Deuzeblog

Last Lecture At Indiana University

2013-04-22T08:50:00.003-04:00

This Thursday, April 25 (2013), I will deliver my last lecture at Indiana University, where I worked since 2004 (first as a visiting professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of Communication and Culture, now as associate professor in the Department of Telecommunications).

It will also be the closing lecture for 'my' cherished T101 Media Life undergraduate course - which I have been teaching pretty much since I got here, and was the inspiration for my 2012 book "Media Life" (published with Polity Press).

Obviously, this will be an emotional moment, and I plan to go out with a bang...

So, if you are around Bloomington at the time and feel like dropping by, you are very welcome to do so. The lecture is from 2:30 to 3:45pm in Woodburn Hall (the room has well over 400 seats). We'll keep the doors open.

There is also a live Twitter feed during the lecture: please use hashtag #T101medialife and/or follow @T101medialife if you'd like to participate virtually.

In case you are wondering, this is what that lecture should be about, on YouTube please check this awesome course movie trailer, created by former student Austin Guevara.

Looking forward seeing you Thursday, and if not, let me take this opportunity to thank IU, the students, staff and colleagues for giving me the most amazing nine years of my career and life.

Here is the slideshow for the final lecture (the lecture itself will feature many video clips as well; a recording should be up on this blog soon):

Media Life Final Lecture from Mark Deuze

Media Life Slideshow (2013)

2013-03-10T14:46:00.000-04:00

Media Life 2013 from Mark Deuze

Media Life On The Road 2013

2013-01-12T17:49:00.002-05:00

[last updated: March 29, 2013]

I am pleased to be able to announce some speaking dates regarding the ongoing Media Life project, to promote the book (out since October 2012), and to explore new directions of applying the media life perspective to empirical projects, for example regarding media work, (beyond) journalism, and so on...

updating the list as new dates get added... Please feel free to stop by, catch me on the road, or connect if you would like me to stop by where you are! It is always a privilege to be able to talk about the stuff one works on with students, faculty, professionals and practitioners alike.

Dates

February 7-8: paper presentation at the NEFCA Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap conference in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

February 27: panel presentation at the 24th annual Joseph T. Taylor Symposium in Indianapolis, Indiana (USA), from 10-11:15am.

March 5: lecture at the honours class Shaping Society In A Virtual World at Leiden University, The Netherlands, from 7:15-9:30pm.

March 8-11: I'll be guest at the Department of Media, Journalism and Communication of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; speaking at the MEG13 conference (panel at 14:30, March 8); seminar on March 10th (10am-noon), and an open lecture "Liquid journalism, media work and media life" (from 1-3pm).

March 11-12: guest at Media and Communication Studies of the School of Culture and Education of Sodertorn University in Stockholm, Sweden; research seminar on March 12th from 1-4pm.

March 13-14: guest at the Department of Media and Communication of the University of Oslo, Norway. Open talk/lecture from 2:14-4pm on March 13th, seminar on (managing) media work on March 14th (from 1:15-4pm.

March 15-16: Panel presenter at the ECREA workshop on Mediatization and New Media at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark; talk on "The Mediatization of Everyday Life" scheduled from 1:15-4:15pm on March 15th.

March 21: keynote at the Dutch journalism union (NVJ) roundtable conference at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in The Hague, The Netherlands.

April 3-7: guest at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge (Boston, USA).

April 19-20: panel chair and discussant at the 14th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

May 23-24: presentation at the "Media Monitoring in a Digital Age" symposium of the Huston School of Film and Media, National University of Ireland in Galway, Ireland.

May 30: keynote at the 'liquid journalism' masterclass Mediafonds@Sandberg, location: TBC, The Netherlands.

June 4: presentation at the 'Grote Freelancersdag: Fun & Profit' of the Dutch journalism union (NVJ), location: TBC, The Netherlands.

June 7 14: participant at 'De Verkenners' debate night in theater De Balie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

June 16: panel presentation at the 10th anniversary conference of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, UK.

June 17: participant at the 'Beyond The Brand' ICA pre-conference of the Popular Communication Division at the London School of Economics, UK.

June 19: panel presentation on "Post-Institutional Strategies in Media Work" at the International Communication Association annual conference in London, UK, scheduled from 2-315pm.

June 29: presentation at the 'day of journalism studies' of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

September 30-October 3: participant at the "Culture Industries Work" workshop at the Department of Communication of the University of Haifa, Israel.

November 12-14: presentation at the International Congress on Cyberjournalism and Web 2.0 at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain.

November 21: lecture at the Instituut voor Interdisciplinaire Studies of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

(more dates to be announced)

Living In Media

2012-09-26T09:52:00.001-04:00

-->
Remark: this is a brief essay that I have been using to introduce my new monograph, Media Life (Polity Press, 2012), at presentations and talks. It outlines the basic definition and approach underlying the exploration of what it means to live in, rather than with, media.

Living In Media

Media are to us as water is to fish. This does not mean life is determined by media - it just suggests that whether we like it or not, every aspect of our lives takes place in media, and that our engagement with media in many ways contributes to our chances of survival. Part of this kind of life is coming to terms with a supersaturation of media messages and machines in households, workplaces, shopping malls, bars and restaurants, and all the other in-between spaces of today's world. 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 multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life. Consuming media regularly takes place alongside producing media, as the distinction between media activities such as zapping, zipping, viewing, reading, and downloading and actions like chatting, forwarding, remixing, editing, and uploading disappears from people’s active awareness of media use.

The fusion of media making and using activities over the last few decades can be considered to have taken place in the context of a socio-cultural convergence, where the key categories of human aliveness and activity converged in a concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of, and immersion in media. It must be clear, that media are not just types of technology and chunks of content occupying the world around us - a view that considers media as external agents affecting us in a myriad of ways. If anything, today the uses and appropriations of media can be seen as fused with everything people do, everywhere people are, everyone people aspire to be. There is no external to media life - whatever we perceive as escape hatch, passage out, or potential delete key is just an illusion. In fact, we can only imagine a life outside of media.

Ontologically, the media life perspective is part of a rich tradition in theorizing the relationships between nature, society (or: humanity), and technology as more or less integrated, symbiotic, and recombinant. Political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) makes the case for a vital materialism in our consideration of contemporary society, forcefully arguing for a fused perspective on life and matter as both possessing agency and potential for action. For Bennett matter has a lively materiality that is "active and creative without needing to be experienced or conceived as partaking in divinity or puposiveness" (93). She counters claims that "only humans and God can bear any traces of creative agency" (120), pointing to the active role matter such as food, metals, and electricity play in the transformation of the world and our experience of it.

Feminist theorist and particle physicist Karen Barad offers an equally intriguing way past the life and matter dichotomy by proposing that the relationship between matter and culture is one of "agential intra-action" (2004: 814), as everything in the world acts upon everything else all the time, regardless whether it is human or non-human (2007: 132ff).

Barad forcefully moves our thinking beyond the age-old distinction between reality (what something is) and representation (what it appears to be in media), remarking that there are only agential realist phenomena constituted out of dynamic relations between nature, the body, and materiality. This work posits that nothing is timeless or ahistorical, that everything is always iterative, performative and (thus) in a constant state of becoming.

Bruno Latours’ series of essays bundled in "We Have Never Been Modern" (1991[1993]) speaks similarly to the false dichotomy of life and matter. Latour offers that our proclivity of neatly separating the natural, technological and social worlds should be seen as a particular feature of the modernist project, disempowering us from making sense of (or effectively dealing with) phenomena such as global warming and biotechnologies. Instead, Latour advocates a 'nonmodern' Constitution, premised on a "nonseparability of the common production of societies and natures" (141).

With direct or indirect reference to media life, several authors have signaled the uncanny convergence of technologies and life in more or less similar ways as Barad and Bennett. Ned Kock’s (2005) media naturalness theory, and the work by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass (1996) on the media equation are examples of such crucial references, making us aware of how our embodied cognition does not distinguish between media and people when it comes to interacting with its environment. Sue Thomas in this context talks astutely about technobiophilia: people’s innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology.

A medial touchstone for this kind of symbiotic thinking about matter and life is provided by Friedrich Kittler. Like Latour, Bennett and Barad, Kittler is adamant about the agential potential of matter - which, in his argument, deliberately includes media. His ontology of media raises one's awareness about the fundamental force of media in shaping the social fabric and what we can say about it - power which only grows as we tend to ignore media when making sense of the world. To Kittler, "this crazy coincidence of forgetfulness with technological change" (2009: 26) that pervades the history of philosophy and social theory directly relates to "the exclusion of physical and technical media from questions of ontology" (ibid.: 23).

Epistemologically, American philosopher Don Ihde's key work "Technology and the Lifeworld" (1990) is an early appreciation of a media life point of view, where he proposes a de-essentialization of nature, society, and technologies, while building an overall argument that throughout history, human cultures and societies have been technologically embedded and that those technologies transform the human lifeworld. Although Ihde implicitly keeps media and life at some distance from each other, he does emphasize how their relations are mediated through a technological intentionality (141).

Dutch media philosopher Jos de Mul makes a similar point with specific reference to media in that "every medium carries with it its own distinctive worldview or metaphysics" (2010: 89). For De Mul, the essential worldview we get from our current media mix is based on their key characteristics of being multimedial, interactive, and capable of virtualizing reality.

Canadian e-learning expert Norm Friesen and his Austrian colleague Theo Hug (2009) explicitly postulate that media become epistemology - the grounds for knowledge and knowing itself - and therefore call on educators and educational researchers to take seriously what they call the mediatic a priori: "the contention that media play an important role in defining the epistemological preconditions or characteristics of cognition, such as the perception of time, space, and the shaping of attention and communication" (73).

In all of this one is reminded of how the offline world of practices and experience extends into the realm of media and vice versa, giving shape and form to what Manuel Castells (2010[1996]) describes as a culture of real virtuality, where the online world of appearances becomes part of everyday lived experience instead of just existing on our computer and television screens. Most recently, the work of Katherine Hayles on post-humanism (1999) and technogenesis (2012) carefully maps such co-evolutionary relationships between media, technology, and life.

Media as Artifacts, Activities, and Arrangements

On the level of praxeology – what people are actually doing when living their lives in media – scholarship tends to be exemplified by a tendency to keep media and what people do with them firmly separate. A comprehensive challenge to this paradigm, bringing media theory back into the empirical domain of media studies, comes from Sonia Livingstone and Leah Lievrouw, who preface their seminal Handbook of New Media (first edition, 2002) with a definition of media as “information and communication technologies and their associated social contexts, incorporating: the artifacts or devices that enable and extend our abilities to communicate; the communication activities or practices we engage in to develop and use these devices; and the social arrangements or organizations that form around the devices and practices” (7). The power of this definition is that it includes existing approaches that would externalize media, while recognizing how media have become an integral part – building blocks (to continue the architectural reference) – of everyday life.

Although a general review of the evolution of media as artifacts is beyond the scope of our paper, it is safe to say that media do meet the criteria of an evolutionary design: in the course of media history our artifacts have exponentially multiplied – every year there are more, not fewer media at our disposal – and these devices become increasingly diverse and complex all the time. Media converge and diverge at a rapid pace, often not necessarily progressing along neat linear trajectories, with different media ‘species’ becoming dominant not exclusively based on the objective quality of their features – their successful survival often better explained by fitness with their environment (one could think of the videotape standards war between VHS versus Betamax in the 1970s and 1980s).

Beyond their increasing complexity, media artifacts throughout history have also, generally speaking (and with numerous caveats), become both larger and smaller at the same time. Considering the two most widely used media artifacts on the planet, we should point out the increasing size of television screens set against the decreasing size of mobile phones. Interestingly, as screen sizes get bigger (and higher in definition), our physiological ability to take in all the information does not keep up. Effectively this means that we simply cannot ‘see’ everything that is available on wide screens. Similarly, it is possible to argue that touchscreen ‘smart’ phones refuse articulation and therefore active awareness as telephones – that in the past would notify users of their existence by pushing back at people pressing their buttons or rotating their dials.

The twin forces of media artifacts becoming both ubiquituous and somewhat invisible further collide in a contemporary environment of context-aware computing, next-generation networks, and intermedia communications - in other words, an internet of things, heralded in a 2005 report by the International Telecommunications Union as a new dimension to be added to "the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs): from anytime, any place connectivity for anyone, we will now have connectivity for anything" (2). The internet of things, defined as a global internet-based information architecture facilitating the exchange of goods and services, according to some will at some point come to dominate mediated interactions. Although global communication traffic is dominated by mobile phones, machines communicating with other machines already come in second in terms of data volume. All in all we contend that the evolution of media as artifacts suggest an increasingly seamless and altogether ambient lived experience of them.

In terms of what people do with all these media, the range of activities has become almost as multiplied and diversified as the media technologies themselves. A bird’s eye view of how people use media in this bewildering variety of contexts does suggest some commonalities, though. In media usage studies, the differences in time reported spent with media through for example phone surveys, personal written diaries, and participant observation are stark.

In most countries around the world, reports and studies on the amount of time people use media are more or less similar: almost every waking moment is either directly (paging through a magazine, making a phone call, tuning in to a show on the radio, surfing to a particular website, and so on) or indirectly (having music, images, and video in the background while traversing public spaces, a computer or mobile phone in always-on mode) spent with media. Yet when asked about it, people tend to forget most of their media use, mainly because they are concurrently exposed to multiple media at the same time, and most of their media use occurs in combination with other everyday activities such as working, hanging out, and eating.

The mundane nature of media use has additional properties beyond its concurrence and generally less-than-deliberateness. Consider the verbs deployed to describe people’s principal media activities throughout much of the offline 20th century: reading, listening, viewing, typing, zapping, and calling. In today’s online media environment, one has to add to this list verbs such as: cutting, pasting, editing, forwarding, linking, liking, chatting, texting, zipping, (re-) mixing, redacting, uploading (and downloading), sharing, rating, recommending, commenting – so on, so forth.

In 2008 US market researcher Jakob Nielsen coined the distinction between these two types of activities in terms of lean-back versus lean-forward media. Beyond its significance of articulating the embodied nature of our media use, Nielsen’s distinction marks a subtly shift in media activities from those that are primarily consumptive in nature, to a range of behaviors that seem more productive. In media life, media using equals media making – often without deliberate intent (or consent) of the user. This is not to privilege the kind of creativity on display by those who write or edit Wikipedia entries, create and share their own videos on Youtube and Vimeo, or are otherwise engaged in ‘hard’ forms of creativity. This is a relatively small group compared to the vast majority of media users that have become creative in one way or another without necessarily realizing it, participating in the creating and shaping of a social reality in media that is different from one that is simply consumed.

At the heart of our engagement with media is the reconstruction of the self as source, as Shyam Sundar codifies the mediation between technology and psychology at work in media life (2008). Based on his experimental work on people’s media use, Sundar higlights the importance of our own selves in the co-evolution of technology and psychology. This trend prompted Time magazine to make all of us – “YOU” – as its ‘Person of the Year’ in 2006, featuring a front cover with a YouTube screen functioning as a mirror. The person holding up the magazine would be looking at herself. The centrality of ourselves as having to take responsibility for reconstructing the world and our lives in it through (the way we use) media cannot be underestimated.

Writing in the Winter 2005 issue of The New Atlantis magazine, Christine Rosen sees in the way people use media to both consume and produce information for and about themselves evidence of an emerging age of egocasting, where sophisticated technologies give us "the illusion of perfect control", inescapably leading to a "thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one's personal taste" (52). For Rosen, contemporary media artifacts and what we do with them make us forget about our fellow human beings in general, as they allow people to focus only on things of interest to them. At the same time, it bears pointing out that the vast majority of people’s use of media is indeed social, in that media are used to connect to other people all the time. when the self becomes source it therefore does not necessarily reduce the world to our solipsistic experience of it. On the other hand, when the media thus quite literally become (all about) us, they become almost completely invisible to us as distinct or discrete praxis.

In the taxonomy of media’s definition, their existence as social arrangements can be articulated by imagining any of life’s fundamental experiences – undergoing processes of social change, seeking and finding love, becoming part of a community, being alone – existing (wholly or in part) outside of media. This type of thought is possible – but indeed, solely or increasingly, only as an imagined life. Whether it is the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movement, the uncanny experience of attending a concert or marriage at which more people seem to be recording the event than in fact witnessing it, or simply by trying articulate a more or less coherent sense of self: media are inextricably linked, enmeshed, and involved with social reality. In this process, media come to arrange such realities: adding perspectives and dimensions (while obfuscating others), introducing (and excluding) others into events without necessarily being co-present, enable participation in otherwise (or formerly) utilitarian experiences of life.

Media Life

Our conclusion must be that our lives as lived in media not only make media disappear, but also bring the self forth in relation to the world around us: nature, machines, and people. It is in this ontological, epistemological, and praxeological context that the media life perspective can be made to work.

Media Life Exhibit August-September 2012

2012-08-22T13:55:00.001-04:00

check it out: the Media Life Show (works by miek.org) opens Friday (Aug24), runs until Sept15 at indiana.edu/~grunwald/exhi… #medialife
— Mark Deuze (@markdeuze) August 22, 2012

Friday, August 24 (2012), the Media Life Exhibit kicks off in the Grunwald Gallery of Art of Indiana University, Bloomington (USA).

Media Life is not just the title of my new book (published with Polity Press), but has also been the inspiration behind a joint creative project between Dutch artist Miek van Dongen and myself, considering the consequences of living our lives inseparably fused with media.

During the writing of Media Life Miek - whose works are featured at this exibition - proceeded with her own series of pieces documenting her analysis of the media life condition.

Miek and I have been friends for well over twenty years. All this time, even though our careers took vastly different paths, we have been talking and thinking along similar lines: inspired by the messiness and the magical quality of our interactions with the world around us - and particularly with the role of technologies, machines, and media in our lives.

Miek's awesome work embodies the fusion of media and life, as she combines 'classic' paper and pencil drawings with digital and interactive animations. The book contains 16 original works by Miek, and the exhibition features even more work, including an audio/video installation.

If you are around, please stop by (and join our event on Facebook)!

Media Life Book Talks 2012

2012-08-06T10:50:00.000-04:00

[LAST UPDATED: October 24, 2012] With Media Life ~~coming~~ out NOW all over the world ~~in August 2012 (Europe) and September 2012 (US/ROW)~~, the next year or two will be dedicated to two projects: taking the book on the road, and starting the work on a completely updated and revised second edition of Media Work (including brand new chapters on the music industry and independent artists), and finally getting down to writing the Beyond Journalism manuscript (that has been on my desk for quite some time now). I'm also preparing two other long-term book projects with some amazing colleagues...

Here are some book presentation dates for 2012-2013:

February 10-12: At the Winter College of Indiana University, Naples Grande Beach Resort - Naples, Florida (United States).

March 4-6: Guest at the Department of Communication Studies of Wilfrid Laurier University - Waterloo, Ontario (Canada).

April 1-3: Delivering the annual Pockrass Memorial Lecture at the College of Communications of Penn State University - College Park, Pennsylvania (United States). Video of slideshow available via YouTube.

April 18: Comments at the Symposium Sociale Media (NIFV & VDMMP) in Arnhem, The Netherlands. Video of this presentation available via YouTube.

April 19: Presentation at the Creative Labor in Chaotic Times: Implications for Journalists, Authors and Innovators Symposium at Stanford University - Palo Alto, California (United States). Video of this talk available at YouTube.

May 7: Workshop/seminar at the Future of Man and Society in a Virtual World honours course at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

May 14: Keynote at the International Conference on Media and Communication at the University of Porto, Portugal.

~~May 22: Lecture at the Engaging Technology: New Media, Politics and Practices of Commonization PhD course of the Wageningen School of Social Sciences, Wageningen University, The Netherlands.~~ (moved to Spring 2013)

May 24-28: Polity Press will have advance copies of Media Life available at the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Phoenix, Arizona.

June 12: Public presentation of Media Life at the School voor Journalistiek in Utrecht, The Netherlands (from noon to 2pm).

June 14: Keynote at the Summer School for Journalists of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

~~June 19: Lecture (on my birthday...) at Indiana University's Mini University in Bloomington, Indiana.~~

June 26: panel presentation at the Citizen Science conference in Utrecht, The Netherlands (with among many excellent others Douglas Rushkoff).

and upcoming in the Fall:

August/September 2012: Media Life exhibition by Miek van Dongen at the Grunwald Gallery of Art of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Opening reception: August 24; artist talk: September 12, 6-8pm.

September 20: Media Life public lecture and research seminar "New Media, New Methods" at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

September 27: debate on media and power, sponsored by student media magazine Xi at CREA (cultural student centre of the University of Amsterdam and the Hogeschool van Amsterdam), The Netherlands, 8-10pm.

October 3: keynote at the international conference on online journalism "Towards Neo-Journalism?" organized by ULC (Louvain) and FUNDP (Namur) in Brussels, Belgium.

November 3: joint book presentation with Nick Couldry at the first annual Media@IU symposium on media and social change in Bloomington, Indiana.

November 5: joint book presentation with Nick Couldry at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

November 29: two lectures and one seminar, hosted by the School of Communication Studies, the School of Media Arts & Studies, and the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

forthcoming in 2013:

[preliminary announcement] scheduled book talks, keynotes and seminars at the 14th International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin in April; Södertörn University in Stockholm and the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the University of Oslo (Norway) in March; at the University of Haifa (Israel) in September. Hopefully I can add more date soon in Germany, Portugal, the UK, Holland, Australia, China, and the US.

Top Twelve Albums 1984-2012

2012-05-19T10:38:00.000-04:00

[update: March 24, 2014; needed to add one album]

It must have been 1984 when I bought my first album (on vinyl, of course), in a record store in the Woensel Winkelcentrum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Perhaps it was a Van Leest store (today part of the Free Record Shop company), I do not remember.

What I do remember, is the album in question: Black Sabbath's "Greatest Hits" in a Dutch release (originally from 1977) with part of the epic Pieter Bruegel painting ("The Triump of Death") on its cover (see image, taken from Amazon). Staring at that cover for hours, listening to equally epic songs like "Sabbath bloody Sabbath" over and over again, scared and exhilarated.

For a variety of reasons, I am working my way back through my life, looking at formative elements. Music in general (and metal in particular) plays a profound part in this narrative.

While I am certain you could not care less about my personal story, what may be fun is a joint exploration of ~~eleven~~ twelve albums (as these go to eleven), listed here in no particular order, that I have acquired since those early 1980s and never stopped listening to.

David Sylvian (1987) "Secrets of the beehive" by Virgin Records.
Slayer (1986) "Reign in blood" by Def Jam.
The Cure (1989) "Disintegration" by Fiction Records.
Low (1999) "Secret name" by Kranky.
Opeth (2001) "Blackwater park" by Music for Nations.
Tool (2001) "Lateralus" by Volcano Entertainment.
Portishead (1994) "Dummy" by Gol Discs.
Dimmu Borgir (2001) "Puritanical euphoric misanthropia" by Nuclear Blast Records.
Motorpsycho (2000) "Let them eat cake" by Stickman/Sony.
Sodom (1987) "Persecution mania" by Steamhammer/SPV.
Deus (1999) "The ideal crash" by Island.
Duran Duran (1982) "Rio" by EMI.

At some point I would like to explore what it is about these albums that made them stick. All of these are tunes I never grow tired of - in full length form. Often I cannot even name individual songs as favorites, there is something to the experience of the whole album.

Media Life: Expanded Table of Contents

2012-05-16T10:13:00.001-04:00

~~Next week~~ Last month, at the annual International Communication Association conference (this year in Phoenix, Arizona), my publisher Polity Press ~~will have~~ had a preview print copy of Media Life available - we are currently putting the final touches on artwork scans.

As the book is officially scheduled to come out (and be available in your bookstore) in the UK and Europe on July 20th (less than a month later in the US and the rest of the world), let me share an expanded table of contents here - featuring chapter titles, taglines, and all subheadings (with links to relevant sources of inspiration).

Overview: In Media

where who you are is what media are

Chapter One: Media Life

where we go beyond human-machine differences and focus on living a good media life

Caught in the grip of the immediate - Life in the media city - The digital and the physical - Anthropotechnologies, humachines, inforgs and the posthuman - Prosthetic gods - Divine beings in a post-metaphysical world

Chapter Two: Media Today

where media organize all aspects of our everyday lives and disappear

A media archaeology of artifacts, activities and arrangements - Feeling deeply at breakneck speed - Charismatic technologies of love - The unseen disappearance of invisible media

Chapter Three: What Media Do

where media record and store everything and we lose ourselves in media

Welcome to the unforgettable - Mindless Martini media - Yes we can (record, store, access and redact life)! - The permanently impermanent archive

Chapter Four: No Life Outside Media

where we become profiling machines

Discipline, control and suspicion - O Big Brother, wherefore art thou? - Panopticism revisited - Reverse engineering the panopticon - Beyond the panopticon

Chapter Five: Society in Media

where we live in media forever

We're all fucking zombies - Everything (and everyone) zombie - You are not special - Aliens in mediaspace - Digital masters and femmes digitales - Everyone knows you're (not) a dog - Survival in the metaverse

Chapter Six: Together Alone

where we are closely connected to endless versions of ourselves

Try to remain visible - Systemworlds, placeworlds, wikiworlds, mediaworlds - The mediated lifeworld - The world is a map in the palm of your hand - Who am I and who are you?

Chapter Seven: In Media We Fit

where living in media provides social and reproductive success

"I am the one, Orgasmatron" - "Take control. Get a divorce" - Darwin among the machines - Media life as survival strategy - Avatar activism - Grooming at a distance - Living in the global mediascape

Chapter Eight: Life in Media

where you can see yourself live, and delusion is the way to keep it real

To picture any image of yourself to yourself - It's all about me - Keeping it real - The Truman Show delusion - "The best of all possible worlds" - The art of media life

Quality of (Media) Life

2012-04-30T10:50:00.001-04:00

[UPDATED version: May 1, 2012] As our lives get fused with media in all kinds of ways, we need to let go of age-old ways of making sense of our living environments and social arrangements. This is not because such debates - about proposed 'effects' machines in general and media in particular have on us - have become invalid. The reason why our sense-making practices need to evolve is exactly because that is what media do. Evolve.

Considering our lives as lived in media as an evolutionary step articulates media life with ever-increasing complexity rather than things getting better or worse. It equates what people do with media with what they did before (with other media), and recognizes the richness of communicative practices in today's media ecology.

In media life, the same power dynamics as before are at play, perhaps even more so (and in more contentious and contested ways): corporate enclosure and information commons, ambient intimacy and cloakroom communities, precarity and social solitude, participatory culture and multiple media literacies, bridging and bonding social circles online.

This is why the recent work of scholars such as the eminent Sherry Turkle is so striking in its expressed fearfulness of breaking through the boundaries of making sense of media and everyday life. Although her book "Alone Together" is rich in texture and detail, Turkle keeps coming back to publishable one-liners such as this one, recently, in the New York Times: "we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection."

The argument Turkle makes - a more grounded iteration of journalist Nicholas Carr earlier book "The Shallows" - sees communication as it gets enveloped in ubiquitous and pervasive media in terms of its transaction value: everything gets reduced to a cost-benefit analysis and in that process, the cost of connectivity in media is too high: we get distracted, we think superficially, we trust ourselves to machines rather than to community, so on and so forth. Whether all of this is caused by the technique of technologies, by the worldwide spread of capitalism or the alienation engendered by modernity... it all gets collapsed into arguments about mobile phones and online social networks.

Please note: I am not belittling concerns about the sometimes profound emptiness of everyday social engagements, nor do critiques of hyperindividualism, techno-fetishism, and our overstretched selves living inside personalized bubbles leave me cold.

But, I wonder, what is actually happening when our lives get lived in media? If we consider the consequences of a completely mediated lifeworld (that has already re-colonized the systemworld), how useful are frames of things being 'good' or 'bad' for us to advance our understanding? Sure, they make for easily digestible snacks in terms of our information diet. But the infocalories provided by lamentations (and, indeed, celebrations) of the role media play in the world are not a superfood.

In many ways, life after the mediatic turn is not all that different from lives as lived before. For me, the most significant distinctiveness of a life lived in media is the perception that we can see ourselves live. We can take responsbility for our lives, as life plays out - almost in realtime or in a culture of real virtuality - at a (slight) distance from us. This opens it up for intervention (and for fun).

So, instead of sticking with a fearful exploration for exits out of the studio that provides the primary playground for the performance of our life's show, perhaps we should accept the studio for what it is - everything and nothing - and ask how we can turn its cameras on ourselves and, in doing so, stare back into (the abyss that is) the world. It is increasingly,and perhaps only, through media that we can get back to reality. Anything else keeps the unreal running in the background, running our lives.

The end-goal of a media life is not to 'be yourself', as that would inevitably turn you into (a version of) everyone else. It is the realization that the self is always dancing with so many other versions of itself, and in a media life not only can we see ourselves dancing, but we can participate in the living archive of the life that we live, and that we see others live.

Of course, all of this needs much more careful working through. But be honest: what seems to offer more paths to knowledge: concluding that what people do with media is either debilitating or wonderful, or suggesting that the relationship between people and their media collapses the zombie categories of thing and not-thing, of man and machine, of artifact and activity, of product and process, of public and private, so on and so forth?

Media Life Working Papers & Publications

2012-03-29T08:55:00.000-04:00

[UPDATE: March 27, 2013] The manuscript for Media Life is finished (a snapshot of the page proofs is shown here) and the book was published in October 2012.

Several publications have documented this project, and it is my hope and planning this will continue in the future with ongoing research and collaborations with students and faculty around the world. Please contact me if you would like to get involved.

Below you will find references to these works, with direct links to author versions of papers, essays, and book chapters as archived online.

If you are more visually inclined - and really, who isn't - perhaps I can redirect you to a couple of clips available at Vimeo and YouTube of talks and video-slideshows based on the media life project:

March 15, 2010: public lecture on "Love, Sex and Death in Media Life" at the University of Illinois-Chicago on media life, available on Vimeo.
April 13, 2011: delivering the annual Thomas Scheidel lecture at the University of Washington-Seattle on media life, available at the website of the Department of Communication.
March 31, 2012: video of slideshow "Living in Media is Creating Art with Life", available on YouTube.
April 18, 2012: short talk (in Dutch) for a symposium on social media in Arnhem, The Netherlands, available on YouTube.
April 19, 2012: panel presentation on the link between media life and media work at "Creative Labor in Chaotic Times", Stanford University's Rebele First Amendment Symposium, available on YouTube.

Below are links to written content coming out of the media life project. Please contact me if you would like a PDF of one or more of these publications if you do not have access. I'll regularly post updates to this list, so here goes.

Mark Deuze (2012). Media Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Mark Deuze (2012). The unseen disappearance of invisible media: a response to Sebastian Kubitschko and Daniel Knapp. In: Media Culture & Society 34(3), pp.365-368.

Mark Deuze (2012). Quality of (Media) Life. Deuzeblog, April 30.

Deuze, Mark, Brown, Watson, Ibold, Hans, Lewis, Nicky (2012). Mobile Media Life. In: Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Eds.), Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

Blank, Peter, Brown, Watson, Deuze, Mark, Ems, Lindsey, Lewis, Nicky, McWilliams, Jenna, Speers, Laura (2012). Participatory Culture and Media Life: Approaching Freedom. In: Henderson, Jennifer, Delwiche, Aaron (Eds.), Handbook of Participatory Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.

Mark Deuze (2012). Media Life is a Threat to Social Order. Culture Digitally, January 26.

Mark Deuze, Peter Blank, Laura Speers (2012). A Life As Lived In Media. In: Digital Humanities Quarterly 6(1).

Mark Deuze (2011). Survival of the Mediated. In: Journal of Cultural Science 3(2).

Mark Deuze (2011). Facebook Timeline, Google+ and Media Life. Deuzeblog, September 26.

Mark Deuze (2011). Media Life (2.0). In: Media Culture & Society 33(1), pp.137-148.

Mark Deuze (2011). Media Life and Protests in the Arab World. Deuzeblog, January 31.

Mark Deuze, Peter Blank, Laura Speers, (2010). Media Life. In: Papathanassopoulos, Stylianos (Ed.), Media Perspectives for the 21st Century, pp.181-195. London (etc.): Routledge.

Mark Deuze, Peter Blank, Laura Speers (2010; in Portuguese). Vida midiática. In: Revista USP 86, pp.139-145.

Mark Deuze (2010; in Dutch). Media maken: hoe een ringtone de wereld verandert. In: Segers, Katia, Bauwens, Joke (Eds.), Maak mij wat wijs, pp.169-177. Heverlee: Lannoo Campus.

Mark Deuze (2010; in Dutch). Mobiliteit en Leven in Media. Essay voor het rapport 'Internetlogica' van de Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling.

Mark Deuze (2009). Media industries, work and life. In: European Journal of Communication 24(4), pp.1-14.

Mark Deuze, Peter Blank, Laura Speers (2008). Media Life (1.0). Unpublished working paper (first draft).

Mark Deuze (2008; in Dutch). Leven in Media. In: Omzien naar de Toekomst: Jaarboek ICT en Samenleving 2008|09, onder redactie van Valerie Frissen en Jop Esmeijer. Uitgave: Media Update Vakpublicaties, pp.67-84.

A Life Lived In Media in Digital Humanities Quarterly

2012-01-26T13:45:00.001-05:00

Just received note of the preview publication of the follow-up to our original working paper (of 2009) on the media life project, titled A Life Lived In Media and coauthored with Peter Blank (of BlankMediation in Chicago, US) and Laura Speers (of King's College in London, UK) in the excellent online open access journal Digital Humanities Quarterly (volume 6, issue 1).

In this piece, we try to give more body to the media life hypothesis - that we do not live as much with, but increasingly (and inevitably) in media - by exploring how a life as lived in media gets expression through the kind of invisibility, selectivity,creativity, sociability, and reality engendered by what we do in media.

Our 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.

Please check it out, leave a comment (here or at the DHQ website), and let us know what you think! More papers from the media life project are listed here.

Media (Life) Is A Threat To Social Order

2012-01-26T09:32:00.001-05:00

[remark: an updated and slightly expanded version of this comment is posted at the group weblog Culture Digitally, where you will find a lot of excellent posts and dialogues by colleagues and friends in new media studies]

Media can reinforce and support agencies of socialization and agents of control - such as parents, educators, the state. At the same time, media can be viewed as potentially disrupting, undermining or otherwise threatening the established way of doing things in society. This fundamental premise - outlined most clearly in Denis McQuail's unparalleled work on mass communication theory - comes into play every time one tries to make sense of the lifeworld and the role media play in it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current twin developments of, on the one hand, global activism amplified and accelerated by the spread of cell phones, wireless internet access, and online social networking platforms (such as Facebook and Twitter), and on the other hand increasingly worlwide crackdowns by the political and economical establishment on just about everything people and their (social) media do: SOPA and PIPA in the United States, ACTA globally, the US Congress and the British government considering killing the internet (or, better yet, doing this temporarily thus turning internet into a zombie) under the guise of unspecified national emergencies, up to and including parents, priests, professors and presidents in supposedly 'free' societies openly telling you to censor yourself when self-expressing online.

As our lives gradually, invisibly, shift from living with media - in which case there are indeed things that can be effectively switched 'off' (by pulling a plug or developing sophisticated media literacies) - to living in media, the established post-WWII social order awakens, starting to display its power. Whatever people are doing in media, it clearly has become a threat to the establishment - even when it involves people expressing their unbridled embrace of the commodification of their deepest intimacies through commercial platforms for the public exchange of private information.

Let me express my optimist bias: the fact that governments and corporations are indeed openly attacking the freedom of (self-)expression worldwide is a hopeful sign. It suggests that whatever we are doing in media, matters. Let me paraphrase US President Barack Obama from his 2012 State of the Union speech: "anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that [you should not be living in media], doesn’t know what they’re talking about. (Applause.)"

Living our lives in media opens social reality up for co-creation (like it has always been, but which has been made invisible in an anomalous age of mass communication). As one of my students recently remarked: the real question of a media life is: what would zombies do?

Media Life (2012): Preface

2011-10-30T12:49:00.002-04:00

[UPDATED: January 10, 2013] Media Life (available at Amazon and your local bookstore) came out October 2012, and has sold about a thousand copies... hopefully the book contributes to ongoing discussions about the future of media studies (see the latest work by Nick Couldry in particular)!

The excellent external reviews of the manuscript (courtesy of my publisher, Polity Press) all but asked to include a bit of a roadmap, as I have tended to let the argument emerge organically out of my writing (I sincerely had no idea where I was going with the narrative other than wanting to explore a life in, rather than with, media).

So please find below the full preface (in its second draft) of the book. Of course, I would appreciate any thoughts you have on this, and hope this will propel you to get the book, find and download existing papers on the media life project, or hit me up via email to ask for a free copy...

Media Life - Preface: In Media

You live in media. Who you are, what you do, and what all of this means to you does not exist outside of media. Media are to us as water is to fish. This does not mean life is determined by media - it just suggests that whether we like it or not, every aspect of our lives takes place in media. Part of this kind of life is coming to terms with a supersaturation of media messages and machines in households, workplaces, shopping malls, bars and restaurants, and all the other in-between spaces of today's world. Over the last few decades, the key categories of human aliveness and activity converged in a concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of, and immersion in media. It must be clear, that media are not just types of technology and chunks of content occupying the world around us - a view that considers media as external agents affecting us in a myriad of ways. If anything, today the uses and appropriations of media can be seen as fused with everything people do, everywhere people are, everyone people aspire to be. There is no external to media life - whatever we perceive as escape hatch, passage out, or potential delete key is just an illusion. In fact, we can only imagine a life outside of media.

In terms of what media communicate it is tempting to point to governments, companies and corporations for pushing an unrelenting, ever-accelerating stream of content and experiences into our lives. However, most mediated communication comprises of work done by you and me: through our endless texts, chats, and e-mails, with our phone calls from anywhere at anytime, and through our online social networks that function as the living archives of social reality. With the majority of the world population owning a mobile phone, telecommunication networks spanning almost every inch of the globe, sales figures of any and all media devices growing steadily worldwide, dead media technologies and practices regularly resurrected, any and all media by default integrated into an always-on real-time live mode of being, an almost complete mediatization of society (link to PDF) seems a somewhat self-evident observation.

A media life is much more than media hardware, software, and content - it is also everything we do with and in response to media: how we build and sustain relationships and family ties, how we derive cultural status and social currency from the kinds of media we use (the music we listen to, the shows we follow, the games we catch live), and the various ways we more or less deliberately manipulate time and space by checking our email on mobile devices, listen to audiobooks with noise-cancelling headphones, and record our private participation in public proceedings (weddings, concerts, the weekend soccer game) with networked devices that simultaneously immediatize and immortalize our lived experience as they mediatize it. As we merge our perception of ourselves and others with what can be mediated about us, media competencies, literacies and fitness become paramount to the human condition. Media benchmark our experience of the world, and how we make sense of our role in it. A media life reflects how media are both a necessary and unavoidable part of our existence and survival.

It certainly seems there is more media in everyday life. Media are ubiquitous - they are everywhere - and pervasive - they cannot be switched off. Furthermore, our near-complete immersion in media constitutes the majority of time spent in waking life. Media consumption studies worldwide consistently show over the years how more of our time on any given day gets spent using media, and that being concurrently exposed to media has become a mundane mark of existence. The media life perspective recognizes one further quality of media: that they, as much as the human brain (or the cosmos), are indeterminate. Media are not finished, nor static - but plastic, and malleable. Media evolve. As hardware and software, they act upon each other next to their interactions with us. We emotionally invest ourselves into media as much as our media become an affective part of us. As platforms for communication media constitute as well as reproduce the world we live in.

Throughout this book, I use media interchangeably with information and communication technologies, and with machines more generally insofar relations with humanity and society are involved.

Media, thus broadly conceived, are any (symbolical or technological) systems that enable, structure or amplify communication between people.

Life, on the other hand, is not just about surviving - it is about living a live life, a life worth living, a form of liveness that goes beyond simply making it work from day to day.

At the heart of the project in this book is the question what a good, passionate, beautiful, and socially responsible media life looks like.

A dichotomous reading of the mixing of media and life identifies and maps ways in which human beings and behaviors steer the development of media in an attempt to make sense of people's everyday life and what can be done about it. Such media-centrism and technological determinism often boils down to benevolent or malevolent mechanistic fascination with the machinery of media and the technique of technologies. It tends to obscure rather than unveil the interdependency of humanity and technology - as it keeps insisting on finding ways of making sense of the world outside of media, of attributing primacy of the social over the technological.

In essence, media-centrism (and its attendant arguments about the real or perceived influences of media on ways of being alive) is a product of a live lived in media: it is a delusion we maintain in order to convince ourselves and each other that we exist not just next to, but in an intrinsically more central and indeed privileged relationship to our media. Maintaining an outside to media makes us, as human beings, feel special. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard remarked in response to the way the Wachowski's used his work as inspiration for their The Matrix film franchise (in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, July 2004): "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce." Correspondingly, media-centrism and technological determinism can be considered to be the kind of theoretical stopgaps a media life perspective would produce in order to mask itself. The illusion that we can comprehensively control our media (for example by pulling the plug, pressing the 'off' switch on a remote control, by becoming 'mediawise' or developing sophisticated media literacies) in fact preserves media as the primary definer of our reality. If we let go of this deception - this dualist fallacy of domination of man over machine (or vice versa) - it may be possible to come to terms with the world we are a part of in ways that are less about effects, things and what happens, more about process, practice, and what can be done.

The heart of this book is the question how we can understand ourselves and the world we live in if we accept, if only for a moment, that we do not live with, but in media.

Media, to most people, belong to the realm of the unreal, or less real. What if this exclusive orientation to the otherness of (reality in) media acts as a crutch rather than a tool for living our lives more ethically and aesthetically? Instead of fusing the horizons of media and life, it seems as if we invest all our time in keeping them separate. By way of first step and chapter in this book, I therefore unpack this history of man-machine separation, while at the same time highlighting how throughout this discussion media life was always already firmly established in our sense-making practices of the world and our role in it.

The second dilemma I faced, was how to bring media back into our awareness without simply stating that one needs to look more closely at media - which would maintain their alterity. By adopting an archaeological approach to media in conjunction with a social history of dominant media species - the television and the mobile phone - I suggest that the key to understanding media is not to emphasize their difference but their disappearance from our lives. This amounts to a paradox: the more media dematerialize, the more people seem to be talking about media and what they mean to us. From a media life point of view I engage this enigma by emphasizing how, through our apparent need for media in order to express anything meaningful about them, the intense discussions about the role of media in people's lives are symptomatic of the mediatization of both individuals and society.

As we lose ourselves to technology, what happens next? The conflation of technology with technique, and of media with being mediated tends to be viewed with apprehension. Surely, the cold machines of media are alien to all that we consider as life? If so, an existence engulfed in media means we are perpetually caught in what has been aqueously described as a communicational 'bubble' filled with the 'foam' of media. Indeed, "we swim in an ocean of media," as a headline in The Christian Science Monitor (of 28 September 2005) reads in a report on people's media use. Splashing around in open water makes it hard to notice what is going on around you, on shore and elsewhere, let alone taking in the plights of other human beings. Such liquid lamentations pervade much of the otherwise prudent thinking on media and everyday life. I try to take up this challenge in chapter three by arguing that there is no necessary relationship between the technological and the social. The relations that do exist are clearly both structural - machines are always social as much as they are technical (paraphrasing Gilles Deleuze) - and highly dynamic - living in media is not the same for everyone.

Just like human beings, media have both traits and states. In the everyday negotiation and symbiosis between media and life, it becomes possible to uncover these qualities and explore them to a fuller extent. One of the key qualities of our media is their uncanny capacity for recording and storing everything we do with them. As social media strategist Renny Gleeson (of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon) observes about the way people use mobile media in his TED talk of February 2009: "our reality right now is less interesting than the story we're going to tell about it later.

A media life can be seen as living in an ultimate archive, a public library of (almost) everything, a personalized experience of all the information of the universe. At the same time, in media life the archive is alive, in that it is subject to constant intervention by yourself and others, that it always remains incomplete as much as it is endlessly comprehensive. In the absence of all-seeing librarians and neatly categorized compendiums, the only way we can make sense of ourselves and each other in media is by carefully, and continuously, checking each other out. This is the theme of the fourth chapter, as the age-old premise of a Big Brother-like surveillance society comes full circle in a media world of mundanely massive mutual monitoring, where everyone is (or can be expected to be) watching everyone else.

If we live in media, we are in the process of co-creating a society particular to the media of our time that are always already remediations of earlier technologies and societies: never the same, always similar. In chapter five I address the constituent elements of a society in media by suggesting that it resembles a world after the zombie apocalypse. Like zombies, we lose our sense of ego and individuality as we are collectively lost in our technologies. Whether through watching the same or similar television shows regardless of where we are in the world, or simply by logging on to the global grid of the 'network of networks' that is internet, we are - again, much like zombies - irreducibly connected into a worldwide flow of data, information, techniques and technologies. Like zombies, we cannot seem to get enough of media - even though there does not seem to be a collective nor consensual agenda as to where we are going.

As Sonia Livingstone suggests (link to PDF) regarding the motivation of a society in media: "[f]irst, the media mediate, entering into and shaping the mundane but ubiquitous relations among individuals and between individuals and society; and second, as a result, the media mediate, for better or for worse, more than ever before."
Zombies are similarly driven - even the amputation of limbs does not tend to stop them - yet seemingly without creative impulse (other than feasting on our brains). Beyond the zombie metaphor, thinking about media zombies is instrumental to digging deeper, going beyond the surface of media and life: looking for ways in which we can theorize conjunctions of humanity and technology that highlight how a society in media is at once individual and interconnected as it is both embodied and virtual. This would hopefully open society up for the kind of plasticity and malleability of a world we are used to in media: whether by wielding a remote control or by re-arranging hardware, by clicking a mouse or by re-programming software, reality (in media) is open source.

If our sense of the real is experienced in media, how can we think of media as elements of our lives that can help us to get closer to reality than ever before? This dilemma is at the heart of the sixth chapter, where I question the kinds of connections we have with each other and ourselves in media, and try to move beyond either postmodern or existentialist frames for what is (or may be) real. Our lifeworld - the world we experience most directly, instantly, and without reservation - is irreversibly mediated. It confronts us with endless versions of ourselves and everyone else. There certainly seems to be too much information available - to us as well as about us. Yet, as online social networks scholar danah boyd suggests, "in many situations, there is more to be gained by accepting the public default than by going out of one's way to keep things private. And here's where we see the shift. It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private."

In media life it is pertinent to explore how one can derive value from mediated oversharing and overexposure. Such value may not only be symbolic. The seventh chapter explores evolutionary readings of media life, showing how contemporary discourse about the skills and competences one needs to navigate a mediated lifeworld signposts multiple media literacies as survival values. The solution is not, as has been suggested as far back as in the original responses to Charles Darwin's "On The Origin Of Species" (1859), to wage war on machines. It is by becoming media we enhance our fitness for survival.

In the eight and final chapter I tie all the elements of my exploration of life as lived in media together in the diagnosis of a 'Truman Show delusion' by American psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold, who suggest that classical syndromes such as narcissism and paranoia in combination with pervasive information technologies in the context of a media culture where the boundaries between the physical and virtual world are blurring produce a new type of psychosis. What makes their analysis a fitting conclusion to this book is its conclusion that this delusion, as diagnosed in patients and confirmed by colleagues elsewhere, can best be understood as an extreme rendering of what most people feel. In media life, the world can certainly sometimes seem like the television studio in the Truman Show movie (from 1998), with the significant difference that there is not exit. The question is therefore not how to avoid or destroy the media in our lives, but what Truman Burbank could do if he decided to stay inside of his fully mediated living arrangements. For one, he would be able to see himself live - and, if need be, adapt and evolve accordingly. This evolutionary process necessarily involves an awareness of how we are interconnected (in media), and therefore requires a sense of responsibility towards ourselves and each other that necessarily moves beyond the real or perceived manifestations of our divine machines.

Whether we like it or not, we are slowly but surely becoming information players and creators rather than simply those who are expected to work with the information that is given to us. We can indeed create art with life. In media, that is.

Managing Media Work Book Review (2)

2011-10-28T14:35:00.003-04:00

Just came across a new review of my edited volume Managing Media Work in the quarterly journal Communication Research Trends, written by Paul Soukup.

The review provides a thorough overview of the book, and concludes:

"Managing Media Work fills an important gap in communication teaching because it calls attention to the world in which the graduates will function. The idea of management applies, Deuze and his contributors argue, to people and their day-to-day work, to their careers, to the various media content they produce, to the legal and regulatory environments, and to the economic health of the industries. The essays provide an eye-opening look at this somewhat hidden part of communication."

Openings for MA/PhD Students on Media Life Projects

2011-10-10T11:15:00.002-04:00

UPDATE [January 2012]: This call for applications for MA/PhD projects related to Media Life stays open, as we have funded and non-funded lines available every year. Please study the graduate guidelines carefully before contacting me (or indeed any of my colleagues).

It is getting close to the deadline for applying to our graduate program here at Indiana University. If you are a non-US student, the deadline is December 1 (for US students its January 15).

Of course, our Department is always looking for excellent new people to work with on various ongoing interdisciplinary studies, such as the Games@IU network, the Institute for Communications Research, as well as various projects on (new/digital/emerging) media and society at Media@IU/Digital@IU.

Beyond all of that, and especially for these upcoming years, I am looking for highly motivated people to work with us on a series of new projects related to Media Life (where we consider people's lives as lived in rather than with media). There will opportunities to connect and work with colleagues and fellow students in Journalism, Communication and Culture, the Kinsey Institute, Social Informatics, and so on.

Our graduate program consist of students from all over the world, representing a strong and mutually supportive community of peers.

If you are concerned about cost, please note the following quote regarding funding from our graduate program website:

In the Department of Telecommunications, successful applicants to the PhD program may expect guaranteed funding support as a Student Academic Appointee for three years. This will cover the costs of tuition as well as pay a stipend for living costs. Typical positions include Associate Instructor or Research Assistant.

Applicants to MS and MA programs may receive up to two years of guaranteed funding support as a Student Academic Appointee. The decision is based on merit and available department resources.

Note that your chances for a fully funded position improve substantially if you have: excellent English language skills, strong letters of recommendation from faculty mentors, and some record of academic conference presentations and/or publications. More information on how to apply is available at our graduate website.

Consider this is a call-out for students interested in pursuing a MA or PhD in the media arts and sciences! Please forward this to anyone you think may be interested in studying and living in beautiful southern Indiana... and do not hesitate to contact me for more information.

You Are Not Special: Facebook Timeline, Google+ And Media Life

2011-09-26T07:50:00.000-04:00

Facebook Timeline: You Are Not Special

09.26.2011 (long post)

The public/private debate about the product introduction and innovation of online social networks like Google+ and Facebook, if anything, shows how many (if not most) people realize how their lives have become fused with media to the extent that switching/logging off isn't going to separate the link.

Technoenthusiasts and mediaprophets of doom alike are slowly but surely moving beyond the shackles of 'weak' media perspectives - that is, considering media as external agents having effects and needing to be switched off (at times) - toward a postulate of 'strong' media: media that are us, as we stop obsessing about ourselves (as individuals), and start living along the lines of the networks and relations that connect all of us.

To be sure, people still parse their points of view along the false dichotomy of good/bad media, but the basic premise of our lives as lived in media seems beyond anyone's doubt - especially when considering some of its most visible features, such as our tendency to both willingly and involuntarily overshare our personal lives in media. It is this tendency that features such as Facebook's Timeline are built upon (which presupposes that social media do not make people produce their private lives in public, but simply amplify and accelerate a specific performativity of the self).

If we can move beyond the question whether a media life is good or bad for us, an important first step must be to map the reasons why we would live our lives, mediated. Back in 2010 US comedian and satirist Stephen Colbert - host of the popular TV show The Colbert Report on the Comedy Central cable television channel - proposed a new service integrating all the online places where "ordinary people [...] publicize their lives in minute detail": Knowny. In a segment aired on February 2, 2010 Colbert described such a service that "records every interaction, every movement of every person on earth and posts them online like a storm of random data points that shouts out to the blind, indifferent universe: 'we exist! we exist! please, please, let this mean something!'" His explanation for our seemingly insatiable to mediate our lives is the human desire to be known: "cognoscor ergo sum" (translation: I am known, therefore I am).

Albeit indirectly, Colbert seems to refer to an assumption as for example rooted in the ancient Greek philosophy and literature of Plato and Homer, namely that at the heart of human being lies the desire to be recognized (in Greek: thumos or thymos). Francis Fukuyama uses this concept of "thymotic self-assertion" (1992: 173) to articulate how, historically, increasing freedom of expression can be coupled with people's rising expectations and demands regarding their sense of identity and self. Zygmunt Bauman adds that a media life is not just about being known but perhaps more importantly about being seen - suggesting that René Descartes' famous proof of existence 'I think therefore I am' (originally published in 1637) in a fully mediated mode of being has been elbowed out by 'I am seen, therefore I am' (2010: 20).

Beyond the human desire to be seen - as in: witnessed and recognized - in an increasingly complex and global world (that to some extent seems chaotic and out of control exactly because of its mediatization) lies a perhaps more mundane impulse to share our lives in media: through the ongoing performance of what Zizi Papacharissi calls "public displays of social connections" we in fact get to "authenticate identity and introduce the self through the reflexive process of fluid association with social circles" (2011: 304-5). The very notion of publicness thus may provide a media life some kind of stability in an otherwise potentially fragmented and plastic experience of identity. Living our media life in public by default may be a key paradoxical quality of media life: as we can 'see' ourselves live, we see less of those who are seeing us, while spending most of our time trying to be seen.

The uncanny quality of our mediated interaction means that we generally do not know who we are interacting with, nor do we have much control over how our interactions are understood. It is a proposition befitting Oscar Wilde: the worst thing about being seen (in media), is not being seen. Claims about whether all of this mass self-communication may just be a narcissistic expression seem to miss the point: a narcissist only looks at his/her own reflection, and needs a direct, observable (and impressionable) audience to validate this image. Generally speaking, this kind of controllable self-validation is impossible in a fully mediated context.

Other explanations include the outsourcing of social bonding and grooming rituals to media in an increasingly migratory and mobile social context of everyday life. As families and circles of friends scatter across physical space, our communication that would constitute such forms of social cohesion virtualizes accordingly. A third potent hypothesis would point towards a global hyperconformism prevalent in social media, as in the absence of traditional social cues (such as provided by elites and authority figures like parents, presidents, professors and priests) our collective need to belong produces an overwhelming need to fit in.

Narcissism, grooming, and hyperconformity certainly explain some of the variation in people's oversharing tendencies - but certainly do not cover all what we do in media, and all seem to assume the faulty premise of a time (and life) before and after media.

There is no life outside of media. You know it - you can feel it.

So now what?

People experience the ongoing mediation and mediatization of their lives, but seem to remain blind to its profound potential. First, most people spend most of their time with media, generally not aware nor overtly mindful about this constant and concurrent media exposure. Second, most of the time spent with media today is taken up by some combination of consuming (primarily watching television) and producing (engaging in social media and to a much lesser extent creating one's own media), which behaviors are, increasingly and inevitably, mutually implicated as media devices, platforms, industries and services converge and become networked. Our media use and the capabilities of media devices thus become part of a feedback loop where it is indeed possible to argue that media mediate more and more by virtue of the fact that they mediate. Third, as people use media on a continuous basis, the boundaries between their previously partitioned aspects of everyday life - such as school, work and play - blur beyond meaningful recognition to themselves and others. The extent to which one's media presence can be managed or maintained in multiple coherent selves is not just highly questionable, but profoundly unrealistic. Fourth, as mediated communication provides the benchmark for social relationships in all aspects of life - within and between families, circles of friends and colleagues, loved ones, and anyone else - people's social reality only comes into being insofar it gets produced in terms of media; it therefore intrinsically is 'real' and 'unreal' at the same time.

It seems to be up to us as individuals to make sense of and take responsibility for it all - even though whomever we will find in media when we go looking for ourselves will not be special, as there will always be countless other ways of being alive (and dead) in media.

At the heart of the process of media life, people know (or are being told) that everything they do in life gets recorded, archived, edited, redacted, and publicized on a continuous basis: by governments and corporations, by other people, and (predominantly) by ourselves. With people's lives playing out in digital and networked archives, the need for more or less stable cultural memories gets gradually erased - which in turn would seem to make for a world that can only live in the moment of recording itself.

Media do not make us look for ourselves, nor do we in media necessarily become insular individuals. In media we can see ourselves live. The art of media life consists of finding ways to let go of sticking either to a real or perceived version of yourself who you 'really' are, or to a self-image that is to some extent idealized - that constantly needs to live up to criteria defined by invisible others.

In other words: I think that the media life perspective - the one I explore in my forthcoming (May 2012) book with Polity Press - teaches me that I am not special: living my life in media makes me aware of how my life constitutes and is constituted by relations with others: other people, technologies, and nature. Those links, no matter how problematic and precarious, are special - enabling us to take charge of our world and take responsibility for what we want of it.

Media enable us to make art of life.

The condition seems to be to let go of ourselves.

Spreekbeurten in Nederland (September 2011)

2011-09-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

Eind september ben ik kort in Nederland voor twee openbare spreekbeurten: een naar aanleiding van mijn in mei 2012 te verschijnen boek "Media Life" (bij uitgever Polity Press) over ons leven in media, en een lezing als aftrap voor het werk aan een nieuw boek, eveneens uitgegeven door Polity Press (en vooralsnog op de rol voor 2014), met de titel "Beyond Journalism":

Woensdag 21 september, in Villa De Vier Jaargetijden te Tilburg: symposium ‘Sociale media, de journalistiek en de beroepsethiek’ (met aansluitend afscheidsreceptie Huub Evers; Huub was nog mijn docent ethiek toen ik van 1988-1992 student op de Tilburgse journalistenopleiding was). Het symposium start om 14:45 uur en mijn bijdrage begint om ongeveer kwart over drie. Meer informatie bij Villamedia.

Donderdag 22 september, in de Lawickse Allee 13 (LA13) van de Universiteit Wageningen in het kader van de Studium Generale. Mijn presentatie (een voorbeeld van eerder dit jaar is te zien op Slideshare) start om 20:00 uur. Dit is de eerste in een serie lezingen naar aanleiding van de documentaire "iPhone iPod I am" van IJsbrand van Veelen, waar ik een bijdrage aan mocht leveren.

Managing Media Work Wins Award

2011-08-12T10:13:00.006-04:00

Very pleased to report that my edited volume, "Managing Media Work" (published in 2010 by Sage), is the recipient of the 2011 Robert Picard Book Award of the Media Management and Economics Division of the Assocation for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

The award was presented at the 2011 AEJMC convention in St. Louis (USA), where contributing author Bozena Mierzejewska accepted the plaque in the name of all authors involved.

Obviously I'm thrilled and honored, and would like to thank the exceptional colleagues who contributed original work to the volume (listed in the order of appearance in the book):

Brian Steward, Bozena Mierzejewska, Chris Bilton, Lucy Küng, Terry Flew, Philip Napoli, Toby Miller, Jane Singer, Leopoldina Fortunati, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Tim Marjoribanks, Keith Randle, Alisa Perren, Charles Davis, Susan Christopherson, Liz McFall, Sean Nixon, Hackley Chris, Amy Rungpaka Tiwsakul, Marina Vujnovic, Dean Kruckeberg, Aphra Kerr, Eric Harvey, Rosalind Gill, Annet Aris, Geert Lovink, and Ned Rossiter.

Please note: an extensive review of the book (unrelated to the juried award) will appear in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Media Mangement.

Media Life: Done

2011-07-25T13:34:00.005-04:00

Just want to share a brief moment of professional (and personal) joy: I just sent the first complete draft manuscript of Media Life to the publisher, Polity Press. Now it's waiting for the reviews... but I am really happy with how it turned out.

Here is, by way of a teaser, the final sentences of the book:

In his book "The Revolution Of Everyday Life" (1967), Belgian poet and philosopher Raoul Vaneigem writes:

"the search for new forms of communication, far from being the preserve of painters and poets, is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life."

In this book I insist to add media to such a life. The inevitable consequence of such a hopeful conclusion is that we have to come to terms with media like the people of Babel did with their all-encompassing Library, which is to say: we have to be able to let go of seeing media as influence machines, and start witnessing each other through them, in them.

When we, like Truman Burbank, navigate our ocean of media to what we think will be the door leading beyond the studio, we will see what Patrick Bateman - the serial killer in Brett Easton Ellis' novel "American Psycho" (1991) - saw on the door of a place anywhere in the world (as it dawns on the reader that they will never ever know whether any of the horrific murders in the book really took place): "a sign and on the sign [...] are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT" (399).

Media Life in the Journal of Cultural Science

2011-04-29T11:31:00.009-04:00

Really excited to report the publication of another part of my forthcoming book with Polity Press on Media Life. The latest issue of the Journal of Cultural Science features an essay based off a chapter on evolutionary theories and why we live in media, accepted as part of a special issue on research methods as moments of evolution (other media life papers are listed here).

Essay abstract:
Departing from a perspective of life as lived in rather than with media, this paper articulates the evolutionary context for people's near-complete immersion in media. Using examples such as the appropriation of the movie "Avatar" by activists around the world it is argued how our orientation to media provides adaptive advantage in contemporary postgeographical society.

The formal reference:
Mark Deuze (2011). Survival of the Mediated. Journal of Cultural Science 3(2).

The Journal of Cultural Science is a relatively new open access peer reviewed publication, coming from the Queensland University of Technology's Creative Industries Faculty. Cultural science - as a discipline and as a journal - is an attempt to bridge the false dichotomy between culture and science (as zombie categories of inquiry):

"Cultural science is emerging as the result of dialogue and convergence between evolutionary/complexity theory (especially in evolutionary economics) and the study of change in human relationships and identities (especially in creative industries and cultural studies)."

Media Life Book Notes

2011-03-05T10:23:00.008-05:00

Mark Deuze - Media Life - book notes (Polity Press, 2011/2).

Some wonder how writing a book works. One thing I know, is that it works differently for each author. My process is evolving, but what has been working well in the course of writing Media Life is to base the project on book notes: a rough outline of what I would like to say in each chapter, serving as a reminder of where I am (and whether I've arrived at a certain argument or story before). Below are the notes I am working with at the moment. Chapters 6 and 8 still need to be written, I am currently rewriting chapter 5, and chapter 7 (an shortened version of which has been accepted for publication in the journal Cultural Science) needs some rigorous copy-editing.

Of course, I'm posting this to myself, really.

Annotated book notes; version date: March 5, 2011

• Chapter 1: Media Life - argue the ongoing concurrence of media and life; context: Hoffman's The Sandman and Poe's The Man That Was Used Up; debate on technology & society mutual influence, man-machine hybridization, cities as living machines, real time cities and urban informatics, cyborgs (Haraway, Lewis Mumford), the Singularity and Butler’s Darwin Among The Machines; versions of media + life frameworks for thinking, introduce the emphasis on ethics and aesthetics (a good & beautiful life) in this book.

Tagline: Where we try to live a good media life.

• Chapter 2: The Media Today - defining media as artefacts/activities/arrangements; social history & media archaeology; introduce concepts like mediamorphosis (Fidler); remediation (Bolter & Grusin); genealogy of media (Eco/Zielinski/Parikka); consider Buckminster Fuller's dymaxion principle; Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"; see also: Ned Kock on Darwinism and information technology; Brian Arthur on the nature of technology and the Zorg scene from 5th Element; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; key for a media life today: the media disappear and become invisible (Gitelman's argument about authority and amnesia regarding media; the ideal of an invisible computer as formulated by Weiser) and therefore all-powerful (Žižek, on money, 2008: 35 makes the same argument); Kittler's appeal for an ontology of media.

Tagline: Where media organize all aspects of life and dissappear.

• Chapter 3: What Media Do - starting with examples: MyLifeBits, Memex, Knowledge Navigator, Microsoft Surface to illustrate and contextualize today's media's qualities of recording/ storing/ redacting everything; the end of forgetting and Mayer-Schönberger's value of forgetting; compare to Borges' The Aleph; Offray de la Mettrie's Man A Machine; using Stephen Colbert's "I am known therefore I am" opinion, discuss why we mediate our lives; key is: we have to work hard to keep media in mind, even though we are wired to respond to media mindlessly (consider Reeves & Nass' The Media Equation).

Tagline: Where media record and store everything and we lose ourselves in media.

• Chapter 4: No Life Outside Media - start with surveillance art (Jill Magid, Bag Lady 2.0) to discuss personal information economy and media as profiling machines (Elmer); link with dataveillance (Clark) & surveillance (Andrejevic, Lyon), Bentham's panopticon and reality TV, the history of discipline/ control/suspicion societies (Foucault, Deleuze, Mattelart); synopticism (Mathiesen); and today's omnopticism (Jensen) & sousveilance (Wellman): ultimate question: "who will babysit the babysitters" (Jello Biafra & Lard)?

Tagline: Where we become profiling machines.

• Chapter 5: Society In Media – recap everyone is watching everyone - we are all profiling machines; a key issue: how do we manage this and what is really going on? What do we do? first: can this be wonderful (Dewey), a source of ecstacy (Baudrillard); second: if so, we have to come to terms with media overload & infobesity (Stephenson's Babel/Infocalypse and Borges' Tower of Babel); three: introduce remix as coping strategy; remix culture (Lev Manovich); four: what about those who do not remix? (digital shadow, participation gap & digital divides; Andrew Feenberg, Jodi Dean).

Tagline: Where we live in media forever.

• Chapter 6: Together Alone - reflexive biographization (Veith) & biographical solutions to systemic contradictions (Beck); context: first we saw the systemworld colonize the lifeworld (Habermas), then lifeworld colonized the systemworld (Beck, Bauman), now, media colonize lifeworld (Goran Sonesson); metaphors for media life: Casares' The Invention Of Morel & the Star Trek Holodeck; media life and extreme isolation (Sloterdijk, the hikikomori phenomenon, De Zengotita's solipsism) or social cohesion (McLuhan, Wellman)? anchorage or rootlessness (Zizek)? together alone: Silent Disco as a metaphor for the experience of family life (see Žižek's notion of the big Other in the guise of cyberspace, Pierre Levy's notion of cyberspace & collective intelligence); compare to Leibniz’ monadology; friendships, love, sex and death in media: direct and indirect at the same time; living/dying privately in public (lifecasting & deathcasting); close plus at-a-distance equals instantaneous experience. collapsing identity categories: self and social, public and private, front stage and backstage (see Nancy Baym; Wittel's networked sociality, Zizi Papacharissi's networked self). conclude with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's work on the experience of real and real-time; see Stanislav Lem's Solaris: in our exploration of the other in media we run the risk of only looking for mirrors.

Tagline: Where we are closely connected to endless versions of ourselves

• Chapter 7: In Media We Fit - what media do as social arrangements: orientation to media is a survival strategy (Luhmann; Hjarvard; Krotz; Schulz; Lundby); teledildonics, cybereroticism and ongoing body/machine interaction/integration (Kafka’s In The Penal Colony); evolutionary question: what adaptive advantage is gained with a media life? consider: social grooming, bonding, cooperation and sociality, thymotic self-assertion (Fukuyama), presentation of the self, natural and sexual selection.

Tagline: Where living in media provides social and reproductive success.

• Chapter 8: Life in Media - start with Borges Library of Babel (phantasmal living); in media life, the real/reality is malleable, under (co-) construction, permanently beta (De Mul) - in other words: a map; see Borges' On Exactitude In Science; memory as a map; claims about living in the map as the world using mobile/GPS/Google Latitude, Foursquare, Facebook Places), Steve Mann's mediated reality (CyborGLOGS), the unreality of our time (Lowen); creative engagements with reality: alternate reality games (Elan Lee, Christy Dena); argument: there are four realities at work simultaneously: The Matrix (esp. Baudrillard's take on it); The Panopticon (as well as its inverse and reverse, synopticon/omnopticon); Google/Wikiality (compare consensus with Luhmann's reality of the media; and the Truman Show Delusion (TSD); subtlemobs ("try to remain invisible"); in the end, the media put your life at a distance (Shaun Moores), and the opportunities for self-monitoring are endless (Sherry Turkle); see studies on social media use: people generally don't check others (Twitter; Pew 2010); consider Gadamer's "Who Am I And Who Are You?", Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Merleau-Ponty's ideas of living-at-a-distance and Luigi Pirandello's One, No One & One Hundred Thousand; speculative turn in philosophy and the return of the real; Jason Lanier on machines giving people more options to act morally, Van Ess' digital media ethics, and ultimately the unique quality of seeing yourself live in conjunction with a meaning of (media) life (Irving Singer, Rorty's social hope); conclude with life as art (Raoul Vaneigem, Bauman's Art Of Life).

Tagline: Where delusion is the way to keep it real, and you can see yourself live.

Teaching Media Life

2011-02-17T09:28:00.007-05:00

Tomorrow (Friday, February 18, 2011) I will have the honor of presenting a workshop on teaching of media life - as a massive lecture course, as a pedagogical concept, and as a general approach to learning with (I should say: in) media.

The media life course and pedagogical conceptualization form part of the broader Media Life project.

Below are the slides of the workshop; at a later date, I hope to be able to share audio/video recordings of the workshop. But if you are around, please drop by - we meet from 12:30-1:45pm in room 226 of the RTV Building on campus.

Media Life: Teaching & Pedagogy

View more presentations from Mark Deuze.

Media Life and Protests in the Arab World

2011-01-31T14:59:00.010-05:00

It is safe to say that just about every news organization and technology-blog spends significant time these days engaging with the ongoing protests and turmoil across the Arab world and the role of internet and mobile media in general and Al-Jazeera, Twitter, Facebook, and texting in particular.

Let me refer to several excellent essays and posts on this issue by people much better positioned than I am to engage in this debate: Robert Worth and David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times on Al-Jazeera, Net sociologist Zeynep Tufekci on social media and Twitter, and Matthew Ingram of GigaOm on networked media.

UPDATE: Not to mention two more excellent perspectives: Richard Grusin (see comment below this post) on the crisis in Egypt and the concept of premediation, and Ulises Mejias on why "The Twitter Revolution Must Die".

I'm covering this debate in my (work-in-progress) Media Life book, aiming to articulate a position beyond whether 'media did it', instead suggesting that lived experience is synonymous with mediated experience, and therefore we cannot experience a revolution or indeed any kind of process of social change outside of media.

Excerpts from the draft manuscript that talk about this issue:

Asked for advice on what it takes to become president when speaking with a group of 14- and 15-year-olds on 8 September 2009, US president Barack Obama answered:

"I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. And when you're young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff."

Such advice seems to make sense - as employers reportedly check social network sites to research job candidates. Countries such as Germany and Spain attempt to curtail such practices, seeking to make it illegal for prospective employers to check up on applicants' private postings - clearly assuming that in our mass self-communication sometimes we need to be protected from ourselves.

Although such efforts may be noble, there is perhaps something to be said for not opting out, for enthusiastically embracing the recording, storing, and sharing potential of present-day media. Ironically, this insight is also shared by President Obama, if one considers his statement (on January 28, 2011) in response to the mass demonstrations across Egypt, referring directly to the Egyptian government's attempts to shut down the country's internet and mobile communication services:

"I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions that they've taken to interfere with access to the internet, to cell phone service and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century."

Considering the amplifying and accelerating role mobile phones (especially texting) and online social networks play in current processes of social change such as in Iran in 2009, Tunisia in 2010, and Egypt in 2011, it seems as if the future belongs to those clearly not shying away from sharing their life and passions with the world in media. Several news reporters and technology pundits nicknamed these and other major upheavals at the start of the 21st century as a 'Twitter Revolution' (referring to Iran in The Atlantic, 18 June 2010) or 'Facebook Revolution' (referring to Egypt in TIME magazine, 24 January 2011). This in turn prompted numerous commentators to dispute social media's role in causing the widespread protests and calls for change in the Arab world.

From a media life perspective, the debate is not so much about whether our media contribute to or even determine processes of social change. Both positions in such a discussion can be seen examples of deploying media discourse and assigning media qualities to events in the world in order to give them meaning.

Beyond the excerpt above, a couple more observations...

The same media that amplify and potentially accelerate calls for social change are (or can be) instruments of repression and surveillance. Networked media have accelerating and amplifying properties - in particular because of their visibility. We can see each other (and our selves) live, and in that process existing tensions, passions, frustrations, and empathies get emphasized and expressed.

Perhaps the significant problematic is how all this expression is inevitably subsequent to both the material conditions of media (i.e. the structuring properties of the technologies used) as well as their immaterial foundations (for example: what you can and cannot say on Twitter or Facebook because of their Terms of Use and otherwise often arbitrary and generally mainstreamed sensibilities).

Instead of turning to mainstream news media and arrogant academics (myself prominently included) to offer meaningful categories within which to place the messy and complex experiences of struggling human beings, one thing the new visibility (a concept coined by John Thompson) of our media life offers is a chance - and indeed a responsibility - to see the lives of others in great detail, of appreciating their inevitably inconsistent, contradictory, and complicated demands, and of engaging with parts of the world deliberately - even from the relative comfort of our own personal information space.

Peter Sloterdijk argues that this 'media sphere' of ours makes us blind to coexistence. I would say he is right, unless we open our eyes.

Media Life in Media Culture & Society

2011-01-28T09:46:00.003-05:00

Very excited to report that yet another of the Media Life working papers has been published, this time as a commentary in the excellent journal Media, Culture & Society. Subscription to the journal is required (but if you send me an e-mail, I'd be happy to provide you with an author's copy of the piece).

A more or less complete list of published and/or working papers of the Media Life project at Indiana University can be found in an earlier post at Deuzeblog.

In the meantime, I can say that the work on the book is coming to an end - 6 out 8 chapters are written, and I am getting on with the conclusions, where I will make much of the Truman Show Delusion and its relevance for living a good and beautiful (media) life.

Delusions are central to our survival in a completely mediated environment because, as filmmaker Woody Allen states in an interview with The New York Times [09.14.10]: "This sounds so bleak when I say it, but we need some delusions to keep us going. And the people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can't."

Skinflower

2011-01-03T17:35:00.005-05:00

The year has started with, for many reasons, a lot of looking back. In the process, I got hold of some still and moving images from back in the day when we were making noise, in the early 1990s. Below some images from Skinflower, a band I played in with some great people who went on to do pretty amazing things (the tune in the clip is from a concert we did, sometime in 1992).

Earlier stuff, from Dawn Awakening (a band we started in high school), is also up on YouTube. Good times.