From the barbecue to the sauna: A comparative account of the folding of media reception into the everyday life

Abstract

How and why do people still get print newspapers in an era dominated by mobile and social media communication? In this article, we answer this question about the permanence of traditional media in a digital media ecosystem by analyzing 488 semi-structured interviews conducted in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States. We focus on three mechanisms of media reception: access, sociality, and ritualization. Our findings show that these mechanisms are decisively shaped by patterns of everyday life that are not captured by the scholarly foci on either content- or technology-influences on media use. Thus, we argue that a non-media centric approach improves descriptive fit and adds heuristic power by bringing a wider lens into crucial mechanisms of media reception in ways that expand the conceptual toolkit that scholars can utilize to analyze the role of media in everyday life.

The structures that shape news consumption: Evidence from the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Previous studies have examined other structures that shape media audience behavior ( Taneja et al, 2012 ; Webster and Wakshlag, 1983 ; Wu et al, 2021 ), yet even these studies focus less on people’s habits and routines than they do on other aspects of the media environment (e.g., social media platforms, online recommender systems, and television channel flows). By focusing on a moment when so many people’s lives changed, this study is able to shine a light on the powerful role played by daily routines in perpetuating news media habits ( Boczkowski et al., 2021 ).…”

“…They argue that by “de-centering” the media from analysis, communication scholars can better appreciate exactly how media processes and everyday life are interwoven—and thereby recognize how it is the daily rituals, routines, and environmental and structural elements that more greatly influence media use. Boczkowski et al (2021) found, for instance, that people’s use of the print newspaper was more a function of such structural factors as cultural habits, patriarchal family patterns, and market dynamics in particular countries than it was a matter of preference-based choices by individual consumers. For example, people often encounter newspapers in coffee shops or in their parents’ homes—but they do not visit these places primarily to get the news.…”

Restricted but satisfied: Google Maps and agency in the mundane life

“…production logic, technical design): The increasing entanglement of technical development and everyday practices (Neff and Stark, 2003;Manovich, 2013), the 'invisibility' of digital platforms in everyday life (Chun, 2016) or the breakdown of social routines in case of a failure of digital infrastructures (Plantin, 2018) are intuitively convincing. But at the micro-level of individual everyday life questions arise, (1) which social and communicative practices have changed and how stable or performative they are (Shove et al, 2012), (2) which social rituals and constellations, time rhythms, as well as individual expectations and emotions (Boczkowski et al, 2022) are unfolding.…”