Arjun and Hepp discuss the interplay between
Arjun Appadurai «Mediascapes» Accordingto Appadurai, there are five dimensions of global cultural flows: ethnoscapes;mediascapes; technoscapes; financescapes and ideoscapes. Mediascapesrefer to the rise and distribution ofelectronic processes and media toproduce and break down information. Italso considers the “images” of the world created by these media andthe impact these images have on society. Thecontent of these mediascapes provide a “narrative” bywhich society constructs their concepts of reality and fiction. Thelines between these concepts get blurred over time, with individual’s creating”imagined worlds” that are combined with metropolitan life and experiences. Technoscapesrefer to the rise of technology across national boundaries while Financescapesrefer to the international capital exchanges.
Appaduraiemphasises the structural difference between the scapes and notes theirpotential to destabilize each other through their interconnections. Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp Ina paper written together, Couldry and Hepp discuss the interplay between media,culture and society. Theylook beyond the production-text-audience triangle towardsthe open-ended and non-linear consequences of media.
Accordingto them, the term mediatization and its variants is deeply related to socialand cultural research as a whole. It is designed to capture how thecommunicative construction of reality is manifested within certain mediaprocesses. Theyspecifically distinguish the difference between ‘mediation’ and’mediatization’. While ‘mediation’ refers to the process ofcommunication in general, ‘mediatization’is a category designed to describe change. Inother words, ‘mediatization’ refers more specifically to the role of particularmedia in emergent processes of socio-cultural change. Accordingto Couldry and Hepp, our entire reality, socially and culturally is shaped bythe way we communicate and in turn, interpret what is communicated to us. Marshall McLuhan”Global Village and Understanding Media: TheExtensions of Man” (1964) McLuhanwas a theorist that fundamentally changed perceptions of media, communications,and technology. He predicted the internet 30 years before it was actuallyintroduced.
Histheories suggest that the media reshapes the ways in which individuals,societies, and cultures perceive and understand their environments. The introduction of new technologies into asociety has a determining influence on how that society is organized, how itsmembers perceive the world around them and how knowledge is stored and shared. Heintroduces the concept of a “Global Village” as an electronic nervoussystem. The Media creates environments that influence our perceptions to suchan extent that we fail to fully take notice of their effects.
Helooked to the broader culture and society within which a medium operates inorder to pick out patterns of its effects. McLuhan treated all technologies asextensions of our bodies………. a pencil is an extension of the hand, while thewheel is an extension of the feet.
Healso notes the time and space bias that exists in the media and the extent towhich environments and technologies mediate our lives. Lev Manovich The language of new media (2001) Manovichconceptualized the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. Heplaces new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the lastfew centuries. Hediscusses its reliance on conventions of old media andexplains how new media createstheillusion of reality, addresses the viewer, and represents space. Healso analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface anddatabase. Manovichuses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computerscience and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface and spatialmontage.
Thetheory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in his work. Friedrich Krotz Krotzexplains Mediatization as a concept with which to grasp media and societalchange. He discusses the meta-process of’mediatization’ as a conceptual frame. According to him, Media develops innon-substitutional way, New media doesn’t replace older media, they co-exist. Unliketheories from his peers such as Innis, McLuhan and Goody, Krotz views mediatization theory with ahistorical and process based approach not centered around a medium ortechnology. Krotzbelieves that Mediatization is ‘grounded in the modification ofcommunication as the basic principle of how people construct the social andcultural world’.
