Mediatization and Political Autonomy: A Systems Approach

This chapter aims to analyze “mediatization” as a societal phenomenon. In particular it deals with the question of what triggers the process of mediatization, what drives the process, and what consequences result from the process. Socio-theoretical contributions to the discourse on mediatization are few and far between. For example, American sociologist John B. Thompson (1995) sees the transformation of premodern agrarian societies into the functionally differentiated social formations of the modern era as the result of capacities for accumulating, communicating and storing information. For Thompson, these capacities were (initially) provided by the printed and (later) by the electronic mass media, and it is a process he calls “mediazation” (Thompson, 1995, p. 46). Building on Thompson’s work, Hjarvard (2008) conceives of “mediatization” as a process of modernization, at the center of which the organizational, technological, and aesthetic operating mode of the media (media logic) is shaping the forms of interactions between social institutions. In this paper, we adopt a systems theory perspective to supplement some of the socio-theoretical work that has been carried out in relation to the causes and consequences of mediatization. We understand mediatization here as a supra-individual phenomenon that occurs within non-media social systems. It results from the differentiation of a media system containing its own intrinsic logic and the need for public attention expressed in other social systems.