In this paper I want to argue that there are two modernities and that the second modernity is one of generalised mediatization. The second modernity is one in which the media spread like a disease. The first modernity describes a process of rationalization. And the second modernity describes one of mediatization.

This paper partly grows out of a debate in the sociology of the media or cultural studies of the media. Here there is a debate between those who say that media are texts that are encoded by their producers decoded by the media audience. This media audience is socially located. And how they will decode the media texts is connected to their social location. Another position associated with writers like Baudrillard and Castells - who sees a move from a logic of structure to a logic of flows, - will presume that we as social beings are not outside of the media. On this view we live in a very important sense in a mediascape. It is that with the spread of more interactive platforms – the new media of satellite and now interactive television, consumer brand environments, mobile phones, 8MB internet, digital cameras and video and ubiquitous iPods – that we live in mediascape. You will see over the course of this paper that by media, I mean something that is the equivalent of digital media. This is partly because just about all our media now are becoming digital media. Digital media or its equivalent is becoming paradigmatic for media per se. This is an expanded definition of media. Or could it be, as this paper argues, that the media themselves have been expanding? In the second modernity the logic of mediatization expands from the classic media to the objects of consumer culture. It pervades, indeed invades, nature and the body itself. It invades and reconstitutes the social. I am not arguing like Marshall McLuhan that we are increasingly prosthetic beings: that the media are extensions of man, though this is happening too. I am arguing that the logic of the media is taking over more and more areas of life, and indeed of inorganic matter too.

Just what are main features of media will emerge over the course of the paper. I need to make a few preliminary points though. I think that both rationalization and mediatization are equally structured by reason. Mediatization we will see has to do with reflexivity, which is not a post-modern irrationality, but the form that reason takes in the second modernity. Rationalization and mediatization both have, at their core, a paradigm of rules. These rules are also a pivotal locus of reason. Thus mediatization in the second modernity or post-modernity is not anti-rule, or anarchistic, it just operated with different kinds of rules. Here is where the likeness ends. The rules of first modernity rationalization are regulative rules. In them reason as rules operates from the outside. In the first-modernity thus universals subsume particulars. Causes as rule-boundedness operate from the outside. Social actors confront rules as regulative norms. In second-modernity mediatization, rules – and reason - are not regulative. They are also not primarily constitutive. They are instead generative. Rules and reason are generative. They are informational. More precisely they work like algorithms. As sets of instructions. Algorithms are rules. They are rational in that they are sets of instructions. As in computer programming, these rules are instructions that generate difference. They generate different outcomes under different conditions. These rules, these generative rules that generate difference are not external to things as in rationalization, but compressed at the very core of the media themselves. As reflexive subjects - engaging with a mediascape that generates difference out of its own self-causation - we self-cause in a similar sort of way. From a constellations of generative rules we in the second modernity self-legislate. Moreover the result of first modernity rationalization is more or less reproduction and equilibrium. In second modernity mediatization the result is chronic disequilibrium or at least far from equilibrium outcomes. Enough said for the moment by way of introduction. Let us trace this generalized mediatization.

This paper will try to argue how a logic not just of flow (though also of flow) but of the media, of mediatization is attaining ubiquity. It will do so in regard to 1) nature 2) the commodity 3) culture and 4) society, or the social.

Nature
Nature came first to rationalization, and maybe last to mediatization. But a new generation of writers such as Thacker (2004) and Parisi (2004) born in the early 1970s are producing books about biomedia. Rationalization of nature arises with Galileo’s physics, is extended quickly to politics by Hobbes, and then is systematised in Descartes, Newton and Kant’s epistemology. Here nature is conceived as mechanism. Nature is mechanism and observed by a reason that is external to it. This mechanism is a bit like a clockwork. Cause is external to effect. This is already quite a move from pre-modern doctrines of creation. In Christian creationism, God is the prime mover. God in Genesis is the creator. Reason resides supremely in God. In the move from creation to rationalization, God’s reason is displaced onto man. Man does not create here. He observes and finds. God’s power is displaces onto the causes and effects of bodies on bodies in physics. The assumptions of rationalized nature are atomistic: of identical parts making up wholes. These atoms that are involved indeed in what Galileo called exchanges. In which one can take the place of the other without any change. Nature here becomes objective. Reason is not in nature. Reason takes nature for its object. Reason is outside of nature. Its relation to nature is epistemological. This is what Kant called the understanding. This is Max Weber’s famous Entzauberung. De-magicification. Nature loses agency. Life is drained from nature.

Think of how we discuss the media and especially digital media in terms of ‘machines’, ‘codes’, ‘translation’, ‘transcription’, ‘information’, ‘instructions’. Now look at the most hit-upon website for genetic nucleotides. University of Utah. It says the structure of the double helix holds the genetic material. The gene is the genetic unit of ‘information’: the ‘byte’ of information. The DNA (Deoxyribose nucleic acid) contains genetic ‘instructions’. Instructions and this is the language of computer science, are information that is ‘communicated’ to explain how a task is conducted. We already have the algorithm. Now let me say at once that media are only complete for me with digital media: that is with computing. Media are only completely media with Alan Turing. This was always there in the germ.

What is the task to be conducted with genetic media? It is very centrally the constitution of proteins. The musculature, ligaments, skin and hair of the body are largely comprised of protein. The DNA, the ‘genetic material’ contains information. But this information is not yet the byte of information. It is not yet the gene: the difference that makes the difference. But who decides what the gene is? The cell does. The DNA lies in the nucleus of the cell. The DNA comprises sequences of paired – hence a double helix – bases of the four nucleotides: A (adenine), C, (cytosine) G (guanine), T (thymine). Nucleotides are small molecules – monomers – that, in their chaining, form polymers or the macromolecules that are DNA and RNA. It is the cell, the unit of life, which ‘transcribes’ the DNA into RNA. Media, says Friedrich Kittler, are ‘transcription systems’ (Aufschreibsysteme). It transcribes by copying the DNA into messenger RNA. This is all inside the cell nucleus. Then the messenger RNA travels out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm where the ribosome (the protein-making ‘machinery’) ‘reads’ the sequence. In this ‘reading’ the ribosome translates. It reads three nucleotides at a time. Each group of three specifies a particular amino acid. Protein molecules themselves are strings of such amino acids. These are the building blocks of tissue. The ‘Universal Genetic Code’ thus is the code of translation. It translates RNA 3-nucleotide segments (‘codons’) in the cytoplasm into amino acids. The twenty common amino acids make up chains of different sequences which themselves are protein molecules. The ribosome reads the three-nucleotide chain as an amino acid and arranges them in chains as proteins. But information is always a difference that makes a difference. The question is for whom. And here it is for the cell. The cell is the unit of life. Its machinery does the transcribing that is copying and translating. A particular DNA sequence – often more than 40 bases long becomes information, becomes the gene for the cell that transcribes and translates it thus that the organism can live. The cell does the selecting. As in computing and media the issues of ’storage’ and ‘transport’ are important. The DNA stores generic information. The RNA transports it. Media always, we will see below, involve not just structural or algorithmic generation, but also selection through structural coupling with the environment. And such selection modifies the structure itself.

Matter - like genetic matter - that reads and stores and transports is intelligent. Reason enters matter, as it is mediatised. Now reason is no longer just outside of matter. Intelligence is no longer just outside. Intelligence is distributed. Media presume distributed intelligence. Media presume a certain dying of the author. Rationality or reason, once it is distributed, becomes reflexivity. Thus nature becomes intelligent, becomes pervaded by reason as it is mediatized. The same can be said for the smart atoms of inorganic matter in nanotechnology.

At the same time that nature becomes intelligent it becomes technological. Thus the rise of the human genome project (i.e. the project to sequence the human genome) is connected to the rise of biotechnology as an industry. The Project was to identify the 25,000 genes in every cell nucleus, each with its characteristic sequences. Science is different than technology. Science finds and discovers. Science, at least classically, presumes reason is outside of nature. When science is outside nature, it asks ‘what’ questions. When reason is inside nature it asks ‘how’ questions. How questions are like instructions. This is a technological intelligence. In an age of generalised mediatization there is a certain convergence of science and technology. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, divided reason into two realms – one the Verstand or understanding was epistemological: the other, Vernunft, about the being of things-themselves was ontological. With mediatization, the understanding becomes ontological.

But in biology nature is generated through code, or at least partly. Mediaitization always as we shall see involves technologization. Molecular biology often slides into biotechnology and physics slides into nanotechnology. What abut mathematics? Computer Science develops from mathematics. Computer science is a certain technologization of mathematics. In each case we have a partial transformation of science into engineering. Science is not technological. It is, as we said, about the ‘what’. It is about finding the ‘what’. Technology is about the ‘how’. It is about not so much finding as making. Engineering is about making. It is often about locating new materials, new structures with what we might call ‘load-bearing’ capabilities. Thus the engineer used steel in bridges and buildings that had load-bearing possibilities that were unimaginable with the stonemason. There is a very strong engineering principle or logic in mediatization . Science and art, which in the first modernity took their distance from engineering, now find themselves pervaded by it. Research, which is finding becomes R&D, which is making. Papers become prototypes. The difference in contemporary engineering, be it biotech or nanotech or computer science is that materials becomes intelligent.

The Commodity
First modernity rationalization took the form of the mechanization of nature. It leads at the same time to the commoditisation of goods. The commodity is in many senses very much the instrumentalization of mechanism as discussed above. Abstract homogenous, atomized nature becomes Marx’s exchange-value (or commodity) comprised of abstract homogenous labour. The commodity or commoditised economic goods presume that we have a distance from them that we can deal with them objectively in terms of utility and exchange. This is true in Marxist economics and neo-classical economics. There are in each assumptions of equilibrium, of the causes of goods as coming from the outside. How then is the commodity mediatized? Well first the production process in the economy comes to resemble that in the media. With demands of consumers growing for ever new and different products, production has had to move towards the relatively smaller batch production of more and more different and specialised products. With smaller product runs, more and more work is carried out in the design of new products, and less proportionally is carried out in making more and more copies of the same product. Thus there is a growth of people employed in the design process and a relative shrinkage of the workforce employed in the labour process. But this pattern had been established in the media industries a half-century ago. So much more work is done in the studio in film production than in the mere printing of copies of the same film. And so much more work is involved the commissioning, recording and design of a record-album than in the stamping of CDs in a CD plant.

With so many new products there will be a shift in property regimes of law towards one of intellectual property. These new products will often need to be copyrighted or patented. What is copyrighted or patented can be new designs but also new applications and say operating systems. In these cases it is code or algorithms that are patented. These can even be platforms or standards, i.e. the sort of things you need in order to be able to gain entry to informational practices. These too are codes or constellations of algorithms. They can be single-authored or as is perhaps increasingly the case come from the distributed intelligence of teams, of project-networks, non and anti-bureaucratic, hetaerrchic organization either within or between firms (Grabher, Powell, Stark). Platforms give you access to flows – even to transportation flows – in the mediatised society. Take a platform or to be open standard like MPEG7 that is being developed by a forty-nation team of computer scientists. This MPEG distributed intelligence is so distributed that to copyright it is impossible, indeed unwanted. MPEG will be an ‘open source’. And distributed intelligence in the mediatised modernity can be more or less open-source intelligence’ (Speaks 2005)

Increasingly though in terms of intellectual-property court decisions, it is not so much patent or copyright, but trademarks that are in dispute. You can be sued for infringement of trademark law, if you publicly connect to your product a set of marks or properties – and these can be also colour or smell or a phrase lie ‘to infinity and beyond’ – that are already associated with another product from another company. These must be associated by the public, in the public domain (Lury), like for example the Buzz Lightyear character in Toy Story. Or Nike’s swoosh. Or Sony’s logo. It is not the author or inventor that decides who trademarks belong to, but the public. That is trademarks as Klein has argued have to do not with the author but with the ‘social imaginary’. The imagination for Kant, what is nowadays the imaginary comes into play in art, religion and popular culture. For Kant in art it along with reason came into play in experience. This is an even more radically distributed intelligence. That is intelligence is distributed beyond the project-networks of production to the consumers themselves. Though it is the imaginary that is at stake it is still intelligence that is distributed. The imaginary (imagination), though not reason itself, does mediate between reason on the one hand and intuition or perception on the other.

The social imaginary of the consumer is thus at stake in the mediatization of the commodity. And whereas the economic good in first-modernity capitalism which is the commodity, is experienced objectively through the instrumental reason of agents on markets and comes under regimes of property law, the economic good in today’s mediatized capitalism is experienced more ‘subjectively’ through the social imaginary of agents often in brand environments and comes under regimes of intellectual property law. And what the instrumental reason of individual agents encounters as abstract homogeneity (Simmel), the imaginary of social agents encounter as difference.

Now a branded product also in a sense operates algorithmically. A brand will generate a range of products, but these products mist be consistent with the structure at the heart of that brand. This structure is inter alia a constellation of trademarks. These are compressed and abstract. They are intensive and noon-metric. But the generate as if they are a set of instructions, a constellation of algorithms, the range of products in the brand. Yet these products need to interface with the social imaginary of consumers. And this social imaginary is particular in teems of determining the type of information it will experience and take from the product and brand. At stake is what Maturana, Varela and Luhmann call ‘structural coupling’. The consumers, in a sense as a reflexive community, couple with the product and brand. Structurally. The collective social imaginary of the consumer is a deep structure. It is based social memory, fantasy, reason and a number of dimensions. And this structure cples with the deep structure of the meditated product. That is with the virtual core of the brand. This coupling can produce change in both deep structures: in both the social imaginary of the consumer, which is itself a history of previous couplings, and in the algorithmic structure att the hrhat of the branded product. Thus the economic product, once a commodity, is meditatised in the second modernity.

Culture
In nature, in the first modernity rationalization was a question of reason’s objective understanding of the phenomenon. In economic life, and it was reason’s instrumental use of the phenomenon in the commodity. But culture and art have always formed against and in the interstices of this rationalization and bureaucratisation. This is true not just of avant gardes but of the original critique of such instrumental rationality in romanticism. And it was romanticism that gave us not only a body of poetry but also the novel (le roman). If first-modernity science and the economy gave us the phenomenon, art gave us the noumenon. And here Simmel’s now translated essay on Goethe and Kant on the modern Weltanschauung is most lucid. First modernity science and the economy were always about the thing-for-us i.e. the phenomenon. This is the thing for us to know or to instrumentally use. Art was always about the thing-in-itself. Art in first modernity thus transcended the phenomenon to the noumenon. In this sense art does displace religion. The creation of God is displaced to that of the artists, the play of reason and imaginary (and think of the illiterate Mediaeval peasants who got their religion through the imaginary, through the murals of figures on the stained glass windows of churches) is at stake in religion and art, whereas science and philosophy are much more about reason than the imaginary. This is what Simmel understands as the other side of modernity’s Weltanschauung.

Simmel was contrasting Kant’s epistemology with Goethe’s ontology. In Kant’s epistemology nature is experienced objectively, it is a means or an instrument. In Goethe - and of course in Kant’s third, ‘aesthetic’ critique of judgement – nature is a finality (Zweckmäßigkeit). A finality is an end in itself, not an instrument. It is not a means to an end. When the object is an instrument – as in the economy – it is a means. When the object is a finality – as it is in art – it is, not a means, but a medium. That is instrumental rationality’s means is transmuted into art’s ‘substantive rationality’ of the medium. Early modernity gives you culture in terms of the medium: whether this is the lyric poem, the sculpture, the painting, the musical composition or fictional narrative. This medium is a form. Beauty and the sublime in Kant’s first-modernity aesthetics are about form. Through the form of the medium, we are to experience as if through a glass darkly the noumenon, the thing-in-itself.

This classical medium as form becomes transmuted in second-modernity mediatization. Contemporary mediatization – mediatization as instantiated With the media as instantiated in television, the internet, mobile phones, games, the iPod and branded products (because, as we saw above, they too are media) explodes classical form into fragments and recombines it as technological and informational content. Adorno said that culture industry had captured not just industry’s phenomenon, but culture’s thing-in-itself. So what happens to noumenal form – in architecture, painting, poetry, sculpture, and music as form, as medium, as medium in the classical and early-modern sense. What happens then with the late modern media? Two things: form becomes molecularized, becomes informationalized. The media and not the medium are informational. The form becomes decorative, becomes a surface, an interface. As we encounter in Robert Venturi’s ‘decorated shed’, or the ephemerality of change in fashion or brand environments. In art we speak of judgement, in design we speak of taste. Art – which deals with form - is subjective and transcendental: design – in which form becomes decoration - is subjective and empirical. Pierre Bourdieu had this right in Distinction, whose English language edition subtitle is The Social Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu empiricized Kantian judgement into the taste of consumer culture. But contemporary installation art and the heirs of Pop Art – and there are many – as well as the populist shift in conceptual art – have given us an art that is largely decorative. Indeed all this had as their precursor Matisse’s use of textile and the decoration of fabric in his break with the figure. The point is that a mediatized art has emerged that is decorative at the same time as it is art. This is in a sense no longer purely noumenal, nor is it just phenomenal as is design. It is in an important sense halfway between noumenon and phenomenon. It is where judgement becomes taste. It is a halfway transcendental.

We saw above how science becomes (partly) technologized in the second modernity. At stake here is technologization of art. Form becomes mediatic as it is technologized. Technology in early modernity is phenomenal. Art is noumenal. Art must become technological to become mediatized. It is the technologization of the early-modern medium that makes it media.

Science and the understanding deals in concepts, the imaginary in images, which can of course be say poetic images in poetry and the novel. So narrative - which connects to the roman and the romantic - is not experienced primarily through the understanding but the imaginary. In this sense it very much takes place where we have respite from the clockwork of the state bureaucracy and economy. It takes place outside of the public in the private. It is the locus also of religion – or where religion was until the Enlightenment. These liminal spaces are those of avant gardes and the bohemia. But they are also the private spaces of mothers reading stories to children and the passing on of core values. Now we can in given culture speak of a ‘social imaginary’ that is comprised of a constellation of narratives, images. Maybe largely based on the novel, the story and narrative cinema. Now narratives, whether in stories, or the novel or cinema are a very important first-modernity forms. They are not contemporary media (in that they are not technological, informational). These narratives – along with religion – provide a deep structure to the first-modernity social imaginary.

But now in the second modernity this social imaginary comes under the logic of meditatization. The social imaginary is just as structured by the non-narrative and ‘play’ images of gaming, football, Manga, baseball, and is also technological in the sense of operationality and play is as much a question of operationality as of meaning. There is a generative algorithmic and technological operationality in the move from narrative. There is also a move to the surface, to the decorative surface of art and culture. A shift from noumenal form, to on the one hand the even greater depth of algorithmic generation and on the other to the surface of the interface. Perhaps play and digital gaming sets the paradigm for this mediatised modernity.

The Social
First-modernity rationalization of nature is mechanization; rationalization of goods is commoditization; rationalization of forms of relations between human beings it is societalization. Emile Durkheim gave us an idea of the social fact and by implication the social as ‘sui generis’. Durkheim’s social is not to be explained by the psychological factors or even necessarily climatic or other factors. Social facts are not the explananda of psychological facts. The first modernity social as sui generis, that is as its own genre, not the resultant of another genre. This is the social as a sort of being. Now when the social is mediatized in the second modernity, it becomes not so much sui generis and sui-generating or self-causing. Society becomes thus autopoetic, in the age of generalized mediatization, the social is longer a being but a becoming. Society itself becomes less a question – as in for example Parsons and Bourdieu and indeed the late Marx - a matter of reproduction or being, but instead it emerges as an entity in chronic production, and often self-production. Society is now less a being than a becoming.

What about the technologization of sociology? Well it might be argued that media studies or cultural studies are a technologization of sociology. It is concerned with the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’. It is concerned with the production of prototypes. It incorporates lots of Literary studies, sociology and computer science. It wants to make not just scholarly articles but prototypes.

But there is a further way in which mediatization makes society technological. Let us consider code and message. What is code? In classical media and cultural studies, there is a message. The message is generated by code. Encoding is how a medium generates a message. We encounter the message and we decode it. We decode it according most likely to a different code than it was encoded with. But in each case there is code and message, langue and parole, competence and performance for Chomsky. There is, on the one hand, structure and, on the other. speech-act or even agency more generally. This structure for example for Max Weber and many sociologists is a question of rules. These rules are social norms. We follow social norms or need to sufficiently in order that there be a reasonable amount of social cohesion, so that society cans more or less reproduce. But media do not act according to such regulative rules. They follow a different logic. First-modernity regulative rules address us with a set of general norms; that is they are a set of ‘sames’. Like rationalization’s commodity, regulative rules are abstract and homogenous. They address us as if we were all the same: as if we were atoms. This is how law and on another level (that of the imaginary?) convention works. We are aware of these rules and stay within them. Social rules are regulative, and this of course is the first modernity, the one of the social, of generalized societalization.

Media rules are no less derived from reason, or pervaded with reason than are the regulative rules of the classical social. But media rules are not regulative. Nor are they, as in Quine’s two types of rules, even constitutive. Media rules are neither regulative nor constitutive, but instead generative. And they are generative of is a series of differences. It is largely these differences that are encountered in experience in our mediatized modernity. In Kantian epistemology, experience is Erfahrung. This is the experience of regularities in nature. It is the experience of abstract homogenous rules. To Kantian and positivistic ‘Erfahrung’, Goethe and indeed Dilthey’s hermeneutics and proto-phenomenology contrasted Erlebnis. ‘Erlebnis’ extends to aesthetic experience that is also of noumena. It is the experience not of abstract homogenous regularities, but of the singular, of the one-off, as in the experience of art. This is the singular, the authentic that has very long duration, of even centuries. But experience in the information order is also Erlebnis in that is experience of not homogenrties or abstract rules, but of differences. Yet it is experience not of long duration, but of contimius change, of one Erebnis after another. Not of the ever-lasting work of art, but of ciamnstenm change as a series of shocks. Hence Benjamin called it Shockerlebnis. This is our experience is a mediatized modernity. No longer of regulative rules but of a series of differences generated by the rules of the media.

We experience this as suggested above in our structural coupling with the media. Luhmann has understood such structural coupling, in taking his brief from Husserl. For Husserl consciousness is intentional in it no longer stands outside of its environment, but instead couples with objects and with experiences in its environment. Husserl calls these experiences not Erfahrung but Erlebnisse. What makes an Erlebnis an Erlebnis is that it is different from the previous one. No difference, no experience. Luhmann’s systems structurally couple with their environment. Here they take in not Erlebnisse, but information. This too is difference. No difference, no information. This encountering of mediatised difference - rather than regulative rules – would seem to be our paradigmatic mode of experience in what Gerhard Schulze has called the Erlebnisgesellschaft.

Back to the rules of the media. These generative rules that start from the compressed – fractals, vectors, differentials, the non-metric, the molecular – take the form not of norms but of algorithms. For computer scientist’s algorithms are rules. More precisely they are instructions. This is what is at the bottom of code now. When programmers code, they write sets of instructions. This is code not as structure but as sequence. Genetic coding works similarly. It is sequence ATGC, endless permutations of ATGC, digital perhaps but not binary, that folds into structure: fold into protein structure. This is like a set of instructions written by a programmer. Programmers are called ‘coders’ in industry. They work with designers, who are experts of the look of the decorative surface. Rules in he second modernity become algorithmic. The rules that generate difference are like a set of algorithms. Late or reflexive modernity is of the most amazing non-metric compression as well as the most explosive distanciation. Beyond the nation-state. We are not just speaking of the intensivity of Giddens’s intimacy, but compression to the patterns of nerve cell firing in the brain, to the atom in nanotechnology, the DNA sequence in biology. This is at the same time a distanciation, or even distension to the decorative surface: a distension that at points explodes the decorative surface as it does the norms and forms of the nation-state. The social itself is becoming molecular and algorithmic at the same time that it globalizes. In both cases it disrupts the regulative norms of the nation-state. The social becomes less a body a la Hobbes that has functions and reproduces via norms. It becomes instead a molecular body without organs. It becomes a machine, like Turing’s universal machine.

As social norms, i.e. regulative rules, weaken, we must increasingly become, in Ulrich Beck’s sense, reflexive. We must become as if algorithmic. We must find our own rules and use them generatively. That is we must give the rule to ourselves. We are less rule followers than rule finders. Kant gave us two types of judgement: determinate judgement in which the rule is given to us, and reflective (reflexive) judgement in which we must find the rule. As rule-followers we are heteropoetic. As rule finders and rule givers to ourselves we are increasingly autopoetic. We are reflexive and autopoetic individuals, yet at the same time embedded in a collective and social imaginary that is itself autopoetic as it couples with the media environment.