No abstract

In response to Deacon and Stanyer's article 'Mediatization: Key Concept or Conceptual Bandwagon?', we argue that they build their criticism on a simplified methodology. They mistake a media-centered approach for a media-centric one, and they do not capture how mediatization research engages with the complex relationship between changes in media and communication on the one hand and changes in various fields of culture and society on the other. We conclude that the emergence of the concept of mediatization is part of a paradigmatic shift within media and communication research.

In a time of deep mediatization, cross-media approaches to investigating media practices are becoming increasingly relevant. In this respect, we have to consider cross-media from at least two different perspectives. The first perspective considers the ‘individual’ whose cross-media use can be characterized as a particular ‘media repertoire’. The second refers to ‘social domains’ (collectivities and organizations) that can be analysed as communicative figurations characterized by a particular ‘media ensemble’. We propose to interlace both perspectives to help clarify the conceptual and empirical relationship between media use by individuals, on the one hand, and as part of the figuration of a social domain, on the other. From the perspective of the individual, media repertoires are composed of media-related communicative practices that individuals use to relate themselves to the figurations that they are involved in. From the perspective of these figurations, media ensembles are characterized by the media-related communicative practices of the actors involved in them. We argue that a methodological triangulation of media diaries, (group) interviews and sorting techniques is a productive way forward to qualitatively investigate both these perspectives.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion surrounding mediatization by presenting some arguments on how we could include questions of media specificity in an appropriate way. The core argument is that we have to do this by integrating 'media specificity' into a theory of communicative practice or action. In doing so, we can grasp media in their institutional and technological sense as 'molding force' of communicative action and research them empirically as part of mediatization processes.

When various media in their entirety mark how we articulate our social worlds, we need an approach of mediatization research that reflects this transmediality. To develop such an approach, the article first discusses the ‘institutionalist’ and ‘social-constructivist’ traditions of mediatization research. Both traditions concur in their understanding of mediatization as being a concept to capture the interrelation between the change of media and communication on the one hand, and the change of culture and society on the other hand. Taking this as a foundation it becomes possible to reflect on the role of certain media as ‘moulding forces’, i.e. as certain institutionalizations and reifications of communication. Such a conceptual reflection offers the chance to view the mediatization process as the change of transmedial communicative figurations by which we construct our mediatized worlds. Based on this theoretical foundation, the article subsequently reflects a twofold operationalization, i.e. as diachronous and synchronous mediatization research.