ABSTRACT
This chapter broadens the cultural materialist perspective and put the accent on cultural and social conditions rather than materiality. Several researchers have identified the connections between mediatization and individualization. The chapter begins with an introduction to Honneth's theory of recognition in general and his notion of organized self-realization in particular, and includes a discussion of how changing orders of recognition shape mediatization. It offers a problematized view of Honneth's theory and discusses the role and challenges of social recognition in an increasingly mobile and mediatized society. The chapter focuses on the implications for hospitality, understood as the cosmopolitan ethos of recognition, in a world of blurred boundaries and intensified (trans)media flows. The middle classes normalize certain media (along with other goods and practices) as desirable properties and thus play a key role, hegemonic yet socially ambiguous, in mediatization processes.
