Abstract
This book is written by a formidable team. Nick Couldry is a media professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in Great Britain, and Andreas Hepp is a media professor at the University of Bremen in Germany. Together, they have written an ambitious theoretical monograph. It’s been 50 years since Berger and Luckmann (1966) published their now classic The Social Construction of Reality, and the authors translated this influential theory into the present time and renamed it The Mediated Construction of Reality.
Couldry and Hepp argue convincingly that big data, artificial intelligence and automation intensify the complexity of the social, and its degrees of interdependence (p. 69), to such an extent that Berger and Luckmann’s description of social life is made invalid (p. 126). Couldry and Hepp take issue with two specific claims from Berger and Luckmann. Their 1967 claim that “everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world” is no longer clear. The same goes for the claim that the world of everyday life “originates in people’s thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these” (p. 164).
The new book is rigged to support alternative explanations for these social phenomena, where data infrastructures are included in the analysis. It presents itself as a materialist phenomenology of the media, and its aim is to supplement Berger and Luckmann and keep social constructivism alive as a theoretical foundation.
First, a summary of the argument: The introduction sets up the story with a broad historical perspective on media history and its theoretization in the social sciences and humanities. Part I carefully recounts and develops the idea of social construction of the social world, turning to the media’s role in the process. They describe three waves of mediatization during the last centuries: mechanization, electrification, and digitalization. Figuration is introduced as a better concept than network or assemblage to explain the “ordering force” (p. 57) of these technologies. In part II, Couldry and Hepp write truly interesting analyses of shifts in the meaning of time and place due to information technology. The character and scale of technological equipment have really become more complex after 1967. They discuss five translations of data into practice, among them the strange presence of the constantly updated data double that we all carry around along with us (p. 135). Couldry and Hepp suggest that these developments are related to greater systemic order in social life. They argue that “social actors are sorted in relation to particular action-outcomes on the basis of how data relating to them is categorized and processed” (p. 124). Part III deals with the influence of “deep mediatization” on agency in the social world, and discusses issues such as self, collectives, and order. I will say more about this below. In the conclusion, Couldry and Hepp rightly say that normative questions relating to social relations are under-theorized. They encourage us to ask what is good and what is bad about the developments.
Despite their own recommendation, Couldry and Hepp don’t take a clear position regarding good or bad. They don’t recommend certain developments or warn against others, they only describe interesting structures in a procedural, generalized form. While it is understandable that the authors do their best to write like level-headed sociologists, I detect an undercurrent that suggests the authors are in fact worried about the power of technologies and its impact on social life now and in the future.
In the conclusion, they write rather dramatically, “We reject entirely a technological determinist approach, and specifically in the form that argues that new ‘media’ generate a specific ‘logic’ that, in some simple way, is rolled out across the social terrain” (p. 214).
Why do they feel the need to reject this position so strongly? Throughout the book, Couldry and Hepp make descriptions that have a clear causal direction from technology to humans, for example, “the child increasingly depends from her early awareness on a media infrastructure” (p. 150), and “flash mobs are forms of collectivity that have (digital) media as a pre-condition of their existence” (p. 172). While Couldry and Hepp use the language of social constructivism, they deal with a large number of technologically induced changes in social life where substantial technological agency should be reckoned with in a more direct way.
My problem is that while I read, I get a sense that almost everything they write is explained better by the characteristics of the technological novelties that they set out, than by the humans’ social ability to negotiate and restructure. Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I sense that the authors have a less social constructivist argument than they realize. In fact, there is an undertone of concern that reminds me of Heidegger—who by the way is not quoted anywhere in the book. Hepp and Couldry are concerned with digital infrastructure and its relation to “ordering.” They argue that media infrastructures constitute an “organization of material resources” (p. 191), with “figurational order” (p. 125) that humans engage with in communication. In “The Question of Technology” (1954), Heidegger connects order with technology and describes a negative, or at least uncanny, aspect of modern technologies like the computer. Heidegger writes, Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve (Bestand). (Heidegger, 1954: 225)
Couldry and Hepp describe “humans as a service” (p. 186), and while they touch on the fact that humans can be reverse adapted to fit with the needs of big data, artificial intelligence, and automation, they don’t formulate judgments, evaluations, or critiques of what is going on. It’s up to the reader to guess what they mean about these phenomena.
While Couldry and Hepp lack a normative position on future developments, Heidegger has a position that would be a good fit for “deep mediatization” too. Heidegger warns us that there is a serious misunderstanding regarding modern technology, namely, that the humans and their social structures are in control of ordering, or that technological innovation always benefits humans. Heidegger argues that humans can become part of the standing reserve without understanding it properly. “Man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct” (Heidegger, 1954: 232). In my view, Couldry and Hepp, and by extension the mediatization project in general, suffer from the misunderstanding that Heidegger diagnoses. They stick somewhat stubbornly with their modernized version of social construction, and construct clever conceptualizations that confirm the dominance of the human in the human–technology relationship. They are unwilling to face the 21st century technological forces in a truly open manner, and hesitate to engage in a normative evaluation of the future.
I am confused but also deeply impressed after reading The Mediated Construction of Reality. Couldry and Hepp engage in a Herculean struggle to describe the social meaning of data processing in the human lifeworld, and the book is full of sharp observations. I am really glad they took the trouble to write it.