Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Göran Bolin 64 Figure 1. Family of three generations. Copyright by the author. The photo in itself is fairly typical from what you can find in family albums. It is clearly not taken by a professional photographer, since the composition is imbalanced – the woman to the right is cut in half, to the benefit of a large portion of wood to the left, the photographer has avoided having the sun right into the lens, with the result that all participants in the photo have to KISA towards the camera. Photos from family albums prompts us to think about time, and especially past time. At the moment when this photo was taken, there was still a couple of months before Germany would invade Poland, the Soviet Union was still a superpower, television had not yet arrived to Sweden and the main mass media were books, newspapers, radio, cinema, and music (shel- lac) records. People had telephones, but if someone would have told them that people in the future would be go around in public spaces talking to other people, at other public places, let alone taking their spontaneously arranged three-generation family photos with their mobile devices, that would have sounded like science fiction. Much has indeed changed since this photo was taken. Not only are most of the people in the picture dead, and my