Abstract
This editorial introduces a thematic issue on “Rethinking Media and Social Space”. By critically rethinking the relationship between media and social space this issue takes initial steps towards ensuring that media studies is appropriate for a mediatized world. Contemporary societies are permeated by media that play important roles in how people maneuver and position themselves in the social world. Yet, analyses of media-related social change too often fail to engage with the complex and situated nature of power relations. This editorial highlights three enduring problems: (1) the annihilation of the socially structured and structuring role of media technologies and practices; (2) the conflation of inherent social capacities of media technologies and discourses with existing mediations of power, and (3) the reduction of social space to one predominant dimension which overshadows all other forms of social power that media technologies, discourses, and practices are part of. As a response to these problems—and in bringing together the arguments of the five articles included in the thematic issue—this editorial calls for sociologized approaches to media technologies, discourses, and practices.
Highlights
There are several ways to study the relations between media and social space
While the above point may seem quite old, converging with classical debates that have been covered in textbooks such as McQuail’s (2010) Mass Communication Theory, we argue that media and communication studies still too often operate with ontological and epistemological frameworks that fail to grasp the complex ways in which media—understood as technologies of mediation—emerge through and play into social power relations
In contemporary discussions on how media change society and culture, there is a tendency to generalize new developments across social space without problematizing whether and how they are premised on certain power geometries
Summary
There are several ways to study the relations between media and social space. Examples include Bourdieusian studies of the dispersion of media repertoires in a class structure; Lefebvrian analyses of the significance of media for the social production of spaces and places, and their symbolic-material textures; social constructivist interpretations of mediation as a form of world making (following Berger and Luckmann), and mediatization as a form of social structuration (in the Giddensian sense). Keywords mediatization; media discourse; media practice; media sociology; media technology; power; social space
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