[Book Review of] Mediatized Worlds. Culture and Society in a Media Age. by Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz

Mediatization has become a vibrant topic in media and communication research and has led to a paradigmatic shift discussing and interrelating processes of socio-cultural with media-communicative change. With Mediatized Worlds, the editors Hepp and Krotz fruitfully connect mediatization with perspectives on everyday lifeworlds in order to grasp dialectically how the omnipresence of the media has shaped and transformed everyday lives and vice versa. Theoretically, this endeavour is convincingly grounded by the editors in social phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, paying particular attention to the media’s consequences on social practices and processes of cultural meaning-making.
The book has emerged as outcome of a conference in Bremen in April 2011. It brings together renowned scholars from the main fields of media and communication research in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries; 13 out of 24 authors are or were members of the priority programme ‘Mediatized Worlds’ based in Bremen.