Understanding Media Revolution – How digitalization is to be considered

Not only in public discussions but also in scientific discourse the concept of „revolution ” is increasingly used in order to characterise the importance of New Media in general and of smartphones and tablet-pc’s in particular. Above all those political independence movements in North Africa using mobile phones encourage this interpretation. On the other hand the inter-national community of activity theorists remains now as ever very reserved facing this common meaning. Our contribution is to examine whether this reservation is necessarily based on activity theory or whether there is possi-bly an interface between activity theory and present media theory. Aiming at this purpose we check the central concepts like medium, revolution, transformation, and transition and so on. Our hypothesis is: With the help of an epistemic understanding of medium we may understand the ongoing process of New Media Development a media revolution. 1