Mediatisation

Abstract: Drawing on recent advances in mediatisation theory, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding the increased interplay between religion and media. The media have become an important, if not primary, source of information about religious issues, and religious information and experiences become moulded according to the demands of popular media genres. As a cultural and social environment, the media have taken over many of the cultural and social functions of the institutionalised religions and provide spiritual guidance, moral orientation, ritual passages and a sense of community and belonging. Furthermore, the article considers the relationship between mediatisation and secularisation at three levels: society, organisation and individual. At the level of society, mediatisation is an integral part of secularisation. At the level of organisation and the individual, mediatisation may both encourage secular practices and beliefs and invite religious imaginations typically of a more subjecti...

Abstract: Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other services, have established themselves as part of the networked and increasingly hybrid public sphere, extending and transforming it to allow for and facilitate access to all kinds of content and participants. By their sheer ubiquity, these media contribute to changing media ecologies and open new ways and forms of communications between citizens and their representatives. During election campaigns, political parties and their candidates have a number of ways of seeking to mobilise voters by attracting attention to the parties' issues and top candidates. Many of these involve processes of mediatisation, that is, parties and politicians adapt their practices and messages to formats, deadlines and genres that are journalistically attractive. This study seeks to map and understand intermedial agenda setting between social media and traditional news media by analysing data from both local journalism and the social media activity of local politicia...

Abstract: There is little doubt that the landscape of memory has transformed in modern times. How, what and why individuals and societies remember and forget is being shaped by technological, political, social and cultural shifts that interpenetrate memory and memories, their makers, deniers and their (identified mistakingly or otherwise as) ‘repositories’. For instance, public and popular culture and the politics of conflict and security are infused with memory discourses and are conjoined through the contemporary’s obsession with commemoration and that which Erika Doss (2008) calls ‘memorial mania’.

Abstract: The aim of this article is to draw attention to the phenomenon of media-related pioneer communities. The maker, quantified-self and open data movements have made clear how much an analysis of such ...