The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?

Abstract

The explosion of user-created media content on the web (dating from, say, 2005) has unleashed a new media universe. (Other terms often used to refer to this phenomenon include social media and user-generated content.) On a practical level, this universe was made possible by free web platforms and inexpensive software tools that enable people to share their media and easily access media produced by others, cheaper prices for professionalquality devices such as HD video cameras, and the addition of cameras and video capture to mobile phones. What is important, however, is that this new universe is not simply a scaled-up version of twentieth-century media culture. Instead, we have moved from media to social media.1 What does this shift mean for how media functions and for the terms we use to talk about media? What do trends in web use mean for culture in general and for professional art in particular? These are the questions this essay will engage with. Today social media is often discussed in relation to another term, web 2.0 (coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004). This term refers to a number of different technical, economic, and social developments; for our purposes, two commonly held ideas about web 2.0 are most relevant, but, as we will see, only the second is borne out by statistics. First, in the 2000s, we are supposedly seeing a gradual shift from the majority of internet users ac-