Andreas Hepp is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at theUniversityofBremen. Mediatization research is among his various research interests that generally include media and communication theory, media sociology, and transcultural communication. Theoretical and empirical studies on mediatization processes are also among the leading subjects in the academic work of ZeMKI.Andreas Hepp is the author of several publications on the subject of mediatization, including his latest book The Mediated Construction of Reality written with Nick Couldry of the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. In The Mediated Construction of Reality, Couldry and Hepp revisit the question of how the social world is constructed, originally asked by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), and provide the reader with their own original answer, acknowledging the complex and irreducible contribution of digital media to the process. The editorial staff of Mediatization Studies reckons Andreas Hepp as one of the leading academics in the field of mediatization research and his and Couldry’s book as one of the most interesting and up-to-date accounts on the issue. This is why we decided to present it via this interview.The interview was conducted during the Communicative Figurations international conference in Bremen (December 7-9, 2016), which focused on transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Couldry and Hepp’s book had its official presentation during the conference.
Andreas Hepp is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at theUniversityofBremen. Mediatization research is among his various research interests that generally include media and communication theory, media sociology, and transcultural communication. Theoretical and empirical studies on mediatization processes are also among the leading subjects in the academic work of ZeMKI.Andreas Hepp is the author of several publications on the subject of mediatization, including his latest book The Mediated Construction of Reality written with Nick Couldry of the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. In The Mediated Construction of Reality, Couldry and Hepp revisit the question of how the social world is constructed, originally asked by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966), and provide the reader with their own original answer, acknowledging the complex and irreducible contribution of digital media to the process. The editorial staff of Mediatization Studies reckons Andreas Hepp as one of the leading academics in the field of mediatization research and his and Couldry’s book as one of the most interesting and up-to-date accounts on the issue. This is why we decided to present it via this interview.The interview was conducted during the Communicative Figurations international conference in Bremen (December 7-9, 2016), which focused on transforming communications in times of deep mediatization. Couldry and Hepp’s book had its official presentation during the conference.
Theoretically departing from Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, the article analyzes structural conditions of popular culture online. New media are tools and spaces for people’s engagement in various interpretive communities, also consisting of services offered by neoliberal market agents. The article deconstructs the status of these so-called “internets” being both: pop-cultural and civic resource. Popular culture online is nowadays entangled in a curious dialectics between more active communities of its audiences-participants and increasingly powerful digital culture industry. It is also a sphere of processes of articulation understood after Stuart Hall as expressing particular discursive positions (alternative to the official criteria of interpreting the reality), and as connection – here of spheres of people’s meaningful practices and (naturalized) sphere of the market.
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Acknowledging the notoriously ‘incomplete’ nature of privacy has little effect on the considerable expectations the notion implies. Self-determined privacy points to reflexivity, critical practice and tech literacy. While privacy scholarship illustrates those points and explains how agents constantly fail in meeting these expectations, we ask the inverse question. What are the limits of privacy? Interviewing Polish and German activists who engage in privacy-conscious social and professional relations, this qualitative study strives to understand how self-determined privacy is realized. Focusing on how individuals shape their privacies as social agents, including the motivations and contexts of their practices, our insights serve as a case study highlighting the challenges of realizing the everyday endeavor of privacy in datafied environments.