Johanna Sumiala & Leena Suurpää
It must be clear that media are not just types of technology and chunks of content occupying the world around us… If anything, today the uses and appropriations of media can be seen as fused with everything people do, everywhere people are, everyone people aspire to be. There is no external life to media life – whatever we perceive to escape hatch, passage out, or potential delete key is just an illusion. In fact, we can only imagine a life outside of media.
This citation from Mark Deuze’s book Media Life (2012, x) hits the point. In today’s world, young people live fully mediatized lives. This generation 2.0 travels between physical and virtual worlds – or should we say between offline and online. For these digital citizens’ principles such as belonging, intimacy, time, space, and engagement seem to be anything but the dual dichotomy between physical as something more real than virtual. And yet, we should be careful not to conceive this new reality as a utopia of novel borderless social and cultural order. Many hierarchies of power, unequal division of cultural and social capital and symbolic boundaries are at play when young people live and experience their lives in these highly mediatized spaces. The contemporary wandering between on- and offline worlds is not just an exciting world of global trends and new experiences but also a realm of contradiction, conflicts and struggles for space and recognition.
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