Summary of "The appropriation of media in everyday life"

Abstract

Summary of "The appropriation of media in everyday life"

This interdisciplinary edited volume focuses on how people appropriate media in their daily lives. It describes naturally occurring interactions in different media reception situations with conversation analytic or related approaches. It has become clear that media do not function like a hypodermic needle injecting messages into the masses. Still, media studies have for the most part ignored the actual point in time when people use media in their everyday lives. This book analyses the minutiae of the moment when people actively appropriate different types of media for their own purposes in different fashions. All papers are empirically based and rely on audio(-visual) recordings of mundane behaviour in natural settings. Methodologically, they stress the importance of qualitative studies of natural data, i.e. the analysis of media-related behaviour of existing groups of media users (families, friends) using media spontaneously and voluntarily in their everyday life (in contrast to research based on interviews and other ex-post elicitations or focus groups and other artificial constellations, or, obviously, quantitative studies).