Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp: The Mediated Construction of Reality: Society, Culture, Mediatization. Cambridge / Malden, MA: Polity Press 2017. 978074568130

Lundby, Knut

English

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www.ssoar.infoThe Mediated Construction of Reality: MatchingBerger & Luckmann with Elias to Understand HowFacebook and Google Construct Our Social RealityLundby, KnutVeröffentlichungsversion / Published VersionRezension / reviewEmpfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation:Lundby, K. (2017). The Mediated Construction of Reality: Matching Berger & Luckmann with Elias to Understand HowFacebook and Google Construct Our Social Reality. Soziopolis: Gesellschaft beobachten. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-82462-2Nutzungsbedingungen:Dieser Text wird unter einer CC BY Lizenz (Namensnennung) zurVerfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu den CC-Lizenzen findenSie hier:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.deTerms of use:This document is made available under a CC BY Licence(Attribution). For more Information see:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0The Mediated Construction of RealityKnut Lundby | 11.01.2017Knut Lundby | Rezension | 11.01.2017The Mediated Construction of RealityMatching Berger & Luckmann with Elias to Understand How Facebookand Google Construct Our Social RealityNick Couldry, Andreas HeppThe Mediated Construction of Reality .Society, Culture, MediatizationEngland / USACambridge / Malden, MA 2017: Polity Press304 S., EUR 71,31ISBN 9780745681306 50 years after the seminal sociological work on The Social Construction of Reality1 NickCouldry and Andreas Hepp’s book aims to demonstrate that today’s construction of thesocial world is deeply immersed in media and shaped through mediation processes.Couldry and Hepp have re-read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book. They foundnext to nothing on the role of technologically based media of communication in Berger andLuckmann’s understanding of the social construction of reality. Even at that time, this was aneglect.Since The Social Construction of Reality was published in 1966 modern complex societieshave become much more dependent on mediated communication and a larger range ofmedia technologies have become available. Digitalization and networking technologies areat the core of these changes. Citizens can now handle everyday coordination withsmartphones. However, behind this visible surface, the infrastructure provided bycompanies like Facebook and Google control much of the ongoing communication – and ofthe revenue streams in the media industries. The concept of ‘media’ is extended into therealm of ICT, Information and Communication Technologies. Mediated construction of© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 1 / 4The Mediated Construction of RealityKnut Lundby | 11.01.2017reality is to a growing extent taken care of by data-based processes and automatedalgorithms. Couldry and Hepp denote this tendency as “datafication”. It becomes a crucialconcept in their attempt to understand this ongoing transformation of modern societies,which they see as a ‘deep mediatization’.‘Mediatization’ has become a much-used term in media and communication research tograsp the interrelation between changes in the media on the one hand and changes inculture and society on the other.2 This goes beyond early German meanings of‘Mediatisierung’ and ‘ Medialisierung’.3 Couldry and Hepp take the contemporary thinkingon mediatization in Northern Europe to a radical stance by proposing the term ‘deepmediatization’. This is meant to help understand how the contemporary social world isdeeply interwoven with media, and thus involves a fundamental transformation in how thesocial world is constructed.Couldry and Hepp take a phenomenological approach, as did Berger and Luckmann. Thenewcomers, by contrast, plea for a ‘materialist phenomenology’. This term covers theinfluence of data, digitalization and networks in “the types of social world in which mediaplay an obvious and unavoidable part” (p. 5). The approach is materialist in the sense of‘cultural materialism’ as proposed by Raymond Williams,4 where symbolic aspects areincluded.The book is organized with three parts in addition to Introduction and Conclusion. The firstpart outlines how the mediated social world is constructed and how we live with media,today and in history, seen as waves of mediatization. The second part discusses space, timeand data as dimensions of the contemporary social world, while the third part deals withagency in the social world, on different levels: self, collectivities and order.Theoretically, this book builds further on phenomenologists that were central to Berger andLuckmann, primarily on Alfred Schutz. The social world is thus understood by Couldry andHepp as “the intersubjective sphere of the social relations that we as human beingsexperience” (p. 20). However, in bringing the phenomenological take onto the materialaspects of the media in a networked, digital environment, they turn to Norbert Elias.Couldry and Hepp use his thinking of ‘figurations’ to get hold of the complex socialarrangements under deep mediatization.5 A figuration is “a more or less stable interactionof individuals which produce in this interaction a certain kind of social meaning” (p. 63).The concept of figurations help them understand how social entities as families,organizations and so on are constantly under formation and reformation. Digitalization© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 2 / 4The Mediated Construction of RealityKnut Lundby | 11.01.2017offer opportunities to build figurations in changing patterns of online and offlineinteractions. These are “Figurations for Living with Media”, as one of their subtitles read.Thus, Couldry and Hepp apply Elias’s concept of figuration on social interaction incontemporary media infrastructures. They take the concept further by proposing morecomplex patterns as ‘figuration of figurations’.I do not find the concept of figurations easy to grasp but this approach opens for flexiblethinking about social patterns in a mediatized world. This book has certainly an originaltheoretical take on the contemporary social and technological environment. It does exactlywhat the title promises, namely explicate an understanding of ‘the mediated construction ofreality’. This is quite an achievement. It carries original observations, e.g. on how ‘data’influence our social world. The discussion is of highest quality. The authors are well readand build their theorizing on a broad platform of social theory and media studies.I would have appreciated a discussion that had put Couldy and Hepp’s own take onmediatization in contrast to other attempts to grasp these transformations, such as theinstitutionalist approach developed most extensively by Stig Hjarvard.6 The authors alsovery easily do away with the concept of ‘media logic’, rightly from another approach, butmuch-used in scholarly as well as more popular discourses. For this reason, it would havebeen useful with more of a discussion rather than just mentioning this concept in passing.Despite these critical comments: The Mediated Construction of Reality is simply animportant book for sociology and for media and communication studies alike – maybe asimportant as The Social Construction of Reality became half a century ago.© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 3 / 4The Mediated Construction of RealityKnut Lundby | 11.01.2017Endnoten1. Peter L. Berger / Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, London 1966(dt.: Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit. Eine Theorie derWissenssoziologie, m. e. Einl. z. dt. Ausg. v. Helmuth Plessner, übers. v. Monika Plessner,Frankfurt am Main 1969).2. Knut Lundby (ed.), Mediatization of Communication, Berlin/Boston, MA 2014.3. Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz, Understanding Mediatization in “First Modernity”: SociologicalClassics and Their Perspectives on Mediated and Mediatized Societies, in: Lundby (ed.),Mediatization of Communication, 109–130.4. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture. Selected Essays, London 1980.5. The two key references are the following books by Norbert Elias, What is Sociology?,London 1978 (dt.: Was ist Soziologie?, München 1970), and The Society of Individuals 1939, London 1991 (dt.: Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, hrsg. v. Michael Schröter,Frankfurt am Main 1987).6. Stig Hjarvard, The Mediatization of Culture and Society, London 2013. Knut LundbyProfessor Dr. Knut Lundby is a sociologist and media and communication scholar. He isprofessor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway.Lundby has edited two key references on mediatization, Mediatization: Concept, Changes,Consequences (Peter Lang, New York 2009) and the handbook on Mediatization ofCommunication (De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin 2014). (Picture: © University of Oslo). Dieser Beitrag wurde redaktionell betreut von Karsten Malowitz.Artikel auf soziopolis.de:https://www.soziopolis.de/the-mediated-construction-of-reality.htmlPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)© Soziopolis - Gesellschaft beobachten sowie Autor*in 4 / 4

The Mediated Construction of Reality: Matching Berger & Luckmann with Elias to Understand How Facebook and Google Construct Our Social Reality

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The Mediated Construction of Reality: Matching Berger & Luckmann with Elias to Understand How Facebook and Google Construct Our Social Reality

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