Living in the Mediapolis:
A Reaction to the Article Entitled “A Life Lived in Media” by Deuze et al.
by Cheeno Marlo Sayuno
The recent devastation to the country brought about by the monsoon and the downpour of heavy rain that came along could have been a lot worse to deal with if not for media’s eminent and significant role in making our countrymen survive this calamity. From flash reports and round-the-clock updates to communicating to the public the need to prepare for the calamity and to help those in dire need, not only television but also the new media, i.e., the Internet, played vital roles in the transfer of messages in emergency situations. With that, indeed, communication has become faster with media.
However, Deuze et al., authors of the article “A Life Lived in Media,” believe that this is an age where human life does not go on with media coming alongside anymore. According to them, we live not with media but in media and our world, and the experience that we accumulate as we go on with life are famed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by media. For them, media, immersive, integrated, pervasive, and existing everywhere as they are, do not come as form of aid or add-on in our lives. In fact, we live in it. Our world has become a view of the world in media perspective under what the authors believe to be distinct terms in media generation, which are invisibility, creativity, selectivity, and sociability.
In trying to prove their claim, I conducted a survey among users of the blogging site Tumblr, where I asked them to list down five things that they cannot live without. Out of 60 respondents, 19 bloggers included the Internet or computer in their answers, 15 included cellphones, 9 included books, and 3 included Tumblr. All in all, 46 answers were media forms. Other top answers were food (39), water (19), God (18), family (17), and home (14).
In the said survey, it is fascinating that these respondents cannot imagine life without media and they are not even aware of it. This is referred to by Deuze et al. as the invisibility of media. Media become invisible when they remix their properties. For one, they include various options in one device to cater the needs of consumers that users are not aware that they are already using media in, for example, checking the time on their mobile phones or playing music on their personal computers. They also become invisible to us either by being too big that they become part of the background or environment that we live in or by being too small and hidden that we do not realize that they exist. With this invisibility, Deuze et al. believes that they accumulate power, which lies in their influence as they automate, augment, and organize our daily life without us being completely aware of it.
Creativity is also embodied in media in a sense that media offers us a variety of ways to defy cultural and spatial boundaries. How, through one button, we can talk to people from the other side of the globe, how we can send messages in a few clicks, and how we can see each other despite distance are all products of media’s attempt to create innovations for consumers.
It is through media that information is found, created, gathered, selected, edited, disseminated, and redistributed. Therefore, with a life lived in media being a kind where there is a creative outlook on one’s world, media workers create ways toward the convergence on media and the aspects of life, as what Deuze et al. further claim. At first, it was just the voice that seems natural when using media since you can actually hear the message from the person who delivered it, and then, there is the advent of imaging and webcams that even transports the image of the person talking in real time. Now, the sense of touch has been delved into, with touch screens, and even actual movements in gaming such as that in Wii.
A life in media is also creative enough that we can be connected and isolated at the same time in it. To do that, according to Deuze et al., each of us is required to rely on our own creativity to make something out of life. When we see texts around us, we give meaning to them and we try to make sense out of them, but in media, we do not just give them meaning. We also symbolically produce them, the way television dramas and films create a representation of everyday lives, the way news articles give us the view of everyday happenstances, the way books tell us about history, and the way social networks expose the minds of people in the open.
Selectivity in media, on the other hand, is on how the industry and the state use the power of media. Those who can control media use it to sell something, make the audience believe in a certain advocacy, or drive them into a certain action that will favor the creator of the message. With all of us being exposed to media in its array of forms, media workers can somehow project how one message can reach its target recipient. There is selective exposure to the messages conveyed through media so that the aim shall be served. Media workers can control how to make housewives buy a certain household product or even how to drive citizens to believe that a certain law should be rightfully passed to Congress. Control of media is evidently important with how they carefully select who gets what messages.
In my opinion, however, one of the most essential parameters that media have that paved way into its further penetration into the lives of men is its sociability factor. It is through media that we get to communicate to people despite distance and time constraints. Media made the unreachable reachable and the long wait for replies short enough that it is as if we are talking face to face. Media had also presented to us a virtual space where we can meet old acquaintances and even create new ones. They have even created a virtual world within our world, where we can create an identity of our choice. And with a bunch of people who love escaping and being part of something, media have hit us at the right soft spot.
Despite the anonymity and the creation of a virtual self that media, particularly the Internet, offer, as what Deuze et al. claim, the people of today generally tend to feel that selectively sharing private information is part of participating in the public realm of social media. Facebook, for instance, offers us options to share personal information, and we were convinced that nothing is wrong with that since everybody is into it. Twitter and Foursquare offer us a space to say where we are and what we do and let the world see that. In spite of this generation of divulging personal information that people may use for your favor and against you, we can still but control who can see them, i.e., by having the power to choose who to add and who to accept as friends, and we may or may not provide true information because no one would even verify the truth in what we provide; thus, we become public at one point and private at the same time, controlling how much we publicize and how much we keep in private.
Deuze et al. has proven through the aforementioned terms that, in a world of globalization and technological advancement, we do not live with media anymore. We live in media; we thrive in its walls and we can never get out of it. In addition, to be able to see the reality where we used to live in, we have to go through media. We have to get through their walls before we actually see the real world.
While it is true that media are part of man’s life and combat for survival, I would still like to believe that we do not live in media. The Media Dependency Theory by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur states that, the more dependent an individual is on the media for having his or her needs fulfilled, the more important the media will be to that person; however, this is possible if we are constantly exposed to media. We are dependent in media because they are inevitably present around us; take them away, and we still can survive. We still live in reality without media penetrating in it and claiming to be that world. The problem is that people are either not aware or not responsible enough to control media instead of being controlled by them. Thus, it is but important for people to be oriented about media awareness to identify how much of media do we need and not need anymore and how much influence it should give us.
Media may be a social entity, the way they have created their own niche in our society, but they cannot be an independent institution because they can never generate ideas of their own. It is not media that is influential but the people who use and control it. Deuze et al. mentioned that the industry and the state use media as a tool in influencing people. Thus, we do not live in media but live by the ideas transferred to us by those who take advantage of the power of media.
Also, not everything can be communicated in media. Advocacies, for instance, are among those things that people would have to personally deal with in order to obtain such. We can use media to tell people and encourage them, for example, to volunteer for social work, but volunteerism, defined by the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary as “the practice of working as a volunteer, especially in community service or social work,” is not something that can be mediated. The idea is that we use media as a social platform, a space where we can communicate in order to drive others into acting out of media and into the world where we live in.
There would always be something different about the real—the real voice, the real touch, the real presence of people, the real world—that media can never imitate. Media can be our tool in still having temporary and representational realities. Media can cater for our needs to survive and we have to use that advantage. But we should never live in it. Media have a lot to offer, but the world outside of it has something to offer as well that we cannot just let pass just like that.
A new storm is coming to our country. Media will have to aid us once again toward safety. Let us survive with it and not in it. Media are powerful, and so are we.
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