Mediatized politics, Comparative case study of Joe the Plumber and Mirza Agha

Document Type : Research Paper

Author
gholamreza Haddad
Research Center of Cultural Studies
10.22054/cs.2018.30638.437
Abstract
In the era of information revolution, social Sphere in general and political Sphere in particular have been deeply mediatized. In addition to the diverse interpretations that have been made so far, this article is based on a specific notion of mediatized politics, in which the expansion of the presence and role of the media in the political Sphere of societies provides the conditions for unofficial and ordinary persons to act az political actors. This research seeks to answer the question of whether mediatized politics affects all societies in any way, irrespective of their specific capacities and contextual characteristics equally or it is a contextual phenomena that brings different and diverse outcomes in different societies. In this regard, two cases of Joe the plumbers in the US presidential election of 2008 and Mirza Aqa in the 12th presidential election of 1396 as unofficial pesons, which provided the media with the opportunity to turn them into political activists, were the subject of a comparative study. Relying on cultural sociology as a theoretical framework, the comparison of these two cases in three indices of the dynamics of political subjectivity, typology of the media, and the survival of political subjectivity showed that mediatized politics is a contextual phenomena that in democratic developed societies yields maximum dynamic and long-lasting of political subjectivity in the context of all levels media, but in developing societies and pseudo-democracies, has minimal dynamics of political subjectivity only at the level of the micro-media and limited to elections campaign time.
Keywords
Mediatized Politics
Cultural Sociology
Joe the Plumbers
Mirza Agha
Presidential Elections
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New Media Studies
Volume 4, Issue 13
Spring 2018
Pages 63-105