Five decades of local media theory: Responding to globally changing media and communication systems

Media theories are best understood backwards, even if they must be articulated forwards. Media theories have continuously responded to practice – to historically changing technologies and institutions of communication – in shifting local and global research environments. This article addresses the understanding of media prevailing in Danish media and communication research at two pivotal moments –1981 and 1996 – adding a diagnosis of 2026 and a prognosis for coming generations of colleagues to better understand media and theories when looking backwards to the 2020s.