マス・コミュニケーション学会のメディア化

学会名称変更過程における「学術メディアの論理」

抄録

The purposes of this paper are introducing the concept of ’mediatization’ to academics in Japan, and analyzing the process of the renaming of the Japan Society for Studies in the Journalism and Mass Communication (JSSJMC) in terms of it. In the first part of this article, I overview the discussions over the mediatization. Many researchers, especially in Northern Europe, have accepted mediatization as a key concept for understanding the contemporary media environment and the social and cultural changes due to it. Not only some researchers criticize the concept itself, however, there are some differences among researchers who support it. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp distinguish ’social constructivists’ from ’institutionalists’ in their articles on mediatization. I focus on the controversy over the concept of ’media logic’ between Stig Hjarvard, the representative researcher of ’institutionalists’ camp and Couldry in order to clarify the point of contention between them. In the second part of this article, I attempt to analyze the transforming process of the JSSJMC to the Japan Association for Media, Journalism and Communication Studies (JAMS) partly in terms of mediatization. Because it is difficult to regard the process as the ordinary mediatization, I introduce the concept of the ’logic of academic media’ which is different from usual media logic, and discuss how this society has transformed themselves from its viewpoint. For this argument I explain the transformation of Journalism Society of Japan, which was founded in 1951, to the JSSJMC as the process in which the independence of the society from newspaper industry grew and the logic of academic media strengthened. In the age of ubiquitous media in the 21^st century, however, the logic of academic media forced the JSSJMC to face insurmountable problems and consequently it led the renaming to JAMS. Following these arguments, I suggest some important topics which each member of the JAMS should consider by themselves in the final part of this article.