Mediatization and Social Space: Reconstructing Mediatization for the Transmedia Age

Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's triadic model of social space, this article reconstructs mediatization as a sociospatial concept. Such a reconstruction corresponds to a holistic, nonmedia-centric view of mediatization, and provides an analytical framework for generating complex and critical understandings of the media's role in the production of social space. Mediatization is defined in terms of 3 sociospatial regimes of dependence, which can be applied to different domains of society: (1) material indispensability and adaptation, (2) premediation of experience, and (3) normalization of social practice. Focusing on everyday life, the article outlines how the articulations of these regimes shift with the social integration of so-called transmedia technologies, and advances a critical humanistic research agenda for approaching the social consequences of mediatization.