Media and Everyday Life offers an accessible overview for students of media, communication and cultural studies looking to explore how modern-day media practices impact on the experience of everyday life, making this the essential companion to introductory media studies courses. This innovative introduction to media studies challenges conventional accounts of what media do to people - focusing instead on what people do with media in the course of everyday life. By rejecting the conventional media studies approach, the book provides a fresh way of thinking about media cultures and provokes thought into how media influences daily social norms. Each chapter offers a broad discussion of various facets of media, such as technology, social media and industries. Key trends and traditions are also considered, helping to define how media has become so entwined in the everyday experience. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate all the recent developments in media including new social media platforms, new technologies like wearables and smart speakers, and the spread of algorithms into so much of the media we encounter every day. The second edition also takes stock of the environmental impact of digital media and its hidden infrastructures, as well our engagement with social issues and movements from Black Lives Matter to Extinction Rebellion.

The politics of war reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality challenges the assumptions that reporters and their audiences have about the way the journalistic trade operates and how it sees the world. It unpacks the taken-for-granted aspects of the lives of war correspondents, exposing the principles of interaction and valorisation that usually go unacknowledged. Is journalistic authority really only about doing the job well? Do the ethics of war reporting emerge simply from the 'stuff' of journalism? This book asks why it is that the authoritative reporter increasingly needs to appear authentic, and that success depends not only on getting things right but being the right sort of journalist. This, in turn, depends on the uncalculating mastery of practices both before and during a journalist's career. This book includes interviews with war correspondents and others with an active stake in the field and combines them with the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to construct a political phenomenology of war reporting - the power relations and unspoken 'rules of the game' underpinning the representation of conflict and suffering by the media. It considers the recent phenomena of pooling and embedding journalists as well as the impact of new technologies, and asks what changes in the journalistic area can tell us about authority, authenticity and morality in the cultural industries more broadly. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Politics of War Reporting will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of media and cultural studies, sociology and political theory. -- .

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people's everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people's complacency and waking them up to the reality or what's going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn't be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people's everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people's complacency and waking them up to the reality or what's going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn't be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.

Phenomenology has become one of the most important philosophical traditions underpinning recent theory and research on new media, whether or not the word is used explicitly. Conditions of Mediation brings together, for the first time in a single publication, the diversity of phenomenological media research-from social platforms and wearable media to diasporic identity formation and the ethics of consumer technologies. The new orthodoxy in media studies emphasizes the experience of media-whether as forms, texts, technics or protocols-marking a departure from traditional approaches preoccupied with media content or its structural contexts. But phenomenologically informed approaches go beyond merely asking what people do with media. They ask a more profound question: what constitutes the conditions of mediated experience in the first place? Beginning with an accessible introduction, this book invites readers to explore a wide range of phenomenological perspectives on media via two critical dialogues involving key thinkers alongside a series of theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded chapters. In so doing, interdisciplinary media studies is brought into conversation with the work of philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as phenomenologically-inspired thinkers such as Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Ingold, Henri Lefebvre, Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan and Bernard Stiegler.