The extended indispensability of media can be seen as a key indicator of mediatization, whereby our lives become adapted to media. But even though we can assume that the pervasive character of digital media essentially changes everyday life and the way people experience it, we cannot take consequences of technological transformation for granted. Following from this we argue there is a need for quantitative analyses that can verify mediatization processes in time and space.

Here we present a tool that measures the extent to which media reach into the deeper layers of daily human life, used in an empirical study conducted in Sweden in 2017. The results show that perceived media indispensability is played out along three dimensions of daily human life; (1) (re)production; (2) recognition, and (3) civic life, and appears as a socially structured and structuring process, although not in a very strong way. We argue this tool, in diachronic analyses, works as a measurement of mediatization.