ABSTRACT
We use the phrase communication society because the various social changes cannot be understood without what we have described as the mediatization of communicative action. The more recent forms of mediatization demonstrate that communication contributes to material economic production and creates social structures. This leads to a shift from communication culture towards communication society, which we outline in the first section. Because mediatization is a historically overarching phenomenon, the more recent forms of mediatization, which we call communicatization, need to be determined then. They are particularly characterized by digitization, interactivation and the spread of communication work. Their societal dissemination is due to the global development and expansion of an information infrastructure beyond nationally organized societies, which we see as an ongoing active process: infrastructuring. As a materialized form of social structure, infrastructure is characterized by networks, with two opposing tendencies. As a consequence of the expansion of communicatization, there are fundamental changes in communicative action, for example, in the dramatic rearrangement of space, which we call translocalization. The temporal order of the communicative construction of reality also changes and is reflected in, for example, the de- and restructuring of institutional knowledge. Like any form of mediatization of communicative action, communicatization also has consequences for the kind of subjectivation that we describe as a double subjectivation.
The different processes mentioned do not carry equal importance and status: Some emphasize technical effects of the current type of mediatization, others the role of signs or of knowledge. However, all of them refer to aspects of communicative action that have been described above, as the thesis of the communication society presupposes a fundamental change in the structure of communicative action to communication. Moreover, they describe a large-scale change from the industrial to the communication society, which we call “refiguration.”
