Mediatization of communicative action

The Mediatization of Communicative Action is a theoretical approach in Communication and Media studies, focusing on the processes that go along with the increasing permeation of everyday life and culture with different forms of media communication. In its core, the correlation between a change of culture and a change of communication (e.g. through the distribution of new media) is concerned.

The approach offers a theoretical framework, with whom the empirical results of studies can be understood and classified as part of a larger process. In other words, Mediatization is based on single studies and sums them up in an integrative theory of cultural change through media communication. The Mediatization of Communicative Action as a theoretical concept is mainly developed by Friedrich Krotz.

Theoretical Foundations: Communication, Culture and the Media

Mediatization of Communicative Action is based on an each specific understanding of communication, culture and the media that are built on each other.

Communication and Culture

The Theory of Communicative Action is based on an action-theoretical model of communication that refers to the assumptions of Symbolic Interactionism and the Cultural Studies. Thereby communication and culture are inseparably connected. As Norbert Elias emphasizes, the human being lives in a five dimensional world: the three spatial dimensions, the temporal dimension and, last but not least, the symbolic dimension. The symbolic dimension is the culture of the human being. This symbolic dimension can be defined as a background of interpretation enabling the human being to understand the world he/she created by language and communication. In a similar way the Ethnologist Clifford Geertz characterizes culture as a web of significance and as the sum of all contexts, being possible in a society. Considering this understanding of culture, a change of communication forms result in a change of culture.

Media (Communication)

Through human history, growing children learn communication as face–to–face communication first. Therefore language and gesture are the most “natural” and important forms of human communication. They are considered as the ancient forms of communication. Other forms of communications deriving from these ancient forms and being connected with specific additives are called media communication. Consequently, the media are understood as instruments that have the purpose to enable, modify and design communication. Media communication enlarges and/or limits face–to–face communication in different ways. There are three basic types of media communication:

• Mediatized interpersonal communication between human beings, e.g via telephone or letters
• Production and reception of standardized and generally addressed contents like books, television, websites or public tweets (usually called mass communication)
• Interactive communication, e.g. in computer games, GPS–systems, robots such as Aibo

Mediatized Culture as Media Culture

In connection with Mediatization of communicative action, media culture means that the media are substantially involved in the creation and further development of culture. Different forms of media communication permeate culture in terms of time, space and society:

• In terms of time, both the media as such and each single type of media is available in growing numbers at all times and offers more and more content permanently. For instance, TV originally had a fixed closedown. Today TV is a continuous flow of standardized and generally addressed content.
• In terms of space, the media are set at more and more places. This is especially obvious with the distribution of mobile media such as the mobile phone.
• In terms of society, media relate to more and more areas of life. This includes for instance professional life, family and free time that are more and more shaped by media communication.

Not only communication with and through the media increases in importance and “quantity” by these processes of permeating communication and culture. But the media play also an increasing role for face–to–face communication. We talk about the media or media content, we adopt media statements or use information transported by the media. That is way culture cannot be understood without taking the media into consideration. One could argue that for most people in advanced industrial societies there is no communication, which cannot be called media communication – they therefore live in a media culture.

The Meaning of Mediatization of Communicative Action

Mediatization fosters an approach to the topic media geared to the sociology of Culture. Therefore, it is open for many phenomena of media related communication, their theoretical description and empirical substantiation.

For civil society the assumptions subsumed under the theoretical approach of mediatization of communicative action provide many answers to questions related to civil society. Consequentially, it is possible to make substantial statements about a series of topics and to integrate them in a broader social context. Here is a selection:

• Practices of appropriating different media in everyday life
• Interactions between human beings and machines (computers)
• The Media and the socialization of adolescents
• Social effects of virtual spaces

Its historical perspective also characterizes the approach of the Mediatization of communicative action. Mediatization describes a comprehensive and already long-lasting process, similar to processes of globalization, commercialization and individualization. So, the process of mediatization has not begun with the advent of the modern mass media or the Internet, but can already be fixed to the invention of the letters and the process of cultural change caused by it. For Friedrich Krotz the concept therefore provides a basis for a new cultural history of media and communication, which reconstructs the reciprocal relationship between a change of the media and a change of culture.

Literature

• Elias, Norbert (1989): The Symbol Theory: An Introduction. Part One, in: Theory, Culture & Society 6 (1989), S. 169-217. Part Two, in: Theory, Culture & Society 6 (1989), S. 339-383. Part Three, in: Theory, Culture & Society 6 (1989), S. 499-537.
• Geertz, Clifford (1991): Dichte Beschreibung, 2. Auflage, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
• Hepp, Andreas (2011): Medienkultur. Die Kultur mediatisierter Welten. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
• Krotz, Friedrich (2001): Die Mediatisierung des kommunikativen Handelns. Der Wandel von Alltag und sozialen Beziehungen, Kultur und Gesellschaft durch die Medien. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
• Krotz, Friedrich (2007): Mediatisierung. Fallstudien zum Wandel von Kommunikation. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
• Krotz, Friedrich (2010): Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft unter den Bedingungen von Medienkultur. In: Andreas Hepp, Marco Höhn, Jeffrey Wimmer (Hrsg.): Medienkultur im Wandel. Konstanz: UVK, S. 93-105.
• Krotz, Friedrich (2012): Von der Entdeckung der Zentralperspektive zur Augmented Reality: Wie Mediatisierung funktioniert. In: Friedrich Krotz, Andreas Hepp (Hrsg.): Mediatisierte Welten. Forschungsfelder und Beschreibungsansätze, S. 27-55.
• Lundby, Knut (2009): Mediatization: concept, changes, consequences. New York: Lang.

External links

• DFG-Forschungsprojekt Mediatisierte Welten

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