Isabel Löfgren 108 neo-materialist approach highlights the dynamics of networks in interaction with human and non-human agents, as seen in the field of media ecology and actor-network theory (Latour, 2005), as well as in the lines of research on “digital materialism” and the Berlin School, led by Friedrich Kittler. However, the goal of this article is not to map out this vast theoretical territory, but rather to offer reflections on how we might orient ourselves in relation to planetary issues within the field of mediatization studies. 3. The Planetary Turn in Mediatization Mediatization has become a fundamental concept for theorizing how our constantly evolving and intensifying media environments influence social processes, and how these processes, in turn, influence the media (Krotz, 2007; Lunt and Liv- ingstone, 2016). Mediatization fundamentally examines both changes in media and changes in society, culture, institutions, and materialities, in terms of metaprocesses. According to Krotz (2007, p. 15), a metaprocess is a concept that describes and theoretically explains the various economic, social, and cultural dimensions and specific levels of real changes. As such, media- tization, as a metaprocess, intersects with other metaprocesses such as globalization, individualization, commercialization, and also “planetization” (Boff, 2017), as we will explore further. However, Kannengiesser and McCurdy (2021) identify a fundamental conceptual blind spot in the field of mediatization studies, which does not always adequately recognize or theorize the socio-environmental consequences of the very processes it studies. According to the authors, the “environments” discussed in canonical works on mediatization rarely refer to material en- vironments, limiting themselves to “media environments,” un- derstood as “the entire body of media available at a given moment” (Hasebrink and Hölig, 2014). On the other hand, the field of media ecologies has not only reinterpreted the term “environment” but also the term “ecology” itself —using it not in the traditional sense of studying the relationship between biodiversity and the environment, but as a metaphor for the “media environment,” based on the elu-
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