ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘acting on media’ has seen a rise in use in media and communication research that is oriented towards practice theory. In times of deep mediatization, diverse collectivities consider that media and media infrastructures can themselves be identified as an object of engagement – with the expectation that they might have an influence on processes of societal transformation. Mediatization refers to an experience everybody knows from his or her everyday life: media saturate more and more domains of society, and these domains are changing as a result. Due to their increasing relevance, a growing number of individual, corporate, and collective actors are concerned with gaining influence on developments in media technology. Different forms of contemporary pioneer journalism can be understood as examples of acting on media in that data journalism or sensor journalism is not only about communicating by means of such technologies but is, first and foremost, about designing and developing them to make such communication possible.
