ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will consider a number of approaches to media consumption that, in contrast to the work discussed in the previous chapter, does not begin with a media text or practice; rather they begin with the everyday and then attempt to tease out how this is enabled and constrained by media use. The work discussed here either follows or presents a pre-history of a position advocated by David Morley in which he calls for a non-media-centric study of the media. As Morley points out,
[W]e need to ‘decentre’ the media . . . so as to better understand the ways in which media processes and everyday life are interwoven with each other. . . . The key issue here, to put it paradoxically, is how we can generate a non-media-centric form of media studies, how to understand the variety of ways in which new and old media accommodate to each other and coexist in symbiotic forms and also how to better grasp how we live with them as parts of our personal or household ‘media ensemble’ (2007: 200).
