Mediatization from Within: A Plea for Emic Approaches to Media-Related Social Change

Based on a literature review, this article shows that current mediatization scholarship is characterized by what Pike (1967) refers to as etic accounts. These accounts forward theoretical categories on media-related social change to conclude that our age is characterized by deepened and expanded media reliance. However, such theoretical extrapolation takes place not from, but at the expense of, people’s lived experiences, that is, emic accounts of mediatization in everyday life. This article is an attempt to insert the etic/emic distinction to mediatization research in order to develop more reflexive and composite accounts. Drawing on examples from a representative survey and qualitative interviews conducted over twenty years, the article problematizes etic-oriented conceptions of mediatization. Emic analyses expose how perceptions of media reliance shift over time and thus underscore the need to develop research strategies that simultaneously consider the objective structures of the social (mediatized) world and subjective meaning-making structures.