Volume 35, Issue 3

This paper argues that American television fiction with supernatural themes offers Danish teenage audiences a playground for exploring different religious imaginations in a continuous process of internal negotiations; thereby transforming their imaginations. This process of the mediatization of religion is strengthened by three dominating factors: the absence of a homogenous religious worldview in Danish culture, the importance of high production values and visual credibility to supernatural concepts in these shows, and the appeal of transformed religious content in open-structured serial narratives. This essay presents the findings of an empirical qualitative study of seventy-two Danish teenagers and considers two primary parameters for the case-based reception study: the teenagers' levels of fandom and their connection with institutionalized religion. In other words, how are religious imaginations transformed in relation to viewers' level of commitment to the television fiction and to traditional institutionalized religion?

The article employs the mediatization concept to analyze the relationship of science and the mass media. It draws on theoretical considerations from the sociology of science to distinguish and empirically investigate two dimensions of mediatization: changes in media coverage of science on the one hand and the repercussions of this coverage on science on the other hand. Results of content analyses and focused expert interviews show that mediatization phenomena can indeed be observed in the case of science, but they are limited to certain disciplines, to certain phases (mediatization phases differ from routine phases in which the media tend to acknowledge scientific criteria, routines, and knowledge), and to a small number of media visible scientists. We conclude that media-induced structural change in science, though present, is less pronounced than mediatization of other parts of society. Compared to spheres such as politics and sports, science's media resistance is rather high.

This paper presents an empirical account of mediatization from a Bourdieuian perspective, based on the development of a number of new concepts, such as cross-field effects and the rescaling of such effects as linked to processes of globalization. Built on an Australian empirical case relating to educational policy and the knowledge based economy, this paper argues that mediatization can be understood in relation to the cross-field effects of different fields of journalism on subsequent fields, which have their genesis in forms of practice that cross different social fields. Specifically, the case analysis details interactions between the field of print journalism and the field of policy over the course of an Australian science capability review, chaired by the then chief scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, which led to Australia adopting a national version of the knowledge economy. The empirical case also leads us to consider the impact of both global and national fields of journalism on fields of educational policy in relation to mediatization.

This article makes an empirically based contribution to the general debate on the mediatization of politics by looking at the Finnish policy networks as a particular context in which the general processes of mediatization are recognized and where the influences of mediatization are negotiated. Drawing on a qualitative interview sample of 60 elite decision-makers and an elite survey ( N = 419), three themes related to mediatization are highlighted: the role of trust in policy networks, the dynamics of the mutual professionalization of media and politics, and the differentiation of network rationality and media rationality. These findings are at the same time evidence of a general process of mediatization and of how local conditions shape that process.

Following the evolution towards media-saturated societies, this article presents practice theory as an alternative framework for mediatization studies. We discuss how it can help us grasp the diversity of social and cultural changes related to the highly integrated media. This is demonstrated by studying politicians' personalization, not as a product of media logic but by looking at politicians' media-related practices and media's anchoring of practices. Our in-depth interviews with Flemish politicians show that their practices are in many ways organized by the media, but through this mediatization at the same time aim to retain control over them. It is also shown that politicians' practices are not only directly influenced by media, but also by other politicians' media-related practices. Together, these findings draw a complex picture of the mediatization and personalization process.

In this paper we propose that the concept of mediatization should be used not only in the narrow sense to analyze the impact of media on the operational modes of the political system, but also in more general terms to capture the transformation of the public sphere and the changing conditions for the generation of political legitimacy. More specifically and with regard to the role of political communication on the internet, we focus on the transformative potential of online media in terms of a) publicity: the capacity of the online media to focus public attention on the political process of the EU; b) participation: the capacity of the online media to include plural voices and activate the audience; and c) public opinion formation: the capacity of the online media to enable informed opinions. We test our mediatization model on the online debates that took place during the 2009 EU elections (May–June 2009) in 12 member-states and at the trans-European level. The findings confirm the mediatizing impact of online political communication on the generation of the political legitimacy of the EU. Online media constitute a virtually shared forum for political communication that political actors and users increasingly occupy developing homogenous patterns of evaluating European integration. Furthermore, the stronghold of offline media in the EU e-sphere and the tendency to discuss the EP elections within the frame of domestic (national) politics reaffirm the key role of national political and media cultures.