Technology, place and mediatized cosmopolitanism

Miyase Christensen

pp. 159-173

in: Andreas Hepp, Friedrich Krotz (eds), Mediatized worlds, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

The past two decades of media and communication studies have been dominated by a research agenda marked by an overwhelming attention paid to two phenomena: technological change and globalization. The study of digitalization and personalization of technology, particularly in its earlier phase, focused primarily on the emancipatory potential of information and communication technologies, or ICTs (e.g., Plant, 1997; Splender, 1995). While later research incorporated a more down-to-earth appreciation of technology, technological determinism continues to be reinvoked by way of casting new media tools as powerful agents of social change. This leads to the production of reductionist visions, particularly during times of perceived technological breakthrough (such as the Arab Spring and the case of Wikileaks), and a narrow conception of the mediatized worlds, which we find ourselves in today. Likewise, earlier theories of globalization foregrounded mediated and imagined dimensions (e.g., Appadurai, 1996; Beck, 2004; Castells, 2012; Rantanen, 2005) as well as cultural fusion and flows, with material aspects and complexities of "the everyday" often overlooked or underplayed. One reason for this is cookie-cutter approaches to both globalization and technological change. Another is lack of empirical studies to support grand theoretical claims.