When Mediatization Hits the Ground

How best can we think about the effects of media institutions’ existence on the space of the social, that is, on the underlying possibilities of social organization? I use the term ‘the space of the social’ not primarily in a geographical sense, but simply to refer to the whole mass of ways in which the social is organized. That is the question I want to discuss in this chapter. I will stay close to social theory, because there are some issues around mediatization’s relationship to social theory that need, I believe, to be sorted out. I will work towards resolving them, in part, by returning to some earlier work of mine on media meta-capital but also through a wider assessment of where mediatization research stands today.1