Communications Media Geographies-108-144

3 Critical Communication
Geography
Space, Recognition, and the
Dialectic of Mediatization
André Jansson
Entering the Field

My original entry point to the field of communication geography, which at
that time, at the beginning of twenty-first century, did not even have a name,
was via the concept of mediatization. In my dissertation, entitled Image
culture: Media, consumption and everyday life in reflexive modernity (2001),
I analyzed (largely from a Bourdieusian perspective) how different modes of
everyday consumption were shaped through and made dependent on the
media, and how media practices were turned into classifying forms of
consumption. An important part of the analysis dealt with how different
social groups, as defined by their habitus and “creative ethos,” experienced
and responded to these dependences, subsumed under the term “mediatiza-
tion.”1 In a later article (2003), based on the dissertation, I specifically
pinpointed various domains and ways in which the media were regarded as
forces of intrusion and restraint in everyday life. Such intrusions and
restraints carried strong spatial connotations, especially when it came to the
moral and cultural boundaries of the household, the private sphere, and the
nation-state. Television commercials were, by many (especially more cultur-
ally oriented class fractions), understood as unwanted intrusions both in
terms of form (interruptive) and content (stupefying); the “Americanized”
flow of popular culture was regarded as a restriction of cultural outlooks;
people speaking loudly in their mobile phones on buses and trains were
described as intruders into the realm of private thought and conversation. The
term “mediatization” came to denote a state of ongoing negotiation, espe-
cially in terms of spatio-temporal boundary work, where intrusions and
restraints were the price paid for a steadily multiplying flow of culture and
greater opportunities for social connectivity.
In a subsequent project, focusing on the role of the media in the production
of post-industrial cityscapes, I gave these ideas a sharper geographical articu-
lation via Lefebvre’s (1974/91) theories of a triadic social space. In a case
study of the 2001 international housing exhibition Bo01 in Malmö, Sweden,
which marked the starting point of the transformation of the Western Harbor
96â•‡â•‡André Jansson
district from a decaying and de-industrialized area into a fashionable neigh-

borhood, I analyzed the discursive interplay between the high-profile market-
ing that proceeded the fair and the news media coverage that successively—due
to quality problems, delays, economic bankruptcy, and social confronta-
tions—turned the former exhibition space into a stigmatized neighborhood
(Jansson, 2005). These analyses were followed up by interviews with persons
who eventually moved into the new apartments in the Western Harbor area,
and who themselves spoke about being indirectly stigmatized by the negative
media coverage. One of my interviewees stated that she felt like having the
name of the housing fair, Bo01, written in her forehead. The newly estab-
lished local identity of my interviewees was intimately associated with the
exhibition narrative and, thus, dependent on mediated representations of
space. One might say that their life biographies were mediatized, involuntar-
ily, because of their choice of dwelling place.
These studies opened my eyes to the central role played by the media—as
technologies and cultural institutions—in shaping people’s perceptions of
space/place as well as the very spaces/places in which people live and dwell.
They also proved the usefulness of mediatization as a concept for describing
the broader social transformations whereby the production of space, and thus
people’s everyday lifeworlds, become dependent on various means and
processes of technological mediation. These dependences, as well as the
broader social adaptations that constitute mediatization as a long-term “meta-
process” (Krotz, 2007), are, to a great extent, evolving through social dynam-
ics that are beyond the control of individual subjects. At the same time, every
individual decision to appropriate a new technology or sign up for a new
subscription (which we like to think of as entirely rational decisions) plays
into the successive movement that makes the media more and more indispen-
sable to modern ways of life. The ways in which I originally discussed
mediatization clearly denote a “social-constructivist” (Couldry and Hepp,
2013), even “media ecological” (Clark, 2009), understanding of the concept,
through which questions of both time and space are brought to the fore.
My interest in the relations between media/communication and spatial
production was further spurred by a number of important books (written by
geographers as well as media scholars) that were published during the same
period—for example, David Morley’s (2000) Home Territories: Media,
Mobility and Identity, Clive Barnett’s (2003) Culture and Democracy:
Media, Space and Representation, and Nick Couldry’s and Anna McCarthy’s
(2004) MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age. None of these
books, however, paid any attention to the concept of mediatization, the
simplest reason, probably, being that the term was basically alien to the
Anglo-American vocabulary. Whereas Scandinavian and German-speaking
scholars had discussed processes of “medialisering” and “Mediatisierung,”
respectively, for at least two decades, there were, in Anglophone settings,
only very few theorists who applied any other term than “mediation” for
Critical Communication Geographyâ•‡ â•‡ 97
describing the transformative social force of the media—with Thompson’s

(1995) usage of mediazation as the exception to the rule. My first explicit
contribution to the field of communication geography—the Nordic collection
Geographies of Communication: The Spatial Turn in Media Studies
(Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006) —contained three parts (based on Lefebvre’s
triadic space) that indirectly highlighted the distinction between mediation
and mediatization: “Mediated spaces,” “Mediatized spaces,” and “A media-
tized sense of space.” Whereas the first part dealt with the construction and
circulation of spatial representations via media (foreign news, place branding,
and touristic representations), the other two parts dealt with how symbolic-
material media saturation and dependency affect the construction of spaces
(the domestic home, shopping malls, and spa environments), and how media
shape people’s spatial imaginaries and expectations of space (through photo-
graphic practices, computer gaming, and travelogues).
It is obvious that this way of structuring the book involved an act of simpli-
fication. In the Introduction we also stressed that the three spatial realms are
interrelated and that the division between them should merely be understood
as “variations of perspective” (Jansson and Falkheimer, 2006: 17). The
distinction made between mediation and mediatization, however, was left
uncommented. In retrospect, it would have been valuable to point out that
these concepts are also mutually interrelated, and that the divisions between
the sections in this sense too implied “variations of perspective”: where there
is mediatization there are also technological mediations, but not necessarily
the other way around. Furthermore, and probably more importantly, it would
have been a significant contribution to the international discussions on
mediation versus mediatization, as well as to the field of communication
geography, if the distinction between the two concepts, and the rationale
behind making this division of the book, had been clarified.
Today, due to the recently expanded but still predominantly European
debate around mediatization as concept and phenomenon, there seems to be a
general consensus as to what distinguishes mediatization from mediation, and
how the concepts are related to one another (see, e.g., Couldry and Hepp,
2013; Lundby, 2014; Hjarvard, 2013; Hjarvard and Petersen, 2013). However,
in spite of the gradual incorporation of “mediatization” within the interna-
tional lingua franca of media studies, there are still very few scholars who
have acknowledged the prospects of mediatization for (a) analyzing and
understanding the altered conditions of spatial production, and (b) formulating
a critique of the spatial ambiguities and contradictory spatial experiences that
haunt contemporary capitalist societies.2 In two recent texts (Jansson, 2013,
2014a) I have (again) applied Lefebvre’s (1974/91) triadic model of social
space for explicating the different spatial realms through which mediatization
operates, reconstructing mediatization in terms of three sociospatial regimes
of dependence: (a) material adaptation and indispensability of media; (b)
premediation of spatial experience, and (c) normalization of social Â�practice.
I have argued that the ongoing paradigmatic shift from everyday environ-
ments dominated by singular mass media technologies to integrated transme-
dia environments should be understood as alterations within these
regimes—that is, in terms of how dependences come about and what they
mean. “Transmedia” refers to a condition where one particular platform or
content can be reached through a plethora of interconnected (and increasingly
portable) devices, which means that dependences are reinforced within and in
relation to the system as a whole rather than linked to any particular device.
For example, whereas everyday life during the mass media era was largely
organized (temporally and spatially) around and thus more or less dependent
on the schedules and temporal rhythms set up by the broadcasting and news-
paper industries (largely in accordance with the habits of majority popula-
tions), the coming of the transmedia age means that people become
increasingly dependent on abstract technological systems and “upgradings,”
and thus software industries and network providers, in order to enjoy the
liberties of unlimited access (see, e.g., Evans, 2011).
In the present chapter I want to expand on this basic understanding of
mediatization and its ongoing transformations, but approach them from a
somewhat different angle. This time I do not use Lefebvre’s triadic model of
social space as the leading theme. Instead, I construct a critical diagnosis of
the ethical implications of the mediatization of spatial production. This diag-
nosis is based principally upon recognition theory, primarily influenced by
the work of Axel Honneth. Recognition is here taken as a precondition for
individual growth and autonomy, and thus liberation, whose realization may
be nurtured by various forms of mediation, while also being restrained by
escalating media dependence on different levels.
Structure of the Chapter

My analysis starts out with a repositioning of mediatization as a dialectical
concept, whose particular relevance lies in its capacity to found an immanent
critique of the dominant processes that shape and have shaped people’s life-
worlds throughout modern history. The modus operandi of the dialectical
perspective is to unveil the internal contradictions and ambiguities of the media-
tization process. Here I also identify three levels of media Â�dependence—functional,
transactional, and ritual dependence—which describe the different ways in
which the media become indispensable to social life.
Having clarified the properties of the dialectical perspective, I turn to the
main discussion of the chapter, my critical diagnosis, which extends over
three sub-sections. First, I discuss Honneth’s theory of recognition and
present his critique of “organized self-realization” as a dominant structure of
ideologically flawed relations of recognition. I bring Honneth’s critique into
dialogue with the current dynamics of mediatization and point to how
normalized forms of transmedia interaction, notably what I call Â�interveillance,
both respond to and give shape to sociospatial conditions that reproduce

social anxieties and recognition deficits.
Second, I further elaborate the framework of recognition in order to assess
the prospects of a cosmopolitan development in a mediatized society where
people are also increasingly mobile, both globally and in everyday life, and
thus potentially have to negotiate their identities in relation to strangers as
well as peers. As indicated by the opening examples, stemming from an era
still dominated by televised media culture, questions of boundary mainte-
nance, cultural openness versus enclosure, and ways of relating to others and
to oneself, should reasonably be a key concern for communication geogra-
phy. These questions become even more complex in times of pervasive
transmedia environments. Following thinkers like Mustafa Dikeç, I advance
hospitality as an ethical requirement for building mutual relations of recogni-
tion between strangers, and point especially to the importance of collabora-
tive projects of spatial production—the building of hospitable (media)
spaces.
Third, I assess the potentiality of new media for transgressive forms of
spatial production. As several researchers have recently argued, transmedia,
or what, in this context, should be termed “collaborative media” (Löwgren
and Reimer, 2013), provide new opportunities for such practical work. At the
same time, however, these optimistic accounts of collaborative media
projects must be set against the background of dominant transmedial forces
of techno-spatial and sociospatial encapsulation, which rather disintegrate
different groups into their own enclaves and, at the same time, invoke
increasingly complex forms of media dependence. I describe this as a shift
from “spaces of media dependence” to “media spaces of dependence.”
In the final part of the chapter I bring a summary of my arguments and
advance a condensed agenda for critical communication geography. As
outlined in this chapter, such an agenda revolves around the ethics of media
space. But it is also an agenda that has important political implications.3
A Dialectical View of Mediatization

In a special issue of Communication Theory, Couldry and Hepp (2013)
present a useful mapping of how mediatization has been conceptualized over
the years, and how the research field has come to incorporate two main
“camps” or positions: the “institutionalist” and the “social-constructivist”
(see also Hepp, 2013; Lundby, 2014). Whereas members of the former camp
see mediatization as integrating and operating through institutionalized
“logics” that are particular to modern media systems, the latter camp sees
mediatization as a multi-modal and socially situated “meta-process” that
affects social life at a great variety of levels, often in contradictory ways. As
an example of the institutionalist perspective one can mention the implemen-
tation of mediatization as a concept for understanding how politicians, and
the political field at large, adapt their strategies to the “logics” of media (e.g.
Strömbäck, 2008; Asp, 2014). As Hjarvard (2008a, 2008b, 2013) argues, the
media can thus be understood as an institution that, in modern times, has
evolved into a relatively autonomous societal apparatus, which a range of
other fields of institutionalized activity must adapt to. These ideas are
acquainted with Pierre Bourdieu’s (2005) thinking around the relations
between the political field, the social field, and the journalistic field, as well
as Couldry’s (2003a, 2014) elaborations of the media as an overarching and
increasingly prominent field of “meta-capital.” The social-constructivist
perspective, on the contrary, contests the very notion of “logics” and applies
a more open-ended view, where a plethora of media, and thus mediations,
influence the social construction of lifeworlds. The social embeddedness of
media implies that there are mutual processes of shaping, or molding (Hepp,
2012), taking place between “the media” and “the social” (see also
Christensen and Jansson, 2015).
Both perspectives have their problems. The institutionalist perspective can
be criticized for being too reductionist in its view of how mediatization
evolves and where it is located. Since it mainly focuses on “logics” and
processes pertaining to the dominant media institutions in society (such as
news media and various sectors of commercial entertainment), the institu-
tionalist perspective tends to overlook the manifold appearances that media-
tization may take, especially at the level of everyday life. The
social-constructivist perspective instead runs the risk of establishing a notion
of mediatization that is too all encompassing, referring in a vague sense to all
kinds of difference that the media might make to social life and people’s
understandings of the world. By extension, the social-constructivist concep-
tualization may lose its critical potential, since there is no guidance as to what
kinds of media-related changes are not to be seen as part of mediatization (see
also Deacon and Stanyer, 2014). Such a critical potential remains in the insti-
tutional perspective, to the extent the researcher manages to define the domi-
nant media logics that are invoked onto other realms of society, and thus
specify how various relations of mutual dependence and adaptation are put
into place.
As Lundby (2014) points out, the conflict between these perspectives has
gradually arrived at some kind of resolution, at least in the sense that there is
now a mutual awareness of the possibility of approaching mediatization on
two different epistemological levels. At the same time, as the field expands,
there also emerge new approaches that cannot be easily subsumed under any
of these two labels. Neither of these developments has to be problematic as
long as there is agreement on a few basic principles of what mediatization
means. As of today, these principles seem to converge around the understand-
ing of mediatization as a historical movement of structural transformation
conditioned by altered forms of mediation. Couldry and Hepp (2013: 197)
state that movements of mediatization “reflect how the overall consequences
of multiple processes of mediation have changed with the emergence of

different kinds of media.” Similarly, in his introduction to Mediatization of
Communication, Lundby (2014) concludes that whereas mediation refers to
“regular” forms of communication involving some kind of vehicle or
medium, mediatization points to the broader “transformative” consequences
of such processes. Mediatization is thus to be understood as the more struc-
tural concept, referring to a gradual movement of historical change that in
itself contains altered and socially shaped forms of mediation.
There is, however, a very specific feature of the mediatization concept that,
to my knowledge, has not yet been properly articulated in the debate; this is
the critical potential of mediatization. Conceiving of mediatization as a
dialectical process, I argue, contributes to the sharpening of both institution-
alist and social-constructivist analyses. The dialectical view is also what
makes mediatization a particularly useful concept within communication
geography; I will return to this in subsequent parts of the chapter.
So what do I mean by a dialectical, or critical, view? If we go back to the
way in which I have previously defined mediatization, there is a distinct focus
on dependence, which is not often found in other definitions of the term:
mediatization “refers to how other social processes, in a broad variety of
domains, and at different levels, become inseparable from and dependent on
technological processes and resources of mediation” (Jansson, 2013: 281,
italics removed). Mediatization, as I see it, must be formulated in such a way
that it cannot be mistaken for the increasing use or saturation of media in
various realms of society or to the quantitative growth in, for example, inter-
net traffic or access (which is sometimes implied in less elaborated uses of
the term). Nor should mediatization be used for describing just any kind of
historical, qualitative change that is somehow related to the development of
new media. In my view, mediatization refers to those qualitative shifts in
socio-material relations whereby certain increases in the human capacity for
material, social or cultural activity, enabled by media, also incorporate a
decrease in individual or institutional autonomy. Mediatization, thus, neces-
sarily implies a state of growing contradiction, which ultimately boils down
to the opposition between autonomy and dependence.
Three Levels of Media Dependence

In order to clarify and develop this point I will turn to Schulz’s (2004: 88)
influential assertion that mediatization refers to four “processes of social
change in which the media play a key role”: extension, substitution, amalga-
mation, and accommodation. Scrutinizing these four processes helps us
establish the main contours of a dialectical perspective of mediatization and
also differentiate between three levels of dependence.
Let us take a look at each of these processes. As Schulz mentions, they are,
in many cases, intertwined with one another. However, taken as single
processes they tell us different things about what mediatization might mean.
The notion of extension can be traced to McLuhan’s (1964) ideas of media as
means of expanding or extending human senses and capacities (even though
Schulz also stresses that mediatization is different from the techno-determin-
ism associated with the Toronto School). This means that extension primarily
points to the general capacity of media technologies to liberate human beings
from certain bonds, such as spatial and territorial restraints, rather than to
broader social transformations. The process of extension, I argue, is thus to
be understood in terms of mediation rather than mediatization (see also
Hjarvard, 2008a); mediatization occurs only to the extent that social life in
different ways becomes dependent on, and adapted to, the prevalence of
mediated extensions.
This is precisely what is reflected by Schulz’s concept of accommodation,
which potentially points to a dialectical process of adjustment between two
counterparts, where media (technologies and/or institutions) constitute one
side. When Schulz (2004: 89) talks about accommodation he mainly refers
to the institutionalist understanding of the term, using the example of how
“political actors adapt to the rules of the media system trying to increase their
publicity and at the same time accepting a loss of autonomy.” In the political
context, which has been thoroughly researched by a number of scholars (see
Esser and Strömbäck, 2014), we can, thus, identify a type of exchange,
where the growing prevalence of media invokes a state of transactional
dependence. Such relationships are easy to pinpoint in institutional settings
and in relation to social fields where there exist more or less clear-cut goals
and rules. But they also exist within everyday lifeworlds. Whereas the
“currency” of everyday transactions is somewhat difficult to define, the
process of accommodation follows the same basic principle—that is, a
certain “loss of autonomy” is accepted as part of the exchange. This might
mean, for instance, that individuals give up a certain part of their privacy,
complying with commercial systems of surveillance, in order to enhance
their opportunities for social interaction and communion online (Christensen
and Jansson, 2015).
Whereas accommodation involves a moment of transaction or negotiation,
the process of substitution points to a more direct form of functional depend-
ence. Substitution means that a certain type of activity, which was not medi-
ated before, becomes dependent on processes of mediation to the extent that
social actors are virtually forced to appropriate certain media and/or must
learn how to use or interact with certain systems in order to accomplish their
goals. One of the most obvious examples is the expansion of online banking
services, replacing similar services at bank offices, which has made it increas-
ingly problematic for citizens to do without private media technologies to
carry out their transactions. Similarly, in their book Code/Space: Software
and Everyday Life Kitchin and Dodge (2011) demonstrate how the very
constitution of many modern spaces with(in) which people are accustomed to
interact rely on software-monitored processes. One example is the modern

supermarket. If the computerized infrastructures for making purchases
crashed, shopping would be impossible (since staff can no longer process
goods manually), and the supermarket (ultimately defined as a code/space)
would cease to be a supermarket, “instead becoming a temporary warehouse
until such time as the code becomes (re)activated” (ibid.: 17). In other words,
Kitchin and Dodge contend, not only social actors are dependent on coded
mediations; “the sociospatial production of the supermarket is functionally
dependent on code” (ibid.).
In other realms of social life, however, the volume of substitution processes
may not be as large as one might first think. For example, there is little
evidence that the increasing usage of media platforms actually replaces non-
mediated interpersonal communication (as Schulz asserts). Most results point
in the opposite direction (see, e.g., Baym, 2010), suggesting that mediated
interaction tends to foster a need for face-to-face meetings and vice versa
(both in private and professional contexts). In such cases we are, thus, not
dealing with a process of growing functional dependence, but with a more
experiential dimension.
This brings us to Schulz’s final process, amalgamation. This is the most
complicated process to think about from a mediatization perspective.
Whereas extension had to be dismissed as a non-valid articulation of media-
tization, and accommodation and substitution were relatively unproblematic
to fit within a dialectical approach, amalgamation takes us to a phenomeno-
logical level where dependence must be viewed from a more social-construc-
tivist perspective. Amalgamation refers to the ways in which media practices
become inseparable from other, non-mediated activities, saturating the fabric
of our everyday lives as well as institutional processes. Schulz provides a
number of examples, such as listening to the radio while driving or having a
date at the movies. A decade after Schulz’s article, in times of increasingly
portable and multi-functional media devices, we can see how the processes
of amalgamation escalate; there are fewer and fewer space-times that do not
entail moments of mediation. For those of us who have a smartphone, a
plethora of applications are literally at our fingertips wherever we go,
enabling us to go on- and offline in an increasingly seamless manner.
Do these amalgamations or saturations qualify as articulations of mediati-
zation? Here it is tempting to fall into a quantifying mode of reasoning—that
is, to equate mediatization with the mere expansion and omnipresence of
mediation processes in everyday life. I would argue, however, that in order to
understand processes of amalgamation as instances of mediatization they
must have come to occupy a crucial position within the lifeworld—that is,
having produced such a significant level of taken-for-grantedness that certain
practices have become unthinkable without accompanying media (devices,
platforms, texts, etc.). This is to say that amalgamations would count as
expressions of mediatization insofar as they have become indispensable parts
of ritualized “common practice.” Such an understanding, as I have argued

elsewhere (Jansson, 2014a), also means that amalgamations are temporally
and spatially (re)structuring. A certain sphere of activity can be seen as
mediatized if it is commonly understood as unthinkable or problematic to do
something at a certain time or in a certain place without also using media.
Sending a text message to one’s partner just before leaving work, for instance,
may certainly not qualify as an instance of functional or transactional depend-
ence. However, if this behavior is normalized and turned into a taken-for-
granted and mutually expected practice, tied to a certain time and/or place, we
might speak of ritual dependence. When such forms of everyday dependence
in relation the media affect large groups of the population (as opposed to just
a few individuals) we can speak of a movement of mediatization.
Kitchin and Dodge (2011: 18) introduce a corresponding distinction
between “code/space” and “coded space,” where the latter refers to “spaces
where software makes a difference to the transduction of spatiality but the
relationship between code and space is not mutually constituted.” They take
the frequent use of Power Point slides in oral presentations as an example.
Whereas digital projection may indeed lead to an augmentation of space and
is often seen as common practice among audiences, the presentation as such
is not functionally dependent on code. We might, thus, say that the pervasive-
ness of coded space is a function of ritual dependence.
Compared to functional and transactional dependence, however, the
strength of ritual dependence is very difficult to estimate (without denying
that the limits of the other forms are by no means absolute either). In order to
do so, and, ultimately, to be able say something substantial about how medi-
atization is shaping and being shaped by ritual practice, we are bound to
apply hermeneutical modes of analysis where conclusions remain more or
less open-ended. Still, what unites all three levels of dependence, and what
makes it possible to bring together institutionalist and social-constructivist
perspectives within a shared critical framework, is that the gains of increas-
ing resources of mediation come at the price of decreasing autonomy.
Immanent Critique
If we bring this discussion back to the question of institutional versus social-
constructivist approaches to mediatization, we can see how a dialectical
understanding can contribute to both camps. On the one hand, it becomes
obvious that the institutionalist perspective (as we know it) is not sufficient
for grasping the full complexity of mediatization, not even within institu-
tional settings. There is clearly a need for reflecting on how institutionalist
analyses could incorporate problems related to ritual dependence. At the
same time, however, institutionalist analyses dealing with transactional and
functional dependences may hold sufficient validity inasmuch as they
concentrate on areas marked by relatively formalized rules. On the other
hand, in relation to the social-constructivist perspective, the dialectical frame-

work encourages scholars to reflect upon and clarify how they delimit media-
tization in relation to the general multiplication and social saturation of
mediation processes.
My reading of Schulz’s article has pointed to some inconsistencies in his
typology of mediatization processes. At the same time the typology has
proven to be a fruitful starting point for advancing an explicitly dialectical
approach that may also serve as the framework for critical analyses of medi-
atization. Schulz does not endorse such a development, but contends that
“though the mediatization concept may be useful for critical analysis, its
meaning does not necessarily entail an evaluative component” (2004: 90). In
my view, however, the critical potential that a dialectical perspective sets in
motion is something that further sharpens the distinction between mediation
and mediatization, underscoring why we actually need such a concept as
mediatization.
I also argue that the type of criticism that mediatization research makes
possible is of an immanent nature. It means a type of criticism that advances
through the analytical identification of the inherent contradictions, the
tensions between emancipatory and restrictive forces, that mediatization
carries within itself. Here, I largely follow Fornäs’s (2013) assertion that the
most powerful forms of criticism are often those that manage to unveil the
inner ambiguities of dominant relations in order to put those “contradictions
and tensions in movement, rather than freezing them to a standstill” (ibid.:
510). Immanent dialectical criticism is distinct from transcendental criticism,
or what Walzer (1987) calls “inventive” criticism, that rather “raises an exter-
nal ideal image against the prevailing social and cultural conditions” (Fornäs,
2013: 509). Whereas mediatization is not a normative concept, there is an
inbuilt transgressive potential in mediatization research, based on the fact that
ambiguities and contradictions integrate the prospects for further change.
Critical mediatization research, and what I will later advance as critical
communication geography, does not have to point out the particular direc-
tions in which such changes ought to lead. The analytical endeavor of expos-
ing how various dependences are shaped, how they contradict “socially
incorporated ideals” (Honneth, 2009: 53) and what their consequences are,
have important social implications.
Recognition and Hospitality in Mediatized Lifeworlds

The above discussion ultimately begs the question of where the limits are to
be drawn as to the allegedly expanding power and prevalence of media/
mediations. What forms of autonomy are we as individual subjects willing to
negotiate and to what extent? In this part of the chapter I discuss this question
in relation to a key source of individual autonomy: the quest for recognition,
as theorized by Axel Honneth. Recognition and autonomy, as we will see, are
mutually dependent categories. Furthermore, recognition becomes a crucial

category of critical communication geography because this is precisely what
most processes of mediation promise to deliver, whether we look at the level
of mundane media practices or more organized forms of community building.
Still, the media spaces that we, as ordinary citizens, are part of producing are
ambiguous in nature. For example, our virtual worlds (everything from news
sites and political blogs to various forms of social networking sites) may just
as well exploit and reinforce our need for recognition and thus undermine
autonomy—under the auspices of promoting expressivity and social popular-
ity (cf. van Dijck and Poell, 2013).
This is not the place for constructing a comprehensive and genealogically
anchored criticism of such a complex issue as recognition (cf. Honneth, 2009:
Ch. 3). I concentrate my discussion on the sociospatial conditions for recog-
nition and thus begin to establish the link between critical mediatization
research and communication geography. It means that I reflect, first, on how
various forms of media dependence accompany the trend towards “organized
self-realization” (Honneth, 2004) in pluralized and geographically expanded
lifeworlds. Second, I advance the concept of hospitality as the required ethos
for sustaining mutual recognition and collaborative production of open
spaces in a globalized “world of strangers.” This discussion leads, third, to a
questioning of what role media might play in the production of hospitable
spaces. Whereas the questions of recognition and hospitality have strong
political inferences, primarily in terms of identity politics, my discussion
primarily regards the ethical and interactional aspects of mediatization.
Mediatization and Altered Relations of Recognition

Human beings develop their identities through an ongoing interplay between
social integration and separation. These dynamics mark social processes
through various stages of the life-course in relation to various social constel-
lations. Recognition is a basic requirement for the individual to develop a
sense of autonomous self—that is, to establish a sense of security in his or her
own capability of thinking, reflecting, and acting independently of other indi-
viduals. Such a sense of secure “relation-to-self” (Honneth, 2012: 205)
cannot emerge without positive attention from significant others, who
contribute both to social integration and a sense of individual worth on behalf
of the individual. The individual’s desire to belong to groups is, thus, not
merely a reflection of integrative forces, but should be understood as a quest
for autonomy through recognition. One of the predicaments of Honneth’s
theory of recognition is that “groups should be understood, whatever their
size or type, as a social mechanism that serves the interests or needs of the
individual by helping him or her to achieve personal stability and growth”
(ibid.: 203). However, the membership of groups gives no guarantee of
recognition in the true sense of the word, since groups may also involve
repressive tendencies that rather lead to conformism and the dissolution of

autonomy. Such problems regarding the integration of the “I” in the “We”
can be seen as integral to social life from its very outset.
In Honneth’s positive definition of the term, recognition “should be under-
stood as a genus comprising various forms of practical attitudes whose
primary intention consists in a particular act of affirming another person or
group” (ibid.: 80–1). The concept thus contains three basic premises: recogni-
tion should be (a) positively affirmative, (b) actualized through concrete
action (rather than just symbolically), and (c) explicitly intended (rather than
emerging as a social side effect or means for reaching other goals). It is also
stated that the basic attitude of recognition can take the form of various
“subspecies,” above all love, legal respect, and esteem. Against such pure
stances of recognition, Honneth poses ideological forms of recognition that
rather exploit the individual’s psychosocial needs in order to install attitudes
that reproduce certain structures of domination. One example is the way in
which societies of different epochs have endorsed certain attributes among
certain groups as part of the structural reproduction of hegemonic orders for
the division of labor: “We could easily cite past examples that demonstrate
just how often public displays of recognition merely serve to create and main-
tain an individual relation-to-self that is seamlessly integrated into a system
based on the prevailing division of labour” (ibid.: 77). Such ideological forms
of recognition are false, according to Honneth, because they fail to promote
personal autonomy.
What makes Honneth’s thinking around recognition especially interesting
in the context of mediatization is that the concept lays the ground for a
broader social criticism of modern society. Honneth’s critique regards, espe-
cially, the negative consequences of an extended individualization process,
which, in his view, integrates forces (including the media) that, under the
auspices of supporting autonomy and recognition, actually operate in the
opposite direction. Whereas the individualization process, in its positive
realization, promotes the growth of individual freedom and autonomy—
setting individuals free from oppressive structures and normalizing the
pluralization of choice—it has gradually (and especially since the last
decades of the twentieth century) turned into another realm where ideological
forms of recognition prevail (Honneth, 2004, 2012: Ch. 9). There are, today,
institutional expectations and ideological imperatives working on individu-
als, infusing a normalized view of “self-realization” as a required biographi-
cal goal. Media institutions, as well as labor markets and a multitude of
commercial actors, encourage people to actively work on their “authentic
self” and learn how to present their personality in ways that are as beneficial
as possible for reaching certain goals in society or in their careers. This
organized form of self-realization implies that genuinely dialogical processes
of recognition are undermined, replaced by standardized patterns of recogni-
tion and identity-seeking that merely serve the goal of legitimizing and
further integrating individuals into the capitalist system. Authenticity and

autonomy transmute into their opposites, simulation and conformism, and
individuals may ultimately find their lives devoid of meaning.
What Honneth outlines is, thus, a dialectical transformation whereby the
individual quest for recognition and autonomy rather leads in the direction of
system legitimation and growing dependence.4 The role of the media is
mentioned in a few passages, such as this one: “Electronic media have
certainly had a pioneering role in this process of redirection; their increased
significance in everyday life now makes a much stronger contribution to
sustaining the stylistic ideal of an original, creative life” (Honneth, 2012:
162). What Honneth seems to argue here is that “the media,” taken as a
compound institution, operates as a machinery for normalizing what we may
call desirable “formats of self-realization,” which in turn play the role of
legitimizing certain forms of ideological recognition. This also means, if we
assume that Honneth is right, that the transfiguration of individualization into
organized self-realization is symbiotically interlaced with the mediatization
meta-process. The growing reliance on various processes of mediation for
gaining recognition would imply that while “the media” contribute to the
cultivation of false (or at least ambiguous) modes of recognition, such culti-
vation processes put into place an ideological structure that reaffirms media
as indispensable resources for human autonomy and growth, which would
then, paradoxically, spur the process of further autonomy loss.
Beyond this important observation, however, Honneth’s work does not
present any elaboration on the more precise status of “media,” or the ways in
which they intervene in the dialectical movement of organized self-
realization. Here I want to argue that the synergetic relationship between
mediatization and organized self-realization, and the dialectical relations that
are produced, can be further explicated if we also scrutinize how these
changes are related to past and present alterations of sociospatial conditions.
Whereas Honneth does not dress his analysis in spatial terms, it is clear that
the pluralization of both values and social milieus, or what Berger et al.
(1973) once called the “pluralization of lifeworlds,” leads to a state of
increased psychological vulnerability among individuals, which in turn can
be seen as “one, if not the, central motive behind group formation today”
(Honneth, 2012: 207). Furthermore, since modern society, as opposed to
more traditional formations, does not provide one unified standard (such as
religiously grounded ethics) in relation to which the individual may estimate
the value of his or her achievements, it becomes increasingly important for
the individual to seek out the esteem of his or her peers. Thus we can see how
the prevalence of “organized self-realization” is largely rooted in broad trans-
formations of sociospatial conditions through which place-bound communi-
ties (particularly those related to family and kinship) have loosened up and
individuals have become increasingly mobile in their day-to-day activities as
well as through their life trajectories.
This is, indeed, a long-term transformation, which Honneth outlines partly

via Simmel’s (1900/90) classical work on how urbanization and the moneta-
rization of social relations affected the prospects for individual autonomy and
freedom in industrial society. An acquainted diagnosis (not mentioned by
Honneth) can be found in Riesman’s (1950/2001) account of the modern shift
from “inner-directedness” to “other-directedness” as the dominant mode of
social conformity in post-war America. Riesman and his colleagues identified
a growing social anxiety, especially among the urban, increasingly mobile
middle classes, which they argued led to increasingly reflexive forms of iden-
tity and lifestyle management. The desire to achieve mutual recognition
among peers was channeled through standardized consumption practices.
Riesman paid great attention to the mass media, acknowledging their func-
tion as an important agent for the circulation of standardized stylistic ensem-
bles, a kind of omnipresent learning machine that could help individuals
establishing social bonds and channeling their psychological needs for recog-
nition in a spatially fragmented and volatile society. Yet another version of
this perspective on modern mass media can be found in Lefebvre’s critical
analyses of popular culture and the “land of make-believe,” examining, for
instance, how advertising and magazines present consumer objects to audi-
ences “with the codes that ritualize such ‘messages’ and make them available
by programming everyday life” (Lefebvre, 1971/84: 86, italics added).
Following these analyses, the mass media have operated, and still operate,
simultaneously as a map and a guidebook of the social terrain; a representa-
tional system that establishes and negotiates the codes through which patterns
of interpersonal recognition (and misrecognition) evolve. This means that
mass media not only mediate, but also, perhaps more essentially, premediate
sociospatial expectations and experiences of individual actors (Grusin, 2010;
Jansson, 2013), turning the process of (mass) mediation as such into a force
of symbolic legitimation. As Couldry (2003b) suggests, the symbolic power
of the media (taken in the broad, institutional sense) rests on a dominant
mythology, or “programming” of everyday life (cf. Lefebvre above), that
elevates the media as an institution that circulates symbolic material that
possesses exceptional social, cultural, economic or political significance.
This mythology functions as a stabilizing factor in relation to the social
uncertainties articulated through organized self-realization and other-direct-
edness, and legitimizes the ritual dependence on the mass media as a structure
of “premediated recognition” (let alone that these dependences take on
contextually specific forms).
An important conclusion that we can draw from these observations is that
mediatization is not a linear, technologically or otherwise media-induced
process, but precisely the kind of meta-process that Krotz (2007) outlines.
Whereas alterations in sociospatial conditions, involving altered relations of
recognition, have been a historical force behind the growing media depend-
ence in everyday lifeworlds, the affordances of new media technologies also
hold the capacity to reshape these conditions. For instance, by introducing the
term “mobile privatization,” Raymond Williams (1974) eloquently showed
how ritualized uses of broadcasting technologies underpinned the interplay
between a home-centered suburban way of life and new forms of daily (auto)
mobility patterns.
In more recent years these sociospatial conditions, in turn, have been
contested through the advent of the internet, mobile media devices, and a
plethora of transmedial communication platforms. More and more people,
especially younger audiences, reorient their media habits away from mass-
mediated output towards interactive platforms, notably what we call “social
media,” that circulate not only contents emanating from major media outlets,
but also narrowcast and partly user-generated flows. The very architecture of
these expanding platforms, epitomized by successful brands such as
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, enables and demands continu-
ous involvement and updates. They also normalize sociospatial conditions
that differ from those implied by Honneth’s discussions (which is, of course,
partly due to the rapidness of media development) and have not yet been
discussed in relation to recognition theory at large.5 At the same time it is
obvious that the current stage of mediatization at a more foundational level,
and to an accentuated degree, still feeds from the psychosocial needs and
desires that characterize the individualization process, and thus contributes to
the prolongation of organized self-realization.
My point here is that whereas the success of social media platforms (and
here I am talking about dominant commercial corporations such as the ones
just mentioned) stems from their promises of providing a solution to the
widespread “recognition deficit” and accompanying anxiety that characterize
individualized societies, they have, in fact, given rise to an everyday culture
of interveillance, which is largely based on simulated forms of recognition
and where new spaces of self-realization are inseparable from overarching
structures of mediated surveillance (see also Jansson, 2012, 2014b;
Christensen and Jansson, 2015). This absorption of identity-defining commu-
nication practices into what we, in line with Kitchin and Dodge’s (2011)
reasoning, may call “code/space” is one of the most pervasive dialectical
articulations of mediatization today, involving new forms of dependences at
functional, transactional, and ritual levels.
Interveillance is different from surveillance precisely in the sense that it
does not build on or establish any clear-cut hierarchical power relationships
where one part systematically watches over and collates information about
another part. Interveillance refers to a ritualized mode of observing and
evaluating the symbolic actions of one’s peers and venturing into relation-
ships of reciprocal information disclosure as part of self-management. This
means, as Marwick (2012: 378) suggests, that interveillance “assumes the
power differentials evident in everyday interactions.”6 At the same time, the
industrial logic of dominant social media, which is ultimately an economic
logic of profit-making (van Dijck, 2012; van Dijck and Poell, 2013), is built
around the automatic aggregation of communicative acts of self-confirma-
tion, which contributes not only to the individual’s creation of an observable
and manageable “second self,” but also to the commercial recreation of an
algorithmic space of targetable data-doubles (see, e.g., Striphas, 2015;
Trottier, 2011; Trottier and Lyon, 2012).
These processes establish a set of sociospatial relations that reinforce
media dependence in three different ways. First, interveillance implies that
the individual is actively seeking out recognition from his or her peers, which
can take the form of various symbolic acts (“likes,” comments, tags, etc.).
Without dismissing the possibility that social media also function as media-
tors of broader relations of pure recognition, the architecture of these spaces
and the interface through which they unfold tend to sustain open-ended
processes of simulation where the distinction between connectivity (involv-
ing any kind of techno-mediated linkages) and social proximity (or connect-
edness) is collapsed (cf. van Dijck and Poell, 2013). Whereas the system
measures how many connections different users have and how many confirm-
ative acts certain posts generate, it is devoid of the dialogical character that
marks processes of recognition and makes it possible for each actor to herme-
neutically assess and build trust in the intentionality and practical relevance
of other communicators’ affirmations. On the contrary, in social media there
is no proximity, but continuous uncertainty as to what intentions and what
level of involvement may hide behind the digital interface. The promoted
way of securing a sense of positive recognition is, instead, to gain attention
from a greater number of peers, striving for “popularity” (ibid.). While this is
in line with the industrial logics of producing measurable consumer segments,
it also means that users expose themselves to the risk of gaining no or too
little attention and furthering a spiral of narcissism. Nunes (2013: 10) refers
to this process as the escalating “obscenity of visibility,” through which the
“materialization of lived events into its image as ‘status update’… transforms
identity into an aggregation of data.” In sum, the quest for recognition and
autonomy becomes a matter of “surface-acting” (Hochschild, 1983) that may
result in further anxieties while making interveillance a ritualized part of
everyday life and certain media devices and platforms ritually indispensable.
Second, as we have already seen, the basically horizontal processes of
interveillance are structurally integrated within commercially governed
processes of automated surveillance. This means that each user has to
subscribe to those statements of terms that allow the service provider to
aggregate, store, and analyze data flows in order to build consumer segments
for targeted online advertising. Whereas this means that social media, at one
level of analysis, occupy the same symbolically orienting function as the
mass media, being indirectly part of shaping social processes of recognition
and self-making, they are, at another level, revolutionizing these sociospatial
relations by turning individual media consumers into agents of their own
surveillance, complying with substantial privacy restraints (Andrejevic,

2007, 2014). The type of recognition that may stem from increasingly person-
alized services and publicity offers is obviously “false,” in Honneth’s sense
of the term, because it contributes to the legitimation of the dominant system
itself. It also comes at the expense of an explicitly transactional form of
media dependence. Studies show that most media users feel less anxious in
relation to this type of systematic surveillance than in relation to interveil-
lance practices (see Jansson, 2012; Marwick, 2012) and tend to overlook the
complex terms of use that they comply with (Best, 2010; Andrejevic, 2014).
Third, to the extent that social media are institutionalized as functionally
required tools for communication and self-promotion within particular
branches of the economy, which we can see happening especially in those
branches characterized by “network sociality” (Wittel, 2001), ritual and
transactional dependences may actually develop into functional dependence.
This means that the involvement in social media, which, according to self-
branding handbooks, should also integrate strategic management and disclo-
sure of the “private self” and “private spaces” in relation to the public gaze,
is no longer negotiable and that the sociospatial boundaries of the self are
permanently mediatized (cf. Marwick, 2012).
The ultimate conclusion of these discussions is that today’s dominant
social media industries operate as machineries of simulated recognition,
whose power rests on and reproduces an anxiety-driven dependence on new
means and symbols of connectivity. Social media as so conceived constitute
an expanding space of dependence, to which I return below. Whereas such a
critical conclusion may sound drastic, it does not contradict the fact that
social media (notably within broader media ensembles) also spur further and
deeper forms of mutual recognition between peers, as evidenced in various
studies (Linke, 2011; Caughlin and Sharabi, 2013; Jiang and Hancock, 2013).
The overall consequences of mediatization are, as always, difficult to over-
view and may take on different (contradictory) appearances in different
contexts.
Based on this first step of my dialectical critique of mediatization, where I
have tried to identify how altered media dependencies resonate with broader
processes of individualization, I now want to extend the discussion of recog-
nition beyond the realm of peer-to-peer relations. In the next section I focus
on relations that involve the crossing of spatial boundaries (through migration
and other forms of mobility) and where recognition rests on the precondition
of hospitality.
Hospitality and/as Spatial Production

Honneth’s theory of recognition exposes two problems related to his concep-
tion of identity. These problems stand out when his ideas are applied onto
conditions of growing cultural complexity. First, Honneth’s model treats
identity as a relatively homogeneous entity, and largely overlooks the often

complex and internally contradictory relations-to-self that an individual may
experience and express. Honneth’s theoretical discussion seems to overlook
many of the ordinary problems that human beings experience when they actu-
ally encounter one another in everyday life and when ambiguities of identities
(and thus the very object of recognition) are exposed and made the subject of
interpretation. This is a problem that Honneth shares with, for example,
Charles Taylor (1989), who, in his theoretical program for identity politics
“of difference,” tends to reproduce simplified group identities that do not
match the multilayeredness of people’s lives. The complexity and relative
volatility of identities come to the fore, particularly in relations that evolve
between strangers and when individual subjects do not fit easily into obvious
categories of, for example, ethnicity, gender or sexuality.
The second problem is of a more ethical nature. Honneth advocates an
affirmative model of recognition, which means that recognition should be
based on the perception of qualities that other persons or groups already
possess, rather than the attribution of new (albeit positive) qualities. As
Honneth (2012: 81) points out, the problem of the attribution (or transforma-
tive) model is that it does not offer any “internal criteria for judging the
correctness or appropriateness of such acts of ascription.” Similar problems
pertain to the affirmative model as well, but there, Honneth argues, the inter-
subjective potential of the lifeworld paves the way for reaching valid forms
of recognition. More qualified forms of value affirmation can be achieved
through a progressive broadening of one’s interpretative horizons:
Without going into the details of such a process of progress, which I

believe must be defined as a form of reflection on the knowledge that
guides us in the lifeworld, the main idea behind it is that with the differ-
entiation of evaluative qualities we observe and notice on the basis of
our socialization, the normative level of our relations of recognition
rises as well. With every value that we can affirm by an act of recogni-
tion, our opportunities for identifying with our abilities and attaining
greater autonomy grow. This should suffice to justify the idea that our
concept of recognition is anchored in a moderate form of value realism.
(Ibid.: 83)
What is agreeable in Honneth’s approach is that he encourages a continuous

learning process grounded in the ethical responsibility to actively pay atten-
tion to the qualities of others and, thus, also grow as an autonomous indi-
vidual. Still, as Nancy Fraser has pointed out in several texts (see, e.g., Fraser,
1997: Ch. 1, 2000a, 2000b, 2001), there is a tendency in the affirmative
approach to “encourage zero-sum thinking” instead of promoting synergy
and transformation (2000a: 22). Affirmation cannot account for the complex
push and pulls of individual or group identities, but rather contributes to the
reproduction of pre-established identity relations. The problem of affirmation

then boils down to the basic theoretical flaw that was mentioned above—that
is, the cultural reification of identity (Fraser, 2000b).
Any finite choice between affirmative and transformative models of recog-
nition would be difficult to sustain; ultimately, both models are based on
theoretical suppositions that are problematic to fully validate when confronted
with real-life situations. Fraser’s solution to the problem is to advance a
model that moves beyond the ethical challenges of social interaction and, in
doing so, sidesteps the difficulties of the identity model of recognition alto-
gether. In Fraser’s (2001: 24) view, making recognition theory politically
applicable would require that it emphasized the recognition not of group-
specific identities, but of “the status of group members as full partners in
social interaction.” This means that groups and individuals should be recog-
nized in their capacity of being peers with equal status and ability to contrib-
ute to social life. Particular aspects of identity would then be protected from
the risk of being misrecognized.
Fraser’s perspective is, indeed, suggestive at the political level; however,
the obvious fact that she leaves ethical considerations aside (which is also her
main point) makes the status model non-applicable for comprehending and
formulating a critique of relations of recognition that are located within the
lifeworld. In day-to-day life, the ethos of mutual learning that Honneth points
to is not only an ethically desired stance; it is also grounded in the continuous
cultural processes that make up the lifeworld.
My point is that the type of ethos that Honneth discusses does not have to
be one-sidedly associated with the affirmative model of recognition, but may
just as well have as its goal to mediate between affirmative and transforma-
tive acts of recognition. In practical processes of interaction (between stran-
gers or peers) this would signify an ethical stance where openness to the
possibility of mutual self-transformation is paired with a fundamental
respect for what can be regarded intersubjectively as the other person’s pre-
established qualities. The ethos I am thinking of here can be seen as a certain
form of hospitality, whose importance increases in a society of intensified
and pluralized mobility and altered sociospatial conditions. Under mobile
conditions, when people more often encounter strangers, or individuals or
groups whose “qualities” (to speak with Honneth) are unknown or vaguely
known, hospitality becomes the precondition for recognition. I would even
say that hospitality is the ethical modus operandi of recognition under
mobile conditions.
The concept of hospitality, which has been widely debated in theories of
cosmopolitanism, is just as complex as recognition; thorn between the ethical
extremes of affirmation and transformation. In Kant’s (1795/1970) classical
writings on hospitality as a universal law of the cosmopolitan world order
(where all human beings have similar right to the planet) he introduced an
understanding that granted the citizen who arrived in another state the right
to visit—that is, to be openly welcomed as a guest, rather than met with

hostility. The host was also granted the right of not being invaded or threat-
ened in his or her territory. Kant’s formulation (originally pertaining to the
political level) is thus in line with an affirmative approach and presupposes
that the guest is going back to his or her home country after the visit. The
distinction between host and guest is clearly maintained. In a significant
critique of Kant’s perspective, Derrida (2000, 2001) has deconstructed the
idea of hospitality and advocated a transformative approach that stresses the
open-ended character of both host and guest. Hospitality as so conceived
points to a process of continuous negotiation, where the very act of welcom-
ing becomes problematic because it presupposes somebody’s right to claim a
particular space as his or her home. Derrida thus suggests a view where the
status of host and guest is in a state of constant flux, and where hospitality
always remains on its way, on the threshold (ultimately leading to the implo-
sion of the concept itself).
In an attempt to reconcile the affirmative and transformative positions,
Mustafa Dikeç arrives at an understanding that converges with the intermedi-
ary, or mediating, conception that I advanced above:
Thinking about hospitality, more importantly, is to think about openings

and recognition. Although boundaries form an inherent part of the notion
hospitality, without which such a notion would be perhaps unnecessary,
hospitality, I want to argue, is about opening, without abolishing, these
boundaries, and giving spaces to the stranger where recognition on both
sides would be possible. In this sense, it implies the mutuality of recogni-
tion. (Dikeç, 2002: 229, italics in original)
Dikeç’s elaboration of hospitality is elegant in the way in which he, on the

one hand, accounts for the volatile nature of identity and the fact that encoun-
ters, especially between “strangers” (a term that he discusses at length),
necessarily involve some kind of change, at least in terms of those mutual
learning processes that expand the individual’s capacity for making future
interpretations, and, on the other hand, takes seriously the deeper feelings of
attachment and sense of home that individuals generally hold in relation to
sociospatial arrangement(s) of various kinds. As I read Dikeç’s work, he
represents a position that allows the cosmopolitan ethos to incorporate more
phenomenological understandings of place, home, identity, and difference—
such as those found in Tuan’s (1977) work—without falling into spatial
romanticism or cultural reification. The key is to envision hospitality as the
modus operandi through which spaces are opened and kept open for
processes of mutual recognition (and thus growth of autonomy), which may
then point to processes of self-transformation as well as cultural boundary
negotiations and conflicts (which is not the same thing as misrecognition).
Furthermore, hospitality takes time, we are reminded (Dikeç, 2009; Barnett,
2005). Hospitality is about giving both time and space to the stranger who
suddenly stands on the threshold, rather than securing the border through
which he or she is (re)produced as an Other (Dikeç, 2002: 244).
Where can we find such spaces (or, more precisely, time-spaces) of hospi-
tality? How can they emerge and be kept open? To what extent are they
conditioned by our new media of communication? Much has been said and
written about these issues, especially within the areas of urban studies and
critical geography (see, e.g., Dikeç, 2009; Soja, 2010; Harvey, 2012), but also
in research on media, migration, and morality (see, e.g., Morley, 2000;
Silverstone, 2007; Georgiou, 2013). During recent years the discussions have
often been framed within the broader discourse of cosmopolitanism, cosmo-
politanization, and cosmopolitan culture (see, e.g., Beck, 2004/6; Delanty,
2009; Papastergiadis, 2012). My aim here is neither to provide a comprehen-
sive overview of potential answers to these questions, which would generate
a wide range of political questions concerning sociospatial planning and
governance, nor to venture into the rather heated debates surrounding cosmo-
politanism and its relevance as an ethical stance or epistemology. Rather, I
want to extract just one point from these discussions, which stands out as
particularly important in relation to the proposed theory of recognition and
hospitality. This point concerns spatial practice and takes Dikeç’s argument
one step further while at the same time leading us back to Honneth and the
dialectical view of mediatization.
Recognition, as Honneth suggests, cannot rely on merely symbolic activi-
ties or surface-acting, but should be anchored in concrete and consequential
practices, which then also involves a certain moment of risk. The same thing,
consequently, regards hospitality. To actively open spaces to other people
(literally or in cultural and emotional terms) is to initiate a process whose
outcome is uncertain, and where each identity is potentially contested
(Iveson, 2006: 77; Silverstone, 2007). Derrida refers to this as the “double
law” of hospitality: “to calculate the risks, yes, but without closing the door
on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner” (Derrida, 2005:
6). The opening of spaces is thus to be regarded as a spatial practice, in
Lefebvre’s (1974/91) sense of the term, that leads not only to the sharing of
space in mutual recognition, but also to the production of space. Hospitality
invites people to work practically upon space; the guest who is invited into
somebody’s home does not leave that space totally unaffected, but contrib-
utes to its production, if not materially so in the sense that the home-place is
(re)produced (at best) as a hospitable space to which those who live there can
attribute a certain positive value.
Seen from the other side of the process, and as pointed out in the litera-
ture on urban justice and governance (Lefebvre, 1968/93; Sandercock,
2000, 2003; Amin, 2002, 2012; Iveson, 2006; Dikeç, 2009; Harvey, 2012),
the concrete and collaborative production of space holds great potential to
sustain mutual recognition among those involved. The city, understood as a
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pluralized space where “strangeness” is a condition potentially shared by
everybody, provides enhanced opportunities for such interactions to occur
(Iveson, 2006). Still, it may require substantial political governance for
actually bringing about those micro-publics where strangers are forced to
engage collaboratively in shared interests and “where dialogue and prosaic
negotiations are compulsory” (Sandercock, 2003: 94). Using examples from
various (trans)local projects of urban regeneration and development,
Sandercock (2000, 2003) states that these processes become particularly
valuable as part of the solution to xenophobia in that they recognize the
need for “a language and a process of emotional involvement, of embodi-
ment, of allowing the whole person to be present in negotiations and delib-
erations” (Sandercock, 2000: 26). In a related account, Amin (2002)
describes “micro-publics of banal transgression” as spaces where people of
different backgrounds come together, solve problems, and create things. For
example, he maintains that “Colleges of Further Education, usually located
out of the residential areas which dominate the lives of the young people,
are a critical liminal or threshold space between the habituation of home,
school and neighbourhood on the one hand, and that of work, family, class
and cultural group on the other hand” (ibid.: 14, italics added). Even the
very materialities of space (locational properties, infrastructures, boundary
arrangements, signage, etc.) work as unconscious mediators of cultural and
moral value (Amin, 2012), thus making the cosmopolitan quest for open
spaces and collaborative spatial practices an even more critical and forward-
looking challenge.
From “Spaces of Media Dependence” to

“Media Spaces of Dependence”
The spatial-practical approach to hospitality also invites new ways of think-
ing about media as tools for collaborative spatial production, rather than as
one-dimensional means of symbolic transmission or sharing. Notions of
digital media and online spaces as arenas for cultural experimentation and
liminal identity exploration are by no means new, and marked much of the
prophetic discourses of the 1990s (see Mosco, 2006). Today’s media
research, however, involves a more historically grounded, and increasingly
significant turn towards materiality as a realm of cultural reconstruction.
Whereas media archeology is one articulation of this “new materialism” (see,
e.g., Parikka, 2012), “collaborative media” is another branch, which takes
seriously the expanded potentials of digital media for realizing various forms
of co-production and co-design of media contents, media spaces, and, indeed,
media as such (Löwgren and Reimer, 2013). According to this orientation,
collaborative media practices cover a broad spectra, ranging from commer-
cially interwoven processes channeled through social media platforms to
more subversive and socially transformative projects associated with, for
example, cultural governance, artistic interventions or social movements and

“tribes.” The collaborative processes that Löwgren and Reimer identify based
on a number of case studies converge in substantial ways with the vision of
liminal, transgressive spaces outlined by urban theorists like Amin and
Sandercock (cf. Sandercock, 2010). Collaborative media thus integrate a
cosmopolitan potential, which has so far been exposed most prominently
among alternative groupings with identity political agendas and interests in
the nivellation of political and cultural hierarchies (see also Papastergiadis,
2012; Christensen and Jansson, 2011).
The shift from mass media to collaborative (trans)media thus denotes a
promise of emancipation, recognition, and autonomy through boundary-
transcending spatial production, where the media are to be seen both as the
tools for and the very raw material of spatial production. However, from a
critical sociological and geographical point of view the very terminology of
“collaborative/collaboration” seems to stipulate a one-sided, and socially
restricted, view of what current transformations of media environments actu-
ally do to social lifeworlds. The perspective of collaborative media puts the
accent on one, albeit important, side of the complex dialectic of mediatiza-
tion. The other side, as I have outlined above, is dependence. Beyond the type
of transgressive cases that are discussed in the literature on collaborative
media there is ample evidence of deep-going sociospatial transformations
where the shift from mass media to transmedia (collaborative or not) rather
assumes a logic of encapsulation (Jansson, 2007; Jansson and Christensen,
2014). This means, first, that media users are locked into infrastructural
systems and hyper-surveilled spaces in order to connect and interact smoothly
with one another, and, second, that the combined forces of organized self-
realization and mediated interveillance, as discussed above, propel social life
in the direction of further segregation rather than hospitality.
The first aspect, which we may call “techno-spatial encapsulation,”
converges with the above-discussed emergence of software-saturated spaces
of code, or “code/space” (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011), which affects the very
nature of a number of everyday activity spaces. Whereas the implementation
of digital technological infrastructures contributes to increasingly swift and
frictionless mobility, which at the outset sustains the crossing of various
administrative and cultural boundaries and thus the opening of spaces of
encounter and learning, these expanded possibilities are premised on a basic
trust in the justness and non-failure of these systems (cf. Giddens, 1991). As
Amin and Thrift (2007) point out, the spatial saturation of technological
infrastructures is not a new phenomenon, but rather constitutes a historical
development, through which new layers of a taken-for-granted “machinic
order” are continuously added to older ones (see also Graham and Marvin,
2001; Jansson, 2010). Especially in urban areas and in relation to transport
systems such a “machinic order”—which includes as diverse objects as “road
signals, postcodes, pipes and overhead cables, satellite, office design and
furniture, clocks, commuting patterns, computers and telephones” (Amin and

Thrift, 2007: 153–4)—becomes pervasive:
In the city, these objects are aligned and made to count through all
manner of intermediaries such as rhythms of delivery or commuting,
traffic-flow systems, integrated transport and logistics systems, internet
protocols, rituals of civic and public conduct, family routines, and
cultures of workplace or neighbourhood. (Ibid.)
The normalization of code/space, which is aligned with the development of

transmedia, can thus be seen as the latest stage in a much longer sequence of
techno-spatial encapsulation, where the growing smoothness of mobility and
interaction operates in tandem with growing functional and transactional
dependence. Today, the accelerating development of geographical informa-
tion systems (GIS) and locative media, paired with mobile media devices for
personal use, seems to propel this development to yet another level, anticipat-
ing the coming of an “internet of things,” where “tagged” objects in the
environment become carriers of information (actually stored somewhere
else), which ordinary people can also be part of producing and circulating
(e.g. Lapenta, 2011; Felgenhauer and Quage, 2012). Whereas these new
affordances, in a concrete way, illustrate emerging possibilities for alternative
and/or collaborative recodings and reorderings of space, quite literally abol-
ishing the distinctions between mediation and spatial production, it also
means that greater and greater shares of people’s spatial and communicative
practices are monitored. By extension, as Crampton (1995) indicated already
two decades ago, these contradictory conditions raise a broadening set of
ethical issues that are often difficult to resolve.
The second aspect points to the socially segregating logic according to
which these developments tend to unfold—that is, “sociospatial encapsula-
tion.” This logic has a more direct impact upon the prospects of producing
open-ended spaces of hospitality and recognition. In simplistic terms, it
refers to the fact that transmedia spaces tend to sustain people’s endeavors
of nurturing pre-existing social networks and communities, moving about
without risk, rather than spending time on engaging in foreign cultural
spaces, ideas, and subjects. There are both institutional and social drivers
behind this. On the one side, there are commercial and political-administra-
tive interests in governing consumers and citizens in their spatial practice.
This is seen in diverse areas, ranging from interactively generated online
advertising that encourages consumers to stay within their reproductive
enclaves of preference, or what Pariser (2011) calls the “filter bubble,” to the
social sorting of citizens through automated forms of boundary maintenance
and profiling that make mobility and access to certain spaces more compli-
cated for certain groups than for others (Graham, 2004, 2005; Parks, 2007;
Lyon, 2007).
On the other side, the above-discussed prevalence of social other-directed-

ness, the modern desire to be symbolically affirmed by one’s peers, and the
ideological imperative of investing in one’s own personal life-biography,
give shape to more or less insular flows of communication, interveillance,
and bounded solidarities (Ling, 2008), despite the fact that there might be a
continuous quantitative and geographical expansion of connectivities. As
Turkle (2011) argues in a critical account of our increasingly connected lives,
even in public spaces (of transit, consumption, leisure, and so forth) indi-
viduals are absorbed into mediated worlds and attending to the goings-on of
geographically distant peers. As these forms of “amalgamated absence” —a
term that I find complementary to Licoppe’s (2004) notion of “connected
presence” —grow stronger it becomes increasingly less likely that anybody
would have to run into any problematic encounter with others or have to deal
with complex issues of cultural and/or emotional negotiation in their every-
day life. The mutual reinforcement of institutional and social drivers ulti-
mately generates encapsulated sociospatial conditions, sustained by and
ritually dependent on media connectivities and algorithms, which contradict
the basic principles of hospitality (see also Abe, 2009; Molz, 2007, 2012,
2014; Striphas, 2015).
Taken together, these critical themes suggest that we are today witnessing
an ongoing qualitative shift pertaining to what mediatization looks like and
how it feels. In just 20 years we have moved from relatively identifiable
“spaces of media dependence” to increasingly all-pervasive “media spaces of
dependence.” The type of examples to which I referred in the opening part of
this chapter, broadly pertaining to technologies of broadcasting, feels almost
antiquated today. As Couldry and McCarthy (2004) suggested in their influ-
ential volume on Media Space, such a term points to various forms of entan-
glements, on different scales, between spatial production and processes of
mediation. It can thus be thought of as an epistemological construct that
applies to historical processes and power relations too, such as the mass-
mediated construction of nation-states as imagined communities. Still, the
coming of transmedia and/or collaborative media means that the “people
formerly known as the audience” are today generative agents embedded
within the flows they themselves consume, while also being dragged into
other processes of mediation through their everyday practices of, for exam-
ple, consumption and mobility. Accordingly, there is no longer any easy way
of “opting out” from media space. The boundaries between offline and
online, between the outside and the inside of mediation, are dissolving.
When debating the potential losses in terms of autonomy for entering inter-
active transmedia spaces it is still common to use a terminology that denotes
conditions of transactional or ritual dependence, which is also the way in
which individual subjects often describe the situation: The indispensability of
media technologies and platforms are framed by explanations related to prag-
matic calculations (personal gains versus risks) or normalized patterns of
common sense (what is understood as conventional behavior within one’s

circles) (see, e.g., Best, 2010; Jansson, 2014b). However, when social life
moves into the algorithmic bubble of interveillance and when day-to-day
activities take place within code/space, there comes a tipping-point where the
dependence on media as tools is no longer a matter of consideration and
where new dependences rather emerge from within media space itself.
To sum up, the counter-argument, or sociological corrective, to collabora-
tive media is that the new affordances of media endorse developments that
disintegrate society and make people increasingly absorbed in their own
socially and culturally homogeneous capsules, whether locally anchored or
dispersed in space. In these new media spaces even expressions of hospitality
run the risk of obscuring or standing in the way for practical acts of recogni-
tion, getting mixed up with calculating acts of self-branding and moral
legitimation. In a future “internet of things” we may no longer have to reflect
on what we like or where we should go to experience the things we desire, let
alone have to encounter anything that upsets us or forces us to reconsider our
own orientations. Set against such a scenario, critical communication geog-
raphy has an important role to play in the future. It can be seen as an intel-
lectual project that takes up and advances the legacies of Lefebvre (1971/84)
and his critique of the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.
Towards an Agenda for Critical Communication

Geography
In this chapter I have elaborated four major points. First, I argued that medi-
atization is to be understood as a dialectical movement, which makes it
important to analyze how the mediated strivings for recognition and auton-
omy among individuals and groups correspond to various forms of growing
media dependence (functional, transactional, and ritual). Second, I argued
that the current expansion of social (trans)media platforms responds to onto-
logical anxieties tied to the sociospatial consequences of individualization in
general and what Honneth calls organized self-realization in particular, and
leads (on the critical side of the coin) to flawed processes of recognition and
extended media dependence. Third, I argued that processes of recognition in
a mobilized and culturally complex world require hospitality as their modus
operandi, through which the collaborative production of open spaces, which
could potentially involve collaborative media spaces, becomes one way of
sustaining mutual relations of recognition. Finally, I argued that the socios-
patial qualities of the mediatization process have significantly altered due to
the emergence of transmedia, taking us from “spaces of media dependence”
to “media spaces of dependence” and thus further complicating the status of
hospitality and recognition.
Through this line of reasoning I have attempted to show that the dialectical
movement of mediatization entails strong spatial implications when it comes
to both the relations of recognition it enables—and indeed feeds from—and

the forms of dependence it actualizes. This has been a way of identifying how
the mediatization concept can open up for an agenda of critical communica-
tion geography. What, then, can be said more specifically about this critical
agenda? Where does it take us?
To begin with, it is worth emphasizing (again) that such an agenda might
lead in both political and ethical directions. The first direction refers to ques-
tions related to how political governance can secure similar rights and justice
for all citizens under mediatized conditions (notably conditions involving
high levels of functional media dependence)—that is, what we may call the
politics of media space. The second direction refers to interactional questions
of how the mediatization of social space shapes the conditions for nurturing
a “good society” where individual subjects have equal opportunities to grow
their autonomy and freedom, and how different modes of relating to others at
the same time shape the dominant ideology of mediatization. We can call this
the ethics of media space. There is no sharp border between these realms,
however. As we have seen, ethical conditions may often have political impli-
cations in as much as one wants to enforce ethical standards of social interac-
tion between people in general or granting everybody the same access to
certain resources for ethically desired modes of communication.
This chapter has primarily focused on the ethics of media space. From such
a perspective we may narrow down the agenda of critical communication
geography to just one sentence:
Critical communication geography is concerned with (a) how the

dialectic of mediatization affects the productive interplay between
encapsulated/closed spaces and hospitable/open spaces; (b) what
consequences this has for the social formation of relations of recogni-
tion, and (c) how these processes are related to overarching structures
of ideology and power in society.
By extension, critical communication geography can make a concrete differ-

ence to spatial and communicative policy-making in raising awareness of
what the actual conditions for mutual recognition look like in various realms
of society. This not only pertains to the fact that the encapsulating forces of
mediatization have a tendency to reproduce the marginality of certain
groups and sustaining bounded heterotopias of either phantasmagoria or fear
(see De Cauter, 2004; Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008); as given by the
dialectical line of argument pursued here, there are also important questions
(and indeed political challenges) attached to the fact that exactly those
affordances of the media that may empower people to become more mobile
and pursue their cosmopolitan ambitions, to the extent they have any, are
also those that pull people closer together within enclaves of like-minded
(Jansson, 2013, 2014b).
Molz (2007, 2014), for instance, makes an interesting case in her study of
how the reputation systems of mobile online platforms such as Couch Surfing
affect the practices of global travelers. On the one hand, these services enable
travelers to get in touch with other people across the world in order to find
accommodation and travel in a secure, yet affordable way. On the other hand,
their very logic is based on the expectation of exchange, which contradicts the
fundamental idea of hospitality and reproduces a social space of like-minded
people for whom only certain types of difference can be given space and time.
Concrete examples like this articulate the spatial ambiguities of mediatiza-
tion, to which the ethical principles of hospitality and recognition may not
always be easily applied, but which nonetheless require attention and contin-
uous debate if we are to take seriously the vision of a cosmopolitan society.
As given by the last part of my statement, the ambiguous ways in which
mediatization unfolds must also be related to overarching ideologies in society.
In this chapter I have explored how altered dependences of mediatization both
respond to and legitimize the ideological imperatives of “organized self-reali-
zation.” This structure of social conventions and expectations can be seen as an
expression of the dominant direction that the individualization meta-process
takes in contemporary capitalist society. Transmedia in general, and what we
call social media in particular, reproduce this ideology at the most mundane
level of everyday practice, influencing the self-making processes of people in,
basically, all stages of life. Mediated affirmations of one’s own self-making
project, as well as comparisons with the projects of others (that is, people
within one’s peer group), can be sought out more or less regardless of time and
place, contributing to media spaces of steadily escalating flows of lifestyle
simulations. As argued by, for example, Turkle (2011) and Hillis (2009), we
need to critically assess whether people’s everyday normalization of such
simulations are subtly altering the constitution of subjects and subjectivity, and,
if so, in what ways. Does it mean, for instance, that close or otherwise challeng-
ing relations with “real people” —relations that go beyond the mutual “liking”
among peers—are increasingly felt to be problematic and time consuming?
These reflections also suggest that an important research area for critical
communication geography (which I have not discussed in this chapter)
concerns the mythological, even metaphysical, constructs through which
media are normalized as part of common culture and, in the last instance,
taken as functional requirements for a “decent life.” What are the social and
cultural tropes in relation to which ordinary people judge the necessity of
media? In what ways have such tropes altered over time, and what are their
spatial implications? These questions call for historicizing perspectives that
take a closer look at the mythologies of mediatization during different eras
and in different contexts. There are some pioneering studies, notably Marvin
(1987) and Spigel (1992), which have applied similar approaches to how
particular media technologies were (or were not) normalized as part of

people’s everyday spaces in the past. However, critical geographical analyses
would have to start out from a less media-centric perspective and instead take
various spatial processes or relations as their point of departure.
A particularly well-suited framework would be Cresswell’s (2006) theory
of moral geographies, which actualizes the socially pervasive opposition
between the metaphysics of fixity and flow. Such a framework can, on the
one hand, help us discern to what extent and in what ways the ideology of
organized self-realization has been historically linked to optimistic notions of
mobility and flow. This is clearly a hypothesis that finds resonance with
actual research and theory emphasizing how flexible and mobile subjects are
ideologically encoded in everything from fashion to job advertisements (see,
e.g., Bauman, 2000; Molz, 2006). On the other hand, critical communication
geography might also be able to go beyond such a dialectical framework,
staying open to the possibility that other dimensions and sub-forms are at
play. In line with my previous discussions, for instance, one might question
to what extent the emerging culture of interveillance and encapsulation is
actually to be understood as a matter of mobility and flow. The flows that are,
in fact, being generated—that is, predominantly online symbolic exchanges
and mere industrial data—can be seen as “side effects” that are not conceived
of as “flows” or “mobilities” by subjects themselves. The flows of today’s
symbolic economy emerge just as much (or more) out of bonding practices
that adhere to the metaphysics of fixity (Jansson, 2014b).
An alternative way of addressing this paradox would be to develop a
theory that pinpoints how connectivities as such, regardless of what individu-
als actually achieve with them, become the main goal. This would denote the
logical counterpart to Honneth’s theory of organized self-realization, where
the crossing of boundaries and unconditional opening of spaces rather
threaten the perfection of self-image. If based on thorough analyses of histor-
ical and contemporary spaces of representation, such a theory of the meta-
physics of connectivity would have great purchase to the dialectical approach
that I have tried to formulate in this chapter.
Notes
â†œæ¸•1â†œæ¸•In the dissertation I used the term “mediazation,” adopted from Thompson’s
(1995) book The Media and Modernity, in the search for an English word for the
Swedish “medialisering.”
â†œæ¸• 2â†œæ¸• A few exceptions can be identified, most evidently Andreas Hepp’s (2009, 2013)
work on “cultural thickenings” and “communicative figurations,” which is,
however, not explicitly designed as a critical approach.
â†œæ¸• 3â†œæ¸• This chapter is part of the ongoing project Cosmopolitanism from the Margins:
Mediations of Expressivity, Social Space and Cultural Citizenship, funded by the
Swedish Research Council (2012–16). The author wants to thank his colleagues
Karin Fast and Johan Lindell at Karlstad University for valuable comments on
earlier drafts of this chapter.
â†œæ¸• 4â†œæ¸• It should be noted that numerous other thinkers have presented similar diagnoses
during recent decades (e.g. Giddens, 1991; Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999/2007;
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002).
â†œæ¸• 5â†œæ¸• In a recent volume entitled Recognition Theory as Social Research (O’Neill and
Smith, 2012), for example, in spite of the broad scope of the book none of the 11
chapters addresses the pervasive role of media in shaping contemporary relations
of recognition within a variety of spheres. On the whole, recognition theory attains
a strong political and social philosophical bias (see also Bankovsky and Le Goff,
2012) and has, thus far, generated surprisingly little attention in, for example,
media and communication studies. The most significant work so far that has
brought together questions of recognition and mediation is Boltanski’s (1996/9)
seminal work on Distant Suffering. This work deals chiefly with spectatorship,
however, and is linked to questions of pity and self-justification in the age of mass
mediated humanitarian spectacles.
â†œæ¸•6â†œæ¸•Marwick (2012) uses the term “social surveillance” in her discussions of
horizontal online peer-to-peer monitoring. As I have discussed elsewhere
(Jansson, 2014b, 2015), social surveillance, as well as Andrejevic’s (2005) term
“lateral surveillance,” refer to largely overlapping practices as those denoted by
interveillance. However, the introduction of interveillance as a complementary
concept makes it easier to maintain the analytical sharpness of surveillance.
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3 Critical Communication

Entering the Field

district from a decaying and de-industrialized area into a fashionable neigh-

describing the transformative social force of the media—with Thompson’s

Structure of the Chapter

both respond to and give shape to sociospatial conditions that reproduce

A Dialectical View of Mediatization

of multiple processes of mediation have changed with the emergence of

Three Levels of Media Dependence

interact rely on software-monitored processes. One example is the modern

of ritualized “common practice.” Such an understanding, as I have argued

hand, in relation to the social-constructivist perspective, the dialectical frame-

Recognition and Hospitality in Mediatized Lifeworlds

mutually dependent categories. Furthermore, recognition becomes a crucial

Mediatization and Altered Relations of Recognition

repressive tendencies that rather lead to conformism and the dissolution of

further integrating individuals into the capitalist system. Authenticity and

This is, indeed, a long-term transformation, which Honneth outlines partly

surveillance, complying with substantial privacy restraints (Andrejevic,

Hospitality and/as Spatial Production

identity as a relatively homogeneous entity, and largely overlooks the often

Without going into the details of such a process of progress, which I

What is agreeable in Honneth’s approach is that he encourages a continuous

reproduction of pre-established identity relations. The problem of affirmation

to visit—that is, to be openly welcomed as a guest, rather than met with

Thinking about hospitality, more importantly, is to think about openings

Dikeç’s elaboration of hospitality is elegant in the way in which he, on the

From “Spaces of Media Dependence” to

example, cultural governance, artistic interventions or social movements and

furniture, clocks, commuting patterns, computers and telephones” (Amin and

The normalization of code/space, which is aligned with the development of

On the other side, the above-discussed prevalence of social other-directed-

common sense (what is understood as conventional behavior within one’s

Towards an Agenda for Critical Communication

to both the relations of recognition it enables—and indeed feeds from—and

Critical communication geography is concerned with (a) how the

By extension, critical communication geography can make a concrete differ-

particular media technologies were (or were not) normalized as part of

Beck, U. (2004/6). The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Derrida, J. (2005). The principle of hospitality, Parallax 11(1): 6–9.

Hjarvard, S. (2008a). The mediatization of society: A theory of the media as agents of

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