Abstract
Media Life attempts to show us all the different ways, and causes and effects, of humans now living their lives in media, not with media, in much the same way that fish are said to not know they live in water because they know nothing different. Mark Deuze, now at University of Amsterdam (formerly with joint appointments at Indiana University and Leiden University), is known as the author of Media Work and Managing Media Work, although Media Life never cites any earlier work.
Media Life is in most ways an impressive work. Deuze has scoured the literature in a large number of disciplines to produce a book that is in many ways an organized and annotated literature review. Chapter titles, “Overview: In Media,” “Media Life,” “Media Today,” “What Media Do,” “No Life Outside Media,” “Society in Media,” “Together Alone,” “In Media We Fit,” and “Life in Media,” are broad and used that way.
When Deuze sort of sums up this book’s research with, “Researchers in disciplines such as sociobiology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology and cultural science are at the forefront of linking life with media,” he has established his credibility to make such a judgment. (He also is unintentionally making a wake-up call to mass communication scholars about the quantity and quality of research about media published by scholars outside of communication schools and media studies departments. See also Barbie Zelizer’s book, Taking Journalism Seriously.) Indeed, it will be the rare journalism/communication professor who reads this book and is not introduced to scores of scholars, theories, and ideas about media that she has not encountered before. This alone makes the book a highly valuable read.
While Deuze summarizes various scholars and sections, and sometimes makes a favorable or optimistic comment about them, Deuze does not obviously critique or analyze various observations and conclusions by others that he cites. This makes the reader wonder what Deuze thinks. When one realizes that Deuze does not explicitly disagree with or criticize any scholar cited in his book, and that Deuze obviously is too smart to agree with anyone or anything, one must conclude, correctly or not, that Deuze has simply omitted writers/writings with which he disagrees. But scholars he cites do not always agree with one another, and reading Deuze’s summaries and critiques of scholars with whom he disagrees would have made this a more complete and nuanced book. In citing about 400 works, Deuze also does not distinguish among social scientific studies, histories, cultural analyses, and mere essays or journalism; every source seems to be equal in quality and importance.
Media Life also is not as exhaustive as it looks. For instance, it omits any mention of religion, although relevant entry points range from religious (and anti-religious) content’s availability in all media, to faith-oriented websites and Facebook posts, to religion-based opposition to some or all media, to various attitudes toward and usages of media being arguably religious in nature. This book also does not distinguish between countries or cultures, and one can often note that a particular point is a “First World problem” (or a “First World opportunity”).
On subjects related to sex(uality), Deuze dispenses with technology facilitating or hindering sex in a few pages, and pornography/erotica with one paragraph. The latter is remarkable. No type of media content has been feared as much in the last 100 years as pornography/erotica, with doomsday scenarios coming from both the religious right and feminist left, among others. Yet for twenty years, the world has been experiencing a global, real-time experiment: would a massive increase in the quantity and variety of pornography, available to younger audiences than ever, result in major increases in premarital and extramarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, prostitution, orgies, rape, and/or, well, you name it? The answer now surely is no. Because of the explosion in media choices, people worldwide also have learned more information, and perhaps also more misinformation, about sex than ever in the last twenty years. In sum, there is more to media and sex than online dating and Woody Allen’s “Orgasmatron” (p. 208).
But Media Life overemphasizes zombies, with sections titled, “We’re all fucking zombies,” “Everything (and everyone) zombie,” and “You are not special” (pp. 135-146), among other discussions. Deuze’s Overview chapter says, “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.” His proposed antidote is that we 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 social reality up for the kind of plasticity and malleability of a world we are used to in media . . . reality (in media) is open source.
I hope so, but can zombies theorize?