The impact of social media has grown significantly during the past decade in several fields of our society. This article advocates the research subfield of social media memory studies based on empirical data from a case study on the role of social media in a local conflict about re-naming a public square in an average German town. The square had been named after Paul von Hindenburg, who played a crucial role in the implementation of Adolf Hitler as German Reichskanzler and was therefore regarded as an inadequate public patron. Conservatives fought against the new name, also on Facebook. Our findings indicate that the platform played a decisive role as counter-public sphere against hegemonic mainstream media and politics in fostering a new historical consciousness. The case might be seen as a precedent of right-wing movements and their use of social media in the Brexit campaign or the US elections.

Most research on mediatization focuses on media-related actions and structural adaptations that aim to increase media attention. However, social actors may also opt for defensive strategies and try to avoid media publicity. In this article, we conceptualize defensive and offensive mediatization strategies as complementary methods that social actors use to deal with media publicity and public attention as well as to proactively shape mediatization processes. We employ an exploratory approach to identify and systematize defensive mediatization strategies. Consequently, we contribute to a more complete understanding of mediatization and provide starting points for further empirical analyses of media-related strategies used by social actors. A secondary analysis of the data from previous research projects suggests establishing three categories of defensive mediatization strategies—persistence, shielding, and immunization—with regard to the levels of individual actors, organizations, and social systems’ routines and norms.

In recent years, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become major players in sports communication. In this study, we focus on the motives for athletes’ use of social media. Applying a mediatization approach, we conceptualize social media as a possible means to bypass traditional (sports) journalism. For sport disciplines that receive minor media coverage, social media provides the opportunity to increase public visibility. Consequently, our study focuses on indoor volleyball as such a marginalized sport. The online survey results from all players of the 24 either all-male or all-female teams of the German first volleyball leagues are combined with a quantitative content analysis of the players’ social media activities. Results indicate that athletes evaluate traditional media coverage of their sport as negative and social media as extremely influential. Still, their postings on social media seem neither to aim at bypassing sports journalism nor to address sports fans directly. Instead, they use social media primarily to connect with friends and family. In conclusion, volleyball players have so far not embraced social media as a tool to promote themselves as sportspersons. At the moment, they do not exploit social media’s potential as channels for professional sports communication.

Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media's influence and its logic, andcrucially-how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete's point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.

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