Why a handbook on mediatization now?
In earlier societies, social institutions like family, school and church were the most important
providers of information, tradition and moral orientation for the individual member of society.
Today, these institutions have lost some of their former authority, and the media have to some
extent taken over their role as providers of information and moral orientation, at the same
time as the media have become society’s most important storyteller about society itself (Hjarvard 0000: 00).
In the past decade or two, an international group of researchers has sought to tell
not simply the history of media or, even, the history of mediation within diverse
fields of society, but, even more ambitiously, they have sought to investigate the
mediation of history. It seems that the effort to understand the so-called new media
000 Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
has stimulated media and communications researchers to think more deeply about
history.0 The seemingly unstoppable flow of “new media” is leading researchers
to look back over the history of previously new media (Marvin 0000), embracing a
longer timeframe than is common in a field that tends towards presentism. Equally,
it seems that the study of new media is demanding that research becomes more
interdisciplinary. Media and communications researchers increasingly look across
the diverse fields of society in which these are proving significant, even influential,
working with political scientists to examine the mediation of politics, with psychologists to understand the mediation of the family, with theologians to understand
the mediation of religion, and so forth