Media and Everyday Life offers an accessible overview for students of media, communication and cultural studies looking to explore how modern-day media practices impact on the experience of everyday life, making this the essential companion to introductory media studies courses.This innovative introduction to media studies challenges conventional accounts of what media do to people – focusing instead on what people do with media in the course of everyday life. By rejecting...

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systemsMedia backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional ...

Phenomenology has become one of the most important philosophical traditions underpinning recent theory and research on new media, whether or not the word is used explicitly. Conditions of Mediation brings together, for the first time in a single publication, the diversity of phenomenological media research—from social platforms and wearable media to diasporic identity formation and the ethics of consumer technologies.The new orthodoxy in media studies emphasizes the experi...

The politics of war reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged. Is journalistic authority really only about doing the job well? Do the ethics of war reporting emerge simply from the ‘st...

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people’s everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people’s complacency and waking them up to the reality or what’s going on out there. Drawing on both ph...

Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley-led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems...

A new way to teach media studies that centers students’ lived experiences and diverse perspectives from around the world.From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television se...

A bold and imaginative critique of the hidden costs of digital life – and a manifesto for a better future . . .At the turn of the millennium, digital technologies seemed to have immense promise for transforming our society. With these powerful new tools, the thinking went, we would be free to live our best lives, connected to our communities in ways full of infinite potential.A quarter of a century on, this form of utopianism seems like a cruel mirage. Our ...

A sweeping critique of how digital capitalism is reformatting our world.We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the ma...

An exploration of the political qualities of technology design, as seen in projects that span art, computer science, and consumer products.In Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo examines the ways that technology design can provoke and engage the political. He describes a practice, which he terms “adversarial design,” that uses the means and forms of design to challenge beliefs, values, and what is taken to be fact. It is not simply applying design to politics...

The play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age.Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing with software shapes every facet of our lives. In Playing Software, Miguel Sicart delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by malefactors using play to weaponize everything fro...

How the theoretical tools of literacy help us understand programming in its historical, social and conceptual contexts.The message from educators, the tech community, and even politicians is clear: everyone should learn to code. To emphasize the universality and importance of computer programming, promoters of coding for everyone often invoke the concept of “literacy,” drawing parallels between reading and writing code and reading and writing text. In this book, An...