Search

Between 2019 and 2023, media researchers from Södertörn University in UNISINOS and Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) in Brazil, engaged in a collaborative effort to explore Scandinavian and South American perspectives on mediatisation, connecting universities from opposite sides of the world. The project aimed to promote a nuanced understanding of mediatisation theory from different cultural perspectives and media studies traditions, dismantle epistemological barriers, and provide new insights into societies undergoing the process of mediatisation. The chapters presented in this volume are grounded on the mobility of researchers across both countries where a productive knowledge exchange contributed to diversify epistemological, empirical, and methodological approaches to mediatisation theory, and provide new perspectives on mediatisation theory in contested media scenarios in Sweden, Brazil, and beyond., Mediatisation: Empirical, Epistemological and Methodological Inferences from Media Research in Brazil and Sweden

Mediatization discourse has so far mainly been centered on media from institutional or social-constructionist approaches. The technological developments within communications industries coupled with the wider societal process of datafication might, however, beg for dusting off the smaller, although the long-time existing, technological approach to mediatization as a complement to the two other approaches, in order to understand aspects of automation and human-machine communication. This theoretical article explores how existing mediatization approaches can refocus to include lessons learned from human-machine communication. The first section accounts for the main mediatization approaches. The second section discusses debates on communication, artificiality, and meaning-making. The last section takes the example of the recruitment interview for discussing how mediatization theory can benefit from including a technological approach with influx from human-machine communication, as well as how human-machine communication can learn from wider discussions within mediatization theory.

In ‘Requiem for the Media’ (1971), the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard discusses the emancipatory affordances of the media. Can media be used to improve society? Should social movements use new media to coordinate their activities, organise and reach out with their message? In today’s media society, it seems obvious that the answer to these questions is yes. Everyone who wants to change society - whether political movements, companies, organisations or others - adheres to a ‘media strategy’. However, Baudrillard is dismissive of the media’s possibilities to contribute to progressive social change. His text can thus provide interesting perspectives on the interaction between media and politics and on the role of the media in society in general. What is now known as ‘mediatisation’ is anticipated by Baudrillard and his structuralist analysis of the ‘symbolic exchange’, which remains valid for those who aim to analyse such mediatisation processes. With the rise of digital media, Baudrillard’s text has arguably become increasingly relevant over time, as a large part of its content revolves around the (im)possibility of dialogue and interaction via mediated communication.

As research fields, mediatization and Human-Machine Communication (HMC) have distinct historical trajectories. While mediatization research is concerned with the fundamental interrelation between the transformation of media and communications and cultural and societal changes, the much younger field of HMC delves into human meaning-making in interactions with machines. However, the recent wave of “deep mediatization,” characterized by an increasing emphasis on general communicative automation and the rise of communicative AI, highlights a shared interest in technology’s role within human interaction. This introductory article examines the trajectories of both fields, demonstrating how mediatization research “zooms out” from overarching questions of societal and cultural transformations, while HMC tends to “zoom in” to approach the concrete situatedness of the interaction between humans and machines. It is argued that we need to combine both perspectives to better understand how the automation of communication transforms the social construction of culture and society. This article offers an overview of the key themes explored in this thematic issue, highlighting the productive intersection of HMC and mediatization within each article. Additionally, it identifies potential avenues for future research emerging from this fruitful intersection., Correspondence Address: A. Hepp; Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen, Bremen, Linzer Str. 4-6, 28359, Germany; email: hepp@uni-bremen.de

This article explores the ways in which what we call the analogue and the datafied mindsets perceive the functioning of the datafied world. Based on a qualitative interview study of two generations of media users in Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden, we present and analyze underlying patterns in participants’ media attitudes and related practices. We show that belonging to a media generation does not always produce a homogeneous mindset or a uniform attitude toward media technologies. These mindsets, being ideal-typical constructs, are not bound to individuals: the same person can display features of the analogue and the datafied mindset in relation to different parts of the datafied world. One mindset does not replace the other but rather adds another layer to the social action of the individuals. The mindsets are multi-dimensional and molded by contrasting understandings, indicating that the tenacious structures of the analogue world linger on in the datafied social space.

What are the attitudes of online media users to the vast collection of personal data held by commercial platform companies? Do previous experiences of state surveillance have an impact on these attitudes? Do they differ for those brought up in the surveillance regime of Estonia during the Soviet Union era, or who experienced the surveillance apparatus in Portugal under authoritarian dictatorship? Do Swedish media users without authoritarian surveillance experiences differ in their attitudes to commercial surveillance? These questions are discussed in this final report from the project Social Media Surveillance and Authoritarianism (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2020–2023), a three-country comparative study (Estonia, Portugal, Sweden). The project aimed to analyse the role of past experiences of state surveillance on attitudes to dataveillance, that is, the commercial surveillance stemming from online media that is at the heart of data capitalism. The report accounts for the aims, objectives, theoretical and methodological points of departure and and presents empirical examples of the results.

This paper discusses methodological, ethical, and empirical problematics related to forced changes in the research design of a comparative project during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its wider implications for future online audience research. The larger project aims to understand media users’ attitudes towards corporate and state surveillance in countries with different historical surveillance regimes: Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden. In a mixed-methods design, comprising an online survey and focus groups (FGs), we sampled participants from two generational cohorts: born in 1946-1953 and in 1988-1995. In each country, we planned six face-to-face FGs with people from these generational cohorts, divided into three gender-balanced groups with different profiles: higher education; mixed education, living in small cities/countryside; secondary education. The paper discusses the challenges of conducing FGs online, namely the effects of the technological interface on the group size and interaction, the importance of digital skills, and ethics-related considerations. Although we encountered cultural differences between the three countries, our main methodological lessons and suggestions for further audience studies center on the need to consider the subtle facets of inter-generational differences when planning online research. As we witnessed, not all barriers were rooted in access to technology and connectivity. The level of digital skills and self-confidence in use also played a role in participants' possibilities and willingness for taking part in online research. Further research is needed to explore how age and online methods intersect, and the role online settings play, in the experience of focus group and interview participants with various social backgrounds.

In this introductory article, we discuss the rise of the “classical” theories of propaganda, starting with an historical exposé of the concept, which traces its roots and trajectory through the field of academic analysis. Propaganda is then discussed in relation to other adjacent concepts such as soft power, public diplomacy, nation branding, fake news, and so on. In a third section, the concept of propaganda is discussed in relation to the present datafied world, marked by various forms of crises – of democracy and of the environment, for example. In the last section, the articles included in this themed issue are presented and related to the preceding historical and conceptual discussion.

This article discusses the relations between mediatisation and datafication, and how the process of datafication has integrated several diverse value forms in complex interrelations. The first section outlines the rise of datafication in the wake of the technological development of digitisation in combination with new business models of the media and communications industries, leading to a tighter integration between these and other sectors of society. The second accounts for how this development paves way for certain specific value forms that result from this integrative process, and how the interrelation between value forms introduces a shift in the valuation processes of late modern data capitalism, where the social takes a prominent position. The final section discusses the relationship between datafication and mediatisation. The argument is that although datafication introduces a new phase in the mediatisation process, the former also extends beyond the latter.

This chapter offers a brief characterisation of mediatisation research, and critically discusses mediatisation as a “sensitising concept”, as a research programme, a research field, an approach, or a paradigm. It provides a historical overview of how the concept and the field has developed over the past few decades until now, and what has shaped it in this way. The chapter aims to account for the various approaches (the institutional perspective on mediatisation, the technological, and the cultural or social constructionist); and discusses ontological and epistemological differences. It describes the main challenges and objections/criticisms to mediatisation studies defined so far, types of transformations that have been analysed, and which are neglected and marginalised. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

An in-depth look at Ukraine's attempts to shape how it is perceived by the rest of the world. During times of crisis, competing narratives are often advanced to define what is happening, and the stakes of information management by nations are high. In this timely book, Göran Bolin and Per Ståhlberg examine the fraught intersection of state politics, corporate business, and civil activism to understand the dynamics and importance of meaning management in Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork inside the country, the authors discuss the forms, agents, and platforms within the complex political and communicative situation and how each articulated and acted upon perceptions of the propaganda threat. Bolin and Ståhlberg focus their analysis on the period between 2013 and 2022, when political tensions, commercial dynamics, and new communication technologies bred novel forms of information management. As they show, entities from governments and governmental administration to commercial actors, entrepreneurs, and activists formed new alliances in order to claim a stake in information policy. Bolin and Ståhlberg also explore how the various agents engaged in information management and strove to manage meaning in communication practice; the communicative tools they took advantage of; and the subsequent consequences for narrative constructions.

The aim of this book has been to discuss the key challenges related to mediatisation research, and to highlight and critically examine the methodological, technological, and ethical problems that the field is facing. The ambition has been to identify limitations, gaps, and deficiencies, but also to discuss problematic aspects of particular approaches, to highlight contradictions and paradoxes, and to take note of under-represented areas. This chapter summarises the ways in which the book’s contributors have addressed these topics. The body of work in mediatisation studies is rich enough to build on, and as some authors emphasise, what is needed is an awareness and good knowledge of that body of work, which some studies lack. Interdisciplinarity appears nowadays as a natural paradigm of conducting research on mediatisation. Researchers of mediatisation are in this respect burdened with a kind of responsibility, but they can also be said to be well equipped to contribute with improvements to existing research ethically.

This book focuses on key challenges related to conducting research on mediatisation, presenting the most current theoretical, empirical, and methodological challenges and problems, addressing ignored and less frequently discussed topics, critical and controversial themes, and defining niches and directions of development in mediatisation. With a focus on the under-representation of certain topics and aspects, as well as methodological, technological, and ethical dilemmas, the chapters consider the main critical objections formulated against mediatisation studies and exchange critical positions. Moving beyond areas of common focus – culture, sport, and religion – to emerging areas of study such as fashion, the military, business, and the environment, the book then offers a critical assessment of the transformation of fields and the relevance of new and dynamic (meta)processes including datafication, counter-mediatisation, and platformisation. Charting new paths of development in mediatisation, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of mediatisation, media studies, media literacy, communication studies, and research methods.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many research projects were forced to adapt their design and conduct interviews online. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of using online focus groups with participants representing different generations and cultural and social backgrounds. Based on the researchers’ experiences and field notes from a three-country comparative project, aiming at analysing the extent to which previous experience of state surveillance impacted attitudes to commercial monitoring and tracking of online behaviour among two generational cohorts, the paper identifies seven aspects where the move from offline to online interviewing interfered with the original research design. The paper suggests that most of these interferences resulted in a need to adjust the methodology to better fit the online setting. We reflect critically upon the issues of technological preconditions and digital skills, recruitment, group size, degrees of previous acquaintance, the role of the interviewer, participants’ household status and media environment, and ethical considerations concerning privacy and data management. Based on these methodological insights, we conclude that future online focus group research would benefit from using smaller groups and adjusted moderation, flexibility in interviewing tools and channels, and new, online-specific ethical considerations when planning, executing, and analysing interviews. The paper advocates the complementarity between in-person and online focus groups as two modalities of data collection and argues for the normalization of hybrid methods. © The Author(s) 2023., Correspondence Address: G. Bolin; Media & Communication Studies, Department of Media & Communication Studies, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden; email: goran.bolin@sh.se

This chapter considers the theoretical and empirical challenges of research into the mediatisation of culture, specifically challenges related to the heterogeneity of the field and the problem of identifying clearer sub-processes related to culture as a field of research. The chapter seeks to answer the question of how we might overcome these challenges in future research into mediatisation of culture, through a discussion of previous debates in the field and by proposing a possible path for mediatisation research going forward. The chapter considers what Raymond Williams calls structures of feeling and what Ben Highmore, more recently, labels cultural moods, in order to detect transformations in the structures of cultural experiences. The first part of this chapter discusses objections to mediatisation, while the second part of the chapter returns to early contributions to mediatisation studies and the problem with sub-processes of change in the context of culture. The third part of this chapter pays attention to the ongoing discussions of the concept ‘media logic’ and social interaction. Finally, the chapter brings these observations together and concludes by returning to Raymond Williams and his concept structures of feeling, which invites us to consider historical changes and draw out patterns of cultural experiences.

This article re-evaluates some of the previous assumptions made related to the communication practices and information management in Ukraine since before the Euromaidan revolution in 2013. We highlight two points where previous knowledge about nation branding and nation building must be rethought in light of the latest developments Firstly, nation branding is no longer exclusively an activity that is directed to an audience of foreign investors and tourists, but also toward the international field of politics. Simultaneously, it is also clearly directed toward a domestic audience-the citizens of Ukraine. Secondly, this means that there may no longer be any sharp distinction between nation building and nation branding-at least not in times of an ongoing armed conflict.

Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds on research on the developments in post-Soviet Ukraine, and we analyse, firstly, the transformative and disruptive relations related to the so-called Euromaidan Revolution, and secondly, how these events can be placed in a wider narrative of three Ukrainian revolutions. Our analysis concludes that narrative analysis can help explain the ways in which these events are understood by broader international audiences.

Data capitalism builds on the expansion of markets through the datafication of evermore social domains via social media, search engines and interconnected online communication technologies. Education is one such domain in which datafication has entered, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, the introduction of large-scale online teaching has become a necessity, which has further speeded up the transfer from campus-based to online education. With the move of teachers and students from on-site to on-line mode, universities are now increasingly acting like platform companies. Classrooms, lecture halls, offices and meeting rooms are abandoned, and the sites of learning are now delegated to the private sphere of the home of lecturers and students. First, this means transferring the responsibilities for creating a functional educational environment to teachers and students. Second, this would transform large partsof educational practices, thus affecting the very essence of knowledge production and dissemination. This aim of the chapter is to discuss the economic and administrative dynamics behind this transformation on the basis of the different value regimes underlying data capitalism. It is argued that the drive towards the platformisation – or uberisation as one could provocatively label it – of education is partly driven by an economic, and partly by administrative rationality.

This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey (N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, generation-specific, having different predictors. Tolerance toward state surveillance is more characteristic of the older group, being predicted by trustful and obedient attitudes toward state authorities and institutions. Tolerance toward corporate dataveillance is more characteristic of the younger group, being predicted by active and self-confident media use. While the socio-historical context molds the intergenerational gaps in surveillance-related experiences and attitudes, individual-level experiences of state surveillance do not predict tolerance toward either type of contemporary surveillance, suggesting that global techno-cultural developments are probably more powerful factors than past experiences in forming generation-specific attitudes.