Deep Mediatization

Key Ideas in Media & Cultural Studies

Andreas Hepp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351064880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society.

Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today's media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a 'good life' for all.

Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.

1

Introduction

Popular media frequently presents us with fictional characters like Mia, a young woman living in the year 2037: one morning, Mia is woken from a deep sleep with friendly words spoken by Ben, her artificial companion. Ben is an artificial intelligence software application existing primarily in ‘the cloud’. Mia can access Ben at all times through her smart watch, her mobile phone and other devices. Mia also lives in a ‘smart home’: when she enters her bathroom, the lights turn on automatically; at the edge of the mirror is displayed a curated stream of updates and messages from her social media accounts as well as a selection of health information and personal metrics including her heart rate, the quality of her previous night’s sleep and how many calories she burned during the previous day. The food in her kitchen is prepared automatically; artificial meat is cultivated in bioreactors and the refrigerator is automatically filled from purchases made online. Mia travels to work on a high-speed train. If she wants to move through the city more privately, she can do so in an autonomous electric car. She works in a support center for autonomous vehicles and it is her job to commandeer a simulator to control a driverless lorry through busy city centers when human support is required. Mia only has to work four hours a day thanks to the productivity benefits afforded by robotics and artificial intelligence technologies. In their free time, Mia and her friends enjoy virtual reality experiences, travelling to faraway places, perhaps to an outpost on Mars for a drive over the Red Planet’s undulating dunes.

The scenario above was originally recounted by two journalists writing in the German news weekly, Der Spiegel, in collaboration with futurologists from the Ars Electronica Future Lab. The article positions itself as an ‘optimistic vision of the future, though, not necessarily the most realistic’.¹ Despite the oft portended risks and harms associated with mass digitalization, the authors here are more concerned with ‘the opportunities offered by the future’, based not on their ‘unrestrained imagination’ but, rather, on suggestions inferred by ‘current research’ to offer a vision of the future that reflects current innovations in media technology.

There are several reasons why I have begun this book with Mia’s story. First of all, Mia’s everyday life demonstrates what a deeply mediatized life might look like. Some of the features described in the scenario are already part of our lives today: while Ben’s functionalities are more extensive than current assistive technologies, we already have similar companions embedded in our smartphones, our smart watches and in other smart devices; they can be seen in Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana or Apple’s Siri. They are already capable of logging our appointments, we can dictate messages and emails, search for information and make purchases using simple voice commands. These companions already ‘live’ in ‘the cloud’ and it seems that we might be well on the way to a scenario akin to the one described above.

But this scenario is also interesting in terms of what is does not address – namely, the potentially problematic aspects of a life so richly augmented by always connected media technologies. For example, these artificial companions continuously collect data on us while we use them. In many cases, the automated analysis of these data is the core business model behind their manufacture. Technologies such as those that control vehicles and other equipment via simulation interfaces are already common in more professions than we might think. But again, it is not made clear in Der Spiegel’s vision of the future in which areas simulation control are currently most widespread and if we were to investigate its use more thoroughly we would find that their predominant field of use is in the American military and its control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).² On the one hand, therefore, Mia’s story is perhaps not so different from contemporary life where digital media and technology already saturate everyday life. In the context of media and communications research, this increasing ‘entanglement’ (Scott & Orlikowski 2014: 873) of our social world with pervasive media technologies can be referred to as deep mediatization. On the other hand, Der Spiegel’s tale of an everyday life simply made better and more efficient thanks to digital technologies remains myopic of the possible negative ramifications of a life molded by deep mediatization.

This utopian description of a technological future is consistent with many mainstream depictions of media-related change that present us with their imaginaries of possible futures. Journalists and futurologists alike promise a ‘brave new world’ made possible through media technology. Their world is ‘white’, it is ‘clean’ and just ‘better’, because it is created by ‘white’, ‘clean’ and ‘better’ media technologies. We can trace these myths back to the beginning of digitalization. As early as the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, tales were told of digital media technologies that would bring a plethora of ‘positive’ transformations to society, we would engage with a ‘new economy’ (Alexander 1983), for example, and live and interact with each other in ‘virtual communities’ (Rheingold 1994).

In this sense, deep mediatization is not simply ‘produced’ by technology companies and ‘appropriated’ by users. It is also imagined by various actors and driven forward by visions such as those described above which often adopt positive future scenarios. We are dealing here with a highly dynamic and multilayered process.

From mediatization to deep mediatization

Mediatization, a concept often harnessed by the social sciences and cultural studies, refers to an experience everybody is acquainted with in his or her everyday life: technological communication media saturate more and more social domains which are drastically transforming at the same time. More specifically, mediatization refers to the relationship between the transformation of media and communication on the one hand and culture and society on the other (Couldry & Hepp 2013: 197). With reference to everyday experience, it can be said that mediatization has ‘quantitative’ as well as ‘qualitative’ characteristics.

Quantitative observations are concerned with media’s ever-increasing proliferation through society. They can be measured temporally (media were once only available at certain times of day; they can now be accessed 24 hours a day), spatially (media in the past were often static; they are now accessible in more and more places) and socially (our social practices become entangled with and augmented by a variety of media) (Krotz 2007a: 96). Some media scholars have argued that media have become so pervasive we can refer to the ‘mediation of everything’ (Livingstone 2009: 1).

A qualitative analysis of mediatization focuses its attention, both empirically and theoretically, on the specific consequences of this saturation of everyday life by media and to what extent this affects social and cultural change.³ But mediatization research does not deal with the effects of individual media content, rather, it is more concerned with the ways in which society and human practices are transformed more generally by media’s ability to mold and shape them. Mediatization can therefore be understood as a ‘sensitizing concept’.⁴ A sensitizing concept ‘gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances’ (Blumer 1954: 7) and draws their attention to (present) phenomena in culture and society. On these terms, mediatization ‘sensitizes’ us to fundamental transformations we experience in the context of today’s media environment, and this occurs in three ways in particular: the historical depth of the process of media-related transformations, the diversity of media-related transformations in different domains of society and the connection of media-related transformations to further processes of modernization (Lunt & Livingstone 2016: 465).

A more recent focal point within mediatization research is media’s digital character and a need to rethink the whole idea of mediatization because of it. While initial contributions on this matter have been fairly general in tone (Finnemann 2014, Miller 2014), the discussion has intensified and become more specific as digitalization has advanced the processes of mediatization. The reasons for this are multifaceted. Mediatization research has become aware that media is characterized less by the dominant influence of one (digital) medium but more about the differentiation of highly connected digital media and how this affects communication. The focus has shifted, therefore, to life’s ‘polymedia’ (Madianou 2014: 323) character and the ‘media-manifold’ (Couldry 2012: 16) nature of today’s media environment. Against this background, and in order to understand how media shape the entire scope of social domains, it is necessary to consider digital media in terms of their interrelatedness with each other. Furthermore, mediatization research is attentive to the fact that digital media are not merely means of communication. By virtue of being digital, they are at the same time means of generating data while they are used for communication tasks. These data are used as a source for various forms of automated processing which has become a fundamental part of the construction of our social world.

To emphasize, digitalization has seen us emerge into a new stage of mediatization which we can identify as deep mediatization. Deep mediatization is an advanced stage of the process in which all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures (Couldry & Hepp 2017: 7, 34). As previous research has shown, mediatization is not a linear process, it occurs in various ‘waves’ of fundamental change to the media environment. If we look at the past few hundred years, we can identify at least three primary waves of mediatization that have affected society in quite startling ways: mechanization, electrification and digitization.

Mechanization refers to the changes in media practice and distribution engendered by mechanical processes typically exemplified by the invention of the printing press in the 1400s as well as more modern mechanical media such as the typewriters and cameras that came along in the 19th and 20th centuries. Electrification is concerned with the development of electronic media over the course of the 20th century; to a large extent, radio and television are the first things that come to mind, but we can also think about technologies such as the phonograph and the telephone. We can plainly see that, through processes of ‘remediation’ (Bolter & Grusin 2000), older technologies are refashioned into new ones; just as photography remediated painting, the electrical powered off-set printer, and eventually the photocopier, remediated Gutenberg’s press; the typewriter was refashioned into the electric typewriter and the computer keyboard, cinema into television and so on. The most current wave of mediatization is digitalization, which stimulated the trend toward increasing datafication.⁵ Media are increasingly computerized and objects not previously considered as media, a car, for example, are made media by virtue of their digital connectivity. Since these digital media are now software-based and can be automated by means of algorithms – rules for operation, such as those laid down in computer programs – they are no longer simply communicative tools, they also act as generators of data demonstrating clearly how the advanced stage of deep mediatization is firmly grounded in media’s digitization.

The waves of mediatization described above are intrinsically contradictory and have manifested themselves as the consequence of forces beyond themselves at different stages throughout history. However, it is clear that media’s pervasiveness in our lives is made possible largely as a consequence of them being refashioned into the digital realm. These software-based media are shaped in a wide variety of digital devices. ‘Radio’ as a medium, for example, is no longer tied to the radio set. With a variety of software solutions, we can use a whole range of digital devices to listen to the radio. Some still look like radios (the digital radio as a discrete device), some are representations on our screens through specific software (a radio app on a smartphone) and we can apply the same principle to television, telephony and the entire breadth of media services and devices we make use of.

Deep mediatization presents a challenge to mediatization research as it must incorporate the analysis of algorithms, data and digital infrastructures. Investigating algorithms becomes necessary because in a state of deep mediatization facets of the mediated construction of the social world occur through automated data processing. The classification of data, for example, on certain consumer groups when shopping online or personal recommendations based on download histories must be analyzed in a different way compared to political discussions on talk shows, for example.⁶ Attention needs to be paid to the digital infrastructures that underpin contemporary media.⁷

As mediatization is a concept that sensitizes us to the more recent changes in digital media we must rethink its current research paths once again because we are forced to further integrate analytical concepts that address questions of algorithms, data and digital infrastructures. In light of this analytical requirement, the term deep mediatization also resonates with various other uses of ‘deep’ such as ‘deep learning’ (which is understood as a new level of automated learning processes based on algorithmic processes) or ‘deep analytics’ (which is applied to data mining). The use of deep mediatization as a term is, therefore, deliberate because it is the stage of mediatization in which the analysis of algorithms, data and artificial intelligence become crucial to our understanding of the social world.

Traditions and perspectives

With my focus on deep mediatization, I position this book within a certain perspective of the discourse on mediatization. In doing so, I will refer to two lines of thought that can be distinguished in previous and current research, these are the institutionalist and the social-constructivist traditions.⁸

The institutionalist tradition on mediatization arose from mass communication and journalism research. Research carried out in this tradition focuses on the role media – understood as a ‘semi-independent institution’ (Hjarvard 2013: 21) – play in influencing other areas of culture and society that are apparently external to it, a process that often harnesses the metaphor of ‘media logic’. Originally developed by David Altheide and Robert Snow in 1979, media logic theory describes the influence discrete mass-media formats have on other areas of society such as politics or religion. More recently, media logic has been utilized more broadly and is often pluralized so that as an analytical tool it may consider the existence of numerous media-related dynamics.⁹ Media logics, then, act as ‘a metaphor and shorthand for the various modi operandi that characterize the workings of the media’ (Hjarvard 2017: 11). Approaches t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The making of deep mediatization
• 3 Media as a process
• 4 A figurational approach
• 5 Deep mediatization’s re-figuration of society
• 6 The individual in times of deep mediatization
• 7 Deep mediatization and the good life
• References
• Index