ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the supra-individual actors who have promoted the making of deep mediatization the most: on the one hand corporate actors and state agencies and their engagement with an emerging political economy of digital infrastructures; on the other, pioneer communities and their experimental practices and imaginaries of a deeply mediatized world. Mediatization research is often criticized for ignoring the political economy of media-related changes. The view that media contents are reproducible commodities has been discussed at least since the Frankfurt School and the works of Walter. The view that media are commodities gained traction in an era of blanket deregulation that began in the 1980s: radio, television and telecommunications were privatized and organized along market models instead of public service ones. As intermediaries, pioneer communities are crucial to the ongoing curation of ideas for state-of-the-art digital media technologies, often long before they result in established products or services.
