Aca-article: A Life Lived in (and not with) Media
This article proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it are framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by media.
Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Winter 2012, Volume 6 Number 1.
Authors: Mark Deuze, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University; Peter Blank, Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University; Laura Speers, King’s College, London.
Access the article here, full version and open access: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000110/000110.html
Abstract
Research since the early years of the 21st century consistently shows that through the years more of our time gets spent using media, that being concurrently exposed to media has become a foundational feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Contemporary media devices, what people do with them, and how all of this fits into the organization of our everyday life disrupt and unsettle well-established views of the role media play in society. Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, this contribution proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it are framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by (immersive, integrated, ubiquitous and pervasive) media.
EXCERPT
Media Life
In this article, we argue that an additional ontological turn should take place in the way we understand and use media. Media have become so inseparable from us that we no longer live with media, but in media. We bring together and evaluate fundamental media theories with specific reference to the so-called “media generation” to interrogate our argument of media’s ontological possibility, under several distinct terms: the (inevitable) disappearance of media from active awareness (invisibility), the productive approach to the lifeworld that media engender (creativity), the way people and institutions adapt to the criteria for mediated inclusion (selectivity), and the restructuring of social bonds in media (sociability). We conclude by locating the answer to the all-important “so what” question in considering life as a work of art in media.
Research in countries as varied as the United States, Brazil, South Korea, The Netherlands, and Finland consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, and how concurrent use of multiple media has become a regular feature of everyday life. With close to two billion people using internet on a regular basis and well over four billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world (at the time of writing this piece), media can not just be seen as types of technology and chunks of content we pick and choose from the world around us — a view that considers media as an external agent affecting us in a myriad of ways. If anything, today we have to recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of contemporary life, how media are not just both artefacts and contents (as McLuhan envisioned), not just units consisting of queer couplings between hardware and software (as Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant suggest[1]), not even an infrastructural combination of their material conditions, what people do with them, and how all of this shapes and is shaped by people’s everyday social arrangements (as proposed by Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone[2]). There is no external to the media in our lives. In this paper, we explore the implications of this premise.
The whole of the world and our lived experience in it can and perhaps should be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous media. This world is what Roger Silverstone (2007), Alex de Jong and Marc Schuilenburg (2006) label a “mediapolis”: a mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences of everyday life. However, a paradox of pervasive and ubiquitous media is their increasingly invisibility; they are so embedded in our lives that they disappear, which would suggest we inevitably lose ourselves in media. “[T]he dominant information technologies of the day control all understanding and its illusions,” writes Friedrich Kittler in the foreword of his work on emerging media in the 19th century, and in the process “what remains of people is what media can store and communicate” [Kittler 1996, xl]. Media, in other words, make us lose ourselves. Quite literally, sometimes, as Kittler remarks in a 1998 speech in honor of British music theorist and composer Brian Eno: “music shows us that a culture is only as popular as it can lose itself in its own technologies” [Kittler 1998]. When media become both ubiquitous and invisible, we may very well be losing ourselves in our technology to the extent that it generates our lives on the basis of a specific set of rules, codes and protocols. As Brian Arthur states in his take on the evolution of technology: “this thing that fades to the background of our world also creates that world” [Arthur 2009, 10]. From a perspective that aims to resolve the false dichotomy between machines (cf. media) and humans (cf. life), we would prefer to argue that the thing is us as much as it is itself.
Access the article here, full version and open access: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000110/000110.html
