You should participate in bettering life in media says Mark Deuze

The (media) world is fluid, plastic and capable of being molded by people’s willingness, motivation, and agency. Professor of Mediastudies at the University of Amsterdam, Mark Deuze urges his readers, students of media, to act on opportunitites where they can change things for the better.

”The” media includes a variety of industries, including media firms, technology companies and telecommunications corporations. Deuze wants us to keep in mind three fundamentals about media: the media disappear, the media are interwoven with everything we do, and the media engage us on an emotional level.

Common ground

To kick off discussing life in media, Deuze wants the reader to consider two crowdsourced documentaries on YouTube: the 2010 and 2020 films in the life in a day project, as examples of “mediation of everything”. This may be an attempt to find a common ground for his readers, as the book indeed is intended to be a truly global overview of media studies to date. The effort is valiant.

As a seasoned media practitioner and a novice media scholar, I found the textbook extraordinarily pleasant to read. This may be because Deuze has removed all references from the actual text to an appendix. The appendix provides background information on all the media scholars he cites and references, providing a great syllabus on topics chosen such as love, activism, and media as industries.

Watch or listen to Deuzevlog

Finally, Deuze also makes media studies more accessible for all kinds of students by providing media to watch and listen. He has published a series of interviews with scholars he looks up to, and gets them to affectionately reflect on their careers as media scholars (as #deuzevlog). An example is a key moment in a discussion with Henry Jenkins, who remembers being angry at academia not representing his experience of media. Here's the clip (video time 00:14’30 - 00:15’15), Henry Jenkins on Public Scholarship in Media Studies.

I appreciate the book’s encouraging and optimistic tone, as well as the inclusion of social media entertainment, social media content creators and influencers as media professionals. The media industry he discusses appears recognizable to me and reinforces my belief in the importance of my own dissertation project.

I challenge you to go and find your life discussed in this work - and if not, to make your voice heard.


Life in Media (MIT Press, 2023)