Varieties of Mediatization Research: The Case of Education

• In Event: Advancing Mediatization Research

Abstract

Mediatization refers to the (hypothesized) processes by which social changes in particular (or all) fields of society have been shaped by the media (defined broadly). Thus mediatization researchers have examined the influence of media institutions and practices on other fields of social and institutional practice. The promise is to draw on what is known of the history of media and of mediation across diverse fields in order to grasp the changing role and significance of the media in society, while recognizing that such an account will be far from simple, linear or self-sufficient. To understand how the framework of mediatization research can integrate an otherwise-diverse array of findings and theories, this paper examines claims regarding the mediatization of the field of education.

Much interest concentrates on the recent development and use of such educational technologies as the tablet computer, smart board and school information management system. Pedagogic, policy and public debates have seized upon the plethora of new digital devices and contents to speculate about changes far wider than the mere import of technologies into the classroom, including transformations in the nature of learning and literacy, the relation between students and teacher, and the positioning of curricular knowledge and pedagogic practices in the wider community.

This paper argues that the lens of mediatization deepens the analysis of technologically-led change in recent decades by layering in two further accounts, thereby avoiding over-stated claims of a radical break. One concerns the institutionalization of formal education over recent centuries, revealing the longer origins of today’s standardization of education (via league tables, standard testing, metrics for external audits), the increasingly-endemic language of consumerism (schools as service providers, students as consumers, etc.), and the exacerbation of socio-economic inequality as competitive pressures in an individualized society reproduce social stratification. The other offers a history of learning on an even longer timescale, to reveal the culturally diverse and far from linear processes by media, defined broadly, have become implicated in and influential upon education. Only by integrating these three perspectives can we begin to understand how the history of mediation shapes the mediation of history.

Authors

• Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics

• Peter Lunt, U of Leicester - Department of Media and Communication