Personal Media and Everyday Life

A Networked Lifeworld

T. Rasmussen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137446459
• eBook ISBN: 9781137446466
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the widespread use of digital personal media in daily life. With a sociological and historical perspective, it explores the media-enhanced individualization and rationalization of the lifeworld, discussing the dramatic mediatization of daily life and calling on theorists such as McLuhan, Habermas and Goffman.

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Introduction: Personal Media

Abstract: This chapter introduces the central argument of this book and its key terms like ‘personal media’, ‘personalisation’ and the ‘lifeworld’. It exemplifies the unwritten history of personal media by focusing on media of writing, talking and watching, and also between their primary functional modes that are called orientation, interaction, presentation and archiving.

Keywords: communication theory; digital media; everyday life; lifeworld; media theory; personal media; social capital; sociology

Rasmussen, Terje. Personal Media and Everyday Life: A Networked Lifeworld. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137446466.0002.

This little book addresses the convergence of the mediated and the (inter)personal in personal media of everyday life. From the convergence of new multifunctional personal media and the lifeworld, a series of new questions arises that this book only begins to address, concerning sociability and social integration as well as power and control.

The book introduces three main underlying arguments: First, that what I call personal media has its own history and its own sociology, distinct from the mass media. Second, that the concept of the lifeworld helps to understand meaning and power in contemporary everyday life in western societies, and, yet, that it needs revision according to the new reality of personal and mobile media. And third, that the overarching values of society give way to more or less mediated social networks as generators for social cohesion and integration.

Unlike the mass media, personal media favour interpersonal contact with family members, friends, colleagues and others we know. Our ‘face time’, as Rich Ling notes, is being extended and embroidered by mediated interaction. The notion of an everyday life refers to something we all experience, but is far from established as an analytical concept in social theory. Concepts like ‘everyday life’, ‘the private sphere’, the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘domestic’ tend to overlap, while they are also tied to different theoretical traditions. From a Marxist perspective, the private sphere is the space of reproduction and consumption. From a Weberian perspective, everyday life in the modern world remains the sphere of non-instrumental action. As everyday values and practices constitute a foundation of the understanding of technology presented here, we should develop a conception of the hermeneutics of everyday reality. We can derive such a conception by beginning with Husserl’s lifeworld concept as it is developed by Gadamer, Schutz and Habermas, and continuing to sociological interpretations by Heller, Lefebvre, Goffman and Gullestad. A concept of ‘everyday life’ should keep the basic hermeneutic epistemology intact, while leaving out a too rigid and descriptive understanding of the term. Methodically, it should be able to guide empirical investigations and to make sense of specific day-to-day practices in a larger context of social integration.

Everyday life is a mixture of the unnoticed and inconspicuous on the one hand, and the partly strange and abstract arsenal of goods and services for consumption on the other. In his essay on the urban way of life, Simmel famously discussed this confrontation between the ordinary and modern life. The familiar world of daily life is continuously dealing with standardised and mass-produced objects and structurally planned environments. The media explosion of course is one particularly noticeable aspect of the last two decades. How does this disruption take place when the computer and the mobile are placed in the terrain vague between the trivial and the unfamiliar? Is it really a question of disruption or confrontation, or a smooth assimilation? In subtle ways, everyday processes adjust and absorb new technologies and media, as they must with regard to news and information. This has interested ethnographers and sociologists for a long time, as they stress the appropriation of domestic consumption (Gershuny), objects (Miller), TV (Morley, Lull, Silverstone), mobile (Ling, Prøitz) and other media. Sociologists and theorists like Henri Lefebvre, de Certeau, Bourdieu and others have attended to studies of the ordinary with various motives, most importantly because that is where life is lived, this is where the world presents itself, conditioned by class, gender, ethnicity and the brutal randomness of life.

The mobile and the laptop are being massively incorporated into people’s lives, which cannot remain unchanged. The integration of digital media in expressive and instrumental operations in everyday life matters and practices is considerable. It is difficult to say how radical the implications of personal media are on our lives precisely because communication and its devices are fundamentally ingrained in nearly everything we do. But common sense signals to all of us that the changes are dramatic – not because they disrupt the humdrum of daily life, but because they change the way we do ordinary things. Just like people in Europe did one hundred years ago, we read, play, talk, shop, cook, write, enjoy, listen and travel every day, but the ways in which we do it change because new technologies invite us into more convenient avenues of practice. We are surrounded by voices, music and other sounds, texts, images and textures, but from very different sources than those of our parents’ generation. For the last decades or so, everyday communication in particular is affected fundamentally deeper than when the telephone, the radio and TV were introduced. Web, webmail, Youtube, Facebook, Google and a variety of app-based services are now basic ingredients in our lives that reorganise our experiences and practices in time and space; they enable new social networks in new forms and genres.

Much of the changes are about the transfusion of power from social institutions like the school, the workplace, the church and the university, to markets, media, the home and the individual. Synchronisation is made more flexible by social institutions, which make the individual and the family much more the centre of the world. Individual movements and interactions in everyday life are now more in the hands of the individual. This rearrangement of power, giving private life a new dimension of flexibility that was unknown to ordinary families in the post-war era, has been a central nerve of modernisation since the 1970s. It implies more freedom of choice for individuals, within structural delimitations. It changes the lifeworld. The rigid regularity of Weber’s ‘iron cage’ is turned into something softer and more flexible, or with Bauman, more ‘liquid’, however also more integrated into techno-social structures than ever in the history of modern society.

This is the contextual background for this book in conjunction with technological change. In the following, I address changes of everyday life in theoretical terms, and argue that we need a different conception of the lifeworld to contextualise social interaction with personal media. The lifeworld concept helps to make sense of daily life if it can account for actual changes in everyday life as related to individualisation of identity formation and personalisation of media. An understanding of the particular values, practices, habits and rituals of domestic life is vital to the understanding and use of new media practices. In this regard, I think we need a quite different notion of lifeworld than Habermas’ version.

Once we acknowledge that personal media technologically and analytically belong to another world than the mass media, another media history and media sociology appears. This history does not start with Gutenberg’s mass production of holy texts, followed by newspapers, film and broadcasting. Rather, the history of personal media probably begins with private notebooks in Greek and Roman antiquity, followed by letter correspondence through couriers and postal systems. It continues with electro-magnetic telegrams followed by telecommunications and a variety of innovations on the Internet and the Web. This history is not about audiences but about social relations in an extended space: on how individuals and groups interact with absent, and yet specific, others, and by necessity – with oneself.

The emergence of a national and international media industry from the 17th to the 21st century (printed books, the press, magazines, broadcasting etc.) was based on various forms of technological means that served as media, from the production (supply) side to the consumption (demand) side of the audiences. These technical media served as dissemination media, and constituted in their very structure a rupture between production and consumption, which prevented responses and input from the members of the audience. This paradox, the bridging and fencing, the dissemination and separation, which constructed and addressed audiences precisely, enabled, from Gutenberg on, an enormous international media industry. Because this industry created audiences who were impossible to actually observe, the industry had to rely on implied audiences.

However, since 1995 or so, and based on more than 150 years of telecommunications and 40 years of Internet communication, media forms have emerged in daily life that deviate radically from the paradoxes of the mass media. A remarkable wave of innovation in the area of personal communication, largely connected to the laptop, the web and the mobile, constantly offers their services to the modern individual. This is mostly evident with regard to the Internet. Due to the distributed end-to-end architecture of the net, new innovations constantly emerge in its periphery that increasingly rely on user-produced content in one way or another. In the 1990s, the Internet and hypertext converged in the web. Around 1998, a new generation of the web began (outside the news sites) with a wave of innovations, which much more actively integrate user-produced content. In the telecom sector, large-scale investments have allowed for a wave of innovations based on the upgraded mobile as terminal. Involved in what Weber called rationalisation has personalisation as one of its most evident trends characterising contemporary complex society.

In social research, the term ‘personalisation’ has been used primarily by Japanese researchers to describe the trajectory of telecom-based media from the business market to the household and the individual, and the transformation of the media during this process (see Kohiyama 2006, Okada 2006, Matsuda 2005). In Britain, ‘domestication’ caught on in the 1980s as a concept describing the introduction of various media into the household. Also in the 1980s, diffusion theorist Everett Rogers applied the term ‘demassification’ to account for the range of new computer-based media like electronic bulletin boards and email. By personalisation I mean the reorganisation of technology according to the expectations of persons. Kohiyama (2006, 71) argues that personalisation involves enabling access to the broadest possible range of Who, What, When, Where and How, as well as enabling people to specify and restrict access based upon their individual needs. Personalisation refers to devices and their design, such as smartphones, handsets and laptops, to personalised connectivity through passwords, credit cards, and other security and authenticity functions, and finally to personalised services, like shopping and downloading. While laptop-based communication was ahead of mobile-based communication, this gap is closed. Phones, tablets and laptops are rearranging their places in everyday practices continuously.

A central distinction thus needs to be made between personalisation of information and personalisation of media. While the first is a transformation that concerns all media, the latter is a distinct trajectory in media history. Personalisation of information relates to selection and specialisation of services and features in the mass media along with linking to other media to establish feedback channels. Most of this kind of personalisation relates to strategies in the press and broadcasting to appear ‘closer’ to the audience through a number of techniques, ranging from informal talk, studio audiences, call-ins, SMS-TV and so on. This is largely an effect of the endemic structural paradox of the broadcasting industry and the press, the separation from the audience that the industries want to reduce. From the 1980s, the ‘audience’ has been a concept in crisis, as much more complex models of individualised and segmented audiences have emerged that use broadcasting as well as digital media to create new hybrids of communication and consumption. For instance, in the beginning of the 1990s, the TV-companies started to implement measures to gain individual TV ratings, rather than household ratings.

This book addresses implications of the personalisation of media, which refers to the neglected history and sociology of mediated interaction in private life, from the private letter to the telephone, the personal homepage, email, instant messaging, photo-blogs, the mobile and social networking sites. The sender acts as an autonomous being, as in taking holiday snapshots, making phone calls or running a personal blog. And for the last decade or so, the personal aspect has been even more intensified since personal media now make us each personally addressable and more or less perpetually accessible (Ling 2008, 3).

Of course, the processes of personalisation of media and the explosive adoption of personal media cannot be explained by technological change alone, but also by changes in society, particularly increasing personal wealth, urbanisation, changing consumption and lifestyle patterns, including for instance that young people spend more time away from home.

Typically, the history of personalised media is the story of the transition of communication media from military, organisational, domestic and then to personal contexts. In contrast to the mass media, the distinction between sender and receiver is often not of prime analytical relevance, as in letter correspondence and telephone conversations. Even the distinction between the initiator and the responder may not be necessary in order to understand social relationships. Personalising of media relates to transportation infrastructure and telecommunications, rather than to the history of mass media from Gutenberg to Fox. Rather than entertainment, journalism and adverts, this kind of information is about personal notes, practicalities, downloading useful information, chat for no particular purpose, making appointments, and airing of personal opinions in blogs and Twitter and so on. Thus, what is here called personal media does not produce mass communication and is non-mass media. They rather make up lines or threads of social networks.

As noted, the extraordinary about our new personal media is that they have entered the entire realm of the ordinary in less than two decades. They have become part of our conventions and habits, which in return have made the media ordinary and indispensable. The ordinary refers to what we do in everyday life and particularly the ways we conduct everyday practices like shopping, reading the paper, chatting with the bus driver and friends and family, listening to music, watching TV, wearing clothes, spending holidays and cooking dinner. Although many of these practices are signals of lifestyles and self-expression, they are also the low-key life itself, what we do while making plans and producing memories. The ordinary is a topic for reality shows, which is frequently discussed (see Bell and Hollows 2005). Here, ordinariness particularly denotes the mundane practices of keeping in touch, fulfilling one’s obligations, relaxing, searching for a recipe, enjoying something and socialising in the ongoing business of everyday life. The indispensable emerges for exactly the same reasons. In brief, what seems to take place in everyday life is a series of expansions or transfusions which will be addressed in the following:

from reception to production

from interpersona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Personal Media
• 2  Encircling the Person
• 3  A Networked Lifeworld
• 4  Communication in Personal Media
• 5  Personal Media Theory
• 6  Personal Media and Social Capital
• Bibliography
• Index