ABSTRACT
In these sociological accounts of generations, some components in people’s lives seem to have attracted more attention than others. However, and despite the central place of media technologies and content in people’s lives, generational theory has only recently been a prominent feature in media research, barring a few examples
(e.g. Gumpert and Cathcart 1985, Bolin 1997, Hartmann 2003). Lately, however, we have seen a growing interest in generational components as part of media and audience research, where a few edited collections have dealt with the role of media in the formation of generations (Volkmer 2006a, Colombo & Fortunati 2011, Loos et al. 2012, Aroldi & Ponte 2012, Bolin & Skogerbø 2013, Vittadini et al., 2013b). The increased presence of the media in peoples’ lives and in society more generally over the past century has also left few traces in the sociological literature on generations. This part of social and cultural development, which is sometimes referred to as the process of mediatisation (Krotz 2001, Lundby 2008, Hjarvard 2013, Bolin 2014b), is an important background to the formation and experience of generations because the increasingly rapid transformation of our media environments should leave its mark on the experience of each specific generation.
