Göran Bolin 302 So, just as every mediation means a framing of social reality from a specific angle, purposefully or not, it means that all communication is in a sense biased. Also this approach tend to ascribe a causal relation between the media as technologies and sign systems and society, and it equally much as the insti- tutional approach focus on the mass media from the mid-20th century and onwards. And just as the institutional approach, the techno-semiotic approach is on the meso-level of analysis. In Table 1 below, the main features of the three differ- ent types of approaches to mediatization are summarised. Table 1. Three different approaches to mediatization Institutional Social-constructivist Tech o-Semiotic Media as intitutions (e.g. journa- lism), or organizations (e.g. BBC) environment technologies, sign systems Temporal perspective ca. 1950 and onwards Dawn of civilization ca. 1950 and onwards Epistemology causal immanent causal Level of analysis meso macro meso The macro-level of the analysis in the social-constructivist approach does mean that it, in a way, includes the institu- tional approach since the holistic view of society of course can- not exclude its institutions, even if they are analyzed as parts of the social system. We will in the next section relate these charac- teristics with the Latin-American approaches to mediatization, to look for correspondences and divergencies. 3. Latin American approaches to mediatization Now, if we relate the European and the Latin-American approaches to each other, we could argue that the Latin-Amer- ican approach can be described as a mixture of the techno- semiotic and the social-constructivist approaches. In this approach, the media are studied as an environment, dating back
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