Mediatization

Marshall McLuhan’s famous 1964 claim that “the medium is the message,” rather than the medium only being a means of carrying a message, has since become a cornerstone of an entire field of study: media theory.

One component of media theory is often referred to as “mediatization,” which, as the name implies, refers to the influence the media has on all sorts of things; though it’s most commonly applied (outside of scholastic circles, at least) to the way the media influences politicians, and thus, politics.

The primary claim of mediatization (a core version of the term, at least, as there are many variations of the concept) is that the media we consume (films, music, the news, books, video games, etc) influence our perception of the world in various ways.