Media Life and the Mediatization of the Lifeworld

Abstract

In 20th-century discussions about the colonization of the lifeworld by the systemworld (and vice versa), the ongoing mediatization of everyday life has gone barely noticed, to the extent that media are so pervasive and ubiquitous that they disappear. It is exactly the invisibility of media — their disappearance into natural user interfaces, the vanishing of concrete uses through convergence and portability, and their evaporation as the infrastructures of everyday interactions — that alerts us to their profound prominence. In this chapter, I will trace the unseen disappearance of media into the lifeworld, and explore how we can still ‘see’ media even if they have become invisible, turning the lifeworld into a lived experience of a completely medi-atized, multisensory, two-way interactive environment. This is not the Star Trek holodeck, nor is it The Matrix — as such habitats still pre-suppose a way out. It is argued that the mediatization of the lifeworld does not have an exit, nor does it inevitably lead to social cohesion or solitude. Instead, I like to argue that the mediatization of the lifeworld does pose a more or less new ethical and aesthetic challenge considering our being in the world.