digital media and society thesis

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Understanding Social Media: Misinformation, Attention, and Digital Advertising

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The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology

Deana A. Rohlinger is a professor of sociology at Florida State University with expertise in political participation, political change, and digital technologies. She is author of Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social Movements in America (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and New Media and Society (New York University Press, 2019) as well as dozens of research articles and book chapters that analyze topics as diverse as the kinds of claims individuals make in the emails they sent Jeb Bush about the Terri Schiavo case to collective identity processes in MoveOn.org and the Tea Party movement. Her most recent articles can be found in Information, Communication & Society, Signs, Mobilization, New Media & Society, and Social Media + Society. Rohlinger has co-edited three volumes, Strategy in Action: Movements and Social Change (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change: Media, Movements, and Political Change (2012), and Emerald Studies in Media and Communication: Social Movements and Mass Media (2017); guest-edited issues of two journals (Information, Communication & Society in 2018 and the American Behavioral Scientist in 2009); served as the book review editor for the journal Mobilization (2012–2018); and was the editor of the section on social movements for Sociology Compass (2012–2015). Rohlinger chaired the American Sociological Association’s Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology section (2018–2019) and is chair-elect for the Collective Behavior, Social Movements section. She has been interviewed on a range of topics including digital politics and controversies involving Planned Parenthood as well as written commentaries for a variety of media outlets including U.S. News & World Report, Fortune, The American Prospect, and The Conversation. Her body of research was recently honored with the 2021 William F. Ogburn Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Communications and Information Technologies and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.

Sarah Sobieraj is a professor and chair of The Department of Sociology at Tufts University and a faculty associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her most recent book, Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the impact of identity-based digital abuse on women’s participation in social and political discourse. She is also the author of The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility (Oxford University Press, 2014) with Jeff Berry and Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (New York University Press, 2011). Sobieraj also edited (with Rob Boatright, Danna Young, and Tim Schaffer) A Crisis of Civility: Political Discourse and Its Discontents (Routledge, 2019). Her most recent journal articles can be found in Information, Communication & Society , Social Problems , PS: Political Science & Politics , Poetics , Political Communication , and Sociological Theory . Her work has been featured in venues such as The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Boston Globe , Politico , Vox , CNN , PBS , NPR , The American Prospect , National Review , The Atlantic , Pacific Standard , and Salon . Sobieraj serves on the advisory board of the Social Science Research Council’s Disinformation Research Mapping Initiative and is a member of the National Institute for Civil Discourse Research Network.

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Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new information and communications technologies as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or otherworldly, these tools and technologies were framed as extraordinary. But digital media are now mundane, thoroughly embedded—and often unquestioned—in everyday life. Digital media are enmeshed in health and wellness, work and organizations, elections, capital flows, intimate relationships, social movements, and even our own identities. Although the study of these technologies has always been interdisciplinary—at the crossroads of computer science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communications—never has a sociological perspective been more valuable. Sociology excels at helping one re-see the normal. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology is a perfect point of entry for those curious about the state of sociological research on digital media. Each chapter reviews the sociological research that has been done thus far and points toward unanswered questions. The 33 chapters are arranged in six sections which look at digital media as they relate to theory, social institutions, everyday life, community and identity, social inequalities, and politics and power. The contributors to this volume provide a distinctly sociological center that will be an indispensable resource for scholars looking to find their way in the subfield, offering an overview of the research on digital media that is sure to illuminate this shifting terrain. Readers will find it accessible enough for use in class and thorough enough for seasoned professionals interested in a concise update in their areas of interest.

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Introduction: Media Use and Everyday Life in Digital Societies

Media Use in Digital Everyday Life

ISBN : 978-1-80262-386-4 , eISBN : 978-1-80262-383-3

Publication date: 20 February 2023

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted.

Ytre-Arne, B. (2023), "Introduction: Media Use and Everyday Life in Digital Societies", Media Use in Digital Everyday Life , Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-383-320231001

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Brita Ytre-Arne

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this book (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode .

Can you remember your first smartphone, and did it change your life? I bought my first smartphone in the early summer of 2011, right before the birth of my first child. I can safely say that life was never the same again. Although the new phone was hardly the most significant change that happened, it became part of how I reconfigured everyday life.

My coincidental timing of these events might be a personal particularity, but the early 2010s, only a little more than a decade ago, was a period in which smartphones became part of everyday life for lots of people. This happened in Norway where I live, and in other countries in the Global North, soon followed by broader proliferation worldwide (Avle et al., 2020). In 2021, it was estimated that more than 90 per cent of people had smartphone access in a growing number of countries around the globe (Deloitte, 2021). ‘Smartphones changed everything’, wrote the Wall Street Journal in 2020: ‘smartphones upended every element of society during the last decade, from dating to dinner parties, travel to politics. This is just the beginning’ (Kitchen, 9.9.2020). But while all of this was happening, people lived their lives, using smartphones along with other media old and new, interwoven with what was going on in their lives, and in the world around them.

This book explores the role of media in our everyday lives in digital societies, after the proliferation of smartphones and in conditions of ubiquitous connectivity. I analyze everyday media use across platforms, content types and modes of communication, taking the perspective of how we live our lives with media – how we manage plans and practicalities, keep in touch with friends and family, seek information and entertainment, work and learn, take part in shared experiences, and connect to our social lifeworlds. We might do all of this in the space of one single day, and we might experience such a day as ‘ordinary’ – just normal everyday life. But media technologies are also part of our less ordinary days, important to how we manage life-changing transitions and special events in our personal lives, and to how we relate to local communities, political processes or global events. We use media to connect to each other, and to society – throughout an ordinary day, across the life course, and in times of disruption.

The smartphone is emblematic of how our everyday lives with media are changing in a digital and hyper-connected society, and as such it is essential to the topic of this book. A central question I discuss is what it means that most of us now have a smartphone to reach for, from where we are and what we are doing, to manage multiple aspects of our daily lives: A mobile, flexible device we rely on to communicate, find information, entertain and assist us, often used in combination with other media, but also a device that enables tracking and surveillance of our movements and engagements, informing feedback loops based on our personal data. How has digital media use in everyday life changed after the smartphone?

To answer these questions, I draw on classic scholarship on media and communication technologies in everyday life (Baym, 2015; Silverstone, 1994), and on recent analysis of digital ambivalence and disconnection (Syvertsen, 2020). With a user perspective, I situate smartphones and other kinds of digital platforms as part of broader media repertoires (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017), with an interest in the totality and internal relationships of any kind of media that people use and find meaningful in their everyday lives. I further understand everyday media use as central to public connection (Couldry et al., 2010), to how we orient ourselves to a world beyond our private concerns.

The book provides an updated perspective on media in everyday life after digital media has become increasingly embedded and ingrained in society. A purpose for the book is to fill a gap between classic (but old) discussions on everyday media use, and recent (but sometimes narrowly focused) studies of new technologies. Our understandings of everyday media use are still shaped by theories developed before the internet, before digital and social and mobile media. This book highlights rather than discards these understandings, but moves forward in tackling dilemmas of technological transformations, and by considering recent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. I untangle how media becomes meaningful to us in the everyday, connecting us to each other and to communities and publics. The book offers empirical, methodological and theoretical insight on media use in digital everyday life.

Why Everyday Life?

‘Everyday life’ is one of those concepts that everyone understands, but which is still difficult to define. The term is not internal jargon belonging to a particular research field, but instead recognizable across a range of contexts – we might even describe it as an ‘everyday’ term. One of the early ideas behind this book was to answer the questions: ‘But what do you mean by everyday life?’ and further ‘Why do you [meaning media use researchers] go on about everyday life?’. These are good questions. Let us start with the latter: Why everyday life? More precisely, why would someone interested in media use find it important to refer to everyday life for contextualization?

In media and communication studies, interest in everyday life has a long history. The idea of everyday life has been central to approaches and research interests in cultural studies (Gray, 2002; Morley, 1992), media phenomenology (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2013; Scannell, 1995) or media ethnography (Hermes, 1995; Radway, 1984). The term has been particularly central to theories of domestication (Haddon, 2016; Silverstone et al., 2021) focused on processes of gradually integrating media technologies in the home. Roger Silverstone wrote a classic volume on Television and everyday life (Silverstone, 1994), arguing that in order to move past debates on television as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and actually understand what it is, we have to consider television as embedded in tensions and dynamics of everyday life. Shaun Moores (2000) applied everyday life as a framework for understanding the historical development of broadcast media, and Maria Bakardjieva (2005) analyzed the domestication of computers and internet technologies in everyday life. Elizabeth Bird (2003) wrote The Audience in Everyday Life to argue for the relevance of ethnographic methods to understand our media-saturated reality, while Tim Markham (2017) wrote an introductory textbook titled Media and Everyday Life to present topics and thinkers in media studies through their relevance to daily life.

All of the above are books on media with ‘everyday life’ in the title. Moreover, the term keeps popping up in journal articles on a variety of topics regarding media use: A comparative study of why people read print newspapers in the digital age refer to how different media are integrated into everyday life (Boczkowski et al., 2021), while a study of people who prefer online media at home find that digital alternatives are perceived to be better integrated into domestic everyday life (Müller, 2020). In analysis of how and why we follow news, the idea of the everyday provides a way of situating ordinary users at the centre of attention, by discussing everyday news use (Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2019) or everyday public connection (Swart et al., 2017). In debates about datafication and emergent technologies, the notion of the everyday is used to highlight human and social experiences with for instance self-tracking (Lomborg & Frandsen, 2016), smart homes (Hine, 2020) or algorithmic media (Willson, 2017).

What do these different contributions have in common? They refer to everyday life to signal a position, because referencing ‘everyday life’ holds some empirical, methodological or theoretical implications. The term can be invoked to answer the ‘so what’-question: A compelling reason for why we need to study media at all is its relevance to everyday life (Silverstone, 1999). Today we can adapt this argument to why we need to study the smartphone – it is part of everyday life. Through such statements, we frame the smartphone as a technology and research topic that is recognizable and relevant to experiences and dilemmas each of us encounter. The smartphone has transformed society, but it has done so through our everyday interactions.

Similarly: Why does it matter if people read international news or look at cat videos online, watch Netflix or Linear TV, listen to music on Spotify or prefer vinyl records? If you are interested in media business models or media policies, and find the choices users make a bit puzzling, you might need to look into motivations and contexts in everyday life to gain a deeper understanding of what goes on. Attention to everyday contexts can both complicate and enhance insights gained from other types of tracking and measurements of media use (Groot Kormelink & Costera Meijer, 2020). To understand new technologies, or connect critiques of these phenomena to people’s experiences, everyday life is an essential framework: It is easier to grasp the idea of ‘the Internet of Things’ (Bunz & Meikle, 2018) as having to do with whether your refrigerator needs internet connection, than through concepts such as machine learning or smart sensors.

Sometimes the position signalled by referring to everyday life is explicitly normative. A key example is the debate on everyday experiences with datafication, or ‘the quantification of human life through digital information, very often for economic value’ (Mejias & Couldry, 2019). The idea of so-called ‘big data’ as more precise or valuable has been met with critical questions (Boyd & Crawford, 2012), and with concern for how audience engagement can be harvested and utilized for opaque purposes (Ytre-Arne & Das, 2020). In criticizing these developments, the notion of ‘everyday life’ is central to put the human experience of living in datafied conditions front and centre (Kennedy & Hill, 2018), or to focus on the people rather than systems (Livingstone, 2019). This interest further corresponds to feminist (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and postcolonial critiques (Milan & Treré, 2019) of datafication and power.

We can also signal analytical and methodological interests by referring to everyday life: The term is used to prioritize context over generalizability, and ordinary user perspectives and experiences over media professionals and institutions. This could imply attention to small acts of engagement in social media (Picone et al., 2019), and inclusion of seemingly mundane practices of media use (Hermes, 1995; Sandvik et al., 2016). An everyday life perspective is a backdrop for cross-media research (Lomborg & Mortensen, 2017; Schrøder, 2011) rather than pre-selecting which media to study based on the researchers’ preconceived notions of what matters. Qualitative researchers and ethnographers also draw on ‘everyday life’ as a term that points towards preferred methods: Talking to people about a day in the life (del Rio Carral, 2014), ‘capturing life as it is narrated’ (Kaun, 2010) with diary methods, and exploring experiences and reflections in informants’ own words. Some quantitative studies of media use also use the term (Hovden & Rosenlund, 2021) and research on everyday media repertoires can combine qualitative and quantitative approaches (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017).

I am also someone who often explain and position my key research interests through the notion of everyday life. A long-running interest in everyday life has informed my preference for qualitative and user-focused methods, in the studies I draw on in this book and in other projects. I have used the term ‘everyday life’ in the title of publications (Moe & Ytre-Arne, 2021; Ytre-Arne, 2012), and also explored how media use changes with biographical disruption to everyday routines (Ytre-Arne, 2019) or discussed audience agency in everyday encounters with digital and datafied media (Ytre-Arne & Das, 2020; Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2021a). For me, the everyday signals a perspective on why and how to study media use: it is important because it is part of daily life, it is interesting because everyday life is diverse and meaningful, and it is impossible to be done with because it changes constantly. I do not think there is any necessary contradiction between an everyday perspective versus a societal or political perspective on media use – instead, everyday life is where political dimensions of media are experienced, interpreted, and acted upon. This point runs as an undercurrent through the analyses of this book and is highlighted in the concluding chapter.

What is Everyday Life?

We have established that media are part of everyday life, and that research on media use is interested in everyday life. That is not to say that definitions everyday life abound in the literature referenced above, or in the field at large. Even classic contributions observe that commenting on the topic of everyday life might seem simplistic (e.g. Silverstone, 1994, p. 19). There is considerable variation in how precisely or extensively the concept is explained: Some works develop distinct philosophical understandings (e.g. Bakardijeva in Sandvik et al., 2016), or ground the term in substantial discussion of different theoretical positions (e.g. Cavalcante et al., 2017). Some authors define the term and how it connects to methodological and analytical frameworks in their studies). Others explain adjacent concepts to the everyday, such as the study mentioned above of why people still read print newspapers (Boczkowski et al., 2021), which draws on theories of ritualization, sociality and cultural contexts.

Nevertheless, everyday life is theorized in disciplines from human geography (Holloway & Hubbard, 2001) to psychology (Schraube & Højholt, 2016). Some central philosophical contributions are Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (1947), which formulates a Marxist-inspired argument about the importance of this sphere of human conduct in the face of capitalism and technological change, and Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) which emphasizes the concept of potentially subversive tactics in people’s navigation through daily life. Another key work is The Structures of the Lifeworld (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973) which formulates Alfred Schutz’ theory of the lifeworld in which everyday life is enacted, including spatial, temporal and social dimensions, and how we move through ‘zones of operation’ where people and places beyond our immediate surroundings are yet within ‘restorable reach’ to us, through the familiarity or routines in the everyday which we take for granted (1973). This understanding has been particularly important to phenomenological and sociological studies of media and technologies in everyday life.

Such philosophical works on everyday life are briefly to comprehensively referenced in studies of everyday media use, providing a background understanding that is made more or less explicit. For instance, Herman Bausinger (1984) set out to discuss the role of media in daily living, drawing on Schutz and a growing empirical as well as philosophical interest in everyday life as a research topic. He observed that media are not used in isolation from one another or from personal relationships. Making an example of the intricate details of negotiating media use in family dynamics at home, he argued that ‘The media are an integral part of the way the everyday is conducted’ (Bausinger, 1984, p. 349) and made several points that have later been picked up in discussions of media ensembles (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017) and of media use as mundane but yet meaningful in everyday settings (Hermes, 1995; Sandvik et al., 2016). In her study of early internet use at home, Marija Bakardjieva (Bakardjieva, 2005) provides a thorough theoretical discussion of how Scuhtz and Lefebvre’s theories relate to communication technologies, developing the idea of a critical phenomenology to understand users as well as systems.

Roger Silverstone’s work on everyday life also references Schutz’ understanding of the lifeworld, and further invokes Anthony Giddens’ sociology of the self in a discussion of whether this lifeworld is different in conditions of late modernity (Silverstone, 1993). Silverstone references debates about order and chaos in a world of complex societal issues and new communication systems, juxtaposed with an observation that television is something we have seemingly come to take for granted, as a technology and social phenomenon and as part of our everyday lives. Connecting these threads, Silverstone emphasizes the significance of routines and familiarity in in keeping the chaos of the world at bay and upholding a sense of order:

Routines, rituals, traditions, myths, these are the stuff of social order and everyday life. Within the familiar and taken for granted, as well as through the heightened and dramatic, our lives take shape and within those shapes, spatially and temporarily grounded and signified, we attempt to go about our business, avoiding or managing, for the most part, the traumas and the catastrophes that threaten to disturb our peace and sanity. (Silverstone, 1994, p. 18)

In this understanding, everyday habits institute and reaffirm a sense of ontological security , a concept Giddens applies to describe feelings of trust and continuity in people’s experience of the world and sense of self, central to how people position themselves in the world and give meaning to life (Giddens, 1991). Ontological security is also a key concept in Annette Markham’s more recent theory of digital communication as echolocation, emphasizing ping-backs when we send out messages through digital media, and in return have our continued existence in the world confirmed (Markham, 2021). Her discussion underlines how feelings of being connected or disconnected through digital media can harbour existential anxieties related to the confirmation of the self.

Across these theories of everyday life, some key dimensions stand out. Everyday life has to do with the organization of time (temporal dimensions), space (spatial dimensions), and people and activities (social dimensions) through which we make meaning and relate to the word and our position in it (existential dimensions). I draw on these dimensions to further situate media use in everyday life, emphasizing how we use media for routinized navigation across social domains.

Situating Media Use in Everyday Life

To understand media use – here applied as an umbrella term for all kinds of relationships and engagements with media and communication technologies – we need to situate media use as part of everyday life, in people’s lifeworlds. Drawing on the ideas introduced above, of familiarity and routines, and of spatial, temporal, social and existential dimensions, we can envision many different roles and positions for media. I am particularly interested in how we use media to orient ourselves as we move through our everyday lives, as part of what I call routinized navigation across social domains . What does this mean, exactly?

Everyday media use is routinized because we do not invent it from scratch – we rely on repeated actions that we are familiar with, regarding media use as well as other aspects of everyday living. Imagine waking up in the morning and not repeating anything you have done before – instead of making the same type of coffee and checking the same apps on your smartphone. Like other habits and routines, familiar and repeated media use practices are particularly essential to the ontological security of everyday life emphasized by Silverstone, Markham and others. Habits are also a central concept in media and communication psychology (LaRose, 2010, 2015), and central to studies seeking to grasp user patterns over time or across demographics. We build everyday habits in many forms and around many activities – including media use.

Everyday life encompasses multiple social domains – such as work and family life – that are meaningful to us and that we engage with frequently, and that also form important contexts for how we use media. There are rich research literatures that explore meanings of media use in different social domains, for instance focused on life phases such as adolescence or experiences such as parenthood (e.g. Boyd, 2014; Das, 2019; Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Transitions between life phases, such as a student graduating or a worker retiring, are so significant because the social domains of our everyday lives change with these events. These social domains are essential to the meaning we find in life, making the conduct of everyday life an existential project. We engage with social domains in many ways – including media use and communication.

A specific interest I explore in this book is how we use media across and in-between social domains, for what I refer to as navigation : Everyday media use entails navigation across multiple social domains because an ordinary day can encompass an array of activities and locations, in which we enact different social roles with different people. Everyday life can be messy and disorganized, with too many things to juggle at once, or feel too fast- or slow-paced, but whether we have plans for everything or go with the flow, some form of coordination and navigation is required, both physically and metaphorically. We conduct such navigation in many ways – including media use and communication. Digital technologies have become fundamental to this navigation – practically and specifically, but also socially and existentially.

So, to summarize: We have already established that media are part of daily routines, and that such routines are essential to everyday life in. We can also discuss if and how the social domains of everyday life are mediated or mediatized, and how deep these processes run (Couldry & Hepp, 2017; Hepp, 2020). But my main interest in this book is how our navigation across the social domains of everyday life changes with digital media – how we use digital media to connect to different social domains, orient ourselves to what goes on there, coordinate activities and communicate across contexts. Media use is essential to the navigation of everyday life, and the role of media in this navigation holds implications for how we experience our lives as meaningful, for how we understand and situate ourselves in the world. How we conduct this navigation is changing with the digitalization and datafication of the media, particularly after the smartphone.

Analyzing Media Use in Everyday Life

The theories of everyday life that are most central to media and communication studies originate from an era of television, and the domestic sphere is the social domain that has received the most attention. Family dynamics and the spatiality of the home are central to analyses ranging from Morely’s discussion of who controls the remote control (Morley, 1992) to what happens when the people watching television also have tablets and computers (D’Heer & Courtois, 2016). However, we can no longer simply declare, as Silverstone could in his classic volume, that ‘Television is a domestic medium. It is watched at home. Ignored at home. Discussed at home’ (Silverstone, 1994, p. 24). Instead, streaming and mobile and social media makes a mess of the boundaries formerly established when living room locations and scheduled programming were organizing principles for watching television. Similarly, a question in earlier internet studies of whether and how people would actually want to make space for computers in their homes (Bakardjieva, 2005) is made more complicated not just by laptops and smartphones, but also by connective household devices and wearable technologies. The home is still important, but our navigation with media inside and beyond the home has changed.

A broader point is therefore that the proliferation of digital media has made it more difficult to make assumptions about how to situate media in everyday life, while media might be more important than ever to how we navigate across our daily lives. This also has implications for the analytical concepts and approaches we invoke to study everyday media use.

To analyze media in everyday life, it is possible to select a particular platform, medium, genre or media text, and look for its applications and meaning in everyday settings, similar to investigations into how the cultural role of television played out in people’s everyday lives. But to account for the increased potential for variation in everyday media use, it is more relevant to start with people and how we live our lives, and then explore how media matters. Much of the scholarship already discussed in this chapter argues for the value of less media-centric approaches to media studies – media might need to be de-centred in order to understand what it means. I will particularly draw on two conceptual approaches to situate media use in everyday life through a user perspective: Media repertoires and public connection.

Media repertoires is a concept intended to capture the totality and meaningful relations between media a person uses regularly (Hasebrink & Domeyer, 2012; Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017). Following the essential insight that ‘audiences are inherently cross-media’ (Schrøder, 2011), a key value of repertoire approaches is to focus less on singular experiences with reading The Guardian , watching Game of Thrones or using TikTok, and instead figure out how these or completely different elements are relative to each other in the context of a person’s everyday media use. Consequently, media repertoire approaches explore which media users have a routinized relationship with, how they prioritize between different possibilities, and how people compose and reflect upon the totality of their regular media use. Media repertoire research has moved from figuring out how to establish elements of repertoires towards growing interest in repertoires as dynamic and reflexive constructs, analyzing how they emerge, are maintained and change over time (Peters & Schrøder, 2018; Vandenplas et al., 2021; Vulpius et al., 2022; Ytre-Arne, 2019).

Public connection is a concept that describes people’s orientations to society, in a broad sense – how people connect to public life, politics, culture or community (Couldry et al., 2010; Nærland, 2019; Swart et al., 2017; Ytre-Arne & Moe, 2018). The advantage of a public connection approach – as opposed to a pre-determined focus on whether people follow hard news or traditional politics – is to explore more openly what issues people are interested in, and how they follow those interests, across but also beyond journalism (Couldry et al., 2010; Moe & Ytre-Arne, 2021). Media is important to public connection, but not the only means of societal orientation, and mediated public connection can take many forms. Joelle Swart and colleagues define public connection as ‘the various shared frames of reference that enable individuals to engage and participate in cultural, social, civic, and political networks in everyday life’ (Swart et al., 2017) and suggest that inclusiveness, constructiveness, relevance and engagement are dimensions in how media becomes meaningful in everyday life.

Both of these perspectives imply that there is no universal answer to when, how, or why media matters in everyday life – it is contextual and relative. Both perspectives are easily opened up to analysis of the heightened complexities that digitalization have brought to everyday media use. In this book, I draw on media repertoire approaches to analyze everyday media use from the perspective of individual users, and on the public connection concept to discuss how people connect to society through everyday media use.

A More Digital Everyday Life

A different way of situating media in everyday life is to ask if one shapes the other, and if so, which way around. A useful parallel can be found in debates on how digital technologies shape our social realities. Nancy Baym argues in Personal Connections in the Digital Age (2015) that perspectives such as technological determinism or social constructivism need a middle ground, and draws on theories about social shaping of technologies (and media domestication) to emphasize how we interact and negotiate with media technologies, over time and with tensions, in cultural and social contexts. A similar dynamic applies to media use in everyday life with advanced digital technologies. We can simultaneously consider how digital media use shapes everyday life, and how everyday life shapes digital media use.

Arguments for why digital media use shapes everyday life are not hard to come by. Social, mobile and digital media has transformed how people socialize, learn, work, relax, and conduct practical tasks, with the smartphone as a coordinating centre aggregating personal communication streams for multiple spheres of life. Scholars have framed the evolving role of social media and digital platforms as a culture of connectivity (van Dijck, 2013) or a digital environment in which we live our lives (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2021). Digital anthropologist Daniel Miller theorizes the smartphone as a ‘transportable home’, arguing that we should regard it ‘less as a device we use, than as a place within which we now live’ (Miller, 2021). This metaphor allows us to think of the smartphone as a place where lots of different activities take place, from the mundane to the special, a place where we might invite others in or be alone. Some argue that we live in media (Deuze, 2012) or that the construction of reality itself is mediatized (Couldry & Hepp, 2017). With the datafication of society, practices and dilemmas of interacting with digital platforms, and of being tracked and surveilled as part of opaque power dynamics, become increasingly relevant across a range of everyday contexts and social domains (Das & Ytre-Arne, 2018; Dencik et al., 2017; Kennedy et al., 2015; Møller Hartley et al., 2021).

On the other hand, everyday life shapes digital media use. Media are not the only components of the lifeworld, following the understanding of it developed above, meaning that the everyday lives in which we use media are shaped by many other factors. Things happen, within or beyond our control: A series of planned, sudden, expected, accidental, incidental, repeated, extraordinary, small and big events have direct impact on how we live our lives and use media. A key interest for Giddens is how individuals reflexively work to integrate such events into coherent understandings of the self (Giddens, 1991). Likewise, different societal contexts, and differences in privileges and resources and freedoms to shape everyday life, pose restrictions as well as opportunities. Some of these contexts we can negotiate, some we might work to change over time, others appear beyond control.

A recent and striking example is the COVID-19 pandemic: It might be impossible to separate our experience of the event from the mediation of it, but it was a virus spreading across the globe and a series of counter-measures that impacted people’s lives, including uses of digital media, and that affected people differently and accentuated already established divides (e.g. Milan et al., 2020). The pandemic is an example of how norms for and meanings of media use are made visible in precarious situations, when established practices are uprooted by change. It illustrates how everyday circumstances have profound impact on media use and that there are severe inequalities affecting the current crisis as well as more long-term divides. These restrictions and inequalities also affect our uses of digital media to understand the changing world around us.

It has become impossible to imagine everyday life as we know it without digital media, while interest in what this fundamentally means is growing – as seen for instance in the debates on ubiquitous connectivity (van Dijck, 2013), deep mediatization (Couldry & Hepp, 2017) or digital disconnection (Bucher, 2020; Syvertsen, 2020). The growing scholarship on digital disconnection problematizes the meanings of connection and disconnection (e.g. Baym et al., 2020; Bucher, 2020; Kuntsman & Miyake, 2019), but the cultural resonance of digital detox also hinges on ideas of meaningful sociality and presence away from the digital. Empirical studies find that disconnecting users refer to more meaningful personal relations as a perceived benefit (e.g. Brennen, 2019; Pennington, 2020), while there is an abundance of arguments in media and communication studies against presumptions of digital communication as separate or inferior to other aspects of social life (Baym, 2015; Boyd, 2014; Fortunati, 2005).

So, when we say that everyday life is more digital than before, we might consider the existence and proliferation of relatively new devices such as the smartphone or various forms of connective technologies in our surroundings, or we might think of the ways in which social and digital media take part in how we constitute our identities and social relationships, and interact with each other at home, at work and in a range of everyday settings. This book takes a dynamic middle perspective similar to what Baym (2015) calls social shaping of technologies, and investigates experiences and dilemmas of media use in digital everyday life.

Whose Everyday Life?

Everyday lives are significantly different, but everyone has one. This makes media use in everyday life both a very inclusive topic and one that is riddled with unequal power positions. It is problematic to write about how ‘we’ interact with media, as I do in this introductory chapter, because inequalities and divides are fundamental to the role that media play in different everyday lives. Dimensions such as gender, class, age or ethnicity, and the uneven distribution of resources between the Global North or Global South, form intersectional patterns that affect digital media use in everyday contexts. In particular, the debate on datafication strongly accentuates these perspectives (Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Milan & Treré, 2019). Several studies of digital media use in non-Western contexts demonstrate the need to be careful about generalizing, and instead develop contextualized understandings of empirical cases and key concepts (e.g. Boczkowski, 2021; Costa, 2018).

However, everyday media use is also a topic where it is possible to read a study from one historical period, cultural context, or global power position, and recognize resonant themes as well as significant differences to one’s own experiences. To situate media use in everyday life is useful to this purpose, because it makes visible rather than obscures some of the sociocultural conditions and normative expectations surrounding media use. This book draws on cross-national studies of everyday media use (e.g. Boczkowski et al., 2021; Carolus et al., 2019; Treré, 2021) as well as single-country studies from geographical and cultural contexts that are different to those analyzed here, but is influenced by my positionality as a media researcher in a small Northern European country.

Empirically, the book is based on extensive qualitative research on digital media use in Norway. Norway is a wealthy welfare state in the Global North, with an active media policy, high ICT penetration, high levels of news use and an advanced digitalized society (Newman et al., 2021; Syvertsen et al., 2014,). Norway is also a very small country with a dispersed population, with many cultural similarities and some differences to its Scandinavian neighbours and the rest of Northern Europe. The Norwegian case is obviously not representative of everyday lives elsewhere or everywhere, as no single country study could possibly be. However, Norway is a suitable case for qualitatively exploring how technological transformations affect media users across everyday contexts, because of the wide and deep proliferation of media technologies in Norwegian society. In the book, the Norwegian cultural and social context is part of the empirical materials as well as my interpretation of them, and I comment and reflect upon some aspects of the Norwegian case and context in the empirical chapters. The main categories that form the three empirical chapters – the ordinary day, across the life course, major disruption – are intended to be relevant and applicable more broadly, even though they can be filled with extensive variation.

An empirical background for the book is a broadly oriented cross-media interview and diary study, with 50 informants mirroring the Norwegian population (Moe et al., 2019a; Moe & Ytre-Arne, 2021), while new empirical materials include smaller case studies focusing on media use amongst new mothers, and media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. These originate from several research projects conducted over the past years, as explained in further detail in the methods appendix. All studies are relatively diverse in terms of the socioeconomic background of informants, in a Norwegian context, and with the exception of the sample on new mothers, there is variation in gender and age groups. The larger sample in particular includes informants with various forms of immigrant or minority backgrounds. 1

Conclusion: Everyday Life After the Smartphone

After more than a decade with the smartphone, what is different about everyday life?

In this book I argue that everyday life is – as before – an experienced lifeworld, a sphere of temporal, spatial, social and existential dimensions, in which we conduct routinized navigation across social domains. Digital, social, and mobile media transform how this navigation takes place – and blurs boundaries set by these temporal, spatial and social structures. We have a lot more choice than before in terms of when, where and how to use media, but this also raises dilemmas and intensifies negotiations of social norms. These tensions are encountered and enacted in workplaces, schools and public areas as much as through quarrels about the remote control in the living room, increasing the mobility and reducing the domesticity of media use in everyday life.

The smartphone is emblematic of this development, due to three important characteristics: It is adaptable, aggregating and always nearby. Adaptability refers to how smartphone use can be adapted to different personal preferences, tasks and settings, making it a go-to platform for a growing number of purposes across digital platforms and services. Aggregating refers to how smartphones connect and integrate these purposes and forms of communication in one single device that forms the centre of a personalized and networked ecosystem of digital communication technologies. Always near , or proximity, refers to how we come to rely on the smartphone as an extension of ourselves, kept near to the body also at night and through different social settings, picked up too frequently to remember. So, we increasingly conduct our routinized navigation across social domains through the smartphone, the centrepiece of our digital everyday life.

In Chapter 2, I substantiate the arguments above about media use after the proliferation of smartphones, focusing on the timeframe of one ordinary day for media users. Based on day-in-the-life interviews, I analyze experiences of waking up with the smartphone, navigating across social domains through digital media use, and negotiating norms and contexts for when and how to use different media. I draw on the arguments introduced here about the adaptable, aggregating and always-near status of the smartphone, but also situate smartphone use in light of broader media repertoires and modes of public connection, by following media users with different everyday lives.

In Chapter 3, I progress from ordinary days to instead discuss periods in which everyday life is changing. I discuss destabilization and reorientation in media use as part of transitions in the life course. Here, I argue that life events are turning points in which we also reconfigure our media repertoires and modes of public connection, and that the adaptable, aggregating and always-near smartphone is particularly easy to turn to in processes. The empirical analysis focuses on the experience of parenthood, but provides two broader arguments: one on destabilization and reorientation of media use, and one on how norms for digital media are negotiated in contexts of changing roles and responsibilities.

In Chapter 4, I push the arguments on destabilization further by discussing the COVID-19 pandemic as an example of global crisis that disrupted everyday life, and affected the ways we use the media for navigating in precarious situations. The pandemic called for re-configuration of everyday media use, but of a different nature and on a different scale as opposed to the life course perspective discussed in Chapter 3. I analyze how the pandemic destabilized media repertoires into becoming more digital, less mobile and still social, and discuss new terminology for pandemic media experiences including doomscrolling and Zoom fatigue.

The last chapter, Chapter 5, concludes by summarizing the main arguments and contributions of the book, and particularly underlines the political dimensions of digital media use in everyday settings.

All informant names in the book are pseudonyms.

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Digital Media and Society: An Introduction

""The rise of digital media has been widely regarded as transforming the nature of our social experience in the twenty–first century. The speed with which new forms of connectivity and communication are being incorporated into our everyday lives often gives us little time to stop and consider the social implications of those practices. Nonetheless, it is critically important that we do so, and this sociological introduction to the field of digital technologies is intended to enable a deeper understanding of their prominent role in everyday life. The fundamental theoretical and ethical debates on the sociology of the digital media are presented in accessible summaries, ranging from economy and technology to criminology and sexuality. Key theoretical paradigms are explored through a broad range of contemporary social phenomena – from social networking and virtual lives to the rise of cybercrime and identity theft, from the utopian ideals of virtual democracy to the Orwellian nightmare of the surveillance society, from the free software movement to the implications of online shopping. As an entry–level pathway for students in sociology, media, communications and cultural studies, the aim of this work is to situate the rise of digital media within the context of a complex and rapidly changing world. ‘ Digital Media and Society is a comprehensive, compelling and critical examination of the social and cultural consequences of digital media and communication technologies. The book provides a cohesive and coherent look at the present digital state of society, and it explains how the digital present came to be and what its consequences are. It is written in a clear, jargon–free manner and filled with information and questions that make it a remarkably useful teaching text.’ Steve Jones, University of Illinois at Chicago ‘Adrian Athique’s introduction brings digital media, and its culture, politics and economics, into sharp focus. This book provides an essential outline of the digital world; it is accessible to all while remaining complex enough to be accurate.’ Tim Jordan, King’s College London" " The book is jammed packed with many current and interesting issues of concern and includes an impressive review of an extensive range of related scholarly publications. The style of the book makes it a great textbook for students of sociology or communication and media studies. All in all, the book is ambitious and impressive, it includes an extensive account of contemporary scholarly work in related fields, and it was easy and enjoyable to read. The book is warmly recommend to other readers." Nasrine Olson, Information Research "Digital Media and Society’s main strength to provide a concise and eclectic yet satisfactorily rich and well contextualized account of digital life. Athique successfully situates this complex, multifaceted subject with the same proficiency he showed in his explorations of India’s media culture, at the crossroads between cultural practice, economic development, and geopolitical struggle...Digital Media and Society (is) a great didactic tool to introduce sociology and communications students to the advent of the digital society. The author’s ability to situate the complex, interconnected issues and perspectives at stake will without any doubt encourage those students not only to critically engage but also to continue exploring this new indispensable field of sociological inquiry." Louis Melancon, Canadian Journal of Sociology "Overall, in a context characterised by a lot of published, but at times fragmented, ‘noise’ around digital media and society, Athique’s book provides a clear, well-structured and comprehensive overview of the historical development of both digital media and the variety of approaches to theorise their impact. If we allow for the duly acknowledged ‘Anglophone bias’, the book convincingly explores a contemporary ‘digital society’." Henk Huijser, Media International Australia"

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Introduction: Understanding Media and Society in the Age of Digitalisation

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The introduction sets the context by outlining the goals and scope of the book and emphasises the international outlook and focus on research practices and methodologies. It provides a brief account of recent developments in the field that highlight why the discipline and its methods constantly re-invent themselves but also why traditional method will coexist with new approaches. It then outlines how each of the parts is connected to each other and what chapters they include. The main goals of this chapter are outlining the context of the book, which is to discuss, explain, and evaluate the diversity in practices, views, and methodologies in contemporary media studies and communications research, and providing a summary of parts and chapters, including information about the authors.

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Nguyen, D., Dekker, I., Nguyen, S. (2020). Introduction: Understanding Media and Society in the Age of Digitalisation. In: Nguyen, D., Dekker, I., Nguyen, S. (eds) Understanding Media and Society in the Age of Digitalisation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38577-4_1

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What's Next? How Digital Media Shapes Our Society

A summary of Professor Leah A. Lievrouw's most recent book, which explores the rapidly changing role communication plays at the center of human experience and endeavor.

UCLA Information Studies Professor Leah A. Lievrouw’s first academic job was at Rutgers University in the late 1980s. One day, a colleague, a media effects researcher, was talking with her in her office and said, “Well, you know this new media stuff, it’s kind of interesting, but really it’s just a fad, isn’t it?”

That “new media stuff” has been the centerpiece of Lievrouw’s research ever since and today is central to many of the economic, social, political and policy challenges that confront the globe.

“My interest is in new technologies, communication information technologies and social change, and how change happens for good and ill. It’s really a sociological take. I’m more interested in what’s going on at the whole society or whole community level,” Lievrouw said. Professor Lievrouw joined the UCLA Department of Information Studies in 1995 and in 2005 co-edited “The Handbook of New Media” (Sage Publications), with Sonia Livingston of the London School of Economics. The book became a central resource for study of the field and is still used in classrooms and cited in research.

“It was really a big comprehensive survey with leading people in the field who were working on this research, right across various sub-fields and different topics,” Lievrouw said. “For a long time and in some circles still it is kind of the definitive capture of what the field was like and what the issues were at the moment.”

With changes in technology and communication rapidly occurring with ever larger impact, Lievrouw and her colleagues began talking about not just an update, but a whole new book.

Lievrouw decided to move forward and eventually linked up with Brian Loader, a professor at the University of York in the United Kingdom and editor-in-chief of the journal Information, Communication and Society, to serve as co-editor.

The book draws together the work of scholars from across the globe to examine the forces that shape our digital social lives and further our understanding of the sociocultural impact of digital media.

Routledge Handbook of Digital Media and Communication

“As of this writing, as the world undergoes breakdowns in social, institutional, and technological systems across every domain of human affairs in the wake of a biological and public health crisis of unprecedented scale and scope, such a framework for understanding communicative action, technology, and social forms has never been so apt or so urgently needed.” - Routledge Publishing

Mirroring the approach of the earlier “Handbook of Social Media,” the book is organized into a three-part framework exploring the artifacts or devices, the practices and institutional arrangements that are central to digital media, and draws the connections across the three elements.

The book explores topics such as the power of algorithms, digital currency, gaming culture, surveillance, social networking, and connective mobilization. As described in the introduction by Routledge, the “Handbook delivers a comprehensive, authoritative overview of the state of new media scholarship and its most important future directions that will shape and animate current debates.”

“I really like that again this seems to be a pretty definitive state-of-the-art kind of look at what is going on with these technologies,” Lievrouw said. “This has perhaps a more critical edge than we had 20 years ago, because we have begun to see the downsides of digital media as well as all the upsides that everyone had such hopes about. What makes me really happy is that this volume kind of pulls back a bit and takes a bigger stock of the issues and challenges. We have a few chapters that I think are just really definitive, written by some of the very best people on the planet. We were very lucky to recruit such a terrific lineup of people.”

Professor Lievrouw refers to a series of essays on critical topics in the book by leading experts such as Paul Dourish exploring Ubiquity or the everywhereness of digital media; Veronica Barrasi, writing about youth, algorithms, and political data; and Julie Cohen, writing about the nature of property in a world driven by social media and more.

“In her chapter, Cohen asks, what’s the nature of property? Every aspect of our behavior or of our beliefs is constantly kind of being pulled away from us, appropriated and owned by outfits like Google and like Facebook. They now consider this their proprietary information, and we’ve not had that before in the world really, certainly not on this scale. I think that’s worth exploring,” Lievrouw said.

Timing is everything, and the new book is emerging at a time of particular relevance and questioning about digital media.

“The book has happened to come out at a moment when there’s so much skepticism, and so much worry,” Professor Lievrouw said. “What’s interesting is that the worry is in the scholarly community too and has been for a little while.

“We’re in that moment where we are having to look, not only at the most egregious and outrageous behaviors, opinions, and disinformation, and all the kinds of things that have come out from under the rocks. And the system itself is rather mature at this point, so the question becomes, ‘Where is it going to go? What do we do next? Is it just more incursion, more data, more surveillance, more circulation of stuff?’ And we are doing it without editing, without gatekeepers. And we should never forget about the impact of places like Facebook, Google, Amazon. “It has changed social structure.

It has changed cultural practices. It has changed our perception of the world fundamentally. And I think it’s not just the technology that did this, it’s the way we built it.

“I think we are entering a period of reckoning about these technologies, the whole complex of people involved in the building and operation of platforms and different kinds of applications, especially data gathering. Data has come to the center of the economics of this thing in a way that it hasn’t before. This is a good moment to reassess what works, what has been emancipatory, what has been enabling for people, how the diffusion of these technologies, and the adaptation of their use, is impacting different places and different cultures all over the world.

“Every thoughtful researcher in this area I know is turning this over in their head, saying, ‘How did we get to this point? What happened here?’ I think what this book can help us understand not only where we are right now, but also to think about what could be next, and what can we do to repair this. Right now, I don’t think anybody has a solid answer for that. If they do, it’s an answer they don’t like.”

Excerpt from Introduction

No longer new, digital media and communication technologies—and their associated infrastructures, practices, and cultural forms—have become woven into the very social fabric of contemporary human life. Despite the cautiously optimistic accounts of the potential of the Internet to foster stronger democratic governance, enable connective forms of mobilization, stimulate social capital (community, social, or crisis informatics), restructure education and learning, support remote health care, or facilitate networked flexible organization, the actual development of digital media and communication has been far more problematic. Indeed, recent commentary has been more pessimistic about the disruptive impact of digital media and communication upon our everyday lives. The promise of personal emancipation and free access to unlimited digital resources has, some argue, led us to sleepwalk into a world of unremitting surveillance, gross disparities in wealth, precarious employment opportunities, a deepening crisis in democracy, and an opaque global network of financial channels and transnational corporations with unaccountable monopoly power.

A critical appraisal of the current state of play of the digital world is thus timely, indeed overdue, and required if we are to examine these assertions and concerns clearly. There is no preordained technological pathway that digital media must follow or are following. A measure of these changes is the inadequacy of many familiar concepts— such as commons, public sphere, social capital, class, and others—to capture contemporary power relations or to explain transitions from “mass society” to networked sociality—or from mass to personalized consumption. Even the strategies of resistance to these transitions draw upon traditional appeals to unionization, democratic accountability, mass mobilization, state regulation, and the like, all part of the legacy of earlier capitalist and political forms.

How then to examine the current digitalscape? Internet-based and data-driven systems, applications, platforms, and affordances now play a pivotal role in every domain of social life. Under the rubric of new media research, computer-mediated communication, social media or Internet studies, media sociology, or media anthropology, research and scholarship in the area have moved from the fringe to the theoretical and empirical center of many disciplines, spawning a whole generation of new journals and publishers’ lists. Within communication research and scholarship itself, digital technologies and their consequences have become central topics in every area of the discipline—indeed, they have helped blur some of the most enduring boundaries dividing many of the field’s traditional specializations. Meanwhile, the ubiquity, adaptability, responsiveness, and networked structure of online communication, the advantages of which—participation, convenience, engagement, connectedness, community—were often celebrated in earlier studies, have also introduced troubling new risks, including pervasive surveillance, monopolization, vigilantism, cyberwar, worker displacement, intolerance, disinformation, and social separatism.

Technology infrastructure has several defining features that make it a distinctive object of study. Infrastructures are embedded; transparent (support tasks invisibly); have reach or scope beyond a single context; learned as part of membership in a social or cultural group; are linked to existing practices and routines; embody standards; are built on an existing, installed base; and, perhaps most critically, ordinarily become “visible” or apparent to users only when they break down: when “the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout.” As of this writing, as the world undergoes breakdowns in social, institutional, and technological systems across every domain of human affairs in the wake of a biological and public health crisis of unprecedented scale and scope, such a framework for understanding communicative action, technology, and social forms has never been so apt or so urgently needed.

Two cross-cutting themes had come to characterize the quality and processes of mediated communication over the prior two decades. The first is a broad shift from the mass and toward the network as the defining structure and dominant logic of communication technologies, systems, relations, and practices; the second is the growing enclosure of those technologies, relations, and practices by private ownership and state security interests. These two features of digital media and communication have joined to create socio-technical conditions for communication today that would have been unrecognizable even to early new media scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, to say nothing of the communication researchers before them specializing in classical media effects research, political economy of media, interpersonal and group process, political communication, global/comparative communication research, or organizational communication, for example.

This collection of essays reveals an extraordinarily faceted, nuanced picture of communication and communication studies, today. For example, the opening part, “Artifacts,” richly portrays the infrastructural qualities of digital media tools and systems. Stephen C. Slota, Aubrey Slaughter, and Geoffrey C. Bowker’s piece on “occult” infrastructures of communication expands and elaborates on the infrastructure studies perspective. Paul Dourish provides an incisive discussion on the nature and meaning of ubiquity for designers and users of digital systems. Essays on big data and algorithms (Taina Bucher), mobile devices and communicative gestures (Lee Humphreys and Larissa Hjorth), digital embodiment and financial infrastructures (Kaitlyn Wauthier and Radhika Gajjala), interfaces and affordances (Matt Ratto, Curtis McCord, Dawn Walker, and Gabby Resch), hacking (Finn Brunton), and digital records and memory (David Beer) demonstrate how computation and data generation/capture have transfigured both the material features and the human experience of engagement with media technologies and systems. The second part, “Practices,” shifts focus from devices, tools, and systems to the communicative practices of the people who use them. Digital media and communication today have fostered what some writers have called datafication—capturing and rendering all aspects of communicative action, expression, and meaning into quantified data that are often traded in markets and used to make countless decisions about, and to intercede in, people’s experiences. Systems that allow people to make and share meaning are also configured by private-sector firms and state security actors to capture and enclose human communication and information.

This dynamic is played out in routine monitoring and surveillance (an essay by Mark Andrejevic), in the construction and practice of personal identity (Mary Chayko), in family routines and relationships (Nancy Jennings), in political participation (Brian Loader and Veronica Barassi), in our closest relationships and sociality (Irina Shklovski), in education and new literacies (Antero Garcia), in the increasing precarity of “information work” (Leah Lievrouw and Brittany Paris), and in what Walter Lippmann famously called the “picture of reality” portrayed in the news (Stuart Allan, Chris Peters, and Holly Steel). Many suggest that the erosion of boundaries between public and private, true and false, and ourselves and others is increasingly taken for granted, with mediated communication as likely to create a destabilizing, chronic sense of disruption and displacement as it is to promote deliberation, cohesion, or solidarities.

The broader social, organizational, and institutional arrangements that shape and regulate the tools and the practices of digital communication and information, and which themselves are continuously reformed, are explored in the third part. Nick Couldry starts with an overview of mediatization, the growing centrality of media in what he calls the “institutionalization of the social” and the establishment of social order, at every level from microscale interaction to the jockeying among nation-states. There are essays that present evidence of the instability, uncertainty, and delegitimation associated with digital media; reflections on globalization; a survey of governance and regulation; a revisitation of political economy; and the trenchant reconsideration of the notion of property. Elena Pavan and Donatella della Porta examine the role of digital media in social movements while Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman argue that digital technologies may, in fact, help reinforce people’s senses of community and belonging both online and offline. Shiv Ganesh and Cynthia Stohl show that while much past research was focused on the “fluidity” or formlessness of organization afforded by “digital ubiquity,” in fact contemporary organizing is a more subtle process comprising “opposing tendencies and human activities, of both form and formlessness.”

Taken together, the contributions present a complex, interwoven technical, social/cultural, and institutional fabric of society, which nonetheless seems to be showing signs of wear, or perhaps even breakdown in response to systemic environmental and institutional crises. As digital media and communication technologies have become routine, even banal—convenience, immediacy, connectedness—they are increasingly accompanied by a growing recognition of their negative externalities—monopoly and suppressed competition, ethical and leadership failures, and technological lock-in instead of genuine, path breaking innovation. The promise and possibility of new media and digitally mediated communication are increasingly tempered with sober assessments of risk, conflict, and exploitation.

This scenario may seem pessimistic, but perhaps one way to view the current state of digital media and communication studies is that it has matured, or reached a moment of consolidation, in which the visionary enthusiasms and forecasts of earlier decades have grown into a more developed or skeptical perspective. Digital media platforms and systems have diffused across the globe into cultural, political, and economic contexts and among diverse populations that often challenge the assumptions and expectations that were built into the early networks. The systems themselves, and their ownership and operations, have stabilized and become routinized, much as utilities and earlier media systems have done before, so they are more likely to resist root-and-branch change. They are as likely to reinforce and sustain patterns of knowledge and power as they are to “disrupt” them.

In another decade we might expect to find that the devices, practices, and institutional arrangements will have become even more integrated into common activities, places, and experiences, and culture will be unremarkable, embedded, woven into cultural practices, standardized, and invisible or transparent, just as satellite transmissions and undersea cables, or content streaming and social media platforms, are to us today. These socio-technical qualities will pose new kinds of challenges for communication researchers and scholars, but they also herald possibilities for a fuller, deeper understanding of the role communication plays at the center of human experience and endeavor.

This article is part of the UCLA Ed&IS Magazine Summer 2021 Issue. To read the full issue click here .

• Department of Information Studies
• Knowledge That Matters
• Leah Lievrouw
• UCLA Ed&IS Magazine

Digital Media and Society Essay

The penetration and impact of digital media on society are hard to overestimate nowadays. Digital technology dominates over the traditional one because of being more convenient in use and because of offering a multitude of opportunities to the consumers. Due to this fact, the process of globalization accelerates, making the data more and more universal. Therefore, it can be stated that we are becoming equal in front of digital media: consuming, equally dependant and equally manipulated. This connection is especially topical in the United States, where digital technology is accessible practically for anyone. Digital media have become an egalitarian force in American society.

Every day millions of people in America face problems, needs, and questions of various natures; and all of them have a single answer. If a student needs some information for studying, they may use sources of the Internet. If a mother finds her baby covered with a rash or has a high temperature, she will be more likely to consult Google than a doctor. If a businessman needs some data to be copied and transmitted immediately, he will use digital cameras and other gadgets.

If some pensioner wants to entertain themselves in their free time, they are going to turn on the TV set and endlessly switch the thousands of channels performed by a digital satellite. And finally, if this essay was to be presented to a great audience, it would be more convenient to broadcast it with the help of digital technologies than to print it thousands of times. Let us face it: digital media has usurped our life; in fact, it became a part of it, the bigger part. It has so far replaced all the means of interaction, communication, education, or entertainment known ever before. And the process of digital media spread is still in progress, as humanity itself stimulates this to happen.

First of all, it is worth stressing the fact that the issue concerns only American society. For if to analyze the world in general, the thesis will lose its viability. For instance, countries of the Third World are too contrastive to the United States in the respect of technological potential. In addition, there still are countries, which prefer traditional radio, television, and newspapers to digital media. American society, a society of consumers in a country that meets the consumers’ requirements, is the most likely to be related to digital media.

So what makes digital media so popular? And how does it reflect on society? The preference of digital media today can be explained by its universal form. All the information is coded, which is convenient and much faster to use. In comparison to some traditional technologies, digital media deals with numbers instead of images, voices, and other materials. Manovich accentuates the fact that “an image or a shape can be described using a mathematical function” (Manovich, 9).

Of course, it does not make digital media any more reliable, as far as the numerous copying and transferring of information leads to loss of data. Namely, some scientists have an opinion that “while in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise” (Manovich, 5). In addition, digital data cannot even be called genuine simply because of having a cyber shape.

But the huge advantage of it is that a combination of numbers is and always will be the most convenient to copy, carry and perform than anything else. Such coding is now studied and demonstrated at any computer course; therefore anyone can try to operate it if needed. This points to the connection between digital media and society: anyone can deal with it with no difficulties.

Indeed, digital media is one of the greatest means of globalization. Mixing different ethnical groups and their mentalities is just one of the numerous processes which are happening due to it today. We use digital gadgets to live our lives, we even prefer virtual money to those we can touch and smell. On the national level, different monopolies spread and become more powerful because of the commercials which are delivered to people together with news and entertainment. This can be treated as an egalitarian force of digital media on the economical level. Besides, there are several other issues that lead to the unity of the nation in different respects.

Another significant feature of digital media is its accessibility. The United States of America, a multicultural country with different nations and ethnic groups, can provide all the citizens with news or any other information which is important for them. And the viability of digital media as an egalitarian force, in this case, is reached with the help of the members of the society. People who speak different languages suddenly start to speak and comprehend English when it comes to the need for technology use.

In addition, even if someone had an extreme need to have the information on their language, it would be more than possible. It is well-known that nowadays the technology managed to even find a way of digitalizing the language, coding, and converting it. Of course, language cannot be translated by a system, but artificial intelligence is very popular and often used in this case.

Another issue concerning language as a factor that became rather flexible due to digital technologies is that digital media offers a special vocabulary that has the same form in every language. Numerous studies have shown the tendency of using such a vocabulary even in real life. It means that everyone who has access to digital media (which practically means anyone who lives in the United States) is at the same time involved in membership of a community with their secret language. This is another example of digital media being a link that unites and equals people. So it remains an open question if the digital media was made universal by technology or by consumers. In any case, people of any age or nation have equal opportunities to access digital media today.

A controversial point about the accessibility of digital media may appear when it comes to its cost. All the technologies seem to develop with an overwhelming speed; the tendencies of miniaturizing and improving can make the digital technologies quite expensive for some of the members of society. It can contradict its theoretical accessibility. But, on the other hand, there are sources that are open to the wide public. For instance, the Internet is one of those universal databases which can be used in any place by anyone.

Talking about the ability of digital media to make people equal, it is worth mentioning the Internet as a web of sites with information, which is divided into sections according to different topics. If several people are interested in one issue, they would probably try to find it on Internet, which is the fastest way. The web usually offers a set of articles, pieces of news, and writings that are the same for anyone who would like to read them.

This means that all the people will be given the same information about one issue, with a possibility which is a few times higher than a possibility of buying the same newspaper or watching the same channel. The information will also be listed on the Internet in the way from the most significant to the least significant, but the point is that the degree of importance is also defined by the system. This issue was also raised in the work of Gillmor, who writes about cable companies that used to decide which package of channels was to offer. The author notes ironically: “Oh, sure, customers had a choice: yes or no” (Gillmor, 5).

Therefore, all the interested appear to be just consumers who take in the prepared information. “Egalitarian” means based on the belief that everybody should have equal rights and opportunities. Even if these rights are repressed or manipulated, the key feature is equality. Negative or positive, the process described above is another demonstration of the egalitarian power of digital media.

The previous discussion can persuade us to make a logical conclusion about the tendency of digital technologies to atomize people. We no longer analyze the information, but just consume it. Moreover, digital technology has robbed people of a chance to perform their creativity. There is no more need of being creative in a world where numbers can replace thoughts. The digital media with its coded voice and image is practically nothing more than just a simple noise.

Anything can be changed, corrected, or even faked. That is why creativity is not stimulated to be developed today, which turns people into an atomized mass of consumers and wipes away any features of individual vision. This can be treated as a personality destroying power, but what it does is uniting all the people and breathing a single idea into them. If people are concerned about a single issue and have the same ideas about it then isn’t it a feature of an egalitarian community?

It is also worth mentioning that while talking about digital media as an egalitarian force it means only mental and behavioral equality of people. In respect of actual access to digital media, there are different aspects, most of which were discussed above. But there is also one distinguishing feature about how digital media tends to individualize people. There is something very special about the way we, for example, work with computers. Everyone nowadays has their computer, called Personal, and everyone is likely to sit alone in front of it while working or playing. This model of face-to-screen communication is sole for anyone today and therefore we can say that it makes people equal not only in having access to the digital media but also in the way they do it.

Media, in general, can be characterized as a means of delivery of information to the general public. This includes both news and entertainment, and the latter is much more popular. Digital media, like no other, can provide people with entertainment. Even though twenty-five percent of entertaining sites on the Internet are related to pornography (a sign of egalitarian unity of dissatisfied men?), there are also different readings, images, archives of music, etc.

Every day we download loads of information that can be measured mathematically but which influence is hard to imagine. It occupies, entertains, involves. Online games became so popular that the majority of studies about the impact of digital media are devoted to the analysis of the games’ characters, their hidden message, and their influence on players. People in costumes of the characters of games are welcomed to different shows and parades. It seems like the nation has a separate group of heroes, the virtual ones. American children are all equal in playing online games, and the adults – in being irritated by that. And yet it can be derived from the examples given that these entertainments unite the nation.

However, there is also some educational potential of digital media. The infinite sources of information are open to anyone today. Possibility of distanced and combined studying made it easier for students to get a diploma. What is more, anyone can use digital technologies for spreading their information. Undoubtedly, the Internet is much more convenient in use than a real library. Therefore, the new generation is highly unlikely to choose paper books and taking some notes when there is an opportunity of pressing just a few keys. Critical thinking and filtering the information read has been replaced by simple Ctrl C – Ctrl V.

Any student can simply recognize these combinations of keys, which once more points to the egalitarian force of digital media. But there should be no prejudices against modern students who often are considered to be lazy. It should also be taken into consideration that they are often stimulated to deal with digital media more than with the traditional ones. Specifically, academic presentations are always more successful when supported by some digital data: a film or images, which can be presented to the audience.

The students are often given a task to watch or read or find and analyze some articles or other materials which are spread with the help of digital media. In addition, pen and paper nowadays are more and more often replaced with the keyboard and screen. Indeed, the printed information is much easier to hold, transmit, or correct. As a result, even this essay was printed and typed with digital gadgets, and the digital media was a source of ideas for this work. Such changes in information form and value create a model of life and its perception for anyone who uses digital media. Of course, the information can be reliable and useful, but what changes gradually is how people use it.

The invention and development of artificial intelligence is another great issue that has both positive and negative sides. Everyone with no exception is familiar with it, and sometimes people use it undeliberately. For instance, John Mecklin writes about complex algorithms programming, which is “often placed under the over-colorful umbrella of artificial intelligence” (Mecklin, 1). Web sites like Google are very popular and irreplaceable for Americans today. Pursuit of news, entertainment, and a piece of advice are just varieties of one aim – using digital data. We have become addicted to it and much dependent on it, and, which is most striking, this concerns everyone.

Not only was the entertainment and studying digitalized, but also the most important sphere of adolescent life – work. Digital labor is nowadays preferred to all the other kinds of work. To illustrate, we can mention the expression of one of the scientists: “Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies” (Terranova, 34). Does it concern American society? Indisputably.

Even though the politicians may argue about giving an exact definition to American society, there is a capitalist basis that is supported and developed by the digital media. The commercial nature of this media suggests that society is divided into consumers and those who work for consumers, and often these roles coincide. Everybody needs something and everybody has an equal possibility to satisfy their needs. Thus, digital media continues equaling people in all the spheres of their lives.

After an argumentative discussion, it would be relevant to give some predictions for the future. Of course, we have no power to tell exactly how digital media will influence people’s life further on. But it undoubtedly will and we are likely to accelerate this process. Even though the images, shapes, and sounds are being coded nowadays, the codes are created and composed by human beings. It can give hope to people occupying technology in the future, but not vice versa.

On the other hand, people can get tired of the traditional ways of working which are left and live it all up to machines. This is very likely to happen, for the progressing of digital technology leaves no chance for conventional media to continue existing. In any case, all the processes connected to digital media development will influence the whole American nation, as far as technology has already become a part of our lives. When it comes to the nation’s interests, it is essential that not everyone is concerned about politics, not all the people are communicative or have the same ideas, but everybody is familiar with and interested in digital media. Hence, the only statement which will for sure be efficient is that digital media will always be an egalitarian force in American society.

Reference list

Manovich, Lev “What is New Media” (ch 1 of The Language of New Media).

Mecklin, John “Deep Throat Meets Data-Mining”.

Terranova, Tiziana “Free Labor Producing Culture for the Digital Economy”. Duke University Press. 2000.

Gillmor, Dan “From Tom Paine to Blogs”.

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IvyPanda. (2021, November 9). Digital Media and Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-media-and-society/

"Digital Media and Society." IvyPanda , 9 Nov. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/digital-media-and-society/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Digital Media and Society'. 9 November.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Digital Media and Society." November 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-media-and-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "Digital Media and Society." November 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-media-and-society/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Digital Media and Society." November 9, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/digital-media-and-society/.

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Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet

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Huxley, Aino

Abstract [en].

The increasing importance of media, especially digital media, in society has been studied widely, from identity formation to activist movements. In international relations studies digital media’s impact has focused considerably on public diplomacy 2.0. This focus has caused a more holistic view of digital diplomacy to be neglected. This study explores how digital media’s impacts as a part of mediatization are seen within the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. Semi-structured interviews with 11 officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were conducted. These led to the creation of three thematic fields. The first one looks into how the agency of the Ministry is seen to be impacted by digitalization. The second section looks into how community building is seen as essential. And the third part investigated how the ministry evaluates the impacts of digitalization on other ministries of foreign affairs in the light of its own experience. The finding is that the ministry is expanding into a new digital sphere and that in the process of so doing the Ministry is not a tabula rasa, but it mirrors the cultural and political context of the country within the online sphere. 

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• Postgraduate study
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Digital Media and Society

Explore this course:.

Department of Sociological Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences

Course description

This course offers you a unique opportunity to develop a broad understanding of the interweaving of digital media and society from a sociological perspective.

Drawing on staff expertise in digital media and digital society, you'll get a thorough grounding in key aspects of digital media, allowing you to specialise in a specific area. You'll develop a deep understanding of the following themes: researching digital society, digital practices and digital methods.

As a student within the Faculty of Social Sciences, you'll also benefit from the research and training activities of both the Sheffield Methods Institute and the faculty-wide Digital Society Network. The latter brings together interdisciplinary researchers engaged in cutting-edge research at the intersection of society and technology.

An open day gives you the best opportunity to hear first-hand from our current students and staff about our courses.

Find out what makes us special at our next online open day on  Wednesday 17 April 2024 .

You may also be able to pre-book a department visit as part of a campus tour. Open days and campus tours

• 1 year full-time
• 2 years part-time

Teaching is conducted through a combination of lectures, workshops, seminars, and small-group work. Emphasis is placed on the individual aspects of learning.

Assessment forms vary across modules and will include essays, blog posts, reports, research projects and practical work.

Students will also conduct a sociological research project on a topic of their interest and write a dissertation of 15,000 words on their project. You will be allocated a dedicated Dissertation Supervisor who will be there to support you along the way, providing you with advice and guidance throughout your dissertation.

Formal examination may be required for some optional modules.

Your career

87.5% of our graduates are in work or further study fifteen months after graduating (2020/21 Graduate Outcomes Survey). Completing this programme will set you apart from the rest as you embark on your career journey.

Your employability is a priority for us. This is why you can add valuable skills to your CV throughout the course, by taking advantage of the faculty employability hub and access support and opportunities. Alumni from the department have gone on to work in various roles across the globe, such as:

• Government Worker
• Designer Journalist
• Corporate Culture Specialist
• Apps and Games Marketer
• Research Assistant 

Find out more about graduate careers on our  PGT Careers and employability page .

Department of Sociological Studies

You'll learn about key concepts like society, community, social relationships, and identity. Our courses explore important sociological issues, including inequalities, gender, migration, and the digital world.

Our world-leading research shapes our teaching, so you're always challenged and up to date. Our interdisciplinary approach brings sociologists, social policy analysts, digital media scholars and social workers together under one roof.

Your tutors are experts in their fields and work with organisations in the UK and worldwide, bringing fresh perspectives to your studies. They'll give you the advice and support you need to excel in your subject.

Department staff also play key roles in the Faculty of Social Science's Digital Society Network (DSN), an active group of researchers working on all aspects of digital-society relations. The DSN hosts events and activities to stimulate and support research in this area.

Our courses develop students who are socially aware, with strong analytical skills and a flair for approaching problems in new ways. You'll become skilled at research and bring your own insights to key issues that affect our lives.

Department of Sociological Studies students are based in the world-class Faculty of Social Sciences building, The Wave. It features state-of-the-art collaborative lecture theatres, study spaces and seminar rooms. Teaching may also be timetabled to take place within other departments or central teaching space. If you want to have a closer look, check out our 360 degree tour .

Student profiles

The course has enabled me to learn practical skills and think critically. I’ve learned to use different tools for data scraping, data mining, data visualisations and to conduct research using qualitative and quantitative methods. I then analyse the results from a social and cultural perspective.

I am going back to China after the course ends. My plan is to find a job that is related to the media so I can use the skills I have gained.

Entry requirements

Minimum 2:1 undergraduate honours degree in a relevant social science subject.

If you're an international student who does not meet the entry requirements for this course, you have the opportunity to apply for a pre-masters programme in Business, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Sheffield International College . This course is designed to develop your English language and academic skills. Upon successful completion, you can progress to degree level study at the University of Sheffield.

If you have any questions about entry requirements, please contact the department .

Fees and funding

You can apply for postgraduate study using our Postgraduate Online Application Form. It's a quick and easy process.

This course has a  date of equal consideration  of 14 January 2024. This date has now passed, but we are currently still welcoming applications.

More information

[email protected] +44 114 222 6402

Digital Media and Society (Master)

Fachbereich 09

Title on graduation Master of Arts ( M.A. )

Standard course length 4 Semester

Language of delivery English

Application period (beginner) winter semester: 01.02. - 15.03.

Restricted admission

Study description

Digitalization is changing the world around us. Datafication – the growing number of data that can be aggregated and processed in automated ways – increasingly becomes characteristic for our societies. As part of these processes, the role of media and communication devices and what we mean by media and communication studies is changing as well. The M.A. Digital Media and Society is situated at the leading edge of these developments. Its aim is to qualify students for media planning and decision-making positions in a datafied society.

Does my bachelor's degree qualify for this master's program?

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Additional Information

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Study details

Application and enrolment.

• restricted admission
• open admission

For inclusion in a master's degree is the completion of studies at the Bachelor's level requirement. The subject-specific entry requirements are set out in the current Aufnahme-/Zulassungsordnung (admission regulations). It also includes the different deadlines for the provision of evidence.

If proof of German language skills is required: Information on German language skills .

Objectives and contents of program

The integrative program concept is reflected in the following study objectives:

• In-depth scientific and application-oriented development of theories concerning digital media, digital society and digital literacy;
• Better understanding the interplay between processes of digitalization and datafication and its impact on the everyday lives, chances and options of people in different segments of society
• Better understanding the interplay between processes of digitalization and datafication and its impact on businesses, institutions (schools, universities), and organizations
• Gathering practical media experience of at least two different media with a focus on processes of media conception (as electives)
• Knowledge and practical experience of empirical methods, focusing on digital media and the analysis of different forms of data, especially with regard to the conception and realization of independent empirical research projects on different phenomena
• Basic communication research and media analysis, in particular with a focus on digital media
• Key qualifications, in particular in the area of ​​concept planning, project management, presentation techniques, media literacy, moderation and chairing debates, as well as teamwork and leadership tasks.

The M.A. in Digital Media and Society is a 2-year full-time program. We encourage students to integrate a semester abroad or an internship into their studies. 

The  first semester  serves to deepen knowledge in the field of digital media and the datafied society in particular. It also offers initial orientation in the area of digital media practice, which can be further developed in the following semesters. The goal of this semester is to develop a shared conceptual understanding and apparatus.

The focus of the  second semester  is on (digital) methods. Not only is the methods-training module localized in this semester, but also the beginning of the two-semester research seminar with the development of an empirical student project. Parallel to this, the second semester serves to explore other areas of digital societies in depth, with particular emphasis on questions arising from processes of deep mediatization and datafication.

The central focus of the  third semester  is on research practice. While students conduct the data collection and analysis as part of their research seminar; they also work on an independent study project. At the same time, there is an in-depth study of digital literacy. In addition, the media practical elements take place in this semester and, if applicable, the voluntary media-practice internship can be undertaken in this semester. Students build up and deepen contacts with companies and institutions that qualify as potential employers. The goal is to facilitate swift entry into professional life after graduation.

The  fourth semester  has a targeted focus on completing the program, i.e. on writing the master’s thesis and preparing for its defense.

Our students have plenty of opportunities to integrate a study period abroad during this M.A. program. We have partnerships with dozens of universities in Europe and beyond, ranging from Aarhus to Barcelona, and from Istanbul to Zurich. In addition, students from these partner universities routinely enjoy study periods with us in Bremen adding even more to the international culture of the study program.

Formalities

• of 23.06.2021: DigiPruefO-UB-06-21 [pdf] (68.6 KB)
• of 19.03.2024: AT-MPO-01-22_Lesefassung_berichtigt_automatVerz.pdf [pdf] (481.1 KB)
• of 13.02.2024: MPO-DMS-05-18_2-berichtigt.pdf [pdf] (207.2 KB)
• of 04.07.2018: PraO-FB9-07-18.pdf [pdf] (111.5 KB)

PhD and career paths

The interdisciplinary approach and the focus on current research project and relevant social challenges of the MA "Digital Media and Society" prepares graduates for a number of professional roles. In addition to working in different capacities within the media industries, graduates can contribute in various capacities within businesses, NGOs and governmental institutions.

During the course of study, students have ample opportunity to gather practicial experience and build their professional networks.

Research and teaching

The 'MA Digital Media and Society' is closely linked to current research at the ZeMKI. 

Information on research activities of the ZeMKI can be found here:  https://zemki.uni-bremen.de/en/research/

Contact and counselling

Home > FACULTIES > Information & Media Studies (FIMS) > MEDIASTUDIES-ETD

Media Studies Theses and Dissertations

This collection contains theses and dissertations from the Department of Media Studies, collected from the Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theses/Dissertations from 2023 2023

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing an Intersectional Approach to Conspiracy Theory Research , David Guignion

Canadians Redefining R&B: The Online Marketing of Drake, Justin Bieber, and Jessie Reyez , Amara Pope Ms.

Theses/Dissertations from 2022 2022

Instagram Influencers and their Youngest Female Followers , Amanda Jenkins

A descriptive analysis of sport nationalism, digital media, and fandom to launch the Canadian Premier League , Farzan Mirzazadeh

Influencer Engagement Pods and the Struggle Over Measure in Instagram Platform Labour , Victoria J. O'Meara

Radiant Dreams and Nuclear Nightmares: Japanese Resistance Narratives and American Intervention in Postwar Speculative Popular Culture , Aidan J. Warlow

Theses/Dissertations from 2021 2021

More barriers than solutions: Women’s experiences of support with online abuse , Chandell E. Gosse

Heavy Metal Fundraisers: Entrepreneurial Recording Artists in Platform Capitalism , Jason Netherton

Theses/Dissertations from 2019 2019

Resistant Vulnerability in The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America , Kristen Allison

Unwrapping the Toronto Christmas Market: An Examination of Tradition and Nostalgia in a Socially Constructed Space , Lydia J. Gibson

Trauma, Creativity, And Bearing Witness Through Art: Marian Kołodziej's Labyrinth , Alyssa Logie

Appropriating Play: Examining Twitch.tv as a Commercial Platform , Charlotte Panneton

Dead Men Walking: An Analysis of Working-Class Masculinity in Post-2008 Hollywood Film , Ryan Schroeder

Glocalization in China: An Analysis of Coca-Cola’s Brand Co-Creation Process with Consumers in China , Yinuo Shi

Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: An Analysis of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry , James Steinhoff

Watching and Working Through: Navigating Non-being in Television Storytelling , Tiara Lalita Sukhan

Theses/Dissertations from 2018 2018

Hone the Means of Production: Craft Antagonism and Domination in the Journalistic Labour Process of Freelance Writers , Robert Bertuzzi

Invisible Labour: Support-Service Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry , Indranil Chakraborty

Exhibiting Human Rights: Making the Means of Dignity Visible , Amy J. Freier

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling and Cultural Production , Jennifer A. Hambleton

Cultural Hybridity in the Contemporary Korean Popular Culture through the Practice of Genre Transformation , Kyunghee Kim

Theses/Dissertations from 2017 2017

Regarding Aid: The photographic situation of humanitarianism , Sonya de Laat

The Representation of the Canadian Government’s Warrantless Domestic Collection of Metadata in the Canadian Print News Media , Alan Del Pino

(Not) One of the Boys: A Case Study of Female Detectives on HBO , Darcy Griffin

Pitching the Feminist Voice: A Critique of Contemporary Consumer Feminism , Kate Hoad-Reddick

Local-Global Tensions: Professional Experience, Role Perceptions and Image Production of Afghan Photojournalists Working for a Global Audience , Saumava Mitra

A place for locative media: A theoretical framework for assessing locative media use in urban environments , Darryl A. Pieber

Mapping the Arab Diaspora: Examining Placelessness and Memory in Arab Art , Shahad Rashid

Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentary Governance of Indigenous Life in Canada and its Disruption , Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Theses/Dissertations from 2016 2016

Finding Your Way: Navigating Online News and Opinions , Charlotte Britten

Law and Abuse: Representations of Intimate Partner Homicide in Law Procedural Dramas , Jaime A. Campbell

Creative Management: Disciplining the Neoliberal Worker , Trent Cruz

No hay Sólo un Idioma, No hay Sólo una Voz: A Revisionist History of Chicana/os and Latina/os in Punk , Richard C. Davila

Shifting Temporalities: The Construction of Flexible Subjectivities through Part-time Retail Workers’ Use of Smartphone Technology , Jessica Fanning

Becoming Sonic: Ambient Poetics and the Ecology of Listening in Four Militant Sound Investigations , David C. Jackson

Capital's Media: The Physical Conditions of Circulation , Atle Mikkola Kjøsen

On the Internet by Means of Popular Music: The Cases of Grimes and Childish Gambino , Kristopher R. K. Ohlendorf

Believing the News: Exploring How Young Canadians Make Decisions About Their News Consumption , Jessica Thom

Theses/Dissertations from 2015 2015

Narrative Epic and New Media: The Totalizing Spaces of Postmodernity in The Wire, Batman, and The Legend of Zelda , Luke Arnott

Canada: Multiculturalism, Religion, and Accommodation , Brittainy R. Bonnis

Navigating the Social Landscape: An Exploration of Social Networking Site Usage among Emerging Adults , Kristen Colbeck

Impassioned Objects And Seething Absences: The Olympics In Canada, National Identity and Consumer Culture , Estee Fresco

Satirical News and Political Subversiveness: A Critical Approach to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report , Roberto Leclerc

"When [S]He is Working [S]He is Not at Home": Challenging Assumptions About Remote Work , Eric Lohman

Heating Up the Debate: E-cigarettes and Instagram , Stephanie L. Ritter

Limitation to Innovation in the North American Console Video Game Industry 2001-2013: A Critical Analysis , Michael Schmalz

Happiest People Alive: An Analysis of Class and Gender in the Trinidad Carnival , Asha L. St. Bernard

Human-Machinic Assemblages: Technologies, Bodies, and the Recuperation of Social Reproduction in the Crisis Era , Elise D. Thorburn

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Evangelizing the ‘Gallery of the Future’: a Critical Analysis of the Google Art Project Narrative and its Political, Cultural and Technological Stakes , Alanna Bayer

Face Value: Beyond the Surface of Brand Philanthropy and the Cultural Production of the M.A.C AIDS Fund , Andrea Benoit

Cultivating Better Brains: Transhumanism and its Critics on the Ethics of Enhancement Via Brain-computer Interfacing , Matthew Devlin

Man Versus Food: An Analysis of 'Dude Food' Television and Public Health , Amy R. Eisner-Levine

Media Literacy and the English as a Second Language Curriculum: A Curricular Critique and Dreams for the Future , Clara R. Madrenas

Fantasizing Disability: Representation of loss and limitation in Popular Television and Film , Jeffrey M. Preston

(Un)Covering Suicide: The Changing Ethical Norms in Canadian Journalism , Gemma Richardson

Labours Of Love: Affect, Fan Labour, And The Monetization Of Fandom , Jennifer Spence

'What's in a List?' Cultural Techniques, Logistics, Poeisis , Liam Cole Young

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Distinguishing the 'Vanguard' from the 'Insipid': Exploring the Valorization of Mainstream Popular Music in Online Indie Music Criticism , Charles J. Blazevic

Anonymous: Polemics and Non-identity , Samuel Chiang

Manufacturing Legitimacy: A Critical Theory of Election News Coverage , Gabriel N. Elias

The Academic Grind: A Critique of Creative and Collaborative Discourses Between Digital Games Industries and Post-Secondary Education in Canada , Owen R. Livermore

We’re on This Road Together: The Changing Fan/Producer Relationship in Television as Demonstrated by Supernatural , Lisa Macklem

Brave New Wireless World: Mapping the Rise of Ubiquitous Connectivity from Myth to Market , Vincent R. Manzerolle

Promotional Ubiquitous Musics: New Identities and Emerging Markets in the Digitalizing Music Industry , Leslie Meier

Money, Morals, and Human Rights: Commercial Influences in the Marketing, Branding, and Fundraising of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch , Danielle Morgan

If I Had a Hammer: An Archeology of Tactical Media From the Hootenanny to the People's Microphone , Henry Adam Svec

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

Watching High School: Representing Disempowerment on Teen Drama Television , Sarah M. Baxter

Will Work For Free: Examining the Biopolitics of Unwaged Immaterial Labour , Brian A. Brown

Social Net-working: Exploring the Political Economy of the Online Social Network Industry , Craig Butosi

Watching the games: Critical media literacy and students’ abilities to identify and critique the politics of sports , Raúl J. Feliciano Ortiz

The Invisible Genocide: An Analysis of ABC, CBS, and NBC Television News Coverage of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. , Daniel C. Harvey

It's Complicated: Romantic Breakups and Their Aftermath on Facebook , Veronika A. Lukacs

Keeping Up with the Virtual Joneses: The Practices, Meanings, and Consequences of Consumption in Second Life , Jennifer M. Martin

The (m)Health Connection: An Examination of the Promise of Mobile Phones for HIV/AIDS Intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa , Trisha M. Phippard

Born Again Hard : Transgender Subjectivity in Paul Chadwick's Concrete , Justin Raymond

Communicating Crimes: Covering Gangs in Contemporary Canadian Journalism , Chris Richardson

Online Social Breast-Working: Representations of Breast Milk Sharing in the 21st Century , Cari L. Rotstein

Because I am Not Here, Selected Second Life-Based Art Case Studies. Subjectivity, Autoempathy and Virtual World Aesthetics , Francisco Gerardo Toledo Ramírez

Day of the Woman?: Feminism & Rape-Revenge Films , Kayley A. Viteo

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

"Aren't They Keen?" Early Children's Food Advertising and the Emergence of the Brand-loyal Child Consumer , Kyle R. Asquith

Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and Digital Media: Mass Media’s Challenge to the Democratization of Media Production , Michael S. Daubs

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