[Medical discourse as a social activity: formation, priorities, dynamics (based on the material of the Russian popular science magazine «Zdorovie»)]

Increasing interest in society in topics related to medicine and health is due to the current trend to consider physical, mental and social well-being as a basic human need. In the context of modern life, health is perceived as one of the most important values of an individual and society as a whole, therefore, medical discourse today plays a special role in culture, covering not only the professional expert and scientific community, but also the widest audience - the audience of the media. The media play a key role as a source of medical information and its targeted and targeted distribution. In this article, the medical discourse is analyzed in terms of its formation as a social activity and the role of modern mass media in it. The aim of the study is to analyze the demand for medical discourse in society and the features of its mediatization, which is the most important factor in the value-semantic dynamics of society and its way of life. The main empirical material is publications in the magazine "Zdorovie", the most popular Russian publication about a healthy lifestyle, medicine, practices for the treatment and prevention of diseases, the art of preserving beauty and vitality. The discourse of the popular scientific magazine "Zdorovie" as a very important segment of the value-semantic space of modern media is represented by a set of genres aimed at disseminating theoretical and practical medical knowledge, experience and providing medical services, taking into account the characteristics of medical subjects. dis-course, their information needs and problem-thematic requests, goal-setting attitudes, the degree and nature of interest, as well as the level of professional, general cultural and communicative competencies.

The rise and fall of the Synthetic: The mediatization of Canada's oil sands

The concept of the Synthetic is developed to trace and trouble the prevailing popular mythology of Alberta's oil sands and place the omnipresence of petro-hegemony into focus in a time of crisis and transition. The Synthetic is theorized as a period of petroculture beginning in the late 1960s with the rise of Alberta's oil sands industry together with a rise in oil sands narratives, docudrama, and the emergence of mediated or synthetic politics reliant upon processed images. Attention focuses on three mediated moments within the Synthetic beginning with the banned 1977 CBC docudrama The Tar Sands and the reaction of Premier Peter Lougheed. This signals the power and grip of oil's hegemony. Second, the short film Synergy produced for Expo 86 captures the thickening of synthetic culture and oil's saturation of the public imagination. Finally, the controversy manufactured by Alberta's Canadian Energy Centre over the animated film Bigfoot Family suggests petro-hegemony's loosening grip.

Global Mediatized Death and Emotion: Parasocial Grieving-Mourning #stephenhawking on Twitter

This study examined mediatized death and emotion, specifically parasocial grieving, toward high-profile celebrity Stephen Hawking's death from a global perspective. A thematic analysis of public tweets explored how social media mourners expressed parasocial grieving following Hawking's death and how that shaped mediatized global flows of emotion in terms of digital affect culture. Findings showed varied forms of mediatized emotional responses associated with parasocial grievings, such as sadness, shock, confusion, love, and longing. Mourners also adopted varied coping mechanisms, including individualized tributes, reminiscing, memorializing, and advocacy. Findings suggested that Hawking's mourners performed parasocial death rituals on Twitter as a legitimate public space of mourning. Findings contribute to parasocial grieving scholarship and mediatization of death and emotion.

“The war phone”: mobile communication on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine

One of the problems in the growing subfield of mediatization of war is evidence on how exactly civilian communication devices become integrated with warfare. In this article, I focus on patterns of use of mobile phones on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with Ukrainian servicemen and women, this article presents a typology for the frontline use of mobiles in the spirit of actor–network theory. The omnipresence of mobiles on the battlefield creates a set of unique participatory media practices. A variety of personal purposes, such as private communication and entertainment, are combined in the same device with wiretapping, fire targeting, minefield mapping and combat communication. Mobiles supplant old or unavailable equipment and fill gaps in military infrastructure, becoming weaponized and contributing to the hybridization of the military and the intimate, and of war and peace. These results imply the role of mobiles as a mediated extension of battlefield and question the very definition of what constitutes weapon as tool of combat.

Mediatization in Times of Pandemic: How German Grassroots Sports Clubs Employed Digital Media to Overcome Communication Challenges During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on all societal domains, including sports. Social distancing measures and the closure of sports facilities posed especially severe challenges for grassroots sports clubs, which thrive on joint activities and member social contact. Drawing on mediatization theory, the study examines the communication challenges faced by grassroots sports clubs and the perceived potential of digital media to overcome these obstacles during and beyond the pandemic. Based on in-depth interviews with 32 club officials of German grassroots sports clubs, the study identified ongoing uncertainty about COVID-19 regulations, preserving members' sense of belonging during social distancing, and involving everyone in formal processes as the major communication challenges. While most of the interviewees valued the potential of digital media to address these challenges, they acknowledged that the benefits of digital media for individual members would depend on their skill, motivation, and concerns, as well as on the availability of digital infrastructure. For that reason, digital media were not considered a substitute for face-to-face social contact or sporting activity but were seen to extend opportunities for communication and training. More generally, these findings raise new questions about the relationship between mediatization and social cohesion.

Civic Participation in Chinese Cyberpolitics: A Grounded Theory Approach of Para-Xylene Projects

The internet provides a free and convenient platform for the public to obtain political information and participate in political life. Meanwhile, there occurs fierce confrontation of various values and ideologies, shaping a complicated and changeable field of public opinion. The strategies of civic participation and the generation of public opinion show quite different characteristics in such a mediatized society. This article aimed to study civic participation in Chinese cyberpolitics and to find its patterns and the logic behind it. Due to the natural advantage of the environmental issues in its commonality, the internet events in the last decade related to the PX (para-xylene) project were selected as the research object. This study used grounded theory as the method and conducted a cross-case analysis on the original data captured on Weibo—one of the most popular social media sites in China. Finally, four patterns of civic participation in internet events were found and summarized, as well as the intervention and influence of media logic in different modes. However, it is political logic, rather than media logic, that reveals greater vitality in the civic participation of cyber deliberation. Mediatization does exist but is far from dominance. It has certain significance for the supervision and management of public opinion and the rational and harmonious development of civic participation in public issues.

A Case Study of Romania

This article presents an empirical study on the institutional audiovisual mediatization of social sustainability made by the eighteen religious denominations officially recognized in Romania during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic onset. Research is undertaken based on the mediatization theories. Specifically, it highlights and discusses the conditions for producing the meaning of social sustainability as a result of religious mediatization during the months of March, April and May 2020, a period with strong religious connotations since it involved the dates of the major annual feasts celebrated by the three majority monotheistic religions, i.e., the Christian Easter, the Muslim Ramadan and the Jewish Passover. As a result, we noticed that the production of meaning in terms of social sustainability was simultaneously anchored in the accumulation of four contextual “social worlds”: (a) that of social transformation induced by mediatization, (b) that of the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that is neither social, economic, or environmental, but with consequences on the three levels of reality mentioned above, (c) that of spirituality during the time of the great monotheistic religious feasts and (d) that of the national culture of Romania, statistically the most religious country of the European Union.

Beyond the Linguistic/Medical Anthropology Divide: Retooling Anthropology to Face COVID-19

Differing analytics and ethnographic practices impede conversations between linguistic and medical anthropologists. Here I juxtapose articles in this special issue that use diverse ethnographic sites to rethink anthropological concepts of health, disease, care, the body, language, and communication in the light of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I track how anthropologists and their interlocutors envision relations between ideologies, embedded modeling (or metacommunication), and ordinary pragmatics, particularly by projecting their actual or ideal consonance versus exploring how sounds, bodies, technologies, and practices emerge from disjunctures. Comparing H1N1 in 2009 and COVID-19 prompts reflection on why anthropologists must transcend this foundational divide to tackle pandemic complexities.