Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 456
The dashboard now sets the agenda
Mediatization identifies long-run shifts in which media infrastructures, formats, and logics reorganize how institutions allocate attention, authority, timing, visibility, and access
Premise
A new channel can leave an institution essentially unchanged. Mediatization addresses a larger transformation: media become so embedded in social and organizational life that they alter the conditions under which action is practical, visible, legitimate, or timely. A workflow permission can relocate authority; platform metrics can redirect attention; persistent connectivity can redefine expected response time.
Channel analysis is too narrow once those dependencies begin organizing the work itself. The executive problem becomes one of institutional design: which external or internal media conditions now shape decisions, routines, incentives, and capabilities that the organization once governed differently?
What the model is: Mediatization in Knowledge →

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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryParadigms, Traditions & Metatheories
- DomainMedia, Publics & Society
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Paradigms, Traditions & Metatheories
Provides a broad intellectual perspective within which multiple concepts, theories or investigations are developed. Traditions carry histories and commitments; metatheories examine how theories themselves are organized or related.
- KnowledgeMediatization
- Key conceptDeep mediatization
- Key conceptInstitutional media dependence