When Media Matter

Over recent times, much media scholarship has been concerned with the ever-deeper incursion of media and its associated logics into both macro-processes of social change and micro-practices of everyday life. For media audience researchers, this situation has given rise to the dual challenge of arguing the field's enduring relevance and adapting its conceptual tools to contexts of pervasive digital media. This book aims to respond to these challenges by furnishing media audience studies with fresh intellectual resources and an alternative philosophical footing. Drawing inspiration from the late pragmatism of John Dewey, new materialist scholarship and wider anti-dualistic, relational and ecological thought, When Media Matter proposes a novel approach to studying the activities of media audiences and users, one centred on understanding media engagements as constituted by dynamic, processual relations. As a radical re-visioning of existing approaches in the field, the process-relational prospectus undoubtedly raises a series of questions and brings new challenges at the levels of both theory and research practice. Over its course, this book tackles these with the aid of resources and ideas from fields ranging from sociology, psychology and anthropology to the cognitive sciences and quantum physics. When Media Matter primarily seeks to appeal to media audience researchers from both culturalist and social-scientific traditions, as well as scholars and researchers interested in broader questions of cultural consumption and taste. In proposing an approach to the study of media activities which understands them as both productive and revelatory of broader social dynamics – including the operations of power and inequality – the book should also speak to sociologists of culture and others exploring questions about the interface of cultural practices and social action.