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Computers, tablets, smartphones and mobile phones enable people to act across contexts. For individuals born during the first half of the twentieth century, these social infrastructures for agency arrived late in the life course. This article presents an analysis of a set of interviews that were thematically coded to reveal ways in which the infrastructures figured in reflexive practices among older single-dwelling women. The interviews were patterned by the shared image of a ‘media world’ and the hypothesis of the indispensability of newer media for living a socially integrated life in today’s society. Control of media connected with feelings of dis- or empowerment; ultimately media amplified the participants’ feelings of being autonomous actors. I argue that the newer media infrastructures extend the scope and need for reflexivity and augment the reflexive ageing associated with the continued activity and autonomy of the third age.

This article is a production study of two talk shows for the Danish television channel, TV2 Charlie: Meyerheim’s Talk Show (2006-) and Cecilie’s Book Show (2015-). TV2 Charlie is a niche channel (part of the TV2 network) that set out to target a mature and elderly audience when it started in 2004. The aim is to bring together mediatization research with production studies and cultural gerontology, and I argue that media logic is a useful analy tical concept that allows us to describe production processes in concrete ways and, at the same time, understand the context-specific ways in which media play a role in societal changes. Thus, through a logic of operationalising conviviality at the channel level, the production level and the programme level, the programmes contribute to perceptions of ageing and old age that emphasise an increased need for stability and safety, on one hand, and a desire for feel-good moments, on the other. Furthermore, the programmes promote positive and active ageing in some instances while keeping old age invisible in other instances.

With a focus on elderly people this article puts forward a concept of media generation as a thickening of one or more age groups of people who in their media appropriation share a specific experience space of mediatization and subsequently, based on their personal media biographies, develop a shared self-image as a media generation. Such a conceptualisation grasps media generation as a process. It operates with the central aspects of media relatedness, media-generational specifics of appropriation, and self-positioning. This offers an understanding of elderly people after retirement as members of a mass-media media generation. As the qualitative empirical analysis presented in this article demonstrates, members of this mass-media media generation define themselves in contrast to younger media generations.

The idea of distinct media generations is frequently discussed in the research literature about elderly media users. This article reviews the theoretical framework of media generations and develops a contrasting perspective that focuses on the dynamics of ageing. Its line of argument is supported empirically based on ten years of longitudinal, representative German national survey data and thirty media biographical interviews. The results indicate the fluidity of generational belonging and the importance of contextual factors to assess elderly’s media use. Finally, it is concluded that media dynamics in the lives of the elderly are best examined with a concept of media generations that is not essentially derived from birth – neither of technology, nor of people.

The present article analyses the mediatization of the brand and celebrity Zlatan Ibrahimović using the reception and marketing of the footballer’s life story and autobiography as its main case. It is shown that the construction of a myth such as Ibrahimović transcends the materiality of the book as well as geographical, vernacular and media boundaries, as it is constituted as content in a digital network that produces signification. This ‘Zlatan content’ is framed by national Swedish values and a traditional Western myth of individual masculine excellence. It is also marked by emotions, class and race, telling a tale about the marginalized emotive immigrant becoming both a national icon and part of an imaginary Western ghetto experience and global literary canon formation. It is argued that the performance of excitable speech acts is crucial in the mediatization and branding of mass market literature and celebrities such as Ibrahimović.

In summer 2012, the Archbishop of the Church of Sweden appeared on Twitter. There was only one problem - it was not the Archbishop himself who was tweeting, but an anonymous person. A discussion then ensued on Twitter and in the blogosphere between those in favor of the Archbishop and his department and mainly social media proponents.

The present article analyses the mediatization of corporate power with a special focus on the work of the CEO. A review of the literature on the role of the media in corporate management, especially in the work of corporate leaders, shows how the techniques of power in corporate management have become mediatized. Different media have become increasingly important for the work of corporate leaders. More importantly, media have become tools of power. In flexible and soft capitalism, corporate power is exercised using performative and affective techniques aimed at identity and community formation. Consequently, different media are utilized as tools of corporate management and control. With regard to the mediatization of power, the case of corporate management suggests that one should look into the societal and institutional structures of power rather than into the power of the media.

In late 2011 we are in the beginning of a revolution that may or may not turn out to be more far-reaching than the one unleashed in 1989. A common denominator in this resurging revolution is the mobilizing power of the so-called social media. Even if labels such as the Twitter or Facebook revolution are rightfully refuted, the on-going Arab Spring is a clear-cut example of an unprecedented communication power, largely out of the authorities’ control.

Using mediatization as the key concept, this article presents a theory of the influence media exert on society and culture. After reviewing existing discussions of mediatization by Krotz (2007), Schulz (2004), Thompson (1995), and others, an institutional approach to the mediatization process is suggested. Mediatization is to be considered a double-sided process of high modernity in which the media on the one hand emerge as an independent institution with a logic of its own that other social institutions have to accommodate to. On the other hand, media simultaneously become an integrated part of other institutions like politics, work, family, and religion as more and more of these institutional activities are performed through both interactive and mass media. The logic of the media refers to the institutional and technological modus operandi of the media, including the ways in which media distribute material and symbolic resources and make use of formal and informal rules.