Christian Pentzold

Attempts to ground mediatisation in time have, this commentary argues, usually exhibited two distinct temporal orientations: their view is either quite far-sighted or short-sighted. In one direction, there are indispensable studies on the historicity of mediatisation processes. They examine long-term transformations that are inextricably linked to the cumulative volume of information and communication technologies. In the opposite direction, media are treated as agents of social acceleration that hasten the collapse of time-space distanciations. What largely disappears unnoticed in the gap between these suggestive timescales are the multiple temporal structures and experiences that characterise people’s engagement with media technologies and texts. Rather than assuming that media have an inherent time bias, this commentary invites scholars to refocus their attention on the practices of temporal scaffolding through which the entimed potential of communicative devices, media programmes and services are configured. Doing so will help us to arrive at a more time-literate understanding of mediatisation as a fundamental but multi-faceted change in human activity, social institutions and cultural expression that will likely leave its mark on the practicalities and politics of arranging the past, present and future. The full article can be found here The Spanish version can be read here.