Cultures of Mediatization

Andreas Hepp

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745663494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

What does it mean that we can be reached on our mobile phones wherever we are and at all times? What are the cultural consequences if we are informed about 'everything and anything important' via television? How are our political, religious and ethnic belongings impacted through being increasingly connected by digital media? And what is the significance of all this for our everyday lives?

Drawing on Hepp's fifteen-year research expertise on media change, this book deals with questions like these in a refreshingly straightforward and readable way. 'Cultures of mediatization' are described as cultures whose main resources are mediated by technical media. Therefore, everyday life in cultures of mediatization is 'moulded' by the media.

To understand this challenging media change it is inappropriate to focus on any one single medium like television, the press, mobile phones, the Internet or other forms of digital media. One has to capture the 'mediatization' of culture in its entirety. Cultures of Mediatization outlines how this can be done critically. In so doing, it offers a new way of thinking about our present-day media-saturated world.

1

Introduction

Why should anyone today write a book about media culture? For a book with a title like this one, we should certainly ask this question right away, and this ‘why?’ has at least two aspects. First of all, it can be asked why one is still preoccupied by the topic of media culture. For decades there has been academic discussion of the degree to which our contemporary cultures are to be regarded as media cultures. Moreover, in our newspapers and magazines we also find discussion of tendencies of development, decline and change in our media cultures. Secondly, it can be asked why such discussion should take the form of a book. Today’s media culture is of course increasingly digitalized, and the Internet is the dominating environment. I would like to respond to both questions at the beginning of this book.

The reason for dealing with the topic of media culture lies in the fact that, since the very first writings on modern mass culture and the influence of the media, ever more has been written and published about media culture. However, the analyses that have resulted are, I believe, inadequate for a proper appraisal of the ongoing transition of our culture into a media culture. This is because the significance of this transition is underrated, lacking sufficient understanding of the way in which the media – or, more exactly, communication via media – have increasingly left their mark on our everyday life, our identity and the way in which we live together. Media communication appears in such discussion as to some extent merely secondary. By contrast we can read pieces in which media are talked up into the essence of change and transition – that we are leaving the era of the book or of the television and entering the bright new world of the Internet. A basic argument that will be developed in the course of this book is that both these ways of thinking about media culture are misguided. If we would really like to know how our culture has been and is being transformed into a media culture through the increasing use of media, then we need a much more complex approach than either of these extremes, so that we might avoid simplified argument. Media cultures are cultures of mediatization: that is, cultures that are ‘moulded’ by the media.

And here we can start to see why this should be presented in the form of a book. Some years ago now, in his historical study In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), the philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich examined the early development of the modern book, in the course of which he reflected that, as he wrote this book, the form of communication that it represented was threatened with decline. Time has passed since then, and the book as a form of communication is still here. Despite all the dire predictions, even the Internet has changed nothing. In fact, the Internet has become a platform for the purchase of printed books from websites as well as for downloading digital books. The actual non-disappearance of the book as a communicative form indicates that it has properties and possibilities that no Internet encyclopaedia, blog or article in an online academic journal has: the book makes it possible to develop an overarching argument through many pages, an argument that cannot be reduced to a few bullet points. Since an investigation of media culture involves wide-ranging questions affecting everybody, and not only academics interested in communication and the media, answers to these questions cannot be reduced to a few Wikipedia entries, for all one’s sympathy with online reference sources. That is why my discussion and argument are presented in the form of a book. My hope in publishing in this form is that the book is interesting and readable, stimulating readers to develop a different way of dealing with media in everyday life.

But before I go any further, it is important to introduce and clarify three basic concepts, so that later misunderstanding might be avoided: the concepts of communication, medium and culture.

If I refer to communication, I mean any form of symbolic interaction conducted either in a planned and conscious manner or in a highly habituated and socially situated way (Reichertz 2009: 94). 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. There is no ‘natural reason’ for calling a tree ‘tree’. Interaction means people’s reciprocally related social action. This implies that humans ‘do something’ in orientation with each other. Communication is fundamental to the human construction of reality: that is, we ourselves ‘create’ our social reality in multiple communicative processes. 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 also communicative action. Many theorists have discussed these issues (for an overview see Krotz 2008a). Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, whose work The Social Construction of Reality (1967) became a sociological classic, 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). It would be hard to find a more striking and precise way of describing the constitutive force of communication for our human reality as so many of these forms of communication are today mediated by media.

Which brings us to the concept of medium. Wherever in the following I refer to a medium, I mean a given technological communication medium. I am not concerned with the general symbolic media discussed in sociological systems theory, such as power, money and love (which, in regard to my later usage, have also been confusingly called ‘media of communication’, see Luhmann 1997: 316ff.). Nor am I interested in language (or our bodies) as a ‘primary medium’ (Beth and Pross 1976: 112–19) based upon the ‘biological organization’ of humans (Elias 1991: 23). My use of ‘media’ adheres quite closely to its everyday meaning: the set of institutions and technical apparata that we humans employ to communicate across space and time. Important here is that technical media of communication are at issue, those media that the informational theorist and organizational analyst Herbert Kubicek has called ‘second-order media’ (1997). For Kubicek, ‘first-order media’ are technological systems with particular functions and potentialities for the dissemination of information in the technical sense of the word: for instance, the Internet as a vehicle for the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) model. ‘Second-order media’ are in addition socio-cultural institutions of communication. This would be, for example, not the Internet itself but an online newspaper or email. And so when reference is made to ‘media’ in the following this means ‘second-order media’ media of this kind. This is a technical means of mediating communication involving (at minimum) a technically based system of signs embedded in a particular social institutional structure, and which as such facilitates communicative action (Beck 2006: 14).

The most complex concept used in this book is certainly that of culture, or media culture. Ultimately the entire book deals with the question of what media culture is. Without wishing to anticipate the arguments that I present, it nonetheless seems necessary to make some preliminary remarks about this, so that we do not get sidetracked from the very beginning. First of all, I use the expression ‘culture’, or ‘media culture’, in the singular when seeking to establish the term as a concept. Of course, I do not assume that there is only one (media) culture: from the empirical point of view there is only a plurality of cultures. In addition to that it has to be taken into account that cultures are formed at very different levels. A few years ago the German writer Eckhard Henscheid wrote a book with the title All 756 Cultures: An Assessment (2001). In what he referred to as a ‘Grand Prix for cultures’ he demonstrated the presence of 756 different ways of using the expression ‘culture’ in everyday German language. These run from A (abendländischer Kultur – occidental culture) to Z (Zynismuskultur – culture of cynicism). The book can be used as proof of the fact that there is not simply a ‘national culture’ (which Henscheid refers to as ‘German culture’), but multifarious cultures. I would like to take up this idea, although I would also wish to render it more precise than a simple additive approach can. Culture is always to do with the production of everyday meanings. Borrowing from Stuart Hall (1997: 222), we can understand by ‘culture’ the ‘sum of the different classificatory systems and discursive formations’ to which our production of everyday meanings relates. Systems of classification are ultimately the pattern of systematic relationships between signs (understanding ‘sign’ in a very broad sense, and not only as a linguistic sign). Discursive formations are continuing patterned and power-producing constellations of the use of these signs in linguistic and non-linguistic practice. Culture is always a matter of practice, the ‘doing’ part of the production of meanings. Hence culture is thoroughly contradictory and embedded in a process of social contestation and discussion. Questions of culture are likewise questions of power: whoever is able to define what ‘culture’ is and is not holds power. German discussion of a ‘primary culture’ (Leitkultur) is a clear example of this. What is important is to keep in mind that we live simultaneously in a number of cultures. These are not simply the given national cultures, but also ‘democratic cultures’, ‘protest cultures’, ‘musical cultures’, to cite some examples from Eckhard Henscheid’s collection. We can take their sheer multiplicity as an indication that cultures flow into and over each other; they are not that well defined and are best conceived as ‘thickenings’.

These points regarding the concept of culture already suggest how many-layered the phenomenon of media culture as ‘cultures of mediatization’ is. To deal with this we need to work with all three concepts – communication, medium and culture – and not seek to further differentiate them. Above all we need to see the connections between them. For I would in this book like to show that media cultures are those cultures whose primary resources are mediated by technological means of communication, and in this process are ‘moulded’ in various ways that must be carefully specified. That is the reason why I call them ‘cultures of mediatization’.

The line of argument that I would like to develop in this book runs as follows. I begin in Chapter 2 with a review of the existing theory and analysis of media culture. I will argue that these approaches do shed light upon important aspects of media culture, but they do not really provide anything in the way of an adequate point of departure for theoretically founded and empirically informed research into media culture. Hence, following such a critique, one must seek to construct a suitable point of departure step by step. This begins with the definition of mediatization as a metaprocess and panorama (Chapter 3), a definition which seeks a line of demarcation with respect to concepts of mediation (Vermittlung) and media logic. This conceptual work then allows us to develop in Chapter 4 an understanding of media culture which conceives this as cultures of mediatization. Useful concepts for the description of media cultures will here be found in the ideas of mediatized worlds, communication networks and communicative figuration. Chapter 5 then follows by raising an important aspect of today’s media cultures: how we live in different forms of translocal communities. Finally, Chapter 6 deals with the question of what might be an appropriate methodological approach for the empirical study of media cultures. The book is concluded in Chapter 7, where I seek to formulate some thoughts on how, given the account of media cultures and their change which I have developed, further questions and criticism might be integrated.

This outline already makes clear that this book is no final description of what media cultures are today. It is more of a draft, an appeal, a sketch which seeks to grasp what we need to consider if we wish properly to comprehend ongoing cultural change. It is in this sense, then, that this book is intended to prompt further questions and research, rather than premature answers.

2

What Media Culture Is (Not)

As already noted in the Introduction, media culture has for a long time been a topic for research in the study of communication and media. This has not, however, prevented the development of many misconceptions about what exactly media culture is, misconceptions that have been formed on the basis of different approaches and strands of thought. In this chapter I seek to deal with what I consider to be the most prominent misconceptions commonly encountered in everyday discussions of the media. And to make myself quite clear from the outset: media culture is neither a mass culture, nor the culture of a particular dominating medium (whether books, TV or the world-wide web); nor is it a programme that integrates us into one society, or a cyberculture that gradually enmeshes us and turns us into cyborgs or cyberpunks. But we cannot simply dismiss out of hand the way in which various discourses mobilize these and other concepts in their construction of what media culture is supposed to be. Even if particular conclusions seem to be wrong, or at least problematic, they do nonetheless conceal ideas with whose help we can learn something of what media culture really is. And so this chapter represents a second step in a gradual approach to an understanding of the real nature of media culture.

Omnipresent, But Not a Mass Culture

If one asks where we can find the very first reflections about media culture, sooner or later we come across Critical Theory, as practised by the Frankfurt School. This is a form of critical sociology developed by members of the Institut für Sozialforschung, which opened its doors in Frankfurt am Main in 1924. The most important representatives of this School are generally thought to be Max Horkheimer, Director of the Institut for many years, and Theodor Adorno. From the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, while in American exile, they worked together on their well-known book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The concept which this book placed centre stage was not that of media culture, but rather the culture industry and its mass culture.

In their book Adorno and Horkheimer describe the culture industry as an omnipresent system. This culture industry is said to be a ‘filter’ through which the whole world passes (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 126). The term ‘culture industry’ is intended to make plain that this is not a culture spontaneously formed among the masses, the contemporary form of popular art. The central characteristic of the culture industry is standardization and serialization: ‘procedural schematization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 136), the ‘constant reproduction of the same thing’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 134). The production of cultural commodities proceeds according to standardized patterns, their content deriving from the same common model – whether of genre, narrative or staging. The constant industrial dynamic of innovation lies in the variation of these patterns. And we can add to the elements of the culture industry described by Adorno and Horkheimer not only culture as commodity, but also the apparatus of production, the culture market and cultural consumption (Müller-Doohm 2008).

The commodities produced by the culture industry – for Adorno and Horkheimer the genre films of the 1940s were an obvious example – are of such a nature that consumers are rendered passive when confronted with the superficial activity of constantly changing images whose substance nonetheless remains unchanged; and this passivity immobilizes consumers’ ‘thinking activity’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 126–7). The consequence of the standardization of products is a standardization of reception and a ‘pseudo-individuality’ of people. The life of one’s own individuality comes to depend on the acquisition of normalized media contents – as for example in the cultural model presented by the life of the stars – and these become the all-enveloping basis of the articulation of one’s own identity. The entertainment provided by the culture industry is therefore a standardized enjoyment. Correspondingly, the enjoyment offered by the culture industry represents a flight – not a flight from an evil reality, but rather from any thought of resistance (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 144). This is a standardized ‘mass culture’ (Adorno 1975: 12; Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 152). Hence the total effect of the culture industry is that of an anti-Enlightenment:

But what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents – which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 136)

Their vision of the culture industry and its mass culture is a very gloomy one, possibly one about which we would today have distinct reservations, a vision which now seems in some aspects at least a reflection of their experience of fascism and American exile. All the same, if we adopt a rather different perspective, Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry does have relevance to what we might today call media culture: they were among the first to point to a phenomenon that we might today call the omnipresence of media culture. Penetration of the entire society by the culture industry is a matter concerning not just the production of cultural commodities and the production process itself, but also the identities with which people live: ‘The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1986: 126).

If we take a quotation like this, it is in fact possible to read Adorno and Horkheimer’s arguments rather differently. The theory of the culture industry becomes an early attempt at critical reflection on the ubiquity of media communication in the modern world. That there is a direct line connecting the theory of the culture industry to new approaches to the description of media culture should not be any surprise. A prominent example of this is the work of Douglas Kellner, which connects directly to the Frankfurt School, but also to contemporary cultural studies (Kellner 1995a). The way in which Kellner develops his concept of media culture takes up aspects of the culture industry theory: for him, media culture is above all a culture generated by (mass) media and the culture industry. However, for Kellner, media culture cannot be detached from people’s lives: society and culture are ‘colonized by media culture’, ‘media culture has come to dominate everyday life, serving as the ubiquitous background and often the highly seductive foreground of our attention and activity …’ (Kellner 1995b: 3). Here too we find the idea of the omnipresence of media culture, an idea developed directly from Critical Theory. Of course, Kellner regards media culture with a much greater degree of ambivalence than did Adorno and Horkheimer when confronted with mass culture, for he maintains that while ‘media culture … induces individuals to conform to the established organization of society … it also provides resources that can empower individuals against that society’ (Kellner 1995b: 3).

Kellner thus gives us something to reflect on here. He argues that media cultures are extremely complex phenomena which have so far evaded adequate theorization, in spite of the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What Media Culture Is (Not)
• 3 The Mediatization of Culture
• 4 Cultures of Mediatization and Mediatized Worlds
• 5 Communitization within Cultures of Mediatization
• 6 Studying Cultures of Mediatization
• 7 Prospect
• References
• Index