Media life

Media Life presents a comprehensive and original concept of "life in media." Although people usually believe technology to be something external in relation to their life, media in fact reproduce, even create the world in which we live. The presence of media in human life is usually perceived only in terms of their technological infrastructure, however, we should realize that their intuitive and quite natural use result in their disappearance from our active consciousness, in their invisibility. The scholar presents new forms of social organization, which arise from the global, mass-scale use of media technologies. Life in media disrupts the traditional social hierarchy, based on power, replacing it with a promise of participation culture, in which competition is superseded by cooperation. This culture based on sharing emphasizes creativity and social involvement. On the other hand, the "hypersociability" of contemporary media society deprives us of our uniqueness and individuality; we cannot get enough of technology, like zombies, which Deuze uses as a metaphor of the hybrid world. With the real and media world collapsing into each other, it becomes impossible to safely distinguish them from one another. When considering the survival strategies we employ in media and are analogical to the survival strategies in primitive societies, we may regard the modern media era as another stage in the development of humankind.