Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Generational analysis & mediatized social change 69 within the framework of people who have preceded us. This brings me back to the theme of generations. III – Generations in media landscapes Theoretically, there are two types of generation ap- proaches, producing two kinds of belonging or “we-sense” (BUDE , 1997; CORSTEN , 1999) – the generation as kinship, fol- lowing Margaret Mead’s (1970) research on generation gaps, and Karl Mannheim’s (1928/1952) theory on generation as so- cial formation of coevals, that is, people of same age, living at the same time, and sharing experience of historical events. In the words of Mannheim, being situated in the same location in the history. For a long time, however, generational exchanges were not dramatically different from one another. With modernity, the pace of change was seemingly increasing: Prior to the late nineteenth century media explo- sion, generations came and went, all exposed to and acquiring the same print grammar. Thus me- dia seemed to have little bearing on human time relationships. Though we still think of people as related, or separated in chronological generation time, the rapid advent of newmedia and the acqui- sition of new media grammars implies new align- ments, shorter and more diverse than those based on generations. (GUMPERT; CATHCART, 1985: 31) When this was written, the newmediumwas television and one can ponder about the consequences for the new and rapidly changing digital environment – if that would produce shorter generational spans, as Gumpert & Cathcart predicts. One way to discuss this is to analyse tentative gen- erations as located in specific media landscapes. Below can be found an example of such as landscape, based on an empirical comparative study of media generations in Sweden and Estonia (BOLIN, 2016). The idea to situate generational cohorts in a media landscape build on the fact that every sociological cohort, that