What we call media and mediated communication is more and more interwoven with processes of datafication in an environment of continuous and largely automated data-gathering, for example, from our activities online or our mobile phone use. The uses of data collected, aggregated and analysed by systems of computers are today a precondition for everyday life. In short, data are changing social ontology, and as a result the role of ‘media’ within the constitution of the social. This can be understood as  part of a process of ‘deep’ mediatization (Couldry and Hepp 2016) – in which the very elements and building-blocks from which social is constructed are based in processes of mediation, accompanied by automated data processing.

In this transformed context, this pre-conference asks: What do such changes mean for critical communications and social research – indeed for critical social theory and informed political action generally? How should we now do critical empirical research into media and communications bearing this deep mediatization in mind? The pre-conference aims both to focus these questions theoretically and to encourage perspectives on what constitutes critical empirical research under such conditions.

Questions on which we welcome either theoretical or empirical contributions include:

• What sort of economic, political and social order is being built through today’s data relations and their underlying linked infrastructures?

• How are the self’s relations to institutional power changing through digital traces, data relations and with implications for autonomy and freedom?

• How is the nature of social institutions changing through deep mediatization and the pervasiveness of data relations?

• Are practices of civic and political intervention for social change on balance stimulated or undermined in a datafied environment?

• What does community and other forms of collectivity come to mean under these new datafied conditions?

• How should we develop our methods for a critical analysis of processes of deep mediatization?

• What kind of social interventions are needed that build from critical analyses of datafication ?