Media life
Mark Deuze
Over the last few decades, key areas of human existence have converged in and through
our synchronized and continuous exposure to and use of media, information and
communication technologies; more of our time gets spent using media, and that multi-
tasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life.
We have to recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of
contemporary life; a ‘Mediapolis’ a comprehensively mediated public space where
media underpin and overarch the experiences and expressions of everyday life. lived in,
rather than with.
As media become universal and ubiquitous, forming the building blocks for our constant
remix of the categories of everyday life (the public and the private, the local and the
global, the individual and the collective), we become blind to that which shapes our lives
the most increasing invisibility of media is demonstrated by their disappearing from
consciousness when used intensely change in the human experience of time –
increasing speed of travel and telecommunications media become the playground for a
search for meaning and belonging culture of ‘real virtuality’, where reality itself is
entirely captured by mediated communication.
It is important for media studies not to see people as hapless victims of this seemingly
fragmented worldview, nor to assume that this shift towards a media life inevitably makes
people’s experience of society somehow less ‘real’ or ‘true’. The potential power of
people to shape their lives and identities can be found in the assumption that people
produce themselves (and therefore each other) in media. This perhaps may additionally
explain why people do not recognize their media habits because they are a constitutive
part of them.
Beyond the blurring of boundaries between people as producers and consumers of
information that is disseminated and co-created across multiple media platforms
(‘convergence culture’) the distinctions drawn all too easily between humans and
machines, a reality that could be cut, pasted, edited, remixed and forwarded.
Media should not be seen as somehow located outside of lived experience, but rather
should be seen as part of it.
Our life is lived in, rather than with, media – we are living a media life.
Mark Deuze
Over the last few decades, key areas of human existence have converged in and through
our synchronized and continuous exposure to and use of media, information and
communication technologies; more of our time gets spent using media, and that multi-
tasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life.
We have to recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of
contemporary life; a ‘Mediapolis’ a comprehensively mediated public space where
media underpin and overarch the experiences and expressions of everyday life. lived in,
rather than with.
As media become universal and ubiquitous, forming the building blocks for our constant
remix of the categories of everyday life (the public and the private, the local and the
global, the individual and the collective), we become blind to that which shapes our lives
the most increasing invisibility of media is demonstrated by their disappearing from
consciousness when used intensely change in the human experience of time –
increasing speed of travel and telecommunications media become the playground for a
search for meaning and belonging culture of ‘real virtuality’, where reality itself is
entirely captured by mediated communication.
It is important for media studies not to see people as hapless victims of this seemingly
fragmented worldview, nor to assume that this shift towards a media life inevitably makes
people’s experience of society somehow less ‘real’ or ‘true’. The potential power of
people to shape their lives and identities can be found in the assumption that people
produce themselves (and therefore each other) in media. This perhaps may additionally
explain why people do not recognize their media habits because they are a constitutive
part of them.
Beyond the blurring of boundaries between people as producers and consumers of
information that is disseminated and co-created across multiple media platforms
(‘convergence culture’) the distinctions drawn all too easily between humans and
machines, a reality that could be cut, pasted, edited, remixed and forwarded.
Media should not be seen as somehow located outside of lived experience, but rather
should be seen as part of it.
Our life is lived in, rather than with, media – we are living a media life.
