Mediatization

Mediatization may run the risk of becoming the new favoured buzzword for our contemporary predicament, as the formerly ubiquitous ‘globalization’ is coming of age and becoming retired. Mediatization describes a comprehensive development process similar to globalization and individualization, namely the increasing influence of mediated communication on all sectors of culture and society. Mediatized worlds, as defined by German researchers Friedrich Krotz and Andreas Hepp (2010) are concretized in public and political spheres as well as in people's everyday experience; life-worlds today are inseparably entangled with the media.

Mediatization is not a “new” phenomenon, it can be traced back all the way to Aristotle’s Poetics, or at least to Marshall McLuhan’s Media theory and catchy but obscure conception of the medium as the message … Nor is it confined to the global North. At this very moment, the wave of popular protest – wittily called the tunisami – that toppled the corrupt governments of Tunisia and Egypt, is shaking the remaining authoritarian regimes of the Arab world. Like preceding mass demonstrations in Iran (and Burma), the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt were largely mobilized through Facebook, Twitter and other social media. The new media environments, in which “old” and “new” media converge in ever changing forms, are both radically transforming the arenas of public opinion and agency – redefining the very concept of a public sphere – and yielding new forms of expression that transgress former genre and media boundaries.

Mediatization is characteristically associated with worlds in the plural, i.e. life-worlds, not the world as a singular yet diverse entity, and its global implications have hence been little analyzed. Moreover, the emerging new forms of social and political agency have as yet hardly been discussed at all in a context of media, communication and development.

For a more extensive background on the concept of mediatization see Sonia Livingstone, “On the Mediation of Everything”, Journal of Communication, 59, 2009.