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Andreas Hepp

'The mediated construction of reality: Taking a figurational approach to deep mediatization'

What would a media sociology look like that rethought the project of understanding how social reality is constructed with full attention not only to media, but to the particular digital media infrastructure of deep mediatization? The result, I argue, would be a materialist phenomenology of the social world, and how media (including today’s information and data infrastructures) are configured to construct ‘reality’ in quite particular ways.

A fundamental help for developing such an approach is Norbert Elias’ idea of figurations: we can understand the contemporary social world as comprised of various linked figurations that humans form on the basis of distinctive ensembles of media technologies and media habits. These can be the figurations of particular groups or communities, or the figurations constituted around certain digital platforms. While media technologies gain huge importance in the figurations from which life is constructed, it is still human practices of sense-making that keep them together. To grasp this, I argue, media sociology in the age of deep mediatization needs to have a continued interest in interpreting the social world, that is, in social hermeneutics. A sociology that lacks this interest will miss the transformations and tensions to which our entanglements with media technologies today give rise. 

About the speaker

Andreas Hepp is co-initiator of the research network ‘Communicative Figurations’ and was spokesperson of its Creative Research Unit at the University of Bremen, responsible for the projects ‘Mediatized Localities of Urban Communities’ and ‘Transformations of Mediatized Cultures and Societies’.

His main research interests are media sociology, mediatization, transnational and transcultural communication, datafication, and qualitative methods of cross-media research. Publications include the monographs Cultures of Mediatization (2013), Transcultural Communication (2015) and The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Nick Couldry, 2017).