ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a summary of the cultural materialist approach that highlights the relevance of a critical bottom-up perspective for understanding mediatization. It extends the dialectical aspect of my approach in order to unpack the relationship between intensified mediatization and various forms of cultural resistance and critique. Envisioning mobile lives broadly as a mediatized and hegemonic structure of feeling, largely sustained by the middle classes, the chapter theorizes the inherent ambiguities of such a structure of feeling and discusses its social significance as a source of counter-mediatization. It suggests that the globalizing force of mediatization is played out, and can be analysed, in relation to three registers: connectivity, mobility and osmosity. The triadic model offers a systematized view of how social power-geometries are (re)configured under the dual pressure of mediatization and globalization. One of the cornerstones of this analysis has been that mediatization is an embedded as well as an embodied part of ordinary culture.
