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One of the central interests of media and communication research is how technologies and communication media are involved in social and cultural change. Often such studies are rather one-sided because they disregard questions of continuity, which can lead to inadequate analyses and exaggerated claims of change. Three categories of reasons for this bias towards change are identified through a literature review. Crucially, since continuity remains an undervalued concern, we lack sophisticated theorizations and analytical approaches to study it adequately. In response, this article presents a taxonomy of continuity based on a thematic analysis of 74 articles in leading communication journals. The five observed dimensions of continuity offer scholars the vocabulary and a conceptual framework to study continuity more systematically as a complex and multi-dimensional issue. This contribution serves as a starting point towards building a theory of change and continuity, and suggestions for necessary future work are given.

More than a decade and a half after the concerted application of practice theory to media and communications, this IJoC Special Section “Practicing Media—Mediating Practice” aims to assess, apply, and expand on the diverse approaches to practice theory. Our focus on contemporary practice theories as well as empirical practice-based research comes at a time when the understanding of mediated and mediatized social life as practices is proliferating across research settings that may not explicitly engage with practice theory literature. This editorial introduction begins with the historical emergence of practice theories and the paradigmatic implications of engaging with practices as essential elements of the social world. Second, it considers the particular tensions emerging when considering both mediating practices and practicing media. In so doing, we outline the contributions to this Special Section, dividing them into three sets of articles that deal with (a) media practices as constituent elements of the social; (b) the employment of practice as a lens through which to make sense of processes of media production and its interpretation; and (c) the foundations of practice theories, their limits, and potential combination with other theoretical approaches.

‘[T]alk about celebrity is more than just talk about celebrity’ (14) perfectly captures the research strategy employed by Heather Mendick, Kim Allen, Laura Harvey and Aisha Ahmad. This group of soc...

In the introduction to this volume, we set out why it is important to focus on dynamics of mediatization and how this contributes to the study of media-related social change. We stress that to fully understand dynamics of change, mediatization should be studied in interrelation with other meta-processes, such as commercialization or politicization. Furthermore, also the contexts of change need to be taken seriously, in terms of field(s) of analysis, space and geography, as well as in terms of time, thereby avoiding so-called epochalist thinking.

This volume sheds light on the underlying dynamics of mediatization, disentangling the actual unfolding of mediatization processes. The wide adoption and deep embedding of digital media and technol ...

Following up on Turner’s argument on the dominance of textual and discursive analyses in celebrity studies, this article argues for more focus on celebrity culture’s agents and their social practices, particularly by conducting interviews with celebrities, which is rare in literature. While this opens up several theoretical opportunities, it also raises methodological challenges, especially regarding access and data quality. Access to celebrities is limited because they are already ‘over-interviewed’ by journalists, and thus might not be motivated to engage in academic studies. This article suggests ways to deal with or even surpass cultural intermediaries, such as managers, who control the celebrity’s agenda. Regarding data quality, it also discusses ways for interviewers to get beyond the sound bite and generate in-depth understanding, while also trying to manage or recognise which celebrity persona is speaking. While these methodological considerations apply to celebrity, they might also be relevant for elite studies more generally.

This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu’s field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better.

This report analyses the labelling of domestic celebrities in Flanders (Belgium) as BVs or Bekende Vlamingen, its definition and evolution. Through interviews with Flemish celebrities, it is observed that there is a tension around this label: on the one hand, it has a negative connotation, especially since more people became famous through reality TV; on the other, most interviewed celebrities acknowledge that objectively speaking, they are a BV. This self-definition as BV is made with reference to three criteria: personal characteristics (achievements), the public (degree of recognisability) and the media.

In recent debates about the ever-growing prominence of celebrity in society and culture, a number of scholars have started to use the often intermingled terms ‘celebrification’ and ‘celebritization’. This article contributes to these debates first by distinguishing and clearly defining both terms, and especially by presenting a multidimensional conceptual model of celebritization to remedy the current one-sided approaches that obscure its theoretical and empirical complexity. Here ‘celebrification’ captures the transformation of ordinary people and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is conceptualized as a meta-process that grasps the changing nature, as well as the societal and cultural embedding of celebrity, which can be observed through its democratization, diversification and migration. It is argued that these manifestations of celebritization are driven by three separate but interacting moulding forces: mediatization, personalization and commodification.

This article addresses the crucial but often overlooked issue of operationalising celebrity. If we study celebrity empirically, what exactly are we looking at and how can we grasp this? These epist...

The concept of celebrity culture remains remarkably undertheorized in the literature, and it is precisely this gap that this article aims to begin filling in. Starting with media culture definitions, celebrity culture is conceptualized as collections of sense-making practices whose main resources of meaning are celebrity. Consequently, celebrity cultures are necessarily plural. This approach enables us to focus on the spatial differentiation between (sub)national celebrity cultures, for which the Flemish case is taken as a central example. We gain a better understanding of this differentiation by adopting a translocal frame on culture and by focusing on the construction of celebrity cultures through the ‘us and them’ binary and communities. Finally, it is also suggested that what is termed cultural working memory improves our understanding of the remembering and forgetting of actual celebrities, as opposed to more historical figures captured by concepts such as cultural memory.

This article conceptualizes media provocation, a common but understudied practice of mediatized protest and resistance, marketing or (self-)promotion and awareness raising. It is defined as a mediated act that questions or contravenes norms, values, laws, rules and symbolic power, thereby intentionally running counter to the normal horizon of expectations in a certain situation or context. As such, media provocation can have a major impact on public debate, politics and the course of events. In this article, the key elements of media provocation are initially examined and subsequently illustrated by drawing on a case study on Stijn Meuris, a Belgian rock artist and television personality. In 2010, he announced his refusal to vote in the next elections, although it is mandatory in Belgium for all adults to vote. The findings of this case study demonstrate the contingency of the component ‘intentionality’ in the definition of media provocation.

This article studies the mediatization of criminal and deviant subcultures by analyzing the media-related practices of graffiti writers and skaters in Ghent, Belgium. The ethnographic analysis shows how these subcultures orient themselves toward media and how media become an essential part of and change their everyday practices. Three consequences of this mediatization are highlighted: First, by emphasizing their artistic and performative skills through the mediation of their practices, these subcultures start losing their rebellious and oppositional image. Second, as such, it can be observed that they increasingly become part of mainstream culture. Third, our analysis demonstrates how the mediatization of subcultural groups and their practices goes hand in hand with their commercialization and commodification, as they engage in recording and disseminating their work not only for artistic reasons but also as a means of acquiring sponsorship deals and job opportunities.

In our contemporary mediatized societies, philanthropy seems to be part of celebrities’ ontology, while celebrities have become indispensable for the charity industry. This has provoked both negative and positive appraisals, although the specific nature and consequences of celebrities’ involvement remain unclear. This article contributes to these debates by providing a systematic analysis of the roles celebrities play in telethons, which we redefine as charity media events, allowing us to study the shows in their full contextual complexity as ideological constructs. Applying qualitative content analysis, we have analysed two charity media events following the 2010 Haitian earthquake. In general, four distinct roles have been discerned: celebrities add an aura of exclusiveness and glamour, they render distant suffering relevant to domestic audiences, they function as principal motivators, and also contribute to the commodification of charity. Celebrities’ involvement thus reinforces charity media events’ dominant discourse of charitainment, in which a disaster is portrayed as a short term problem that can be remedied by supporting relief aid. Although this analysis does not disregard the usefulness and impact of fundraising campaigns and the contribution celebrities can make, it criticizes the oversimplified representation of complex issues and the decontextualized and depoliticized interpretations of distant suffering.

Hilde Van den Bulck en Sil Tambuyzer (2008)De CelebritysupermarktBerchem: EPOISBN: 978 90 6445 495 0; 263 blz.; € 20

Following the evolution towards media-saturated societies, this article presents practice theory as an alternative framework for mediatization studies. We discuss how it can help us grasp the diversity of social and cultural changes related to the highly integrated media. This is demonstrated by studying politicians' personalization, not as a product of media logic but by looking at politicians' media-related practices and media's anchoring of practices. Our in-depth interviews with Flemish politicians show that their practices are in many ways organized by the media, but through this mediatization at the same time aim to retain control over them. It is also shown that politicians' practices are not only directly influenced by media, but also by other politicians' media-related practices. Together, these findings draw a complex picture of the mediatization and personalization process.

Em debates recentes sobre a crescente proeminência das celebridades na sociedade e na cultura, muitosacadêmicos começaram a usar os termos ‘celebrificação’ e ‘celebritização’ de forma misturada. Este artigo contribuipara esses debates primeiramente ao distinguir e claramente definir ambos os termos, e especialmente ao apresentaro modelo conceitual multidimensional da celebritização para remediar as atuais abordagens partidárias que obscurecemsua complexidade empírica e teórica. Aqui, a ‘celebrificação’ captura a transformação de pessoas comunse figuras públicas em celebridades, enquanto a ‘celebritização’ se conceitua como um metaprocesso que capturaa natureza em mutação, assim como a inserção social e cultural da celebridade, que pode ser observada por meiode sua democratização, diversificação e migração. Discute-se que essas manifestações de celebritização são motivadaspor três diferentes, porém relacionadas, forças estruturantes: midiatização, personalização e comoditização.PALAVRAS-CHAVE celebrificação; celebritização; celebridade; comoditização; democratização;diversificação; midiatização; migração; neoliberalismo; personalização.