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Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments

Article in Communication Theory · August 2013

DOI: 10.1111/comt.12019

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 Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

EDITORIAL

Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts,

Traditions, Arguments
Nick Couldry1 & Andreas Hepp2
1 Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
2 Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

doi:10.1111/comt.12019

The contexts of the concept

Why ‘‘mediatization’’ as a topic for communication theory now? This rather ungainly
word has been rising in prominence for the past decade, but many readers of this
journal may still want to ask: What does it mean? What does it add to communications
theory? And is it necessary at all? The purpose of this introduction to the special
issue—apart from introducing and summarizing the articles that follow—is to
provide some context for the emergence of ‘‘mediatization’’ as a key theoretical
concept for contemporary media and communications research, and to offer some
reasons why it now deserves the full attention of scholars of communication theory.
The word ‘‘mediatization’’ does indeed strike an odd note to the ears of native
English speakers, provoking the immediate reaction: Why is such an awkward formu-
lation needed? But we are long past the point in communications research when the
instincts of native English speakers should have priority! A fully institutionalized field
of communications research has a pressing need for common terms that can orientate
researchers from many countries and geolinguistic regions toward shared problems
and areas of inquiry. As Sonia Livingstone (2009) explained in her ICA Presidential
address in Montreal in 2008, ‘‘mediatization’’—or in German: Mediatisierung —is
a term with a long and respectable history in German-speaking countries. More
important, it has emerged as the most likely ‘‘winner’’ in a race between many terms,
all cumbersome or ambiguous to varying degrees—mediazation, medialization,
mediation—that have been coined to capture somehow the broad consequences
for everyday life and practical organization (social, political, cultural, economic) of
media, and more particularly of the pervasive spread of media contents and platforms
through all types of context and practice. Put simply, something is going on with
media in our lives, and it is deep enough not to be reached simply by accumulating
more and more specific studies that analyze this newspaper, describe how that pro-
gram was produced, or trace how particular audiences make sense of that film on a
particular occasion.

Corresponding authors: Nick Couldry; e-mail: [email protected]: Andreas Hepp; email:

[email protected]

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Editorial N. Couldry & A. Hepp

Until the mid-2000s the three approaches to media research just mentioned
(textual analysis, political economy of production, and audience or reception studies)
comprised the majority of media and communications research. Together they still
failed to answer key questions about why media mattered so much (and increasingly
more). Cultural studies scholars argued with political economy scholars, and vice
versa, about how much economic structures mattered for media’s cultural uses
(Garnham, 1995; Grossberg, 1995; Morley, 1998); audience scholars challenged
textual analysts to provide some evidence for their claims that textual content made
a difference to anything outside the text and the immediate context of its reception
(Lewis, 1991, p. 49); meanwhile audience scholars started to worry about whether
the meanings audiences make from media are undecidable (Ang, 1996, p. 72).
True, while much media studies by the early 2000s seemed to reserve ‘‘media
effects’’ questions for the ‘‘too difficult’’ tray, other areas of communications research
pursued that question through very different approaches (for example, in health
communications or political communications) in work that focused on increasingly
refined statistical methods for isolating certain causal consequences of particular
messages or the agendas implied within them. Meanwhile another tradition prior-
itized the patterns and shifts in communication and communicative form that go
broader than changes in media (see Jensen, 2011, for an excellent review).
All the time, however, the wider communications field lacked consensus on a
common focusing concept for researchers who remained interested in the broader
‘‘consequences’’ of media and communications for everyday life and across social
space, yet were aware of the acute methodological difficulties of isolating and
identifying such effects within the complex weave of contemporary experience. This
problem—the problem of ‘‘consequences’’—goes back to the very beginnings of
media and communications research when Lazarsfeld and Merton identified as the
first ‘‘effect’’ of media the sheer fact of media institutions’ existence, but regarded this
‘‘effect’’ as unresearchable because it could never be experimentally removed from
the conditions of modern life (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1969 [1948]).
Meanwhile, from various directions in the 1990s and early 2000s, other approaches
were emerging that sought to find a midrange language for media’s broad conse-
quences for everyday life, or which at least point to this direction. Some of these
approaches originated from outside the Anglo-American sites that had dominated
communications research in its early decades. It is in this sense that the eventual
emergence of ‘‘mediatization’’ as an integrative concept in the late 2000s embodies
the de facto internationalization of the field for which many have called (Curran &
Park, 2000; Thussu, 2009).
We would like, before we turn in more detail to mediatization as a concept, to
sketch out some of the factors and research streams that came together around the
mid-2000s to make some concept such as mediatization a necessity.
First, there was the brute fact of media’s growing role in everyday lives in so many
developed countries by the mid-2000s, a decade that saw the normalization of fast
Internet access, the near universalization of mobile phones, the massive expansion of

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N. Couldry & A. Hepp Editorial

web search capacity, and the emergence of blogs, then YouTube, then social media as
new communicative forms—in other words, the fact of media in our lives, every day,
as a basic reference point for children, friends, family, and work. The omnipresent
and multidirectional nature of media’s contribution to the ‘‘texture’’ of our lives
(Silverstone, 1999, p. 6) came to require new approaches that moved away from
the staid triangle of production–text–audience. Indeed this was already clear in the
early 2000s before social media emerged (Couldry, 2000) and had generated a push
to think about the whole range of practices related or oriented to media (Couldry,
2004). However, this stream of everyday experience with media was not in itself
sufficient to stimulate the search for a common conceptual frame for understanding
the mass of things we do with media.
Here, a second stream was important: the long tradition from the 1980s of
looking far beyond the production–text–audience triangle toward the open-ended
and nonlinear (as we would now call them) consequences of media as they circulate
through our lives. Two scholars, Roger Silverstone from the United Kingdom and
Jesús Martín-Barbero from Colombia, were particularly important to this move,
though they were not the only ones who made this move.
Silverstone had from the beginning of his career framed ‘‘media’’ in a broad way:
in terms of ‘‘myth’’ (1981), or the production of knowledge about science (1985).
Parallels had been, for example, in Germany where Hermann Bausinger (1984)
analyzed the interweaving of various media technologies for articulating families and
other forms of communities. But from the late 1980s, Silverstone (1994), together with
David Morley, emphasized the role that television especially played in the regulation
of society’s basic structures, the family: not just the family in isolation, but the family
as a node in various important regulatory grids (state, education, leisure, everyday
knowledge). Silverstone took this further in a manifesto for studying media that,
while it avoided an explicit conceptual architecture, insisted on the linked diversity
of fields in which media mattered (Silverstone, 1999). This was followed during the
early 2000s in essays that explored the concept of ‘‘mediation’’ as a dialectical term
for the continuous interchange whereby media shaped or were shaped by broader life
and culture (Silverstone, 2005). Silverstone’s work without doubt was by the time of
his death in 2006 pointing to the site where scholars have since converged under the
term ‘‘mediatization,’’, even though he did not use the term himself.
Jesús Martín-Barbero, by contrast, in De los medios a las mediaciones: comu-
nicación, cultura y hegemonía (oddly, it now seems, translated in English as
‘‘Communication Culture and Hegemony,’’ 1993), had, unknown to Silverstone,1
made a parallel move. This important book, which has since become in Spanish-
speaking countries the acknowledged key reference point for all media and cultural
studies research, offered a remarkable historical panorama for understanding the
cumulative diffusion of media of many sorts (including the ‘‘cordela,’’ or short nar-
rative on paper held together by string) throughout Latin American countries dealing
with a modernity very different (and more dominated) from that of Western Europe
and North America, the paradigmatic site of most early communications research.

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Editorial N. Couldry & A. Hepp

While Martín-Barbero also did not use the term ‘‘mediatization,’’ he decisively opened
the door to a ‘‘media research’’ that traversed a wider domain of enquiry than just
mass media messages, although sadly his book remained little noticed in the English-
speaking communications research field for more than a decade after its translation.
A third key stream leading toward the recent convergence around ‘‘mediatization’’
is much broader and more heterogeneous: We mean the emergence, and increasing
dominance from the mid-1990s, of approaches to power that no longer located it
inside powerful institutions, let alone powerful people, but saw it being reproduced
everywhere in a huge network of linkages, apparatuses, and habits within everyday
life. The key influence here was of course Michel Foucault (particularly Discipline
and Punish, 1979), but another later influence of growing importance—and itself
influenced by Foucault—was the Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and
others, still barely acknowledged however in media and communications research
by the early 2000s (but see Couldry, 2000, pp. 6–7). In addition, the growing
interest of anthropologists in media was also of emerging importance from the early
2000s, with a crucial collection being published in 2002 (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod,
& Larkin, 2002) and the now vast media anthropology online-list formed by John
Postill around the same time (http://lists.easaonline.org/listinfo.cgi/medianthro-
easaonline.org). Anthropologists also refused to limit the site of their inquiries to the
media text, or the moments of its production and reception.
If by the mid-2000s, these multiple influences and research streams were con-
verging around a need to find a common term for research into media’s broader
influences, some proximate causes were required to prompt today’s emerging agree-
ment around the term ‘‘mediatization.’’ One such cause was the increasingly effective
internationalization of the media and communications research field, evidenced by
the increasing number of non-American members in the International Communi-
cation Association (ICA) and the emergence of a separate European association, the
European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), whose
former president François Heinderyckx became 2012 President-elect of the ICA.
Another cause was the opportunities to meet that emerged between scholars whose
first language was English and scholars from the rest of the world: Important here
were, for example, the ‘‘Media, Religion and Culture’’ international conferences
at the Center for Media, Religion and Culture, University of Colorado (Boulder,
USA) or taking place on various occasions beyond Boulder, for example, in Sigtuna
(Sweden), Toronto (Canada), São Paulo (Brazil), Louisville (USA) and Eskisehir
(Turkey). Specific conferences on mediatization and religion took place, organized
by the Nordic research network on ‘‘Mediatization of Religion and Culture’’ from
2006 and onwards (cf. Lövheim & Lynch, 2011). Further conferences were more
topic-related, such as the conference ‘‘Media Events in a Global Age’’ in Bremen,
Germany (2007), on which the relationship between Elihu Katz and Daniel Dayan’s
approach on ‘‘media events’’ and ‘‘mediatization’’ was already discussed (Hepp
& Couldry, 2010). Important also were international research collaborations such
as the international network Mediatized Stories: Mediation Perspectives on Digital

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Storytelling Among Youth led from Norway by Knut Lundby (see in detail Lundby,
2013a). In 2011 and 2012, a working group on mediatization research was formed
in ECREA, which organized workshops and panels on mediatization that focused on
topics such as researching mediatization outside the western world or power relations
and mediatization (http://mediatization.eu). More recently, comprehensive and far-
reaching research programs started, for example, the research program Mediatized
Worlds being coordinated by Friedrich Krotz at the University of Bremen (where
also the research network Communicative Figurations is located, together with the
University of Hamburg), the comprehensive research project The Mediatization of
Culture with its main node at the University of Copenhagen, or the National Centre
of Competence in Research Democracy at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and
its research on the mediatization of politics—just to name a few of the major funded
research programs on mediatization.
In summary, the context of this special issue is an increasing institutionalization of
research on the wider ‘‘consequences’’ of mediated communications on our present
cultures and societies. This institutionalization represents a broad and ambitious
reorientation of media and communication research away from models of theorizing
influence as an ‘‘effect’’ of media texts to a more extensive understanding of
‘‘mediatization’’ as a way of capturing the wider consequences of media’s embedding
in everyday life.

Two traditions of mediatization research

The emergence of the concept of ‘‘mediatization’’ as outlined so far builds on longer
traditions. Remarkably we can trace the use of this concept back to the beginnings
of media and communication research in the social sciences. One example is Ernst
Manheim (1933) in his postdoctoral thesis The Bearers of Public Opinion. In this book
he wrote about the ‘‘mediatization of direct human relationships’’ (p. 11). He uses this
term in order to describe changes of social relations within modernity, changes that
are marked by the so-called mass media. Jean Baudrillard (1976, p. 98), in L’échange
symbolique et la mort, described information as mediatized because there is no level
of reality behind its mediation. Within his Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen
Habermas (1984 [1981]) uses the term mediatization to describe a subprocess within
the colonialization of the life-world. However, he does not refer to communication
media, but to generalized symbolic media like power and money. In his edited volume
Medier och kulturer, anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1990) characterized the cultural
influence of media on culture as such (that is, beyond its contents) as mediatization.
These examples demonstrate that the term mediatization in its different variants is
deeply related to social and cultural research as a whole. However, these general uses
do not, in themselves, promise any more detailed theoretical elaborations.
We had to wait for media and communication research to elaborate the concept
further. Important early reference points for this were ‘‘medium theory’’ in the
tradition of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Joshua Meyrowitz (1995) on the

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Editorial N. Couldry & A. Hepp

one hand, and the ‘‘ecology of communication’’ by David Altheide and Robert Snow
(1988, 1979) (Altheide, 1995) on the other. Medium theory contributed the idea of
focusing not only on media contents but also on the influence of media in their
materiality as a means of communication. Altheide and Snow’s approach brought in
an analysis that highlighted media’s ‘‘formatting’’ power—described by the concept
of ‘‘media logic.’’ These starting points were further developed in the 1990s. While
early understandings of mediatization were rather metaphorical (Asp, 1990), later
the concept became increasingly theorized (for example, Krotz, 2001; Mazzoleni &
Schulz, 1999; Schulz, 2004). Within this formative phase of ‘‘mediatization research’’
we can distinguish two more concrete traditions: an ‘‘institutionalist’’ and a ‘‘social-
constructivist tradition’’ (cf. for the following argument in more detail Hepp, 2014).
Coming mainly from journalism studies and political communication, the institu-
tionalist tradition understood media more or less as an independent social institution
with its own sets of rules (Hjarvard, 2008, p. 110, 2013, p. 17). Mediatization here
refers to the adaptation of different social fields or systems (for example, politics
or religion) to these institutionalized rules. The latter are mainly described as a
‘‘media logic’’ (Altheide & Snow, 1979): that is, in the widest sense of the word,
institutionalized formats and forms of staging. This ‘‘media logic,’’ on the one hand,
takes up nonmediatized forms of representation; on the other hand, nonmedia actors
have to conform to this ‘‘media logic’’ if they want to be represented in the (mass)
media or if they want to act successfully in a media culture and media society. Starting
from this preliminary understanding of ‘‘media logic,’’ the concept diversified and
became differentiated, while keeping the link to its original ideas.
The social-constructivist tradition’s understanding of mediatization, by contrast,
highlights the role of various media as part of the process of the communicative
construction of social and cultural reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). Mediatization
here refers to the process of a communicative construction of socio cultural reality
and analyzes the status of various media within that process (Krotz, 2009; Hepp, 2012;
Hepp, 2013, pp. 54–68). The term ‘‘mediatization’’ here is designed to capture both
how the communicative construction of reality is manifested within certain media
processes and how, in turn, specific features of certain media have a contextualized
‘‘consequence’’ for the overall process whereby sociocultural reality is constructed
in and through communication. The theorization of these media-specific forms for
constructing sociocultural reality is more open than in the concept of ‘‘media logic,’’
emphasizing the complexity of media as institutions and technologies.
While these two different traditions of mediatization research co-exist, they have
come closer to each other in recent years. One important step in this regard was shared
publication activities—continued with the present special issue of Communication
Theory —especially the book Mediatization: Concepts, Changes, Consequences, edited
by Knut Lundby (2009). The idea of this volume was born at a breakfast meeting
during the ICA conference 2008 in Montreal (Lundby, 2009, pp. xiii–xiv). The merit
of that book was to present internationally up-to-date reflections on mediatization
across various research fields. Other publication activities followed, especially in the

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form of special issues of various academic journals. For example, there was a special
issue of Communications: European Journal for Communication Research (2010, 35(3)),
focused on empirical perspectives on mediatization, and an issue of Culture and Reli-
gion (2011, 12(2)) on the mediatization of religion debate; and the journal Empedocles:
European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication (2013, 3(2)) addressed medi-
atization as part of more general ‘‘media processes.’’ In addition, a comprehensive
handbook on mediatization is under preparation, again edited by Lundby.
Through this intensified discussion across different traditions of doing mediatiza-
tion research the contours of a shared, basic understanding of the term have emerged.
On that fundamental level the term ‘‘mediatization’’ does not refer to a single theory
but to a more general approach within media and communications research. Gen-
erally speaking, mediatization is a concept used to analyze critically the interrelation
between changes in media and communications on the one hand, and changes in culture
and society on the other. At this general level, mediatization has quantitative as well as
qualitative dimensions. With regard to quantitative aspects, mediatization refers to
the increasing temporal, spatial and social spread of mediated communication. Over
time we have become more and more used to communicate via media in various
contexts. With regard to qualitative aspects, mediatization refers to the specificity of
certain media within sociocultural change: It matters what kind of media is used for
what kind of communication. Several researchers understand this process of media-
tization as a long-term process that has more or less accompanied the whole history
of humankind (Krotz, 2009; Hepp, 2012, pp. 46–54). Seen from such a perspective,
human history is, among other things, a process of an intensifying mediatization. In
contrast, other researchers use the term ‘‘mediatization’’ to describe media’s increas-
ing social and cultural relevance since the emergence of mass media (print, cinema,
radio, television) (Couldry, 2012, pp. 136–137; Hjarvard, 2008; Lundby, 2013b).
That said, the difference between ‘‘mediation’’ and ‘‘mediatization’’ is quite
obvious: While ‘‘mediation’’ refers to the process of communication in general—that
is, how communication has to be understood as involving the ongoing mediation
of meaning construction, ‘‘mediatization’’ is a category designed to describe
change. It then becomes possible to link both concepts in the following way:
Mediatization reflects how the overall consequences of multiple processes of
mediation have changed with the emergence of different kinds of media. Even
so, the concept of ‘‘mediation’’ continues to describe a fundamental moment in
the development of communication as symbolic interaction: its passing through
technologically-based infrastructures of transmission and distribution (‘‘media’’).
By contrast, ‘‘mediatization’’ refers more specifically to the role of particular media
in emergent processes of socio cultural change.
However, beyond such basic definitional matters, there are clear differences in
how different scholars conceptualize mediatization. While some still find useful the
term ‘‘media logic’’(understood, perhaps, as a shorthand for any account of media’s
regular causal consequences in the world), others ask what role the concept of ‘‘media
logic’’ can still have if we have the increasing variety of different media in mind? Even

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Editorial N. Couldry & A. Hepp

if it remains a useful concept, what is its relation to other kinds of ‘‘logic’’? Might
other ways of theorizing ‘‘media specificity’’ be more appropriate for mediatization
research? On what level can we locate mediatization theory? Is it a ‘‘middle range’’
theory or do its implications go wider, opening up new ‘‘meta’’ questions about how
the transformations of societies and cultures should now be understood? How can
we relate the concept of mediatization in more detail to wider theory within the social
sciences? These are the questions that emerge from the starting points of this special
issue on conceptualizing mediatization.

The arguments in this issue

The idea of this special issue is to represent a contemporary range of reflections
on how to conceptualize mediatization. We have tried to give academics from
various theoretical, cultural, and generational backgrounds the space to develop
their arguments. The special issue includes articles of scholars from both traditions
of mediatization research (institutionalist and social-constructivist)—from various
countries reflecting different media landscapes, and representing a range from the
‘‘founding fathers’’ of mediatization research to a new generation of scholars whose
empirical research has been stimulated by the concept of mediatization.
In the opening article and straddling the two traditions of mediatization research,
Klaus Bruhn Jensen discusses the present state-of-play in ‘‘conceptualizing mediatiza-
tion,’’ using Herbert Blumer’s (1954, pp. 7–10) distinction between ‘‘definitive’’and
‘‘sensitizing’’ concepts. While ‘‘definitive concepts’’ refer to what is common to a class
of objects, a sensitizing concept provides guidance in approaching empirical instances.
Based on this distinction, we can find ‘‘definitive conceptualizations’’ of mediatization
(institutionalization, hegemony), as well as ‘‘sensitizing conceptualizations’’ (social
structuration, technological momentum, embedded communication). This neatly
opens up a horizon for comparing different conceptualizations of mediatization.
David Altheide revisits in his article the original idea of ‘‘media logic,’’ which
became the main reference point for the institutionalist tradition of mediatization
research. His core argument is that the existing current confusion in relation to
this term has partly to do with the inattention to its later development as part of
an ‘‘ecology of communication,’’ reflecting the power of emerging ‘‘communication
formats’’ that accompanied ‘‘new technologies.’’ The importance of this article is
on the one hand to clarify those original ideas and on the other hand to open up
possibilities for rethinking the link between the ideas of media logic, ‘‘mediation’’
and ‘‘mediatization’’ when analyzing media’s role in processes of social control.
The third article was written by Nino Landerer, a political communications
specialist. He also starts from the idea of ‘‘media logic,’’ but comes to a different
understanding within the context of contemporary mediatization research. Landerer
critically discusses the ideas of ‘‘media logic’’ and ‘‘political logic’’ and argues that
‘‘normative logic’’ and ‘‘market logic’’ are more appropriate concepts for theorizing
and empirically analyzing mass media and political actors. While Landerer stands by

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N. Couldry & A. Hepp Editorial

the idea that social and cultural ‘‘logics’’ is a useful term for mediatization research,
his article can be read as a plea for using the term ‘‘logic’’ in a more differentiated way.
Building on contextualized empirical research on media hegemony in Chávez’s
Venezuela, Elena Block moves more into the social-constructivist tradition of medi-
atization research and outlines a ‘‘culturalist approach’’ to the mediatization of
politics. By this she criticizes the idea of conceptualizing mediatization in terms of
the increasing influence of a ‘‘(media) logic’’ and links ‘‘mediatization’’ more to the
symbolic and hegemonic qualities of media communication. For Block, the mediati-
zation of politics refers to a symbolically interactive, co articulated situation whereby
politics, culture, and media communication have merged. That said, mediatized
politics becomes theorized as the forms of politics that rely on particular forms of
media, a process that goes beyond media influence and is better understood as new
forms of articulation.
Yet another emphasis is made by André Jansson. Inspired by Henri Lefeb-
vre’s triadic model of social space, Jansson brings sociospatial regimes into the
foreground of his concept of mediatization. He argues that mediatization is
best understood as a concept that can help us think of media-enhanced social-
spatial transformations in complex ways. In this view, mediatization refers to
‘‘how other social processes in a broad variety of domains and at different
levels become inseparable from and dependent on technological processes and
resources of mediation.’’ The characteristic of this social-constructivist understand-
ing of mediatization is that it tries to encompass the everyday struggles involved
in the contemporary social and cultural transformations to which media-related
processes contribute.
The concluding article by Hubert Knoblauch discusses more generally the con-
ceptual bridge between mediatization and social constructivism. His argument is that
communication is the main link between both: It is communication that changes
through mediatization, and communication also that is the main means by which cul-
ture and society is constructed. ‘‘Communicative constructivism’’ therefore becomes
a theoretical framework for conceptualizing mediatization. While ‘‘communicative
constructivism’’ is still a developing approach, it has the potential to link media and
communication research to more fundamental questions about the nature of social
knowledge and social order.
Taken together, these articles represent in their variety both the commonal-
ities and the differences within today’s fast-growing debate on ‘‘mediatization.’’
One thing they have in common is the argument that we need a new term to
rethink the interrelations between changes in media and communications on the
one hand, and changes in culture and society on the other. Such a term has to
reflect both the specifics of different media and the irreducible involvement of
many interacting media in today’s transformations, not just single media acting
in isolation. Where they differ is in the particular conceptual language they use
to capture these ‘‘multiple entanglements’’ (Thomas, 1991) of media in cultural
and social change: as ‘‘logics,’’ ‘‘forms,’’ ‘‘objectivations,’’ ‘‘institutionalizations,’’

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Editorial N. Couldry & A. Hepp

or ‘‘molding forces’’ (just to name some of the concepts employed in this special
issue).
We hope that this journal’s readers will find the resulting conceptual diversity
stimulating, and a provocation to develop alternative theorizations of media’s
contributions to the huge transformations of social and cultural ‘‘texture’’ (Knorr-
Cetina, 2001, p. 527; Silverstone, 1999, p. 6) in which all of us are now implicated.

Note
1 Silverstone was not aware of Martin-Barbero’s book until 2004 or 2005, as Nick Couldry
recalls from a conversation with him.

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