Digital Mediation and Everyday Life
How digital and networked media saturate daily life, mediatizing social relations and reshaping identity, sociality, and the construction of reality.
Definition
Mediatization is the long-term process by which media increasingly shape and are interwoven with social and cultural life; digital mediation refers to how digital and networked media come to constitute everyday social relations and the experience of reality.
Scope
This topic examines the mediatization of everyday life, the process by which digital media become integral to social practices and institutions. It covers theories of the mediated construction of reality, the domestication of media in the home, datafication and deep mediatization, and empirical studies of how people, including networked youth, live with digital media.
Core questions
- How do digital media become woven into everyday social practice?
- What does it mean to say reality is increasingly mediated?
- How are media domesticated within households and routines?
- How does datafication transform everyday life?
Key concepts
- Mediatization
- Domestication
- Datafication
- Deep mediatization
- Networked publics
- Everyday life
Key theories
- The mediated construction of reality
- Couldry and Hepp's argument that, under deep mediatization, social reality is increasingly constructed in and through digital media and data infrastructures.
- Domestication of media
- Silverstone's account of how households incorporate media technologies into everyday routines, taming and giving meaning to them.
- Mediatization theory
- Hjarvard's framework analyzing how media logics increasingly shape other social and cultural institutions over the long term.
History
Building on earlier work on television and everyday life, such as Silverstone's, scholars developed mediatization theory in the 2000s and 2010s to capture media's deepening role in social life. Couldry and Hepp theorized the mediated construction of reality under datafication, while empirical studies like boyd's examined how digital media shape everyday sociality.
Debates
- Mediatization as concept
- Whether mediatization names a genuine, distinctive social process or is too broad to specify clear mechanisms of media's influence on social life.
Key figures
- Nick Couldry
- Andreas Hepp
- Roger Silverstone
- danah boyd
- Stig Hjarvard
Related topics
Seminal works
- couldryhepp2017
- silverstone1994
- boyd2014
- hjarvard2013
Frequently asked questions
- What is mediatization?
- It is the long-term process by which media become increasingly central to and intertwined with social and cultural life, shaping how institutions and everyday practices operate.
- What does 'domestication' of media mean?
- Silverstone's idea that households actively incorporate media technologies into their routines and give them meaning, taming new devices into everyday life.