Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Generational analysis & mediatized social change 65 mother is not a girl anymore, but an 85-year-old woman who has her own children, grandchildren and even great-grandchil- dren. These changes, although they are very obvious to us, do not reveal the full story about social change. In order to establish such a change, we need to develop an analytical research per- spective. In this chapter I would like to suggest an epistemologi- cal approach to social change, or more precisely, to the process of mediatization, grounded in generational analysis. I will do this in three steps. First, I will discuss the theo- retical framework of mediatization, and I will suggest that there are at least threeways of thinking around this concept, all of which have their benefits and limitations: I will call these three types of mediatization approaches for the institutional, the technologi- cal, and the cultural approach. Second, I will discuss the problems with studying mediatization, and I will suggest that we need to have an epistemological approach that can capture long-term so- cial changes. This approach is the generational analysis. Third, I will give some examples of an analysis of generations in media landscapes. Many of these are drawn frommy larger study of Me- dia Generations (BOLIN, 2016), but I will in this context especially focus on the temporal aspect of mediatization analysis. II – Three approaches to mediatization theory This section will be accounted for three approaches to mediatization as a social process. They all have their advantages and limitations, so in that sense none of them are qualitatively superior to the others. But since they are based in different on- tological and epistemological traditions, they respond to differ- ent sets of questions. I will discuss these approaches by distinguishing the ways in which they differ on a number of parameters. The first of these is the way in which they theorise the relation between ‘the media’ and culture and society, and whether there is a causal relationship between these entities or not. The second concern is what they mean by ‘the media’, that is, whether they approach the media as technologies, organisations, sign structures, or in- stitutions. The third concern is their approach to history, and