Thomas McCoy’s article “Surveillance, privacy and power: Information trumps knowledge” provokes a number of reflections of relevance for contemporary discussions within the field of media and communications. Not only is it an early example of introducing Foucauldian theory, it is also an early attempt at discussing questions related to database surveillance, something that anticipates today’s concept of “surveillance capitalism.” McCoy also highlights the tension between information and knowledge, although his definitions of these concepts remain a bit vague. Lastly, he also takes on the discussion of privacy in relation to database surveillance. Although McCoy could not have predicted the full extent of today’s datafication, his concerns about surveillance anticipate contemporary debates.

One of the great achievements in the history of human communication is the invention of writing, as it allows for the preservation of memory over time, from generation to generation. Writing expands our worlds and extends our abilities to communicate with distant others both in time – across generations – and in space, with others that are geographically separated from us. Time and space are, of course, inherently interconnected as has been theorized in a multiplicity of ways – not least in relation to the media and communication technologies throughout history, as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong have eloquently discussed. And as media and communication scholars we are all indebted to the works of pioneer researchers. However, we are also caught in the paradox that although the media technologies and forms date back to the dawn of civilization, they also constantly change with time – not only between generations of researchers, but also within the lifetime of single generations. Against the background of these facts, I will in the following few pages reflect on one of the interests that I share with Fausto Colombo, and which followed him over the course of his academic life: the relation between media, time, generation, social memory and archives...(dall'incipit)

Most previous studies on online surveillance have been conducted in long-time liberal democracies with limited experiences of explicit and intrusive state surveillance. This article explores the role of the historical legacy of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, embodied in generational experiences, in the formation of imaginaries of, and attitudes toward, contemporary state and corporate surveillance. We propose a theoretical hypothesis of the "surveillance survival paradox": firsthand experiences of the past (totalitarian/authoritarian) surveillance regime do not lead to a greater fear or criticism of the contemporary regime; rather, it is the opposite. The article presents results from an original mixed-method study combining a quantitative online survey (N=3,221) with focus group and individual interviews (seventy-one participants) conducted among two generations (born in 1946-1953 and 1988- 1995) in three European countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden). The quantitative analysis reveals significant cross-cultural differences in personal and mediated experiences of surveillance. Inter-generational differences in attitudes toward contemporary surveillance were surprisingly similar across the countries, with the older groups in all countries demonstrating higher tolerance toward online state surveillance, and the younger groups reporting higher acceptance for corporate dataveillance. The qualitative analysis reveals that perceptions of the past surveillance regime as more direct and dangerous overshadow sensitivities toward more abstract and covert risks related to the extended state and corporate surveillance in the contemporary datafied world. The results led us to formulate the "surveillance survival paradox" as a generation-specific, and probably also country- or regime-specific, phenomenon.

With the digitalization of the media, many of the business models of media companies have become obsolete and had to be adapted. Various new forms of value circulate in digital markets, resulting from the different ways in which professional media makers and everyday media users value media. This chapter discusses these different forms of value and the relations between them. 

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.