Past Seminars

Issue 16
editor's column by Oscar Hemer

The new spectre –Mediatization

When trying to assess our contemporary predicament, the once controversial G-word may be about to be replaced by another elusive concept: Mediatization. The second or third phase of the digital revolution, with its explosion of so-called social media, has made it adamantly clear to us how all sectors of culture and society are saturated with, and increasingly influenced by, mediated communication. Not only politics and the public sphere, but our private lives and everyday experiences are today inseparably entangled with the media.

This 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… But whereas mediatization used to be largely confined to the global North, or the so-called developed world, and hence not a concern for the traditional field of Communication for Development, it is now truly a global phenomenon, as demonstrated by the ongoing so-called Arabic Spring.

Today’s 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.

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