Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life

Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, non-representational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the ‘media-saturated’ household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life.