From mediation to mediatization

the institutionalization of new media

Stig Hjarvard

pp. 123-139

in: Andreas Hepp, Friedrich Krotz (eds), Mediatized worlds, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Within both scholarly research and wider public debate, profound influence on contemporary cultural and social affairs — positively and negatively — is attributed to new media, such as the internet and mobile phones. New media are regarded as either revolutionizing or significantly transforming culture and society, at both the level of global political power and the level of intimate human relationships. At the macro level of social affairs, Castells (2009) suggests that the internet allows a historically new form of "mass selfcommunication" that may reconfigure the distribution and exercise of power in the network society. At the micro level of social affairs, Turkle (2011) provides a very critical view of new media and emphasizes that social relationships suffer in an online world: "The ties we form through the internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy […] We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other" (pp. 280–1). New media are also transforming older forms of mass communication, such as broadcasting and journalism, to the extent that we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift in mediated communication. Deuze (2007) prophesies that "journalism as it is, is coming to an end. The boundaries between journalism and other forms of public communication […] are vanishing, the internet makes all other types of news media rather obsolete" (p. 141).