Mediatization discourse has so far mainly been centered on media from institutional or social-constructionist approaches. The technological developments within communications industries coupled with the wider societal process of datafication might, however, beg for dusting off the smaller, although the long-time existing, technological approach to mediatization as a complement to the two other approaches, in order to understand aspects of automation and human-machine communication. This theoretical article explores how existing mediatization approaches can refocus to include lessons learned from human-machine communication. The first section accounts for the main mediatization approaches. The second section discusses debates on communication, artificiality, and meaning-making. The last section takes the example of the recruitment interview for discussing how mediatization theory can benefit from including a technological approach with influx from human-machine communication, as well as how human-machine communication can learn from wider discussions within mediatization theory.

In ‘Requiem for the Media’ (1971), the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard discusses the emancipatory affordances of the media. Can media be used to improve society? Should social movements use new media to coordinate their activities, organise and reach out with their message? In today’s media society, it seems obvious that the answer to these questions is yes. Everyone who wants to change society - whether political movements, companies, organisations or others - adheres to a ‘media strategy’. However, Baudrillard is dismissive of the media’s possibilities to contribute to progressive social change. His text can thus provide interesting perspectives on the interaction between media and politics and on the role of the media in society in general. What is now known as ‘mediatisation’ is anticipated by Baudrillard and his structuralist analysis of the ‘symbolic exchange’, which remains valid for those who aim to analyse such mediatisation processes. With the rise of digital media, Baudrillard’s text has arguably become increasingly relevant over time, as a large part of its content revolves around the (im)possibility of dialogue and interaction via mediated communication.

Between 2019 and 2023, media researchers from Södertörn University in UNISINOS and Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) in Brazil, engaged in a collaborative effort to explore Scandinavian and South American perspectives on mediatisation, connecting universities from opposite sides of the world.

The project aimed to promote a nuanced understanding of mediatisation theory from different cultural perspectives and media studies traditions, dismantle epistemological barriers, and provide new insights into societies undergoing the process of mediatisation.

The chapters presented in this volume are grounded on the mobility of researchers across both countries where a productive knowledge exchange contributed to diversify epistemological, empirical, and methodological approaches to mediatisation theory, and provide new perspectives on mediatisation theory in contested media scenarios in Sweden, Brazil, and beyond.

As research fields, mediatization and Human-Machine Communication (HMC) have distinct historical trajectories. While mediatization research is concerned with the fundamental interrelation between the transformation of media and communications and cultural and societal changes, the much younger field of HMC delves into human meaning-making in interactions with machines. However, the recent wave of “deep mediatization,” characterized by an increasing emphasis on general communicative automation and the rise of communicative AI, highlights a shared interest in technology’s role within human interaction. This introductory article examines the trajectories of both fields, demonstrating how mediatization research “zooms out” from overarching questions of societal and cultural transformations, while HMC tends to “zoom in” to approach the concrete situatedness of the interaction between humans and machines. It is argued that we need to combine both perspectives to better understand how the automation of communication transforms the social construction of culture and society. This article offers an overview of the key themes explored in this thematic issue, highlighting the productive intersection of HMC and mediatization within each article. Additionally, it identifies potential avenues for future research emerging from this fruitful intersection. 

This article explores the ways in which what we call the analogue and the datafied mindsets perceive the functioning of the datafied world. Based on a qualitative interview study of two generations of media users in Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden, we present and analyze underlying patterns in participants’ media attitudes and related practices. We show that belonging to a media generation does not always produce a homogeneous mindset or a uniform attitude toward media technologies. These mindsets, being ideal-typical constructs, are not bound to individuals: the same person can display features of the analogue and the datafied mindset in relation to different parts of the datafied world. One mindset does not replace the other but rather adds another layer to the social action of the individuals. The mindsets are multi-dimensional and molded by contrasting understandings, indicating that the tenacious structures of the analogue world linger on in the datafied social space. 

This article compares surveillance-related experiences and attitudes of two generations of media users in countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden) and analyzes the predictors of the attitudes toward contemporary surveillance. A large-scale online survey (N = 3221) reveals that attitudes toward online state and corporate surveillance are interrelated; the two attitudinal components are, however, generation-specific, having different predictors. Tolerance toward state surveillance is more characteristic of the older group, being predicted by trustful and obedient attitudes toward state authorities and institutions. Tolerance toward corporate dataveillance is more characteristic of the younger group, being predicted by active and self-confident media use. While the socio-historical context molds the intergenerational gaps in surveillance-related experiences and attitudes, individual-level experiences of state surveillance do not predict tolerance toward either type of contemporary surveillance, suggesting that global techno-cultural developments are probably more powerful factors than past experiences in forming generation-specific attitudes.

This paper discusses methodological, ethical, and empirical problematics related to forced changes in the research design of a comparative project during the Covid-19 pandemic, and its wider implications for future online audience research. The larger project aims to understand media users’ attitudes towards corporate and state surveillance in countries with different historical surveillance regimes: Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden. In a mixed-methods design, comprising an online survey and focus groups (FGs), we sampled participants from two generational cohorts: born in 1946-1953 and in 1988-1995. In each country, we planned six face-to-face FGs with people from these generational cohorts, divided into three gender-balanced groups with different profiles: higher education; mixed education, living in small cities/countryside; secondary education. The paper discusses the challenges of conducing FGs online, namely the effects of the technological interface on the group size and interaction, the importance of digital skills, and ethics-related considerations. Although we encountered cultural differences between the three countries, our main methodological lessons and suggestions for further audience studies center on the need to consider the subtle facets of inter-generational differences when planning online research. As we witnessed, not all barriers were rooted in access to technology and connectivity. The level of digital skills and self-confidence in use also played a role in participants' possibilities and willingness for taking part in online research. Further research is needed to explore how age and online methods intersect, and the role online settings play, in the experience of focus group and interview participants with various social backgrounds.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many research projects were forced to adapt their design and conduct interviews online. This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of using online focus groups with participants representing different generations and cultural and social backgrounds. Based on the researchers’ experiences and field notes from a three-country comparative project, aiming at analysing the extent to which previous experience of state surveillance impacted attitudes to commercial monitoring and tracking of online behaviour among two generational cohorts, the paper identifies seven aspects where the move from offline to online interviewing interfered with the original research design. The paper suggests that most of these interferences resulted in a need to adjust the methodology to better fit the online setting. We reflect critically upon the issues of technological preconditions and digital skills, recruitment, group size, degrees of previous acquaintance, the role of the interviewer, participants’ household status and media environment, and ethical considerations concerning privacy and data management. Based on these methodological insights, we conclude that future online focus group research would benefit from using smaller groups and adjusted moderation, flexibility in interviewing tools and channels, and new, online-specific ethical considerations when planning, executing, and analysing interviews. The paper advocates the complementarity between in-person and online focus groups as two modalities of data collection and argues for the normalization of hybrid methods. © The Author(s) 2023.