reflects a profound quantitative and qualitative change in the relationship between media, culture, and 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 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 “revolution” 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 influence 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 important, 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 boundaries between public and private spheres of communication.

2 An institutional perspective In this chapter, I will argue the advantages of an institutional perspective on mediatization when it comes to grasping the changing structural relationship between

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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 circumstances within particular social and cultural domains. More specifically, the institutional perspective is advantageous in terms of considering the following three dimensions: 1. Mediatization concerns the long-term structural transformations of the relationship between media and other social spheres. In contrast to “mediation”, which concerns the use of media for specific communicative practices in situated 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 analyses of endless variations of social interaction. From this perspective, mediatization 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 interaction 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 particular institutional frameworks (e.g. children’s play within the family or election 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 implications since the very notion of “institution” presupposes a particular understanding of culture and society. Not only is “institution” defined differently by different social science theories, but its definition also involves a specific understanding of

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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 institutions 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 implications 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 welldeveloped sociological framework. From the media studies point of view, our institutional 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 “institutionalization” 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 sociology in which structure determines agency and a bottom-up sociology hypostatizing the primary power of agency. The institutional perspective on mediatization is thus not intended to favor social structure over agency or to highlight institutional 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 particular situations and how social structures are reproduced and perhaps altered through agency. It should, however, be noted that our general concepts of mediatization and institutions are not necessarily dependent on the specificities of structuration 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 circumstances 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 “institutional 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 dimension 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

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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 institutional 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 information, 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 mediatization 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 institutions, 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 category 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 cultural 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 generalization concerning the processes of mediatization. An institutional approach favors the meso-level of cultural and social affairs since it is concerned with the supraindividual 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-

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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 politicians 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 “mediatization” 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 transformed 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 perspective also asserts that mediatization is a particular process of (high) modernity comparable with globalization and urbanization and that, in this sense, mediatization may also be considered a macro-theoretical framework concerned with overall societal developments. At this level, mediatization theory builds on general sociological 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.

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4 Structuration theory Social institutions are the best-established and most pervasive structures of society, 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 structural 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). Institutions 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/symbolic 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 organizations (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 individuals 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 activated 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 manner by adjusting them to the particular situation at hand. Institutional rules and

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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 variety of institutions (family, education, work, etc.), she becomes capable of employing 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 individual 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 freedom 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 institution, for example the family, should be theoretically distinguished from the consolidation of social cohesion (Giddens 1984: 24); the family may continue as an institution, 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 cultural change. Stones has convincingly argued (2005) that Giddens’ contribution to structuration theory concerns a highly abstract and ontological level of analysis and therefore 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 relative degrees of structural features’ endurance, importance, and flexibility as well as graduations of social agents’ ability and motivations to alter institutional structures. 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, empirically 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 individual agency and the reflexive use of structural resources and rules and too little

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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 Giddens’ 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 understanding of the structuration process. Instead of Giddens’ two dimensions of structuration (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 autonomous from the social agent in question; 2. Internal structures within the social agent that comprise both internal structures 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 structuration, and it may thus also be considered a process model of the continuous (re)production 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 recognizes the ability of human agency to make use of internalized social structures in both routine and reflective ways. Stones’ distinction may, however, potentially

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blur Giddens’ key insight that structures are not just external but also have an internal cognitive and bodily existence. External structural conditions such as living 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. External 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 particular 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 otherwise” 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 simultaneously inside and outside human agency: They represent an external structural condition in terms of the available communicative resources (the media environment) 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

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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 specialization but also created a global division of labor. Urbanization has moved people out of smaller and traditional contexts and into large-scale modern environments in which more individualized forms of life predominate. Within structuration theory, the dynamics of modernity (Giddens 1990) are understood as time– space distanciations that disembed social practices from local settings and reembed 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 altering 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 developments. 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 journalistic 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 profession 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 indispensable 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 distanciation 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).

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The media also acquire a particular position within modern society as they constitute a public sphere that potentially interconnects with all other social institutions. 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 experience 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 concerning both public and private affairs. Media thus facilitate key aspects of modernity 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 process 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 “metaprocess” may be useful to the extent that it points to the trans-institutional dimension 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 subordinated to religious, political, or military interests.

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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 individual 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 ontological 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 perspective, 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 modernity, 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 mediatization to globalization and individualization also seems to indicate that mediatization – 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

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from this strand of social research into our institutional framework of mediatization theory. In particular, I will use “institutional logics” to consider how institutional 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. DiMaggio and Powell (1991: 8) formulated the core idea of new institutionalism as a “rejection of rational-actor models, an interest in institutions as independent variables, 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 structures” (Meyer and Rowan 1977: 343). For instance, the professional norms of doctors and engineers structure the organization and work of hospitals and technology-intensive industries. Other prevailing institutional norms from the family or state may also inform ways of organizing and conducting work in such organizations. 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 entities 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 similar 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 collectivity: “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 expectations 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).

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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 institutional change, including how individual and organizational actors may both influence and be influenced by a historically contingent set of loosely coupled institutional 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. Institutional logics are generally understood in a way resembling Giddens’ (1984) notion of institutions as structured by resources and rules and is thereby compatible with our notion of “media logics” (cf. above and Hjarvard 2013a). For instance, Thornton and Ocasio (1999: 804) define institutional logics as the “socially constructed, historical pattern of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize 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 Friedland 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 institutions that have played a central role in the development of modern Western societies: the family, the capitalist market, the state bureaucracy, political democracy, 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 institutions while also expanding their quantity by including, for instance, professions as an institutional order. Seen from the point of view of structuration theory, institutions 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

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social roles (teacher, student), overall purpose (learning), typical practices (teaching, exercises, exams), etc. I will argue for a pragmatic and empirically based approach with regards to the precise number and types of institutions since boundaries between institutions have changed historically and are contingent on the overall social context. Furthermore, I will not a priori consider any of these institutions and their logics to be more important than any others. Their relative importance 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, heterogeneous, and often contradictory sets of institutional logics. Social conflicts and transformations are thus often the result of overlapping institutional considerations: “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, however, been intertwined with questions and stakeholders from outside of the political 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 categorizations 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 confinement 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 complex 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-institutional configuration breaks up, as was the case with the end of the public broadcasting monopolies in Western Europe in the last decades of the 20th century, a

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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 transformations in social practices may occur when competing logics overlap within a particular domain. The neoliberal deregulating of public sector institutions over the past decades is a prime example of this. Through a state-initiated introduction of market-like steering logics into public institutions like hospitals and public transportation, 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 professionals are inside the political organization, they may introduce new logics to the communication of politics. Change in social practices is often instigated by socalled 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 perceptions and relationships into the newsroom.

7 Institutional overlap Media may introduce structural overlap between institutional logics in three different 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

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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 confronted 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 important 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 physical space or place unimportant since most institutions still maintain a core physical 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 workplace, 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 institutional logics that may induce various forms of change. For instance, when digital media like computers and mobile phones are introduced into the educational system 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

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available a whole range of other logics from other institutional orders. With Internet 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 institutions. 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 workplace 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 presence 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, Meyrowitz argues, information circulated within confined circuits of communication allowing 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 necessarily 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 difficult 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.

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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 institutions 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 particular institutional contexts. For instance, when religious organizations begin making use of Internet websites or social network media as resources for communicating with their followers, they may gradually need to accommodate to the various social, technological, and aesthetic rules that have already been institutionalized 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 consumerlike 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 influential. 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 understood 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 structuration with the absence of alternative practices or lack of conflict. On the contrary,

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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 competing interests, norms, and practices, but their mutual interdependency has created 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) distinguishes between three phases in the history of the Swedish public service broadcaster 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

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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 nevertheless serve an important heuristic purpose as analytical tools for discerning the interplay between various institutions while taking into account the path-dependencies of the past.

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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” consequences. 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 information 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 communication. 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. ideologically framed or artistically narrated), how relationships are constructed (e.g.

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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 libraries, research, news, personal mail, commercial advertising, etc. We should also, therefore, following Schulz (2004; cf. Hjarvard 2013b), focus on the various communicative functions of the media when we study the institutionalized rules pertaining to their use and not just consider the individual media or media organizations. 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 communication 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 institution 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 institutions, between institutions, and in society as a whole. As a social process, mediatization 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 transversal 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 possibilities 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 something more fundamental: a complete rethinking of the dynamics, even the dimensionality, 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 certain angle, can enter a productive dialogue with those working within the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory; there are indeed other possibilities for mediatization 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 developed within the broader context of debates on media’s contributions to late modernity 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 preliminary adjustments. First, mediatization theory must rethink itself as a contribution

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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 circulation 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 consequences 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 ambitious horizon comes clearly into view: first, the history of mediatization as a concept 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 perspective 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 mediatization research might look like, if applied to understanding media’s consequences for the broadest practices that seek to manage social space, that is, government.

1 Mediatization’s social theory deficit “Mediatization” is the term around which research within various national traditions 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 terminology, but about the type of explanation at which we are aiming. The startingpoints are agreed: first, that media influence now extends to “all the spheres of society and social life” (Mazzoleni 2008); second, that, because of this pervasiveness, 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 enquiries 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-

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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 fashion (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 complexity 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 finding 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).

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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 mediatization identifies, its very singularity risks repeating such blurring and reducing a diversity of causal processes to one, apparently homogeneous term, so undercutting 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 (provided 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 materials or media-based processes? Indeed should we imagine social space (as a whole)

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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 associated 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 everyday 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 dynamics 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 chapter, 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.

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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 differentiation of social space in late modernity. Well-known examples analysed by Bourdieu’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”. Understood 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 reproduced” (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

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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 influence 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 exercised? 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 “journalistic-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

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be adjusted to take account of universal or cross-field effects, but without undermining 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 mediatization 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 processes, 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 formation 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 transversal 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 violence (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-

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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 particular, the rules of reproduction of those games”; more precisely, the state influences 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); Bourdieu in Wacquant (2003: 23).

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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 fundamental 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 representatives 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 overlapping promotional advantages (Boyle and Kelly 2010). When the media intensively 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 metacapital 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 Hjarvard 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 metaprocess 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 infrastructures 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-

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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 transformations 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 different 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 understand (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 emergent, 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

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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 exploring it. One is to explore media’s growing role in the internal structures and organizational “logics” of specific institutions and institution-types; the challenge there remains to understand how such institutional dynamics link to the wider fieldbased competition in which such organizations are involved (on which see Hjarvard, 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 platforms. 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 manners 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 “figuration” help us understand the patterning at work in our contemporary mediarelated 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-

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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 institutions. 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 understand. 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 mediatization 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 connected 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 everyday leisure and much everyday interaction: a key link here, I will suggest, will be understanding media’s role in contemporary processes of categorization and normformation. There remains a further possibility for mediatization research’s developing dialogue 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 assemblages. 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://kommunikative-figurationen.de/?L=1

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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 categories 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 transformations. 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 conditions 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 distinctive position within the explanation of everyday action, allied particularly to hermeneutic 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).

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4 Government and the future of social-theoryoriented 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 government is mediatized. A lot of the initial research in mediatization looked at political communications and the most competitive aspect of government communications (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 mediatization 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 institutionally-based process that mediatization research could track in attempting to understand media’s contribution to social change. It is inconceivable that media have not changed how government is done and is imagined. Government is a multidimensional 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 policy 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).

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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 messages – from and about government – affects governments’ conditions of operation, including their possibilities for taking action and sustaining legitimacy (Rosanvallon 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 governmental 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 feeding on themselves, are having profound implications for the mediatization of management in all institutions, and above all for government as the institutionallybased 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. Government 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 coverage; 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 government regulates the operations of any field “freely” from the outside is not sus-

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tainable under these conditions because both government and governed are entangled 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 infrastructure 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 challenges 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 reintroducing 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 understood 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 alternative approaches, whether independently or in tandem with an approach to mediatization 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.

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References Altheide, David. 1985. Media Power. Beverly Hills: Sage. Altheide, David and Robert Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage. Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Benson, Rodney and Erik Neveu (eds.). 2005. Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field. Cambridge: Polity. Bimber, Bruce. 2003. Information and American Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bolin, Göran. 2009. Symbolic production and value in media industries. Journal of Cultural Economy 2(3): 345–361. Bolin, Göran. 2011. Value and the Media. Aldershot: Ashgate. Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot. 2006. On Justification. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996a. The State Nobility. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996b. The Rules of Art. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto. Boyle, Raymond and Lisa Kelly. 2010. The celebrity entrepreneur on television: Profile, politics and power. Celebrity Studies 1(3): 334–350. Champagne, Patrick. 1990. Faire L’Opinion [Producing Opinion]. Paris: Editions Minuit. Champagne, Patrick and Dominique Marchetti. 2005. The contaminated blood scandal: Reframing medical news. In: Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, 113–134. Cambridge: Polity. Cook, Timothy. 2005. Governing With the News. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media meta-capital: Extending the range of Bourdieu’s field theory. Theory and Society 32(5/6): 653–677. Couldry, Nick. 2008a. Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society 10(3): 373–392. Couldry, Nick. 2008b. Form and power in an age of continuous spectacle. In: David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (eds.), Media and Social Theory, 161–176. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick. 2008c. Actor network theory and media: Do they connect and on what terms? In: Andreas Hepp et al. (eds) Cultures of Connectivity, 93–110. Creskill, NJ: The Hampton Press. Couldry, Nick. 2011. Making populations appear. In: Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender (eds.), The Politics of Reality Television: Global Perspectives, 194–206. London: Routledge. Couldry, Nick. 2012. Media Society World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Duval, Julien. 2005. Economic journalism in France. In: Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, 135–155. Cambridge: Polity. Elias, Norbert. 1994. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell. First published [1939]. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hjarvard, Stig. 2006. The mediatization of religion: A theory of the media as an agent of religious change. Paper presented to 5th international conference on Media Religion and Culture, Sigtuna, Sweden, 6–9 July. Hjarvard, Stig. 2009. Soft individualism: Media and the changing social character. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 159–178. New York: Peter Lang.

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Hjarvard, Stig. 2011. Mediatization: The Challenge of New Media. Keynote address to Mediatized worlds conferene. University of Bremen, 14–15 April 2011. Hjarvard, Stig. 2013. The Mediatization of Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 21–40. New York: Peter Lang. Lahire, Bernard. 1999. Champ, hors-champ, contre-champ [Field, extra-field, anti-field]. In: Bernard Lahire (ed.), Le Travail Sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu – Dettes et Critiques, 23–58. Paris: La Découverte/Poche. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lingard, Bob, Shaun Rawolle and Sandra Taylor. 2005. Globalizing policy sociology in education: Working with Bourdieu. Journal of Education Policy 20(6): 759–777. Lundby, Knut. 2009. Media logic: Looking for social interaction. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 101–121. New York: Peter Lang. Mansell, Robin. 2012. Imagining the Internet. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marlière, Philippe. 1998. The rules of the journalistic field: Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to the sociology of the media. European Journal of Communication 13(2): 219–234. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. 2008. Media logic. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Volume VII, 2930–2932. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Meyer, Thomas. 2003. Media Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2011. Democratic Legitimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sewell, William. 2005. Logics of History. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schrott, Andrea. 2009. Dimensions: catch-all label or technical term. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 41–62. New York: Peter Lang. Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconsidering mediatization as an analytical concept. European Journal of Communication 19(1): 87–101. Silverstone, Roger. 2005. Media and communication. In: Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek and Bryan Turner (eds.), The International Handbook of Sociology, 188–208. London: Sage. Slater, Don. Forthcoming. New Media, Development and Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Snow, D. 1983. Creating Media Culture. Beverley Hills: Sage. Strömbäck, Jesper and Frank Esser. 2009. Shaping politics: Mediatization and media interventionism. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 205–224. New York: Peter Lang. Wacquant, Loïc. 2003. On the tracks of symbolic power: Prefatory notes to Bourdieu’s “state nobility”. Theory, Culture and Society 10(3): 1–17. Weber, Max. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Free Press.

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 interrelation between mediatization, interaction and communication. Based on this, the concept of communicative figurations is introduced. This is followed by a reflection of the empirical grounding of communicative figurations, and then a conclusion regarding the relevance of this concept for mediatization research that is oriented to questions of interaction and communication. Keywords: interaction, communication, communicative constructivism, communicative figurations, translocality, transmediality, belonging, power, rules, segmentation, 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

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of cultures and societies in such a way, we need an intermediate concept for a corresponding analysis. This chapter outlines the concept of “communicative figurations” as such an approach: This concept makes it possible to develop a practical, transmedial analysis of the changing communicative construction of mediatized cultures and societies. To grasp these considerations, we want to argue in three steps. First, we outline 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 section 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-constructivist 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 mediatization 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” communication. 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)

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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 concept for both traditions. In his recent volume on the (then) present state of mediatization 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 interactive 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 “communicative 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 mediatization research. For example, Stig Hjarvard recently reminded us of some problems when overemphasizing “social interaction” in a “one-sided” way as this might “obscure the question of how to grasp the specificities of the media” (Hjarvard 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 interaction 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

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human beings – to the fundamental unit of each analysis (Weber 1978: 4). Understood 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 developed it out of the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. The fundamental 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, communicate, 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 Sandstrom 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 communication is interconnected with them. When we build something together (a garden fence for example) we socially interact on this process of building, and we coordinate 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 conscious 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. Communication is fundamental to the social construction of reality: that is, we ourselves “create” our social reality in multiple communicative processes (beside other forms of social interaction). We are born into a world in which communication 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).

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For describing communication as one form of social interaction, different concepts are common in media and communication research. These are “forms”, “patterns”, “practices”, and “types” of communicative action. Basically, all these different 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 – additionally 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 discussion). 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” altogether 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

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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 describing “forms”, “patterns”, and “practices” of communicative action is a way of “typifying” 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 describing 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 understanding 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 communication 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 modernity: “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 communication 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.

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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 environments 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” (Thompson 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 mediatization 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 mediatization 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” (Rothenbuhler 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 communication 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 mediatization 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 communication” (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.

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Tab. 1: Basic types of communication. Direct Communication

Reciprocal media communication

Produced media communication

Virtualized media communication

Constitution in time and space

Co-present context; shared system of space and time references

Separation of contexts; extended access to space and time

Separation of contexts; extended access to space and time

Separation of contexts; extended access to space and time

Range of symbolic means

Variety of symbolic means

Limitation of symbolic means

Limitation and Relative limitation standardization of and standardizasymbolic means tion of symbolic means

Action orientation

Oriented to specific others

Oriented to specific others

Oriented to an indefinite potential number of addressees

Oriented to a potential space of action

Mode of communication

Dialogic

Dialogic

Monologic

Interlogical

Form of connectivity

Local

Translocally addressed

Translocal open

Translocally 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 further. 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 personal 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 quantitatively speaking that the spread of technical communication media is first of all related to the emergence of basic types of communication beyond direct communication: Only with technical media can we think about reciprocal media communication, produced media communication, and virtualized media communication.

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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. Irrespective 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 constructivism, we gain a certain understanding of how all this is related to the transformation of cultures and societies. Following the idea of “communicative constructivism” 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 communicative 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 communicate 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 process 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 analytical point of departure for describing the specific forms and practices of communicative 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).

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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. Therefore, it would fall short to discuss the transformation of the communicative construction 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 mediatization 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: conversations, 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

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of individuals” (Elias 1978: 15) which constitute a larger social entity through reciprocal 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 relationship between figuration analysis and current media and communication research can be found in the common interest to describe actors and their interweaving which, according to Georg Simmel (1972), can be conceptualized as a common pattern of interdependency or reciprocation. Unlike the also widely discussed 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 historical transformation. The concept of communicative figuration therefore becomes an ideal starting point for analysing the transformation of communicative construction 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 communication media must be taken into consideration when describing a specific communicative 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 possibility to transmit decision-making “live” to the national public via smartphone. Integrating 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 communication 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 figurations has to deal with a careful investigation of the role of various media in the communicative forms and practices which are characteristic for each communicative 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

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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 figurations, the terms of “form”, (overlapping) “patterns”, and “practices” of communicative 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, reciprocal 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 communicative constructions of socio-cultural reality are changing. At this level, an analysis 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 figurations 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 symbolic interaction their symbolically meaningful socio-cultural realities. Consequently, 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 consider 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 figuration exists.

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Fig. 1: Heuristics to analyse communicative figurations.

– –

Thirdly, a typical constellation of actors can be determined for each communicative figuration which constitutes itself through its communicative action. Fourthly, every communicative figuration is characterized by a thematic framing; 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 interaction is the core anchor to describe mediatization, it becomes obvious how far “communication” builds the first feature of each communicative figuration. However, 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 political 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 environment” (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

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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 influence”, 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 communicative 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 influenced 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 thematic 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 teaching situation in a classroom as a frame: We “produce” this situation by our interaction 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 constellation of actors build up a “unity of meaning” which orientates the ongoing procedure of “producing” as well as the “perception” of this communicative figuration. 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

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to have in mind when describing communicative figurations. They can be described in a first approach with the help of four questions: How do communicative figurations construct our different “belongings”? How are certain “rules” created 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, communitization, 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 comprehensive 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 transnational 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 relevancy of media and communication change. This concerns transnational diasporas (Dayan 1999), popular-cultural communitizations (Jenkins 2006), religious communities (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-making 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”, responsible for the regulation of Internet addresses, or the World Summit on the Information 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

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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 architecture of platforms or communication services (Lessig 2006; Zittrain 2008; Pariser 2011). If we investigate communicative figurations, we also have to have this construction capacity of rules in mind. The construction capacity of segmentation is more or less related to the tradition 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 mediatization 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 “disempowerment”. Manuel Castells discussed this in great detail for the establishment of comprehensively 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

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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 individuallyselectable 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 analysis of communicative figurations further: If we understand communicative figurations 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 understand 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 communicative 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 enormously elaborate and mostly also expensive – is there also the need for synchronous mediatization research. The main reason for this is that the mediatization process is not linear but has certain “eruptive” moments we might call “mediatization waves”. This term indicates that certain media developments might result in a qualitatively different media environment that makes completely new communicative figurations possible. We can understand the recent phenomenon of digitalization as such a “mediatization wave”, which is at the same time related to a farreaching transformation of formerly non-digital media – television becomes Internet television, cinema becomes digital cinema and so forth. But also other, never-

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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 communication 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 mediatization 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 perspective that moves “communication” into the foreground. Because of that it is neces-

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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 overall 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 figurations. The potential of this approach is that we can use it to analyse various phenomena 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 communicative figurations while our idea of communicative figurations is much more concrete: 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 interrelation 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 societies 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 Federal States.

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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 existence 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 sociocultural 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 fluctuations within the mediatization meta-process as it unfolds in relation to different technological regimes, during different periods, and in diverse socio-cultural contexts. 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 people in their everyday lives, and how people have (re)arranged their life environments materially in response to the appearance (and disappearance) of media. This chapter establishes a theoretical framework for sorting out the different mechanisms 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

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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 television. 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 technology. 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 transformations. 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.

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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 environments, bring along the successive marginalization or elimination of many “standalone” 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 reachability 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, sociophenomenological 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 indispensable 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

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significance (Marvin 1988, Gitelman and Pingree 2003), while others have rapidly fallen into obsolescence due to various contextual (cultural, economic, technological, and so on) circumstances (Löfgren 2009; Acland 2007). Media (like other technologies) become indispensable only when practical affordances are brought into a meaningful relationship with pre-existing, or emerging, socio-material conditions, 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 processes 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 smartphone 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 indispensability and adaptation” may look very differently depending on type of technology 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 indispensability. 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 understanding 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 indispensability. 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

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surface as a successive shift from stand alone media fixtures to increasingly integrated 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 features. This is neither to suggest the end of mediatization, nor to advocate a mediacentric 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 perspective 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 comprehensive 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 commercialization, 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 “accommodation” (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) different 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 dominant 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

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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 analytical sensitivity to these complexities. Still, in order to make it possible to actually pin down and explain concrete expressions and consequences of (trans)mediatization 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 departure 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/ideological realms. Whereas these three realms, which Lefebvre terms perceived, conceived, 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 mental 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 representational register (Grusin 2010). A good example is tourism, whose very existence 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-

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ing register of spatial experiences is premediated in a similar manner via various (trans)media circuits. 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 normalizations, which operate through common sense and thus contribute to the maintenance 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. parents 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 foundational 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 contradictions 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 correspond in a positive manner with alterations within the other two. For example, the common experience of not managing one’s life without a smartphone (indispensability) is positively correlated to managing and planning all kinds of upcoming events online (premediation) and a sense of belonging to a well-functioning modern media society where such practices are positively sanctioned (normalization 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 forthcoming 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.

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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 technology, whose presence is barely noticed or reflected upon by the subject. When wearing glasses, if they function well, they “withdraw” from the wearer’s experience 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 pertinent throughout modern history, giving rise to utopian as well as dystopian prophecies 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 reading, 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 different type of symbiosis or transparency occurs, one between technology and the world, when the user enters the representational realm through the praxis of interpretation. As Ihde (1990: 82) explains, “textual transparency is hermeneutic transparency, not perceptual transparency”. This means that a technology, whether we speak of a thermometer, a newspaper, 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. Transparency is immediately threatened if the reader does not find a certain scale trustworthy or suspect that information is incomplete or biased – a problem which has been scrutinized extensively and from different perspectives in media and communication studies ever since Shannon and Weaver ([1948] 1963) introduced their influential model of radio transmission.

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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 relations, 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 something to master or contest; technology as a toy or object of fascination, and technology as something to interact with as a competitor. As Ihde argues, many technological 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 experiences (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 technics, 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 transparent as technology, the more difficult it is to exclude it from the practices of day-today 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 mediatization according to each of the four human–technology relations mentioned

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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 computers, 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 respondents which medium was the most important one in their lives. Most respondents mentioned television, laptop, and/or mobile telephone. The latter two were motivated in terms of their portability and versatility, highlighting the social significance of the technological leap from “ordinary” cellphones to smartphones (basically 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 different 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 experience 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

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touch-pads entails a more direct code than older, text-based menus and commands, 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 indispensability 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 themselves explain (trans)mediatization, they are important to its lubrication. Thirdly, smartphones and associated devices make the lines between hermeneutic 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 performances, typically in sports, are designed to enable a significant degree of playability and shareability. It means that users enter into a world of play and competition, 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 particular 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 premediations (conceived space) and to the successive normalization of new social practices (lived space).

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Finally, the media have a long history of generating and entering into background 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 background 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 experience 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 – materially, socially, or in other ways. If we consider the other aspect of this regime of mediatization, adaptation, however, the picture becomes clearer. The amalgamation of private media technologies and other practices through the creation of background relations constitutes a good example of how certain individual activities 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 (compared to singular media) may be incorporated within the lifeworld in increasingly complex, open-ended ways. This must not be misunderstood as a techno-deterministic 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

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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 consumption. 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 benefit 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 regarding 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.

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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 socioculturally 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-technology-world” relation each television set is needed for: gaming, video films, children’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). Furthermore, 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 adaptation merely through the lens of technological-relational dependency. As indicated 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 ambiguity 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 (antimaterialist) attitude towards the value of properties, informed by cultural rather than economic capital. Eventually she got herself a smartphone, due to the felt

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need for staying in touch with her son (who helped her to decide) and other relatives around the world via social media. As a further consequence, she has successively 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 appropriation 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 Scandinavian 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. Disconnection 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. However, 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 phenomenological 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-process – an expression of resistance to (trans)mediatization linked to the cultural desire for maintaining clear boundaries in terms of time, space, and social relations. From such a view-point, the integrated and system-dependent nature of transmedia technologies constitutes a threat to individual autonomy and established 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 environments, where one particular function or relation might be established via various

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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 openended, so does the value of “media things” as properties. In a material environment where there are (hypothetically) no longer any record collections, newspapers, 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 building 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 indispensable 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 framework, which as Wise (2012: 160) argues, “is more about resonance than representation, about forms and substances brought into relation”. To some extent we have already touched upon these issues. In Ihde’s work there are overlapping arguments 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 physical 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 Lefebvre’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 communicative properties in space, as well as to the naturalized bodily and sensory experience, 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-

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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 people). They thus support our sense of continuity and belonging (or “out-of-placeness”) 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 “thickenings” (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 provision of efficient and safe transit systems. As illustrated by our fourth interview extract, even though the systemic imposition of abstract technologies, notably surveillance 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 Facebook, or playing Wordfeud, while waiting for or travelling by public transit. Certain

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media forms, translated into practice, thus have a stronger potential to amalgamate with certain spatial practices than others. Through repetition these amalgamations 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 disabled, 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 winding 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 gatherings 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 amalgamation 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

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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 transmedia 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 temporally and/or spatially fixed and predefined. Newspapers were categorized as “evening papers” or “morning papers”, distributed according to institutionalized transport 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 “timeshifting”), 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 amalgamate 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) institutionally 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 indispensability and adaptation, (2) premediation of spatial experience, and (3) normaliza-

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tion of social practice. Together these regimes chart out the complexity and pervasiveness 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 framework 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 material 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) sociological theories of socio-cultural legitimation and practical knowledge (media properties), and Lefebvre’s ([1974] 1991) phenomenology of the materialization of everyday 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 textural 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 technological determinism; the non-media-centric view of interdependencies between media developments (technological, institutional, and representational) and structural conditions in society. Such a perspective is integral to the analytical framework 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 indispensability 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.

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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 mediatization might add to the understanding of digital media. It is argued that digital media open an array of new trajectories in human communication, 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 mediatization and the notion of media. Section 3 analyses the relation between mediatization 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, materializations 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 developments 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 mediatization 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?

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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 primarily 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 properties, the material characteristics of various media, and the institutional forms understood? – seems to be the most difficult; there have been quite a lot of indications 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 systems, the printing press, the telephone, television systems, the Internet – are simply reduced to “technology”, which can be left out of the analysis of media cultures. 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 institutions 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

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mediatization. Since digital media introduce a radical change in the materialization 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 communication: it is always mediated, but in a variety of historically distinct forms. Consequently, mediatization cannot be said to comprise a general set of properties characterizing 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 particular 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 systems. 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 institutionalizations 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 interpretation, embracing the whole history of human communication. This is in accordance with the claim that all forms of human communication are externalized, materialized 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.

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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 material world, res extensa, which only exists in time and space. Since media are material 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 communication. 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 information, 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 discrepancies 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).

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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 inclusion 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 converted into a shared physical format – the binary alphabet – that can be mechanically 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 reconfigurations 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 Meyrowitz (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 systems, 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.

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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. Writing 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 exaptation has been proposed, focusing on the non-deterministic increase in complexity. 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 natural 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 separate 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 materially 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 noncausal 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 characteristics, as they do not allow individual events that are not rule-governed. However, if all individual events were determined by previous events, there would be

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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 transcendent 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-

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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 localized 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 conceptualization 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 presenting 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 reconfiguration 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

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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 programmes. 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. Nevertheless, digitization of non-digital materials gives rise to a range of new opportunities 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 considered 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 profiles, created for use in connection with home banking or online health services,

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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 similar 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 incorporated in pacemakers or operated into the body to replace ruined nerve fibres and connecting patients and hospitals for monitoring and adjustment purposes; observational 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 mediatization 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 phenomenological interpretations of media communication, but it is a part of all forms of digital media and a fundamental part of the contemporary processes of mediatization, 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 analysing digital materials.

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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 digital computers. Also radio receivers were early on capable of detecting radio stations 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 Schneider 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 methodologies 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 several 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.

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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 evolutionary 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 interpretations 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, technological, 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 position 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, background 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 institutions, 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 revenues 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-

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munication and search made possible by the Internet. The media systems experienced 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 standards 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 themselves 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 initiatives 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 asynchronous 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, analogue 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 electronic. Finally, it also makes everything digital searchable. In this respect too electronic digital media differ radically from analogue electronic media. Analogue electronic 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

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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 networks 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 theories, 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 fundamental, 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 methodological devices and architectures for studying the object, which at the same time has become a moving target.

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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 architecture, 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 mainframes 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 reinterpretation of the computer. Thus, “digital media” is used to denote not simply the networked connections between many computers, but also to replace 1) the concept 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 connection with the interpretation of the mainframe machines of the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, it deviates from the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) conceptualization 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

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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 particular 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

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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 relevance to people. According to a survey on media usage in Denmark in 2009, television 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, YouTube, 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 externalized communication media. A third distinction, therefore, might be related to externalization. Digital processes are only included if they are manifested in externalized, 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 communication, 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

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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. religion, 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 permanently untouched by digitization. Still, digitization makes a difference both to nondigital 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 mediatization 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 precondition for digital communication. Traditional “Newtonian” machines, however complex they are, can be defined as based on an intended repetitive functional

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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 communication 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 Meyrowitz (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 reduces this media culture to that of one dominant media culture. But this is too simplistic: 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 interpretations reduces media culture to one dominant medium and culture, it is not necessarily an intrinsic part of the approach. Furthermore, the idea of dominant media does not necessarily imply a reduction of media cultures, but it does imply the existence of relations between media,

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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 replacement theories (new media replace old media), theories of extension, different theories 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 microlevel 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

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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 understanding of media and mediatization, but on the basis of medium theory approaches and other contributions it is possible to identify spatiotemporal, material, 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 communicational 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 presented 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, referring 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.

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Like writing, print, radio, and television, digital media also open up for new trajectories 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 multimodal 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 communication, b) local, national, and transnational reach, and c) the choice of communication 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 characterized 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

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Mirca Madianou

14 Polymedia communication and mediatized migration: an ethnographic approach Abstract: This chapter investigates the cumulative consequences of new communication 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 country. This discourse, which ultimately normalizes migration decisions, is also evident 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 migration – they transform it altogether. The chapter also outlines the distinct contribution of an ethnographic approach to mediatization. Keywords: migration, transnational families, interpersonal communication, family relationships, social change, media anthropology, ethnography, new communication 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 communication 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-

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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 conditions of family separation. While for most people family life will involve a combination 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 question of representation – the ways migrants are (mis)representend in various formats 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 important 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 representatives, non-governmental organizations, and telecommunications companies themselves. Adopting a wider analytical lens helps to address the cumulative consequences of the media for migrants themselves and for the phenomenon of migration more broadly. What does it mean for a migrant woman from the Philippines 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 leftbehind 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-forgrantedness of transnational communication made possible because of the avail-

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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-proliferating new communication technologies for Filipino families whose members experience 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 implications 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 Couldry and Hepp 2013; Lundby 2009b). This chapter develops a hybrid approach that draws on the social constructionist tradition of mediatization (Couldry 2012; Couldry 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 relationships 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 earlier 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 contribute 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

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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 Philippines to the UK which is often described as short-term and individual, often involving family separation at the nuclear level. Migrants are typically employed in the care sector occupying different types of low-skilled (domestic work) and highskilled (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 practices 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 mediatization occurs at the level of relationships themselves (for a discussion on motherhood, 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 destination/host country before moving on to the research design. The empirical discussion brings together the perspectives of various stakeholders involved in the process 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-

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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. Textual 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 problems. 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 coverage 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 exception 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 decades 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 conditions of subjugation (Sun 2011). Media consumption emerges as a key site in the symbolic articulations of identities which are recognized as processes of negotia-

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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 transnational 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 diaspora 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 notable exceptions which have made broader arguments for the consequences of media for migration and wider social change. For example, Qiu’s (2009) work on (internal) 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. Madianou’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 figurations” 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. Mediatization represents the convergence of efforts to capture the cumulative social consequences 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

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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 mediatization (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 consumption 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, transnationally. 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 unpredictable, such insight is invaluable for a mediatization approach. One of my secondary 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 construction 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, technologies 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. Additionally, 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

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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 countries (UK and US) which have differing legal frameworks and labour markets reveals that media change is dependent on the social contexts (Madianou, in preparation). 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 different guises and shapes depending on the media and platforms employed. Communication media introduce structural and technological parameters in human interactions. 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 (Madianou and Miller 2013) will be structured differently. In order to understand mediation 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 relationships. Rather than implying that affordances introduce a version of media logic at the level of mediation, I argue that mediation requires a combined understanding 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.

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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 understood 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 remittance-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 government 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

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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 phenomenon of transnational mothering (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2005). Female migration and transnational mothering has been a source of controversy 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 stereotypes about motherhood and mothering as “the light of the home” (ArellanoCaradang, 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 Filipina migrant women focuses on how they negotiate these contradictory discourses and articulate their own personal and maternal subjectivities through their everyday 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.

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back home) and thus better equipped for long distance parenting – the arrival of smartphones and cheap netbooks seem to open up the opportunities for transnational 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 migration 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 Rumbaut 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 Philippines 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 leftbehind 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 agencies, advocacy groups, and telecommunications companies. I also attended the mandatory Pre-Departure Orientation Seminars organized by the Philippine Overseas 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 migration 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).

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institutional discourses regarding new media in the context of migration and family 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 implications 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 transnational 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 government 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 leftbehind 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 transnational 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

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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 developed a dedicated digital literacy training programme for migrants and their leftbehind 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 destinations 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 themselves 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 intermediaries. 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

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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 communication 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 companies. Globe, for instance, sponsors OWWA’s “Model OFW Family of the Year” competition which recognizes a financially successful migrant family whose members maintain close family ties despite separation. This competition seems to encapsulate 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 optimism surrounding new media justified when assessing the success of transnational communication? The following two sections provide answers to this question.

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 webcam 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 mothers 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

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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 communication 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 conflicts – 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 conflict – 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 communication. Rather strikingly, the sample was divided into two: those for whom new media worked well and who reported an improvement in relationships post-migration; 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

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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 prohibitively 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 monitoring 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’ frequent 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

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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 problems 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 consequence 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 children? 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 mediated 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 decisions 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

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many of our participants had found oppressive in the context of their personal relationships. It is thus not surprising that many participants experienced migration 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”. Unsurprisingly, 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 reinforce 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 appropriate 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 justification for their personal decisions. I would not assume, however, that migrant women are simply influenced by the neoliberal ideologies of the Philippine government (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 experienced 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

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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 communication at a distance is beginning to contribute to the shaping of the wider phenomenon of migration itself. Migrant women justify decisions relating to migration as well as decisions relating to the prolongation of their stay on the availability of transnational communication. Even though new media will not solve problems 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 discourses 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 communication 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 sustains 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 managed their relationships through their choice of media. Choosing a platform over another from within the menu of available media opportunities acquired communicative 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, economic, gender, and cultural factors which determine migration flows and migrant experiences. Being an economic migrant from the Philippines differs fundamentally from being a refugee or asylum seeker from a war-torn country. The migrant

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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 investigation of different stakeholders, from government agencies to mobile phone companies themselves. At this point it’s worth reflecting on what an anthropological approach to mediatization would include: first, a wide lens approach, investigating 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 organizations relevant to the research. Second, a historical perspective; ethnography is often considered as too preoccupied with the present. That is not accurate and there is a plethora of ethnographies, including media ethnographies (see Larkin 2002), which encompass a historical 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 particularly revealing of changes brought about by new communication technologies. Related to this point about temporality is the importance of a long-term perspective. 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 geographical 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 – fieldwork is like a solving a mystery, full of surprises and unexpected twists (see also

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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 mediatization of migration would ideally need to extend these comparisons to different migrant populations, migration patterns as well different destinations/host societies. This will allow for the disaggregation of factors relating to sending countries, receiving countries, legal frameworks, and media environments which will contribute to theory building and the further understanding of the deeper social consequences of the media. So although the thesis presented here may have wider applicability in different empirical contexts it is understood as only the beginning of a larger project of new media environments, migration and social change.

References Acacio, Kristel. 2008. Managing labor migration: Philippine state policy and intenational migration flows, 1969–2000. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 17: 103–132. Arellano-Caradang, Maria Lourdes, Beatrix A. Sison and Christopher Caradang. 2007. Nawala Ang Ilaw Ng Tahanan, case studies of families left behind by OFW mothers. Manila: Anvil. Asis, Maruja M. B. 2008. The Philippines. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 17(3–4): 349–378. Baldassar, Loretta. 2008. Missing kin and longing to be together: Emotions and the construction of co-presence in transnational relationships. Journal of Intercultural Studies 29(3): 247– 266. Baym, Nancy. 2010. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity. Benson, Rodney. 2013. Shaping Immigration News. A French–American Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin. Castles, Stephen and Mark Miller. 2009. The Age of Migration. London: Palgrave. Clark, Lynn Schofield. 2012. The Parent App. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Constable, Nicole. 2009. At home but not at home: Filipina narratives of ambivalent returns. Cultural Anthropology 14(2): 203–228. Couldry, Nick. 2012. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity. Couldry, Nick and Andreas Hepp. 2013. Conceptualizing mediatization: Contexts, traditions, arguments. Communication Theory 23(3): 191–202. Deuze, Mark. 2012. Media Life. Cambridge: Polity Diminescu, Dana. 2008. The connected migrant: an epistemological manifesto. Social Science Information 47(4): 565–579. Elias, Nelly and Dafna Lemish. 2009. Spinning the web of identity: the roles of the internet in the lives of immigrant adolescents. New Media and Society. 11(4): 533–551.

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Franklin, Marianne I. 2001. Inside out: postcolonial subjectivities and everyday life online. International Feminist Journal of Politics 3(3): 387–422. Fortunati, Leopoldina, Raul Pertierra and Jane Vincent (eds. ). 2012. Migrations, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies. London: Routledge. Georgiou, Myria. 2006. Diaspora, Identity and the Media. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Gillespie, Marie. 1995. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change. London: Routledge. Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds.). 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guibernau, Montserrat. 2010. Migration and the Rise of the Radical Right. London: Policy Network Paper. Hartmann, P. and C. Husband. 1974. Racism and the Mass Media. London: Davis and Poynter. Hegde, Radha (ed.). 2011. Circuits of Visibility. New York: New York Press. Hepp, Andreas. 2012. Mediatization and the ‘moulding forces’ of the media. Communications 37(1): 1–28. doi: 10.1515/commun-2012-0001. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hiller, Harry and Tara Franz. 2004. New ties, old ties and lost ties: the use of the internet in diaspora. New Media and Society 6(6): 731–752. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29(2): 105–134. Hjarvard, Stig. 2013. The Mediatization of Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Hochschild, Arlie. 2000. Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In: Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds.), On The Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, 130–146. London: Jonathan Cape. Hondagneu- Sotelo, Pierrette and Ernestine Avila. 1997. “I’m here, but I’m there”: The meanings of Latina transnational motherhood. Gender and Society 11(5): 538–571. Horst, Heather, Becky Herr-Stephenson and Laura Robinson. 2010. Media ecologies. In: Mizuko Ito et al., Hanging out, Messing Around and Geeking out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, 32–78. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Horst, Heather and Daniel Miller. 2006. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg. Horst, Heather and Daniel Miller (eds.). 2012. Digital Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Husband, Charles. 2005. Minority ethnic media as communities of practice: professionalism and identity politics in interaction. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(3): 461–479. Hutchby, Ian. 2001. Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology 35: 441–456. Jha, Shikha, Guntur Sugiyarto and Carlos Vargas Silva. 2009. The Global Crisis and the Impact on Remittances to Developing Asia. Economics Working Paper Series. Kaye, Ronald. 2001. Blaming the victim: an analysis of press representation of refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. In: Russell King and Nancy Wood (eds.), Media and Migration, 53–70. London: Routledge. Kosnick, Kira. 2007. Migrant Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization. A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 19–38. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Larkin, Brian. 2002. Materializing culture: cinema and the creation of social space in media worlds. In: Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (eds.), Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, pp. 319–336. Berkeley: University of California Press. Livingstone, Sonia. 2009. On the mediation of everything. Journal of Communication 59(1): 1–18. Loshitzky, Yosefa. 2010. Screening Strangers: Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary European Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Lundby, Knut. 2009a. Media logic: looking for social interaction. In: Knut Lundby (ed.) Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, 101–119, New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut (ed.). 2009b. Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. MacKenzie, Donald and Judy Wajcman. 1999. Introductory essay. In: Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology (2nd ed.), 3–27, Buckingham: Open University Press. Madianou, Mirca. 2005a. Mediating the Nation: News, Audiences and the Politics of Identity. London: UCL Press/Routledge. Madianou, Mirca. 2005b. Contested communicative spaces: identities, boundaries and the role of the media. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31(3): 521–541. Madianou, Mirca. 2011. Beyond the presumption of identity? Ethnicities, cultures and transnational audiences. In: Virginia Nightingale (ed.), Handbook of Media Audiences, 444–458. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Madianou, Mirca. 2012. Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood: the role of ICTs in Filipino Transnational Families. Global Networks 12(3): 277–295. Madianou, Mirca. 2014. Smartphones as polymedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19(3): 667–680. Madianou, Mirca. in preparation. The tangibility of networks. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. London: Routledge. Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2013. Polymedia: towards a new theory of digital media in interpersonal communication. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169–187. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Martín-Barbero, Jesus. 1993. Communication, Culture and Hegemony. London, England: Sage. Miller, Daniel and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg. Mitra, Ananda. 2001. Marginal voices in cyberspace. New Media and Society 3(1): 29–48. Moore, Kerry, Bernhard Gross and Terry Threadgold (eds.). 2012. Migrations and the Media. New York: Peter Lang. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Padios, Jan Maghinay. 2011. Dial C for Culture: telecommunications, gender and the Filipino transnational gender market. In: Radha Hegde (ed), Circuits of Visibility, 212–230. New York: New York Press. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2001. Servants of Globalization. Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2005. Children of Global Migration. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2008. The Force of Domesticity. New York: New York Press. Pertierra, Raul. 2010. The Anthropology of New Media in the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press. Philo, Greg, Emma Briant and Pauline Donald. 2013. Bad News for Refugees. London: Pluto Press. POEA. [2005] Overseas Employment Statistics. Manila: POEA POEA. [2009] 2008. Overseas Employment Statistics. URL http://poea.gov.ph/stats/ stats2007.pdf. Consulted 19 March 2010 Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbaut. 2006. Immigrant America, a portrait, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Qiu, Jack. 2009. Working-Class Network Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Reuters. 2008. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS94568+09-Jan-2008+PRN20080109 Last consulted: 22 November 2012

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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 mediainduced 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 mediatization 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, mediatization 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 massmedier (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, however, 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”. Consequently, 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

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was a conscious attempt to introduce a concept that in the same way as “Americanization” 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 nothing “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

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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 adaptation 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) adaptation 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 fundamental 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).

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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 hypothesis; 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 during 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 environment and the continuous adaptation of individuals and societal institutions to this environment. Thus, adaptation is the first key element in the theory of mediatization.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 membership 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; Kepplinger 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.

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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 adaptation. 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 departure 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 mediatization 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 rationality 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 television and the mediatization of the lifeworld in the age of the Internet, this distinction 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 reducing the distinctiveness of the concept. Consequently, mediatization should be considered 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 contributions that others have made. In Schulz’s account (1998: 98), “four different processes of change represent different aspects of mediatization: extensions, substitution, amalgamation and accommodation”. 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 apparent example of what Schultz discusses in terms of “extension”).

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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 adaptation of individuals and societal institutions to the media environment is a onedimensional process of social learning. Essentially, this learning process occurs in two subsequent steps; a sensemaking 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. Consequently, 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 environment – 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 parties. However, as television became increasingly important, the politicians gradually 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 independently; 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, acclimatization 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 qualitative 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 onedimensional 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.

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The third phase of mediatization began in Sweden in the mid-1980s as politicians increasingly started to adjust to the powerful media and their modus operandi. By copying the media, the politicians’ understanding of media logic gradually 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 institutions now accommodated to the media rather customarily; over time, they increasingly 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 thoroughly.

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 different 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 emphasis 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.

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In comparison, amongst researchers who conceive of the media as an institution 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 difference 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 neoinstitutional 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 wishful 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 constraints (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.

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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 organized 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 institutions. 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 discussion 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 understood. 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 procedures), 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 institution 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. “objectivity”) 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 institutions 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).

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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 professional 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 introduction 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 underlying 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 audience, 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 politicians (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.

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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 Studies: 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 commentators 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, journalists have increasingly freed themselves from a former dependency on political sources. Over time, that is, the media have become less interested in the information 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 developments 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 conformity towards established institutions and traditions, and increasing political volatility have all implied that the potential for persuasion has grown. For example, 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.

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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). The professionalization of politics: Since the 1960s, the traditional Swedish membership parties have increasingly given way to electoral-professional parties (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).

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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 narrower 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 critical, 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 estimates 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 institutions, 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 evidence 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”.

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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 agendasetting 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 actordefined 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 elections campaigns in Sweden are highly influenced by the media.14 The next step in the analysis is to test the hypothesis that predicts an adaptation 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 distinguished, and an underlying notion was that increased adaptation indicates increased media power. In other words, the more individuals and societal institutions 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 accommodation 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) integration (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: compared to other societal institutions, the media as an institution has become increasingly 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 conflicts (Robinson 1976; Ranney 1983; Entman 1989); poll-driven horse race journalism; game orientation (at the expense of attention to issues and substance); pack journalism (Patterson 1993; Cappella and Jamieson 1996; Fallows 1996; Gabler 1998); and media intrusion/interventionism (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Swanson and Mancini 1996; Strömbäck and Esser 2009).

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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 Strömbäck (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 development 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 politics: 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

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news media of today are conceived of as a political institution integral to government. 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 increasingly 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 advocated 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-ridden issues, fragmented political debates devoid of ideology, and short-term opinion 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 relations 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

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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 confrontational 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 traditional 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

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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 generally 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 reelaborated. What must be clarified is the causal mechanism – how the process of adaptation 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-institutional 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 perspective 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 politics and society are marked by power shifts. The reasons are twofold: the traditional 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 historical 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

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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 relatively 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 mediatization. My fourth conclusion is concerned with the two driving forces behind mediatization: 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

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institution; it is as the rules of the game become increasingly influenced by television 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 arguments against this scenario; the Internet and social media demassify and individualize 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 process 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 communication 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 formats 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 societal power.

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Today, both people’s leisure time and working hours are increasingly organized 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 controlling 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 theoretical sense, the mediatization of the lifeworld can be seen as a development of increased adaptation to a logic that is ultimately determined by commercial enterprises 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 relevance 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 institutions, and the extent to which media content and political institutions, organizations, 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 interventionism, 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 Berganza 2012), more focused on covering politics as a strategic game (Aalberg, Strömbäck 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

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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), journalistic 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 mediatization 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 politics and outline the conceptualization of the mediatization of politics as a fourdimensional 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 dimensions. Finally, we will address some key challenges in future research on the mediatization 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 technology and as an organization) into all spheres of society and social life”, while

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Hjarvard (2013: 17) defines mediatization as “the process whereby culture and society becomes dependent on media and their logic”. In the context of politics, Mazzoleni 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 important 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 functions as a necessary prerequisite for further processes of the mediatization of politics. The second dimension refers to the degree to which media have become differentiated 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 independent of political institutions, their modus operandi and coverage of politics will increasingly be shaped by the media’s own interests, needs, and standards of

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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 happens, 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

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

the relationship between politics and media – be interactive (Blumler and Gurevitch 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 mediatized.

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 newspapers, 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 anyone 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

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Internet has undoubtedly transformed many aspects of society (van Dijk 2012), including politics and political communication, but it has not (yet) replaced traditional 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 services (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 organizations 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 functions 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). However, 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 pressures, 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 important 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 considerable power on political actors.

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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; Schillemans 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 subsystems. 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 singularity 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 acting, 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 understood 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.

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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 journalism 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 commercial 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 technologies shape content in production and reproduction processes, as well as the processes 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 commercialism 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.

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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 decisionmaking 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 regulating 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 country. Policy refers to the processes of defining problems and forming and implementing 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 candidacy, 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 elections, 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 recognizes that power, and the battle for power, is an inherent part of all things political, and that politicians often have to “go public” to achieve this (Kernell 2007). Based on this understanding, political logic is shaped by the overall institutional 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 institutions 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).

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5 Mediatization as a theory of media influence Revisiting our earlier definition of the mediatization of politics in light of the discussion 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 (organizational) 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 structure 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 function 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 structures 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

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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 illustrate 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 indirect 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 succession. 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 reciprocal and indirect than linear and direct effects, and more in instrumental (or functional) than causal explanations. Thus, from the perspective of the mediatization of politics, media influence refers to all politically relevant activities and processes 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 (Marcinkowski 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 management, media agenda building, stage management, and other marketing and

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political public relations strategies and tactics could thus be understood as selfmediatization 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; Bennett and Entman 2001, a recent review suggests that there is surprisingly scant empirical evidence on exactly how important news media, relative to other potential 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

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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 Eurobarometer (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 Semetko 2008), even when listing interpersonal communication and personal contacts 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 (Purcell 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 studies 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, substantial 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 suggests 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 communication 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-

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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 environments 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 Hallin 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 particular, Polarized Pluralist systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004; Udris and Lucht 2014). In both Liberal and Democratic Corporatist systems, the political independ-

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ence of media has eroded political parallelism whereas in Polarized Pluralist systems, media have been and often continue to be subject to political instrumentalization. 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. Looking at the last few decades, the media in Democratic Corporatist systems in particular have become more independent of political institutions. While political parallelism 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 journalism 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 organizations; degree of journalistic professionalism and strength of a distinct set of journalistic 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 independent from political institutions. At a general level, it can also be argued that media are always positioned somewhere between the political system and the economic 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 systems such as the United States and the United Kingdom and in Democratic Corporatist 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 systems such as Italy or France, where the news media is less independent from political institutions and more embedded in politics. The implication is that politics is likely to be more mediatized in countries with Liberal systems, followed by countries with Democratic Corporatist and, lastly, countries with Polarized Pluralist 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

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and a highly partisan – if institutionally independent – press. This makes the United Kingdom less Liberal than the United States, and more similar to Democratic 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 mediatization of politics it is also important to recognize differences across countries. The degree of media autonomy from political institutions, as the mediatization of politics 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 independent of political institutions, and to take similarities and differences across countries 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 journalists; (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 candidates 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).

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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 cooperation (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 mediatization. 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 stories, 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 covered 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 countries, 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 similarities notwithstanding, the study also established the contours of three political news cultures: a strongly interventionist US American approach, a moderately 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 election 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

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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 Berganza 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 different 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-production 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 independent, 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 perceived need of individuals, organizations, institutions, and social systems to communicate with or through news media. Hence, it includes both the structural influence 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 influence and the fact that media and media considerations have become increasingly

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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 politicians would do anything to get attention from the media, while the corresponding 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 Sheafer (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 mightier 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 influence. In one meta-analysis of the media’s political agenda-setting influence, covering 19 empirical studies, eight studies showed considerable media impact, four showed some impact, while seven showed no or weak impact (Walgrave and van

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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 institutions, organizations, and actors within countries (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012; Schillemans 2012; Donges and Jarren 2014; Landerer 2014) as well as across different 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 (polity). 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 substitution. 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 attention, 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 variations 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 influence is how media and media considerations have come to be increasingly embedded 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 structures 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

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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 compromises – suggesting one kind of media influence – but it also suggests how media and media considerations have become integrated in the perhaps least public of political processes – suggesting another kind of media influence. As concluded by Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski (2010: 20–21), “media logic is omnipresent in political negotiations, but it does not put them at risk per se: Rather, media impact can be generalized as institutional responses by strategically thinking 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 Reunanen 2012). While mediatization suggests that the media have great influence on political institutions, organizations, and actors, it thus also suggests that recognizing and adapting to media influence can be a strategic means to enhance political influence. Thus, media influence may be mediated through the relations and intentions of political and media actors (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012; Strömbäck and van Aelst 2013). This is also an example of self-mediatization or reflexive mediatization (Meyer 2002; Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010) and of how the structural 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 confirming 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

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public. Similar to other meta-processes such as individualization and globalization, 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 consequences 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 empirical 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 mediatization 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 antecedents 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 interactive 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.

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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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Strömbäck, Jesper and Peter Van Aelst. 2013. Why political parties adapt to the media: Exploring the fourth dimension of mediatization. International Communication Gazette 75(4): 341–358. Strömbäck, Jesper, Mark Ørsten and Toril Aalberg (eds.). 2008. Communicating Politics. Political Communication in the Nordic Countries. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Strömbäck, Jesper, Ralph Negrine, David Nicolas Hopmann, Michaela Maier, Carlos Jalali, Rosa Berganza, Gilg U. H. Seeber, Andra Seceleanu, Jaromir Volek, Boguslawa Dobek-Ostrowska, Juri Mykkänen, Marinella Belluati and Jolán Róka. 2011. The mediatization and framing of European parliamentary election campaigns. In: Michaela Maier, Jesper Strömbäck and Lynda Lee Kaid (eds.), Political Communication in European Parliamentary Elections, 161– 174. Farnham: Ashgate. Takens, Janet, Wouter van Atteveldt, Anita van Hoof and Jan Kleinnijenhuis. 2013 Media logic in election campaign coverage. European Journal of Communication 28(3): 277–293. Tal-Or, Nurit, Yariv Tsfati and Albert C. Gunther. 2009. The influence of presumed influence: Origins and implications of the third-person perception. In: Robin L. Nabi and Mary Beth Oliver (eds), The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, 99–112. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Tewksbury, David and Jason Rittenberg. 2012. News on the Internet. Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Udris, Linards and Jens Lucht. 2014. Mediatization at the system level: Independence from politics, dependence on the market. In: Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck (eds.), Mediatization of Politics. Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies, 114– 136. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Aelst, Peter and Stefaan Walgrave. 2011. Minimal or massive? The political agenda-setting power of the mass media according to different methods. International Journal of Press/ Politics 16(3): 295–313. Van Aelst, Peter, Bart Maddens, Jo Noppe and Stefaan Fiers. 2008a. Politicians in the news: Media or party logic? Media attention and electoral success in the Belgian election campaign of 2003. European Journal of Communication 23(2): 193–210. Van Aelst, Peter, Kees Brants, Philip Van Praag, Claes H. de Vreese, Michiel Nuytemans and Arjen van Dalen. 2008b. The fourth estate as superpower? An empirical study of perceptions of media power in Belgium and the Netherlands. Journalism Studies 9(4): 494–511. Van Aelst, Peter, Tamir Sheafer and James Stanyer. 2012. The personalization of mediated political communication: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism 13(2): 203–220. Van Aelst, Peter, Gunnar Thesen, Stefaan Walgrave and Rens Vliegenthart. 2014. Mediatization and political agenda setting: Changing issue priorities? In: Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck (eds.), Mediatization of Politics. Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies, 200–220. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. van Biezen, Ingrid, Peter Mair and Thomas Poguntke. 2012. Going, going, ... gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research 51(1): 24– 56. van Dijk, Jan. 2012. The Network Society (3rd Edition). London: Sage. Walgrave, Stefaan and Peter van Aelst. 2006. The contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting power: Toward a preliminary theory. Journal of Communication 56(1): 88– 109. Williams, Bruce A. and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2011. After Broadcast News. Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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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 responsibilities within the organization are discussed. The chapter argues that career bureaucrats 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 frequently 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 dominated 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

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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 encompassing 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 servants 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 conduct 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 mandate of modern public bureaucracies. Based on this discussion, the chapter outlines 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-

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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 mediatization 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 principles 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 fullyfledged 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 routines 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

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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 represent the opposite type of institution; they are formalized organizations whose activities are derived from a comprehensive set of procedures and norms of conduct 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 structures and principles of coordination. The classic Weberian hierarchical organization, 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

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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 private 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 bureaucracies 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 participation 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 considerations 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 responsiveness 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 efficiently and at the same time restrict them enough to prevent power abuse and secure accountability (Kettl 2008). Mediatization has been defined as a non-normative concept (Hjarvard 2008), and although mediatization processes are not negative per se, it is imperative to investigate the potential normative implications of the mediatization of democratic institutions. Some have argued that, with new

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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? Furthermore, 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 dominate 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 powerful, logic of the news institution. The analysis is based on a comprehensive study of mediatization of the central Norwegian public administration, based on extensive 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

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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 prerequisite 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 organization is well-run and rational; that regulations and laws are fulfilling their intentions within the given budgets and political framework; and that case-handling is fair, efficient, and correct. In contrast to party politics, where the individual politicians 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 nevertheless 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 Thorbjørnsrud 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 neutrality 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 essential, 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 institutions and actors. The 24/7 flow of news alters or influences the work of civil servants 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

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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 successful 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, practitioners 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 increasingly 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 (Thorbjørnsrud, 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, decreasing 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-

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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 (Iyengar 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 emotional 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 language 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 journalists 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

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of formal media and communication training (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 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 caseworkers 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 talking points, their role as neutral expert is continuously challenged. In mediatized public bureaucracies, the civil servants will go beyond answering 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 organizations; 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 communication 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 socalled “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,

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public reports and propositions are often written with a clear message, some type of introductory teaser, personifications, and/or illustrations (photos) (Thorbjørnsrud, 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 interactions between public bureaucracy and journalists (between institutions), interactions 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 traditional hierarchical organizational structures. A focus on controlling the dissemination 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

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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, flexibility, and the ability to perform under high pressure are imposed on public servants. 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, administrative 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 casework in the wake of media coverage does occur (Thorbjørnsrud, Ihlen and Figenschou 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 regulations 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 legislature, but this initiative can be the result of advice from civil servants within the

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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, mediatization 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 valuable, as traditional bureaucratic language often tends to be cumbersome and inaccessible 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 language 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 changing 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 decisionmaking processes. Notwithstanding the above, the responsiveness to the press by public bureaucracies 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 decisions reached because of the unpleasant noise created and the volume of mass media coverage. There is a vital difference between responsiveness to the documentation 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.

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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 information barriers protecting the organization as such and not the public interest. Organizations 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 different 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 superficial adaptations to media requests to more substantial organizational changes. The type of mediatization outlined here is suitable as a guide for future empirically-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, precise 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

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directly with the formal, explicit traditional norms of bureaucracies. By spelling out the characteristics of mediatization in public bureaucracies, this chapter contributes 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 influenced by the proximity or distance of a bureaucratic organization to or from the elected political leadership. An important question to answer is whether mediatization actually implies politicization of bureaucracies, or whether the public administration develops its own raison d’être for being present in the news? One hypothesis 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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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 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. 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 demonstrate how the revenue of many corporations surpasses the Gross Domestic Product of entire countries. For instance, the 2010 revenue of Wal-Mart made this corporation 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

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has become central (De Geer, Borglund and Frostenson 2009). Corporate misbehavior has been a focus since the introduction of investigating reporting practice during 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 relationship 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 understood 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 volume). 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). Having this discussion in mind, we refer in the following to mediatization as a phenomenon 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 pressure. Different parts of the social world understand and are exposed to the media(tization) pressures differently – which has been shown for example by studies 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 interests and contestations from parallel or competing institutions (Pallas and Fredriksson 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 understand each other; and b) that it is possible for other institutions like the corporation to intentionally and skillfully relate to these processes through the practice of public relations or more specifically media relations.

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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 relations, 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 intentionally (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 explanations 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 mediatization effects, and thirdly, we examine the tools of corporations; we focus first on why corporations devote resources to media relations of media relations. The complexity, 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 overlapping. 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-tobusiness corporations in uncontroversial sectors, are less influenced by the practices 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; Micklethwait 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

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attraction of the latter media is that they provide reach and the credibility of thirdparty endorsement (Bailey 2009; Hallahan 2010b). For many people, public relations 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 construction 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 corporate 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 stakeholders have on each other. Media, next to its direct role in providing information

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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 presenting 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 importance of legitimacy also points to the significance of the media as a site for contestation about legitimacy, and, it should be added, public opinion on what constitutes 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 corporate environment and the issues that are discussed here. Again, media coverage is important. Research has shown how media framing influences the reputation of corporations 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 qualities (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 jubilees 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

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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 overcome public hostility towards corporations “because of ignorance or misinformation”. 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 proactive 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. Wellknown 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 particular 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 indispensable 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

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as a mediatization effect. And although people and organizations have been preoccupied 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 coverage. 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).

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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 Norwegian 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). Similarly, Grünberg and Pallas (2013) illustrate how corporations publish their quarterly 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 corporations that bear witness to the increased importance of (understanding) the media. Human Resources and Investor Relations practices, Legal Issues, and CSR departments are commonly being re-structured and staffed in relation to prevailing corporate media strategies (Engwall et al. forthcoming). Also studies on implementation 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

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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 influenced 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 tangometaphor 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 corporations and the media differ as to their formality, time frame, content, and setting. The authors introduce three different forms of corporate media activities – providing, 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 legitimate 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 prevailing context in which they conduct their activities. Promoting includes wellorchestrated 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 societal actors. Co-opting as media strategy has as a goal the creation of strong collaborative 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 persuading about own interests. Such media efforts are often based on co-operation

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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, “packaged” and scripted for publicity. Instead of changing the product as such, a competition 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 common practice among corporations, along with the use of press releases, press meetings/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 interest 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, practically 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 journalists’ 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 professional 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 traditional 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.

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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 particularly 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), individual/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-Ewoldsen 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 dayto-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

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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 pressures to which corporations are exposed by various actors and developments in their surroundings. Thus corporate media activities not only protect the corporations 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 corporations 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 corporate 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 institution 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 mediatization processes, this logic is pitted against the news logic; the media’s preferences and practices. Negative news coverage can hamper the profitability of a corporation and steal attention and human resources. On the other side, positive media

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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 knowledge. 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 mediatized, 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 exciting 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 corporations influence the media generally. As always, more research is needed.

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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 mediatization 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 profession 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 mediatization 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 opinion and base their decisions solely on the law. Yet the legal system in many countries 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.

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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 developments in the media and legal scenes in Israel, using theoretical insights about the mediatization process, particularly in the works of Schulz (2004) and Strömbäck (2008). We will discuss the Israeli results with reference to other legal systems, 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).

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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 mediatization 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 important 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 political 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 capacities; 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 mediatization process is not unidirectional and inevitable, and that there may be differences 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 basically 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 continental Europe, its former colonies, and some other nations who reformed their distinctive 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).

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judge has much greater control of the proceedings and the lawyers play subordinate 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 questions 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 “horserace” style coverage (Brants and van Praag 2006; Strömbäck 2008). Legal language is often convoluted, “highly coded, jargon-laden and obscure to all but a special4 In some specialized courts, like the Labor Court, professional judges sit in panels with two lay members of the public.

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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 conduct 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 language 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 elections, 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; Malleson 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 understanding 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 accountability 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-

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tion passed by the representatives of the democratically elected majority. These have enhanced the centrality and power of the legal sphere (Hirschl 2004; Malleson 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; Malleson, 1999). Thus, courts began changing their policy of “allowing the decisions to speak for themselves”, not responding to media criticism, and distancing themselves from the press as a strategy to maintain their neutral, professional, nonpolitical image (Davis 1994; Rosen-Zvi 2005; Schulz 2010; Gies 2008). Public relations departments and/or press judges have been set up in many modern democracies, 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 coverage. 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 journalistic 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 conducting 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,

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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 practices. 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 shortterm 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 second 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 institutional 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).

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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 professional 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 prosecution backed down from pressing charges in the form of ‘fiasco’ ‘blow’ ‘the prosecution 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 coverage 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 procedures, 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

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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” (Interview, 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 lawyers 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 journalists 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 intervention 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 innovative, but also more dramatic, sensational, and sometimes inaccurate legal reporting. 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 practices 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.

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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 institutions in other Western countries (e.g. Schulz 2010; Staton 2004), the public relations 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 incomplete (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 collecting talkbacks on judicial matters from various social networks (pers. comm., Ayelet Philo, spokesperson, the Judicial Authority, April 15, 2012).

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and have called meetings to give the press background information about complicated 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 restrictions 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 professional 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 elsewhere, 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).

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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 Authority’s public relations department is being challenged by unofficial moves by individual 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 coverage 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 regardless 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

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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 accommodated 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 represented lawyers, up from ten at the time of their study.

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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

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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 publisher’s agenda (Interview, May 7, 2007).

Nonetheless, despite the manipulation of the media, and their own efforts to harness 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 importance 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

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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 selfpromotion, 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 phenomenon, potentially threatening the judicial process, the legal profession, and the rule of law. Judges regard the simplified, sensationalist, and consequently inaccurate 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 criticized, and led to leaks and other unofficial encounters with the press that challenged 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-

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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 suggested, 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 population, 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 evidence 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.

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Hantler, Steven B., Victor B. Schwartz and Phil S.Goldberg. 2004. Extending the privilege to litigation communications specialists in the age of trial by media The Catholic University of America Common Law Conspectus 13(7): 1–20. Hirschl, Ran. 2004. Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism. Boston: Harvard University Press. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29(2): 105–134. Israel Democracy Institute. 2005. Annual Israeli Democracy Index [Hebrew]. Available at: http:// idi.org.il/Pages/Results.aspx?k=%D7 %90 %D7 %9E%D7 %95 %D7 %9F%20 %D7 %A6 %D7 %99 %D7 %91 %D7 %95 %D7 %A8 %202005&start1=21 Karpin, Isabel. 2002. She’s watching the judges: Media feedback loops and what judges notice. In: Margaret Thornton (ed.) Romancing the Tomes, 47–65. London: Cavendish. Kepplinger, Hans Mathias. 2002. Mediatization of politics: Theory and data. Journal of Communication 52(4): 972–986. Lehman-Wilzig, Sam. 2007. The end of the traditional printed newspaper: Factors of on-line journalism that threaten traditional, printed journalism. In: Tehila Schwartz-Altschuller, (ed.), Dot.com Journalism: Internet Newspapers in Israel, 199–242. Jerusalem and Beersheva: Israel Democracy Institute and Burda Center, Ben-Gurion University. Limor, Yehiel and Hillel Nossek. 2006. The military and the media in the twenty first century: Towards a new model of relations, Israel Affairs 12(3): 484–510. Loth, Marc A. 2007. Courts in quest for legitimacy: A comparative approach. http://repub.eur.nl/ res/pub/11005/Courts%20in%20quest%20 f.or%20legitimacy2–2.pdf Lundby, Knut. 2009. Mediatization. Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. 2008. Mediatization. In: Linda Lee Kaid and Christina Holz-Bacha (eds.), Encyclopedia of Political Communication, vol. 2, 447–448. London: Sage. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro and Winfried Schultz. 1999. “Mediatization” of politics: A challenge for democracy? Political Communication 16(3): 247–261. Malleson, Kate. 1999. The New Judiciary: The Effects of Expansion and Activism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moran, Les. 2014. Mass-mediated ‘open justice’: Court and judicial reports in the press in England and Wales. Legal Studies 34(1): 143–166. DOI: 10.1111/lest.12011. Peleg, Anat. 2012. Open Court. Tel Aviv: Matar. [Hebrew] Peleg, Anat and Bryna Bogoch. 2012. Removing Justitia’s blindfold: The mediatization of law in Israel. Media, Culture & Society 34(8): 961–978. Peri, Yoram. 2004. Telepopulism: Media and Politics in Israel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rattner, Arye. 2009. The Culture of Law. Shasha Center for Strategic Research. Hebrew University: Jerusalem [Hebrew]. Rosen-Zvi, Issachar. (2005). Are judges human? The constitution of the image of the professional judge in light of judicial disqualification rules. Law and Government 49(1): 49–118. [Hebrew] Schrott, Andrea and Daniela Spranger. 2006. Mediatization and political negotiating institutions, Annual meeting, International Communication Association, Dresden, Germany. http:// allacademic.com/meta/p92379_index.html Schulz, Pamela. 2010. Courts and Judges on Trial: Analyzing and Managing the Discourse of Disapproval. Hamburg: Lit Verlag. Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept. European Journal of Communication 19(1): 87–101. Segev, Re’em. 2001. Sub Judice: Freedom of Expression in Matters under Adjudication. Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute. Shachar, Yoram. 2007. When Faust takes a lawyer: On the relations between culture and law. Din Udvrarim 3(1): 147–172 [Hebrew].

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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 (galleries, 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” (Livingstone 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, mediatization has been examined in different areas of social reality, especially in politics, sports, education, etc. Livingstone spoke of a “mediatization of everything”

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(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 (individuals), 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 ontological category, but rather as something that exists only through perception and attribution. This makes differentiating between art and non-art quite difficult nowadays. 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, television, and lately the Internet and social media, are viewed as the roots of this longterm process. This focus is not an obvious choice, however, since the understanding 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, sculptures, even buildings). This usage of the term has become quite established; however, 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, indicators of mediatization can be observed. 1. The production of art or media as the subject matter and material of art. Individuals, 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.

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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 everyday object, but were not accepted in the classic motif catalogue of art, especially historical painting. Only when objects of everyday life became worthy of presentation 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 phenomenon 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,

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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 certain 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, prospectuses, 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 Filippo 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 documentary 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 catastrophes 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).

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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 succession. 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

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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 politics, 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 completely 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 protagonist of such art works, also relied on satellite TV to step into its global dissemination (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 lampooned, treated ironically or distortedly, and undermined, by questioning authenticity and subverting the notion of reality. Others attempted to develop a new aesthetic potential for the medium, alternative forms of documentation or an individual 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-

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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 combination. 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 connected 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

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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 subject 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 representation. 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 institutions. 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

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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 moving 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 presentation 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 artwork, 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 Technology], 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 productions (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) (Sydney/Australia), which organized its first symposium in 1988, the Inter Communication Center (Tokyo/Japan, since 1997), the FILE Electronic Language International

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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 catalogue, 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 prepared 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). Cyberspace 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 museums, i.e. “museum cyberspace” (Schwarz 1997: 19). There are several specific online communities for digital art and Internet art (e.g. rhizome.org, artnetweb.com, www.medienkunstnetz.de, www.mediaartnet.org, the.thing.net, variablemedia.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 podcasting to its activities (Maculan 2007). This museum began to produce monthly ArtCasts 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

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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 combination, 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 during 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 consequently 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 reproduction 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 circulation 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, Kuipers 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 dissemination 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 component. Nevertheless, there was much that depended on the organization of these

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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 storage 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 “customers”. 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 Runyard 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 activities. 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 preliminary visit before the doors are opened to the public. The second (and most important) target group of a museum’s PR is the audience. They can be reached directly with the help of the media, but also by individual 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.

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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 different degrees, however. Their actions depend on the resources at hand, their general significance, their technical facilities, as well as the intensity of their public mindedness and pedagogics. Several basic models are apparent from an analysis of museums’ homepages (Kurtz 2006). In the model of online-promotion, self-portrayal is mostly based on the offered information of the museum and its exhibitions, and is aimed at increasing the museum’s appeal and spreading information. Other museums follow the so-called service-model, which offers their target audience 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 increasing 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 translates 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

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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 museums’ 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 perception. The “black boxes” for video presentation have already been mentioned. The length of the videos displayed there often results in a longer period of perception 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-

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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 technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute 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, personalization …, 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 inherently 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 submission 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

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inaccurately reflect the case for art. Many works of media art intend, on the contrary, 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 mentioned) amend via the concept – to use a medical term – an antidromic mediatization, 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.

References Altheide, David. L. and Robert P. Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage. Ammann, Katharina. 2009. Video ausstellen. Potenziale der Präsentation. Bern: Peter Lang. Baldassari, Anne. 2000. Picasso Working on Paper. London: Merrell Publ. Ltd. Belcher, Michael. 1991. Exhibitions in Museums. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin. [Originally published 1936]. Celant, Germano. 1973. Record as Artwork 1959–1973. London: Royal College of Art Gallery. Decker, Edith and Peter Weibel (eds.). (1990). Vom Verschwinden der Ferne. Telekommunikation und Kunst. Köln: DuMont. Dinkla, Söke. 1997. Pioniere der interaktiven Kunst. Ostfildern: Cantz. Donovan, Molly. 2011. Warhol: Headlines. München: Prestel. Doswald, Christoph (ed.). 2010. Press Art. Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel. Bern: Stämpfli. Drechsler, Maximiliane. 1996. Zwischen Kunst und Kommerz. Zur Geschichte des Ausstellungswesens zwischen 1775 und 1905. München, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Fischer, Hartwig (ed.). 2005. Covering the Real. Kunst und Pressebild von Warhol bis Tillmans/Art and the Press Picture from Warhol to Tillmans. Köln: DuMont. French, Ylva and Sue Runyard. 2011. Marketing and Public Relations for Museums, Galleries, Cultural and Heritage Attractions. New York: Routledge. Gerlach, Julia. 2012. The Aesthetic Potential of Sound http://soundart.zkm.de/en/informationen/ 1124–2 [23. 12. 2012] Greene, Rachel. 2004. Internet Art. London: Thames & Hudson. Gruber, Bettina and Maria Vedder. 1983. Kunst und Video. Internationale Entwicklung und Künstler. Köln: DuMont. Groys, Boris. 1997. Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters. München. Carl Hanser. Hanstein, Lydia. 2003. Videokunst. München: C. H. Beck. Haskell, Francis. 1987. The Painful Birth of the Art Book. London: Thames & Hudson. Herzogenrath, Wulf and Edith Decker (eds.). 1989. Video-Skulptur – retrospektiv und aktuell 1963–1989. Köln: DuMont.

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Herzogenrath, Wulf, Thomas W. Gaethgens, Sven Thomas and Peter Hoenisch (eds.). 1997. TVKultur. Das Fernsehen in der Kunst seit 1879. Amsterdam, Dresden: Verlag der Kunst. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change, Nordicom Review 29(2): 105–134. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2012. On the origins of the virtual museum. In: Ross Parry (ed.), Museum in the Digital Age, 121–135. London, New York: Routledge. Janssen, Susanne, Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord. 2008. Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U. S. Newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review 73: 719–740. Kim, Eunji. 2010. Nam June Paik. Videokunst in Museen. Globalisierung und lokale Rezeption. Berlin: Reimer. Klonk, Charlotte. 2009. Spaces of Experience. Art Gallery Interiors 1800 to 2000. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Kurtz, Cristiane. 2006. Zielgruppenbindung mit Online-Kommunikation. Analyse und Evaluation am Beispiel von Museums – Webpages. München: Verlag Reinhard Fischer. Lampalzer, Gerda. 1992. Videokunst. Historischer Überblick und theoretische Zugänge. Wien: Promedia. Licht, Alan. 2007. Sound Art. Beyond, Music, between Categories. New York: Rizzoli. Livingstone, Sonja. 2009a. On the mediation of everything. Journal of Communication 59(1): 1–18. Livingstone, Sonja. 2009b. Foreword: Coming to terms with “mediatization”. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concepts, Changes, Consequences, ix–xi. New York: Peter Lang. Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a Social System. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lundby, Knut (ed.). 2009a. Mediatization. Concepts, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2009b. Media logic: Looking for social interaction. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concepts, Changes, Consequences, 101–119. New York: Peter Lang. Maculan, Lena. 2007. Ein Modell zur Analyse der Auswirkungen von Podcasting auf die Beziehung zwischen Museum und Besuchern. In: Michael Mangold, Peter Weibel and Julie Woletz (eds.), Vom Betrachter zum Gestalter. Neue Medien in Museen – Strategien, Beispiele und Perspektiven für die Bildung, 103–115. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Mangold, Michael, Peter Weibel and Julie Woletz (eds.). 2007. Vom Betrachter zum Gestalter. Neue Medien in Museen – Strategien, Beispiele und Perspektiven für die Bildung. BadenBaden: Nomos. McClellan, Andrew. 2008. The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meyen, Michael. 2009. Medialisierung. Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 57: 23–28. Michalka, Matthias (ed.). 2010. Changing Channels. Kunst und Fernsehen 1963–1987. Berlin: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Parry, Ross (ed.). 2012. Museums in the Digital Age. London, New York: Routledge. Popp, Kathrin. 2013. Das Bild zum Sprechen bringen. Eine Soziologie des Audioguides in Kunstausstellungen. Bielefeld: transcript. Popper, Frank. 1993. Art of the Electronic Age. London: Thames & Hudson. Putnam, James. 2009. Art and Artifact. The Museum as Medium. Rev. edition. London: Thames & Hudson. Rieser, Martin (ed.). 2011. The Mobile Audience. Media Art and Mobile Technologies. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Rush, Michael. 2011. New Media in Art. New edition. London: Thames & Hudson. Schneider, Ira and Beryl Korot (eds.). 1976. Video Art. An Anthology. New York, London: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich. Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconstructing Mediatization as an Analytical Concept. European Journal of Communication 19: 87–101.

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Schwarz, Hans-Peter. 1997. Medien-Kunst-Geschichte. Medienmuseum. München, New York: Prestel. Sheehan, James J. 2000. Museums in the German Art World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. Smerling, Walter (ed.). 2012. Art and Press. Kunst, Wahrheit, Wirklichkeit. Köln: Wienand. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The Harvard Journal of Press/Politics 13(3): 228–246. Tribe, Mark, Reena Jana and Uta Grosenick (eds.). 2009. New Media Art. Hong Kong et al.: Taschen. Wands, Bruce. 2006. Art of the Digital Age. London: Thames & Hudson. Weibel, Peter. 2011. Web 2.0 and the museum. In: Oliver Grau with Thomas Veigel (eds.), Imagery in the 21st Century, 235–243.Cambridge (Mass.)/London: The MIT Press. Weiss, Jeffrey. 1994. The Popular Culture of Modern Art. Picasso, Duchamp. and Avant-Gardism. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Wilke, Jürgen and Jasmin Schülke. 2011. Multiple Medialisierung. Eine Fallstudie zur Kasseler documenta (1955–2007). Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 59: 235–259.

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 process 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 illegitimized 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 mediatization of low culture, audiovisual mediatization of media culture, and digital mediatization 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 mediatization 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

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1 Mediatization Mediation is when something functions as a linking device between different entities, for instance between human subjects or between social worlds across a distance 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 necessity 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 communication 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 Manheim ([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 inspiration and feedback to Knut Lundby, to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s (The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary 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.

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at the end of this chapter be possible to cast new light on its problems and limitations, but first some more general reflections should be made to qualify its application. 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 qualification. 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 transformation 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 comparisons 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. Geographical 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 diversified and deeply embedded in social relations, and therefore do not follow or prescribe any distinct unitary logic. The more forms and facets of mediatization are distinguished, the more the concept itself dissolves, so that the general idea of one mediatization process loses ground. Here, a balance is needed

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between generalization and differentiation, respecting the specificity of different 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 society? 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 undergone 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 particular are affected. It may by extension be possible to look for similar processes 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 popular 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 discerned, 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 overwhelming 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.

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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 humanity 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 anything 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 mediatized 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 everyday 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 encompassed everything in a particular community, culture in the aesthetic sense constitutes a distinct and rather exceptional sphere of activities and institutions 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 modern 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 others. In contrast to nature, ontological culture is thus characterized by its foun-

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dation in meaning-making practices, as a defining characteristic of homo sapiens; the basis of a social lifeform is how it understands and symbolically orders its universe; and the arts are institutionalized spheres of activities specialized in exploring modes of meaning-making. In one sense culture is always mediated, as culture is the mediation of intersubjective relations through constructing, sharing, and interpreting materialized meanings. Hannerz (1990: 7, 1992: 26–30) sees media as the specific technology of culture, i.e. of communicating meaning across distances in time and space, combining three levels: textual meaning contents, technological modes of externalization, and the interactional relations in which they circulate. If communication 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, mediatization 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 composite 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 culturalization, 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 traditional 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.

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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 production 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. Popular 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 technologies 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. 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 workingclass 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 industries that cannot simply be defined as “of the people”. 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 seriously. High and low culture can equally well be either morally exemplary or

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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 culture 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-sociological 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 mediation 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 riverbased 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 techniques 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-

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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) messages 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, writing, 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 “nonmediated” 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

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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 improvised (epic or comic) performance without written support. Since ages back, pictures 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 possible 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-

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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 interaction. 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 theatre 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 transmitter between high and low culture, after they had been polarized against each other than prior to 1600. Manuscripts translated oral practices into texts with symbolic 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 transforming them into symbolic content of mediated texts. Paul Ricoeur (1976, 1981) analyzes 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 contexts. The print mediatization led to a growing proportion of such practices involving 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,

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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 powerful 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 culture developed. This gave rise to a triangular constellation of culture comprising high culture of the fine arts, traditional crafts-based folk culture, and commercialized 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 printing 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 culture 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 “resurrect” 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

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of mediatization to the elites. With audiovisual mediatization, this translation between codes was done by automatic machines such as record players, film projectors, 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 mediation 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 musical 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 integrated into various physical and social settings and forms of social interaction that previously were bound to face-to-face exchange, whether in staged rituals separated 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

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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 significance of media texts or technologies in various levels of social, cultural, or personal 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 history 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 digitalization of communication in the last half-century, i.e. long after the processes discussed 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 combine 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.

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Just like once in the print phase of mediatization books and journals intervened 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 concentrate enormous amounts of texts, images, and sounds in small spaces and to transfer 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 algorithms, 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 convergence 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 democratic potential in this development. Some utopians have continued also in later times to regard the development of digital technologies as a democratic emancipation of the people and a dethronization of elitist authorities. Others have pointed at new forms of capitalist accumulation, commercialization, and surveillance.

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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 mediareflexivity 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 construction 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 processes 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 technological 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 omnivorous diversity and combinatory capacities (rather than any pure and exclusive

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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 thoroughly dichotomized cultural sphere with one upper elite circuit and a lower popular 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 processes: 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. Combining 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 complicated 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-

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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 introduced 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 therefore in the 19th century and up until the early 20th century that a progressive tendency emerged for popular culture to become increasingly identified as intrinsically 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 practices, 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 narrative 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 resources, 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 beginning of this chapter. Much mediatization discourse seems to focus on the most recent forms of digital 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

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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 moving 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 quantitative growth (in terms of numbers, value, or time-use) or internal complexity (intermediality 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 transitions. 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 formations 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, economic, 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. Whatever 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.

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References Altheide, David L. and Robert P. Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills: Sage. Asp, Kent. 1990. Medialization, media logic and mediarchy. Nordicom Review 2: 47–50. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. First published [1965]. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Illuminations. London: Pimlico. First published in German [1936]. Bjurström, Erling. 1997. Högt och lågt. Smak och stil i ungdomskulturen. [High and Low: Taste and Style in Youth Culture]. Umeå: Boréa. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA/London, UK: MIT Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London/New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. First published in French [1979]. Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper & Row. Bürger, Christa, Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (eds.). 1982. Zur Dichotomisierung von hoher und niederer Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. First published in French [1967]. Fornäs, Johan. 1995. Cultural Theory and Late Modernity. London: Sage. Fornäs, Johan. 2012. Kultur [Culture]. Stockholm: Liber. Fornäs, Johan. 2014. Culturalising mediatisation. In: Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (eds.), Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, 38–53. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Fornäs, Johan, Peter Aronsson, Karin Becker, Svante Beckman, Erling Bjurström, Tora Friberg, Martin Kylhammar and Roger Qvarsell. 2007a. Culture Unbound: Dimensions of Culturalisation. Linköping: Tema Q/Linköping University Electronic Press. Fornäs, Johan, Karin Becker, Erling Bjurström and Hillevi Ganetz. 2007b. Consuming Media: Communication, Shopping and Everyday Life. Oxford/New York: Berg. Fornäs, Johan and Anne Kaun (eds.). 2011. Medialisering av kultur, politik, vardag och forskning. Slutrapport från Riksbankens Jubileumsfonds forskarsymposium i Stockholm 18–19 augusti 2011 (Mediestudier vid Södertörns högskola 2011:2). [Mediatization of Culture, Politics, Everyday Life and Research: Final report from the Bank of Sweden Tercentennary Foundation Research symposium in Stockholm 18–19 August 2011 (Media Studies at Södertörn University 2011:2).] Huddinge: Södertörns högskola. Retrieved from urn.kb.se/resolve?urn= urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-12829. Fornäs, Johan, Kajsa Klein, Martina Ladendorf, Jenny Sundén and Malin Sveningsson. 2002. Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang (urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-19830). Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. Selected Essays. New York: BasicBooks. Goody, Jack. 1986. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. First published in German [1962]. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press. First published in German [1981]. Hannerz, Ulf (ed.). 1990. Medier och kulturer. [Media and Cultures.] Stockholm: Carlssons. Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. 2010. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. New York: Portfolio Penguin. First published [2006]. Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Toffler, Alvin. 1990. Third Wave. New York: Bantam. First published [1980]. Williams, Raymond. 1968. Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin. First published [1958]. Williams, Raymond. 1974. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Fontana/Collins. Williams, Raymond. 1988. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana. First published [1976]. Williams, Raymond. 1981. Culture. London: Fontana Press. Ziehe, Thomas. 1991. Zeitvergleiche. Jugend in kulturellen Modernisierungen. Weinheim/ München: Juventa. Ziehe, Thomas and Herbert Stubenrauch. 1982. Plädoyer für ungewöhnliches Lernen. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.

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 mediatization derive from the workings of the culturally dominant media forms of a particular 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 different 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 frequency 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-selfing, 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 mediatized 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).

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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 feelings” 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, everything is always already in relation to (overlapping, repeating, interrupting) other things, and the meaning of each thing emerges relationally rather than autonomously. Discussing performers like Gray and Anderson, I developed the concept of persona to describe their central mechanism for negotiating postmodern mediatized 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 specific human being) and the audience. Unlike characters (in the dramatic sense) personae are not defined by specific narrative contexts, though performance personae can embody characters. For example, when I extended this schema to musicians 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 performed 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 characters 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 autobiographical monologues he performed first on stage then on film and television but

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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 firstperson 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. (Auslander 1992: 77–78)

By developing personae that could take up positions in multiple cultural discourses, performers could engage productively with the information flow of postmodern culture without being wholly absorbed into it and equally without pretending 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 simple example of direct mediatization is “the successive transformation of chess from physical chessboard to computer game” (Hjarvard 2008: 114). As a further example, 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 mediatization. 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 segmented and interrupted by commercial breaks. Rather, the programs are designed

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to accommodate segmentation and interruption; they are designed to accommodate these characteristics of the broadcast flow (Williams 2003: 92–93). The construction 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 mediatization 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 performance 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 embodies 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, genealogically 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 continuing 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 commercials in which she appears as from the changing appearance of the dolls themselves (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

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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 character like Rosa, functioning for the occasion as a stand-in for Minaj herself. In addition 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 confined 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 discourses 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 entertainment, 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

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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 programming 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, entertainment, 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, television 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 functions 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 technologies 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 translation 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, zapping, and moving between broadcast and recorded materials, viewers constructed

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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 conflate 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 concept 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

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to link and guide the constant flow of the self’s social, governmental, economic, and biopolitical 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 consumption 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 negotiates 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 different 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 performance, 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 business 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 engagements 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-presentation 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.

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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 everyone 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 communicative 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 controlled 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. Communication 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 personae 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

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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 lipstick 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 structure 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 imagine 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 constructing 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 videos, fashion shows, museum events, websites, and social media. Like many celebrities, 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 communications, particularly in the form of home videos aimed primarily at her fans who she calls “little monsters”.

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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 taking 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 Gagapedia, “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 different 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 fashion 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”. Alexander 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

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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 primarily in reference to either music, in which case it denotes the practice of combining 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 different 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 appropriates 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 Transmission 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 videos 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 construction 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 presented on Gagavision, who seems accessible if sometimes a bit overwrought, and

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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 manages 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 disjointed, overly chatty home videos of her everyday life and posts them on YouTube – 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 selfreflexive 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 endorsement 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 strategy 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 modeled as a bust of Minaj in full Barbie regalia. The box also features a stylized

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illustration of Minaj. Lady Gaga’s perfume, The Fame, comes in an elegant eggshaped 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 disenfranchised 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 Internet) has no bearing on the multiple, shifting identities she assumes at an evermore 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 performance artist” (Lady Gaga Talks) she works this dichotomy by constructing different 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 prepared 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 musician, 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 performance 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 Abramovic, for whom she has expressed great admiration (Lady Gaga Talks). Lady Gaga, performance artist, was present at the Guggenheim, not Lady Gaga, pop musician.

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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 corresponds 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 “JITlife,” where JIT stands for Just In Time. In JIT-life, everything is immediate and provisional, constantly in flux, and incoherent, including our JIT-identities: “Individual selves are being splintered and are splintering themselves reflexively, looking for fitting identities/differences, trying them out, abandoning them in dissatisfaction, 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”, “multiselfing”, 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

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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 creative 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 Nazhar; eyewear designer Kerin Rose; and photographer Nick Knight, Gaga’s co-conspirator 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 challenges 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 persona and character when an artist’s persona is manifest only as a seemingly infinite 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

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different settings and circumstances. Lady Gaga is a randomized algorithm (Karp 1991) that continuously generates, on demand and just in time, the personae Stefani Germanotta portrays.

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Schutte, Gillian. 2013. Lady Gaga: An avatar for our time. The Huffington Post (May 11). Retrieved [December 9, 2013] from http://huffingtonpost.com/gillian-schutte/lady-gaga_b_ 2257540.html. Sia, Nicole. 2010. The real inspiration for Lady Gaga’s ‘Born this way’ unicorn tattoo revealed!. MTV Buzzworthy Blog (September 15). Retrieved [May 11, 2013] from http://buzzworthy.mtv.com/2010/09/15/lady-gaga-born-this-way-unicorn-tattoo/. Sinnreich, Aram. 2010. Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Spigel, Lynn and Max Dawson. 2008. Television and digital media. In: Catherine Morley and Martin Halliwell (eds.), American Thought and Culture in the Twenty-First Century, 275–289. New York: Columbia University Press. Spigel, Lynn. 2004. Introduction. In: Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds.), Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, 1–34. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Tennery, Amy. 2009. History of the Barbie TV ad. Online Video. SlateTV (10 March). Retrieved [May 17, 2013] from http://slatev.com/video/history-of-the-barbie-tv-ad/. The Harajuku Barbie. Wiki Minaj: The Free Nicki Minaj Encylopedia. Retrieved [April 12, 2013] from http://nickiminaj.wikia.com/wiki/The_Harajuku_Barbie. Toffler, Alvin. 1980. The Third Wave. New York: Bantam Books. Uricchio, William. 2004. Television’s next generation: Technology/interface culture/flow. In: Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson (eds.), Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, 163– 182. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Uricchio, William. 2009. The future of a medium once known as television. In: Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), The YouTube Reader, 24–39. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. Va Va Voom. 2012. Music video directed by Hype Williams. Retrieved [January 12, 2013] from vevo.com, http://vevo.com/watch/nicki-minaj/va-va-voom-explicit/USCMV1100089. Weisgerber, Corinne. 2011. Negotiating multiple identities on the social web: Goffman, fragmentation and the multiverse. Keynote Address at webCom Montréal 2011. Retrieved [April 2, 2013] from St. Edwards Social Media Class blog http://academic.stedwards.edu/ socialmedia/blog/2011/11/16/negotiating-multiple-identities-on-the-social-web-goffmanfragmentation-and-the-multiverse/. Williams, Raymond. 2003. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Edited by Ederyn Williams. London/New York: Routledge. First published London: Fontana, [1973].

Kirsten Frandsen

23 Mediatization of sports Abstract: Sport and media have for many years been closely related and in particular 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 cultures, 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, individualization, 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 television. This medium has for more than 50 years had an exceptionally profound influence on sports both in terms of economy and culture. Accordingly, this chapter 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. Therefore, 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

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“growing importance of media power” (Livingstone 2009: ix) or a new “omnipresence 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 television’s primacy in the sport–media relationship is under attack from emerging digital 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 hegemonic 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 interest in the field of mediated sports communication in the late 1980s, the role of

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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 partnerships 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 orientations 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 organizations, 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 commercial 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

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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 perspective. 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 dominant 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 impression 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 broadcast organizations – which is not really the case. Second, the media/sports complex 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 somehow 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 relationship. 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 examples 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-

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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 readdressed 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 (Hjarvard 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 structural implications for sport as a whole. Exactly how the relations between media and other domains have been conceptualized also differ. They have been seen as reciprocal, as one-way, or as multilevel 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 opportunities for change and challenges, but they may also be seen as “hybrid versions or reconfigurations of conventional media” (Schultz 2004: 97). And the paradoxical 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

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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 television 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 communication 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 consumption. 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 reservations 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 accelerate 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.

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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 conducted 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 example 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 influence 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 sportswriters took part in the development of standardizing rules and statistics in baseball, which he considers the basis for the ensuing years of expansive and continual coverage in the newspapers.

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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 people 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 provided 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 patterns 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 simultaneous 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 mediatization from a communication perspective. The underlying basis for inclusion of this perspective is the basic observation that sports in the media – and in particu-

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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 narrative 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 imprecise, 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 development 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 phenomenon, and this establishes a crux in our search for a more nuanced understanding of the basic social and cultural forces behind the relationship between sport and media. Rothenbuhler argues along similar lines, when he states: “Perhaps 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-

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sion, for example. Dayan and Katz (1992) pick up on this point in their conceptualization of sports events as media events. The French philosopher Roger Caillois ([1958] 2001) has recognized and contributed 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. Accordingly 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 subordinating 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 countries, 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

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national borders and has resulted in strong international organization and regulation 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 commercialization, 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 particular it is worth noticing that in this cultural and social field we find a relationship, which from the outset has been characterized by a specific but varying intertwinement 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 communicative 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 television’s communicative potential (Barnett 1990; Whannel 1992; Bellamy and Walker 2004; Frandsen 2013b). First television’s audio-visual format offers an obvious communicative advantage 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 movements 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 contributed 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

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audio-visual format offers the opportunity for viewers, whether athletes or spectators, 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 pioneers 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 commercial 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 content 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 problems 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 recreational 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 organizational 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

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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 governed 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 commercialization. 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 relationship 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 establishment 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 visually expose arenas and games to much larger and very often international audiences 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 commercialization 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 modernization, 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

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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 transmissions, which focused on international sports and had an increasingly commercial 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 international marketing ambitions and thus very directly related to television coverage and distribution and sometimes even requested that the sports make some specified changes. When the Danish brewery, Carlsberg, and the Danish Football Association 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 adjustments. 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 programmes), 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

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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 adjustment 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 performance in relation to media in general and in relation to specific broadcastpartners. An important consequence of mediatization in this second phase is that as competition in the television markets became increasingly fierce television’s interest 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 specifically by the emergence and presence of television that could have long-term implications.

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,

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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 Badminton 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 organization 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 international 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 traditional 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 mediatization 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 direction, and so will mediatization.

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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, MyFootballClub, 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 multiplied 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, sociology 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 mid1990s, 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 outcomes of how mediation, conceived as the performance of social and cultural activities 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.

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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 phenomenon 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 cartoons by the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, this issue became established 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 disappear 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 concerned the presumed casual relation between societal differentiation and the privatization and decline of religion (1994: 19, 35). Following this critique a reconsideration of the dominant secularization paradigm 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 contemporary 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 religious 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,

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develop rather than disappear through social and cultural modernization. However, 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 diversified 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 revolution in Iran (cf. Hoover 2009: 124). The international research field “Media, Religion and Culture” was established in Uppsala 1993 and has through sequent conferences 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

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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 complemented 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 concept 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

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mediatization for studies of contemporary religion. The final section will summarize points of discussion raised in the debate as well as issues that call for particular 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 procedures 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 increasing dependence on the consumer market makes them produce religious information 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 institutionalized context and circulated and reinterpreted through institutions and purposes other than those controlled by formal religious authorities. Hjarvard also claims that mediatization changes the ways in which most people in modern soci-

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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 various directions and has different consequences depending on the particular religious and media context. His focus is on highly modernized societies in the Western world, particularly the Nordic Countries, and on “weak religions” characterized by a low degree of institutional commitment and a high degree of individualized 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 connection between mediatization of religion and the secularization of society (cf. Hjarvard 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 religion. Religious media refer to media organizations and practices that are primarily controlled and performed by religious actors, collectively or individually. The purpose 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 bricolagelike 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 religion 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 interest in theories of mediatization in media and communication studies (Livingstone 2009). Another reason had to do with the development of the field of media, religion, 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

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situated. As described above the field has been strongly influenced by the culturalist approach developed among researchers in the US context. The concept of mediatization 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 appropriation 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 mediat1 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 Manchester/Open University http://www.cresc.ac.uk/home.

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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 challenges, 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 religious 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 societies. 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 religion 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 dominance in contemporary Roman culture and society as well as in subsequent narratives 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-

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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 concerning 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 cultural 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 consequences 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 mediatization and religion is primarily expressed from a sociological perspective of religion (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 necessarily 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 mainstream media institutions are non-confessional on grounds of institutional history, funding, or media regulations and the use of public media with a strong confes-

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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 performance 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, stateendorsed institutions. Lynch lists (2011: 207) a number of elements needed to clarify 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 influence, 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, cultural, 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-publicization 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 religion. 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 consequences for religion will differ in different societal contexts. Herbert (2011a) discusses 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 symbols 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 markets, and when the disruption of established forms of secularism through, for

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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 communities). 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 becoming 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 cultural 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 mediatization of religion we need to question “received categories of the natural constitution of the essentially ‘religious’” (2009: 129) and acknowledge the integration of religion and media, as well as the commodification of religion, throughout history. In contemporary culture this means that media and religion have become so intermingled 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 identities. 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

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the mediatization of religion to move beyond the focus on large institutional contexts and scales and pay attention to the complex, nuanced, and layered way this process plays out in particular “geographies” and to the complexities of contemporary 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 representation 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 articulated 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 sensibilities 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 original). This approach is broader than Hjarvard’s focus on relations between the media and other social institutions generated by increased mediation in late modern 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 maintenance of religion as a form of “deterritorialized communitization”. Such forms of religion differ from earlier forms in that they are characterized by “the positioning of a mediatized construction of tradition” (2013: 120), meaning that the primary sources for religious beliefs and belonging are mediated through technical communication media. Hepp’s understanding of how the “moulding” of these communicative forms shapes human agency is, however, modeled on Latour’s actor-network 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

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extent to which they articulate in particular religious belonging within the framework of a mediatized common culture (2013: 121). However, this process also concerns 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 looking at the interplay between these “sacred” and “popular” moments or aspects in the production, representation, and appropriation of the media event. In this process 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 characteristics of religion as a social and cultural phenomenon comes to the fore in the discussion concerning the relation between mediatization and the concept of mediation. The German anthropologist Birgit Meyer clearly grounds her critique of the mediatization of religion theory from an epistemological starting point of mediation (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, values, 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

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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 religious 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 transformation 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 perspective 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-

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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 technology, 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 mutually constitutive dynamics of the interplay between, in this case, media as institution, 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 religion” – 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 “religious social shaping of technology”. Hjarvard’s institutional perspective on mediatization and religion directs attention 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 public 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.

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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 FischerNielsen (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-mediatization” to account for how the Evangelical Lutheran church in Finland seeks new ways to communicate in a “post-secular” public sphere. Henrik Reintoft Christensen (2012) expresses a more critical view of how mediatization inhibits the possibilities of religious institutions to assert their standpoints in debates on homosexuality and the national church in the Danish press and rather sharpens polarization 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 Thorbjørnsrud’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 shootings 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-worldliness” 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 representations 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 performing individual achievements of belief (2012). Furthermore, Alexandra Boutros’

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discussion of the mediatization of Voodoo (2011) shows the limitations of Hjarvard’s theory for studying non-institutional religions and also for addressing religious 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 different 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 epistemological and ontological points of departure. This means that the debate and the various applications of the concept that have been published have come to actualize 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. Furthermore, 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 question of agency, of mediatization and conceptions of modernity, the relation

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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 tendencies 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 perspective 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 presented 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 religion, 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 disciplinary standpoints. As Lundby puts it (2013: 200), a mediation perspective approaches transformations of religion from inside the mediation practices of religion, 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 understanding 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.

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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 outcome 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 individualization 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 outcomes. 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 outcomes such as individualization, instrumentalization, or intensification of the public 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 processes 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 mediations 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 disembedded media provide a horizon for communication and interaction within a certain

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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 institutions 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 religious 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 functions – 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.

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References Ammerman, Nancy T. 2007. Everyday Religion, Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Beckford, James A. 1989. Religion in Advanced Industrial Society, London: Unwin Hyman. Berger, Peter. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Berger, Peter, Grace Davie and Effie Fokas. 2008. Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations. Aldershot: Ashgate. Botvar, Pål K. and Ulla Schmidt (eds.). 2010. Religion i dagens Norge. Mellom Sekularisering og Sakralisering [Religion in today’s Norway. Between Secularization and Sacralization). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Boutros, Alexandra. 2011. Gods on the move: the mediatisation of Voodoo. Culture and Religion 12: 185–201. boyd, danah. 2007. Why Youth Heart Social Network Sites. In: David Buckingham (ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume, 119–142. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Bruce, David. 2006. Secularization and the impotence of individualized religion. The Hedgehog Review. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 8: 35–45. Campbell, Heidi. 2012. When Religion Meets New Media. London and New York: Routledge. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Lynn S. 2003. From Angels to Aliens, Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Lynn S. 2008. Religion, philosophy, and the convergence culture online: ABC’s Lost as a study of the processes of mediatization. Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 2008 6: 143–163. Clark, Lynn S. 2011. Considering religion and mediatisation through a case study of J+K’s big day (The J K wedding entrance dance): A response to Stig Hjarvard. Culture and Religion 12: 167–184. Clark, Lynn S. and Stewart M. Hoover. 1997. At the intersection of media, religion, and culture. In: Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby (eds.), Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture, 15– 36. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals. London and New York: Routledge. Couldry, Nick. 2008. Digital storytelling, media research and democracy: conceptual choices and alternative futures. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: SelfRepresentations in New Media, 41–60. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Davie, Grace. 2000. Religion in Modern Europe: a Memory Mutates. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davie, Grace. 2007. The Sociology of Religion. London: Sage. Deuze, Mark. 2006. Participation, remediation, bricolage: Considering principal components of a digital culture. The Information Society 22: 63–75. Dobbelaere, Karel. 2002. Secularization: An Analysis at Three Levels. Bruxelles: Peter Lang. Einstein, Mara. 2008. Brands of Faith. Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age. London and New York: Routledge. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.). 2002. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Engelke, Matthew. 2010. Religion and the media turn: A review essay. American Ethnologist 37: 371–379. Ess, Charles. 1996. Thoughts along the I-way: Philosophy and the emergence of CMC. In: Charles Ess (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication, 1–14. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Fischer-Nielsen, Peter. 2012. The internet mediatization of religion and church. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 45–61. Göteborg: Nordicom. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In: Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, 109–142. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Galal, Ehab. 2012. Belonging through believing. Becoming Muslim through Islamic programming. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 147–160. Göteborg: Nordicom. Habermas, Jürgen. 2006. Religion in the public sphere. European Journal of Philosophy 14: 1–25. Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Anson Shupe. 1988. Televangelism. New York: Holt. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press. Hepp, Andreas. In press. Mediatization as a panorama in media and communication research. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.), The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hepp, Andreas and Viktoria Krönert. 2010. Religious media events. The Catholic World Youth Day as an example of the mediatization and individualization of religion. In: Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp and Frederic Krotz (eds.), Media Events in a Global Age, 265–282. Abingdon: Routledge. Hepp, Andreas, Stig Hjarvard and Knut Lundby. 2010. Mediatization – empirical perspectives: An introduction to a special issue. Communications 35: 223–228. Herbert, David E. J. 2011a. Why has religion gone public again? Towards a theory of media and religious re-publicization. In: Gordon Lynch, Jolyon Mitchell and Anna Straah (eds.), Media, Religion, Culture. A Reader, 89–97. London and New York: Routledge. Herbert, David E. J. 2011b. Theorizing religion and media in contemporary societies: An account of religious “publicization”. European Journal of Cultural Studies 14: 626–648. Herbert, David E. J. and Marie Gillespie. 2011. Editorial. European Journal of Cultural Studies 14: 601–609. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008a. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29: 105–134. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008b. The mediatization of religion. A theory of the media as agents of religious change. Northern Lights 6: 9–26. Hjarvard, Stig. 2009. Soft individualism: Media and the changing social character. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 159–177. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Hjarvard, Stig. 2011. The mediatization of religion: Theorising religion, media and social change. Culture and Religion 12: 119–135. Hjarvard, Stig. 2012. Three forms of mediatized religion: Changing the public face of religion. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 21– 44. Göteborg: Nordicom. Hjarvard, Stig 2013 The Mediatization of Culture and Society. London and New York: Routledge. Hjarvard, Stig and Mia Lövheim (eds.) 2012 Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives. Göteborg: Nordicom. Hoover, Stewart. 2002. The culturalist turn in scholarship on media and religion. Journal of Media and Religion 1: 25–36. Hoover, Stewart M. 2006. Religion in the Media Age. New York, NY: Routledge. Hoover, Stewart M. 2009. Complexities. The case of religious cultures. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 123–138. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Hoover, Stewart M. and Knut Lundby. 1997. Introduction: Setting the agenda. In: Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby (eds.), Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture, 3–14. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Hoover, Stewart M. and Lynn S. Clark (eds.). 2002. Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoover, Stewart M., Lynn S. Clark and Diane Alters. 2004. Media, Home and Family. New York, NY: Routledge. Horsfield, Peter. 2013. The ecology of writing and the shaping of early Christianity. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Religion Across Media. Form Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, 37–53. New York: Peter Lang. Ingelhart, Ronald. 2007. Mapping global values. In: Yilmaz R. Esmer and Thorleif Pettersson (eds.), Measuring and Mapping Cultures: 25 years of Comparative Value Surveys, 11–32. Brill: Leiden. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kelley, David M. 1972. Why Conservative Churches are Growing. A Study in Sociology of Religion. New York: Harper and Row. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Lied, L. Ingeborg. 2012. Religious change and popular culture. With a nod to the mediatization of religion debate. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 183–201. Göteborg: Nordicom. Livingstone, Sonia. 2009. Foreword: Coming to terms with mediatization. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization. Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut (ed.). 2009. Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2010. Medier som ressurs for religion. In: Pål K. Botvar and Ulla Schmidt (eds.), Religion i dagens Norge. Mellom sekularisering og sakralisering [Religion in Today’s Norway. Between Secularization and Sacralization], 111–131. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Lundby, Knut. 2013. Media and transformations of religion. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Religion Across Media. Form Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, 185–202. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud. 2012. When the security police went on Facebook. In: Sitg Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.) Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 95– 108. Göteborg: Nordicom. Lynch, Gordon. 2011. What can we learn from the mediatisation of religion debate? Culture and Religion 12: 203–210. Lynch, Gordon. 2012. The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural Sociological Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lynch, Gordon, Jolyon Mitchell and Anna Strhan. 2011. Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader. London and New York: Routledge. Lövheim, Mia. 2011. Mediatisation of religion. A critical appraisal. Culture and Religion 12: 153– 166. Lövheim, Mia. 2012a. A voice of their own. Young Muslim women, blogs and religion. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 129–145. Göteborg: Nordicom. Lövheim, Mia. 2012b. Religious socialization in a media age. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 5: 151–168. Lövheim, Mia (ed.). 2013. Media, Religion and Gender. Key Issues and New Challenges. London and New York: Routledge. Lövheim, Mia and Marta Axner. 2011. Halal-tv: Negotiating the place of religion in Swedish public discourse. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society 24: 57–74. Lövheim, Mia and Gordon Lynch. 2011. The mediatisation of religion debate: An introduction. Culture and Religion 12: 111–118.

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Lövheim, Mia and Knut Lundby. 2013. Mediatized religion across time and space. A case study of Norwegian newspapers. Nordic Journal of Society and Culture 26: 25–44. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2008. Religious sensations. Why media, aesthetics and power matter in the study of contemporary religion. In: Vries de Heinz (ed.), Religion: Beyond a Concept, 704–723. New York: Fordham University Press. Meyer, Birgit. 2013. Material mediations and religious practices of world-making. In: Knut Lundby (ed.) Religion Across Media. Form Early Antiquity to Late Modernity, 1–19. New York: Peter Lang. Meyer, Birgit and Annelies Moors. 2006. Introduction. In: Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors (eds.), Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, 1–25. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Jolyon and Sophia Marriage (eds.). 2003. Mediating Religion: Conversations In Media, Religion And Culture. London: T&T Clark. Moberg, Marcus and Sofia Sjö. 2012. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church and the media in postsecular Finland. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 79–91. Göteborg: Nordicom. Morgan. David (ed.). 2008. Keywords in Media, Religion and Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Morgan, David. 2011. Mediation or mediatisation: The history of media in the study of religion. Culture and Religion 12: 137–152. Nybro-Petersen, Line. 2012. Danish Twilight fandom. Transformative processes of religion. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 163–182. Göteborg: Nordicom. Orsi, Robert A. 1997. Everyday miracles. The study of lived religion. In: David Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America, Toward a History of Practice, 3–21. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. PEW Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2011. Religion in the news: Islam Was no. 1 topic in 2010. Released February 24, 2011. Available at: http://pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/ Religion-in-the-News-Islam-Was-No-1-Topic-in-2010.aspx#1 on February 18, 2013. Reintoft Christensen, Henrik. 2012. Mediatization, deprivatization, and vicarious religion. Coverage of religion and homosexuality in the Scandinavian mainstream press. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 63–78. Göteborg: Nordicom. Sa Martino, Luis Mauro. 2013. The Mediatization of Religion. When Faith Rocks. Farnham: Ashgate. Starrett, Gregory. 1998. Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkley: University of California Press. Stolow, Jeremy. 2005. Religion and/as media. Theory, Culture and Society 22: 119–145. Sumiala, Johanna. 2012. Ritualizing death in the media. Symbolic immortality, the immanent frame, and school shootings. In: Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, 109–125. Göteborg: Nordicom. Sumiala-Seppänen, Johanna, Knut Lundby and Raimo Salokangas (eds.). 2006. Implications of the Sacred in (Post)Modern Media. Göteborg: Nordicom. Taira, Teemu, Elizabeth Poole and Kim Knott. 2011. Religion in the British media today. In: Gower Owen and Jolyon Mitchell (eds.), Religion and the News, 31–44. London: Ashgate. Toft, Monica D., Daniel Philpott and Timothy D. Shah. 2011. God’s Century. Resurgent Religion and Global Politics. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Winston, Diane. 2011. “The Angel of Broadway”: The transformative dynamics of religion, media, gender and commodification. In Gordon Lynch, Jolyon Mitchell and Anna Strahn (eds.), Religion, Media and Culture, A Reader, 122–130. London and New York: Routledge. Woodhead, Linda and Rebecca Cato (eds.). 2012. Religion and Change in Modern Britain. London and New York: Routledge.

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 communication, and the use of media as scientific instruments) and three facets of mediatization (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 potentially 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 knowledge – 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 amateur, “gentleman” science into specific institutions, such as academies and universities, 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.

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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 society 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 imaging 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 interpreted 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” (Nentwich 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 interpretative, micro-sociological theory and methods (cf. Meyen 2009). And while proponents of “medialization” 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 “medialization” 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

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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 television 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 communication. 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 mediatization 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.

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Tab. 1: Overview of different claims about the mediatization of science that can be found in the literature. Mass Communication

Communication within Science

Interactive Communication

Extension

Science communication increasingly addresses the mass media, broadening and extending its audience.

Research collaborations expand in size, space, across disciplines and beyond science.

Media make better measurements and documentation as well as entirely new research fields possible.

Amalgamation and Substitution

Mass media becomes a relevance source of information for scientists. Scientists might increasingly publish in mass media instead of scientific journals. Media prominence might interfere with the scientific gratification system.

Informal communication within science amalgamates with new media, resulting in publication and literature research going online, and also in more and more scholarly communication being semi-public.

Science (increasingly) analyzes purified and/or simulated versions of reality, increasing the presence and importance of scientific “machinery” in the laboratory.

Accommodation

Scientists and scientific institutions might increasingly adapt their thinking and behavior to the (perceived) mass media logic.

Digital literacy becomes necessary. “Webometrics” have repercussions on science. Scientists’ self-presentation online is becoming more important.

New professional skills are required to deal with and adequately interpret media in the labs.

3.

Amalgamation, where “[m]edia activities not only extend and (partly) substitute 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 similar matrix see Lüthje 2012, 2014). The only deviation from the introduced taxonomies is that Schulz’s “substitution” and “amalgamation” dimensions will be merged into one here, as they seem to indicate a difference in degree (does mediainduced 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 mediatization 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.

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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 relatively 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 phenomena have been documented at some place and time within science, it is difficult 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 scholarship 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 communication, 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 adaptation of both sides (Weingart 2001: 124, 2002: 703; Schäfer 2008; Rödder 2011; Rödder, 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 development 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 “medialization” 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).

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and Miller 1998: 86–99). As a response, “Public Understanding of Science” programs 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 content, 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 community 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 communication. 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 controversial (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

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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 (anymore) to traditional means of scientific communication such as conferences, workshops, 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; Schäfer 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 documenting the existence of such practices. The case of the 47 million-year-old primate 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 findings 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 particularly 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

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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 strongworded criticisms from the scientific community (e.g. Nature 2009). A third (alleged) amalgamation or substitution is seen when scientific gratification 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 accommodation of science towards (perceived) media demands: On the institutional level, most universities and research institutes nowadays employ professional public 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 “misinformation” 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 proactively at times (Rödder 2009b: 216).

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There are even some indications for an accommodation in the “core of knowledge production” (Weingart 2001: 249), i.e. in scientific decision making. Roughly two thirds of stem cell researchers and epidemiologists say they have seen colleagues adapt to media demands in selecting their topics, methods, partners, funding 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 authority of scientific experts.

4 The mediatization of communication within science The second kind of potentially mediatized communication within science is “communication 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 communication appears in multiple and diverse forms: informal talks, scientific conferences and workshops, talks and presentations with subsequent discussions, e-mail exchanges, 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).

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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” (Nentwich 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 dramatic increase in joint-authored papers” (Walsh 1996: 346–347). The social-scientific “Association of Internet Researchers” (AoIR) is another example – a community 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” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 13; Schroeder 2008: 132). Accordingly, scientists state that the availability of computers and the Internet “definitely knocks down geographic barriers,” and that “it’s been a gift,” and “done a lot” for extending collaborations (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 collaborations between disciplines (Nentwich 2003: 447–448), as the above-mentioned “Association of Internet Researchers” from political science, anthropology, information 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 developments – 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 interlinkages in “hyperlink networks between departments, compared to co-authorships and project cooperations, are much more diverse both in audiences that were addressed and in the communicated content” (Heimeriks et al. 2008: 1605).

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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 productivity, 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” (Vasileiadou 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 (Vasileiadou and Vliegenthart 2009: 1266). Amalgamation and substitution: Apart from extending scientific communication, 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 communication 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

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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 amalgamated 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 amalgamation 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 primary 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).

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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 accommodation, however, is not clear yet. A number of scholars argue that researchers require new skills to be successful. 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 researching 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 “webometrics” (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 Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008; Meyer and Schroeder 2009: 225–226). Accordingly, scientists will keep these characteristics in mind when choosing journals to publish their work. A similar kind of accommodation is imaginable with regard to scientists’ selfpresentation online. Nowadays, the visibility of a scientist “does not rely exclusively on the number of publications and their peer citations” anymore, “but can increasingly result from a well-designed and well-linked homepage providing scientific 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 communication 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

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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 mediatization analyses. In modern science, such interactive communication is highly prevalent – 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. “signprocessing machinery” which “mechanically, electrically, and electronically produce[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 laboratories 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 microscope 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 computers 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

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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 experimentation 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 unprecedented scale, for instance in the Human Genome Project” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 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

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data, samples, or experimental setting, the systematic and tightly monitored realization 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 scientific 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-determined 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” (Heimeriks and Vasileiadou 2008: 14). But this translation is not always easy and often involves subtle (and analytically interesting) processes of fact-finding or fact-constructing: Several illustrations can be found in Knorr Cetina’s study on The Manufacture 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 science 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 Network Theory (e.g. Prout 1996; Latour 1996) see them as relevant knots in interaction networks whose role is equal to those of human ‘actants’.

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“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 measuring, 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 illustrate 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 assumptions 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 science, 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.

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These studies should also aim to better establish the causality of mediatization, 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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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 discourse 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 coverage from specialized sections of the quality print media, discussed broadly as a debate about the social contract that was afforded to fields charged with developing 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

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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 education seems self-evident. Indeed, fundamental changes in education have resulted 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 theatres, 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, television 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 highlights 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 communication 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 classrooms, 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

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processes, but in ways that imply the growing dependence of education and education 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 education (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 emergence of new forms of communication technologies. We are led to this representation 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 mediatization 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.

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education policy, and represented in a particular discourse and practices associated with that policy, namely the Australian knowledge economic policy, The Chance to Change (2000). The broad argument that we develop is that for mediatization to be useful as a concept, some precision needs to be proffered about specific effects that can be attributed to the process, and that assumptions about the stages of mediatization (Strömbäck 2008) require some scrutiny for their application 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 mediatization 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 different 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 journalism. In education these kinds have parallel histories that have not always been interrelated, and research that has drawn on mediatization has adapted the concept 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 education policy.

2 Couldry’s own position on these debates has shifted and he now advocates the use of mediatization 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.

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The first use of mediatization emerged from research into the development, use, and effects of computer technologies in education (ICT). This literature generated 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 development 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 practices 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 concern that follows involves questions of provision of media technologies in education 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 standardization 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 individual schools, systems of schools, universities, and to governments. Due to the increasing pressure on governments to ensure that education systems are competitive 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 information 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/

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or promotion of league tables of performance and other instruments of comparison, by which individual schools, groups of schools, or even whole school systems are compared, has provided an ongoing source of content for journalists in multimedia outlets. Indeed, journalists and the media have played a strong and influential role here in demanding access to government held data and other accountability 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 Queensland schools, which utilizes publicly available data. This basically entails a repackaging of My School data and thus involves what we might see as the “privatization” 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 teachers 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; Lingard, Sellar and Savage forthcoming). The media representations of these performance 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 (Lingard 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 challenges the autonomy of education to develop its own specialized language and

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legitimacy as a discipline. Allied with the specific practices of journalists are the borrowing of familiar themes, framing, and stories about education across nationstates, 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 educational issues sometimes acts to represent and create social problems, which precipitates 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. Furthermore, 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 Singapore 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 policy. 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 representations on the practices of education. Though there is direct overlap with the first two kinds of mediatization considered above, the focus on images and representations 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

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with respect to institutions, online environments, other students, adults, and people 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 institutions more broadly, including new forms of literacy demands (for example technological 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 variety 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 educational 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 outcomes 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 crossfield effects: a Bourdieuian account There are a variety of research objects that have been connected to the mediatization 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 interactions 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 practice 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

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policy). These additions are cross-field effects, temporary social fields,3 and incommensurate 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 crossfields 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 application 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 metacapital”. 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 understand 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 practices may impact on the reporting of results, formation of governing boards or councils 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 strategies 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”.

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policy and the knowledge economy, in the form of a review of Australia’s science, engineering, and technology capability, which involved close consideration of education and research (Batterham 2000). This review resulted in Australia’s acceptance 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 policy 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 education 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 engagement with his theoretical framework, and in particular his account of social fields as a way of nominating and researching spheres of competition within which practice takes place, with each social field underpinned by a distinctive logic of practice (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

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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 products 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 interesting 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 mediatization effects. In keeping with Bourdieu’s theorization, these effects can be considered 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 newspapers. 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” possessed by the policy maker (Champagne 1990). The within-field effects of mediatization 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 contribute any further. Despite this large investment, the vast majority of individual articles 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

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terms, these articles contributed to the “circular circulation” of ideas about Batterham’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 representation 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 understand 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 practices 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 different 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

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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 knowledge 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 crossfield 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 particular 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 reconstitution 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 mediatization 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.

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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 policy 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, political, and economic life. This topological turn is part of new spatializations associated 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 infrastructures 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 different 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 relationships. 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 connected 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 educational policy field (as well as for understanding the emergent global media field). Newspaper coverage of international performance data is a central element

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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 schooling (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 character. 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 multinational 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 journalism. 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 Bourdieu’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-

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tion that Bourdieu’s concept of social fields refers to relations within deterritorialized space with particular logics of practice – this is a topological account; such relations do not necessarily function within national or specific geographical places. Our last point in relation to the need to recognize rescaling is that such processes 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 relation 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 consideration. 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 journalism raised by the growth of new media and on-line journalism also raises questions about whether these functions and roles can be realised. For example in countries that that share what Hallin and Mancini (2004) outline 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

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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, improving 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 journalists, 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

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links to globalization, but more research and discussion are needed concerning the links to other processes such as individualization, economization, and commercialization within education.

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Markham, Tim. 2009. Global practices of citizen journalism: Democratizing and collectivist or regulatory and individualist? 59th Political Studies Association Annual Conference Challenges for Democracy in a Global Era 7–9 April 2009, University of Manchester, Renold Building. Peck, Jamie and Adam Tickell. 2002. Neo-liberalizing space. Antipode 34: 380–404. Pina, Ana. 2007. The press and the mediatizing of education policies. Sisifo 4: 101–109. Pusey, Michael and Marion McCutcheon. 2010. The concentration of media ownership in Australia – from the media moguls to the money men? Record of Communications Policy and Research Forum 2010, Network Insight: 211–232. Rantanen, Terhi. 2005. The Media and Globalization. London: Sage. Rawolle, Shaun. 2005. Cross-field effects and temporary social fields: A case study of the mediatization of recent Australian knowledge economy policies. Journal of Education Policy 20: 705–724. Rawolle, Shaun. 2007. When the knowledge economy became the chance to change: Mediatization, crossfield effects and temporary social fields. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, Australia. Rawolle, Shaun. 2010a. Practice chains of production and consumption: Mediatized practices across social fields. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31: 121–135. Rawolle, Shaun. 2010b. Understanding the mediatization of educational policy as practice. Critical Studies in Education 51: 21–39. Rawolle, Shaun and Bob Lingard. 2008. The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and researching education policy. Journal of Education Policy 23: 729–741. Rawolle, Shaun and Bob Lingard. 2010. The mediatization of the knowledge based economy: An Australian field based account. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research 35: 269–286. Rawolle, Shaun and Bob Lingard. 2013. Bourdieu and educational research: thinking tools, relational thinking, beyond epistemological innocence. In: Mark Murphy (ed.), Social Theory and Education Research, 117–137. London: Routledge. Rizvi, Fazal and Bob Lingard. 2010. Globalizing Education Policy. London: Routledge. Ruppert, Evelyn. 2012. The governmental topologies of database devices. Theory, Culture and Society 29: 116–136. Sassen, Saskia. 2007. A Sociology of Globalization. New York: W. W. Norton. Schultz, Julianne. 1998. Reviving the Fourth Estate: Democracy, Accountability and the Media. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Sellar, Sam and Bob Lingard. 2013. The expansion of PISA and new global modes of OECD governance in education. British Educational Research Journal. DOI: 10.1002/berj.3120. Steiner-Khamsi, Gita (ed.). 2004. The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending. New York: Teachers College Press. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics 13: 228–246. Thompson, Greg and Tomaz Lasic. 2011. Doing something about it: Representations of NAPLAN in the public domain. AARE 2011, 27 November–1 December 2011, Hotel Grand Chancellor, Hobart. Thomson, Patricia. 2004. Education policy and the media. Special Issue, Journal of Education Policy, 19: 251–380. Wiseman, Alexander. 2013. Policy responses to PISA in comparative perspective. In: Heinz-Dieter Meyer and Aaron Benavot (eds.), PISA, Power and Policy: The Emergence of Global Educational Governance, 303–322. Oxford: Symposium Books. Yates, Lyn. 2012. “My school, my university, my country, my world, my Google, myself” … What is education for now? Australian Educational Researcher 39: 259–274.

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 mediatized 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 emotional selves. Historically, however, such selves are more dependent upon direction 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, equality, 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 relational selves through informed and careful use of the technologies of literacy-print and secondary orality. Keywords: virtue ethics, medium theory, mediatization, privacy, democracy, autonomy, 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 (beginning 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

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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 mediatization 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 technologies 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 especially 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 – including 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 framework. 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 individual 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

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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 relational 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 Fossheim 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 philosophical 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 emphases. 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.

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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 individual from outside, not from within”. None of this is to say that such sense of selfhood 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 relationships. 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 cultures 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 technologies that begin with the telegraph and then extend from radio to movies and television (McLuhan includes the press as well – 1964: 391) – entail for McLuhan and Ong a marked shift from strongly individual conceptions of identity to more relational 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 dramatic 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

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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 translation 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 terrifying 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 immeasurably 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 communication 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

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communication modality of high modernity, to the rise of electric media, specifically, 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 tradition 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 emphasizing 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-toosimple – 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 considerations 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 “macrolevel” of orality, literacy, and so forth means precisely that I take on board what

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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 passage we reviewed from Ong makes clear that at least at such macro-levels as orality, 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 understandings 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 technologies – can rise and fall with little to no impact on larger social and cultural processes. 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 philosophical perspectives as well as empirical findings from Internet Studies complements and counterbalances the use of medium theory, so as to avoid at least the most serious critiques of “non-media-centric” mediatization research and perspectives. 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 philosophical perspectives. With this as background, I now turn to more careful exploration of these correlations 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

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[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 multitude 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 scriptura – 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 individual emphases in selfhood and identity culminate most prominently in the philosophical 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 formulation) 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

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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 systems 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 revolutionary: 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.

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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 technologies 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 imperative 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, secondary orality signals the return of the immediacy, fluidity, but also ephemerality of oral communication – now also manifest in a “secondary textuality” that emphasizes 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 dramatically 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 consciousness” ([1934] 1967: 171) and Georg Simmel’s account of the self as a “sociable

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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 – specifically, 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 facilitating 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 renaissance of virtue ethics. Most briefly, in both their ancient and contemporary expressions, relational selves evoke a virtue ethics that focuses on the very commonsensical 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 deontology take up what we recognize as desirable, if not simply necessary, for a complete moral life: these include “moral wisdom or discernment, friendship and family 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.

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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 limited in their capacity to offer needed ethical guidance. Somewhat more darkly – at least from the perspective of high modern emphases 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 harmonious 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 relational 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 literacyprint. 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 number 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

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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 religious 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 democratic 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-blogging 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 Orwellian dystopia of a Big Brother now equipped with staggering powers of surveillance – 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.

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5.3 Hybrid selves and the virtues of virtue ethics For all of that, the shift towards more relational senses of selfhood may not inevitably 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 individualrational 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 Huxleyan dystopia of unreflective consumption and thereby happy enslavement. More broadly, virtue ethics should thereby help us to keep in the foreground the importance 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 individual 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 conceptualized 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 prudential 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

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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 differently, 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 relational 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 privacies” 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 individual 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 Kantian 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

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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. Mackenzie 2008). Part of the core insight here is that our autonomy and practices of freedom are inextricably interwoven with and, ideally, enhanced through our multiple relationships with others rather than necessarily in conflict with such relationships (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 networked 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

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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 “privacy” is discussed first and foremost in terms of privatlivet (private life) and the intimsfære (intimate sphere) (Ess and Fossheim 2013). While private life can certainly 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 societies – 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 literacyprint 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 equality. 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 democratic practices and norms (including equality), alongside more relational notions

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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 literacy-print. Again, such practices and cultivation are thus vital if high modern senses of rational autonomy, democratic polity, and their attendant rights (including individual privacy) and norms of equality and gender equality are to be sustained 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 “lifestyle politics”. It is a worry that such lifestyle politics apparently abandons the commitment of high modern emancipatory politics to the norms of autonomy, justice, 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 European 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 provided us by the Googles, Facebooks, Apples, and Microsofts of the world increasingly evolve beyond both national and supranational control, more and more of our lives are lived in and through online environments privately owned and controlled 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).

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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 traditions – 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 conceptions of rationality as a source of moral agency and authority alternative to tradition 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 argument, this hierarchy is not intended to be what moderns would categorize as a

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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 philosopherkings 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 unenlightened 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 education, 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-

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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 University, 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 examples 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 interrelationship: i.e. ontological insecurity and homelessness. Bringing the different strands together, the concept of “homing” will be introduced at the end. It combines 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, homelessness, 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 mediatization 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 framework 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, however, 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 mediatization 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 contribution.

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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 homelessness. Not only are these two phenomena empirically linked, but they provide an entry-point into a more subtle understanding of the notions of ontological security 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 limitations 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 suggesting a new concept, called homing, which is meant to bind the above mentioned concepts and outcomes together. Homing combines media use and homemaking (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 comprehensive 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 communication, 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).

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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 domestication 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 mediatization 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 phenomenon 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 differently 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.

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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 integration 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 household, 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).

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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 inspired research methods. In the beginning, this meant an attempt to conduct participant observations in the chosen households, plus additional methods to engage with the household members’ media use.7 Later, the studies were changed to qualitative 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-saturated. This again provides a clear link to the concept of mediatization. However, since the main context within the original domestication research was the domestic 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 differentiation between household and the everyday: “To us, everyday life is not the same as the household or the reproductive sphere. […] Generally, the everyday is associated 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 outside 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 framework 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).

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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 following 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 processes. 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 engagement 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).

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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 everyday has been an important topic in both philosophy and social sciences (e.g. Lefebvre 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 exploration 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 context 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 ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, 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 contrast this ontologically secure person with an ontologically insecure one, “an individual whose experiences may be utterly lacking in any unquestionable self-validating 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.

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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 further 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 domestication 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 increasingly 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.

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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 blanket 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 political 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 fragile, 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 particularly 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.

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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 framework, 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 congruent 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 domestication 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 ‘homeless’ 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 construction 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” (Somerville 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)).

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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 surveillance 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 differentiate 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 misunderstood 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 summarized 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 surveillance 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 European research overview differentiates between rooflessness, houselessness, living in insecure housing and living in inadequate housing (Edgar 2009: 73).

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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) quietness. 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 ontological security is rather complex. The researchers followed up on the assumption that tenure (in terms of housing) could increase ontological security (a very culturally 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, relationships, 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 understanding 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 sometimes 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 unemployment 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.

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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) environments could be online, especially in social networking sites. The key elements that remain are the secure base for identity-constructions, the freedom from surveillance 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 ownership 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 important 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 (Hersberger 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

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existing social networks, reinforcing ties with people who would otherwise not be easily reachable. Already in 2010, one study on homeless and Internet use underlined 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 networking 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 connected 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 networking, 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 homeless 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.

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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 homeless 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 ontological 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 process 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.

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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 differently 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-forgranted – 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”, however, 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 homing as part of media use is definitely an important building block in the establishment 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 construction 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).

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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 something to eat, but these other things are necessities too” (Jackie, a 61-year-old homeless 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 technologies 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 software, 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 domestication 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.

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Hiscock, Rosemary, Ade Kearns, Sally MacIntyre, and Anne Ellaway. 2001. Ontological security and psychosocial benefits from the home: qualitative evidence on issues of tenure. Housing, Theory and Society 18 (1–2): 50–66. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 105–134. Jansson, Andre. 2010. Mediatization, spatial coherence and social sustainability: The role of digital media networks in a Swedish countryside community. Culture Unbound 2, Article 11 (http://cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/a11/) Johnson, Guy and Nicola Wylie. 2010. This Is Not Living: Chronic Homelessness in Melbourne. Melbourne: RMIT University. Karl, Irmi. 2009. Technology and women’s lives; Queering media ethnography. In: Reconstruction 9.1. Special Issue on Fieldwork and Interdisciplinary Research. http://reconstruction. eserver.org/091/karl.shtml (last viewed 18/6/2009) Kinnvall, Catarina. 2004. Globalization and religious nationalism: Self, identity, and the search for ontological security. Political Psychology 25 (5): 741–767. Krotz, Friedrich. 2001. Die Mediatisierung kommunikativen Handelns. Der Wandel von Alltag und sozialen Beziehungen, Kultur und Gesellschaft durch die Medien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Krotz, Friedrich. 2007. Mediatisierung. Fallstudien. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In: Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences, 21–40. New York: Peter Lang. Krotz, Friedrich and Tanja Thomas. 2007. Domestizierung, Alltag, Mediatisierung: Ein Ansatz zu einer theoriegerichteten Verständigung. In: Jutta Röser (ed.), MedienAlltag. Domestizierungsprozesse alter und neuer Medien, 31–42. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Laing, Ronald D. 1960. The Divided Self. An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. London: Penguin. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life. Vol. I. London: Verso. Lie, Merete and Sørensen, Knut H. 1996. Making Technology Our Own? Domesticating Technology into Everyday Life. Oslo. Scandinavian University Press. Livingstone, Sonia. 2007. On the material and the symbolic: Silverstone’s double articulation of research traditions in new media studies. New Media & Society 9 (1): 16–24. Lüthje, Corinna. In press. Medienwandel und Wissenschaft: Feldspezifische Mediatisierung. In: Martina Löw (ed.), Vielfalt und Zusammenhalt. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Meyen, Michael. 2009. Medialisierung. Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 57 (1): 23–38. Moores, Shaun. 1993. Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption. London: Sage. Morley, David. 2006. Media, Modernity and Technology: The Geography of the New. London: Routledge. Morley, David and Roger Silverstone. 1990. Domestic communication – technologies and meanings. Media, Culture & Society 12(1): 31–55. Padgett, Deborah K. 2007. There’s no place like ‘a’ home: Ontological security among persons with serious mental illness in the United States. Social Science & Medicine 64: 1925–1936. Pollio, David E. D. Scott Batey, Kimberley Bender, Kristin Ferguson, and Sanna Thompson. 2013. Technology use among emerging adult homeless in two U. S. Cities. Social Work 58 (2): 173– 175. Reitze, Helmut and Christa-Maria Ridder. 2011. Massenkommunikation VIII: Eine Langzeitstudie zur Mediennutzung und Medienbewertung 1964–2010 (Schriftenreihe Media Perspektiven, Bd. 21). Baden-Baden: Nomos.

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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 maintenance, 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 becoming 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 relationship: hyperconnectivity. And although counter-trajectories of a mainstream media still persist to challenge the fragmentary and diffused character of memory in post-scarcity culture, the openness of mediatized memory offers an alternative memory boom: an unfinished 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 characterize 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

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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. Roediger 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, proposes that they have a shared locus in their categorical instantiation in the everyday. 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 transformations 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, Hoskins 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 simultaneously undergoing a social diffusion process and an ongoing series of codebased modifications”. This sociotechnical flux is precisely 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 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 relationship: hyperconnectivity. And it is via hyperconnectivity that I define mediatization as: the process of shifting interconnected individual, social, and cultural dependency on media, for maintenance, survival, and growth. The idea of media pervasiveness and saturation as constituting a new environment or ecology of individual, social, and cultural dependency has a long tradition. 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

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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 characterize 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 contemporary 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 outside 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 – permanence, 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 “networked”, and as I stated above, part of a living archive in which media and cognition offer constantly renewed prospects for remembering and forgetting.

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And so, in the sciences-of-the-mind a tradition that seems particularly invogue 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 multidimensional 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 physicality 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 grabbing 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 technological developments” and thus replacing the passive and the consumptive connotations of “audience” and “consumer”. In other words, as the individual as consumer 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

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of some content of the past in the present, but, rather, it is mediatized via sociotechnical 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 services 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 memorykeeping 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 storytelling 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 understanding 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-memory 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 cautions over the metaphorical comparing of memory with a “permanent medium of storage”. He argues: “Such a comparison seems harmless enough, but once the

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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 “cultural 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 horizon, 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 memories 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 previous 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 changing times, of both the relationship between the now and the most recently con-

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nected moment, is an important starting point in the seeking of a more temporallyadequate 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, locating the unfolding details of everyday life in terms of the events of the larger society – 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 understood 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 experiences 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 Gitelman’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) digital 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 allthings-past (which Anderson [2006] calls “the long tail”) and the heightened connectivity of, and in, the present. Furthermore, the construction of memory in everyday 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.

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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 functions 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 communication (and “influence” and the legacy of “effects” research unfortunately still clings to the teaching of and scholarship in the discipline of Media and Communication 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 quality 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 memories of that epoch”. And here the two phases of mediatization are useful in illuminating this relationship.

3 Two phases of mediatization The current (second) phase of mediatization is defined by the staccato transformations 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 commentators on cultural memory, for example, as proliferating overbearing and hierarchically-organized archives. For instance, Nora (1989: 14) argues that such archival accumulations produced a “terrorism of historicized memory”.

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Tab. 1: The two phases of the mediatization of warfare (reproduced from Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010: 19) Phase of mediatization

Characteristics

Central questions in this phase

First

Discrete, large organizations, mass media, mass audiences, international news coverage dominated by a small number of Western media organizations and driven by satellite television. Mass warfare enabled by mostly distanciated and temporally-limited military strikes. Actions and effects largely predictable and measurable.

How do media make war visible? How do media deliver war to audiences? How do media shape public opinion, and how does public opinion shape how war is conducted?

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/representational games are being played, how do they find credible and authoritative information 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. “Emergence” 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”

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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 mediatized 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 memory. 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 Harbor 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) photographer 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 trajectories 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-century Afghanistan, with the image of wounded US marines in the rear of a military

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“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 postscarcity 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 paradoxical 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 inevitable 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 information 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 person, a space, an institution, a nation state. They are socio-technical systems, neither entirely social nor technical”. A key trend in this regard is the ways in which archives have become networked – 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-

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val space of the vault or library subject to the material conditions of order, classification, 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 generated by the quickening pace of material life on the one hand and by the acceleration 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 possessing 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 Internet 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 coexisting 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 produces 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 dynamics of mediatized memory, is that of active versus passive remembering (and forgetting). Aleida Assmann (2008: 98) proposes two modes of cultural memory in that: “The institutions of active memory preserve the past as present while the institutions 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” comprises 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 dynamics 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 operandi of history of the second phase of mediatization is increasingly digital. The

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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 interweaving 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 perceived or certain” (original italics). The temporality of the Web is emergent and continuous as opposed to the temporality of other media, which render our experiences of events as “punctual” (cf. Michael Warner 2002). Compare with, for example, 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 continual 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 “building 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 punctual in their datedness of production, publication, and circulation, and which is embodied in the cultures of their reproduction and archiving (including remediated 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

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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 development of the Internet represents a huge accumulation of archival memory, in Assmann’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 “public”. 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 organizations with the most extensive archives”. The digital is at the very least an accelerant 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 historicization 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

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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 ‘correspondence’ – 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), recoverable, and open to future interpretations and reinterpretations. The temporality, fluidity, 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 memory, 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 significance. Can then the immateriality of this memory and an investment in and preservation 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 transformed and to its emergent possibilities. For example, as Shelia Brown (2003: 22)

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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 reverence 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 memory, 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 vitalized 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 mediatization 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 contexts and in different cases). The article draws on Winfried Schulz’s (2004) 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. 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 interplay 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

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whereby communication refers to media and uses media so that media in the long run increasingly 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). Therefore, 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 relations, 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 communication – media logic – also has the power to influence us as individuals communicating about public death as victims, witnesses, or bystanders (cf. Frosh and Pinchevski 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 accommodate 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 (accident, natural catastrophe, violent attack causing public death) 2. The source that begins to mediatize the message of loss of human life (institutional media organization, officials, social media, people)

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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 massacre in Aurora, Colorado in 2012, are used to illustrate Schulz’s theoretical reflection. 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 analyzed 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, including 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.

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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, firsthand 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 significance as it became more distant in the real-life worlds of people (Goldberg 1998: 29).

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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, importantly, 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 commonly 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 common 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 patriotism 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 century 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 “telling 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 certain ways, and typically supported by the written word.

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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 Vietcong 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 representation 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 globalization 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 traditional 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 balances. 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 societies dies in any one day than in any society at any time in the history of humankind, 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 individually and collectively; affect the formation and maintenance of social relations

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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 analytical framework developed by Winfried Schulz (2004). In this typology, media sources 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 accommodate 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 mediatization works in different media-related contexts and settings. However, it is important 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,

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or global media event, depending on the case in point, in the newsrooms of mainstream broadcasting media. In the history of the mediatization of death, the assassination of John F. Kennedy 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 accessible 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 photographers 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

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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). According 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 mythical 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 oppositions 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

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masculinity (constructed out of the binary oppositions of female–male, pure–polluted 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 narrativization 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),

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Lifton and Olson (1974), and Bauman (1992), a prime motivation for the ritualization 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 orchestrated 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 ritualization 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 regardless of their physical time and location. However, as pointed out by Hanusch (2010), the ritualization of public mourning 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 performances (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

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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 tribute 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 mourning in the Utøya case can be identified as follows (cf. Grimes 2006: 109): Ritualized Action

Ritual Place

Ritual Time

Ritual Objects Ritual Participants

Figures and Roles Qualities and Quantities Language Sounds Beliefs and Emotions

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 Newsrooms, different media platforms (e.g. newsreels and TV), websites, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), screening public sites such as Squares Extra newscasts, constant updating of news material, remediation, commentaries and postings on social media Symbols, icons (e.g. national flags, flowers (rose), candles, notes, portraits of the victims) Journalists, professional and amateur media users, official society (e.g. police, clergymen, politicians, experts, the Royal family), media audience Victims, witnesses, orchestrators of public mourning (the media, politicians, e.g. Prime Minister) Massive circulation of visual representations of mourning and grief Mythological (national, ideological) Funeral music, opening sounds/theme (news media/ social media) Creation of a sense of togetherness in the nation through the collective mourning of a loss of human life and human suffering

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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 collective 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 mediatized 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 management teams at different levels – police, Red Cross, church, and other authorities – 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 Internetbased communication (see e.g. Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle 2012).

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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 religious 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 country. Stig Hjarvard (2012) argues for the connection between mediatization and secularization 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 religious 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 understanding 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 manage a crisis on that scale. The role of symbolic communication and leadership is of crucial importance to the attempts of official society to accommodate communication 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.

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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. Kennedy’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 identification 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 Norway, 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 modern 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 establishing 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 youngsters make better victims than men, as they are considered weaker and more innocent 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 American 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

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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 category 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 category, 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 transform 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 mediatization as an extension, substitution, amalgamation, and accommodation of communication 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 common material in and for the mediatization of death. Through the process of mediatization, these deaths strengthen the cultural and social categories already established and maintained in and by the media. These categories create and maintain social order in society as they structure the world around such fundamental

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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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Hanusch, Folker. 2010. Representing Death in the News: Journalism, Media and Mortality. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of Mediatization. Cambridge: Polity. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society: A theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29(2): 105–134. Hjarvard, Stig. 2012. Three forms of mediatized religion: Changing the public face of religion. In Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), 21– 44. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Höjer, Birgitta. 2004. The discourse of global compassion: The audience and media reporting of human suffering. Media, Culture and Society 26 (4): 513–531. Hoover, Stewart. 2006. Religion in the Media Age. London: Routledge. Howarth, Glennys. 2007. Death and Dying: A Sociological Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Katz, Elihu and Tamar Liebes. 2007. No more peace! How disaster, terror and war have upstaged media events. International Journal of Communication 1: 157–166. Kellerhear, Allan. 2007. A Social History of Dying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kellner, Douglas. 2012. School shootings, crises of masculinities, and media spectacle: Some critical perspectives. In School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age, Glenn Muschert and Johanna Sumiala (eds.), 299–330. Bingley: Emerald. Kitch, Carolyn. 2003. Mourning in America: Ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11. Journalism Studies 4 (2): 213–224. Kitch, Carolyn and Janice Hume. 2008. Journalism in a Culture of Grief. New York: Routledge. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, Knut Lundby (ed.), 21–40. New York: Peter Lang. Liebes, Tamar. 1998. Television’s disaster marathons: A danger for democratic processes?. In Media, Ritual and Identity, Tamar Liebes and James Curran (eds.), 71–84. London: Routledge. Liebes, Tamar and Menahem Blondheim. 2005. Myths to the rescue. How live television intervenes in history. In Media Anthropology, Eric W. Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman (eds.), 188–198. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lifton, Robert and Eric Olson. 1974. Living and Dying. London: Wildwood House. Lundby, Knut (ed.). 2009a. Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. Lundby, Knut. 2009b. Conclusions: Consensus and conflict. In Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, Knut Lundby (ed.), 293–303. New York: Peter Lang. Moeller, Susan. 1999. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. London: Routledge. Muschert, Glenn and Johanna Sumiala (eds.). 2012. School Shootings: Mediatized Violence in a Global Age. Bingley: Emerald. Myerhoff, Barbara. 1984. Death in due time: Construction of self and culture in ritual drama. In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, John J. MacAloon (ed.), 149–178. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Nossek, Hillel. 2008. ‘News media’-media events: Terrorist acts as media events. Communications: The Journal of European Communication Research 33(3): 313–330. Pantti, Mervi and Johanna Sumiala. 2009. Till death do us join: Media, mourning rituals and the sacred centre of society. Media, Culture and Society 31 (1): 119–135. Pantti, Mervi, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Simon Cottle. 2012. Disasters and the Media. New York: Peter Lang. Peterson, Mark Allen. 2005. Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium. New York: Berghahn Books. Robben, Anthony C. G. M. (ed.). 2006. Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

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Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept. European Journal of Communication 19(1): 87–101. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrah, Strauss and Giroux. Starck, Nigel. 2008. Death can make a difference: A comparative study of “quality quartet” obituary practice. Journalism Studies 9(6): 911–924. Staudt, Christina. 2001. Picturing the dead and dying in the nineteenth-century L’Illustration. PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York. Stephens, Mitchell. 2007. A History of News. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Sumiala, Johanna. 2012. Ritualizing death in the media: Symbolic immortality, the immanent frame, and school shootings. In Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives, Stig Hjarvard and Mia Lövheim (eds.), 109–125. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Sumiala, Johanna. 2013. Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Sumiala, Johanna and Salli Hakala. 2010. Crisis: Mediatization of disaster in the Nordic media sphere. In The Nordic Countries and the World: Perspectives from Research on Media and Communication, Borbjörn Broddason, Ullamaija Kivikuru, Birgitte Tufte, Lennart Weibull and Helge Østbye (eds.) 361–378. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Sumiala, Johanna and Minttu Tikka. 2010. “Web first” to death: The media logic of the school shootings in the era of uncertainty. Nordicom Review 31(2): 17–29. Thompson, Susan. 2004. The Penny Press: The Origins of the Modern News Media, 1833–1861. Northport: Vision Press. Walter, Tony. 1991. Modern death – taboo or not taboo? Sociology 25(2): 293–310. Walter, Tony. 1994. The Revival of Death. London: Routledge. Walter, Tony (ed.). 1999. The Mourning of Diana. Oxford: Berg. Walter, Tony, Jane Littlewood and Michael Pickering. 1995. Death in the news: The public invigilation of private emotion. Sociology 29 (4): 579–596. Zelizer, Barbie. 1992. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zelizer, Barbie. 1995. Words against images: Positioning newswork in the age of photography. In: Newsworkers: Towards a History of the Rank and File, Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen (eds.), 135–159. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Zelizer, Barbie. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press.

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 transformations in digital networks over recent decades. It is concluded, first, that the second, institutional perspective makes the strongest case for a theory of mediatization, but that all perspectives could be mutually compatible with further theoretical 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 (Hjarvard 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

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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 psychologists 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 recognized 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 mediatization 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.

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understand “the space of social action in an age when everyday life has become supersaturated with media flows”. While positioning the media within multidisciplinary 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 institutionalized 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 particularities that complicate the telling of a tidy, overarching story. More interestingly, 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 accumulating that the dominance of mass media is unravelling in the emerging digital age, undermining or complicating the operation of the simultaneously unravelling forces 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.

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2 The mediatization of what? The ambition of mediatization research is not, primarily, to understand the changing 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 individual 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 mediatization 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 recognizes 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 institutional 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.

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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 analyse how complex modern societies encode power in terms of the institutionalized arrangements of social class (Durkheim 1984), Bourdieu emphasizes forms of association 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 metaprocess, 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 influenced 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 multiple practices in education, including pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment”. But the introduction of technologies is far from the simple or sole cause of such transformations. 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 commercialization (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 introducing 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.

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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 technologically-determinist approach, taking from mediatization theory an insistence on recognizing 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 deregulate 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 developed 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 historians, 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

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these onto the three distinct perspectives on mediatization advocated within this Handbook – that concerned with the recent impact of digital networked technologies on society, that concerned with rising power of media as institutions in relation 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 society throughout history. While of course, any and every period in history is characterized 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 especially 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 mediatization 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, alternatives 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 presence of media institutions in their midst. Particularly, mass media organizations (print, cinema, broadcasting) have increasingly set agendas, normalized discourses, and disseminated ideas to shape publicity and the public sphere and, thereby, to influence politics, religion, science, education, and more. This influence 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 recognizes that mediatization depends upon the deeper processes of modernity (rationalization, specialization, institutionalization, urbanization, etc.) that, in combination, have brought into existence the very societal fields on which mediatization has had its effects (witness the centuries-long evolution of today’s taken-forgranted market economy, civil society, nuclear family, education system, labour relations, social class, and nation state).

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Third, and simultaneously most broadly yet least clearly, the cultural perspective 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 technological determinism), the cultural perspective sees the media as fundamentally of society. 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 belonging, 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 influence of the dominant mass media of high modernity. But across the often unpredictable 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 systems theory can account for the long history of differing mediated forms of interrelation 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 connectivity (for better and for worse) to every field of society is appropriately mediacentric when applied to the digitalized network society of late modernity, but cannot 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 mediatization 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

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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 system, 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 perspective above? The 20th century saw an extraordinary confluence of global mass audiences, 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 multimedia, 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, scooping 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 information, 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 century 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 messages. 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 messaging originating directly with politicians and associated experts or think tanks.

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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 sufficiently 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 mediated, 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, economic, and social rationalization (sustained by meta-processes of democratization, commercialization, individualization, and globalization), societies have been distinctively and deliberately reshaped by the institutional and cultural logics of the media. In this second narrative, mediatization is conceived not simply as a consequence 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 institutions and structures of state, politics, religion, family, education, etc. that are now being transformed in ways we cannot yet clearly grasp.

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practices which first made possible and then became underpinned by the (ubiquitous, 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 mapping historically and culturally diverse processes of mediation. Then, mediatization 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 mediatization as the exercise of institutional power in high modernity; this asserts a clear historical narrative of media in modernity – that mediatization is the “double-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” (Hjarvard 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 modernity12). 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 different 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, challenges 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, individualization, 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).

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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 institutions (the polity to the government, the consumer to the market, the congregation to the church). In complex, democratic societies, one important means of connecting individuals and institutions is through mediated (first mass, then also networked) communication. 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. Whichever 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.

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democratic politics have long been at the centre of thinking about modernity. Personal 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 mediation, 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 mediatization (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.

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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 simultaneously 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 factor 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 disseminate 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, amalgamation, 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 influence 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).

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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, phenomena 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, technologically-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”.

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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 conciliated. 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 mediatization – 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 deand 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 conceived 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.

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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 convergence and divergence of social and cultural forms and practices, complicating the relations between production and consumption, releasing and yet commodifying the democratic potential of popular culture and, in a historical reversal, drawing the cultural elites back into engaging with popular culture by “making omnivorous 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 hitherto messy and diverse cultural practices. His period of digital mediatization sketches the shifting contours of popular culture over recent decades, simultaneously 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 processes 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 under20 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 consumption). 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.

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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 represent 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 concepts, methods, and claims surrounding mediatization research. Since the contributors 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 colleagues wrote for a popular audience, offering not only an analysis but also a diagnosis of the society being transformed. A parallel diagnosis of mediatized society 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 prediction 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 potential 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 politics, religion, education, sport, science, culture, and more. We are therefore tempted 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 culture studies. Our proposal, therefore, is to conceive of mediatization research as a secondorder investigation. Media and communication researchers, as well as those in

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other disciplines, will continue to examine media texts, practices, influences, institutions, 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 historical 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-technological transformations in the digital age, mediatization as the exercise of institutional power in high modernity, and mediatization as cultural evolution through human history. Each invites further research, but only by unravelling their interrelations can a truly compelling case be made for mediatization as a meta-process in modernity.

References Altheide, David L., and Robert P. Snow. 1979. Media Logic. Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage. Blumler, Jay. 2014. Mediatization and democracy. In: Frank Esser and Jesper Strömbäck (eds.), Mediatization of Politics: Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracy, 31–41. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bolter, Jay D. and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron. 2011. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (2nd edn). London: SAGE. Carey, James W. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge. Clark, Lynn S. 2014. In: Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (eds.), Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age. New York: Palgrave.

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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 journalism, 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 Communication 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 (University 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 University 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 Section: 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 University 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 Communication”-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.

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Göran Bolin is Professor in Media & Communication Studies at Södertörn University, 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 Studies 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 London School of Economics. He is the author or editor of eleven books including Ethics 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 Communication, University of Oslo, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Drury University. Ess has received awards for excellence in teaching and scholarship; 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 Democracy). After studying in Mainz and London, he was assistant professor at the University of Missouri and visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma, of Texas (Austin) and of California (San Diego). His research focuses on cross-national studies 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).

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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 candidate 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, chapters, and reviews related to communication, cognition, media theories, and the history of digital media. He has been a member of the Norwegian Research Council’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 University, Sweden and Editor-in-Chief of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. Having initiated the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation’s (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) Sector Committee for the Mediatization of Culture and Everyday Life, his research interests concern media culture, intermediality, popular music, and intersectional identity discourses, most recently focusing on symbols 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: Communication, 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 developments 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.

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Maren Hartmann is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Arts (UdK) Berlin. 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 teaching 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 concepts (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 Conference in Hamburg. His main research interests are related to patterns of media use in converging media environments, children’s and young people’s online experiences, and the information-related foundations of today’s public spheres. Currently he acts as co-coordinator of the research network “Communicative Figurations” (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 Bremen, 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).

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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 Studies, 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 archival 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, University 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 Communication 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 globalization 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, Germany. He is coordinator of the DFG priority program “Mediatized World” and leads the project “A qualitative longitudinal study about the mediatization of social relationships” (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 Kommunikation (VS, 2007), Mediatization: A Concept to Grasp Media and Societal Change (in K. Lundby; Peter Lang, 2009), and Mediatized Worlds (edited with A. Hepp; Palgrave, 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 decisionmaking and changing journalistic professionalism to transnational and comparative study of journalism. He has authored several books on media and communica-

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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 coedited 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 previously held the Andrew Bell Chair in Education at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent books include: Politics, Policies and Pedagogies in Education (Routledge, 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 Communications 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), Meanings 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 Communication Association in 2007–8. Taking a comparative, critical, and contextualized approach, Sonia’s research asks why and how the changing conditions of mediation 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, University of Oslo, Norway. He has background in sociology and wrote his doctoral dissertation 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 perspectives on digital storytelling among youth” (2006–11). Lundby has edited Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Self-representations in New Media (2008) and Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences (2009), and Religion Across Media. From Early Antiquity to Late Modernity (2013), all with Peter Lang in New York.

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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 (particularly 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 discussions 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 religion 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 Nordic 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 Mediatization and Religion: Nordic Perspectives (Nordicom, 2012). Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published extensively on the social consequences of new media especially in relation to processes of transnationalism and migration. She is the author of Mediating the Nation: News, Audiences 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 communication, 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,

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Australia. Shaun has published in the areas of communications, new contractualism, 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, combining 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 Literature 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 Democracies, edited together with Frank Esser (2014), Opinion Polls and the Media. Reflecting 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 Foundation Senior Fellow. She has authored books, articles, and chapters related to public death, religion, ritual, social media, and virtual ethnography. She is coeditor 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

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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 Communication 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 Information 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, leading the post-graduate program in Journalism and the graduate program in Communication. 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 communication, and international communication. He taught as Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington (Seattle/USA), at the Universitá della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano/Switzerland) and the Lomonosov University (Moscow/Russian Federation) 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

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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

– media change 132–133, 137–139, 141, 144– 145, 149–155 – media effects 454–455 – media environments 323 – media events 70, 90–94, 96–97, 102 – media dependency 351–352, 368 – media history 109, 483 – media influence 384–385, 392–396 – media institutions 375; see also institution – media interventionism 390–392 – media logic 229–230, 238, 355–357, 366– 367, 375–376, 378–379, 381–382, 384– 386, 390–392, 443–447, 449, 452, 457– 459, 479–480, 682, 693, 695 – media meta-capital 235–237, 241, 243 – media power see power – media relations 424–425, 427, 429, 431–434 – media technologies see technology – news media 406–408, 410–413 – polymedia 328–331, 341 – scopic media 40, 42–45, 53, 56–57, 60; see also mediatization – social media 579, 581, 583 – sports/media complex see sport mediality – transmediality 257 medialization 114, 572 mediatic phenomenon 163–165, 166–167 mediation 6–10, 547, 550, 557, 559–560, 563– 566, 717–719; see also mediatization – history of mediation 703–704 – mediation of history 703–704, 724 mediatization – conceptualization of mediatization 5, 14–19, 63–67, 131, 133–134, 156–158, 163–165, 175–176, 227–228, 249–250, 273–276, 349, 351–352, 406–408, 444–445, 465– 467, 483–486, 572–575, 596–597, 622– 623, 642–644, 704–705 – digitization and mediatization 297 – history of mediatization research 13–14, 109 – mediatization as a historical process 23–25, 109 – mediatization as hashtag 719–721 – mediatization by the government 87, 93–98 – mediatization of politics 349, 351–352, 375– 379 – mediatization with Chinese characteristics 87 – modes of mediatization 314

737

– operationalization 406–408 – phases of mediatization 116, 667–671 – self-mediatization 385–386 – scopic mediatization 39, 60; see also media medium – medium concept 144–145 – medium theory see theory memory 662–663 meso-level 202, 204, 207 Meyen, Michael 18, 110, 466, 572, 643 migration 323–328 modernity 175, 209–211, 712–715 – modernization 136–137 – second modernity 179, 193–194 multi-selfing 505 museum 472–474 new institutionalism see theory news – news logic see logic – news media see media Nicki Minaj 508–509 Nissenbaum, Helen 632–633 Nordic 552, 555, 562 on demand 513, 519 ontological (in-)security 641–642, 647–649 operationalization see mediatization partnership 527, 538–539 persona 506–509, 514, 520 phenomenology 273, 280 place of critique 714 Plato 635–637 polarization 525, 539 political – political communication see communication – political legitimicacy see legitimacy – political logic see logic politics – climate politics 74, 79 – mediatization of politics see mediatization power 264–265 – institutional power 713, 721 – media power 351–352, 365–367 – soft power 92, 97 privacy 631–634 process – mediatization as a historical process see mediatization

738

Index

– meta process 135–137 – non-linear processes 165–166 production grammars see grammar professionalism 77–80 propaganda 87, 101–104 pseudo events 432 public diplomacy 88–90 public bureaucracies see bureaucracy public relations 424–428, 476–477 publicity see Habermas rationalization see Habermas regimes 219–221 religion 547–549 reputation 427–429 research 5, 574 respatialization 607–608 response presence 45, 47–48, 51–52 risk 72 ritual 683–684, 690–693 rules 253, 263–264 – rules and resources 204, 206–207 Schulz, Winfried 14, 25–26, 109, 116–119, 122, 125, 151–153, 223, 284, 308, 352–353, 364–369, 377, 384, 443–445, 449, 457– 458, 533, 573–575, 681, 683, 687, 693, 696, 715–716 science 571–572 – post-normal science 73 secularization 548, 555 segmentation 264–265 semiosis 164 situation – face-to-face situation 39, 45, 47, 49, 60 – synthetic situation 45–49 social space 227–228, 278, 285, 291–292, 595, 604 social world 131 society 175–178

space-time alterations 163 sport 527–528 – sports/media complex 527 structuralism 188 Strömbäck, Jesper 12, 17, 27, 111, 116–117, 177–178, 186, 350, 443–447, 457, 715–716 taste 490, 498–499 technology 280–282; see also media – cultural technologies see culture – media technologies 189–190 – new communication technologies 323 – new technologies 595; see also digital media temporality 666, 672–674 theory 4–5, 17–18 – exchange theory 349 – field theory see fields – media theories, modern or general 297 – medium theory 141–145, 315–318, 619–623 – middle-range theory 205 – new institutional theory 407–408 – new institutionalism 357 – public sphere theory 114 – social theory 227–231 – structuration theory 206–209 timing 430–431 transformation 7–8, 202, 211, 216, 220 translocality 249 trust 56–57, 535 Utøya 683, 691–692, 695 virtue ethics 618–619, 626–628, 630–634 war – diffused war 669 Weber, Max 123–125 Williams, Raymond 505–507, 510–511, 513 writing 166–168