conceptualising

I read Jean Burgess web-log the other day where she mentions Chris Atton's paper The Mundane and Its Reproduction in Alternative Media. It's not that I feel short of relevant references, as I've been working on and off with a paper trying to revise the distinctions between personal media and mass media, but this paper still comes in handy.

In my PhD-project I explore how teenagers use communication devices such as IM, mobile phones, profiles, blogs/diaries for private purposes, and I am especially interested in patterns of interplay, or the juggling of various devices. I use the notion of personal media to encompass it all. Obviously mass media are institutionalised and professionalised, and nothing like private conversations between a few friends or the average personal home-page. But at the same time, boundaries are more fuzzy than before the digitalisation of media technologies. Previous definitions of mass media can to a certain degree describe personal media: Niklas Luhmann for instance argues that mass media include all institutions of society that make use of copying technologies to disseminate generally accessible communication. Telephone conversations between individual participants are not generally accessible and thus not mass mediated (fair enough). But clearly a notion of personal media includes communication which is privately produced but still generally accessible. Eventually, the paper will become available online (within an indefinite time or at an unspecified future time)