The Call is titled “Media Practices in Globalized and Multilocal Lifeworlds Between Economics and Subject-Orientation”.
Responsible editorial team: Prof. Dr. Friedrich Krotz (University of Bremen) and the merzWissenschaft (JFF) editorial department
An increasing number of areas of our lives are becoming profoundly mediatized. This process is also changing the basic conditions of human perception and experience, behavior and activity, and communication. New forms and means of communication are emerging: The new smart phones and tablets, for instance, allow for highly flexible media practices – regardless of time and place we are
able to process media content, communicate with other people and send out our own message into the world. Mobile technology in particular expands the possibility to access content and tools for communication, thus increasingly intertwining individual and mass communication. Acting and communicating are thus becoming multi and translocal. In parallel to this, acting and communicating are, in a new sense of the word, becoming embedded in an economic context: In order to fathom all the options of our self-determined living, we have to stay up-to-date with all the given media content and tools and engage with the corresponding communicative structures. The use of digital media relies on technology and forms of organization that have been designed and developed with an economic interest. What happens to communication and personal data beyond the direct experience has become almost untraceable.
Globalization and economization thus accompany the mediatization processes. The resulting cultural, political, economic and media developments are proving to be closely related, changing the way we construct and reconstruct the world. The subject as interpreter and shaper of their own lifeworld is increasingly obligated to adapt their life to all the requirements “from the outside world”.
The challenges to the subject in these media appropriation processes can be seen as unfolding in different dimensions, such as:
- Communitization: The social, cultural and political spheres, in which different topics are negotiated according to the counterpart or audience, are constituted increasingly via mediatized social relationships. This creates and reveals new forms of communitization that are not based on traditional bonding, and in which delimitation is experienced and shaped with mediatic means,e. g. in multilocal families, friendships or romantic relationships.
- Localization: Subjects are forced by medially prestructured relationships and negotiations with others to continually present their different facets and position themselves in relation to various issues, e. g. global or local news topics, and often in relation to the design and shape of local,regional or transcultural identity.
- Flexibilization: Mobile media practices allow flexibility in subjects’ use of media structures or tools. Flexibility has to be discussed, however, in terms of society’s demands of the individual,which are becoming increasingly more important, e. g. in the work place.
- Condensation: Mediatization leads to an observable condensation of communications and relationships. This raises questions of proximity and distance in the shaping of our social lives. At the same time, it shows the new need for orientation as it becomes increasingly difficult to fully understand the consequences of our communicative actions, which are observed, recorded and processed on a huge scale.
The change in the conditions of socialization and social action and perception on the one hand leads to new forms of relationships; on the other hand it might lead to a constriction, allowing only the structurally possible, which could in turn lead to a fundamental uncertainty in our communicative acts. The increasing demand for subjects to deal with the requirements of a mediatized lifeworld and
to actively form it by way of their media activity puts the question of the individual between economic interests and their own sovereign acting back in the focus of research in the communication and media sciences.
merzWissenschaft 2012 invites you to submit your research papers examining processes of media engagement in globalized media markets and structures and (multi) local environments from an action-oriented perspective, as well as papers analyzing media structures under current social conditions, or otherwise targeting these questions empirically or theoretically. merzWissenschaft seeks to back up and push forward the scientific discussion with the provision of
qualified, international papers from various relevant disciplines.
The kind of papers sought:
- are based on empirical or theoretical research,
- offer new knowledge, aspects or approaches to the subject, and
- have not been published elsewhere.
In the first instance, interested authors are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 4,000
characters (including spaces) to our editorial team (merz@jff.de) by 20 February 2012. Please ensure
that the papers follow the merzWissenschaft layout guidelines. These are available at www.merzzeitschrift.
de (-> über merz -> für autoren).
If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact Susanne Eggert by phone on +49.89.68989.120
Deadlines Overview
20 February 2012: Submission of abstracts to merz@jff.de
12 March 2012: Decision on acceptance/rejection of the abstracts
11 June 2012: Submission of papers
11 June – 25 July 2012: Peer review
August/September 2012: Revision Period (several phases if needed)
Final submission: 24 September 2012
