Göran Bolin 300 often have a longer temporal perspective, starting from the dawn of civilization and onwards. This also means that they include all kinds of communication technologies and not only the mass media. The media technologies are rather seen as an intrinsic part of the environment and they have always already been part of society, in fact having been a constituent part of it. This approach is less focused on causal explanations, but rather on the ways in which the media technologies are integrated into the societal process. It therefore means a more macro-oriented approach. Friedrich Krotz (2007), for example, thinks of mediatization as a macro-social force on par with other processes such as globalization, individualization, etc., while Andreas Hepp (2012) describes the societal impact of the media in terms of a moulding force. While this approach is attractive as a theoreti- cal model, it is difficult to operationalize. Where the institutional approach can bracket context and analyze the relations between two societal institutions – for example, journalism and politics during a specific national election – the social-constructivist ap- proach is not as easy to empirically study, not least over time. Besides these two dominant approaches, there is a third approach that I would like to call techno-semiotic. This is an approach that has grown out of the medium theory of Marshall McLuhan (1964), but also from the writings of Walter Ben- jamin (1936/1977) on mechanical reproduction technologies. It is formulated first in the early 1970s by Jean Baudrillard, in his well-cited article “Requiem pour les media” (Baudrillard 1971), where he discusses “l’information mediatisée’ in relation to the mass media and their inability to engage in reciprocal communication. The media, foremost television, which was the newme- dium at the time, were in Baudrillard’s view, “fabricating non- communication”. This conclusion is drawn on the background of the way in which Baudrillard defines communication. With in- spiration from anthropological theories on gift-economies and symbolic exchange (Mauss 1925/1990), Baudrillard builds his definition of communication on the dialogue between co-pres- ent communicators. What characterizes the mass media is that they are opposed to mediation, intransitive, that they
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