ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to do so by way of a research review that taps into several disciplines and subject areas; most notably media and communication studies, communication geography, sociology of work, gender studies, and organizational studies. It offers a long-term overview that runs from Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press of the mid-15th century to the latest mobile transmedia technologies. The chapter discusses historical change in three areas: technological apparatuses, including dominant technologies and their actual or expected temporal-spatial affordances, political-economic structures, including the nature of capitalism and prevailing logics of value, and work organization, including forms of employment and means of control over labour processes. The capitalist labour process is regularly depicted as one that has bred deskilling, routinization, and mechanization across the labour market. Transmediatization continues the ‘acceleration of modern life’ by bringing unprecedented proximity and immediacy. The chapter examines two waves of mediatization – mechanization and electrification – were constitutive of the mass media work regime.
