ABSTRACT
Time and again, it is said that people are living in an era of rapid technological change, or even one of increased acceleration. This idea of accelerating technological change, especially that involving media technologies, also serves as a basis for contemporary theories of media generations. Following Karl Mannheim's seminal paper a founding idea in generational theory is that generations are formed through the common experiences of coevals, located in the same place in the historical process. One way of analysing generationing as a temporal process, as the meeting between a social collective and a techno-cultural structure, is to adopt a cross-generational comparative approach, whereby different generational formations can stand out against each other. The trajectory of a social formation through the spatial unit that is the media landscape thus produces time, both in its linear conception as calendar time and also in its sense of punctual time, that is, time that is defined by its specific quality.
