Media practices, connected lives

In the network society, more than ever, life revolves around communication. In industrialized societies, a minority of the population has been in control of information dissemination – the mass communication media. While this is still true today, the degree of concentration has been easing as communication technologies (ICts) are clearly opening the door wider and wider to the participation of individuals. the architecture of traditional media, whereby the low of information has been essentially, unidirectional, from one or a few to many, is giving way to multimodal, interactive and dynamic and locally and globally intertwined connections among people, whereby the information low is from many to many.. this, in turn, allows information production and exchange to be swift, constant and eficient and enables an increasingly large number of people to broadcast anything (themselves included) anywhere anytime. In fact, ICts are becoming a powerful tool for their users to experiment with and develop ever-renewing communication channels, sometimes so quickly that is seems but bewildering. as a result, the development of ICts, particularly the Internet as well as the explosion of global mobile communication, has brought about a new turn regarding the rules under which mass communication has been run to date. For one thing, this emerging media context leads us to think about communication in relation to social practices where each individual not only receives, but also produces all sorts of content, or at least has the possibility of doing so. Indeed, we delve into the possibility of a new paradigm of media research which understand media, not as text or structures of production, but as practice. [… t]his paradigm aims to move beyond old debates about media effects and the relative importance of political economy and audience interpretation, at the same time as moving beyond a narrow concentration on audience practices, to study the whole range of practices which are oriented towards media and the role of media in ordering other practices in the social world (Couldry, 2004, p.115). Within this framework, we consider communication practices and the media within them as key elements in the building of social and cultural features. We argue that predictably these technologies and their applications are becoming basic instruments of sociocultural change.