Intensifying Mediatization: Everyware Media

Abstract

The notion of mediatization, as recent as it is — still taking shape, in fact, with competing definitions — is nevertheless a concept that labels what are fast becoming past developments. Other terms already push beyond it. Roger Silverstone’s mediapolis (2006) and Mark Deuze’s media life (2011 and in this volume) imply another step in the mediatization process. Mediatization recognizes the emergence of the media as a full-fledged, independent institutional realm, while other institutions necessarily operate interdependently with the media. The ontology of mediapolis or media life, however, grows out of intensifying conditions of media ubiquity, portability, personalization and, most of all, invisibility. When the media are everywhere and used for nearly everything, they lose their familiar distinctiveness as material devices, discrete services and social practices. Instead, they become embedded, inter-twined and increasingly hidden. And their use begins to surpass simulation to become an extended social reality and augmented sensory and cognitive experience.²

The map of the world shows no country called Technopolis, yet in many ways we are already its citizens. If one observes how thoroughly our lives are shaped by interconnected systems of modern technology, how strongly we feel their influence, respect their authority and participate in their workings, one begins to understand that, like it or not, we have become members of a new order in human history … [O]ne begins to comprehend a distinctively modern form of power, the foundations of a technopolitan culture.

(Winner, 1986, p. ix)

My thinking about the issues addressed in this chapter benefited from the appointment as visiting professor at the MIT Media Laboratory. I thank Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, then director of its Center for Future Civic Media, and his colleagues for that invigorating experience.