Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The gas attacks during the First World War stood for a new kind of warfare and shaped the soldiers’ experience of living through an apocalypse never before imagined. This article examines the literary and artistic topics and forms used to express this ordeal by German, British and French writers, poets and painters, the majority of whom had fought in the war. There are striking similarities in their representation of the gas war: the impersonality of this enemy, the feeling of helplessness in gas attacks, the shock of seeing one’s comrades “guttering, choking, drowning” and not least the exposure to an infernal landscape. Nearly all of the authors and painters condemned the waste and pointlessness of the ongoing or past war, but their vision of the future often differed according to their national background. The second part of this article addresses the public battle over the interpretation and collective remembrance in the war’s aftermath. Particularly at the end of the 1920s, a wave of publications mainly in England and Germany displayed a renewed public interest in the preceding war. The written recollections and paintings of the gas warfare played a significant role here.

This chapter introduces the contributions to this volume in three stages. First, it is argued that when considering the present stage of deep mediatization, it is insufficient to concentrate solely on the media as such: one also has to consider how communication transforms with changing media. It is by virtue of the change in human communicative practices together with other social practices that processes of social construction change. This is what is called . Second, the chapter outlines why it is helpful to take a figurational approach for researching such transforming communications. The term figuration goes back to Norbert Elias, who used it to describe structured interrelations between humans. However, for the analysis in question, it is extended to reflect questions of communication. Finally, this introduction provides an overview of the arguments presented in the following chapters.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the concept ‘figurational approach’ as one possible way of researching transforming communications. To do this, the authors reflect on our changing media environment, which is understood as being marked by deep mediatization. Second, they develop the argument that mediatization research is right to emphasize the domain specificity of (deep) mediatization. However, there is a need to sharpen the idea of social domain. With this in mind, the chapter demonstrates how it can be a help to investigate transforming communications by analyzing changing ‘communicative figurations’. Finally, in the conclusion, some remarks are made about what this means for practical empirical research.

What does deep mediatization mean to young people in their daily urban sense of community? Posing this question, the chapter analyzes the mediatization of young people’s urban community building in two German cities: Bremen and Leipzig. In doing so, ‘urban sense of community’ is not treated as a given, but as communicatively constructed in an open process that can assume different empirical forms. The chapter demonstrates that for young urban dwellers—besides family, acquaintances and colleagues—it is their network of friends that remains the primary figuration of their experience of community construction. However, mediatization is not only of importance when it comes to the communicative networking of young people via different digital devices. In addition, the frequented locations that are of importance for an ‘urban sense of community’ are highly mediatized. This can be understood as the figurative quality of individual sites of community construction; that is, the way the mediatization of particular locations in the city lends them a particular quality of community construction. Such an analysis leads to the question concerning the extent to which the city can, for young people, be something like an imagined community.

This chapter displays how hackers’ political engagement today relies on a wide range of practices related to media technologies and infrastructures and, at the same time, continues to be oriented towards larger publics as well as ‘traditional’ centres of political power. By employing the concept of communicative figuration, the chapter elaborates how one of the world’s oldest and largest hacker organizations—the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)—communicatively constructs media technologies and infrastructures as a political category in its own right. To implement this approach, the chapter will proceed in three aligned steps. First, the hacker organization itself is conceptualized as a communicative figuration, which also includes direct political action in the form of hacking. Second, the chapter explains how the CCC positions itself in the public discourse surrounding media technologies. Third, the chapter demonstrates how the Club’s internal figuration and its linkages with relevant actors, such as journalists, politicians and judges as well as the general public, creates a spiral of legitimation that enables the hacker organization to constitute media technologies and infrastructures as publicly recognized political phenomena.

Repair Cafés are new events in which people meet to work together on repairing their objects of everyday life such as electronic devices, textiles or bicycles—media technologies being among the goods which are brought most often to these events. In this chapter, results of a qualitative study are presented in which Repair Cafés have been analyzed from a perspective of media and communication studies. Choosing this approach, the focus of the study was on the people repairing media technologies as well as the organizers of the events. Following a figurational perspective, the actor constellation, the frames of relevance as well as the communicative and media practices are analyzed. Thereby, not only the mediated communication processes were defined as media practices but also the act of repairing media technologies itself. Understanding these repairs as media practice, it is argued that the term media practice has to be understood in a broad sense in media and communication studies, not only taking into account what people do with media content but also what they do with media technologies.

This chapter explores the question of whether a changing media environment in times of deep mediatization opens up informal expertise development for a new culture of learning. It builds upon a theory of autodidaxy and prior research on the role of media in processes of expertise acquisition. In two learning domains that are open to autodidactical learning (DIY_MAKER and multiplayer online gaming), data was collected in a multi-site study based on interviews, observations and netnographic analysis to reconstruct communicative figurations of expertise development and compare them across different learning domains. It can be shown that the learning domain’s media ensembles both share and differ in respect of their media usage. While mainstream media such as Facebook or YouTube are part of both ensembles, each learning domain’s very specific media types are described. In the analysis of constellations of actors, a ‘learning arena’ and a ‘commercialization arena’ can be identified in both domains. In DIY_MAKER, a central arena for informal learning is sharing/community, while in Multiplayer Online Gaming we find a meta-game arena. Both maps of media ensembles and constellations of actors are helpful in grasping the complexity of communicative practices and the role of media for expertise acquisition in the two learning domains. The research clearly shows the specific learning-domain characteristics of communicative figurations of learning.

The chapter analyzes the communicative construction of space-related identities in mass communication from a historical point of view. Focusing on the 1950s, it deals with the medial construction of space-related identities in Hamburg and Leipzig. The main question is how the changing cities’ media ensembles relate to the transformations in urban collectivity building. Elaborating to what extent in Hamburg and Leipzig was constantly constructed by discourses on , we argue that the constructions of global images are very stable umbrella notions, even though the changing media ensembles and the worsening Cold War during the 1950s had some impact on gradually emerging new formations of space-related identities. Finally, the chapter discusses the idea of an , which could enrich the historical view of communicative figurations.

People use media to communicate and thereby create and maintain social relations in two ways. First, media provide technological means to bypass time and space and enable otherwise unconnected individuals to interact. Second, media provide topics for communication. To capture these communicative constructed relations and the emerging social patterns, we propose the theoretical concept of . In order to analyze these networked media collectivities and their relevance in mediatization research, we follow a social network analytic approach. We identify the relative importance of various media and the structures of media-related communication networks among adolescents. By comparing these networks with the friendship networks among the adolescents, we are able to assess the relevance of media for creating and maintaining social ties. Our results show that correlations between media use, media-related interpersonal communication and friendship are strong and highly significant. This supports the assumption that networked media collectivities are likely to be a resource of social capital. Since the causal effect may also be in the opposite direction (from friendship to interpersonal communication to media use), this suggests at the same time that social patterns need to be taken into account when studying processes of individual media use.

This chapter draws on three research projects on journalism, audience practices and newsroom cultures and uses them to illustrate the changing nature of the communicative relationship between journalists and audiences operating in a media environment characterized by digital technologies. This development in communicative practices is already yielding changes in traditional newsroom routines and could lead to a shift in the communicative orientation of journalism that puts an emphasis on dialogue, moderation and curation, instead of the unidirectional dissemination of news, a kind of dissemination that might not suffice any longer as a unique characteristic for journalism in the pluralistic information ecosphere of the digital realm. However, this chapter highlights that this transition follows neither a linear nor a simultaneous process for all segments of journalism, for all journalists or all audience members. In sum, this chapter confronts expectations about innovative journalistic practices and highlights how communicative forms and media ensembles, which were not available in the predigital era, establish new modes of dialogue with audiences. The conclusion discusses how this transformation of communicative figurations among journalists and media users affects their self-conception with regards to their roles and core functions in their given community and in society as a whole.