Conclusion: Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents

Any book on cosmopolitanism remains an unfinished project with open-ended future scenarios rather than a complete discussion. One of the primary goals of the book has been to build upon and give flesh and bone to some of the grand narratives and abstract ideals (often backed by mere anecdotal evidence), which have been influential in the cosmopolitan debate. We have approached the cosmopolitan question from the point of the everyday and taken mediation as a key social practice and mediatization as a meta-process. While accounting for and building upon the roots of cosmopolitan theory, in this book we have tried to put forth a framework within which to regard the implications of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization for contemporary media and communication studies. In this connection, we advocated a turn to communication as a key concept for joining the epistemological discourses of cosmopolitanism and media studies. We explicated and analysed how different kinds of communicative and socialization patterns, social meaning construction and identity formation processes are embodied through mediated practice in certain contexts. We have thus illuminated how mediatization is differently nuanced in different social contexts rather than containing any uniform “media logic”.