ABSTRACT
The brief concluding chapter returns to the strength and importance of the media/democracy nexus, but also to its contingency. The book argues that contemporary Western democracies are inconceivable without media assemblages, but also points to the multiplicity and diversity of these media assemblages. Their omnipresence and significance—arguably—allocate a particular societal responsibility to them, but simultaneously, the exact nature of how these democratic roles should be performed is deeply political and the object of political struggle. The conclusion then argues how different articulations of democracy—structured through a dimension of elitist-democratic and participatory-democratic discourse—impact the articulation of media's democratic roles, and in particular, their representational and participatory roles. Still, as the conclusion also points out, not everything related to the media/democracy nexus is in permanent motion, as there are also hegemonic core elements and stabilizing conditions of possibility. Moreover, the structure of the realms of democracy and media's democratic roles is remarkably similar. The conclusion ends by pointing to a key consequence of the discursive-material approach that the book uses, namely the idea that academic theory formation is not outside discourse and a normative stance cannot be avoided.
