Conclusion

Our goal in this article has been to better understand how people practice mentorship to organize and share know-how for cultural work as it becomes increasingly precarious and deeply mediatized. Given the tacit nature of craft know-how – what one must know to do ‘good work’ – mentorship remains a key way to pass on experience and knowledge. Traditionally, mentorship involved learning-by-doing through co-present work on shared projects, but this model has undergone major transformations, including increased abstraction, flexibilization, and insecurity. Disruptions to the spatiotemporal rhythms of cultural work and the erosion of its autonomy have made cultural workers more precarious. Moreover, the growing technological mediation of cultural work – what we call deep mediatization – adds complexity to co-present sharing of know-how. Scholars like Dormer argue that this complexity constitutes distributed knowledge, separate from human craft know-how. We propose that by re-conceptualizing mentorship as a figuration, it becomes more than one-on-one co-present learning. Instead, mentorship emerges as a communicative process involving a constellation of actors coordinating connected presence to share both know-how and distributed knowledge within shared frames of relevance.

While our case study (presented earlier in the article) is not universally representative, it shows how know-how and distributed knowledge are shared not only through face-to-face interactions but also through mediated, asynchronous practices.

Firstly, our findings support Couldry and Hepp’s argument that deep mediatization does not erase the importance of face-to-face contact. Shared space and time remain vital for transmitting cultural know-how – but co-presence is no longer the default. It must now be actively achieved by mentor-switchers who use communicative practices with distributed knowledge to coordinate connected presence among mentors and mentees.

Secondly, we identify three overlapping frames of relevance that give mentors and mentees a collective sense of purpose and enable coordination of connected presence. Competing interpretations of skill (upskilling and enskilment), experiencing different stages of the creative process and their effect on creative control, and generating commitment through social justice are not only frames of relevance for this figuration – they also point to broader strategies cultural workers use to mediate know-how and distributed knowledge amid precarity and deep mediatization.

Yet even in moments of connected presence, frames of relevance are neither unified nor uncontested. Mentors and mentees do not share a homogenous understanding of the skilled know-how being passed on or how it should apply to cultural work beyond the mentorship. This heterogeneity becomes especially clear in how mentors do not aim to have mentees replicate their media repertoires. Instead, Gena and Yannis focus on helping mentees learn to upskill independently by introducing them to a range of distributed knowledge. The result: mentors and mentees could share know-how without sharing the same media repertoires.

These findings challenge a traditional assumption of mentorship – that its value lies in mentors and mentees developing a shared phenomenological experience of work through close contact. Our exploration of mentorship as a figuration, describing the phenomenological intermeshing through which people share know-how and distributed knowledge amid deep mediatization, shows that despite complexity and inequity in media ensembles and repertoires, mentors and mentees can still share experiences and knowledge with the support of organizations like MAC and the constellation of actors it connects.