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Who is Colonizing Whom? Mediatization and Biomedicalization

Sun, May 28, 14:00 to 15:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon F

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between mediatization and biomedicalization. The field of health and medicine can be said to be strongly mediatized, particularly in the United States: advertising, public relations and press relations play central roles at many levels, health information flows through social media, news coverage is extensive and previously closed information flows now are circulated publicly. At the same a substantial literature has documented a process of “biomedicalization” in which increasingly large spheres of culture and social life come to be shaped by biomedical logics. Both processes are often described using the metaphor of “colonization,” in terms of one set of logics displacing another. In those terms the two theories would appear contradictory: media could not simultaneously be “colonizing” biomedicine, and the other way around.

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