Mediatization As A Mover in Modernity Social and Cultural Change in The Context of Media Change

Friedrich Krotz
6 Mediatization as a mover in modernity:

social and cultural change in the context
of media change
Abstract: This chapter reconstructs the upcoming of the mediatization approach
in the 1990 as an academic answer to the upcoming digital and computer related
media. First it reports on the basic discussion about what to call this development
from a communication studies perspective, its main questions and its consequen-
ces for traditional communication studies. Mediatization is understood as a histori-
cal and actual development similar to globalization and modernization. In the
second part, by identifying sub-processes, more complex characteristics are pre-
sented: its relation to medium theory, its character as a historical meta process
and its complexity. Finally, a definition is given.
Keywords: mediatization, medium theory, medium concept, media change, cul-

tural change, meta process, long term development, social world, modernization,
communication studies
1 Mediatization: a conceptual answer to what was

happening
Compared with former times, we live in a world of change: technology, the media
system and the use of media, culture and society, conditions of work and leisure,
everyday life – nowadays all this and much more can no longer be regarded as
stable, but must be seen as “processes”. Of course, this does not mean that every-
thing is changing in a fundamental way – what we call “structures” are changing
slowly. This is the background against which we observe what is changing more
rapidly. Nevertheless, if we compare the living conditions of a person with an
average length of life at the beginning of her or his life and at the end, it seems
that nearly everything that we have concepts of has changed, maybe with the
exception of rather abstract observations such as “There is no society without
power” and the like.
One reason why things are changing is that media is changing. Here we use
the concept mediatization in order to grasp media change and the developments
that depend on that. “Mediatization” is a word that has a surprisingly long history
in communication studies, as Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz’s chapter in this volume
shows. Nevertheless, the first attempts to develop this concept systematically as a
basic one for communication studies were not seen before the second half of the
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132 Friedrich Krotz
1990s.1 Today, increasing numbers of academic researchers are discussing the con-
cept and its basic assumptions, are trying to find out whether they could refer to
it in doing their own research, and so are contributing to the development of the
concept.
We thus can say that the rise of the concept “mediatization” at the end of the
last century was an academic answer, especially of communication and media
scholars, to the growing importance of digital and computer directed media, which
was accompanied by a change in old media. One idea behind this concept is that
media have to be understood in a broader way, also historically, as processes
which are changing over time. But at that time the rise of digital media, the grow-
ing importance of media and media services for more and more areas of the life
of more and more individuals, for economy and democracy, for culture and society,
could no longer be overlooked, and more and more researchers agreed on the
idea that new theoretical approaches and methods to study and reconstruct these
developments were needed (cf. also Livingstone 2009, Couldry 2008). A side effect
of that development was that it put into question the old, mass communication
centered approaches and the theories of the classical postwar communication and
media studies of industrial societies in the northern parts of the world.
In times of social and cultural change it becomes evident that academic social
sciences are not only empirical sciences, but also need adequate concepts and
theories to describe the world and its development. The different disciplines begin
to construct concepts which help to develop the theories, so that they make a
contributution to developing answers to open questions and grasp developments
theoretically. Of course, they must be adequate and accepted – which means they
should be theoretically and empirically fruitful to describe and understand the
new developments, should assist the reanalysis of old, already existing, concepts
and insights, and should become accepted over time by researchers.
Mediatization is such a concept. Today it is used by increasing numbers of
academics with reference to the developments in culture and society based on
media development. This chapter will first establish relevant basic features of this
concept, as they have been discussed in the recent past – the label “mediatiza-
tion”, the need to think in processes, the core questions of the concept, and some
resulting concepts for the future of communication studies. Then further possibili-
ties and problems of the concept will be introduced: its relationship to medium
theory and the idea that mediatization is not only an actual process concerned
with digital media, but has taken place in the past, as, for example, the long-term
process of societies to become literate and the way book culture has changed. We
thus can understand mediatization as a historical long-term process that has
1 I myself used this concept for the first time in a publication (Krotz 1995) after having developed
the concept in a broader research project about changing public communication, supported by a
grant from the Volkswagen Foundation.

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Mediatization as a mover in modernity 133
occurred since the beginning of human communication. We will discuss the com-
plexity of metaprocess mediatization, that today may be understood to consist of
partial processes. Further, we will describe how mediatization is working and how
the relation between media change and change of culture and society can be
understood. A final definition of mediatization and some further comments will
conclude this chapter. The main aim is thus not only to develop an analytical and
at the same time integrating concept of mediatization, but also to show that we
here have a concept which is crucial for humanity in modernity and postmodern-
ity.
2 Basic features of “mediatization”

2.1 Why call it mediatization?
In the 1990s, it became clear that mobile phone, Internet, and so on were not just
new media, but that they were the visible peak of a more penetrating development.
Some researchers started to analyze single upcoming media or the developments
of old media like television or books. Others tried to take the whole development
into consideration and thus made a step into the mediatization research of today.
But at that time, the process attracted various labels. Some called the develop-
ment “digitalization”, others spoke about the rise of a network, information, or
knowledge society, but besides mediatization there were also labels like “media-
tion”, “mediatation” or “medialization”. Thus, we need a reason for why to use
this or that concept. Of course, behind all existing labels there are specific theoreti-
cal concepts, but the question is whether they hold in the given case.
Firstly, we should decide whether we want to use a dynamic, process-oriented
label like mediatization or digitalization, or a label that refers to a stable final
result of the development like network society or the upcoming information or
knowledge society.
Three reasons make it clear that a dynamic label for such a development is
better: 1) Every society is a network, information, or knowledge society – such a
label thus is not very clear as it does not emphasize a visible difference between
today and the future. 2) There is the question of how one should define “informa-
tion society”: Is this the case today, was it the case ten years ago, when the label
was first coined, or will society in the next ten years finally be an information
society? The concepts “network” or “knowledge” society reflect that something is
changing, but the labels themselves do not make this really clear. 3) It is not
known whether at the end of today’s media development and all the other existing
long-term developments like globalization or individualization, there still will exist
what sociologists call a society. Thus, a process-related concept seems to be more
adequate, as it is more open.

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134 Friedrich Krotz
Secondly, with reference to dynamic concepts, we must decide whether digital-

ization or a media-related concept like mediatization, medialization, or mediata-
tion is better. To decide this, we must look at what exactly is changing today.
On the one hand, today there is of course a process of analog data being
transformed into digital data – that is the fact which seems to make a label like
digitalization relevant. But if we look at why this new form of data is important,
we observe that this is the case because there are computers as “universal
machines” that are able to work with data in digital form. It is the computer that
organizes, sorts, controls, and directs digital data, that transforms, translates, and
uses data, that makes the Internet, the mobile phone, or interactive media pos-
sible. The digital form of the data is only a technological condition of today for
that. If we accept that media development today includes basic changes in culture
and society, then it is not the form of the data that is relevant but the fact that
there are more and more computers all over the world that work with the data.
Thus, the label digitalization is a bit misleading; instead a label like computeriza-
tion would be more apposite.
But both concepts – digitalization and computerization – refer to the technical
conditions. In contrast to that, people as users, as citizens, and as economic and
consuming subjects do not experience technology. Instead, they experienced the
rise of new media like computers, digital TV, or cellular phones. They experienced
the growing importance of media and the changing communication habits of more
and more people at work, at home, and in their leisure time. And they experienced
that new types of media, social communication, and social activities become nor-
mal – websites, organized by single people, wikis, Wikipedia and wikileaks, online
games, flashmobs, and so on. Thus, a label that refers to these media develop-
ments would be much closer to the experiences of people, as it became obvious
that growing up and becoming socialized in society changed, as social relations
and working conditions changed and information and its consumption increas-
ingly took place by using media. Over time then, economy and administration,
learning and political communication, advertisements and public discussions
change as a consequence of media change.
Thus, a media related label like mediatization or mediatation or something
like that would be much more adequate than digitalization or computerization,
when referring to the experiences of people, who construct reality and media by
using and communicating with them.
Thirdly, there then was a still ongoing discussion, whether mediation or medi-
atization, medialization or mediatation is the most adequate label, and what
exactly is meant by this. Again, it is clear that behind these different labels there
are different theoretical concepts, as the work of Lundby (2009a), Hjarvard (2009),
Hartmann and Hepp (2010), Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby (2010), Thompson (1995),
Silverstone (2007), Livingstone (2009) and Couldry (2008), cf. also Krotz and Hepp
(2012), shows. But the ongoing discussion also shows that “Mediatization” is

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accepted by most people and that this includes the broadest approach, at least
at the moment (cf. also Steinmaurer 2013). Thus, we should concentrate further
discussion on important questions instead of going over the label again and again.
2.2. Learning from sociology: processes and meta processes

Using a label like mediatization as the name of a media-related development of
culture and society leads to a lot of open questions: What does this mean exactly?
What becomes mediatized? Where does it start? And so on. We will discuss these
and other questions in this chapter, but first it is necessary to develop an under-
standing of what is meant by process and how we can study and think academi-
cally in processes.
Let us start with the slightly more general question: With which theoretical
concepts we can analyze change? Communication and media studies until now
have not been greatly interested in describing developments – and if they have,
they mostly described developments of single media.2 As so often, sociology is a
bit broader, as there is a lot of work on social change, which is its own subfield, as
seen in the work of authors such as Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, or Immanuel
Wallerstein. In recent decades especially so-called transformation research was
influential here (e.g. Müller and Schmid 1995). But still, as far as I can see, there
are no consensually used concepts that could be transferred to other fields or even
clear definitions for concepts like change, development, evolution, and revolution
and so on in order to grasp what “not stable” could mean.
The only well-defined and accepted concept that is used in sociology and
communication studies seems to be the concept “process”. It is, for example, used
by Everett Rogers (1996) to describe the diffusion of innovations. Here, a process
starts with a fixed given innovation, for example an object like a new technology,
a new drug, or a new way of doing something, like healing a person or producing
more rice. Rogers’ theory then describes the diffusion of this innovation over time
in a given geographical area by describing different states at different points of
time. Here, the innovation is assumed to be stable over time. The description of
such a process of diffusion usually consists of percentages of people or experts of
the whole relevant population, who use this innovation, measured at different
points of time. This is exactly the definition of process for example in the encyclo-
pedia of sociology (Fuchs et al. 1978, 527 f.).3 It is evident that this definition of
“process” follows the rules of mathematical thinking and the way, as Bertrand
2 Of course, the so-called medium theory is also based on the idea of media change, but does not
refer to media development – we will discuss this below.
3 A more open definition is given by Norbert Elias (1998), who wrote the article about “social
processes” in another encyclopedic volume. This is much closer to what we call meta process (see
below).

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136 Friedrich Krotz
Russell pointed out, in which quantitative social research understands and

describes the world. He once said that on the basis of formal logic and mathemati-
cal thinking a flying arrow does not move but is just at different points of time at
different places in the space (Russell 1975). This idea is similar to the fact that a
movie is a rapid sequence of single stable pictures.
But there are at least three arguments why it is not always helpful to reduce
our understanding of reality to such a concept of change, as Rogers used it, when
we think about mediatization.
First of all, Roger’s approach is not really helpful to describe the diffusion of
a medium, as a medium itself is not a stable innovation, but a process and continu-
ously under development: For example, the innovation “computer” changed over
time, as it got a hard disk and later a colored screen and then became a part of
the Internet and so on. Thus, the respective percentages of users and non-users
describe different things at different points of time and cannot be compared. Evi-
dently, a mediatization process is much broader than the diffusion of one or a few
media as it asks in addition for the relevant social and cultural changes. And the
development which we call mediatization does not take place in one area only,
but in different areas of lives of people, in different regions, and different cultural
areas – of course nonlinear, not simultaneously, and with different results, for
example in school, jobs, political discussion, or shopping.
Secondly, we should doubt whether all kinds of processes can be regarded in
the same way as the process of diffusion of innovations, i.e. in a way that continual
changes and motions are reduced to a sequence of stable states. A movie for exam-
ple may consist of a sequence of pictures, but we experience it as an ongoing
continual process. Rogers and Russell’s analytic perspective is thus not helpful in
reconstructing the people’s experience, as it cannot be called a way of experienc-
ing and thinking in processes. What we need is to learn to think in open and broad
processes, the beginning and the results of which we do not know.
Thirdly, in addition, we can learn from sociology. There it is clear that not all
developments can be understood in such a narrow way as process as this is the
case with the diffusion of innovations, as developments like modernization, globali-
zation, enlightenment, individualization, or civilization are of different type: con-
cepts like these are well defined and used in sociology, and we also use them in
our everyday life to explain the world, but they are much broader and more open
than a process in the sense defined above: They do not take place in restricted
areas, they are long-term and last over a few or several generations, they may not
have a clear beginning and may never have a clearly defined end. In addition,
they may take place at the same time with different intensities and directions in
different societies and cultures, as in their concrete form they depend on a lot of
conditions given by the respective culture and society they are part of. For exam-
ple, it is arbitrary to say that modernization or civilization have begun at this or
that date, and those developments took place in very different ways in Europe,
the Arab countries, or in China.

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Here we cannot develop a theory of change, but will concentrate on the third
point: In the following we will call such overriding developments meta processes.
Meta processes are long-term processes of processes that are relevant for the actual
and the long-term development of everyday life and identity of the people and for
culture and society in general. Of course, they can take different ways and direc-
tions in different cultures and societies and historical phases, as it is the case with
media development in different cultures and under different historical conditions.
As examples for meta processes, taken from sociology, the terms modernization,
enlightenment, or christianization can serve here, but also individualization, glo-
balization, and commercialization. With regard to communication studies, for
example, we can observe the coming into existence of a book culture that took
place in China, Korea, and Europe as an earlier mediatization process, but at differ-
ent moments in time and with different forms of development (Bösch 2011). This
example also shows that the rise of book culture ignored the printing press in
China, but in Korea and Europe, the printing press became highly important –
nevertheless all three societies became literate. Thus, meta processes are rather
complex and may differ in a relevant way in different cultures and under different
historical conditions (in more detail: Krotz 2003, 2007: 25 ff., 2009a).
In this sense then, we speak of a meta process mediatization which is taking
place today, nonsimultaneously in different cultures, societies, and different areas
of everyday life and which must be analyzed through communication studies. As
an aside, we can say that cultural and societal developments do not, of course,
depend only on one of the named long-term meta processes. Empirical studies and
theoretical conclusions thus must take into consideration the interplay of such
developments – but we will here concentrate on mediatization as a meta process.
While doing so we should bear in mind that today the meta processes globaliza-
tion, individualization, and commercialization together with mediatization are the
movers of modernity.
2.3 The core topic of mediatization: the relation between media

change and the change of everyday life and identity,
culture and society
In the following we understand mediatization as a meta process as explained
above, as a long term development that includes media change and the respective
change in culture and society (Krotz 2011). In the introduction to this chapter, I
described mediatization as an answer to the empirically observed facts that we
live under changing conditions of media and media development and at the same
time in changing cultures and societies. By going into more detail, we can describe
this central topic of Mediatization better. Let us start by using the field of political
communication as an example and then come on to more general statements.

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138 Friedrich Krotz
Political communication research is mainly concerned with the role of media

in the field of politics. Today, political parties, the administration, government and
all democratic institutions have had to learn to relate in new ways to the media,
which increasingly do not only report and comment on what has happened or
serve as an arena (as in former times), but appear as actors with own their interests
in shaping politics, in order to earn money or at least to gain attention. This means
that the media have become actors of a new type in the political field and must
be taken into consideration by the traditional actors such as parliament, the politi-
cal parties, political organizations, or the lobby. This is what researchers in politi-
cal communication sometimes call medialization (see, for example, Schulz 2008).
But by far this is not all that has been changed in the field of political commu-
nication by what we here call mediatization. On a meso level, the administration,
the parliament, the government, and the political parties “mediatized” themselves
as they used digital media for their tasks, their organization, and their contacts
with their members and the people. Political parties, for example, created virtual
member groups, virtual meetings, developed newsletters and websites, blogs and
used Facebook and Twitter – in this sense, all these institutions and organizations
became producers of media for their own purposes. In tandem, the political partici-
pation of people became mediatized, not only because ever more people used the
new media, but because new forms of participation became possible: new access
to information, new contacts between politicians and voters, new websites to con-
trol and evaluate political developments or politicians and so on. The relevant
contexts of political communication and political discourses also became different
by commenting blogs, wikileaks, a changing in the information gathering of news-
papers, the Clinton hearing via the Internet in Europe, virtual political groups and
online discussions, cyber war, data surveillance and so on. All this together cre-
ated and still is creating new mediatized contexts of political development, as all
these developments are transforming the communicative construction of reality, of
politics and interaction by the people into a mediatized construction of reality.
Thus, it is recommended that researchers in political communication broaden their
understanding of what they describe to be medialization or mediatization.
This example includes the idea that mediatization is a meta process that is at
least relevant for the different forms of communication in a society. In general
terms, communication increasingly takes place with relation to media. I will ana-
lyze this in more detail in section 3 below, but will state here that this does not only
mean that people communicate by media – it is also the case that our knowledge
of everything depends on media or that media may be seen as mighty institutions,
which are relevant for political decisions and processes. Mediatization thus is a
much broader concept in its influence on culture and society than just looking at
media or even at mass media content. On the level of communicative action, we
can differentiate this in the following way:
On the one hand, there is mediated communication, which means that commu-
nication takes place with media like TV or computer games or by using telephone,

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letters, or e-mail, for example. Besides mediated communication, there is media

related communication. This happens if we communicate in the presence of media,
while using media, for example while listening to music or watching pictures, but
also if we communicate about media or using or referring to media content, or if
we communicate by using information which we got from the media, or refer to
emotions that we have had by using media: All these together may serve as the
context of our thinking, our expressions, and our understanding. This then means
that the growing use and meaning of media today not only changes culture and
society, because people use media for more and more purposes and interests, but
also that the contexts of communication more and more are media related: Com-
munication under such conditions is what we might call mediatized communica-
tion, which is much more than mediated communication. The socially and commu-
nicatively constructed reality thus became a mediatized reality, as mediated and
media related communication becomes more and more relevant.
On the basis of this we finally can say that mediatization does not only include
changes in culture and society because of increasing media use, but also a new
quality comes into existence, because this development is not linear and causal,
recursive and reflexive, as the media may play different roles and have different
points of reference. We communicate with the help and in the presence of media
and refer to knowledge and norms, values and emotions, that we learned and
experienced by media, and thus communication, culture, and society cannot be
understood without such a reference to media: As more and more areas of human
life were communicatively constructed in a mediatized way, whole areas and in
the long run the whole culture and society cannot be understood if we does not
take into account that the contexts of communication are mediated and media
related also, and this is what makes communication mediatized. As the develop-
ments have to be described by quantitative and qualitative changes, not just as a
“more and more”, but also as a complex and non linear evolution, in obviously a
similar complexity as globalization or modernization, it makes sense to understand
mediatization as a metaprocess, that of course must be studied further.
2.4 Necessary enlargments of communication studies

To sum up: starting with the point that we live in a rapidly changing world with
rapidly changing media and media services, we assume that we can describe and
theoretically grasp this development as a metaprocess called mediatization. The
question behind this is how media are developing and how this is relevant for the
everyday life of people, their social relations, and their identity and how this is
relevant for the meso level of organizations and institutions and the macro level
of culture and society. We understand this development as an open process that
may be influenced by people and civil society, by government and bureaucracy,
and, of course, enterprises, industry, and other organizations and institutions –

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140 Friedrich Krotz
while all these entities will also be changing if this metaprocess goes on. Further
questions will be discussed in the rest of this chapter, but before we do so we
want to state that such a view also demands changes in communication studies.
Communication studies as a type of social science have until now mostly been
interested in questions of media use, media content, and media effects, whereupon
effects have been defined to be causal consequences of content (see, for example,
McQuail, [1996] 2010). This traditional orientation of communication studies of
course took seriously what public opinion and political institutions wanted to
know from communication studies: How do media influence people, democracy,
and the society by content?
But today, media are much more than an arena, an actor with an opinion, and
an agent of information, as for example Newcomb and Hirsch (1986) described
them. Today, we are not only concerned with what formerly was called mass
media, but also with media of interpersonal and interactive communication. Media
belong in addition to the everyday life of people. They are of high importance for
children and young people, as they grew up with them. Their existence generates
control and power, as they penetrate everyday life, culture, and society. This was
already a topic in early communication studies and also one of McLuhan, Meyro-
witz and others (see below), but has been forgotten in main stream studies.
In this sense then, the study of mediatization is a must for communication
studies. It gives this discipline a broader perspective such that it can contribute to
find answers for civil society and politics, and of course, for an economy interested
in human development, where we go. In the future, at least in the next decades,
communication studies must work under changing media conditions and will
study for example communication with robots and augmented reality, just to name
some developing topics. We also think that a mediatization approach may serve
as a common frame for the different disciplines that are concerned with media
change and other related topics. And we think that such an approach is necessary
if we want to understand the historical development of media and communication
in the past. Other academic disciplines like sociology, psychology, political sci-
ence, or the research on child development today are also interested in media
development and are doing a lot of media related research – we should cooperate
with them (Krotz 2009b).
This helps us to draw further conclusions. For example, communication stud-
ies cannot further be restricted to understand the human being as a part of an
audience at the end of a line of transport of information as described by Harold
Lasswell with his famous set of questions: “Who says what in which channel to
whom with what effect?” (Lasswell 1964, 32–51). Instead, we need an understand-
ing of the human being as a socially and communicatively constructed subject in
society that communicates in specific social and mediatized worlds on the base of
different social and cultural conditions, forms, habits, technologies, and interests
with others. Each subject today is becoming an individual that is living with parts

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of his or her identity in the net and is understanding media like the smartphone
or Google Glass as a part of his or her body.
In connection with the relevance of all these developments, we must decide
what kind of modernity we want. Or to paraphrase Herbert Schiller (1989): We live
in a big experiment that industry, government, administration, and economy is
realizing, without knowing how and why and where we go. It’s the task of acade-
mia and especially of communication studies to inform civil society so that it can
decide what should be done. The following sections now will describe that concept
in more detail in order to collect more knowledge about mediatization develop-
ment and to avoid misunderstandings.
3 Further features of mediatization

While in section 2 of this chapter we have developed the basic features and charac-
teristics of the actual mediatization approach, we now will discuss characteristic
assumptions and ideas belonging to this approach that are not shared by all
researchers working on mediatization.
3.1 Revisiting medium theory: from historical phases to media

change
In some sense, mediatization research is a child of medium theory. Joshua Meyrow-
itz (1997) labeled the common work of those researchers who asked for the role of
media in culture and society with the attribute “medium theory”. It is well known
that Harold Innis (1951, 2007), Marshall McLuhan (1992), Neil Postman (1982) and
Joshua Meyrowitz (1990) already analyzed the role of media in society, starting
with the assumption that culture and society are influenced and formed by the
respective leading media of a historical phase. Besides these researchers, there are
other scholars like Eric Havelock (1990), Walter Ong (1995) or Jack Goody and his
collaborators (1986), who may be added to this approach. They have worked in a
similar way in the same direction, asking for the importance of media for culture
and society, but they differ in relevant points from the first group and belong to
medium theory only in a wider sense.
What is common to all these scholars? They did not reduce the role of (mass-)
media to the content which they transport, as it is for example expressed in the
well-known Lasswell formula, which was basic for main stream communication
studies (see above). Instead, they thought that media technologies themselves just
by their very existence and by human use have been relevant in shaping culture
and society, and – as far as the medium theory researchers are involved – that the
human history can be segmented into phases that are determined by a central

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142 Friedrich Krotz
type of media. They thus speak for example from the era of oral, written, or printed
communication or use similar attributes like the TV age. Under this umbrella,
different ideas have been realized.
Whereas Innis (1951, 2007) asked for the relation between media and power
in different societies and showed that stable stone tables supported a different
type of hierarchy and societal power, compared with light paper, McLuhan (1990)
understood media as extensions of human beings and was concerned with the
changing perception and the changing activities of people, in as far as they used
different media. Postman (1983) then did not create as many of his own ideas but
used McLuhan’s argument to become the “Kassandra” of media development,
which he thought would ruin analytical thinking, democracy, and all the rest.
Meyrowitz (1990) was the empirical researcher of medium theory. He mainly was
concerned with television. His idea was that by the technology of TV basic social
rules that formerly had been relevant for the acceptance of hierarchies, the differ-
ence between men and women, or group building processes would disappear. It
is well known that the researchers of medium theory, with the exception of Mey-
rowitz, did not try to test their hypotheses empirically and that they mostly took
a technologically based argumentation. A further common feature of those me-
dium theory scholars is that they usually tried to explain the whole of human
history by the role of the media. They did so by defining a main media that shaped
and influenced culture and society in a special way for each single phase of human
development (Krotz 2001).
The other scholars mentioned above came from different approaches and disci-
plines and studied the rise of writing, the role of the printing press, and tried to
find out how oral culture could function. They did not develop an overall theory
as this was done by Innis and McLuhan, but studied media and their meaning for
society in a similar way. Nevertheless, they have in common that they all asked
for the role of media in general and not for media effects by content of media.
The work of the scholars of medium theory was of great importance for com-
munication studies, as they worked on a neglected field and created many
insights. Nevertheless, a number of their assumptions must be seen to be wrong:
the technologically based argumentation, their explanations of human history only
or mainly by the influence of media, and the labeling of the epochs of human
existence as oral, electrical, and so on. And of course it is true that human commu-
nication is the basic human activity to construct a common culture and society,
but we should not overestimate media and neglect all other relevant fields that
influence human existence.
Nevertheless, the mediatization approach is committed to medium theory for
some ideas, but must try to avoid the mistakes of medium theory. In the following,
we will discuss in more detail three problematic conclusions that might be drawn
from medium theory but which may lead mediatization theory in the wrong direc-
tion.

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Firstly, there are some researchers like Finneman (2011) who took over the idea
that human history is substantially influenced and formed by media and that it
makes sense to segment history into phases that are labeled by the predominant
media like oral, written, printed, or electric communication. This, of course, is
correct in as far as media are relevant for culture and society, power and organiza-
tion of the society. In the perspective of a mediatization approach, this is the case
because media are relevant for the way in which the world is communicatively
constructed. But we must take into account that mediatization is only one meta
process, and the development of culture and society is not only a result of mediati-
zation. Media are probably overestimated, if it is maintained that they determine
the entire human life.4 In addition, if we look for example at the sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu (2005), it is evident that media are important, but that social, cultural,
financial, and symbolic capital as the resources to be successful in a society may
also come from institutions other than the media.
Further, it cannot be assumed that the development of the whole media system
in history takes place in steps, from writing to printing, from printing to radio and
TV, such that the former media disappear or become irrelevant: As empirical
research is showing, in general the old media will not be substituted, but will take
over new roles, as for example the radio did after the invention of TV. While the
radio before the dissemination of TV was relevant for news, it was no longer rele-
vant for that for most people after TV came into most households. Instead, music
and the transmission of practical information by radio became of importance, and
the radio became a medium of accompanying people in their everyday life. We
should describe this as an ongoing process of differentiation of the media system.
And finally, it should be noted that the mediatization approach emphasizes the
changing of media, culture, and society and does not assume that between the
changing epochs and the points of change which are assumed by medium theory,
nothing happens – on the contrary, these development processes are the main
topic of mediatization theory.
Secondly, there are researchers who take over from medium theory the idea
that media as technologies directly influence the human existence and people’s activ-
ities and thus are relevant for their lives, independent from the culture and society,
in which the people live who use these media. It is well known that this assumption
of the scholars like Innis and McLuhan has again and again been criticized.
Indeed, Innis and McLuhan assume in their argumentation that a medium can
only be used in one way, which is equivalent to assuming that technology deter-
mines what can be done with a media. Meyrowitz argued differently, as he tried
to find out how the use of TV opens new perspectives on and orientations for
activities in a society, but he then argues in a similar way, that every single person
must understand this in the same way.
4 McLuhan, Innis and Finneman do not have an argument why media should be so relevant. They
just argue about what can be done with media, but this of course is not enough.

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Against this, we here understand media not only to be a technology. Referring

to Raymond Williams we define a medium as a technology and a social form, given
by social institutions and enterprises, related with rules, laws, expectations of the
people and the media makers, and so on. These two “dimensions” – cultural form
and/or social institution and technology – at least describe the structural view of
a medium. In addition there is at the same time a situational view, that understands
a medium as an ongoing machine of distributing, producing, and transporting con-
tent, that on the other hand serves as a space of experience of the users. Both
definitions together – similar to the definition of language as given structure and
situational use as parole, following Ferdinand de Saussure (1998) – thus could be
understood as a semiotically based definition of media. Referring to this definition,
it is clear that an only technologically based analysis of media as done by Innis
and McLuhan cannot hold.
Thirdly: There is a further argument about the mediatization meta process that
can be rejected with reference to the above given definition of media. This is the
frequently heard assumption that the reason behind mediatization is a given intern
media logic (e.g. Altheide and Snow 1972; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Schulz 2004,
2008; and others). The underlying argument here is that each medium follows an
own given logic, which is valid under all conditions and always in the same way.
If this is the case, then a medium would operate outside of culture and society.
But this is not possible. If we for example look at the history of TV in the last five
decades, it is obvious that TV is quite different today, compared with earlier times.
If we compare TV in Saudi Arabia or Iran with the private TV in US or public
service TV in some countries of Europe, there are also great differences. For exam-
ple, while the public service stations in the US are independent of ratings, the
private stations put pressure on people to watch more and more TV because of
their economic interests. Against these capitalist goals, the pressure to watch TV
in Saudi Arabia comes from the religious society, which presents itself in a reli-
gious TV in order to educate its members. In sum, there is no overall media logic,
whatever this should be exactly, that holds for mass media, telephone, Internet,
and computer games in the same way. We thus conclude (see also Lundby 2009a;
Hepp 2012) that the idea of media logic cannot hold. Instead, it may make sense
to speak of a capitalistic logic that is relevant for media, at least in a lot of nations
and internationally, but this is not meant by media logic and this discussion seems
to disappear behind the media logic discussion.
Against these three misunderstandings that often are transported from
medium theory to the mediatization approach, we would now mention the ideas
that are common to both approaches. The main thing that mediatization research
in my opinion is taking over from medium theory is the perspective to ask for the
role of media and media change for culture and society. This defines a core question
of both approaches, as it also makes clear if we look at the introductory definition
of mediatization: How do culture and society change in the context of media

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change? In other words, it is the common assumption between medium theory

and mediatization research that there is a relevant influence of media and media
change to the everyday life of people and to culture and society.
While medium theory, as shown above, takes the media technology for the
media, it only asks whether and how media are influencing culture and society.
Because mediatization theory understands media as a technology and cultural
form, we here take the other question into consideration as well: How are media
shaped by culture and society? More precisely this means for example that TV and
other media in different societies may be differently embedded in the respective
society, by laws, organization, and norms, by content and production, by use of
the users. Media change, cultural and social change thus must be understood as a
dialectical process that must be reconstructed in a dialectical way by mediatization
research. Media are created, formed, and influenced by culture and society in an
ongoing process, and they are vice versa influential for culture and society and its
social construction. Both processes take place continually and simultaneously, but
also in a sequence of different steps, where processes may become denser or
looser. This will be discussed further below; it is the question how mediatization
works.
But before doing so let us finally point to another important fact: We said in
the above chapter that the idea to develop a mediatization concept came up with
the rise of digital media and the media explosion that frequently is said to be a
revolution. It is without doubt true that a lot of new technologies came up and
were used by people and by this were installed as media. The appearance of new
media of course is changing the media system as a whole. But this is only one
part of media development that is relevant for changes in culture and society.
What has to be taken into consideration as well is the fact that the old media are
changing, as this also is a reason why the media system is changing. Understand-
ing mediatization thus demands a perspective on the whole media system of a
culture and society, of course with its relations to other cultures and societies. We
will show that below by using some examples. And we will also argue that because
of this mediatization is a metaprocess that was discovered studying digital media
development, but the concept can and should also be used for the description of
other historical developments of media, culture, and society.
3.2 Mediatization as a long-term process that accompanies

human development
In this section, as a consequence of the above argument, the following question
will be discussed: Is mediatization a current process that started with the digital
media in the 20 th century or with the technical media in the 19 th century, or is it a
long-term process that has been taking place over a long time already?

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Now, as far as we refer to medium theory, it would be an simple argument to

say that mediatization research takes over the idea of a long-term development of
mediatization from medium theory. We could also refer to the Austrian Josef Riepl,
who studied the media of the antiquity as well and showed that in those times
there already existed different media that changed over time in production and
use, and that no old medium was substituted by the new one (Riepl 1913). Similar
conclusions could be drawn from media and communication history. But we want
to go a bit deeper and will report two historical case studies: 1) the long-term
process of growing literacy in the world, and 2) the process of the changing modes
of reading in the outgoing Middle Ages in Europe. Both can be understood as sub-
processes of the meta process mediatization, each having a different character.
1. There is broad historical research about the slowly, but continually growing
importance of reading and writing from the invention of writing until today (Stein
2010; Raible 2006) which could be called the “becoming literate” of the world. It
is described as a process drawing from different sources: the personal interest of
some people, a growing number of jobs and working places where reading and
writing was important, for example the church, traders, the administration of King-
doms and cities, the growth of universities in the 13th century and later, and so
on, of course, different ones in different phases of history. This growth of literacy,
at least in Europe, was a long-term process, that for a long time was controlled by
the church and the monasteries and which in most times only integrated a few
children and adults. But then the Prussian King Frederik instituted schools for
everybody in Germany in the 18th century and so gave all children the chance to
go to school, but at the same moment forced them to go to school. As Stein empha-
sizes in his brilliant historical overview of the development of the ability to read
and write in Europe, it was not until the rise of industrial society in the 19th century
that the great mass of children learned to read and to write in Germany, the UK,
and France. He also shows that with the ability to read the book culture made a
great development – that the newspaper culture, the book entertainment culture,
reading in trains and elsewhere was growing. Thus, this development may be
understood to be a process of mediatization long before the rise of digital media.
Of course, it should be noted that this was not a process that the governments
of the respective countries promoted in order to give their inhabitants the chance
to participate in democracy or to offer them ways of self-realization. Instead, the
aim was the production of people who then should be able to work in the factories
and produce more complicated things (Stein 2010) or, in the case of King Frederik
of Prussia, to get better soldiers. The same is described by the historian Juergen
Osterhammel (2011) in his world history of the 19th century. He also describes the
rise of schools as a way to enforce segmentation into social classes by promoting
children of the higher classes. And Stein (2010) reminds us of the fact that even
in 20th-century schools children spent more time in learning good handwriting

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than how to participate actively in democracy and society by writing good argu-
ments and ideas. This did not change until the Internet.
Thus, we can conclude that the long-term process of a society becoming liter-
ate can be understood to be a part of the human meta process of mediatization.
Nevertheless this was not a free decision of the people, but an enforced process.
2. The second historical case study refers to reading in the 11th century in Europe.
We here refer to the impressive example given by the sociologist and historian
Ivan Illich (2010) (see also Krotz 2012, 2014 for more details; Bösch 2011). Illich
wrote a commentary about the book “Didascalicon” written by the monk Hugo of
the monastery Saint-Victor in France in the first half of the 11th century. Hugo’s
book explained how to read correctly. To understand this, we must start with a
description of what a book at that time was. For Hugo, a book is always written
in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, and the author is one of the famous scholars of the
Christian church, of the Roman Empire, or of the Greek times like Plato or Aristotle.
Reading in this sense is free from any relation to your real life, and you must have
high respect for the author and his ideas. In addition, a book is written by hand,
without a lot of features that we expect from a book. It neither had a table of
content nor subtitles or punctuation, and mostly there would have been no spaces
between words. Thus, you can only read such a book aloud, following the
sequence of letters, and by listening to what you are saying, if you want to find
out what was written there. This was the way to understand the author, whom
one must believe and treat with respect. Thus, reading is accompanied by memo-
rizing the text and it usually, at least in the monasteries, ended in a believing
meditation.
Illich explains all this to his readers, and he also makes clear that Hugo wrote
his book in a historical moment of change: a century later, books have been much
more like books as we know them today, with all the things that we would miss
in Hugo’s books. In addition it then was no longer usual to read aloud and in
some sense “by your ears”, but by your eyes. Following Illich, the reason for this
development was the change in social life: Changes in agriculture, craft, and trade,
in the administration of the church, and of the possessions of the nobles and so
on. All that produced a demand for knowledge, and thus books became more
practical. They were written in the languages people used in their everyday lives,
arranged by titles and subtitles and easier to read. Finally even a critical reading
became possible, which by Illich was called scholastic reading. This all happened
centuries before the invention of the printing press, but more or less at the same
time as the idea of the university came into existence in Europe. This also may be
understood as a mediatization development, as here again we have a relation
between culture and society on the one hand and media development on the
other – it is obvious, that there are complex dialectic relations between all these
changes.

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148 Friedrich Krotz
Both examples make clear, that mediatization understood as the relation

between media change and cultural and societal change is a process that did not
start with the digital media, but includes many developments that had happened
before digitalization. We thus can learn a lot about the structures we are living in
today, if we understand mediatization as an ongoing meta process that already
started long ago, and the relations between media, culture, and society do not
only exist today, but already did so in the past. Europe’s becoming literate was
evidently a development that fits under the concept of mediatization, as it hap-
pened together with a long lasting process of changing culture and society. This
process also influenced reading, writing, people’s knowledge, and a lot of other
things. The same is true if we look at the transformation of books, and the transfor-
mation of reading and its aims that were shown in the second example.
We thus conclude that mediatization should be seen as a meta process, that has
accompanied humanity since the invention of communication. Also the development
of audible and visual media in the 19th and 20th centuries may be analyzed in its
relation to changing culture and society. And all this shows that we must take
into consideration historical processes if we want to understand the mediatization
process of today. An understanding of mediatization that cuts the actual develop-
ment off from the former developments is thus not helpful. As the examples above
show that media development takes place in relation to power in a society, we
also need critical consideration and critical research.
3.3 Sub-processes of a meta process: the complexity of

mediatization
Let us now as the next step in developing the mediatization concept have a more
detailed look at problems of how to describe and theorize media change as a part
of what mediatization research must analyze. Here we discuss first ways of media
change and then sub-processes of mediatization. Both perspectives together make
it clear that mediatization is a highly complex meta process that must be studied
empirically in a detailed way.
As has already been said above, if we want to study mediatization starting
with the analysis of media change, we must always ask for the change of the
whole media system. This is the case because changes may come up with new
media, with resulting changes in old ones, but it also may be the case that only
the old media are changing, without new ones coming into existence. In both
cases, the relations between media may change, and this may be a starting point
to look for follow up changes in culture and society.
In addition, in order to describe media changes systematically, it is necessary
to remember an adequate definition of media such that one can describe conse-
quences of different ways of media change. Above, we defined media as consisting
of four “dimensions”: structurally a technology and an embedded social institu-

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tion, situationally a machine for producing and distributing content in specific

forms and a space for experiences (see also Williams 1958, 1990; Krotz 2012). Hav-
ing this in mind, we should conclude that media change can start everywhere in
this square: Structurally by the invention and distribution of a new technology or
socially by the rise or disappearance of institutions, for example, if censorship is
abolished or new rules for advertising will come into effect, and situationally as
shown above by new interests and demands of users or by changing content and
its presentation.
Examples for this are easy to find – the mobile phone was a technologically
driven invention, while radio and the Internet are technologies which were
invented by the military and later promoted by the government. An example for a
technologically driven media change of an already existing medium today is the
cinema, as it becomes more and more an arena for new experiences by technologi-
cal developments. Complex and expensive innovations take place there, as 3D-
movies, live transmissions of sport events or opera, theater, and music events for
public viewing, or the distribution of movies via satellite, which also can be
received in restaurants or cafes and not only in classical cinemas. This in the long
run may contribute not only to changing communicational habits of the people,
as it for example promotes public viewing, but also may change the role of opera,
concerts, or sport events as part of our culture.
Other media innovations may come into existence directly from the users. They
usually are not a homogenous group or audience, and thus specific subgroups
may demand other content or new communicational forms. Such groups even may
create new forms of mediated communication, which lead to new forms of media
use. The classic example for this is the unexpected “invention” of SMS by children
and young people when the mobile phone became a medium used by the masses.
Another example is given by the above reported research of Ivan Illich about books
in the Middle Ages. Here, already existing media are changing fundamentally, and
by this or in the context of this the prevailing ways to use a medium will change.
Similar conclusions can be drawn for example from the work of Jonathan Sterne
(2003) about the coming into existence of audible media. It is also well known
that the introduction of the telephone at the end of the 19th century (Degele 2002
with further quotations) spread out much faster in the more open US society than
in the much more hierarchical society in Great Britain, where people felt frequently
disturbed by the sudden symbolic presence of a caller; here it is obvious again
that the relevant conditions of the life of people may be of high relevance for their
fears and expectations.
As a consequence, we can conclude that mediatization research cannot con-
fine itself to one-medium-studies only and that the history of media cannot be
understood as a sequence of upcoming new media, but must include changes of
old media and take the whole media system into consideration in any case. In
addition, if we look for follow up changes in culture and society, we should not

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150 Friedrich Krotz
only analyze the features of the new media or of the changing old media, but we
must see whether and how these new or changing media are becoming a part of
the media environment of a person – here domestication theory may be helpful –
and whether and how they are really used. Here “the media environment of a
person” is an empirical concept that is necessary as it asks for the real existence
of the media in the everyday life of people and thus allows understanding the
concept “media system” as a social fact in the perspective of the individual. We
further can conclude that mediatization research cannot be done in a media cen-
tered way.
As a consequence, in the context of the analysis of media change further con-
ceptual questions arise. Evidently, there is the question how we can differentiate
between two technologies and between two different media. This is of interest,
because if we speak of media change, then we must answer the question whether
a medium is developing, but still is the same medium, or whether it is developing
into a new medium.
For example, are colored TV sets a new medium compared with black-and-
white TVs, do we call TV sets with a remote control new media in contrast to TV
sets without a remote control, or are all these forms of TV the same category, and
a new one did not come up before satellite TV, or perhaps even later with the new
generation of TV sets − the LED TV with Internet connection? Similar questions
can be asked with respect to other media. In addition, it is unclear, whether an e-
book with its paper-like screen is nothing more than a new carrier of written texts
and thus is a book, or whether it is a computer, as it usually has a connection to
the Internet. This question is of importance, if we state like Riepl (quoted above)
that new media may substitute old ones or not (see also Peiser 2008).
Thus, if we are concerned with media development, we need a discussion
about how to define what. To decide when we speak of a new medium compared
with the old ones, there are at least two solutions: We can take a technological
invention as relevant to differentiate between two media, or we can ask for differ-
ent types of uses by people to define a new medium. In the first case, the color
would be relevant, if we speak of a new generation of TV sets as a new medium,
in the second case the remote control would be the characteristic to make it a new
medium, as this changes the use of TV. Similar questions can be asked for the
book, the computer, or the Internet. In a mediatization perspective that refers to
media change in order to study the developments of culture and society the second
way seems to be more adequate, but this needs more empirical research.
If we look at this the other way round, then we find out that both solutions
may give us different ideas. Take for example the rise of e-books. On the one hand,
we can understand them just as a new carrier of texts that are helpful for some
purposes. E-books thus are a new invention after paper and parchment, black-
boards and similar materials that together with texts make reading possible.
It is obvious and well known that those different carrying materials together
with institutionally guided rules and norms of how to use such media, give hand-

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written or printed texts different features, what can be done with them, may be,
these for the transport of information, those for better memories, some for instruc-
tions, others for entertainment. Thus, not only the goals, when to use what, but
also the accepted ways to approach such a written text and to use it, may be
different, as it was in the Middle Ages, described by Ivan Illich, or as it is the case
today, as most women use e-books on their holidays for entertainment and leisure,
while male users use them as part of their work for instructional reading.
In such a perspective, the e-book is not so much a computer based medium,
but a medium to read, a successor to paper. It could also be regarded as a follower
of the first home computers and the early Internet that started with screens only
for representing characters and signs, which were used as comfortable writing
machines with databases, (and in some cultures, e.g. Japan, as the first typewrit-
ers that really could represent all possible signs). Even computer games on the In-
ternet started as texts, if we think of MOOs and MUDs of the early net (see
www.mud.de). Probably it is still true today that analphabets cannot use the net
or a mobile phone or only in a highly reduced way, as people using the net have
to read a lot. We perhaps should name the smartphone the smartbook.
Thus, in such a perspective, the decline of newspapers printed on paper is not
a democratic catastrophe, which will lead to the end of reading, but just a sign of
the development of a new carrier of written texts, which for some goals may be
better. Thus, society (and the owners of newspapers) should finish sleeping and
develop new ideas how to transfer their symbolic capital to newsreaders on screen.
But in another view, e-books are computers that in the long run will change
reading radically, as more and more pictures, sound, and moving images will
appear here and thus reading will become rarer and more difficult. In such a
perspective, e-books are dangerous for our culture, which for thousands of years
has been based on writing and reading.
Evidently, neither view is wrong, and both should be discussed in public. In
addition, both descriptions may be understood as sub-processes of mediatization,
as they are concerned with the relation between media, cultural, and societal
change. Above all, these considerations making it clear that mediatization is a
rather complex topic, just as the topic of “media change” must be seen as rather
complex. In addition, the above argument makes it clear that the described single
processes may be considered as sub-processes of an overall mediatization process.
This leads us to the second topic of this section, as the question of sub-processes
of mediatization is an old one.
As it is well known in mediatization research, the consideration of sub-proc-
esses was an early idea of Winfried Schulz and Gianpetro Mazzoleni, who defined
mediatization by four sub-processes. They called them extension (to describe that
with media one can perceive over space and time), substitution (of communication
without media and communication mediated by old media), amalgamation (for
mixing mediated communication with other activities), and accommodation (if

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152 Friedrich Krotz
social actors adapt to media logic) (Schulz 2004, 2008; Mazzoleni and Schulz
1999).
These four developments are formulated in a very general way, and they may
take place in the case of mediatization, but they also may take place in other
contexts, and in addition, they are of different type, as we will argue in the follow-
ing.
The Extension sub-process obviously refers to McLuhan’s media concept, for
whom a medium was everything that enhanced human perception and action pos-
sibilities. Nevertheless, in social reality it must be said that it well may be that the
invention of a new medium does not enhance the possibilities of all people, as
not all may have access to such a new medium, for example if it is too expensive
or too complicated, while at the same time because of substitution old media
services may disappear, such that it is only an extension for some. In addition,
the extension concept ignores that some new media (e.g. computer games) do not
extend something, but create a new form of reality, which makes the simple idea
behind “extension” obsolete. Amalgamation is not specific for the media develop-
ment of today, as it already took place, for example, in the case of driving a car
or taking a train while listening to the radio; it depends on the respective media
and the ways how it is used in a culture and society. If we look for example to the
earlier production of cigars, there was always a person who read the laborers texts
while they worked – this already was amalgamation, not depending on media
development but organized by trade unions. Accommodation – if we understand
media logic as the rise of powerful media as societal actors – may take place
whenever something is invented that may influence the power relations in a soci-
ety, but accommodation of interpersonal media do not make sense. Finally the
substitution sub-process should also be regarded in a more diligent way − as we
have already argued above, it needs some theoretical ground to say that a medium
substitutes another one, which is not given here.
Thus, in sum the ideas of Schulz and Mazzoleni are helpful in order to remind
us of sub-processes of mediatization, but have to be developed in many ways.
Seen from the perspective of mediatization as a meta process, we may define and
observe a lot of sub-processes in other historical phases, as we have done in this
chapter, and there may be sub-processes following Schulz and Mazzoleni also. But
this must be shown in much more detail, and in addition, such sub-processes
alone cannot constitute a common long-term process like mediatization. Probably
because of this Schulz and Mazzoleni do not have any argument why the processes
they mention are the relevant ones for mediatization or why they assume that
these constitute the whole mediatization meta process, and what relation exists
between the sub-processes.
Indeed, it must be said that there are many more sub-processes than those
mentioned by Schulz and Mazzoleni, as we have already shown with the process
of making a society literate. Furthermore, the development of visual culture with

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the consequences that Benjamin, for example, described (1980) or the creation of
sound culture as it is reconstructed by Jonathan Sterne (2003) are also relevant
sub-processes of a greater historical mediatization process. Mazzoleni and Schulz
ignore all that – this makes clear that the idea of sub-processes has to be elabo-
rated much more.
In addition, there are sub-processes of a further type: The example of the
changing technology “book” in the European Renaissance as described by Ivan
Illich, in the terminology of sub-processes can perhaps be understood as a segmen-
tation of a mediatization sub-process into two other ones: at first the medium
“book” was newly arranged for new needs and ways to use it, and after that the
printing press was invented to care for an easy and cheap diffusion of this new
type of book. While the domestication process (Silverstone and Haddon 1996)
describes the development of a new medium as a circle between the households
and the industry, here media change is seen as a linear process that consists of
two parts.
Finally, Mazzoleni and Schulz do not really explain their concept of mediatiza-
tion as an integrating process, and also not under which conditions and how
new or changing media give reason to such developments. The core task of any
mediatization concept is that it has to explain what the connection between media
development and the development of culture and society is, which means how
mediatization as a complex concept “works”. Assuming media logic is not enough.
We will develop an answer in the frame of the mediatization concept as presented
in the next paragraph.
To summarize, we have shown in this chapter that the meta process mediatiza-
tion is complex and may be considered as consisting of many sub-processes in time
and by system. This is what must be studied in more detail by actual and historical
mediatization research. But it does not mean that mediatization can be explained
or understood only by reducing the overall process to some sub-processes which do
not refer to one another.
3.4 How mediatization works

After all these critical remarks and examples from history, we now will be con-
cerned with a positive answer about how mediatization works. This gives us the
possibility to avoid all those problems and to integrate the given historical exam-
ples and empirical observations. Thus, the question here is, what the connection
between media change on the one hand and social and cultural change on the other
hand is, without referring only to technological influences and without describing
mediatization only by independent sub-processes.
In order to discuss this, we again have to recall the definition of a medium as
a structural and situational entity. With such a definition it is clear that a medium
is not a stable thing but depends on culture and society and its developments, in

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154 Friedrich Krotz
which it is a medium, as it is a social and cultural entity, besides being a technology.

It is a consequence of this that an invented technology for communication is not
automatically a medium, but must become one. Of course, it can be used to dis-
seminate content, which is set in scene for that technology. But only if this technol-
ogy is used as a space of experience and becomes integrated into society by social
institutions, norms, rules, individual and collective expectations, then this tech-
nology becomes a medium. Thus, an invented technology must be developed into
a medium, and this is a collective process that takes place in a whole society,
which means that it has to be developed into a structural and situational reality.5
This happens, if people use a technology for communicational aims and expe-
riences, and if society as a whole domesticates the technology, to refer here in a
slightly different sense to the work of Silverstone and Haddon (1996). If people
use the newly invented technology for communication, this has a lot of consequen-
ces. They communicate differently, they change the media system, and they
enhance their personal media environment. They for example manage their per-
sonal relations differently if it is a technology of interpersonal communication. In
general, if people get access to new media, they also get access to new information
and orientation and create a different inner reality of the outer world that then
becomes relevant for their further experiences and activities. Thus, they especially
interpret reality differently, but they also create different contexts of their own
communication and media related contexts for others, if they want others to under-
stand what they communicate.
This for example is the process that Joshua Meyrowitz (1990) showed empiri-
cally by analyzing the way how hierarchies, gender relations, and group building
processes can be changed by television. This is also similar to what happened,
when the mobile phone or the Internet came into existence, as from then on the
relational environment of most people changed. Further, under these new techni-
cal conditions, every single person could be addressed, served with wanted or not
wanted information, and observed, or even controlled, in an individual way. In
addition, each person using these media may construct her or his social relations
in different ways, at work, during leisure time, within the family, and everywhere
else, and this is also influenced by changing ways of perception and orientation,
the new possibilities for social organization, influence, and control and the pro-
duction of cultural meaning. All this is concerned with the new forms of communi-
cation and is constantly producing new realities.
This all together then is the complex background for people reproducing cul-
ture and society henceforth differently if new media come up or under the condi-
tion of changing old media. The relation between media change and the change of
5 It should be noted that this must hold for media of interpersonal, of interactive, and of media
of formerly called mass communication, which should better be called media of standardized and
generally addressed communication.

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cultural and social life thus is communication. We do not need media logic, techno-
logical constraints, or specific sub-processes to explain the relation between
changing media and changing culture and society. It is simple: Media directly can
only influence communication in this or that way, and it is this, what is changing
by media change. But if human communication is changing because of media
changes, then this does not only mean a differentiation of media, but also a differ-
entiation in communication, and thus the communicatively constructed world will
henceforth be reconstructed in different ways by the people.
A good example for this is the change in book technology and culture and
society as described by Ivan Illich. Here, new needs came up and changed what
people expected from a book. As more and more books fulfilled these expectations,
it can be assumed that the demand for these kinds of books was growing. They
got more practical value, for example for education or agriculture, for orientation
and understanding the environment. We assume that people thus got new perspec-
tives and orientation, what was real, what was possible, and what they could do.
Thus, perception and meaning changed and also new practical activities became
possible – this finally is experienced as a change in culture and society.
These arguments show the relation between media change and social and
cultural change. Media in this perspective are giving communication a specific
form if they are used, what may be understood to mold communication. But at the
same time, new and other forms can be used to tell other narratives and set already
existing ideas into scene. Both together mean that communication and as a conse-
quence, culture, society, sensemaking processes, and so on are changing. And
because of this finally we are able to act and to perceive differently as a conse-
quence of media development and construct a different social and cultural reality.
This is the reason why the mediatization approach must understand communi-
cation as the central connecting link between media change and changes in cul-
ture and society, and it is the reason why we are interested not primarily in media,
but in the communication possibilities which media are offering.6 The new forms
of reading and writing, of using pictures and books, of producing and receiving
music, and using other audible media, this is what is relevant, not the media itself.
This is also the conclusion of historical research on sound and visual culture, and
it is true for media development and its role in culture and society in general:
As people use technologies, these become media, and they do so because the new
possibilities and functions are helpful for them. Thus the communication modes and
styles of the people are changing, because they become modes and styles of medi-
ated forms of communication and this generates different social and cultural rela-
tions and facts, different perceptions and orientations, and different meaning, and
this finally is what we understand to be social and cultural change.7
6 This is already explained in Krotz 2001, where I analyzed the mediatization of communicative
action.
7 A more differentiated view and further historical examples will appear with Krotz 2014.

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156 Friedrich Krotz
4 A final definition and some conclusions

As announced above, we finally sum up and thus also offer a definition as to what
mediatization means on the basis of the discussions presented here.
The mediatization approach is a theoretically based conceptual approach of
historical and actual societal and cultural developments in the context of the
development of the (communicative) media. It is assumed that media exist and
have been developed since the invention of human communication, which means
the birth of humankind. Media then are constructed by communication and social
action of the people by using technology for communication, and communication
is transformed and modified by media. This is expressed in the idea that mediatiza-
tion is a meta process like Individualization, Globalization, and Commercializa-
tion, a complex process of processes.
In more detail, new media come into existence as technologies for communica-
tion, in as far as these are accepted and used by people and thus become media –
structurally as technologies and social institutions, situationally as producing and
distributing specific content, such that spaces of experience for the receivers are
created. This includes that historically people increasingly use media for more
and more intentions, but also, that communicational forms and communicative
activities of the people are changing by referring to media. This then means that
the world becomes communicatively constructed in a different way, while media
are themselves processes, which develop in the respective culture and society
where they exist. Of course, there is also the inverse relation, as these develop-
ments in communication, culture, and society may create new needs or ideas for
new or for other media. The relation is dialectical.
Mediatization thus can be analyzed on the micro, meso and macro level – we
must ask for changing communication and interaction in everyday life and the
personal environments of the people, for changing organizations and institutions,
relational nets and enterprises, and for the changes in the overall areas like democ-
racy, economy, culture, and society.
Mediatization research then consists of a historical and an actual branch, but
also needs a critical perspective. This is of importance because mediatization today
takes place mostly in the interest of economy and administration and as reaction
to that, but it must take place guided by civil society and the people. Otherwise it
is not oriented towards the future of humankind. Thus, it must follow a strong
critical perspective.
An advantage of the mediatization concept is that we can order academic work
by this concept: questions, empirical research, and theoretical approaches. The
single developments that belong to mediatization today are studied in a lot of
distinct academic disciplines. They are relevant for sociology, political science,
psychology, pedagogic, social anthropology, and others. Today, there exists a mul-
tiplicity of results of these studies. It is obvious that they all belong together, but
until now they have referred only occasionally to one another. Thus, mediatization

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as a concept could be used as a common point of reference to bring the different

research results together, to create a common overview, and to create a common
theoretically based roof. It also serves to construct a general perspective of the
developments of the past and of today, perhaps in some dimensions into the
future. And it may serve to analyze concrete developments in a very concrete way,
as it is not only an overall process, but has concrete articulations in specific cul-
tures and society.
Further it should be mentioned that mediatization includes a way to describe
and reconstruct developments. Together with other meta processes of today like
individualization, commercialization, and globalization we can describe the ongo-
ing development of culture and society. We even can develop assumptions about
the future and thus try to actively shape the development of culture and society.
This is necessary, because, as said above with reference to Herbert Schiller (1989),
today we live in a great experiment with media and communication, while we
have no idea in which direction we finally will go. This development happens
guided by the short-term interests of enterprises, accompanied by a government
and administration that does not really understand what happens, and a civil
society, in the name of which everything happens, but which does not really care
and does not have enough information to become active. Here, finally, is the rele-
vance of all this work. Of course, we must develop the mediatization approach in
the context of all that into a real theory and connect it with other theories like
those of Bourdieu and Foucault, Elias and Schütz, Marx, Durkheim and Simmel,
and others, of course also with the relevant theories of communication and media
studies.
On the basis of the above considerations and arguments we now can say that
mediatization research should consist of three branches, as it is explained in the
following (see also Hepp 2012, Krotz and Hepp 2013):
First of all, there is actual mediatization research to understand the develop-
ments and processes in media change of today and its consequences as part of
the meta process mediatization. Here, we can ask questions to precise actual
research, for example about the Internet, mobile and smart phones, social soft-
ware, and new questions like augmented reality and so called intelligent software
(Krotz 2012). Mediatization may, for example, then serve to bind research in differ-
ent perspectives between different disciplines together and may by this enhance
the knowledge of communication and media studies. This also may include
research on the basis of ideas won by historical studies of earlier media.
Secondly, there is historical mediatization research in order to understand the
coming into existence of specific communicative habits, ways to use media, selec-
tion of media, and the ways that technologies work thus that they may become
media. Examples for this have been given in this chapter. Here, especially the
coming into existence of the old media and the changing old media of today have
to be studied. Mediatization research then not only may ask historical questions

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158 Friedrich Krotz
coming from the reflection of actual research, but also may emphasize knowledge
gathered in historical studies in order to make it fruitful for a better understanding
of the actual developments. For example, it was Bertolt Brecht who once
demanded that the radio as a technology missed the possibility that the people
can talk back. This comment of Brecht at that time was not an abstract idea but
referred to a lot of radio groups of workers and other people, who planned an own
radio for workers and their interests. But this changed rapidly; administration and
private enterprises got control of the radio, because the government feared that
otherwise society would not remain stable. Today, the Internet is frequently
regarded as a medium that enables people to contribute to societal development
and to make participation in democracy possible – this may be the case but this
is not sure. It can become a net of consuming and control, if we do not care, which
is much less then it could be possible.
Thirdly then, mediatization research should have a third integrative and critical
branch, a perspective that understands mediatization as a meta process in the
capitalistic society. This, for example, includes taking into consideration that there
are, as mentioned above, other long-term meta processes, that are intertwined
with the mediatization meta process. Studying these developments together would
inevitably lead to critical questions about privacy, about new forms of control,
alienation and exploitation, and so on. In addition, it must be seen that the most
important difference between face-to-face-communication and all forms of media
related communication is the following: In contrast to face-to-face-communication,
in all mediated forms a third actor is present, for example, a provider, a search
engine, a website owner, or unknown observers. This must be used as a starting
point for systematic critical research – in this case compared with historical obser-
vations, as letters on paper were effectively protected from misuse. This is no
longer the case today with all those new forms of media related communication,
as is well known.
Mediatization in the here described sense is a mover of modernity and post-
modernity and is relevant for all three perspectives. Today we live under social
and cultural conditions (if not to say, in a society) which are more and more
determined by economic and political interests which try to use and to influence
the media and shape the media development to be successful. All great media –
books and letters, radio and TV, and finally the mobile phone and the Internet –
started with a phase of freedom and creativity, the book culture, the radio culture,
and also TV, but they were soon controlled by economy and administration. This
is not as easy today with the Internet and mobile phone, but it is not at all out of
sight. Civil society then must find a balance between these two forces.

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Friedrich Krotz

6 Mediatization as a mover in modernity:

Keywords: mediatization, medium theory, medium concept, media change, cul-

1 Mediatization: a conceptual answer to what was

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2 Basic features of “mediatization”

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Secondly, with reference to dynamic concepts, we must decide whether digital-

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2.2. Learning from sociology: processes and meta processes

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Russell pointed out, in which quantitative social research understands and

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2.3 The core topic of mediatization: the relation between media

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Political communication research is mainly concerned with the role of media

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letters, or e-mail, for example. Besides mediated communication, there is media

2.4 Necessary enlargments of communication studies

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3 Further features of mediatization

3.1 Revisiting medium theory: from historical phases to media

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Against this, we here understand media not only to be a technology. Referring

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change? In other words, it is the common assumption between medium theory

3.2 Mediatization as a long-term process that accompanies

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Now, as far as we refer to medium theory, it would be an simple argument to

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Both examples make clear, that mediatization understood as the relation

3.3 Sub-processes of a meta process: the complexity of

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tion, situationally a machine for producing and distributing content in specific

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3.4 How mediatization works

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which it is a medium, as it is a social and cultural entity, besides being a technology.

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4 A final definition and some conclusions

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as a concept could be used as a common point of reference to bring the different

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