A Latin American approach to mediatization: specificities and contributions to a global discussion about how the media shape contemporary societies

Theories on mediatization have been developed in Latin America in parallel to those flourishing in the Global North. This article analyzes the former while keeping an eye on the more available theoretical production in English-speaking publications. The main part of the article covers Eliseo Verón’s initial reflections on the semantization of violence to his later development of an evolutionary approach to mediatization. The article then introduces the contributions made by Latin American researchers who have followed in Verón’s wake during the last decade. The article concludes with an overview of the parallelisms between the two theoretical strands, and considers their complementarities as well as the possible exchanges between them.