André Jansson - Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach

MEDIATIZATION AND MOBILE LIVES

Mediatization and Mobile Lives: A Critical Approach contributes to a complex, situated and critical understanding of what mediatization means and how it works in contemporary life.

The book explores the tension between the extended capabilities offered by media technology and growing media reliance, focusing particularly on mobile middle-class lives. It problematizes how mediatization is culturally legitimized in our times, when connectivity and mobility are increasingly seen as mandatory elements of self-realization.

Supported by extensive fieldwork carried out in contexts of gentrification, elite cosmopolitanism and post-tourism, Andr Jansson advances a critical, cultural materialist perspective of mediatization as he examines how people are torn between the new opportunities afforded by their mobile lives and the feeling of being trapped by our connected media culture.

Mediatization and Mobile Lives offers an engaging and critical exploration of the interplay between mediatization, individualization and globalization, making it an ideal resource for students and scholars of Media and Communication.

Andr Jansson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies and Director of the Geomedia Research Group at Karlstad University, Sweden. His most recent publications include Cosmopolitanism and the Media (2015, with M. Christensen) and Communications/Media/Geographies (2017, with P. C Adams, J. Cupples, K. Glynn and S. Moores).

MEDIATIZATION AND MOBILE LIVES

A Critical Approach

Andr Jansson

First published 2018
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2018 Andr Jansson

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Mediatization and Mobile Lives is an attempt to bring together research projects and theoretical ideas I have worked on for more than a decade. As such, I hope that this book will succeed in presenting a relatively broad picture of what it means to live in a mediatized society. I also hope that the analyses will provide an inside view of how mediatization works and is experienced in mobile middle-class settings. The empirical material spans several contexts and includes sixty interviews in total; these are now brought together for the first time within a joint theoretical framework.

I am very grateful for the project grants that have made it possible for me to carry out this multi-sited research and explore various aspects of mediatization over the years. The projects that I have participated in, and in some cases led, are: The Post-Industrial City: Culture, Identity and Life Forms (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 20035); Rural Networking/Networking the Rural: Participatory Culture and Civic Communities in the Swedish Countryside (funded by the Research Council Formas, 200812); Secure Spaces: Media, Consumption and Social Surveillance (funded by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 200912); Kinetic lites: The Mediatization of Social Belonging and Close Relationships among Mobile Class Fractions (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 201215), and Cosmopolitanism from the Margins: Mediations of Expressivity, Social Space and Cultural Citizenship (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 201216). I want to thank all the interviewees who kindly participated in these projects, and a special thanks to Sandra Engelbrecht who helped me with contacts during my fieldwork in Geneva in 2014. I also want to thank the good colleagues I have had the privilege to work with on these projects: Magnus Andersson, Miyase Christensen, Karin Fast, Jenny Jansdotter, Thomas Johansson, Johan Lindell, Linda Ryan Bengtsson, Ove Sernhede and Tindra Thor.

There are also other academic platforms that have been important for discussing and thinking through the arguments of this book. From 2012 to 2016 I was a member of the Sector Committee on the Mediatization of Culture and Everyday Life (supported by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences), which organized several successful workshops and colloquia on mediatization. I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to be part of such an intellectual milieu, and want to thank the other members of the committee for many rewarding discussions: Gran Blomqvist, Mats Ekstrm, Johan Forns, Anne Jerslev, Ulrika Knutson, Pelle Snickars, Eva Swartz Grimaldi and Maria Wikse. Since 2013 I also been the director of the Geomedia Research Group (partly funded by the Swedish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences) at Karlstad University, which constitutes my everyday work environment and a vital source of inspiration. I want to thank all Geomedians for producing such a hospitable space for the exchange of ideas.

The synthesizing nature of this book encompasses many ideas, as well as the underlying empirical material, that have been presented and discussed at conferences, workshops and meetings over the years. I have received valuable input from a great number of people. I am particularly grateful to those who have given explicit feedback on various parts of this book or invited me to give talks or participate in other academic exchanges related to this area of study: Paul C. Adams, Stina Bengtsson, Felix Bhlmann, Julie Cupples, Dana Diminescu, Kevin Glynn, Annette Hill, Stig Hjarvard, Bengt Johansson, Maja Klausen, Knut Lundby, Peter Lunt, Ulf Mellstrm, Shaun Moores, Maria Mnsson, Kristian Mller Jrgensen, Zizi Papacharissi, Marcus Prest, Toke Riis Ebbesen, Scott Rodgers, John Tomlinson and Mekonnen Tesfahuney. To some extent this book also comprises discussions that have appeared in previous publications. These are:

Jansson, A. (2014). Indispensible things: On mediatization, space and materiality. In Lundby, K. (Ed.) Mediatization of Communication (Handbook of Communication Sciences, Vol. 21) . Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. (Parts of this chapter have been reworked and incorporated in .)

Jansson, A. (2015a). Using Bourdieu in critical mediatization research: Communicational doxa and osmotic pressures in the field of UN organizations, MedieKultur 58: 1329. (Parts of this article have been reworked and incorporated in .)