Abstract
The book Media Use in Digital Everyday Life by Brita Ytre-Arne examines digital everyday life as ordinary, habitual, and disruptive. Using everyday life as a framework, the author puts forward a people-centric approach that carefully and tangibly contextualizes media use within people’s everyday personal and social lives. The book presents rich data drawn from a vast number of cross-media interviews and diary-based studies among the Norwegian population, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The data captures the informants’ digital social realities through periods of routine, transition, and extreme disruption.
The book’s five complementary chapters lay bare the benefits, tensions, and ambivalences that have emerged when smartphone users navigate the temporal, spatial, and social boundaries of digital and non-digital spheres. In the introductory chapter, Ytre-Arne highlights the taken-for-granted enactment involved in constructing and moving through temporal, spatial, and human layers of everyday familiarity (Giddens, 1991; Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). Conversely, by bringing in Lefebvre’s (1947) link between capitalism, technological change, and human conduct, Ytre-Arne constructs a people-centric approach that understands everyday life as experienced by users within societal systems. In the subsequent three chapters, she maps the various experiences of people’s mediated and digitized life in ordinary or disruptive times, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, she uses a life-course perspective to present the transformative phase of new motherhood and to argue the role of media repertoires and smartphone use in catering to changing social roles and everyday circumstances. The concluding chapter highlights the importance of understanding the intertwining of power dynamics and digital media use in everyday life.
Ytre-Arne’s approach in investigating everyday digital media use is relational, as she writes: “everyday routines are most easily reflected upon when changing” (p. 49); and thus articulating everyday routine as inseparable from transformations and disruptions. By recounting informants’ lived experiences from morning routines to motherhood, and during the pandemic, she shows that the meaning of the mundane becomes visible when it is periodically absent. Ytre-Arne’s analysis underscores the importance of assembling the mundane and meaningful as well as routine with crisis, and the relationship and implications of such deep interlinking in people’s digital lives.
A salient feature of the book is examining digital media use by decentralizing media and unraveling the influence of temporal and social factors in engendering digital behaviors. This approach complements a growing study on non-media centric approaches (Kuntsman & Miyake, 2022; Vanden Abeele et al., 2018), demonstrating ways to consider the social and environmental contexts and factors shaping people’s media practices. Personally, the methodological intervention of the study may propel readers to do further research on understanding the influence of spatial transformations in navigating digital practices, complementing examples that explore the interplay between spaces and practices that are embedded in and out of the digital (see Farman, 2012; Jansson & Adams, 2021). Nonetheless, the book richly contributes to mobile media and communication research, by unpacking the relationality between routine and volatility of digitized everyday life, as well as showing the role the field of mobile media and communication plays in grasping the world’s political dynamics, and as a political tool itself.
Overall, the monograph by Ytre-Arne offers a critical vantage point to examine the ways people’s social conditions shape media use. Resting on an interdisciplinary foundation of sociology, philosophy, and mobile media and society studies, the book presents valuable insights and methodological approaches to students and scholars who are interested in critically unpacking the impacts of mundane digital media in, and potentially beyond, a Western context.