Monday, November 9 2009
Mark Deuze, Indiana University
"Media Life: The Experience of Love, Sex & Death in Digital Culture"
Public Lecture: 12:30pm Coordinated Science Laboratory, Room B02 Auditorium
Reading Group Discussion: 1:45pm in 301 CSL

Abstract:

Research since the early years of the 21st century consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how being concurrently exposed to media has become a foundational feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media. Contemporary media devices, what people do with them, and how all of this fits in the organization of our everyday life disrupt and unsettle well-established views of the role media play in society. Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, this contribution proposes we begin our thinking with a view of life not lived with media, but in media. The media life perspective starts from the realization that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by (immersive, integrated, ubiquitous and pervasive) media. In this presentation, the media life perspective is developed by correlating the claims of contemporary social theory with recent reports on media use among teenagers around the world.

Bio:

Mark Deuze holds a joint appointment as an Associate Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University in Bloomington, United States, and as Professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Publications of his work include five books – including "Media Work" (Polity Press, 2007), guest-edited special issues of journals on convergence culture (Convergence, 2008; International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2009), and articles in journals such as The Information Society, New Media & Society, and Journalism Studies. Forthcoming in 2010: "Managing Media Work" (contracted with Sage), and in 2011: "Media Life" (contracted with Polity Press).

Sponsored by:

• Graduate College
• Coordinated Science Laboratory
• Department of Communication
• Human-Computer Interaction Colloquium Series
• Institute of Communications Research
• Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Information in Society Program, Graduate School of Library and Information Science

Our next reading group meeting is Monday, Oct 26 at 12:15 in CSL 369. We will have foodz on hand. We will be looking at some work by our next speaker, Mark Deuze, and finalizing our choices for speakers in the Spring. Mark is coming Nov 9, more on this later. Please take a look at this working paper on Media Life (the subject of Mark's talk). Feel free to also check out his blog Deuzeblog.

Our next reading group meeting is Monday, Oct 26 at 12:15 in CSL 369. We will have foodz on hand. We will be looking at some work by our next speaker, Mark Deuze, and finalizing our choices for speakers in the Spring. Mark is coming Nov 9, more on this later.

Please take a look at this working paper on Media Life (the subject of Mark's talk):

Feel free to also check out his blog Deuzeblog

James (JJ) Johnston of Neural Audio (formerly Microsoft & Bell Labs) will be visiting UIUC on Oct 15-17. He is giving a talk in ECE 537 on Friday, in 106B3 Eng Hall.

Information in Society speaker series

Dr. Matthew Hindman
Date: Mon, Oct 12 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Location: GSLIS Room 126

Lecture Abstract:
Almost all of our conclusions of the Internet's impact on American society depend on assumptions about Web traffic. Unfortunately, there has been little big picture research on online audiences, and even less work on how site traffic changes over time.

Using three years of daily Web traffic data from Hitwise, this talk examines large-scale variation in Web traffic. Smaller sites show orders of magnitude more variation in the audience share they receive. Moreover, the relationship between size and audience variability is consistent enough to estimate how likely it is that Google will still be the top U.S. site a year from now, or the odds that a site currently at rank 50 will break into the top 10.

These results challenge many accepted notions about the future of journalism, the workability of supporting online content with ads, and the supposed openness of the online public sphere.

Speaker biography:
Matthew Hindman is an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, and was previously a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His book The Myth of Digital Democracy was published this winter by Princeton University Press.