The mediatization approach deals empirically and theoretically with the current as well as the historical development of the media and with the related changes in everyday life, culture and society. Following Stuart Hall (quoted after Procter, 2004), research on mediatization may be understood to aim at a practical intervention of civil society in development. Phenomena and processes at the micro, meso and macro levels are called mediatized if they cannot be explained or understood without taking the media into account (Krotz 2017). With regard to digitization, research on mediatization is accordingly interested in reconstructing today's communicative practices and their framework conditions in their emergence and development and thus understanding digitization on the basis of how it came about.
The starting point of a mediatization-theoretical approach to the analysis of today's digitization is therefore the analysis of its technological basis, namely the computer as a symbol-processing apparatus, and the question of how its conditions of origin affect the significance of digitization today. The emergence, development, and distribution of the computer and computer-based techniques can be described in five phases on the basis of existing social science studies (e.g., empirical studies and historical analyses according to Friedman 2005):
# Its invention as a data-processing machine in the context of a capitalist division of intellectual labor by Charles Babbage around 1830,
# its technical realization by Konrad Zuse as well as Howard Aiken and IBM from 1930 onwards and the emergence of a mainframe culture,
# a first dissemination push through the construction of home and personal computers
# a second ultimate dissemination through the internet and the transformation of its use into a communication apparatus, together with a commercialization of the internet,
# an increasing penetration of all analogue technology as well as an increasing interference of computers in all forms of human life and the upcoming of computer controlled infrastructure of symbol operations.
The lecture will trace this development and draw conclusions about the social and cultural development of the forms of human coexistence in the context of the growing presence and importance of the computer. It can be shown that the division of labor already envisaged by Babbage still today defines people as data producers and companies as data processors. New communicative potentials of such diversity are emerging, but their use takes place under conditions of comprehensive dependence on and massive influence by the newly emerging global companies such as Amazon and Apple, Facebook, Google, Uber and others. The new power structures thus emerging have a comprehensive impact on the conditions of human life, for example on journalism and democracy, but also on the way how people deal with each other. This raises the question of how these developments can be influenced in a way that is compatible with democracy.
Literature
Friedman, Ted (2005): Electric Dreams. Computers in American Culture. New York: New York University Press
Krotz, Friedrich (2017): Explaining the mediatisation approach. In JAVNOST - THE PUBLIC Vol. 24,2, 2017, p. 103-118.
Procter, James (2004): Stuart Hall. NewYork: Routledge