Mediarchy

We think that we live in democracies: in fact, we live in mediarchies. Our political regimes are based less on nations or citizens than on audiences shaped by the media. We assume that our social and political destinies are shaped by the will of the people without realizing that ‘the people’ are always produced, both as individuals and as aggregates, by the media: we are all embedded in mediated publics, ‘intra-structured’ by the apparatuses of communication that govern our interactions.

In this major book, Yves Citton maps out the new regime of experience, media and power that he designates by the term ‘mediarchy’.  To understand mediarchy, we need to look both at the effects that the media have on us and also at the new forms of being and experience that they induce in us.  We can never entirely escape from the effects of the mediarchies that operate through us but by becoming more aware of their conditioning, we can develop the new forms of political analysis and practice which are essential if we are to rise to the unprecedented challenges of our time.
     
This comprehensive and far-reaching book will be essential reading for students and scholars in media and communications, politics and sociology, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the multiple and complex ways that the media – from newspapers and TV to social media and the internet – shape our social, political and personal lives today.

Yves Citton is Professor in Literature and Media at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, co-editor of the journal Multitudes, and director of the ArTeC Graduate School in Paris.

Contents
Prelude: Democracy or mediarchy?

PART ONE: MEDIA
Chapter One: Naming mediarchy
Interlude One: Heterarchy 
Chapter Two: Approaching mediarchy
Interlude Two: Informational pharmacology  
Chapter Three: Unfolding mediarchy   
Interlude Three: Affective meteorologies   
Chapter Four: Equipping mediarchy    

PART TWO: MASS MEDIA 
Chapter Five: Massifying mediarchy   
Interlude: Populisms 
Chapter Six: Systematizing mediarchy
Interlude Five: Media powers
Chapter Seven: Decolonizing mediarchy

PART THREE: MEDIUM   
Chapter Eight: Archaeologizing mediarchy
Interlude: Accelerationisms
Chapter Nine: Stratifying mediarchy  
The politics of low frequencies
Chapter Ten: Magnetizing mediarchy
Interlude: Formative milieus    
Chapter Eleven: Zombifying mediarchy

PART FOUR: META-MEDIA
Chapter Twelve: Digitizing mediarchy
Interlude: Data commons   
Chapter Thirteen: Inhabiting mediarchy
Interlude: Mediarchic metamorphoses  
Chapter Fourteen: Surprising mediarchy

Postlude: Medianarchism?  
List of illustrations
Notes