Abstract
One of the most important features of media studies as it has developed since the 1980s is the opening up of a media user dimension that goes beyond consumption and is situated in the context of everyday life. This edited collection is dedicated to the further cultivation and exploration of this dimension. At the start, though they emphasise that no one approach to it is advocated or pursued in the book, the editors offer a useful summary of the concept of everyday life ‘as meaning those mundane contexts of use where the encoded meanings and affordances of media and media technologies are translated into the lived experiences of ordinary people’ (p. 9). A further development has been a move away from a focus on a single communications medium to a focus on several, as they are used in combination with each other, the different point of interest then being the practices associated with such use and their various interlinkages as well as one-by-one engagements. The contributors to this volume take up these media-related practices and examine how they operate through ‘spaces of agency’ in everyday social contexts. The first three chapters are theoretical in orientation, with Leslie Haddon attending to the domestication of complex media repertoires, bearing in mind the greater variety of media available now compared with when the concept of domestication was initially formulated in the early 1990s; Maria Bakardjieva to the transformations in the experienced social world generated by cross-media technologies and practices; and Rasmus Helle to how critical realism can be applied to the effort after understanding mobile media from an everyday life perspective. The six case-study chapters which follow cover the way smartphones are part of the spatial and temporal weft and weave of everyday life; the role played by self-tracking apps on smartphones in daily exercise routines; self-organised Facebook groups for civic participation among those suffering from chronic illness; media and the mundane practices of bereaved parents; the digitalisation of cultural heritage and its appliance in everyday contexts; and everyday appropriations of the political opportunities offered to active citizens by social media. The final chapter by the three editors sums up the contributions in a critical discussion of everyday life and the perspectives it provides on the way media are used and combined. This is an absorbing, empirically grounded yet theoretically informed book that helps advance our understanding of cross-mediated communication patterns and agentic potential among media users in mundane settings and contexts. The editors as well as the contributors are due a solid round of applause.