Abstract
The notion of ‘media logics’ is useful for understanding the processes of mediatization and the ways in which media come to influence communication and social interaction in various domains of society. Media logics are the combined technological, aesthetic, and institutional modus operandi of the media and logics may in a general sociological vocabulary be understood as the rules and resources that govern a particular institutional domain. Media logics do‚ however‚ rarely exert their influence in isolation. We need to consider the media’s influence on an aggregate level and not only at the level of the individual media and its particular logics. Mediatization involves cultural and social processes in which logics of both media and other institutions are interacting and adapting to each other and through these processes a particular configuration of logics are established within an institutional domain. Such configurations condition, but do not determine communication and social interaction. Within a particular institution such as politics or education‚ the available media repertoire inserts various dynamics to communication and social interaction‚ and these dynamics represent the mediatized conditions of communication and social interaction.
This article is a revised and shortened version of the first two chapters in the book: “Medialisering: Mediernes rolle i social og kulturel forandring” [“ Mediatization : The Role of Media in Social and Cultural Change ”], edited by Stig Hjarvard, Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 2016.
1 Introduction
Mobile and interactive media have already exerted significant influence on culture and society . In a relatively short period of time, mobile phones, social media , and the internet in general have not only become widespread, but have also been integrated into many different aspects of culture and society , including politics , business, education , and family life. One consequence of this massive media presence is that we have all begun to take for granted the fact that other people also use the internet and mobile phones and, as such, they are available to us, anytime and anywhere (Ling, 2012). These newer forms of media have not replaced mass media , but rather added to the complexity of the overall media environment. The increased media presence also has wider implications for the ways in which both big societal institutions (e.g., the political system ) and smaller contexts of civil society work. There has been a growing acknowledgement that the various media not only change communication, but also change the relationships between people and organizations and come to condition the ways people usually communicate and interact with each other in different contexts.
In this light, one important contribution from mediatization theory is to create a conceptual framework for understanding how media, culture , and society interact with each other, and how—because of this—the media come to co-structure the ways in which people, both in society at large and in everyday local contexts, communicate, act, and strike up social relationships. In this chapter I will develop the notion of media logics and discuss how various forms of media logics—always in combination with other logics—come to condition social and communicative interaction . The various forms of media logics do not determine communication and interaction ; to the extent that “determine” is a useful notion to describe the influence of media logics, it is—to paraphrase Stuart Hall—rather a “determination in the first instance” (e.g., a conditioning influence) and not a “determination in the last instance” (Hall, 1983). Furthermore, because various logics are simultaneously at work in actual social and cultural life, we should make a distinction between the various logics of the media and how these logics together with other social and cultural logics at an aggregate level come to insert particular dynamics into communication and interaction . Put otherwise, we cannot make direct inferences from the level of individual media logics to the level of recurrent patterns of communication and interaction within a particular field. For instance, a media logic as “journalistic news value” does not exert influence on politics by itself alone. We need to construct our analytical object of media’s influence on social and cultural affairs at an aggregate level at which both social structure and cultural norms of interaction are dependent on a variety of operating logics. It is through the inter-institutional configuration of various forms of political and news media logics (as well as others) that particular patterns of political communication and interaction occur. Media logic —as any other type of social logic —does rarely condition human interaction by itself. This does not make “media logic ” less important as an analytical concept, but it suggest that we need a wider theoretical framework to specify how media logics come to make a difference.
2 From mediation to mediatization
In order to understand the special perspective that mediatization theory applies to the influence of media logics, it is important to distinguish between the concepts of “mediation ” and “mediatization ” (Hjarvard, 2013). “Mediation ” is the use of media for communication and interaction , e.g., a politician choosing to mediate his or her communication via a press conference or a tweet. The choice of the form of mediation has a direct impact on the form and content of the message, as well as on who is capable of taking part in the act of communication. However, the way in which the individual political message is mediated has no effect on the modus operandi of the political institution or the relationship of politics to media, culture , and society in general. The mediatization of politics , on the other hand, is about the long-term, structural changes in the relationship between politics and the media through which the relations between the institutions involved are changed and new conditions for communication and interaction emerge. Mediation is a communicative action; mediatization relates to structural changes between different cultural and social domains.
A considerable amount of research into media and communication has, unsurprisingly, focused on the use of media for communication and concentrated on the three basic elements of the communication process—sender, content and recipient—and their interrelationships. Lasswell’s (1948, 37) classic model of communication has traditionally formed the basis for the questions posed in media research : “Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?” Analyses of mediation processes have, of course, become increasingly sophisticated and evolved in many different ways—e.g., by incorporating the context for reception in order to understand how recipients interpret messages. Nevertheless, a significant proportion of media research has continued to focus on the actual mediation , and has localized the influence of the media on this level. It is still important to study how the mediation of messages influences form, content, and reception. However, if the objective is to understand the influence of media on modern society , it is not enough to focus on mediation alone—processes of mediatization also need to be analyzed.
“Mediation ” and “mediatization ” are two different concepts and, as such, they should be kept apart. However, it is also worth stressing that the processes that these concepts cover are mutually interrelated. Firstly, the cumulative change in mediation practices over time may in itself contribute to the mediatization of a given institutional domain . For example, politicians turning more readily to Twitter to communicate about politics , or sports clubs using social media to communicate with their members to a greater extent, could lead to a gradual mediatization of their social practices. Secondly, mediatization has consequences for the mediation . The conditions for communication and interaction change as media become integrated into more and more areas of culture and society . The media become therefore an important resource, and the steering logics of the media are both influenced by the media themselves and by the institutional logics in the area concerned (e.g., politics or sport). This, in turn, changes the conditions for how messages are mediated in this particular context (see Fig. 4.1).
Before expanding on the notion of media logics, it is important to clarify precisely what is meant by “media” in this context. Given that mediatization theory stems from a media studies research tradition, the definition of “media” is also underpinned by a media studies understanding. In short, media are defined as technologies that make it possible to extend human communication in time, space and modality. Media make it possible to communicate in text , sound and images (different modalities) over long distances (space), and to store communication for future use (time). However, a medium does not have to fulfil all three functions. Historically, many media have initially only extended human communication in one dimension; the telephone made it possible for people to speak over distance, for example, but the conversation could not be stored or supplemented by other communicative modalities, such as text and images. Over time, the media have become increasingly multi-functional, which affords users greater flexibility with which to control time, space and modalities.
The presentation of mediatization theory in this chapter adopts a broad view of the media, which encompasses mass media (e.g., books, radio and television ), interpersonal media (e.g., telephone , e-mail and SMS/texting ) and social media (e.g., blogs , Facebook , Twitter ), all of which meet the criteria in the definition of media. According to this definition, a technological component is a necessary part of a medium but it does not suffice to describe a medium only by way of technology . The ways in which media work are not determined by the technology alone. They are also characterized by symbolic and aesthetic practices (e.g., genre and stylistic conventions) and institutionally embedded regulations (e.g., legislation, market mechanisms, and organizational structures). In order to shed light on the ways in which the media interact with other cultural and social phenomena, our understanding of media logics must incorporate all three dimensions—material-technological, aesthetic-symbolic, and institutional.
3 Mediatization
Drawing on existing theory in the field (Esser & Strömbäck, 2014; Hjarvard, 2013; Lundby, 2014), we will define mediatization as the processes through which the importance of the media in culture , society and different social institutions is changed and intensified, and through which cultural domains become dependent on the media and their logics. It is also characteristic of the impact of mediatization on modern societies like those in Scandinavia that it embodies two related developments: on the one hand, the media have become more independent—in some respects, they have become an independent social institution; on the other, they have become increasingly integrated into more and more cultural and social contexts. As a consequence of this duality, the media are both “out there” in wider society as an institution that exerts influence on the public agenda, and they have become an important factor “in here,” in the multiple local contexts of everyday life, as a set of institutionalized tools for communication and interaction in the family , at work, etc. In both cases, they constitute a resource (material and symbolic) for social action and a set of rules (formal and informal) for meaningful interaction with each other. In both of these roles, the media are integrated into the wider society “out there” and into the smaller community “in here” and, as such, their logics co-structure how culture and society develop.
Mediatization must be understood as a general process of high modernity , on a par with other comparable processes such as urbanization , globalization , and individualization . How exactly mediatization plays out beyond this must be seen in relation to the specific historical contexts and institutional domains into which the media are integrated. Mediatization is not a uniform process that reshapes all parts of culture and society in the same way in every country. A more in-depth analysis of forms of mediatization must therefore take into account how the media and other institutions operate in specific contexts. An analysis of the mediatization of politics in China, the USA, and Denmark must therefore take into account the differences in media systems (e.g., in terms of the dominance of state, public, and private media) and differences in political systems (e.g., one-party, two-party, multi-party).
Mediatization has two important dimensions: It designates a process in which relations between media and other cultural and social domains are changed, and—by extension—it engenders new conditions for communication and interaction . In analyzing these two dimensions, this article sheds theoretical light on how (and to some extent, why) the media come to exert influence in other areas of culture and society —and are influenced by them. It then addresses how mediatization makes certain media logics and dynamics predominant in the ways in which communication and interaction occur.
4 Media logic
As mentioned previously, mediatization needs to be understood as a series of processes that not only leads to a greater media presence in culture and society , but also makes other institutions and domains dependent on the media and their logics. This suggests that the “logic” concept plays a key role and needs to be carefully defined. In the context of institutional theory (Hjarvard, 2014a; Thornton, Ocasio, & Lounsbury, 2012), the concept of “logic” is seen as the conventionalized ways of functioning that characterize the media, e.g., the use of certain news criteria in journalistic media and the use of genre-specific narrative forms in audiovisual fiction. These two examples suffice to illustrate the fact that different media are not epitomized by the same logics and the differences can be quite significant. The network logics that characterize social media , e.g., Facebook , differ somewhat from the logics that characterize SMS traffic from mobile phones. A national public-service organization like the Danish Broadcasting Corporation operates according to different logics than a commercial and global media conglomerate like Google .
The concept of “media logic ” was introduced by Altheide and Snow (1979), who understood it as a “form of communication” that creates a special interpretation of the world; specifically, it is about the fact that the media exert influence on “how material is organized, the style in which it is presented, the focus or emphasis on particular characteristics of behavior, and the grammar of media communication ” (Altheide & Snow, 1979, 10). As source of inspiration for their understanding of media logic , they point to the sociologist Georg Simmel’s (1971 [1920]) concept of “social form,” but do not expand upon this (Lundby, 2009). Instead, the concept of “format” (which also encompasses the verb “to format”) is central to their perception of what constitutes the core of media logic , i.e., it formats the world in a certain way. Media logic is, however, also influenced by organizational and institutional factors. One finding of their study of American media was that the commercial factor was a key driver in the media logic . This media logic is key to their “analysis of social institutions ’ transformation through media” (Altheide & Snow, 1979, 7).
The concept of “media logic ” has since been refined and honed, especially in relation to an understanding of the logic of the news media. Esser (2013) identified the necessity of a multifaceted concept of media logic , which takes into account the differences between the various media. He distinguishes between three aspects of the news media’s logic—professional, commercial and technological—together these comprise the concrete figuration of news media logic . In the light of this, he points out that public-service media and serious broadsheet newspapers usually bear the hallmarks of professional journalism more than commercial broadcasters and tabloid newspapers , whose media logic tends to be primarily influenced by commercial concerns. In Altheide and Snow (1979), and in Strömbäck’s (2008) theory of the mediatization of politics , media logic is described as being in opposition to other logics: in the process of adapting to the media’s logic, the political system must, for example, give up some of its own logic and thus autonomy . In this way, mediatization appears to be a zero-sum game: If the logic of the media gains ground, then the logic of politics , for example, loses ground.
Faced with this assertion, Aelst, Thesen, Walgrave, & Vliegenthart (2014) and Donges and Jarren (2014) point out that media logic is not necessarily inconsistent with other institutional logics —indeed, there may be some degree of similarity—and that the influence goes both ways; it is not just the outside world that adapts to the media, the media also adapts to the outside world (see also Strömbäck & Esser, 2014). For example, any attempt to understand the correlation between TV and football over the last half-century reveals that the TV companies and the football authorities have a clear range of interests in common. In particular, both have been driven by a desire to maximize audience interest in television and football, and they have adapted to each other to achieve this (Frandsen, 2014).
Seen in relation to the general sociological and institutional perspective adopted in this article, all institutional contexts have a set of logics that, together, create the typical modus operandi for how things work, e.g., in sports , politics , or the family . When formulated in a sociological vocabulary, media logics are quite simply the governance principles that apply in the media’s area, in the same way as other logics apply in other areas (see Table 4.1). More specifically, media logic is another term for the institutional rules and resources that characterize the different media. In principle, the concept of “media logic ” is not actually needed. The sociological concepts of “rules” and “resources” could be used instead (Giddens, 1984). However, the term “media logic ” has gained a certain foothold in media studies . In a communicative sense, it is a more intuitive term than the more precise but cumbersome formulation “institutional rules (formal and informal) and resources (material and authoritative).” In social media , for example, formal rules consist of the laws regulating the use of such media (e.g., copyright ), while informal rules are the social norms for posting and “liking” messages. The user’s profile represents a symbolic resource qua the reputation that the user has built up over time. The information-technology infrastructure that underpins the social networking medium constitutes a material resource for the user—one that facilitates interaction but also places some constraints on what is possible.
Media logics involve technical, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions and any understanding of how a medium works must involve all three dimensions. As mentioned above, it could just be referred to as institutional rules and resources (leaving out “technical” and “aesthetic”), as “institutions ” in principle also cover technological resources and communicative rules. However, as media are defined precisely in terms of communication technologies, it is particularly relevant to identify the technological modus operandi and the aesthetic forms that regulate the media’s communications. In light of this, it is possible, on a general level, to describe the different dimensions of media logic as follows:
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Technology : typical modus operandi for specific media technologies, e.g., mass communications, network communications , mobile or stationary, online or offline, etc.
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Aesthetics : typical modus operandi in communicative practice , e.g., dramaturgy, performativity, modality (text , sound, images), framing, style, etc.
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Institutional: typical modus operandi as a result of legislation, organizational form, financing, historical experience, reputation, etc.
It is also important to stress that the media, in terms of their functions, are also influenced by other institutions —the way in which they function is not just determined by a “pure” media logic . Just as the media, through integration into politics and family life, have left their mark on these institutions , so other institutions have left their mark on the media. For example, broadcasting media (radio and TV) have always taken into account other cultural and social institutions , e.g., the family , politics , the nation, and the market. So, for example, children’s programs are influenced by the particular needs of this target group. The rules for political democracy influence the radio and television coverage of election campaigns. Advertising is regulated in various ways, including to protect the interests of consumers, but also to ensure fair competition rules for all advertisers. Radio and television also have to adapt to a national framework, e.g., in relation to language. Figure 4.2 exemplifies this mutual interdependence between media and other institutions in an inter-institutional system (Thornton et al., 2012) for radio and television . As discussed in more detail later in this article, developments in recent decades have tended to make the media more market-dependent but they have also attained greater autonomy vis-à-vis other institutions . The modus operandi of radio and television have therefore not only been governed by the media’s own professional (technical or organizational) considerations or the interests of users, but also by the demands other institutions place on the media. This also applies to other media, not just radio and television .
In this light, mediatization can be described as a process created by the overlap and reciprocal adaptation between media logics and the logics of institutions , as illustrated in Fig. 4.3. The figure shows that the result of this clash is not necessarily simply a mediatization of the institution concerned—change also works the other way. For example, when media are integrated into political life, to some extent they can be influenced by a political logic, making it legitimate to talk of a politicization of the media. The news services run by political parties and interest groups may appear to be driven by journalistic concerns, but they are largely governed by political considerations. Similarly, the integration of media into the education institution contains elements of both a mediatization of education and an “educationalization ” of the media, i.e., the media are adapted to serve educational purposes. Both processes can take place at the same time. The use of computer games for educational purposes (e.g., the Danish game Global Conflicts: Palestine) involves both a “gamification” of teaching, in which computer game dramaturgy is used as a motivating factor, and an educational and knowledge-based instrumentalization of the computer game genre.
5 Mass media and networks: different logics
It is possible to distinguish between media logics on a more general level, as well as at the level of the specific medium (e.g., TV) or the individual genre (e.g., news media). Klinger and Svensson (2014) point out the distinction between a mass media logic and a network media logic. The former is epitomized by a high degree of professional and costly content production by a mass media organization and the content is distributed to a big, usually anonymous, audience. The mass media logic has been crucial to the creation of a public sphere in which the experience of participating in collective communication is essential. Network media logic is usually epitomized by the production and distribution of cheap content by amateurs. Here, there is no centralized gatekeeper function, rather the distribution depends on individual recommendations, sometimes in a similar manner to the circulation of chain letters. Network media can establish both public and private fora, but they are not characterized by establishing collective communication for the whole of society . Rather they create an association of people who share common interests or attitudes. However, it is important to stress that these descriptions of the logics behind the mass media and network media are of ideal-typical characteristics. In practice, actual media like YouTube can function according to both mass-media and network-media logics, while some media companies like Google are involved in activities that have the character of mass communication (e.g., an online library like Google Books), social network communication (e.g., Google +) and individual communication (e.g., Gmail) (Hjarvard, 2014b).
The rise of network media has led several social scientists to point to a number of far-reaching changes in social organization, not just in terms of the media itself, but in society as a whole, both on an overlapping structural level and on the level of individual practice. This influence of the media’s network logic can be viewed as a more general mediatization that not only affects individual areas of society and culture , but—at least in principle—society as a whole. Castells (2001, 2011) and Dijk (2012) consider the network society to be a distinct social formation that differs from the nation-based mass and industrial society . In the network society , social and digital networks play a crucial role in value generation and the exercise of power. The network society is not only created by the network media and their logic, but is the result of a complex interaction between forms of social organization and new technological media. For both Castells (2001) and Dijk (2012), digital media (internet , social networking media, etc.) play an important role as part of the infrastructure of the network society . Access to, and management of, networks have therefore become crucial to understanding the exercise of power in modern society (Castells, 2011).
On an individual level, Rainie and Wellman (2014) point out that digital media have facilitated changes to social relations and new ways of interacting. Rainie and Wellman (2014) even speak of a new “social operating system” that creates the basis for a “networked individualism ,” in which the single individual is no longer so dependent on close social ties in groups or collectives (family , company, organization), but is able to communicate and act more flexibly and take advantage of the numerous, but weaker, social bonds afforded by digital media . This provides new opportunities for activities such as learning, political activism and product development. Rainie and Wellman (2014) have, however, a tendency to identify only the many opportunities available to the individual but take little account of the fact that the rules that characterize network media are also a product of collective norms, which can set limits and involve a range of controlling factors that are both ideological and economic in nature.
Dijck (2013) provides a more critical representation of how the democratic and collective potential of network media have been “co-opted by the logic of connectivity imbued in the commercial drives and coercive formats of many platforms”, e.g., Facebook (Dijck, 2013, 155). Network media have a number of built-in preferences or logics in the algorithms (codes) that form the basis for digital interaction . For example, Dijck (2013, 157) points out that “Contacting a friend you have not seen since high school may be a thoroughly human act but, if performed online, a People You May Know algorithm typically prompts this deed. A teenager who never considered following her favorite singer may be pushed by cross-linked microsystems connecting viral videos via YouTube , Twitter , and Facebook .” Dijck’s (2013) general intention is to show how social networking media’s technology , politics , and economics—in interaction with social norms of human behavior—have established a series of normative steering principles over a number of years (or media logics in the terminology of this article) for interpersonal communications using these media, e.g., popularity, quick turnover, hierarchical ranking, personalized recommendations, and so on.
It is important to make a distinction between the logics of mass media and network media in order to understand the different ways in which the media exert influence on culture and society . It is also important to emphasize that network media have not replaced mass media , but rather supplement them, and that there is a significant convergence and interaction between the two. When content is shared on social media , it often stems from the mass media (e.g., the news), while the news media are increasingly using social media to expand contact and interaction with users (Kammer, 2013). A more complex media ecology is therefore emerging, one in which both mass media logics and network logics apply and interact within different cultural and social contexts.
In this context, it is also relevant to consider Webster’s (2014) observation that there are also similarities between the modus operandi of mass media and network media . Network media do not just encourage users to consume very different and individualized media products (referred to as the “long tail” on the internet ), nor do mass media only concentrate on a few popular products. Neither is it the case that network media only bring users into contact with like-minded people (referred to as the “filter bubble”), while mass media create a general public. Network media are also driven by popularity parameters, which encourage users to click on the same content and discuss the same topics, while mass media (e.g., television ) increasingly have opted for a more content-and consumer-segmented path. Overall, Webster (2014, 160) thinks that the forces capable of attracting the attention of the general public are undervalued:
If I’m right, media will continue to provide a unifying function, although it will result less from the work of a few outlets and more from the ways in which people use the resources now at their disposal. The outcome will be a massively overlapping culture . (Webster, 2014, 160)
The distinction between mass media logic and network media logic is still relevant in this light. However, any analysis of which logics are at play must take into account that the answer may be both at the same time.
6 Changed conditions for communication and interaction
As mentioned previously, mediatization has changed the conditions for mediation , i.e., communication and interaction through the media. These changes assume, of course, many different forms, depending on the types of communication and interaction . Bank customers now have, via online banking , new opportunities to communicate with the bank and to perform transactions, while the bank has new tools with which to manage its customers through the digital interface’s templates and options. The advent of a range of social networking media affords opportunities for sustained contact with an expanded group of ‘friends’ and contacts. However, the interaction with those in this extended network is subject, as previously mentioned, to a range of logics, such as popularity, quick turnover and personalized recommendations. Politicians have at their disposal new tools for communication with citizens and the general public. However, these tools also have their own dynamics, which politicians must take into account when attempting to optimize contact with potential supporters. In the light of these many differences, the changed conditions for communication and interaction must primarily be studied empirically, and this includes taking into account specific media and their respective logics, as well as their real-world cultural and social contexts.
While individual media may have their own specific logics, they may together—at an aggregate level—constitute a repertoire of media (Hasebrink & Domeyer, 2012) that makes them condition communication and interaction in certain ways within a given domain. This is, for instance, the case in relation to various forms of political and social conflicts. Here the media, understood as a repertoire of news media, social network media , and interpersonal media, each of which may be mobilized by involved actors for various purposes during a conflict, come to influence the ways that conflicts emerge, become critical and perhaps are resolved. At this aggregate level of repertories it is not useful to talk about media “logics,” since logics relate to the rules and resources of particular types of media. Instead we may discern certain overall media dynamics that become prevalent during the course of a conflict. The stakeholders concerned can both benefit from these and are also more or less forced to take them into account when they use media. These dynamics are particularly evident when the media are used to influence public opinion in conflict situations, but are also present, albeit less visibly so, under less conflict-ridden circumstances. In conflict situations, which usually involve power struggles, it can be seen very clearly how different stakeholders try to use the media to their own advantage, while at the same time their actions are to some extent influenced by the media. Drawing on Meyrowitz’s (1993) metaphorical distinctions between various dimensions of media, Hjarvard, Mortensen and Eskjær (2015) identify a typology for media dynamics that represents conditions for communication and interaction in a mediatized society in general: amplification, framing and performative agency and co-structuring (see Table 4.2).
The role of media as conduits is primarily to transport the communication content, i.e., messages from sender to recipient. The focus is on the medium’s technical ability to spread a message through both time and space. Based on this understanding of the media, it can be said that the media have an intrinsic dynamic as amplifiers, which are capable of turning up a conflict’s “volume”—e.g., how fast and how far the conflict spreads to other groups in society or across national borders . As a consequence, the media can increase the level of involvement and, by bringing new actors into a conflict, they can help to intensify and prolong it. The presence of global television channels—such as CNN and Al Jazeera—and social media means that conflicts in one location are very quickly known in other parts of the world. When journalists’ and amateurs’ messages are circulated globally, and live, the ability to control and restrict conflict becomes more difficult. In Denmark, the authorities, and especially the foreign ministry, found this out the hard way during the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis of 2005–2006, when it became clear that, in addition to the usual diplomacy between states, there was a need for a “public diplomacy ” aimed at exerting influence through a more active use of various media targeting different countries and social groups (Hjarvard, 2010).
With regard to the second metaphor, media as language, the media’s ability to shape messages and stage events in certain ways comes to the fore. One of the central dynamics in this context is the competition between different stakeholders (politicians, journalists, interest groups) to “frame” events in certain ways, i.e., place them into a certain frame of reference, which journalists refer to as the “angle” on a story. According to Entman (1993), framing essentially consists of selecting and emphasizing elements from shared experience. The framing triggers four functions associated with the creation of meaning: a specific definition of the problem; an interpretation of the causes; a moral evaluation; and a recommendation for a solution to the problem (Entman, 1993, 52). Framing depends on the language chosen to present the events in question. For example, a fall in car sales may be presented as a crisis for the automotive industry or as a step forward for the environment. In conflict situations, there is usually competition—in terms of both text and images—to define reality in certain ways in order to win public opinion over to certain points of view. This is encapsulated by the maxim “naming is framing,” in other words, the way in which you name a phenomenon has an impact on how it is interpreted and evaluated morally.
The media contribute not only to an interpretative dynamic, but also a performative, staging dynamic that embeds events within a certain dramaturgy. Communication via media consists not only of statements about the world, but also of speech acts intended to influence others. The Danish Prime Minister’s New Year address on television is not just a review of the state of the nation , it is also a ritualized event that means the speech has a special form, and greater impact and a larger audience than the content might otherwise justify. Public scandals, usually political ones, are good examples of the media’s ability to stage events in a particular dramaturgy. Thompson (2000) identified that, because of the media, political scandals often follow a fixed sequence of events, from the pre-scandal phase to the actual scandal and climax to the aftermath. This process includes a number of important language actions: For a scandal to become a public scandal, it must be designated as such by the news media and be recognized as a scandal by important stakeholders in society .
The third metaphor, media as environment, places the media in a relational perspective, in which the media themselves constitute an environment, i.e., a configuration of media with different properties. At the same time, they are embedded in culture and society , and thus form part of the social environment in which people live and act. From this perspective, the media, as an environment or system, co-structure the ways in which people interact with each other, partly because access to the media is characterized by unequal relationships: The media are not only embedded in existing social power relationships but also play a role in constituting those power relations. For example, elite sources in politics , industry, and academia usually have easier access to journalists, as they represent important interests in terms of holding political, economic, and knowledge power. The news media help to reproduce these sources’ discursive power by treating them as authoritative and making it easy for them to make their voices heard. The rise of social media has challenged centralized power in politics and journalism in some ways, and has the potential to bring about a more pluralistic communication system with a lower access threshold. The new media environment thus affects the balance of power in the social environment.
The notion of “media logics” is useful for sensitizing us to the particular rules and resources that characterize a particular medium’s modus operandi. In actual social practices such media logics rarely operate on their own, because media have adjusted to their institutional surroundings in various ways—and vice versa. Furthermore, as the media systems becomes still more diverse, communication and interaction will take place through a variety of media, making their influence more varied and conditional due to contextual factors. We may, however, as suggested above, discern particular overall patterns of influence or media dynamics at an aggregate level.
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Epilogue
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This article has discussed the role of media logics within mediatization theory . As such, the presentation has been kept on a general and conceptual level. An empirical analysis of mediatization processes would have to be more specific and focused, taking into account the real-life context in which the interaction between media, culture and society takes place . As argued elsewhere (Hjarvard, 2014a), it is an advantage to conduct analyses of mediatization at middle-range level (Boudon, 1991; Merton, 1968). This is defined as a level of generalization that lies between the macro and micro levels. It is characterized by, on the one hand, the desire to generalize beyond purely local and particular contexts and to develop models and concepts for features that transcend different local contexts. On the other hand, it entails a commitment to ground theoretical concepts and models by empirical evidence and retain a degree of skepticism regarding excessively generalizing claims about developments in society as a whole. At the middle-range level, it is possible to be theoretically ambitious in terms of devising models for trends in a given area and to conduct an empirical analysis of the actual conditions in the specific area. This also includes the identification of particular media logics, understood as rules and resources of the media, that in combination with other social logics may evoke social and cultural change as well as new conditions for communication and interaction .
Analyses of the mediatization of culture and society must, therefore, be historically sensitive and take into account the cultural and social context of a given area, e.g., politics , family , education . Existing analyses have largely been dominated by European and Scandinavian perspectives. Thus, there is a real need to evaluate the role of the media in social and cultural change in other contexts, such as in Latin America and Asia. A number of media have now a global presence but there are significant variations in the ways in which they influence culture and society —and are themselves affected by this process. As emphasized in this chapter, media logics also become influenced by the particular inter-institutional context in question. Comparative analyses of mediatization in different countries and social systems would help to identify similarities and differences in the media’s role in cultural and social change and how media come to condition social interaction .
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Hjarvard, S. (2018). The Logics of the Media and the Mediatized Conditions of Social Interaction. In: Thimm, C., Anastasiadis, M., Einspänner-Pflock, J. (eds) Media Logic(s) Revisited. Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65756-1_4
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