Abstract
That the social world is constructed, in some sense, should not be a matter of debate. The issue should instead question from what the social is constructed and how its components are related. The 20th-century media use and related academic studies of media and communication have highlighted these as components in the construction of the social world, and according to Couldry and Hepp in The Mediated Construction of Reality, they are increasingly necessary to include in thinking about and studies of the social world today.
Berger and Luckmann (1966) presented The Social Construction of Reality, offering a renewal of sociology of knowledge from a social phenomenological perspective. In their seminal book, face-to-face interaction was used as the nexus for the construction of the social. Through interaction, language, signs, and symbols were given important roles in the processes of objectification and internalization and for the emerging institutionalized and legitimate social order. But the role of media was only briefly explored, and Couldry and Hepp now address this shortcoming and highlight how media and communication matters for the mediated construction of the social reality.
The book aims to study ‘the mutual transformations of the media and the social world’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 3) and first deals with conceptual and historical relations between the social and media/communication. The social world is studied as a communicative construction, where communicative actions, practices, forms of actions, and patterns of action contribute to the construction of the social. The development of technical media of communication is mapped trough three waves of mediatization – mechanization, electrification, and digitalization (carrying the seed of a fourth wave named datafication). The role of media in everyday life is then presented using the concept the media manifold, the many-sided and interdependent availability of different technological communication media from which individuals select their specific media ensembles. Inspired by Elias (1978), the concept figuration is advocated as alternative to the concepts network or assemblage to better catch how agents, action, and things are interdependent and how they are interpreted in meaningful ways, constructing social worlds and associated figurational orders.
The second part of the book explores how social action and relations are affected by media in space and time. A major claim is that the third wave of mediatization, digitalization and especially the growing importance of data, is altering the social in unprecedented ways through what the authors call, deep mediatization. In the third, and final, part the authors deal with agency, studying how selves, collectivities, and organizations interact with and are shaped by the media. The authors also discuss normative implications of different forms of mediatization.
The authors’ aim is to contribute both to media theory and to social theory, arguing that social theory is no longer viable unless it is informed by media theory. The aim is also to develop a materialist phenomenology that covers the material and symbolic and the interplay between them. The writers see a need for ‘a full-blown rethinking of the social construction of reality, in all its interconnectedness, for the digital age’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 6).
The book’s ambition to offer an account of the social construction of reality in the digital age is delivered in an impressive way, offering a broad overview of the media and communication theory field and recent research on digital media. It is up-to-date and in-depth in its presentations and discussions. It also offers several relevant and fruitful notions and concepts that can be used and developed in further studies of the area: material phenomenology, waves of mediatization, media manifold, and figuration. Compared to the authors’ earlier use of the figuration concept (Hepp, 2013), this is a more developed use where the social aspect is in focus. The book is rich and encompassing, and the style of presentation is detailed and systematic. It is full of ideas and positions worth pursuing and developing in social and media theory.
The shortcomings of the book mirror its merits, it is encompassing, even grand, and filled with ideas of how to make sense of the digitally mediated constructions of social reality. The general arguments are simple – that the construction of social reality is mediated and that digital media makes the social interdependent with the media in a new and ‘deep’ sense – but the expression of these two arguments comes in different guises. Presenting complex arguments, the book could also have been called The Communicative Construction of Social Worlds, signaling more important roles of communication and sociality in the account of the mediated construction of reality, ideas earlier advocated by Hepp (2013: 83–97).
A conceptual issue is how mediation and mediatization are used. The authors claim that there is a difference between mediation (that something is communicated using technological media) and mediatization (as meta-process or as the study of how sociocultural and media change are connected), but they sometimes fail to uphold this distinction, for instance, in the title of their book, where the mediatization aspect is lost.
The idea of successive waves of mediatization seems relevant, but the waves are not related to changes of the figurations explicitly, making them more into a timeline of media innovation, rather than an analysis of mediatization and deep mediatization. This points at another weakness of the work – parallel or overlapping conceptual presentations of the same phenomena. When addressing the social world as a communicative construct, the terms action, practices, forms of actions, and patterns/fields of action are used. When addressing the everyday life and the media, the authors make use of figurations, figurations of figurations, and orders of figuration. The book, and further work, would benefit from a more clear explication of how these different accounts relate.
The major contribution of the book is its insistence that media and communication matters for the shaping of the social and that digital media, digital communication, and digital data introduce a new kind of interdependence, where the interdependence come to depend on the media (Couldry and Hepp, 2016: 215). In other words, media becomes constitutive of the social. The book also defends a human and interpretative approach to media and the social, positioning itself against actor network theory, complexity theory, and network theory, through the use of Norbert Elias (1978) ideas. Their contribution to media and communication theory is more toward building a general framework on how to study mediatization, rather than contributing to a more open and transdisciplinary agenda for investigation of the historicity, specificity, or measurement of mediatization as advocated by Ekström et al. (2016).
This is a work that surely will inspire development of the framework presented or criticism of it. It is a rich and fruitful contribution on how to relate the media and the social that merits sustained attention. The reconstruction work of the construction of social reality might be endless, so the constructivist’s say, but this is certainly a significant, even indispensable, part in that ongoing work.