Blackwell Reference Online

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The neologism médiologie was coined in 1979 by the French essayist, novelist, and political agitator Régis Debray in Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France (Debray 1979/1981). The invention of the label predated the foundation of the new interdiscipline of mediation studies in 1991, the launch of a new journal, Cahiers de médiologie (now defunct), and the gathering of some of France's most interesting philosophers and sociologists of technology, notably Bernard Stiegler, François Dagognet, Pierre Lévy, and Bruno Latour, around his project. Situated at the crossroads of philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, political sciences, semiotics, media, and cultural studies, mediology is a relatively autonomous discipline that analyzes the totality of the processes of mediation that make possible the transmission and diffusion of ideas. With its focus on the interplay between social and technological forces that connect culture to practices, it is, first and foremost, a political sociology in the Marxist tradition that analyzes how ideas are transformed into a material force that can change the world. Taunting communication scholars working in the poststructuralist tradition of Roland Barthes, it presents the new interdiscipline as a materialist successor science to media studies that integrates the semiotic analysis of contents within a more encompassing philosophy ... log in or subscribe to read full text