Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 168
One video. Different communications.
Mediations locate communication in culture institutions technical forms social relations and repeated practice
Premise
Jesus Martin-Barbero’s 1987 De los medios a las mediaciones changed the object of media analysis. Instead of beginning with a medium, message, or effect, it asks how communication is lived and made meaningful through popular culture, social history, everyday routines, identities, institutions, and power. Mediations name this relocation, not an intervening-variable list placed between media and audiences.
The framework is not anti-media and does not idealize an autonomous audience. Martin-Barbero connected mass culture and popular culture with modernity and hegemony, showing that reception occurs inside existing social worlds. A message enters work schedules, authority relations, memories, genre knowledge, habits, and expectations. Those relations shape what media become without eliminating institutional or technical power.
What the model is: Theory of Mediations (“From the Media to Mediations”) in Knowledge →
Continue in the series
- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
The full brief is in its volume, with the other works of the series.
Need the full brief now? Request it under NDA →
New works are announced in The Debrief. Subscribe →
- FamilyModel
- CategoryParadigms, Traditions & Metatheories
- DomainMedia, Publics & Society
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Paradigms, Traditions & Metatheories
Provides a broad intellectual perspective within which multiple concepts, theories or investigations are developed. Traditions carry histories and commitments; metatheories examine how theories themselves are organized or related.