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"The media plays a massive role in shaping the world as we see it. Couldry explains the significance of five core dimensions of media, and shows that understanding these dynamics is a vital skill that every person needs in the digital age, when the fate of our political worlds and social environment may rest on how we communicate with each other"--

Preface: Analysis without Sorting Hats - Jonathan Gray -- Part One SPEAKING UP AND SPEAKING OUT -- Speaking Up in a Public Space: The Strange Case of Rachel Whiteread's House -- Local Magics, Global Discretion -- Speaking about Others and Speaking Personally: Reflections after Elspeth Probyn's Sexing the Self -- The Individual "Point of View": Learning from Bourdieu's The Weight of the World -- Part Two SPACES OF MEDIA, SPACES OF EXCLUSION -- Remembering Diana: The Geography of Celebrity and the Politics of Lack -- Passing Ethnographies: Rethinking the Sites of Agency and Reflexivity in a Mediated World -- The Umbrella Man: Crossing a Landscape of Speech and Silence -- On the Set of the Sopranos: "Inside" a Fan's construction of Nearness -- Teaching Us to Fake It: The Ritualised Norms of Television's "Reality" Games -- Class and Contemporary Forms of "Reality" Production Or, Hidden Injuries of Class -- Part Three: DEMOCRACY'S UNCERTAIN FUTURES -- Form and Power in an Age of Continuous Spectacle -- Living Well with and through Media -- What and Where is the Transnationalized Public Sphere? -- A Necessary Disenchantment: Myth, Agency and Injustice in the Digital Age -- Media in Modernity: A Nice Derangement of Institutions -- Afterword: Refracting Power in an Age of Big Data - Nick Couldry

Media are fundamental to our sense of living in a social world. Since the beginning of modernity, media have transformed the scale on which we act as social beings. And now in the era of digital media, media themselves are being transformed as platforms, content, and producers multiply. Yet the implications of social theory for understanding media and of media for rethinking social theory have been neglected; never before has it been more important to understand those implications. This book takes on this challenge. Drawing on Couldry's fifteen years of work on media and social theory, this book explores how questions of power and ritual, capital and social order, and the conduct of political struggle, professional competition, and everyday life, are all transformed by today's complex combinations of traditional and 'new' media. In the concluding chapters Couldry develops a framework for global comparative research into media and for thinking collectively about the ethics and justice of our lives with media. The result is a book that is both a major intervention in the field and required reading for all students of media and sociology. Nick Couldryis professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London.

This article, after discussing the obstacles to the initial reception of Martín-Barbero's work on mediation in Europe, analyses its importance to contemporary media research in terms of three factors: mediation, inequality and complexity. Far from being less relevant today, those insights, and Martín-Barbero's overall insistence on a hermeneutic approach to understanding culture are of huge relevant today in an age when the automation of cultural production and data extraction is characterized by an anti-hermeneutic drive.

This review of two recent books, with further discussion of a third, addresses questions of the direction of democracy and the impacts of media circulation and data extraction on democratic culture. The reviewed books are Selena Nemorin (2018). Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World, Discourse, Representation, and Dipankar Sinha (2018). The Information Game in Democracy, with discussion also of Peter Csigo (2016). The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on "the People" in Late Modern Democracy.

This article starts out from the need for critical work on processes of datafication and their consequences for the constitution of social knowledge and the social world. Current social science work on datafication has been greatly shaped by the theoretical approach of Bruno Latour, as reflected in the work of Actor Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies (ANT/STS). The article asks whether this approach, given its philosophical underpinnings, provides sufficient resources for the critical work that is required in relation to datafication. Drawing on Latour's own reflections about the flatness of the social, it concludes that it does not, since key questions, in particular about the nature of social order cannot be asked or answered within ANT. In the article's final section, three approaches from earlier social theory are considered as possible supplements to ANT/STS for a social science serious about addressing the challenges that datafication poses for society.