Full Description
For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people's everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people's complacency and waking them up to the reality or what's going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn't be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.
Contents
1. Introduction / 2. Professional Media Amid Change and Hysteresis / 3. Empirical Perspectives: Arab Journalists Debate the Upheavals / 4. Change and Hysteresis in Cairo / 5. Flux and Atrophy in Beirut / 6. Anti-politics, Populism and Social Media / 7. The Politics of Change: Media, Protest and Conflict / 8. Facebook Revolutions? Understanding the Work That Social Media Do / 9. Living in Interesting Times: The Work of Experience, Engagement and Identity / References
