This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations. “Mediatization” characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves. This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media. The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.

Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular the theory of mediatization has proved fruitful for the analysis of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other social institutions and cultural phenomena like politics, play and religion. This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and society. This is supplemented by in-depth studies of: The mediatization of politics: From party press to opinion industry; The mediatization of religion: From the faith of the church to the enchantment of the media; The mediatization of play: From bricks to bytes; The mediatization of habitus: The social character of a new individualism. Mediatization represents a new social condition in which the media have emerged as an important institution in society at the same time as they have become integrated into the very fabric of social and cultural life. Making use of a broad conception of the media as technologies, institutions and aesthetic forms, Stig Hjarvard considers how characteristics of both old and new media come to influence human interaction, social institutions and cultural imaginations.

This book results from the IV International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes held in 2020/2021. The III International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes had a program developed on two levels: debate panels with invited researchers (5 panels, with the participation of researchers from Sweden(2), Argentina (2), and Brazil (9, including five from PPGCC-Unisinos). The IV Seminar program and its structure are at https://www.midiaticom.org/seminario-midiatizacao/programacao-2020/. In this IV Seminar, the theme of the panels was “Mediatized Sapiens: the social construction of knowledge among interactions, means, circulation, and social mediation.” With mediatized sapiens, we want to refer to several media processes related to the mental changes of the species. Several questions can be enunciated related to these. How can we think of knowledge social construction when mediated by the media processes? To what extent does the mental experience of the species hold media processes as references to its building and inferences? How do the actors in a network participate in these processes? To what extent do institutions and organizations adapt to these new environments? In particular, how do the University, research, and scientific fields participate in this repair? Do the media in digital media, in action through expert systems and artificial intelligence, interpose themselves in these processes to the point of asking incisive and secondary questions? How do temporalities and spatiality affect the conditions of production and reception, including social practices, in the social production of knowledge? What epistemologies and methodologies can account for this new complexity amid indetermination and uncertainty zones?

An argument for a shift in understanding new media--from a fascination with devices to an examination of the complex processes of mediation.

This book is one of the results of the III International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes held in 2019. The III International Seminar on Research on Mediatization and Social Processes had a program developed on two levels: Debate Tables, with invited researchers (five discussion tables, with the participation of researchers from France (3), Argentina (2), Germany (1), and Brazil (5). The schedule of the III Seminar and its structure can be seen at https://www.midiaticom.org/seminario-midiatizacao/grade-de-programacao-2019/. In total, there were 15 hours of debates at the five Discussion Tables. Methodologically, the Seminar takes place in the articulation of Debate Tables with international guests and Working Groups with the presence of researchers, doctors, doctoral students, masters, and masters' degree students. We point out that, even in the scope of training processes, master's and doctoral students, masters and doctors, post-doctors and post-doctoral graduates, and members of the organizing Research Group take part as reviewers, in a blind evaluation process, of the expanded abstracts submitted by graduates with a lower title - under the coordination of the research professors from the Mediatization and Social Processes Group. They evaluated (in a group of more than three dozen reviewers) each of the works submitted by colleagues with a lower instructional level, with classificatory notes, which resulted in the approved works. They were then grouped by the Organizing Committee, successively, until they reached the event's working groups.

What does it mean that we can be reached on our mobile phones wherever we are and at all times? What are the cultural consequences if we are informed about ‘everything and anything important’ via television? How are our political, religious and ethnic belongings impacted through being increasingly connected by digital media? And what is the significance of all this for our everyday lives? Drawing on Hepp’s fifteen-year research expertise on media change, this book deals with questions like these in a refreshingly straightforward and readable way. ‘Cultures of mediatization’ are described as cultures whose main resources are mediated by technical media. Therefore, everyday life in cultures of mediatization is ‘moulded’ by the media. To understand this challenging media change it is inappropriate to focus on any one single medium like television, the press, mobile phones, the Internet or other forms of digital media. One has to capture the ‘mediatization’ of culture in its entirety. Cultures of Mediatization outlines how this can be done critically. In so doing, it offers a new way of thinking about our present-day media-saturated world.

Public involvement has the power to promote an active circulation of media content and can generate economic and cultural value for organizations. The current perspectives on interactions between audiences, organizations, and content production suggests a relational logic between audiences and media through new productivity proposals. In this sense, it is interesting to observe the reasoning of audience experience through the concepts of interactivity and participation. However, there is a gap between the intentions of communication professionals and their organizations and the effective circulation and content retention among the audiences of interest, as well as the distinction between informing and communicating. Navigating Digital Communication and Challenges for Organizations discusses communication research with a focus on organizational communication that includes a range of methods, strategies, and viewpoints on digital communication. Covering a range of topics such as internal communication and public relations, this reference work is ideal for researchers, academicians, policymakers, business owners, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society. Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today’s media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a 'good life' for all. Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.

This book examines under what scope conditions foreign policy actors adopt media logic. The authors analyze media logic under three specific scope conditions: uncertainty, identity, resonance. First, they lay out the general adaptation of media logic in the general debate of the UN General Assembly 1992-2010. They then explore the adaptation of media logic in Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom concerning the cases of humanitarian intervention in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya, both in 2011. The results indicate the need to move beyond the assumption of a general process of mediatization affecting politics in total. Instead, they point in the direction of a nuanced process of mediatization more likely under certain scope conditions and in certain political contexts.