[ecrea] Media and Everyday Life: A Textbook

With the usual apologies for cross-posting, I’d like to announce the 
publication of my new textbook /Media and Everyday Life 
<https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187> 
/with Palgrave Macmillan.

The book comes out of ten years’ experience teaching the same first-year 
undergraduate media theory course, trying out different texts each time, 
and finding that students consistently fail to engage with certain 
themes, as well as being resistant to the analytical orientation to the 
media that dominates the literature in this field. This isn’t because 
the students are incapable, but because they just don’t share some of 
the core assumptions that pervade media studies. One of these is the 
Frankfurt School-inspired premise that the media sits at the centre of 
our society, acting as a kind of cultural machine that reproduces 
dominant ideas and ideologies as well as coercive relations of power. 
Jettisoning the Frankfurt School entirely would be counter-productive, 
but a properly critical discussion of cultural reproduction needs to 
take into account the idea that few people working in the media 
industries wake up with a burning desire to entrench social norms and 
hierarchies of power.

Another assumption it challenges is that there’s something profound, and 
potentially pathological, about new or digital media – indeed, even 
using the terms ‘new’ and ‘digital’ now feels anachronistic. There are 
other disjunctures too: the idea that electoral politics is or should be 
at the heart of society, that the public/private distinction is 
meaningful and worth defending, that there are certain kinds of events 
and phenomena that we should pay attention to, collectively. The book 
responds not by dismissing politics or power, privacy or news, but by 
setting out /how/ they and other cultural forces are experienced at the 
level of everyday life – rather than in the canonical form through which 
they are conventionally presented.

It bears emphasising that ‘everyday life’ does not indicate an 
uncritical descriptive account of what people do with media these days. 
The approach taken is phenomenological – not that I ever use the word 
explicitly. It means that each chapter takes a set of media practices, 
or forms, or institutions, and asks how they come to be experienced 
primarily as normal, even unremarkable, with scholarly explanations 
ranging from the political and economic to the cultural and arbitrary. 
It is thoroughly interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing on 
sociology, political science and philosophy as well as media theory – 
though it does so only insofar as such perspectives are useful, and 
straightforwardly explicable to students at the undergraduate level.

The focus in each chapter on the experience of everyday life is not 
about me putting forward a narrow yet insightful academic perspective on 
media, nor is it a craven attempt to appear relevant to students. 
Instead, it’s a heuristic device which allows us to identify what 
practices now count as normal across all aspects of our mediated lives, 
then to take a breath and ask how we got here and with what 
implications. It’s also a way of showing that what students often regard 
as the drier aspects of studying media – its institutions and 
regulation, for instance – aren’t external entities that need to be 
studied because that’s what media students do, but lived aspects of 
contemporary societies: think of how deeply entwined practical realities 
like media law, market research and human resources regulations are with 
our internalised notions of gender. The aim is to establish a critical 
break with the way we usually experience media as given, to take a step 
back and ask challenging questions about what underpins that experience, 
and to set out the full range of academic perspectives available to 
begin to answer those questions.

Hope you (and your students) enjoy it. Full details here: 
https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187


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