Search

This article explores the integration of the mobile phone into the religious experience of Christians in Nigeria. Based on the results of an online survey and the author's observation, it argues that the mobile phone has become an actant in the mediatization of religion, creating dependency among some users and transforming religious praxis in palpable ways. Unsurprisingly, perspectives vary on whether and how the phone should be used during worship. Attitudes coalesce around three viewpoints, leading to the emergence of user groups labelled critics, advocates, and dualists. The accounts of study participants give access into the ways some people seek to (re)configure their engagement with religion by inserting the mobile phone as a multifunctional techno-spiritual gadget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues for the audience studies, which draws on the analysis of artifactual, spatial, temporal, and sensorial aspects of media consumption and builds on, that is, the so-called medium theory and theory of practice in sociology. In the second part of the article, we interpret the results of a qualitative empirical study regarding the daily use of media technology among young people, aged between 19 and 29 years. The study finds that circumstances, under which digital media have colonized all spheres of public life and under which online social life has become completely naturalized, have led to constant online connectivity as well as highly fragmented and dispersed communication practices of users moving between different media. The analysis of media consumption diaries points to radical mediatization, which plays an important role in the changing generational structure of feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a hybrid, journo-activist space, tweeting #Ferguson quickly emerged as a way for activists and journalists to network and spread information. Using a mixed-methods approach combining digital ethnographic content analysis with social network analysis and link analysis, this study examines journalistic and activist uses of Twitter to identify changes in field relations and practices. Employing the lenses of field theory and mediatization, this study finds parity and divergence in the themes, frames, format, and discourse of journalist and activist Twitter practices. While the traditions of objective journalism and affective activism persist, notable exceptions occurred, especially following acts of police suppression. The networked communities of professional and activist Twitter users were overlapping and interactive, suggesting hybridity at the margins of the journalistic field. Given the hybridizing of journalistic and journo-activist practices, this case study examines the role of social media in efforts to report on and bolster social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores changing discursive practices on the implications of the continuous development of the Internet and information and communications technology (ICTs) within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. The article argues that the development of the Internet and new media technologies has been accompanied by the proliferation of a set of influential and widespread discursive formations on the character of institutional communication and practice in a digital era. These developments have motivated an increasing technologization of discourse within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland that has chiefly involved a conscious redesign of its discursive practices vis-à-vis the Internet and ICTs in accordance with new criteria of communication effectivity and a notable new emphasis on training in these new practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As societies are ageing and mediatizing at the same time, it becomes both timely and relevant to develop particular perspectives on the role and meaning of media for older people. The diversity and inequality in the lived experience of the ageing population in the new media environment constitute a blind spot in current research. In this essay, we bring literatures of (cultural) ageing studies and (new) media studies into conversation with each other by asking what future directions for research on older people and their media lives from the particular perspective of social diversity could be. We propose three key interventions: developing a focus on social stratification and inequality broadly conceived; designing research with a life course perspective rather than reducing people to age groups; and focusing empirical work looking at the various ways people 'do' media in an ensemblematic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the development of Digital Religion studies and the theoretical approaches frequently employed within this area. Through considering the ways and theories of mediatization, mediation of meaning, and the religious-social shaping of technology have been engaged and applied in studies of new media technologies, religion, and digital culture we see how Digital Religion studies has grown into a unique area of inquiry informed by both Internet studies and media, religion, and culture studies. Overall, it offers a concise summary of the current state of research inquiry within Digital Religion studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdmapping and geolocated protests form complex multilayered systems of communicated spaces and places that can only be partially grasped by the available literature. This article responds to these limitations by presenting a model for the analysis of the composition of space and place in networked geolocated activities. The model identifies the several forms of expression, opens four modes of analysis (representations, textures, structures, and connections), and allows the consideration of the communication devices involved, while highlighting the forms of power behind the social and cultural practices of protests and crowdmapping. The model is applied to the case of Voces25s, a protest action against the Spanish government’s austerity measures in September 2012, which relied heavily on interactive, networked maps. Furthermore, the raised sensitivity for space and place as forms of social (in)justice opens a fertile empirical research agenda in the area of the governance of communicative spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional and meta-processual dimensions of surveillance have been scrutinized extensively in literature. In these accounts, the subjective, individual level has often been invoked in relation to subject–object, surveillor–surveilled dualities and in terms of the kinds of subjectivity modern and late-modern institutions engender. The experiential, ontological realm of the “mediatized everyday” vis-a-vis surveillance remains less explored, particularly from the phenomenological perspective of the lifeworld. Academic discourses of surveillance mostly address rhetorically oriented macro-perspectives. The same diagnosis largely applies to the debates on the cosmopolitanization process. The literature of cosmopolitanism revolves around broad cultural and ethical transformations in terms of the relationship between Self and Other, individual and humanity, and the local and the universal. Our aim in this article is to conceptualize the dynamics that yield a cosmopolitan Self and an encapsulated Self under conditions of increasingly interactive and ubiquitous forms of mediation and surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular its potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. It is argued that mediatization (developed, for example, by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz) is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the open-ended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]