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Life in Media: A Global Introduction to Media Studies
A new way to teach media studies that centers students’ lived experiences and diverse perspectives from around the world.
From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life.
Life in Media uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. The book is structured around six core how media inform and inspire our daily activities; how we live our lives in the public eye; how we make distinctions between real and fake; how we seek and express love; how we use media to effect change; how we create media and shared narratives; and how we seek to create well-being within media. By deliberately including diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this book innovates ways to teach and talk about media.
From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life.
Life in Media uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. The book is structured around six core how media inform and inspire our daily activities; how we live our lives in the public eye; how we make distinctions between real and fake; how we seek and express love; how we use media to effect change; how we create media and shared narratives; and how we seek to create well-being within media. By deliberately including diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this book innovates ways to teach and talk about media.
334 pages, Paperback
Published July 25, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 22, 2024
I love you mark deuze thanks for signing my book
April 2, 2024
overall, a good textbook. i actually read all of it because i thought it was interesting so that’s cool. wish he didn’t repeat his point a million times tho
September 22, 2024
I had to read this book for a class as part of my PhD coursework so the following review is a bit more rigid and serious than my romance novel ones. The assignment was to analyse one of the assigned books and determine whether we would use it in our own classrooms as an introductory textbook for 1st year students in their undergrad. This one was the most recent of all 4, having been released a year ago while the other three were written in the 90s and 2010s so this one centers social media more.
The book is intended to be a new way for students to look at media studies from a holistic point of view, using relatable examples of everyday life and focusing on lived experiences and diverse perspectives to understand the role of media in society. From the very first page of the book, Mark Deuze makes the distinction between living with Media and living inside of Media, referring to it as all encompassing and inevitable. Media surrounds us, constitutes “our most intimate feelings and experiences”, and he argues that this has been the case for a long time. Through it we build worlds and navigate others. The author went on to provide case studies to support his claim. This is basically how every chapter is structured and the word “life” shows up in the title of every chapter.
This book didn’t feel like a textbook to me at times, but rather a manuscript and I worry it might present ideas in a dense, compact way to first-year students who just started university. My typical understanding of a textbook is that it presents an idea, provides one or more example(s) for it and then follows it by an activity or exercise the students can apply the concept to. The author draws on real-life experiences, which I enjoy, but don’t necessarily find they belong in a textbook. The book talks mostly about media as experiences, not as something tangible and measurable which I would expect to find in a first year textbook meant to teach key learnings to teenagers.
Overall, I think that the book does what it intended to in its description but not what professors want for their classrooms. In my opinion, this book, while providing crucial case studies to understand how media shapes our lives, requires some previous level of engagement with the field and isn’t suitable for first-year students who are new to the world of academia or the discipline of media studies.
The book is intended to be a new way for students to look at media studies from a holistic point of view, using relatable examples of everyday life and focusing on lived experiences and diverse perspectives to understand the role of media in society. From the very first page of the book, Mark Deuze makes the distinction between living with Media and living inside of Media, referring to it as all encompassing and inevitable. Media surrounds us, constitutes “our most intimate feelings and experiences”, and he argues that this has been the case for a long time. Through it we build worlds and navigate others. The author went on to provide case studies to support his claim. This is basically how every chapter is structured and the word “life” shows up in the title of every chapter.
This book didn’t feel like a textbook to me at times, but rather a manuscript and I worry it might present ideas in a dense, compact way to first-year students who just started university. My typical understanding of a textbook is that it presents an idea, provides one or more example(s) for it and then follows it by an activity or exercise the students can apply the concept to. The author draws on real-life experiences, which I enjoy, but don’t necessarily find they belong in a textbook. The book talks mostly about media as experiences, not as something tangible and measurable which I would expect to find in a first year textbook meant to teach key learnings to teenagers.
Overall, I think that the book does what it intended to in its description but not what professors want for their classrooms. In my opinion, this book, while providing crucial case studies to understand how media shapes our lives, requires some previous level of engagement with the field and isn’t suitable for first-year students who are new to the world of academia or the discipline of media studies.
October 28, 2023
This book made me look differently at the history of media and how media affect our daily life. Although the book touched on many intriguing concepts, they were, at times, too hard to grasp for me, which made me forget quite a lot of the content that it was covering. Nevertheless, it was a nice read!
September 6, 2024
The first chapter already contains a spelling mistake ("an unique ..."), the text is highly subjective and biased (which isn't suited for educational purposes imo), statements aren't supported by sources, the layout is a complete mess and all this for 70+ euros. I honestly don't understand my university allows this as official study material for our course.
April 2, 2024
Interesting! Read for class lol but it counts i read it. Did not enjoy feeling so called out by the Turman Show Delusion however
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews