We Have Never Been Mediatized 299 society and for common life together. The question is then not so much if, and to what extent society is mediatized, but rather in what way society is moulded by media technologies, the ways in which they are organized, and what potentials for meaning making they offer. 2. European approaches to mediatization Most discussions on mediatization takes their point of departure in the axiomatic presupposition that we are dealing with a process where something that was at one time not affected by “media” has become so, or, alternatively, has become so to a higher degree than before. I have elsewhere discussed the three approaches to mediatization (Bolin 2014), so suffice it for this article to outline their differences very shortly. In the European context, the most popular approach is the institutional approach, drawing on the theory of media logics by Altheide & Snow (1979), and with prominent representatives in Scandina- vian scholars Stig Hjarvard (e.g. 2013) and Kent Asp (1990). Its focus is on media as institutions, often the institution of journal- ism and likewise often in relation to the institution of politics. Its temporal perspective is from the mid-20th century and onwards, and by media is often referred the mass media institutions such as BBC, or Globo. Epistemologically, it also has as a point of de- parture that societal institutions (such as politics) have once been less reliant on “the media”, while the opposite is true today (see a good example in Strömbäck, 2008). This approach makes sense if we by media mean mass media, and by politics mean parliamentary politics in mass democracies, which is most often the case of the institutional approach. Naturally, political debate and opinion formation have always involved communication technologies, from the rhetorical technologies practiced in, for instance, Greek city states, to the printed pamphlets of the refor- mation, but in mass democracies, political opinion formation is reliant on mass media, including their iterations on online plat- forms on the internet. A second, also relatively widespread approach is the socioconstructivist. Researchers encompassing this approach
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