ABSTRACT
The work of the European Media Technology and Everyday Life Network over the last three years has addressed the problematique which the above quotation identifies. What is at stake is the significance of social processes for the nature, direction and speed of technological change, and the significance of the everyday as a context for the acceptance of, or resistance to, new communication and information technologies. Such a perspective has, potentially, radical implications, for it demands a different view of the so-called European Information Society than the one which commonly informs both research and policy in this field at both European and national levels. It is one that is grounded in a requirement to investigate, and in that investigation to privilege, the ways in which the user, the consumer, the citizen, the worker, incorporates or fails to incorporate the new and the technological into the familiar, ordinary and more or less secure routines of his or her life in contemporary European society.1
