(De)constructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization

This special issue focuses on mediatizations of societal threats in the era of hybrid media. Mediatization is a theoretical framework which has evolved somewhat in parallel with media ecologies. It was originally defined as the “growing intrusion of media logic as an institutional rule into fields where other rules of defining appropriate behavior prevailed” (Esser & Matthes, 2013, p. 177). Much of the early work in this area focused on the processes whereby modern media constrained and directly influenced the behavior of political actors (Maurer & Pfetsch, 2014; Strömbäck, 2008), as well as other institutions like the military (Maltby, 2012). However, this arguably goes much further than media-centric approaches which privilege the internationalization of media logics over other factors. Kissas (2019, p. 236) disentangles mediatization from this media centrism through the prism of “media performativity” i.e., the ways in which power is wielded within the context of mediatized politics. What is increasingly clear is that we live in deeply mediatized, datafied societies characterized by fragmented audiences that pose a challenge to the hegemony of established media and political institutions (Couldry & Hepp, 2018). While legacy media emain influential in the construction of societal threats, audiences increasingly experience these via platforms that, nominally at least, appear beyond the control of political elites. Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2015) argue that we are currently in the third phase of mediatization. This new paradigm has seen legacy media and military institutions harness the chaotic dynamics of user-generated content in order to re-assert the agenda-setting power they exercised prior to the social media era. Yet, politicians’ dependence on social media continues to create opportunities for underreported conflicts, such as the Syrian civil war, to appear on parliamentary agendas (Herrero-Jiménez, Carratalá, & Berganza, 2018). While it may be overly optimistic to suggest we are witnessing a shift in informational power from elites to non-elites, there do appear to be more fluid opportunity