What is the role of media and communications technologies in shaping our everyday lives? This course opens up everyday life as a worthy –albeit difficult and serpentine –field of inquiry. Essentially, everyday life is our home base, our domus, and an utterly familiar place defined by repetition, habit, order, and the mundane. However, it is also far more capacious than this. Perhaps because of its heterogeneity and complexity, ordinary, everyday life has largely been an overlooked site in media studies. According to media scholar Paddy Scannell (1996), the study of media suffers “great difficulty with any idea of ordinary unpolitical daily life, and its everyday concerns and enjoyments” (4, original emphasis). This course uses everyday life as a launching pad for investigating media culture and communications technology. In particular, the course conceptualizes media and technology within the context of their use. It privileges an understanding of media as an active practice, a creative form of engagement, and a mode of world building.
Throughout the semester, we will examine the nature of everyday life, explore how media give order and meaning to our daily experience, and investigate how media engagements construct everyday time and space. Topics explored include the nature of everyday life, the representation of everyday life, theories of media and communication, the phenomenology of media, media and emotion, media and the everyday self, a case study of Instagram use, and the question of media reception and use. The goal of the course is to discern and appreciate how media are firmly embedded in the routines and rhythms of our daily lived experience. “Media and Everyday Life” aims to create a theoretical framework for considering those quieter, less heroic, and less politically conspicuous forms of media use, which can typically go overlooked by researchers.
