Mediatisation and Beyond: A Critical Appraisal of Media Transformation, Vol. 24 - 2017, No. 2
Guest Edited by Hannu Nieminen and Josef Trappel
Explaining the Mediatisation Approach
This article provides an overview of the mediatisation approach, which for the last two decades has gradually become a systematic concept for understanding and theorising the transformation of everyday life, culture and society in the context of the ongoing transformation of media. The article is divided into four sections. The first section addresses the ongoing transformation of media and the emergence of a computer-controlled digital infrastructure for all symbolic operations in a society; some of the new types of media are also presented. In the second section, the development of the mediatisation approach as a reaction to media changes is explained, and the central assumptions and conditions of this approach are discussed. This section also shows why, in addition to actual mediatisation research, historical mediatisation research is also necessary to understand the developments occurring today. The third section clarifies this and discusses how the transformation of media produces a transformation of everyday life, culture and society; this section also presents some results of empirical studies. The fourth and final section provides some preliminary ideas about how to establish a necessary third branch of mediatisation research, which offers a critical view with reference to civil society, besides actual and historical mediatisation research.
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Mediatisation and the Transformation of Capitalism: The Elephant in the Room
Recent years have seen the idea of mediatisation promoted as a unifying concept capable of overcoming the increasing specialisation and fragmentation of communication research and addressing the increasing ubiquity and centrality of media across all areas of institutional and intimate life. Advocates present it as media centred but not media centric, arguing for inquiry that explores the interconnections between innovations in media and wider social and cultural change. While shifts in the organisation of economic activity are referenced, mediatisation research has not so far developed a comprehensive analysis of the central role played by the resurgence of market fundamentalist models of capitalism in reorganising the relations between media and social and cultural life it seeks to address. Through a close reading of key writings on mediatisation, this article demonstrates the necessity of integrating a critical political economy into its core project.
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Changes in Contemporary Communication Ecosystems Ask for a “New Look” at the Concept of Mediatisation
The concept of “mediatisation” is enjoying growing popularity in scholarly research because it provides an insight into the influence of media logics in society. This is why mediatisation has been applied to several social, cultural and political phenomena. However, its original meaning is to be re-examined vis-à-vis the establishing of new media and communication ecosystems. This article provides a concise overview of the concept’s applications in academia and probes into its real usefulness for mass and new media communication research.
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Inequality and Digitally Mediated Communication: Divides, Contradictions and Consequences
This article examines relationships between economic and social inequality and digitally mediated communication. Differences between instrumental and critical approaches in the digital divide literature are considered to highlight the limitations of the former approaches and the ways these are reflected in European policy. What we know about the relationship between technological innovation and society and its consequences for economic and social inequality is summarised and emerging expressions of inequality between humans and their digital machines are discussed. With computational models, algorithms and machine learning becoming more pervasive, it is argued that human beings are at risk of losing the ability to control the digitally mediated environment. Policy measures create incentives for small shifts in corporate digital platform strategy that amount to tinkering with the overall direction of technological innovation. The article emphasises the need for an inclusive dialogue to reveal potential alternative directions that might take better account of what people value in their digitally mediated lives.
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Particularistic and Universalistic Media Policies: Inequalities in the Media in Hungary
In consolidated western democracies, contemporary approaches to media policy have largely been affected by the social responsibility theory of the press. A number of media policy measures have been designed and implemented in an attempt to counter market imperfections such as the concentration of media ownership and the resulting concentration of content as well as to compensate for the inequalities of access to the media created by the socio-economic disadvantages of some citizens. Such policy measures include, among other things, the establishment of public service media, the introduction of press subsidy systems and the allocation of frequencies to community radio stations. These can be described as universalistic media policy measures, and are aimed at equally distributing media resources. But what if a state intentionally pursues a particularistic media policy aimed at promoting some voices and discriminating other ones; that is, aimed at enhancing unequal access to media resources? The example of post-2010 Hungary shows the devastating effects of such a media policy regime.
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For Public Communication: Promises and Perils of Public Engagement
In this article I make a case for the importance of public engagement and political commitment on the part of communication scholars. I do this initially by drawing on the work of Michael Burawoy who, in his 2004 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, made an impassioned argument for the rebirth of a public sociology. Burawoy’s provocation has, however, been largely overlooked by scholars working in the field of communication and media. I then discuss the impact of the Research Excellence Framework on public communication research in the United Kingdom, a development that I so far consider to be, on the whole, positive for the field of communication and media research because it has provided incentives for academics to engage with publics. However, it is crucially important to ground this public engagement in critical theory, which means that we should question the traditional dichotomy between academic and activist. The grounds for engagement in theories of reciprocity and generality have implications for what “good” and “bad” public communication research might be. Clearly, however, we need to understand who our publics are. To this end, I discuss some of the difficulties, encountered personally, in conducting critically-informed public communication research.
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Put a Ring on it! Why We Need More Commitment in Media Scholarship
This article reflects on how academics might best respond to the social, political and economic crises that are unfolding in the contemporary world: for example, increased inequality within nations, falling levels of trust in established political institutions, the growth of populist movements that seek to use racism and sexism to divide populations and the failure of the media to scrutinise successfully current dangers. In particular, in light of intensified marketisation of and managerialism within higher education, the article asks how communication scholars should respond to a situation in which the media are seen as intimately connected to both the emergence of and solution to these crises. To what extent should academics remain aloof from grassroots movements or should their research and teaching inform campaigns for social justice? The article discusses how academics are simultaneously urged to “engage” in the social world in order to achieve “impact” and to retain a scholarly detachment that protects their “neutrality”. It argues that media studies, however, should not (and probably cannot) be insulated from fundamental questions of power and injustice, and suggests that academics should refuse the false binary between “scholarly” and “political” activity to pursue a “committed” approach to their work.
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