Mediatization(s): Theoretical Conversations between Europe and Latin America

Introduction

Resuming the Conversation

Joan R. Rodríguez-Amat

Carlos A. Scolari

José L. Fernández

A fragmented disciplinary field: An early colourful map

This book simultaneously in English and Spanish contributes and updates the discussion around the concept of mediatization. The notion epitomizes both the disciplinary fragmentation explored by Waisbord in the territories of the communication research; and an uncomfortable conceptual dispersion provoked by the opportunity of a rather fashionable catch-all concept. As the book shows, while the fragmentation adopts the shape of a complex constellation of meaning that extends across processes involving: media, mediation, mass media, new media, social media, broadcasting, networks, media platforms and interfaces, among others, and also their societal contexts, the dispersion shows that the umbrella concept of mediatization is actually the product of a combination and maturity of different theoretical strands and approaches that have reached and grown the concept as a heuristic opportunity to explain a rather complex multifaceted phenomenon.

Under these circumstances, the concept of mediatization requires to be taken with care. This book has been planned as the start of a conversation between the works of consolidated authors writing about mediatization. Fifteen authors from ten countries have contributed to this exploration of the extension of the meanings of the concept with the double purpose to map the state of the art as an update to previous works, and as an effort to build theoretical bridges between the works from diverse cultural and scientific traditions.

The article by Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat published in a special issue of Communication Theory marked the starting point of this project. That first gaze became an initiative to ask the referred authors about their views on mediatization research in a broad sense. The question about the state of the art is relevant, particularly considering that it has been half a decade since the publication of Mediatization of Communication, a collective volume edited by Lundby that marked an inflexion point in the European- and English-spoken debates on mediatization; some of the authors present in that volume are now contributing too to this book, and presenting an update for the start of the question. However, this book does not continue that line of work. Instead, this book has invited the participation of several consolidated authors installed in what can be called the Latin American tradition around mediatization research, that is, authors that followed the path traced by Eliseo Verón (see Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat).

Research into mediatization processes started in Europe when the concept was introduced in the early twentieth century; only in the past two decades the notion has become one of the buzzwords in contemporary reflections and analytical tools about change in media and society. It is increasingly evident that media (old and new) play a key role in the construction of reality (Couldry and Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality). In Latin America the concept was developed by Eliseo Verón in the late 1970s and popularized in the 1980s (Verón, Construire l’événement); many scholars in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina adopted his models and expanded the analysis of local phenomena using his perspective.

However, Latin American research is still largely absent from the international academia. Significantly, in the edited collection of more than thirty authors Mediatization of Communication (Lundby), Verón (‘Mediatization Theory’) was the sole Latin American. In Couldry and Hepp’s special issue of Communication Theory on ‘Conceptualizing Mediatization’ there was no participation of Latin American researchers. Furthermore, whereas some significant Latin American publications like deSignis (journal of the Latin American Federation of Semiotic Studies), L.I.S. Letra. Imagen. Sonido. Ciudad Mediatizada (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina), Rizoma (Universidade de Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil) and La Trama de la Comunicación (Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Argentina) are effectively contributing to the diffusion of research into mediatization processes in Latin America, the near absence of European authors and production does not help the building of academic bridges, either. Symptomatically, the extensive work by Verón is little known among media researchers beyond the Spanish and French circuits even though his last published paper was in English (Verón, ‘Mediatization Theory’). However, it is true that some dialogue seems to have started up between the two research constellations. In a journal published by the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), MATRIZes, a 2014 special issue contained some initial exchanges between Latin American and European scholars: Hepp (‘The Communicative Figurations of Mediatized Worlds’) (MATRIZes), Hjarvard (‘Mediatization’), Vassallo de Lopes, and Verón (‘Mediatization Theory’) were included, among others. It was the first single publication to include European and Latin American mediatization researchers. Later in June 2015, yet another publication from the Centre of Advanced Studies of the National University of Cordoba (Argentina) included a section with articles on Verón, with contributions by Sophie Fisher from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France), and by Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz (‘Eliseo Verón leído desde la perspectiva de los estudios en comunicación alemanes’) from the University of Bremen (Germany). In 2016, the Uruguayan journal InMediaciones de la Comunicación published a special issue coordinated by Sandra Valdettaro with contributions by European (Francescutti, ‘Los usos del documento en el periodismo digital’) and Canadian scholars (Granata, ‘La cultura como mediatización’).

The article by Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat indeed demonstrated that two alternative and parallel clusters of developments of the concept of mediatization had grown. One in the English-speaking academia led by European researchers; and another in the Latin American academia following 30 years of Verón’s work. And these alternative views seem to follow somewhat geographic continuities but are rather entangled with traditions of knowledge: in the European front, mediatization is more a development of Altheide’s media logic and a social-recentred variation of McLuhan’s deterministic principle of ‘media is the message’; whereas for what has been pointed as the Latin American front, mediatizations are semiotic modulations of a social practice following Verón’s idea of social semiosis. This geographic distribution is not a condition, but responds to the affiliations of Eliseo Verón, and today, the main body of production derived from his work can be traced in the Argentinian universities; but, as the article showed, there is also work on this line of mediatizations thriving in other Latin American regions.

After describing the main contributions of some of the most important Latin American and European scholars – many of whom participate in the present volume – the article stated in the conclusions:

Even if the distance between Latin American and the Global North theoretical productions is real, the globalization of the academic circuit and decided efforts like the above-mentioned international events, special issues, and collective volumes are reducing the gap and enhancing the exchanges. The increasing number of Latin American doctorate students and researchers around the world and a growing number of translations will generate more theoretical conversations and define new areas of reciprocal epistemological exchange and innovative scientific convergences. (Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat 19)

Despite the prominent geographic axis, this book has preferred to avoid such apriorism as organization key. Indeed, there are other consolidated schematics of organization of the mediatization approaches. In the European literature, for instance, the agreed and accepted distinction initially suggested by Hepp and mentioned in the next chapter by Couldry and Hepp distinguishing a social-constructivist approach to mediatization from the institutional approach:

Reviewing this process, we can distinguish between two intertwined traditions that we might call ‘institutionalist’ and ‘social-constructivist’ traditions.¹ Both differ in their focus on how to theorize mediatization: while the ‘institutional tradition’ has until recently mainly been interested in traditional mass media, whose influence is described as a ‘media logic’, the ‘social-constructivist tradition’ is more interested in everyday communication practices – especially related to digital media and personal communication – and focuses on the changing communicative construction of culture and society. (Hepp, ‘The Communicative Figurations of Mediatized Worlds’ 616)

This distinction is relevant for the understanding of the dispersion within the European and English-spoken academy; but it does not incorporate well the models rooted on semiotic approaches. Stated this, the current volume has incorporated examples of both the constructivist and of the institutional approaches to mediatization but does not stick to this axis to organize the chapters. Instead, and with the inclusive hopes to raise strands of mutual collaboration beyond the authors across the geographies, the book has taken on board the distinction suggested in Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat and opted to organize the contributions along the axis that distinguishes general mediatizations (contributions that address general theoretical issues) from applied mediatizations (analysis of mediatization processes in politics, tourism, sports, perceptions, etc.).

The difference between general and applied is not natural or innocent. It represents two of the possible ways of approaching any research on mediatization in order to open up the possibilities of improving the relationships between the general theories about mediatization and empirical studies. This distinction, inspired by Eco’s split between ‘general semiotics’ and ‘specific or applied semiotics’, is merely a way of organizing the conversations about mediatization:

•General approaches to mediatization. In this case the research and reflections focus on the transition from media to mediated societies, the long-term evolution of mediatization and the general dynamics of mediatization processes beyond the specificities of each society. General mediatization works as the umbrella of specific approaches (Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat 17).

•Specific or applied approaches to mediatizations. In this case the research focuses on well-delimited phenomena: either the substance of the medium (sound, visual, audio-visual mediatizations) or the social institution being mediatized (mediatization of religion, politics, health, journalism, sports, etc.). Paraphrasing Eco, it could be said that the general mediatization approach is influenced (and fed) by the experiences of applied mediatization research (Scolari and Rodríguez-Amat 17).

For the purpose of this book, the authors were asked to contribute in the light of our intentions of exploring the conversation between the diverse perspectives.

General approaches to mediatizations

The first section of the book includes contributions with broader theoretical intentions. The inclusive diversity signed by very relevant authors of all the approaches helps to build the conditions for a further dialogue representing the multiple perspectives in the mediatization field: constructivist, institutional, Veronian, as well as chapters that opt for liminal positions increasing the strands of contact between views.

On this road, ‘Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments’ is a perfect contribution by Nick Couldry (London School of Economics, United Kingdom) and Andreas Hepp (University of Bremen, Germany) for the understanding of the mediatization theories in Europe. Originally published in 2013 as an introduction to a special issue in Communication Theory, this is an effective and compact overview of the theoretical conversations about mediatizations in the international English-dominant academic arena. The chapter deals with semantic issues, and distinguishes two European traditions of mediatization research: the institutionalist tradition that understands media ‘more or less as an independent social institution with its own sets of rules’, and the social-constructivist tradition that ‘highlights the role of various media as part of the process of the communicative construction of social and cultural reality’ (‘The Communicative Figurations of Mediatized Worlds’ 196).

Stig Hjarvard (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) participates in this volume with an interview conducted by Nicolás Llano Linares, a young Brazilian researcher. The interview transits around Hjarvard’s own academic journey in media and communication studies, the potential of mediatization theory as a macro-sociological framework and the dialogue of this framework with other concepts (like ‘media logic’). In this interview Hjarvard also explores the connections between his work and the contributions of researchers as John B. Thompson, David L. Altheide, Friedrich Krotz, Nick Couldry or José van Dijck. Hjarvard work is not only representative of the institutional approach to mediatization, as mentioned earlier; but also he is one of the still too few European authors who have been translated into Spanish and is present among the works or collections of Latin American publications (Hjarvard, ‘Mediatización’). An example of this is his presence as external member in the Centre for Research in Mediatizations (CIM) at the University of Rosario (Argentina).

From Brazil, Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes (University of São Paulo, Brazil) suggests a bridging approach that articulates the work by Jesús Martín-Barbero with that by Eliseo Verón. Her background as researcher in the telenovela sector (Vassallo de Lopes et al.) helps her to suggest an immersion in the Latin American tradition of reception studies based precisely on the contributions of the Spanish-Colombian scholar. After describing Martín-Barbero’s mediation model, Vassallo de Lopes introduces Verón’s model of mediatization and expands the theoretical conversation with the inclusion of European scholars (i.e. S. Hjarvard, R. Silverstone or S. Livingstone). Vassallo de Lopez considers that the contemporary mediatized culture can be better understood with the model of the communicative mediation of culture, a conception very close to the idea of mediatization.

In the mediatization literature, visualization has been presented as a subfield of mediatization with growing possibilities as it responds to the integral and ubiquitous experience that visual communication has become in today’s highly mediatized societies. This volume, thus, includes a chapter called ‘Mediated perception and the mediatization of seeing’ signed by Katharina Lobinger (University of the Italian Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland) and Friedrich Krotz (University of Bremen, Germany) to reflect on how the visuality of many spheres of life is leading to qualitative changes in communication. If mediatization scholars argue that it makes a difference ‘which kind of media is used for which kind of communication’ (Hepp and Krotz 5), it is then pertinent to examine what changes when people increasingly express and represent themselves visually instead of verbally (Krotz).

Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz (University of Bremen, Germany) analysed the origins of mediatization studies in Europe (‘Understanding Mediatization in First Modernity’), and has recently delved into Eliseo Verón’s works and the Latin American school, proposing a worthwhile confrontation of theories and approaches. In her chapter, Averbeck-Lietz outlines Verón’s approach to mediatization as ‘an epistemological meta-concept in relation to its empirical object: the mediated social reality’ (Averbeck-Lietz, in this volume, p. 79).

In his chapter Carlos A. Scolari (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain) opens the discussion on mediatization to tackle the notion of time. He proposes to move past the debates about the origins of mediatization to incorporate other disciplinary areas in the exchange: media ecology and media evolution (Scolari, ‘Media Ecology’, ‘Media Evolution’, Ecología de los Medios, Media Evolution). This operation enables new areas for research, such as the analysis of the metaphors behind the conception of media and social change (i.e. ‘wave’, ‘acceleration’ etc.) or such as complex and network-based research to challenge the usual linear conceptions of media.

This section about general mediatizations concludes with an interview to late Eliseo Verón by Carlos A. Scolari. The interview, available in English for the first time, coincided with the presentation of Verón’s last book, Semiosis Social 2 (La Semiosis Social 2). Scolari´s questions captured Verón at a mature but transitional moment in his work, when the consequences of the ongoing transformations of mediatizations could not yet be fully seen. The second part of the interview focuses on the crisis of television in the context of a theory of mediatization. In other words, the interview starts with an exchange about general theoretical issues and concludes with a specific case of applied mediatization. It is an inspiring way of concluding this first part as it interfaces the first and second sections of this book.

Applied approaches to mediatizations

Mirroring the first section of the book, the second section starts with an interview. Friedrich Krotz kindly responded to a set of questions put by Joan Ramon Rodríguez-Amat (Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom) coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the first grant conceded to the research project Mediatized Worlds led by Krotz himself (see Krotz and Hepp). After the interview, the texts selected for this section unfold several crucial topics related to the transformation of mediatization processes and the areas they cover: governance and citizenship, urbanism and tourism, relationships between music, media platforms and face-to-face performances, the cultural recommendations on social media and the gender conflict. Along with the central theme, and to emphasize their different modes of mediatization, the section highlights the following issues: the new tensions between broadcasting and networking, with their resistances and competitions; the emergence of a post-broadcasting scenario; and the always conflicting relations between the inside of media and their outside.

The interview to Krotz grounds the theoretical debates on general mediatizations to the applied and empirical strands of the applied mediatizations. As Krotz puts it: ‘not everything is mediatized at the same time or in the same degree, but rather […] each of the various areas of people’s lives are changing by mediatization in their own ways’ (Krotz, in this volume, p. 112). The project Mediatized Worlds has framed and embedded a number of fellowships, further grants and impacting initiatives of empirical research on multiple areas: as Krotz explains in the interview himself, ‘more than 140 applications were received from a wide range of disciplines, and altogether 35 of these were selected, each for two years. Most of these projects were conducted by sociologists and researchers in communication studies’ on a variety of topics from politics, to music, from labour, and teaching, to social media (Krotz, in this volume, p. 113). The interview also explores the relevance and opportunities of empirical research and finishes with an opening towards the critical concerns around datafication and its relevance in relation to the mediatization discussion.

The section follows with the writing by Lucrecia Escudero Chauvel (University Lille3, France) dedicated to the relationships that the new mediatizations are producing between politics and citizenship. Escudero Chauvel’s text warns that people on the Web are not necessarily mediatizated people. Following Verón’s proposition that ‘there is no mass democracy without mass communication’, Escudero Chauvel has developed a decade long research strand on the mediatization of war and politics (see Escudero Chauvel; Escudero Chauvel and García Rubio). In her chapter, she explores the novelties produced by new political mediatizations in France with the rise of new relationships between citizens and politicians, after the struggles around the yellow vests movement. Escudero Chauvel, disciple of both Eliseo Verón and Umberto Eco, has spent the last few years interfacing between the European and the Latin America academic circuits through the direction of the journal deSignis.

Undoubtedly, tourism is one areas of the social life in which the interaction between social spaces and mediatizations can be particularly appreciated. André Jansson (Karlstad University, Sweden), a scholar with a long list of publications inquiring into different forms of media consumption (Jansson, ‘The Mediatization of Consumption’, ‘Spatial Phantasmagoria’) or media platforms or cities, tourism and geography (see Jansson, ‘The Mediatization of Consumption’, ‘Spatial Phantasmagoria’ or Rodríguez-Amat and Brantner), identifies different enjoyment alternatives that hide the complex and contradictory process of gentrification (among other aspects). Jansson proposes three ontological points about mediatization: he describes social normalization of media as cultural forms as a dialectical process, without ‘an unequivocal development’. Mediatization (re)produces social power relations that ‘shape to what extent and in what ways different individuals and groups are affected by mediatization’ (Jansson, in this volume, p. 140).

In the new digital mediatizing interfaces, the relationships between emission and reception have changed. The idea of circulation is therefore relevant, because it challenges Verón’s original model that only understood circulation in the mass media as the differential between production (which leads to emission) and recognition (the process of reception by different audiences). Indeed, Gastón Cingolani (National University of Arts, Argentina), who has worked on visuality regimes (Cingolani and Fernández) as well as in theoretical discussions about mediatization (Cingolani) aligns here with the work by Neto. He studies the case of the contemporary Recommendation Systems (RSs). The author identifies circulation marks, such as recommendations, as key differences between networking and broadcasting. Cingolani shows how the Recommendation Systems open social-interactive spaces that enable users to contact each other, and to actively engage in sharing works.

While Cingolani’s work focuses on internal – discursive – exchanges within the media platforms and the resulting social networks, the text by José Luis Fernández (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) turns around the external relationships maintained by different types of platforms in the parallel life of mediatizations (see also Fernández, Plataformas Mediáticas). For Fernández, specialized in the mediatization of sound (see Fernández, Los Lenguajes de la Radio), different types of mediatization build different forms of musical performance: platforms such as Spotify or Deezer alter the ways musicians behave online. The chapter shows that mediatizations of platforms can be approached in two ways: first as an analysis of the discursive exchanges in music platforms, parallel to other cases available in the volume such as those by Escudero Chauvel, Jansson or Valdettaro; and second, as a research on cultural social spaces in which live musical performances combine with online activity.

In her chapter, Sandra Valdettaro (National University of Rosario, Argentina) explores the gender dispute as a matter of social status (see Valdettaro et al., and Valdettaro). Moving beyond the journalistic theme, Valdettaro argues that the gender dispute is constituted by often unrelated micro-stories producing a constellation of general conflicts. For her, the mediatization of the problem always refers to some temporary event, mediatized almost live, and yet rooted in a strongly delimited territory. Valdettaro illustrates this understanding with cases with great media impact in Argentina: each of her cases form a corpus that considers the media location (media, platforms, interfaces). She concludes that the development of the gender dispute is not that of an organized transmedia narrative, but a patchwork or a group of fragments that form a complex interpretative constellation. With this chapter concludes the applied mediatization section of the book.

Not all that are, are here. But all here, are

The spoonerism fits the presence of these authors contributing in one single necessary volume. This line up of authors turns this opportunity into a milestone in the double direction announced earlier: the international debate and conceptual discussions around mediatization as a contemporary phenomenon and as a theoretical approach to understand the role of the media in society; and the expansion of the meaning of mediatization beyond the hegemonic English-speaking European-led academy.

This book is a first. The exploration on mediatization is vast and this contribution barely shed some light to the opportunity of bringing the Veronian approach to the discussion. It builds therefore as an opportunity to recognize and to acknowledge the work and the tradition of research across the Atlantic. There is very serious work being done currently in other areas of the rich, diverse and active European academy, as there is sensitive and fertile work done across the vast Latin American academia. Not everyone could be represented here, to the extent of the proportion of their contribution to the scientific field. Indeed, it is noble to insist that the work by Carlón (Sobre lo Televisivo, De lo Cinematográfico a lo Televisivo, ‘La concepción evolutiva en el desarrollo de la ecología de los medios y en la teoría de la mediatización’), Traversa (‘Eliseo Verón y el Trayecto Largo de la Mediatización’), Cid Jurado (‘Visión espectacular, visión mediatizada en el caso del flashmob’) or Lundby, Strömbäck, or Fornäs could easily fit the map, here, too; and yet, this volume succeeded in bringing together a good representation of authors and views that build a strong starting point for further possible debates.

And whereas all mistakes are on us, it is thanks to the authors that joined this project, and the arduous work by the anonymous manuscript reviewers. The latter suggested improvements that truly enriched the original proposal and helped this work to become what it is now. The editors also wish to thank Intellect, an academic publisher that enthusiastically supported the present project since the first conversations. The interlocutors in Intellect – Katie Evans, Laura Christopher and Tim Mitchel – helped start this wonderful conversation that now continues on the hands of the readers.

It is time now to let the authors of this adventure talk their research, their approaches and their theoretical views; and it will be the purpose of the conclusions afterwards to provide further considerations about shared assumptions, and areas of dispersion, complementarities and contradictions, isolations and commonalities among them. Such stuff as this book’s conclusions are made on.

REFERENCES

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——— ‘Eliseo Verón leído desde la perspectiva de los estudios en comunicación alemanes: Semio-pragmática: Comunicación e investigación en mediatización’. Estudios, vol. 33, 2015, pp. 131–49.

Carlón, M. Sobre lo Televisivo: Dispositivos, discursos y sujetos. La Crujía, 2004.

——— De lo Cinematográfico a lo Televisivo. La Crujía, 2006.

——— ‘La concepción evolutiva en el desarrollo de la ecología de los medios y en la teoría de la mediatización: ¿la hora de una teoría general?’. Palabra Clave, vol. 18, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1111–36. doi:10.5294/pacla.2015.18.4.7.

Cid Jurado, A. T. ‘La semiótica y el estudio de la televisión: El caso de México’. Letra. Imagen. Sonido: Ciudad Mediatizada, vol. 6–7, 2010/2011, pp. 95–116.

——— ‘Visión espectacular, visión mediatizada en el caso del flashmob’. Letra. Imagen. Sonido: Ciudad Mediatizada, vol. 14, 2015, pp. 43–60.

Cingolani, G. ‘¿Qué se transforma cuando hay mediatización?’ AAVV: CIM–Estado actual de las investigaciones sobre mediatizaciones, UNR Editora, 2014, pp. 11–23.

Cingolani, G., and M. Fernández. ‘Televisión y política: Espacio público, puestas en escena y regímenes de visibilidad’. Oficios Terrestres, vol. 25, 2010, pp. 37–49.

Couldry, N., and A. Hepp. ‘Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments’. Communication Theory, vol. 23, no. 3, 2013, pp. 191–202. doi:10.1111/comt.12019.

——— The Mediated Construction of Reality. Polity Press, 2017.

Eco, U. Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. Indiana University Press,