The article is entitled “Transforming Communications. Media-related Changes in Times of Deep Mediatization” and can be downloaded here.
Further Communicative Figurations Working Papers can be accessed here.
From October 31 to November 1, the University of Copenhagen hosts an international research seminar on the topic “Becoming old in the age of mediatization”.
Andreas Hepp will give the keynote on the first conference day on the topic “Media generation as a process: The generational self-positioning of elderly people in times of deep mediatization”. Further participants of the research seminar come from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden.
Further information about the programme can be accessed here.
The joint effort is an original theoretical take on the contemporary social and technological environment and on the present understanding of mediatization, reflecting on Berger and Luckmann’s ‘The Social Construction of Reality’.
“This book by Couldry and Hepp might well become a new classic in the theory of the social, on par with Elias and Latour. . Mandatory reading for everyone who seriously reflects on the implications of contemporary media systems and practices on society.”
José van Dijck, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
“An excellent and pathbreaking book.”
Anthony Giddens, member of the House of Lords, former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science
“An indispensable contribution to social theory in communication research and media sociology.”
Leah Lievrouw, University of California, Los Angeles
The book is published by Polity. Further information can be accessed here.
The workshop is jointly organized by the “Communicative Figurations” research network and the Creative Unit of the same name at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) of the University of Bremen and the subject group “Sociology of Media Communication” in the German Communication Association (DGPuK).
Researchers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK will discuss innovative forms to act with media in order to shape society and public discourse.
Detailled information on the workshop can be accessed here.
The ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research of the University of Bremen, organises the international conference in collaboration with the Hans-Bredow-Institute for Media Research, Hamburg and the SOCIUM of the Universty of Bremen. The conference welcomes numerous speakers from all over Europe and the United States who investigate transforming communications against the background of an increasing complexity of the media environment. Richard Rogers (Digital Method Initiative, University of Amsterdam) and Gina Neff (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford) will be keynote speakers.
For today’s life-worlds, media communication is essential: work, leisure, socialization, the public sphere, public engagement, etc. are articulated by different types of mediated communication. Even from a historical point of view it is impossible for us to imagine the multiple and contradictory processes of modernization without media. Today, various domains of the social world are so closely related to (digital) media that they could not exist in their present form beyond media. In this sense, we live in times of “deep mediatization”.
A particular challenge of researching this stage of mediatization is the present complexity of the media environment: It is not one single medium that is the driving force of change. With the spreading of various technical communication media – television, radio, mobile phone, internet platforms etc. – we are confronted with a “media manifold” which stimulates various processes of re-mediation and transmediation. And as media are more and more software-based and related to the internet, their use becomes entangled with processes of datafication. How can we investigate then transforming communications in times of deep mediatization? How do the figurations of living together change with the media environment?
The conference takes these fundamental questions seriously and moves the transformation of communications and figurations through the “media manifold” into the foreground. The focuses of the conference are the transformation of journalism, religion, education, communities, politics, and public discourse. Beyond this, the conference puts an emphasis on the (digital) methods used to investigate related processes of transformation. It is the concluding event of the Creative Research Unit “Communicative Figurations”, being funded within the framework of the Initiative of Excellence.
The full programme and information on the registration procedure can be accessed here.
The programme brochure can be downloaded here.