Mediatization (media)

In communication studies or media studies, mediatization is a theory that argues that the media shapes and frames the processes and discourse of political communication as well as the society in which that communication takes place. In this framework, an important aspect of modernization is the development of media, beginning with a change in communication media and proceeding to subordination of the power of prevailing influential institutions. As a consequence of this process, institutions and whole societies are shaped by and dependent on mass media.

Mediatization is part of a paradigmatic shift in media and communication research. Following the concept of 'mediation', 'mediatization' has become the proper concept for capturing how processes of communication transform society, designating large-scale relationships. The two are complementary.

As noted by Von Joachim Preusse and Sarah Zielmann, Kent Asp introduced and lamented on the concept of mediatization, and they clarifiy that: "Mediatisation was first applied to media's impact on political communication and other effects on politics. The Swedish media researcher Kent Asp was the first to speak of the mediatisation of political life, by which he meant a process whereby 'a political system to a high degree is influenced by and adjusted to the demands of the mass media in their coverage of politics'" (2010: 336).

Asp used the term mediated politics to describe how the media have become a necessary source of information between politicians and those in authority and those they governed. According to Asp's understanding politics are mediated when the mass media are the main or the only source of political information through which it may influence or even shape people's conceptions of political reality. Asp's theoretical assumptions that mass media may influence and mobilize current political ideas through mediatized rituals have been adopted by various communication scholars. In the tradition of Asp, the Danish media scholar Stig Hjarvard helped to develop the concept of mediatization and suggested that mediatization is a social process whereby the society is saturated and inundated by the media to the extent that the media cannot longer be thought of separated from other institutions within the society.

The concept has evolved to focus not only on media effects but on the interrelation between the change of media communication on the one hand and sociocultural changes on the other, as part of our everyday communication practices and our communicative construction of reality. Mediatization research investigates the interrelation between media communicative change and sociocultural change, understood as a meta-process (a conceptual construct designating long-term processes of change). Media do not necessarily 'cause' the transformations but they have become co-constitutive for the articulation of politics, economics, education, religion, etc. For example, television, by showcasing know-how health specialists who promote quick individual changes in lifestyle, co-constructs the notion of health together with other institutions and broader cultural shifts in perceptions of the body.

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