Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Göran Bolin 70 is, of coevals, is located in a culturally and historically specific media landscape. This landscape consists on the one hand of already existing media, and on the other, of media arriving dur- ing the life time of the cohort. This means that these cohorts are confronted by a media surrounding that they have to act in relation to. It is objective, in the sense that they cannot chose away the landscape, although they might choose to use certain specific media technologies, or avoid specific media contents. However, also the technologies and contents avoided will have an impact on their lives, since – as Marshall McLuhan (1964) pointed to already in the 1960s, ‘the medium is the message’, and also those who do not use smartphones are affected by the fact that they exist. Figure 2. Media landscape of Sweden and Estonia with four tentative generational trajectories. Figure by the author. The technological and semiotic structure of the me- dia landscape is a structure that we act against. It is a structure that is formed by previous generations, in turn having grown up in the landscape formed by their predecessors. Those who are born into this landscape act in it according to how they perceive of its structure, and their action will in turn impact on it, creat- ing a new structure for coming cohorts. The four lines in figure 2 represent four tentative gen- erations or cohorts that was interviewed in Sweden and Esto- nia – a neighbouring country to Sweden, just across the Baltic Sea. Although the two countries are neighbours, they have quite different histories. Sweden is a long-time democracy that was