Writing Media Life: Day 31

This is more for me than for anyone else... writing is progressing slowly but surely. Find myself trying to manage about 30 open screens (I just love Google Books for finding those hard to locate phrases), multiple windows with text (largely to prevent writing something I've already written somewhere else), and piles and piles of open/closed books, scattered papers, and two cabinets of books staring at me disapprovingly for not having read them yet. But hey - I managed to put 4608 words down for the first chapter! Not necessarily in sequence, and definitely not polished in any way - I suck at polishing anything, really - but they're there. Let me share, for fun, the first draft of the opening paragraph of the book:

"You live in media. Who you are, what you do, and what this means to you does not exist outside of media. This does not mean life is determined by media; it just suggests that whether we like it or not, every aspect of our lives is mediated. This "mediation of everything" is but one aspect of media life.

Part of this kind of life is coming to terms with what has been dramatically described as the "supersaturation" of media images, songs and stories in households, workplaces, elevators, shopping malls, bars, airports, and all the other in-between spaces of today's world.

This overwhelming, empowering, mindless and thoughtful torrent gets fueled not just by attention-hungry global (and local) companies publishing an unrelenting and accelerating stream of media - today, most media content and experiences are produced by you and me: in our endless texts, chats, and e-mails, with our phone calls from anywhere at anytime, and through our online social networks.

With the majority of the world population owning a mobile phone, telecommunication networks spanning almost every inch of the globe, and the sales figures of any and all media devices growing steadily worldwide, an almost complete mediatization of society seems a rather obvious observation. Yet a media life is so much more than just hardware, software, and contents - it is also everything we do with and in response to media. Ultimately, a media life is about how media are both a necessary and unavoidable part of lived experience - from the way we fall in love to how we break up, from how we work and play to how we make sense of the world and our role in it."

Video: Media Life talk @UIC

Earlier this year, in March 2010, I had the privilege of presenting the work-in-progress of our Media Life project at UIC Communication in Chicago. The wonderful folks over at UIC now have posted a video of that talk online as part of their channel line-up at Vimeo. Check out their other speakers!

UIC Communication presents Mark Deuze on MEDIA LIFE: Love, Sex and Death in a Digital Culture from UIC Communication on Vimeo.

Media Life Soundtrack (03)

Still under the weather, as they say, so writing is not exactly happening at blistering speed. Perhaps a tune or two will edge things along.

As speed goes, few contemporary acts beat Krisiun. Okay, perhaps the Dutch soccer team beat Brazil this week in the World Cup, but as far as (death) metal goes, Brazilian bands like Krisiun and early Sepultura at times kick Dutch bands' (such as Gorefest or Pestilence) ass.

So let me share Krisiun's "Contradictions of Decay" from their recent (2008) Southern Storm album. If that does not get the writing juices flowing...

Writing Media Life: Day 1

As promised to myself, today (July 1 2010) marked the start of the writing process for Media Life. Did not feel too jolly for most of the day - due to a lingering cold and mild ear infection from last week's escapades in Singapore - but managed to type 408 words. What words those are I'll figure out tomorrow.

Media Life Soundtrack (02)

At the moment I'm working on our presentation on the Media Life project, next week at ICA in Singapore. I'll be presenting together with Peter Blank, who is one of the co-authors of the piece with Laura Speers.

So to follow up on the previous post, here's another track from the late 1980s/early 1990s, that I keep coming back to... Amebix' "Nobody's Driving", from their 1987 "Monolith" album. It has the perfect combination of raw, underproduced noise, Motorhead-style driving drums & bass, and a healthy mix of hardcore, punk, and metal song structures. Amebix apparently has reformed in recent years...

Media Life Soundtrack (01)

Media Life - the book - is scheduled to be delivered to the publisher (Polity Press) by December 31 (2010).

I've planned to start writing proper on July 1. So in the meantime, I'm reading, grilling (one has to), and completing some rewrites and edits of essays and working papers. Over the coming months, expect to see excerpts, updates, and other news about the project on this blog.

All of that has to come with a soundtrack for writing, of course. And here's what I found: the best music to write to (or, as Zygmunt Bauman does it, to read and write at the same time to), is either sludge/stoner rock, or traditional death metal. In other words: things either need to sound like the darkest depths of a swamp, or like the blistering speeds of a tornado.

Creative labor works that way, I guess - either too slow or too fast. But never within neatly defined and well-organized parameters.

But, as I'm realizing, in both genres, no matter how far apart, its crucial to select artists/sounds with a hardcore-inspired edge. So that would mean bands like Bloodbath, Slayer, (early) Sepultura, (early) Voivod, Immolation, Terrorizer, Repulsion, Krisiun, (early) Carcass and Napalm Death, Comecon, (early) Entombed, Lair of the Minotaur, Gorefest (early) Celtic Frost and Hellhammer in the metal category, and Melvins, (Los) Natas, Boris, Baroness, Howl, Gore, Amebix, Norma Jean, The Chariot, and Taint in the sludge genre.

So I'll share, over the next months, as much as I can some tunes that comprise the soundtrack to media life (writing). The mp3 files can be downloaded via sharing tool Box.

First up: "Dog Days" by Comecon.

This track is from their debut cd ("Megatrends in Brutality", 1992) featuring Entombed-vocalist Lars Petrov. Somehow this tune has always stuck with me, from way back when I got to review this cd as a music reporter.

Mobiliteit en Leven in Media

[on a new essay titled Mobilities and Media Life; rest of this post is in Dutch]

UPDATE 05.07/10: Het advies "Internetlogica" van het RMO is inmiddels beschikbaar, en de organisatie heeft de informerende essays van o.a. Tamara Witschge, Albert Benschop en mijzelf online gezet.

Bijna een jaar geleden (september 2009) vroeg de Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling (RMO) me om een "origineel essay" aan te leveren over mobiliteit en mobiele communicatie.

Voor mij was dit een leuke uitdaging om eerder werk over ons leven in, in plaats van met, media te verdiepen.

In het kort biedt mijn verhaal een bescheiden overzicht van recente onderzoeksliteratuur over mobiliteit aan de hand van drie centrale thema's:

- (de gevolgen van) constante communicatie en de verwachting dat we altijd en overal bereikbaar zijn;
- de (verdwijnende) scheiding tussen publiek en prive in het alledaagse leven;
- en de thematiek rondom toegang en controle (van informatie en communicatie).

Delen van de tekst werden eerder gepubliceerd in Omzien naar de Toekomst: Jaarboek ICT en Samenleving 2008|09, (uitgave: Media Update Vakpublicaties), en in de essays "Mobilities" (met co-auteur Moises Montenegro) en "Media Life" (met co-auteurs Peter Blank en Laura Speers), beschikbaar in het open online IU Scholarworks archief.

Het essay is uiteindelijk niet goedgekeurd door het RMO, omdat het "vooralsnog niet aansluit bij de richting die gekozen is voor het advies" dat de Raad bezig is om voor te bereiden. De samenwerking met de mensen van de RMO was bijzonder prettig en ik ben dankbaar voor de kans om een bijdrage te mogen leveren aan het lopende debat in Nederland over media en samenleving.

Hier rest het mij alleen nog om de auteursversie aan te bieden.

Ondanks het feit dat het niet in het uiteindelijke advies van de RMO tercht komt, ben ik toch erg tevreden met dit stuk. Het stelde me in staat een aantal kernthema's van ons leven in media - het altijd samen alleen zijn, een allesdoordringende mobiele logica, de flexibilisering van relaties en ervaringen in een medialeven, tele-cocooning en andere vormen van 'mediatisering', de moeite die het kost om niet publiek te leven, digitale democratie en "m-government", enzovoorts...

Het hele essay is beschikbaar in PDF via IU Scholarworks.

Verder geinteresseerden verwijs ik graag naar de website van het RMO. Alle reacties/commentaar zijn natuurlijk van harte welkom!

Reviews of Media Work

Since my last book, Media Work, was published in September 2007 (with Polity Press), it has been reviewed by six scholarly journals, one (UK) newspaper, and several weblogs.

The most recent review has appeared in the March 2010 issue of the Work, Employment & Society journal. It is a wonderful piece, written by Claudia Catacchio (University of Cambridge). At a later date I hope to be able to reproduce the review here, but for now I would like to cite the final paragraph, as these comments truly reflect what I hoped people would pick up from the book:

"There are very few training programmes, academic or otherwise, that can adequately prepare people for work in the convergence culture described by Deuze, making his book all the more valuable."

Media Life @ IU CMCL

After some wonderful responses to presentations on the Media Life project at my own Department of Telecommunications, at the Department of Sociology of Indiana University, as well as after seminars at Leiden University, and the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses) earlier this year), this week, on Friday April 2, I'm excited to be presenting this work-in-progress at a colloquium of my friends over at Indiana University's Department of Communication and Culture.

The talk is part of a series of CMCL Colloquia), and is scheduled from 4PM-5PM in the Classroom Office Building (COB) Room 100 (CMCL offices/800 E. 3rd Street between Woodlawn and Indiana).

If you are around and have time, or know of colleagues and/or students who might be interested, it would be great to see you there. feel free to forward this announcement!

The working paper, co-authored with Peter Blank and Laura Speers, can be downloaded from IU ScholarWorks.

An updated Media Life slideshow is archived at Slideshare.

For this particular seminar, I intend to ground the media life perspective more deliberately within and beyond a distinct set of earlier theoretical notions of a more or less seamless integration between media and society (or: humans and machines; culture and computers; the social and the technological), such as:

media equation; Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass’s notion of media as equating real life in terms of how people "mindlessly" (link to PDF) interact with media as social actors

mediascapes; one of five dimensions of global cultural flow as outlined by Arjun Appadurai, suggesting how media are central to constituting imagined worlds by persons and groups spread around the globe

mediasphere; Peter Sloterdijk's conceptualization of our contemporary mediasphere (link to PDF of his foreword to "Spheres") as the stage of electronic and telematic globalization, where people live inside their own societal bubbles of space, necessarily leaving them blind to coexistence

mediology/media philosophy; a range of approaches such as advocated by Regis Debray, Mike Sandbothe and Frank Hartmann calling for a critical and reflective study on "the fuzzy zone of interactions between technology and culture" and to deliberately move theory beyond "the cool present."

mediatization; an institutional approach primarily developed by theorists such as Stig Hjarvard (link to PDF of a definitional article in Nordicom Review), where media are seen as an independent societal institution with a logic of its own, and where media simultaneously become an integrated part of other institutions like politics, work, family, and religion as more and more of these institutional activities are performed through media

media ontology; as proposed by Friedrich Kittler, arguing how philosophy over time has become blind (or even outright hostile) to that what supports and shapes thinking the most (media)

actor-network theory (ANT); in an attempt to consider the technological on the same plane as the social, ANT considers that everything (human and non-human) is continually produced through their connections and relationships, thus emphasizing "radical indeterminacy", "relational materiality" and "performativity" of both scientific and technological actors (see for example the work of John Law, John Hassard, and Bruno Latour)

media ecology; as defined by Neil Postman and others, media ecology is a generally 'soft' determinist view on how media affect "human perception, understanding, feeling, and value."

remix and remixability; a point of view developed by Lev Manovich in an argument to show the increasing inseparability of culture and computers, and as such providing the interface with which we engage with the world (an interface that privileges selection over originality, exemplified by the cut-and-paste method of the remix)

media theory; many contemporary theorists such as Katherine Hayles, Jodi Dean, Slavoj Zizek, Donna Haraway, William Mitchell, Douglas Rushkoff, Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Gane, Rich Ling, Paul Virilio, Barry Wellman, Tiziana Terranova, Nelly Oudshoorn, Loet Leydesdorff, Niklas Luhmann, and danah boyd (to name but a few), who all in some way have postulated the ongoing and increasing interaction, integration and interfacing of the social and the technological.

The media life perspective is, all things considered, a logical extension of these arguments - including older ones such as by Walter Ong, Harold Innes, and Marshall McLuhan. What media life hopefully adds is a grounding in everyday experiences with media that moves beyond concerns over whether media are "good" or "bad" for us, instead focusing on their empancipatory, structurating, disruptive potential; a rejection of research goals in media and communication studies that implicitly or explicitly suggest that we can somehow "master" or "control" media by simply evolving a "new" brain or raising a level of superior and critical awareness/consciousness vis-a-vis media; a conceptual (and phenomenological) attempt to move beyond human/non-human distinctions to make sense of such mediated lived experience, and a discussion of concrete implications for our understanding of ourselves in the world with - paraphrasing Richard Rorty - a deliberate focus on social hope.

Love, Sex and Death in Chicago

After a really nice evening presentation and discussion in The Netherlands earlier this week - nicely covered in Dutch by the good people over at Het Rondje Van Pavlov - I have the privilege of doing it again, new and improved I hope, in Chicago.

The public talk is sponsored by the Department of Communication of the University of Chicago-Illinois, scheduled for Monday, March 15, 2010 from noon – 1:30 p.m. in room 1169 of the Behavioral Sciences Building (which is at 1007 W Harrison Street). More info on the UIC Facebook page and Department of Communication website.

I'm especially appreciative of their kind invitation in light of the ongoing budget issues facing Illinois (and other US, including Indiana) universities. Respect to the faculty for making a stand against the exploitative practices of legislators and industry - all intended to weed out academic freedom and faculty governance, and toturn institutions of higher learning into market-driven "edufactories."

Hope to see you there!