Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Andreas Hepp 26 tradition, on the other hand, highlights the role various media play in the communicative construction of social reality and ap- proaches the idea of mediatization to analyze the ways media may operate across that process. Research carried out in the institutionalist tradition focuses on the role media (understood as a social institution) plays in influencing other areas of culture and society that ap - parently are external to it, a process often referred to as media logic. Originally coined by David Altheide and Robert Snow in 1979, media logic describes the influence discrete mass- media formats have on other areas of society, politics, or religion, for example. More recently, media logic has been utilized more broadly and is often pluralized to take into consideration the ex- istence of many media logics (for an overview see STRÖMBÄCK; ESSER, 2014; THIMM; ANASTASIADIS; EINSPÄNNER-PFLOCK, 2018). Mediatization can be seen as having been responsible for introducing a certain media logic as a way of staging, pre- senting, and selecting into other areas of society leading to the language of media logic(s) acting as a metaphor and shorthand for the various modi operandi that characterize the workings of the media (HJARVARD, 2017, p. 11). Typically, media logic links to more specific analytical concepts such as media’s forms of interaction and their organizational rules and how they shape communication in other social institutions as well as how their technological affordances mold media use. Media’s influence is not conceptualized as a (more-or-less direct) effect, non-media actors bring with them their own logic(s) which in turn have the potential to work against media logic(s) resulting in inertia and resistance despite transformations in the media environment. By contrast, the social-constructivist tradition empha- sizes the role media play in the communicative construction of social and cultural reality and predominantly explores media- tization from the perspective of everyday actors (KNOBLAUCH, 2013; KROTZ, 2014). Researchers in this tradition question how our cultural and societal practices are altered, when they are en- tangled with media. Here, we can see one more way of theoriz- ing the influence media may have, that is, by considering them as means of communication that shape our practices through processes of institutionalization and materialization (COULDRY;