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Italy represents, in most respects, an ideal-type for the presidentialization of the political system: the role of individual leaders has been greatly enhanced vis-à-vis their parties, while they have simultaneously gained a stronger hold over the executive branch of the state through the growing autonomy of the Prime Minister’s office and the exercise of an increasingly monocratic form of rule. Presidentialization has also deeply affected the electoral process: campaign style, media focus, and voting behaviour have all come to reflect an increasingly personalized form of leadership.

Among the major causes of presidentialization, two—the internationalization of politics and the growth of the state—refer to general trends common to most industrial democracies. Thus, the presidentialization of the Italian political system must be seen, at least in part, as a response to the growing demands laid upon the political executive by the changing role of the state, both domestically and internationally. However, in order to account for the momentous and rapid nature of change in Italy, one needs to focus primarily upon the critical role played by the other two factors: the erosion of traditional social cleavage politics and the mediatization of politics.

The questions of parenting in relation to these technologies is a more complex subject than many reports, and even advice books, would have us believe. Two styles of communication give shape to how families, positioned differently in terms of socio-economic status, approach digital and mobile media: the ethic of “expressive empowerment” and the ethic of “respectful connectedness” inform us about how technologies are relevant to and problematic within differing families. The ethic of expressive empowerment can lead parents to emphasize the individual rights of the young person, sometimes at the expense of other familial goals. In contrast, the ethic of respectful connectedness emphasizes the rights of the family over the individualThe chapter then criticizes theories of the role of media in social change that have tended to assume that media change all people and groups within society in the same way. Finally, specific suggestions are offered to help parents educate themselves and their families on digital and mobile media.

The chapter begins by arguing that the sacred in the modern world has become mediatized, in the sense that public media have become the primary institution through which people engage with sacred forms. This suggests that public media are implicated in complicated patterns of relationship between media practices and technologies, sacred forms, and audience response. This is examined through a discussion of the BBC’s refusal to air a humanitarian appeal for Gaza in January 2009 in the wake of Operation Cast Lead. The strong public reaction against the BBC’s decision is discussed in terms of its perceived failure to offer restitution to the breach of the sacrality of the care of children. This illustrates the fundamental tension between the moral legitimacy of broadcasters, which derives from their identification with widely-shared sacred forms, and the professional aspiration for an impartiality which does not alienate any section of a broadcaster’s audience.

This chapter addresses the question: how did the state come to believe that branding could help defeat the FARC? It goes back in history to trace mediatization of the Colombian conflict, that is the ways in which media played an increasingly central role in the war as it wore on. The chapter focuses on three inflection points. The first is the shift from agitprop, Soviet-style propaganda, to what the Colombian urban guerrilla group, the M19, called "armed propaganda." The second transformation was when Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellín Cartel, adapted "armed propaganda" in his bid to avoid extradition to the United States, putting it at the service of an urban war that terrorized city residents and kidnapped high profile hostages, especially journalists. The third inflection point is the FARC's usage of hostages in a cynical bid to break what it describes as a "media siege" that does not allow it to speak for itself, and the public backlash to its efforts. In tracing the semiotic sensibility of Colombia's armed actors and the way the learned from each other, the chapter traces a history of the emergence of brand warfare.

The return of religion cannot be understood as archaism within modernity's deterritorializing dynamic. Jacques Derrida argued that there is a profound connection between mediatization and Christianity, this is to say that Christianity embraces its own mediatization to the extent that it affirms itself as aesthetic religion. As Derrida goes on to assert, “mediatic manifestations of religion, Christian or other, in their production and their organization to national phenomena,” testify to the continuing power of the aesthetic, which has been inseparable from Western-style nationalism. In all cases these relations or intersections are characterized by ambivalence. Weber's attention to ambivalence seems to become curiously indirect or discreet, even teasing. In the Western tradition, the question concerning technology has always angled into questions of gender and sexual difference. Media is perhaps another name for the enactment of the aesthetic as a self-divided, self-displacing technique of manifestation.

This chapter addresses party and party system changes in relation to the future development of women’s representation in politics. What is the effect on women’s representation of the crisis of representative democracy (albeit disputed) and of the decline of parties? It argues that the effects of the ongoing dealignment process in politics, such as personalization, the strong focus on leadership, the mediatization as well as the fragmentation of the party system, and especially the electoral success of populist parties, have a profound impact on the recruitment of women. Some effects are positive, some are negative, but all in all they contribute positively to a future gender balance in politics. The chapter pays specific attention to two types of parties, the greens and the populist, xenophobic parties, identifying the first type as often feminist and the latter type as often disruptive to women’s political representation.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to this book’s central argument that speech and/or writing produced by queerqueen personalities is ventriloquilized and entextualized by transcribers, ghost writers, editors, and/or producers through language-labor practices. The chapter traces the recycling of the visual and sonic image of the queerqueen figure in contemporary popular culture from the 1950s. It proposes that, though processes of mass commodification, the trope of the (sometimes) cross-dressing (sometimes) cross-speaking queerqueen has been recycled in print, audiovisual, and digital media through recurring cultural “booms.” These “booms” position queerqueen speech as a new phenomenon and shape the commodification of it within the historical and cultural context that forms the background to Japanese popular cultural productions. This chapter outlines how one can trace the entextualization of “queer linguistic excess” and its containment through analysis of the (re)production of “actual” conversations by “authentic” queerqueens as written text.

Chapter 3 continues the initial review of existing research literature related to the changing role and forms of the media and economic affairs, and the issues of economic inequality in particular. It aims to identify some high-level ideas and concepts drawn from the fields of socioeconomics and political economy, as well as certain sub-sets of the communication and journalism studies fields, which shed light on the meaning of economic inequality and the key influences on the selection or making of news culture and journalistic practices. The chapter considers the shifting forms and meanings of economic equality in the modern social sciences, indicating the diversity of prior studies, engagement with, or neglect of inequality matters. It then moves on to address the notion of mediatization and select aspects of the evolving role and scope of the media in relation to economic and other societal processes, including those related to economic inequality. Next, some of the major approaches and prevailing perspectives on ‘making the news’ are identified. This outlines a typology of the prior research literature, noting a number of distinct schools in explaining the key influences on newsmaking and shaping journalism discourses. The authors focus on certain macro- and meso-level factors which influence news media and journalistic discourse (rather than individual-level characteristics or failings of journalists). The chapter ends with an outline of the authors’ transdisciplinary approach towards ‘making the news’, combining conceptual elements from both the critical cultural studies and political economy approaches. A final section considers conclusions and implications.

Chapter 4 explores how mass media, in the form of daily press, professional journals and television, represented and interpreted contemporary art that was deemed as illegal acts. In consequence, it considers how media discourses intervened and acted in such artistic and legal processes. At the centre of this study are artworks made by three Swedish artists between 1967 and 2009 which were simultaneously considered as both artistic statements and real illegal deeds. These artworks and the ensuing media debates are illuminating examples of how the notion of art is continuously negotiated and interpreted very differently by various agents in diverse contexts. This chapter, therefore, expands its focus beyond the typical agents of the art world such as curators, critics and art historians to include statements and writing by representatives of politics, media, entertainment, law and the general public. Being controversial acts, these artworks were open to multiple interpretations and fed smoothly into the logic of the media system. Accordingly, the artists and their artworks were described as breaking news in the standard vocabulary of the press. In addition, they all elicited extensive media discussions on the definition of art.

The chapter examines the complications of “mediatization” around 1800 in two separate senses. The first involves the growth in the variety, reach, and influence of media of communication. The second is a reorganization of political power in the wake of Napoleon, whereby territories that were formerly answerable only to the Emperor and therefore stood in “immediate” relation to imperial power became “mediatized.” Both developments and their profound consequences are represented in Kleist’s novella, “Michael Kohlhaas.” The text frames Kohlhaas’s spiral into madness and immoderation with a chain of virulent circulating signifiers (horses, letters, missives, prophecies, and so on) and an almost obsessive attention to borders, boundaries, and lines of difference that can only be crossed at great cost. Reading Kleist’s text alongside twentieth-century commentaries reveals how its urgent insights into language, force, and justice are intertwined with deep misgivings about mediality and its proliferating logic.

This chapter examines the relationship between sincerity and digitization and how sincerity relates to such central concepts in the sincerity-and-media debate as amateurism, imperfection, and craft. It considers the many online “produsers”—media expert Axel Bruns's term for denoting that, online, “distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance”—who use online self-publishing tools to publicly share their views on sincerity. The chapter problematizes existing notions of mediatization and authenticity and discusses current debates about our “mediated” world. It calls for a move beyond Western paradigms and more transcultural sensitiveness in the academic debate on new media, reality, and honesty. It also looks at existing studies' near-exclusive emphasis on authenticity, sincerity's conceptual twin. It shows that in post-Soviet space, those who reflect on the impact of new media on our lives show a special interest not in authenticity but in sincerity.

This chapter begins with an explanation of “elite authenticity” in full, including a definition of the five rhetorical strategies of which it is composed: historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. Using theories pertaining to media discourse and mediatization, the author presents an analysis of the New York Times food section, relying on a corpus of 259 articles (including restaurant reviews and top-viewed articles). Throughout her analysis she demonstrates how the aforementioned interconnected rhetorical strategies are not only indexical of what is considered “authentic” in contemporary society, but also essential to the construction of status based on a purposeful distancing from traditional markers of eliteness. In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for the simultaneous (dis)avowal of distinction which is integral to contemporary class maintenance.

As a form of anti-mediatization movement, the call for “slow media” gains its popularity in many societies. How exactly are “slow media” different and disconnected from the digital media? Where is the sense of slowness and disconnection from? This chapter uses a case in the context of contemporary China to interrogate these questions: shouzhang (手账‎), a form of diary keeping turning back to pen and paper and performed by many Chinese millennials. Based on the investigations of both the products and users, it demonstrates that doing shouzhang in today’s China involves a media ensemble that goes far beyond the physical diary and stationery, such that digital media play a constitutional role. Even the design of the physical diary is permeated with the digital principles. As for the sense of slowness and disconnection, it does not come from any fixed materiality of paper and pen, but is produced by a series of technological and cultural operations under the logic of hypermediacy.