f Editorial

We can think of two broad ways of theorizing the media-saturated texture of our times. One would be to approach the contemporary as an era of increased mediatization of all domains of life, including the biological. The second approach, which the readers will discern in the essays in this Special Issue on ‘Media Studies and the Contemporary’, is to privilege the category of the contemporary by paying attention to the domain of media cultures as the site that bears the most visible signs of the transitions unfolding in conditions of life today. The essays in this volume propose a set of approaches which take seriously many of the media cultural forms that define the contemporary, without fetishizing media devices and their phenomenology.