THE CONCEPT OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN CYBERSPACE

The concept of everyday life is central to work in Cultural Studies and Media Studies. It covers the family relationships, routines, cultural practices and spaces through which people make sense of the world. On the one hand then, everyday life is the site in which the popular meanings and uses of new media are negotiated and played out. On the other hand, nearly all of the discussions of new media to a greater or lesser degree make claims that they transform, or will soon transform (or transcend) day-to-day life, its spatio-temporal limits, its restrictions and power structures.

The nature of this transformation is contentious; for some observers new media offer new creativities and possibilities, for others they reinforce and extend existing social constraints and power relationships. Everyday life is a central concept within Cultural Studies’ approach to technologies.

                                         It is studied and theorized as:

• The market for which companies develop consumer hardware and software

• The site of practices and relationships in which sense is made of new media

• The focal point of an interlocking set of convergences of consumer, media, educational and entertainment technologies and markets

• The social conditions which are, to a greater or lesser degree, transformed by the use and consumption of new media

• The absent or underplayed term in utopian visions of new knowledge and shifting identities in cyberspace – as alienation and routine to the connectivity and creativity emerging in Internet communication media

• The site of consumption of mediated popular culture, not least the images and dramas from comics, television and video that constitute a commercial technological imaginary.

From the perspective of Cultural Studies, the ‘newness’ of any new medium is always tempered by the longevity of the economic and social conditions from which it emerges and the domestic and cultural contexts – from the architecture and layout of the home to the relative stability of the nuclear family – into which it is inserted. In his study of an old medium that was once new, Raymond Williams argues that the arrival of television as a popular medium was bound up with historical and cultural processes originating in the Industrial Revolution. His notion of ‘mobile privatisation’ highlights, for example, a complex of developments linking the privatisation and domestication of screen media with television’s usurpation of cinema, and the new mobilities of the privatised family afforded by technologies such as the motor car.

Socially, this complex is characterised by the two apparently paradoxical yet deeply connected tendencies of modern urban living: on the one hand mobility, on the other hand the more apparently self-sufficient family home. The earlier period of public technology, best exemplified by the railways and city lighting, was being replaced by a kind of technology for which no satisfactory name has yet been found: that which served an at once mobile and home-centred way of living: a form of mobile privatisation. Broadcasting in its applied form was a social product of this distinctive tendency. (Williams 1990).

For accounts of everyday life in the study of media culture and technologies, see Silverstone (1994), Mackay (1997), and Highmore (2001)
Popular culture is here taken to mean both the commercially produced artefacts of entertainment culture (television and television programmes, toys, films, etc.) and the lived practices, experiences and contexts within which these artefacts are engaged with and consumed

However, whilst these longer historical trajectories have shaped the everyday world into which new media insinuate themselves, and indeed have shaped the design of, and intentions for, new media technologies, the new media and the cultural activities and uses to which they are put are by no means wholly determined by these contexts. In its review of research into, and theories of, technology and culture in everyday life this section will highlight how newness and continuity are identified and articulated, and signal the underlying conceptions of the relationships of determination between technologies, people and culture.

Cyberspace Cultural Studies’ concentration on everyday life would seem at first glance to be unhelpful in the study of new media and cyber culture. The former implies the mundane and quotidian, the routine and ordinary – all the features of daily existence from which the latter, in both their fictional and actual forms, promise to transform. Both celebrations and critiques of cyberspace tend to posit its separateness, its profound otherness to everyday life, embodiment, subjectivity. For Michael Heim, ‘cyberspace is Platonism as a working concept’, and ‘the cybernaut seated before us, strapped into sensory-input devices, appears to be, and is indeed, lost to this world. Suspended in computer space, the cybernaut leaves the prison of the body and emerges in a world of digital sensation’ (Heim 1993). The intense excitement generated by new media forms such as the World Wide Web and Virtual Reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s has waned as such media have become part of a commonly experienced media world.

However, the notion of ‘cyberspace’ as a separate, emancipatory (or more often, threatening) realm within, yet distinct from, everyday media culture persists. Journalists routinely affirm the apartness of Internet media such as chatrooms and social networking sites in articles on the ominous implications for children and young people. Here cyberspace is either an alienating, anti-social distraction from more authentic social and communicative activities, or a dangerous realm stalked by predators.

Manufacturers of, and service providers for, new (or newly upgraded) digital communication media also invoke the transformation of daily routines and domestic space through the collision of actual and virtual space, albeit in an enthusiastic and celebratory tone. Another persistent model of a more fully mediated everyday life is that of ubiquitous computing. It becomes clear that on the one hand a more nuanced conception of the relationship between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ in everyday digital culture is required; while on the other, that the materiality, the reality of new technologies and new technocultures must be addressed.
However, excitement about, and anticipation of, particular consumer technological trajectories (currently minituarisation, virtualisation, pervasiveness, etc.) does inform and shape producers’ designs and research, and consumers’ expectations and willingness to invest in new formats and devices

Importantly though, this is not to argue that there is nothing new or revolutionary in the mediations of the Internet and everyday life (or that the widespread sense of ‘space’ that computer media produce is false). Rather it is to suggest that any progressive understanding of the potentialities of new media in everyday life is only possible by rejecting a notion of ‘a self-enclosed cyberian apartness’ (Miller and Slater 2000) and recognising the materiality of these technologies and their place in everyday lived experience. We could instead think of a productive tension between the places and practices of new media: ‘these spaces are important as part of everyday life, not apart from it’ (Miller and Slater 2000).

Also, in their emphasis on the rolling horizon of everyday media mundanity, Miller and Slater downplay aspects of new media that are genuinely novel. Everyday cyberspaces do exist, generated by telematic communication through networked and mobile digital media, and in the dynamic software worlds of videogames. Whilst they are thoroughly enmeshed in, and accessed from, everyday life, they generate new modes of communication, new games, new opportunities for identity play, and new relationships between the human and technological. The virtual and the actual are intertwined, and each is all the more interesting for it. This Part offers some productive theoretical resources for the study of the historical, social and cultural dynamics that shape, and are shaped by, everyday techno culture.

 Consuming new media; the concept of consumption is central to Cultural and Media Studies’ approach to technology in everyday life. It is a contested term: seen variously as the primary cultural practice in a passive, greedy consumer society; or as a potentially rich and creative way of making sense of individual identity in a complex world: ‘Rather than being a passive, secondary, determined activity, consumption ... is seen increasingly as an activity with its own practices, tempo, significance and determination’ (Mackay 1997). Though Cultural and Media Studies are characterised by a wide range of conceptual and methodological approaches, it is possible to generalise and assert that their analyses of technology and consumption tend to be based on certain premisses. First, digital media technologies tend not to be seen as fundamentally distinct from ‘old’ electronic media, or even, in some studies, other domestic technologies, such as microwaves or freezers (Silverstone and Hirsch 1992). Second, there is a general reluctance to privilege either consumption or production in the generation of the meanings of a domestic technological device. That is to say, the meanings and uses of domestic technologies (and consumer goods and mediated images) are not fixed in either the moment of their production or in the act of their consumption. Rather, they are the always contingent product of the relationship between the constraint or ‘encoding’ of meaning through production and marketing, and the creative activities through which individuals and groups make sense of or ‘decode’ these meanings. Cultural and Media Studies’ work on domestic media technologies is based on a political dynamic between ‘constraint’ and ‘creativity’ (Mackay 1997).

Producers attempt to constrain the uses and meanings of their products, consumers negotiate these intended meanings more or less in accordance with the producers’ desires, and Cultural Studies scholars attempt to identify creative or progressive trends within the consumers’ negotiations. The emphasis on the ‘meanings’ rather than, say, the ‘uses’ of media technologies here is significant. It draws our attention to the cultural nature of technologies, for instance the ways in which the acquisition of the latest mobile phone or MP3 player might be driven more by its owner’s desire for status than by its functionality. Producers and advertisers operate by the long-established dynamic of differentiating essentially similar products through the generation of images and brand identities. In this regard, a phone is the same as any other commodity.

Certainly, the notion of ‘meaning’ by no means exhausts the cultural operation and circulation of media technologies, indeed concentrating only on their discursive construction detracts from their material nature as technologies, in actual lived moments of adoption and use. This tension between meaning and use will be explored further below. For now we will look at some ethnographic case studies that draw out some of the dynamics of the relationships between new media technologies and their domestic context.

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III -  42686