Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling

This article reviews the social potential of digital storytelling, and in particular digital storytelling’s potential to contribute to the strengthening of democracy. Through answering this question, it seeks to test out the relative strengths and weaknesses of two competing concepts for grasping the wider consequences of media for the social world: the concept of mediatization and the concept of mediation. The concept of mediatization (developed for example by Stig Hjarvard and Winfried Schulz), it is argued, is stronger at addressing aspects of media textuality, suggesting that a unitary media-based logic is at work. In spite of its apparent vagueness, the concept of mediation (developed in particular by Roger Silverstone) provides more flexibility for thinking about the openended and dialectical social transformations which, as with the printed book, may come in time to be articulated with the new form of digital storytelling.