Medialife

Mark Deuze’s book is essentially written around a single idea, that we do not live ‘with’ the media but rather we live ‘in’ media. ‘Media make us real, because we create ourselves in media’, he comments (p. 130), and his agenda is therefore one about how we can best carry out this creative role to our advantage, allowing ourselves in the process to ‘be at peace with the perpetual plasticity of that reality’ which mediation produces (p. 263). As one might gather from this, his book is strong on abstract generality and, although he is a lively writer, keen to engage his main theme from multiple perspectives and with a McLuhanish taste for paradox, a few questions about what it all means ‘on the ground’ gradually start to accumulate. The situation is not helped by a duality running through his account, one familiar from recent media theory. On the one side, there is the idea of the media as promise, as new connectedness and flexibility, as self-rejuvenation and the enhancement of sociality. On the other side, there is the idea of surveillance and control, of reduced independence and of a hall-of-mirrors whose distortions are driven by commodity values. Deuze has quite a few sections showing a thoughtful ambivalence on these matters but at many points he wishes to project himself as an optimist, if sometimes unconvincingly and even rather desperately so. Since, as I have indicated, he is certainly not blind to the potential of the threats posed by the power-relations of mediation (and mediatization) at the moment, it is not surprising that Foucauldian spectres keep turning up to darken the mood. At one point in Chapter 4, the breezily uncompromising subhead ‘We’re all fucking zombies’ introduces a discussion of the appropriateness of seeing ‘life in media’ as having similarities with a society of the undead. The subhead is a citation rather than a directly offered thought and there is, thank goodness, a great deal more subtlety introduced into the use of this term than might initially appear to be possible. However, any text that plays for long with the idea that media users are like zombies is going to give any optimistic inclinations it possesses a hard time.

The idea that perceiving of the media as ‘external’ both to the self and society is a misleading view, reductive of research design and of argument, is not a new one of course. A great deal of media research, particularly over the last decade, has sought to introduce more flexibility, interactivity and sense of ‘immersion’ into its frameworks, challenging though this is to do for some kinds of methodological approach. Raymond Williams’s Television, Technology and Cultural Form, 40 years ago, was an attempt, still influential, to change the terms on which our relationship with technology and with the idea of ‘influence’ might be conceived, and there have been many others, both in the USA and Europe, who have worked to this end. Deuze’s project of pushing the idea harder than most previous writers certainly provides his book with some stimulating pages on our insertion within contemporary media flows, drawing on a very wide range of sources with regular and sometimes arresting citation. But it risks pushing it too hard, and when in the final chapter he makes use of The Truman Show narrative to indicate some of the circumstances within which we have to ‘learn to live’ (rather than trying to break out of the studio) any illumination is offset by the begged questions. Specific political and economic systems and institutions, although they are certainly brought into the book, do not really figure in the summarizing arguments as much as they should do. The ‘us’ which features strongly throughout glides into being an ‘us’ undifferentiated by social class, gender, race or age. Deuze’s recipes for living in the media (there is a sense in which his book can be seen as in part a self-help manual) are denied a degree of cogency by this relative lack of connection with particularity, with the various terms of the mediated everyday as actually lived experiences. It is not as if the volume needs to turn itself in an empirical study, just occasionally to register more immediately the specific historical and demographic realities lying behind its too easy pronominal collectivity.

Deuze divides his book into eight chapters, the titles of which indicate the development-with variations of a main, guiding idea, as I noted earlier – ‘media life’, ‘media today’, what media do’, ‘no life outside media’, ‘society in media’, ‘together alone’, ‘in media we fit’, ‘life in media’. What is surprising across these chapters is that very little at all is said about how we might go about investigating the media and collecting evidence for arguments which would offer criticism and perhaps the case for change. It is almost as if Deuze’s sense of total mediation – the complex, ever-changing employment of ‘open source’ material to fashion identities and projects which occurs alongside the more negative, subordinating dynamics – has overwhelmed his interest in carrying out any systematic study, so anxious is he to get together the right survival kit. At times, what Denis McQuail calls on his cover endorsement the ‘original causal-linear model’ of mass communications seems to have its distinct advantages whatever its downside, when judged alongside the ‘new paradigm’ on offer here. This is a paradigm in which the justified correction of over-tidy separation and division leads on to the perception of so much multidimensional interactivity and flux that making systematic sense of any it begins to look naïve.

Not saying much about how we should study the media might be excusable in a book which extended its observations into ideas for specific forms of organization and action, as these might be different in relation to national, institutional, social and cultural settings. In this respect, it is decidedly not a good sign when on the first page of the book, Deuze notes that:

… 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 emails. (p. x)

Elite power does appear in the book (and so do some recommendations for resistance and for reworked policy perspectives) but as the above may suggest, it is often displaced in relation to the activities of ‘you and me’ and not confronted with quite the non-ambivalent boldness which the scale of its institutionalization and the potency of its professionalized strategies deserve.

Deuze has written an account which draws on a wide array of sometimes sharply original ideas about both entrapment and opportunity, organizing them vigorously and often with wit. Carrying accompanying artwork in the form of intriguing line illustrations, it has many provocative and enjoyable pages. However, it finally lacks the qualities which would have followed from a stronger concern with development rather than repetition, a more sustained contact with specific examples of ‘media life’ and a better sense of how its perceptions of the kaleidoscopic, the unstable and the ambiguous might help to progress the existing agenda of media research.