D R A F T

(Final version to appear in the Journal of Communication, December 2008)

“On the mediation of everything”

Sonia Livingstone[1]

Department of Media and Communications

London School of Economics and Political Science

s.livingstone@lse.ac.uk

Introduction

“No part of the world, no human activity, is untouched by the new media. Societies worldwide are being reshaped, for better or for worse, by changes in the global media and information environment. So too are the everyday lives of their citizens. National and subnational forms of social, political and economic inclusion and exclusion are reconfigured by the increasing reliance on information and communication technologies in mediating almost every dimension of social life.”

This is how Leah Lievrouw and I open our forthcoming volume, Major Works in New Media. Many in the field of media and communication have written such paragraphs. Today, however, I wish to halt the confident flow and ask, what do we mean by claiming that information and communication technologies now mediate every dimension of society? Is this paragraph merely introductory verbiage? Is it, instead, rhetorical, designed to persuade the doubters?

Such a paragraph is grander, I suggest, than the kind of paragraph we used to write, perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. So what’s changed – both in the world, and in our conception of it? Should my title for today’s talk have a question mark at the end? In unpacking our claims about the supposed mediation of everything, I have an additional purpose – to note how our field is changing, how it is adapting to encompass international and multilingual dialogue (S. Livingstone, 2007), and how it is repositioning the scope for critique.

A changing field

Consider the changes in book titles. Several decades ago, typical book titles included Mass Communication and Society, Mass Communication and Public Health, Television and the Child, Television and the Public Sphere, Television and the Public, and so forth (see, for example, Atkin & Wallack, 1990; Bower, 1973; Curran, Gurevitch, & Woollacott, 1977; Dahlgren, 1995; Himmelweit, 1996). The form was that of ‘mass communication and…’, ‘television and…’. Now we examine ‘mediated ….’, with the focus on the verb. Consider Mediated Politics, The Mediation of Power, Mediating the Nation, Mediating the Family, Mediating Culture, Mediated Sex (Bennett & Entman, 2001; Davis, 2007; Madianou, 2002; McNair, 1996; Tincknell, 2005) It seems that we have moved from a social analysis in which the mass media comprise one among many influential but independent institutions whose relations with the media can be usefully analysed, to a social analysis in which everything is mediated, implying that all influential institutions have been transformed in their very nature by the process of mediation.

According to the earlier model, media and communication studies should analyse the relation between media and politics, say, while in other disciplines they analyse the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family. But in a wholly mediated world, one cannot analyse the relation between politics and the environment, or society and the family without also recognising the influence of the media – all these spheres and their intersections have become mediated. Thus, it has become commonplace to inquire, with Thompson, into “the nature of self, experience and everyday life in a mediated world” (1995: 207). In noting what he called the “media’s intrusive ubiquity” (2005: 191), Silverstone said, “politics, like experience, can no longer even be thought outside a media frame” (p.190). Or as Scannell (1988: 28) said grandly of national broadcasting systems, “their primary task is the mediation of modernity”.

These are indeed grand claims we are making. And we make them in the face of some apathy or even contradiction by others: society at large. University administrations in particular, do not always consider our field to be of such importance, and our colleagues in departments of politics, sociology, psychology and economics seem merrily to continue their business without knocking on our doors too often or referring to our work in their articles. Hence the rhetorical intent of my opening paragraph, for we appear to have ambitions in media and communication not only to defend our terrain but also to expand it into those traditionally held by other disciplines.

Lost in translation

Book titles are not enough to establish that our field is changing. Consider, additionally, a growing confusion over terms, and a tendency to invent new words – indications, surely, that something is happening. Not only, some years ago, did our associations, journals and departments rename themselves – taking out ‘mass communication’ and rebranding themselves ‘media and communication’, or similar – but also new concepts are emerging: ‘mediation’, ‘mediatization’, ‘medialisation’, ‘mediazation’, ‘remediation’, the ‘mediatic turn’, and so forth (Couldry, 2008; Schulz, 2004; Thompson, 1995).

This is partly because of the advent of new media, the remediation of old media, and renewed attention to the oldest form of mediation - face-to-face communication. Thus in their classic article on mediated interpersonal communication, Cathcart and Gumpert (1983: 271) use ‘mediation’ to refer to the (increasingly pervasive) technological intermediaries that have ‘been interposed to transcend the limitations of time and space’, both mass communication and interpersonal communication being transformed as a result. But new terms also emerge because this is an international – and therefore multilingual – dialogue.[2]

In English, ‘mediation’ has been ‘repurposed’ – enabled by the fortunate overlap of the term for linking disparate elements and the term for media of communication. Not a coincidence, of course, but still an overlap that does not exist in all languages. For example, my Slovenian colleague reports that it is difficult to translate the concept of mediation. It translates literally as the verb, posredovanje, posredovati (to mediate, to intervene) but then it bears no relation to media and communication. My Polish colleague agrees – it’s a judicial term, no more, no less. Or, as a Tibetan student pointed out in my lecture recently, the mediator is the matchmaker in his village. Meanwhile, to my Icelandic colleague, mediation translates as midlun, meaning to convey or share information with others, but as he reminded me, it is related to midill or medium, used both for mass media and for a person who can communicate with the dead.

In Portugese, mediação is used as an academic term for the negotiation of media meanings between producers and consumers, or for how issues are changed once framed/ represented by the media. Such a term may not work so well for the general public, but then it doesn’t in English either. Further, while my Bulgarian colleague regards mediation as a legal term for dispute resolution, she also recognises the term for mediatization as exposing an issue in the media or using the media expressly for something. On the other hand, my Estonian colleague noted with some asperity, that for a non-English speaker, mediation or mediatization makes little difference.

My French colleague had the least to say on the subject – in French, mediation is médiation. But my German colleagues had much to say on the subject, and their debates are influencing those in Scandinavian countries also. Indeed, in Germanic languges, mediation is again the legal/regulatory term for seeking discursive solutions to disputes. However, Mediatisierung (mediatization) and Medialisierung (medialisation) refer to the meta process by which everyday practices and social relations are increasingly shaped by mediating technologies and media organisations.

From semantic confusion to conceptual distinction

I am not a linguist, but I discern three patterns here. First, in some languages, conceptual terms used in English are puzzling or incomprehensible. Of course the concepts have their equivalents, but we must take care, when promoting international dialogue, to attend to matters of translation - in both directions - or else, frankly, we shall become ‘lost in translation’. Working with colleagues internationally has taught me that subtle attempts to define, oppose or prescribe exactly what our concepts should mean is a doomed effort, as ordinary language meanings will reassert themselves and confusion will result.

Perhaps this is what led McQuail (2006: 115) to title his recent review article, ‘On the mediatization of war’. In this, he uses the term as a catch all for the multiple ways in which practices of media and war are becoming interlinked, noting what he sees as a failure to establish clearly theorised and empirically supported “chains of reasoning” regarding the influence of media on war and/or vice versa. His frustration hints a common response to these terms, often shared by my students, namely that they obfuscate what, surely, should be clear arguments about relations of power.

Second, my brief linguistic review suggests that ordinary language prioritises the notion of mediation as getting in between, negotiating or resolving disputes. Often this is meant positively – mediation means generating mutual understanding and agreement where before there was conflict. Whether the mediator creates marriages or alleviates the pain of divorcing couples, society generally values this role. But, in our academic use in English language media and communication research, we generally reverse this valuation.

To be sure, there are times when we celebrate the ways in which individuals use media creatively, contra the expectations of major providers, and when we welcome the ways in which media connect individuals across the globe, transcending the parochial constraints of face-to-face communication – on such occasions, we see the media’s role in mediating as change for the better. But when we ask who controls these media institutions, whether global corporation or the state, and when we critically observe how mediated communication is subordinated to, shaped by, the inexorable logic of global capitalism - commodification, standardisation, privatisation, co-option, surveillance, and the rest – then we see this as change for the worse.

At the heart of this claim is the Hegelian argument that there is no pure experience prior to mediation (for a contemporary statement, see Waite, 2003). Hence, yes, everything is mediated; my title needs no question mark. Gergen notes the long tradition of argument that ‘Language comes into being – into meaning – through coordinated relationships among persons. [And that] It is through language that persons acquire their ways of understanding the world and themselves’ (2002: 228). So, when Silverstone (2005: 188) observed that language is the paradigm case of mediation, as a precursor to making a case for how the media mediate, he deliberately drew a strong analogy. We live surrounded by media like fish surrounded by water - we may miss the significance of this, but once we’ve noticed it, we can’t forget it. Fish evolved to fit water, of course, but today’s ecological communication theorists would extend the analogy in both directions to understand the co-evolutionary fit between modern communication media and the reflexive individual of late modernity.

Paraphrasing Gergen, then, we can claim that, as for language before them, today’s media become meaningful because of coordinated human activity and, at the same time, people understand the world and their position in it through the media. Mediation works both ways. On this view, we need media and communication research to understand how the media mediate, for the same reason that we need linguistics to understand how language mediates, economics to understand how money mediates, literature to understand how narratives and myths mediate, and consumption studies to understand material goods mediate.

Like those disciplines too perhaps, we are interested in the processes of mediation more because they reveal the changing relations among social structures and agents more than they tell us about ‘the media’ per se. Indeed, contrary to the periodic misunderstandings of our colleagues in the ‘-Ology’ Faculty, who suppose us only interested in the ad hoc and transient collection of technologies that mediate these fundamental themes (television, mobile, internet, games, networks, etc), in the Faculty of ‘Mediation’ that I have sketched here, our real interest lies in questions of democracy, culture, society, communication, identity, inequality and power.

Mediation and mediatization

The third conclusion I draw from the linguistic muddle noted earlier is signalled by the fact that media and communication departments are, generally, the newest entrant in this faculty. Thus the Germanic tradition favours ‘mediatization’, evident in several other countries also, as a distinct historical argument not to be confused with the interlinking of media and mediation. Krotz (2008) identifies mediatization as one of four fundamental meta-processes that have shaped, and continue to shape, modernity, along with globalization, individualization and, especially, commercialization (for an overview of the associated debates, see Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1995). Krotz says:

‘By mediatization we mean the historical developments that took and take place as a result of change in (communication) media and the consequences of those changes.’ (p. 23)

He adds carefully, to distinguish this position from the technological determinism of medium theory (Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1999), that although ‘mediatization changes human communication by offering new possibilities of communication to individuals, economies, societies, and cultures, this process ‘is a man-made one’ (p. 23).

I was somewhat puzzled by the term ‘mediatization’ – a clumsy neologism in English – until I learned of the German Laws of Mediatization in the early nineteenth century, when the states of the Holy Roman Empire were ‘mediatized’ by Napoleon.[3] In brief, Napoleon interposed between the miscellany of independent cities, the princes and the archbishops who previously answered only to the Emperor an intermediate level of territorial authorities. As Wikipedia explains:

‘Mediatization, defined broadly, is the subsumation of one monarchy into another monarchy in such a way that the ruler of the annexed state keeps his or her sovereign title and, sometimes, a measure of local power.’

One may think this has nothing to do with the media, only with the notion of mediation as getting in between distinct and possibly conflictual participants. But today, the media not only get between any and all participants in society but also, crucially, annex a sizeable part of their power by mediatizing – subordinating - the previously-powerful authorities of government, education, the church, the family, etc.

Consider Hjarvard’s (2008: 7) definition of mediatization:

‘In earlier societies, social institutions like family, school and church were the most important providers of information, tradition and moral orientation for the individual member of society. Today, these institutions have lost some of their former authority, and the media have to some extent taken over their role as providers of information and moral orientation, at the same time as the media have become society’s most important storyteller about society itself.’

The parallels between the two notions of mediatization are convincing - it seems we are telling a two hundred year history here, from Napoleon to Rupert Murdoch. However, notwithstanding the power of Murdoch et al, it is the case that for mediatization theorists, the question mark should go back onto my title. The question of how far the power of traditional authorities has in fact been annexed by the media remains contested. Writing on politics, Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999: 247)suggest that this is only partial, arguing that, ‘the best description of the current situation is “mediatization”, where political institutions increasingly are dependent on and shaped by mass media but nevertheless remain in control of political processes and functions’ (see also Kepplinger, 2002). In short, establishing the degree, nature and consequences of the mediatization of anything or everything - politics, education, family, religion, self - is an empirical task still largely ahead of us.

Not only is mediatization an incomplete and still unfolding historical project, mediation may be even less consequential. As Hjarvard (2008: 8) cautions, in stressing that ‘mediatization is not to be mistaken for the common phenomenon of mediation’ – that ‘mediation in itself may not have any profound impact on social institutions’. Similarly, while Krotz (2008: 17) agrees with Silverstone, Martin-Barbero et al at least in part, arguing that ‘humans are beings who exist in and depend on interaction, communication, and social relations’, he evinces little conviction that the reverse occurs, namely that human actions transform communication, especially insofar as this may have consequences beyond the lifeworld.

This is a real difference of opinion, for it is in relation to historical shifts in institutional power as much as in daily life that mediation theories would stake their claim, arguing that all dimensions of society are indeed shaped not only through the actions of the major power players but also, through a mutual dialectic, through the numerous tactical acts of appropriation, interpretation, and resistance. Mediation theory is precisely interested in the transformative potential of the media to blur or reconfigure hitherto fundamental distinctions precisely through the subtle actions of individuals in their everyday lives – especially distinctions traditionally marked by the paired terms ‘public’/ ‘private’ (Meyrowitz, 1985), ‘self’/ ‘other’ (Chouliaraki, 2008; Poster, 2001), ‘nature’/ ‘society’ (Haraway), ‘masculine’/ ‘feminine’ (Wajcman), or ‘local’/ ‘global’, reformulated by what Tomlinson (1999) terms ‘the interplay of multiple mediations’.

In each such case, scholars seek to trace the consequences of mediation for both lifeworld and system world, to use Habermas’ (2006) terms. Most have, too, done their historical spade-work, although it is true that, for example in Silverstone’s (2005) otherwise convincing appeal to join the cultural, processual turn, he says little about institutions or matters of political economy, instead focusing on tactical acts of resistance, oppositional interpretations and unintended consequences. But it could hardly be claimed that mediation theorists are unconcerned with the power inequalities that differentially constrain or enable people’s actions, including in relation to the media (e.g. Couldry, 2000; Couldry, Livingstone, & Markham, 2007).

Nor, of course, are mediatization theorists unconcerned with questions of experience and semiosis in the lifeworld (e.g. Krotz, 2008). Schulz (2004: 87) argues that developments in technology permit the media to bridge time-space distances in particular ways, that semiotic potentialities encode the world in particular ways, and that the economic underpinning of media systems then ensures the standardization (or commodification) of these bridging and encoding activities. Thus he links mediation to mediatization by arguing that four kinds of social/historical transformation follow, each resulting in ‘problematic dependencies, constraints and exaggerations’ (p. 87):

‘First, the media extend the natural limits of human communication capacities; second, the media substitute social activities and social institutions; third, media amalgamate with various non-media activities in social life; and fourth, the actors and organizations of all sectors of society accommodate to the media logic.’ (p. 98)

Thompson (1995: 213) makes a similar case for integration (- using the term, ‘mediazation’), and noting four negative consequences for the self in a mediated/mediatized world:

‘(1) the mediated intrusion of ideological messages; (2) the double-bind of mediated dependency; (3) the disorienting effect of symbolic overload; and (4) the absorption of the self in mediated quasi-interaction’.

Thus Thompson (1995) calls for an analysis of ‘the overall cumulative impact on social life of the existence of media institutions and their involvement in the circulation of symbol’, an analysis which Davis (2007) calls an ‘inverted political economy’. Castells makes a stronger shift in focus from institution to process when he argues that, in the network society, ‘political institutions are not the site of power any longer. The real power is the power of instrumental flows, and cultural codes, embedded in networks.’

So, without meaning to polarize these or related terms (see Couldry, 2008, for a comparison of ‘mediation’ and ‘mediatization’), I suggest that in this semantic seeking after new formulations, not one but two grand claims are being made: first -the media mediate, entering into and shaping the mundane but ubiquitous relations among individuals and between individuals and society; and second, as a result - the media mediate, for better or for worse, more than ever before. How we explore these claims and their interdependencies is a crucial task before us.

An illustration, drawing on the notion of ‘mediated childhood’

Let me illustrate these interconnections with some empirical research. Once, writing on the notion of ‘mediated childhoods’ (Livingstone, 1998), I began with an empirical observation as follows:

‘Two eight year old boys play their favourite multimedia adventure game on the family PC. When they discover an Internet site where the same game could be played interactively with unknown others, this occasions great excitement in the household. The boys choose their fantasy personae, and try diverse strategies to play the game, both cooperative and competitive, simultaneously 'talking' on-line (i.e. writing) to the other participants. But when restricted in their access to the Internet, for reasons of cost, the game spins off into 'real life'. Now the boys, together with their younger sisters, choose a character, don their battle dress and play 'the game' all over the house, going downstairs to Hell, The Volcanoes and The Labyrinth, and upstairs to The Town, ‘improving’ the game in the process. This new game is called, confusingly for adult observers, “playing the Internet”.’

What did I mean by mediation, in this context? First and most obviously, that the media have entered into the close relationship between children and their play. Contrary to the many sociologists and psychologists of childhood who leave media, television, internet etc. out of their book contents, even out of the index, childhood is mediated.

Second, the parties to this interaction cannot be understood independently. Rather, there is a mutual re-negotiation of meaning – nonlinear, unpredictable - that alters the children, their play and the cultural meaning of the game itself. The media do not simply add a new element to the story, they transform it.

Third, this process is both subtle and easily taken-for granted – the involvement of the media could easily be overlooked by a casual observer. The analysis of mediation, therefore, requires an ethnographic methodology – what Radway called a ‘radical contextualism’ - to encompass ‘the kaleidoscope of daily life’ (1988: 366) and so recognise the horizontal and historical connections within and across the array of mass and new media in people’s communication environments.

Focusing on mediatization as ‘the growing media presence in identity constructions’, since ‘culture is more and more dependent on communication media’, Fornas (1995: 210) similarly links the digital hermeutics of new media users with earlier analyses of mass media audiences by claiming that ‘our communication society is based on mediations between texts and people, in that people pass and meet each other through texts, just as texts pass and encounter each other through people’ (2002: 104). Fornas is here, I think, influenced by the German reception theorist, Iser (1980: 106), who said, in a statement that influenced a generation of audience theorists,

‘The work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism. As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text, and relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion too.’

We must be quick-footed to grasp these processes, especially since, as Ang notes, radical contextualism points to ‘the impossibility of determining any social or textual meaning outside of the complex situation in which it is produced’, this making it ‘difficult to imagine where to begin and where to end the analysis’ (1996: 253).

Fourth, through such slight but ubiquitous moments of mediation, a historical shift in childhood is effected – towards individualisation, commercialisation, globalisation and, if you will, mediatization. To sustain this last, perhaps more tenuous claim, other kinds of evidence – especially the political economy of the game’s production, and the longer history of children’s play, must be considered. To illustrate this, consider the following.

Heller (2008) writes about how children’s board game Monopoly was popular in pre-Communist Hungary (called Capitaly) but then rejected for purveying capitalist propaganda and reinvented in a socialist form in the 1960s (as Gazdalkodj okosan! – Economize wisely!). Players visited good socialist institutions, free because of their pedagogic value (the national gallery, zoo, sports) or pay a lot for the places with negative morals (pub, tobacconist, nightclub) – the aim was to acquire a block flat with basic equipment while saving in the state bank. But mediation, as ever, worked both ways. The socialist version achieved some popularity, but Capitaly survived and was secretly circulated among friends and, in addition, handmade versions of Monopoly were created as samizdat toys. Meanwhile, in the West, critics of capitalism were promoting the opposite values (e.g. the French game, Anti-Monopoly). Clearly, values are mediated through all media, including children’s toys, and we need to pay attention to the often unstated processes by which struggles over power occur in everyday life.

A contemporary version of these struggles emerged also from my recent work on teenagers’ use of social networking sites. In this, I show both the creative ways in which teenagers express their developing identities, strongly shaped by social determinations (the peer group, life style expectations, gender norms, privacy from parents, etc) and how these dovetail with, are constrained by or even rendered problematic by the affordances of the sites themselves (Hutchby, 2001). In the case of social networking sites, these affordances insist on highly standardised formats for identity expression, and their design features – for example, regarding privacy – appear somewhat ‘illegible’ to teenagers (S. Livingstone, 2008b). In short, the intersection of youthful literacies and technological affordances is resulting in the mediation of identity and social relations. But it is also a story of historical change – of the mediatization of experiences once conducted, for free, in the bedroom or on the street corner. The commodification of routine daily interactions has been recently brought into sharp relief by the guerrilla action on the part of Facebook users to protect their privacy and data, along with struggles over children’s privacy between parent groups and sites such as MySpace.

Multi-layered circuits of meaning

The field of children, youth and media is just one case among many in which identifying these historical, value-laden shifts is becoming a crucial focus for scholars hitherto primarily attentive to the micro (perhaps overly universalised) processes of the here and now. Some ambitious projects are underway. For example, Buckingham, Scanlon & Sefton-Green (2001) links their analysis of how children learn in expected and unexpected ways using edutainment games to the marketing strategies of the games business in ‘selling edutainment’ to parents and teachers. Reid-Walsh (2008) explores how the commercial intent behind the production of The Sims translates into design features that are then reshaped by the playful practices of the children gleefully find new ways to murder their Sims. Jenkins (2003) seeks to disentangle where the power lies in the ongoing dynamic of co-option and evasion between Lucas Entertainment Ltd. and the writers of Star Wars fanzines.

Each of these and related projects can be framed as embracing but also transcending the core elements of the traditional model of producer/ text/ audience, thereby elaborating a dynamic, nonlinear circuit of meaning (c.f. Hall, 1999) or mediation. To develop this, and drawing on Star & Bowker’s (2002) concept of infrastructure, Lievrouw and I (2006) reformulated this traditional mass communication model in terms of three interrelated aspects of new media infrastructure:

‘The first is the artefacts or devices used to communicate or convey information, which comprises questions of technology design, innovation, and development. The second aspect is the activities or practices in which people engage to communicate or share information; this aspect includes issues related to the social and cultural contexts of new media. The third is the social institutions, structures, or arrangements that develop around new media devices and practices, including how technologies and practices are organized and governed.’

Tracing this interweaving of the cultural and the economic, the tactics of the everyday and the grand sweep of history, demands that we become collectively, if not individually, highly interdisciplinary, skilled in multiple methods and, arguably, more critical – drawing conclusions from our work about the importance, or otherwise, of changing media remains a tall order, perhaps because of the multiplicity of competing explanations always in the frame.

Conclusion - clarity through keywords

In conclusion, let me return to the critical ambitions of our work. Williams (1983) traces ‘mediation’ back to the 14th century shift from pre-modern to modern society, noting three central meanings:

‘(i) acting as an intermediary (e.g. the political act of reconciling adversaries);

‘(ii) intermediate (indirect) agency between otherwise separated parties to a relationship; and

‘(iii) a formal way of directly expressing otherwise unexpressed relations.’

In short - reconciling two opponents, bridging over distance, stating the unstated. All verbs, processes. Each meaning is already captured, of course, in the notion of ‘communicating’ but with the addition of highlighting the mode of communication - ‘the media’, the technology (- of course, others have captured this emphasis in other ways too - with notions of social shaping, or technological affordances, or framing, or encoding and decoding, and so forth).

Some in the field of media and communication give mediation a strong theoretical frame, following the first sense and stressing the process of negotiation, especially among critical theorists analysing how media enter the power struggles between dominant and subaltern groups in society. Notably, Martin-Barbero (2003) argues that critical scholars should attend to mediations (plural) as the cultural processes by which power is negotiated between dominant institutions and popular or resistant movements.

Others use mediation less strongly, in Williams’ second sense, to point to how the media overcome (or transform) distance, both physical and symbolic, time and space, and so connect otherwise separated parties – e.g. peoples separated by continents, politicians separated from their publics. Relatedly, now that ‘it is no longer easy (or necessarily meaningful) to separate producers and consumers, senders and receivers, content and channel’ (Lievrouw and Livingstone, in press), the term mediation serves to bridge formally distinct spheres of inquiry into mass and interpersonal communication and to recognise emerging and hybrid forms.

Following a long tradition of critical theory, Williams argued that mediation works to disguise or deflect from social conflict, while making the work of mediation unnoticed, naturalised. Methodologically, this brings into play his third meaning of mediation. For it is the critic’s task, as he sees it, to reject the ‘persuasive physical metaphor’ that art (or media) simply reflects reality, and instead to reveal ‘the social and material character of artistic activity’ (1977: 97) and so to clarify these otherwise unexpressed relations of power.[4] As communication scholars have argued, these may be analysed and revealed as part of a semiotic or critical discourse analysis , or by drawing on a political economy framework, or by uncovering what the everyday hermeneutic activities that Katz (1996) called “viewers’ work” (c.f. Smythe, 1984).

Whatever our own politics regarding these relations of power, and whether or not we seek to contest them, the enterprise of revealing the ways in which their operation is both mediated and mediatized indeed seems an appropriate ambition for those who believe media and communications to be ever more crucial in today’s world – in short, for those who seek to explore the possible and actual mediation of everything.

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