Necessary Entanglements: Reflections on the Role of a “Materialist Phenomenology” in Researching Deep Mediatization and Datafication

Andreas  Hepp; Nick Couldry

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15793

Authors

Andreas Hepp ZeMKI - Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, University of Bremen https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7292-4147

Andreas Hepp is Professor of Media and Communication Studies with the Special Areas Media Culture and Communication Theory at the ZeMKI (Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research), University of Bremen (Germany). He holds a PhD from the University of Trier (Germany). He is involved the research network "Communicative Figurations" as "Creative Unit" of the University of Bremen, funded by the German Excellence Initiative 2013-2016). His main research areas are media and communication theory, media sociology, mediatization research, datafication of social practices, transnational and transcultural communication, and cross-media research.
Nick Couldry Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8233-3287

Nick Couldry is a sociologist working at the Department of Media and Communications of the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom). His main interests are media and communications, culture and power, and social theory. Most of all, he is interested in the consequences for everyday reality of symbolic power's concentration in particular institutions. His latest project has developed the framework of data colonialism: The Costs of Connection (Stanford University Press, 2019, with Ulises Mejias).

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15793

Keywords:

Social construction, materiality, entanglement, deep mediatization, data colonialism

Abstract

This article unpacks the deep engagement of media and communication studies with questions of social construction and the material infrastructures on which media’s role in social construction is based. For that reason, for communication scholars, there is no contradiction between constructivism and realism, and the notion of a materialist phenomenology seems necessary and unproblematic. We take materialist phenomenology further as a concept via the notion of entanglements, drawing on Karen Barad. Then we go on to explore two contemporary debates in media and communication studies which illustrate its broader commitment to understanding the materiality of social construction: first, the broad phenomenon of deep mediatization (Couldry & Hepp, 2016) whereby all aspects of social processes now take mediated forms, and second, the particular process of data colonialism (Couldry & Mejias, 2019) whereby life itself is increasingly the object of colonial appropriation in the form of extracted data.

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Necessary Entanglements: Reflections on the Role of a “Materialist Phenomenology” in Researching Deep Mediatization and Datafication

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