Andreas Hepp – författare

What does it mean that we can be reached on our mobile phones wherever we are and at all times? What are the cultural consequences if we are informed about ‘everything and anything important’ via television? How are our political, religious and ethnic belongings impacted through being increasingly connected by digital media? And what is the significance of all this for our everyday lives?

Drawing on Hepp’s fifteen-year research expertise on media change, this book deals with questions like these in a refreshingly straightforward and readable way. ‘Cultures of mediatization’ are described as cultures whose main resources are mediated by technical media. Therefore, everyday life in cultures of mediatization is ‘moulded’ by the media.

To understand this challenging media change it is inappropriate to focus on any one single medium like television, the press, mobile phones, the Internet or other forms of digital media. One has to capture the ‘mediatization’ of culture in its entirety. Cultures of Mediatization outlines how this can be done critically. In so doing, it offers a new way of thinking about our present-day media-saturated world.

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media.

Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other social and media theorists, they ask: what are the implications of digital media�s profound involvement in those processes? Is the result a social world that is stable and liveable, or one that is increasingly unstable and unliveable?

"This volume assembles an estimable range of critical analyses of one of the most important mediated artifacts of the modern world—the media event. The authors challenge the construct, extend its usefulness, expand its theoretical basis and application, and examine media events in a far larger and richer context than ever before. Students of global media today are well served by this superb collection of essays."David Morgan, Duke University, USA

"A welcome and worthy successor to Dayan and Katz’s path-breaking study that expands and enriches the discourse on global media events."

Daya Thussu, University of Westminster, UK

"This is an excellent collection, that will enable new kinds of argument about, and hopefully research into, the spectacular functions of the contemporary media."

Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia

We live in an age where the media is intensely global and profoundly changed by digitalization. Not only do many media events have audiences who access them online, but additionally digital media flows are generating new ways in which media events can emerge. In times of increasingly differentiated media technologies and fragmented media landscapes, the ‘eventization’ of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appreciation of popular media texts.

The events covered include Celebrity Big Brother, 9/11, the Iraq war and World Youth Day 2005 to give readers an understanding of the major debates in this increasingly high-profile area of media and cultural research.

"This volume assembles an estimable range of critical analyses of one of the most important mediated artifacts of the modern world—the media event. The authors challenge the construct, extend its usefulness, expand its theoretical basis and application, and examine media events in a far larger and richer context than ever before. Students of global media today are well served by this superb collection of essays."David Morgan, Duke University, USA

"A welcome and worthy successor to Dayan and Katz’s path-breaking study that expands and enriches the discourse on global media events."

Daya Thussu, University of Westminster, UK

"This is an excellent collection, that will enable new kinds of argument about, and hopefully research into, the spectacular functions of the contemporary media."

Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia

We live in an age where the media is intensely global and profoundly changed by digitalization. Not only do many media events have audiences who access them online, but additionally digital media flows are generating new ways in which media events can emerge. In times of increasingly differentiated media technologies and fragmented media landscapes, the ‘eventization’ of the media is increasingly important for the marketing and everyday appreciation of popular media texts.

The events covered include Celebrity Big Brother, 9/11, the Iraq war and World Youth Day 2005 to give readers an understanding of the major debates in this increasingly high-profile area of media and cultural research.

Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society.

Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today’s media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a ''good life'' for all.

Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.

Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society.

Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of the re-figuration of society by digital media and their infrastructures, and provides an understanding of how profound today’s media-related changes are, not only for institutions, organizations and communities, but for the individual as well. Rooted in the latest research, this book does not stop at a description of media-related change; instead, it raises the normative challenge of what deep mediatization should look like so that it might just stimulate a ''good life'' for all.

Providing original and critical research, the book introduces deep mediatization to students of media and cultural studies, as well as neighboring disciplines like sociology, political science and other cognate disciplines.

This volume sheds light on the underlying dynamics of mediatization, disentangling the actual unfolding of mediatization processes. The wide adoption and deep embedding of digital media and technology brings new questions to mediatization studies: how can we grasp this ‘deep mediatization’? In which way should we develop existing approaches of mediatization to analyse such dynamics? What are the consequences of this for theorising and empirically studying mediatization?  By using these questions as a starting point, this book presents an innovative and original collection that is dedicated to both the underlying dynamics of mediatization and recent dynamics related to digital media.