Media life

Life in today's liquid modern society is all about finding ways to deal with constant change, whether it is at home, at work or at play.Over the last few decades, these key areas of human existence have converged in and through our concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of and immersion in media, information and communication technologies.Research in countries as varied as the United States, Brazil, South Korea, The Netherlands and Finland consistently shows that more of our time gets spent using media, and that multi-tasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life.It must be clear that media are not just types of technology and chunks of content we pick and choose from the world around us -a view that considers media as external agents affecting us in a myriad of ways.If anything, today we have to recognize how the uses and appropriations of media penetrate all aspects of contemporary life.This world is what Roger Silverstone (2007), Alex de Jong and Marc Schuilenburg ( 2006), and Sam Inkinen (1998) label a 'mediapolis': a comprehensively mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences and expressions of everyday life.It is the point of this commentary to argue that such a perspective on life lived in, rather than with, media can and perhaps should be the ontological benchmark for a 21st-century media studies (Deuze, 2009).As media become pervasive and ubiquitous, forming the building blocks for our constant remix of the categories of everyday life (the public and the private, the local and the global, the individual and the collective), they become invisible -in the sense that, as Friedrich Kittler suggests, we become blind to that which shapes our lives the most.I propose that the key challenge of communication and media studies in the 21st century is, or will be, the disappearance of media.This is not a renewed claim for the kind of soft techno-determinism espoused in the work of Marshall McLuhan and Manuel Castells (Stalder, 2006: 153).The increasing invisibility of media is exemplified by their disappearing from consciousness when used intensely -by their logic of immediacy (Bolter and Grusin, 1996).In this process, the primary bias of media technologies -the fact that people can read, edit and write their codes, programs, protocols and texts -comes to shape our sense of reality.This is a reality that seems malleable as well, that could be manipulated, fast-forwarded, panned, scanned and zoomed in on (Stephens, 1998).