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Mediatization or mediation

Couldry, N. (2008) Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling in New Media & Society Vol. 10(3).18

Couldry argues that we need both concepts in order to be able to understand digital storytelling (although he does not really explore that concept or the differences between a ‘Twitter’ Renga-style story of fragments and a Hollywood-narrative on YouTube).0

He argues that ‘mediatization’, a ‘linear logic’ of media where everything becomes part of a media space and practice is useful in order to be able to address standardization and access (an issue that could be looked at in terms of Protocol 1. ‘Mediation’ on the other hand offers a way of exploring how:0

“the availability of digital storytelling forms enable enduring habits of exchange, archiving, commentary and reinterpretation” (p388)0

as well as issues of institutional embedding.0

Couldry notes issues of space in terms of Lefebvre’s ideas of how social relations become ‘inscribed’ in and transform social space as well as Wuthnow’s account of ‘the book’ as  historically articulated through different spaces 2.0

He notes the way in which mobile media may complicate these issues still further but does not address mobile reading or writing in any depth.0

The storytelling he seems to be addressing is extended narratives rather than lifestreaming, relational fragments. Arguably the reading and writing (with words and pictures) carried out on mobiles and in/through/across mobile space must be seen in different terms.0

Individual images or text-stories have their own semiotic and narrative forms (however condensed) but they also exist in relation to all the others in the Set, stream, or conversation.0

The concept of  ’mediation’ , with its emphasis on flow, dialectics and relationships may offer a way of mapping those texts and textual practices but any analysis must shift from the story-text to the space between the stories, where the story fragments collide and montage creating the sort of dialectical images that Benjamin was looking for.

  1. Galloway (2004) ↩
  2. Wuthnow (1989) ↩
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Posted in reading fragments 4 months, 2 weeks ago at 11:44 am.

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