Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Göran Bolin 72 2012). It is rehearsed over and over again during the life-course, activated in certain moments, for example in an interview or a class reunion, while hibernating for most of the time. This gen- erationing process of becoming means that to study media gen- erations is also to study the process of mediatization. They are both processes, evolving over time. The generationing process, thus, means that the generational identity can be expected to be stronger the older the person is, since having travelled a long road through the social and media landscape means that one has rehearsed one’s life story, including the component that binds people together in a generational self-consciousness. In order to capture such processes empirically, one can, as we did in the project, conduct focus group interviews, and start themwith the prompting question ‘Which media did you have in your home as a child? Can you tell us about your earliest media memories?’ Through prompting people to remember their earliest memo- ries, the focus group situation triggers the participants to gather around common experiences, and this, in turn, highlights the things that bring them together in shared memories of past me- dia technologies and contents. It produces a ‘we-sense’, if only for the moment and duration of the interview. This ‘we-sense’ is characteristic for the Mannheimian conceptualisation of generations as placed in the same location of the historical process, as can be seen from the below excerpt from an interview with Estonian respondents. Interviewer : I mean, what kind of films did they show mostly at that time? Aire : Indian films. Marika : Yes, Indian films. Ruth : French comedies. Aire : Yes. Louis de Funes. Tomas : Louis de Funes, yes. Marika : Oktober or Pioneer, the one on Viru street where they showed one film all day and you could enter whenever you wanted. Tomas: Yes, yes. (Focus group, born 1959-1966)