The Special Section presents the work of the Scandinavian network Mediatization Times, which has gathered scholars with diverse backgrounds to discuss the complex relationship between time and the media. The contributions link to discussions of history and memory, liveness, and simultaneous presence as well as cultural techniques and infrastructures for temporal mediation. The section suggests that there is a renewed need to discuss temporal aspects of media and social change in the context of digital culture.

This article examines Ingmar Bergman's first (and only) television adaptations of dramatist August Strindberg: The Storm (1960) and A Dream Play (1963). Both were broadcast live and favorably received by contemporary critics. A recurrent reaction was that television finally "did justice" to these plays from the early 20th century; implying, as did Raymond Williams in his 1974 book on television, that Strindberg's later drama somehow "anticipated" television. This claim is explored in relation to various thematic and formal expressions of temporality in both plays (motifs of enclosed spaces, telephones, clouds, and faces and the dialectics of progress and repetition) and the specificities of television (the "management of liveness," " mobile privatization," monitoring, etc.). The type of historicity involved in the claim that art may anticipate oncoming media technology is related to Walter Benjamin's notion of pre- and post-history.