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 an influx from human-machine communication, as well as how human-machine communication can learn from wider discussions within mediatization theory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The mediatized nation Bolin, Göran; Ståhlberg, Per
InMediaciones de la Comunicación,
12/2019, Letnik:
14, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Nation branding is a dynamic and rapidly developing practice and a subprocess under the wider process of mediatization for promoting or readjusting images of a nation-state for tourists or investors. ...Especially young nation states have a felt need to build new images of themselves in the eyes of the surrounding world, but since these nation states also have a short history of sovereignty, they simultaneously need to build the social solidarity and community inwards, to form the basis needed for the building of a nation. This article takes its departure in this tension and addresses three themes – agency, audience and identity – that we consider needs further theorizing due to the fact that the practice is yet trying to find its form. These themes are discussed in relation to the branding efforts in the new Eastern European state of Ukraine over the past decade. It is concluded that the nation branding campaigns are today orchestrated also by domestic PR agencies (to the contrary of the previous dominance of British agencies), that the domestic audience is taken into consideration in other ways than in previous branding campaigns, and that the questions of identity construction is more complex than what is previously accounted for. The Ukrainian case thus illustrates the mediatization of national symbols in contemporary society.
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.
Dynamics Of Mediatization Olivier Driessens, Göran Bolin, Andreas Hepp, Stig Hjarvard
2017, 20171201, 2017-11-30
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
This volume sheds light on the underlying dynamics of mediatization, disentangling the actual unfolding of mediatization processes. The wide adoption and deep embedding of digital media and ...technology brings new questions to mediatization studies: how can we grasp this 'deep mediatization'? In which way should we develop existing approaches of mediatization to analyse such dynamics? What are the consequences of this for theorising and empirically studying mediatization? By using these questions as a starting point, this book presents an innovative and original collection that is dedicated to both the underlying dynamics of mediatization and recent dynamics related to digital media.
One component in the generational experience strongly related to media is the intimate and often passionate relation that is developed towards media technologies and content from one’s formative ...youth period: musical genres and stars, as well as reproduction technologies such as the vinyl record, music cassette tapes, comics and other now dead media forms. Passion, however, is a dialectic concept that not only refers to the joyful desire and intense emotional engagement of cherished objects but also includes its dialectic opposite in the form of pain and suffering. This passion, it is argued in the article, is activated by the nostalgic relationships to past media experiences, the bittersweet remembrances of media habits connected to earlier life phases of one’s own. Taking its point of departure in generational theory of Mannheim and others, this article analyses a series of focus group interviews with Swedish and Estonian media users tentatively belonging to four different generations. Based on the analysis of these interviews, it is suggested that passion and nostalgia are produced, first, in relation to old technologies, second, in relation to childhood memories and, third, at the limits of shared intergenerational experience, that is, at the moment when one realises that one’s own experiences of past media forms cannot be shared by younger generations, and especially one’s own children.
This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics ...of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser’s intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this article, we reflect on three kinds of disorientations that users expressed, linked to temporality, sociality and value. Relating these to the history of audience measurement in mass media, we argue that there is merit in using this methodology for further analysis of continuities in audience responses to metrics, in order to better understand the ways in which metrics work to create the ‘audience commodity’.
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