“Liquid Life” – Mark Deuze

Liquid tone, crossing grow, and Media Work Mark Deuze Bloomington Indiana USA (Ph) 1-812-3231699 Email emailprotected edu URL http//deuze. blogspot. com Dated March 19, 2006 Working paper Word count (excluding references) 7. 917 Author Mark Deuze (Indiana University) Keywords Social Theory, Liquid Modernity, Media Work Biographical attainment Mark Deuze (1969) is associate professor at Indiana Universitys Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, the United States, and Professor of daybookism and New Media at Leiden University, The Netherlands.He received his PhD in the genial sciences from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Publications of his action include five books, as salubrious as articles in peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, The Information Society, and First Monday, and he publishes an irregular weblog on saucy media and club at http//deuze. blogspot. com. Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work Abstract Life today h as have analogous with manoeuver and it increasingly displays whole the contemporary characteristics of utilization in what has been described as the unsanded capitalist economy ineradicable flux, constant change, and structural indeterminacy.Zygmunt Bauman on that pointfore argues how we be both living a tranquil emotional state, which is a precarious brio, lived under ticks of constant doubtfulness. In unstable aliveness, the modern categories of outturn ( run low) and spending (life) have converged, which trend is tokenly visible in our al nigh constant and concurrent tightness in media. check to hydrogen Jenkins, these argon the conditions of an emerging convergence finis.In this paper these trends will be explored in detail, coupling insights from contemporary social theory, clean media studies and popular culture to raise how our modern conceptions of media, culture and society have modernized, and how the emerging media ecosystem throne be illumi nated by setting it against the ways in which those at the forefront of these ethnic and technological changes negotiate their nonrecreational identity the media practiceers. 1 Liquid Life, Convergence Culture, and Media Work In todays society, argues Zygmunt Bauman, work is the normal state of wholly mans not working is abnormal (2005a 5).Life has bring analogous to work. Instead of developing a life style, our e realday efforts and energy go into choosing a work-style a way of working and a way of being at work, as one British professional coaching situation describes it. As work becomes a way of life, life increasingly displays all the characteristics of contemporary work, where we have to come to terms with the challenges and opportunities of contingent employment, precarious labour, and a structural sense of real or perceived job insecurity.Ulrich Beck (2000) points at the fundamentally ambivalent prospects of contemporary work-styles at all levels of society as marked by uncertainty, paradox and risk. The conditions of work at the solution of the 21st century are in a constant state of flux, brought about by all human bodys of job destruction practices in the context of what Richard Sennett (1998) calls hands flexibility.This culture of contemporary capitalism manifests itself most directly in the notable change of ones career from a serial of more or slight predictable achievements inside the context of a life extensive contract to a constant reshuffling of career bits and pieces in the portfolio worklife, as heralded by Charles Hand as early as 1989 (pp. 183ff). In the portfolio lifestyle, careers are a sequence of stepping stones through life, where workers as individuals and organizations as collectives do not commit to all(prenominal) cutting(prenominal) for a great deal measure more than the short-term goal, the project at hand, the talent needed now.The modern categories of life and work at the beginning of ther 21st century a re and then spilling everywhere, into each other, making each of these key aspects of our human condition contingent on the characteristics of the other. Bauman shows how this increasing fluidity of the everyday, bring together with a prevalent sense of permanent flux, has created the conditions of contemporary liquid life as a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty (2005b, p. 2).In this paper I will set the sketched developments and discussions on the centrality of work and the convergence of work and life in liquid modernity against a context of the pervasive and ubiquitous temper of media in our everyday lives. I will show how our almost constant and concurrent immersion in media can be seen as both a reflection as come up as an amplification of the hybridization of life in culture of young capitalism. This perspective coarseeds up antithetic ways of feeling at evidently contradictory thus deeply unsettling trends in 2 todays lived experiences at substructure, at work, and at play.At the heart of this argument stands a selective study of contemporary social theories on the changing temper of work by Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck, coupled with the approaches to new media by Lev Manovich and Pierre charge, and popular culture by Henry Jenkins. By conceptually tie-ining in the midst of the centrality of work in todays risk society, with the omnipresence of new media and the pervasiveness of the genres, discourses and uses of popular culture, we may open up exciting ways of looking at both historical and contemporary phenomena on the intersection mingled with media, culture and society.New Capitalism The constant uncertainty of everyday liquid life today, as sketched by Zygmunt Bauman, is accelerated and amplified at work following the prevailing management mantras of new capitalism, where stability and solidity as one-time hallmarks of a healthy comp both now have become signs of weakness (Sennett, 2005 41). The relationships of capital and labour, argues Manuel Castells, are increasingly individualized and organized around the network enterprisingness form of production, which integrates the work process globosely through telecommunications, transportation and client-customer networks.Such manhoodwide integration introduces a fundamental aspect of unpredictability to the nature of work, as the advantage or failure of the local production process becomes almost completely contingent on the fluctuations in the global network and vice versa, as both individual capital is submitted to the doings of the global automaton (Castells, 2000 18).Here, adaptive behavior, permanent change, casualization of labor, and continual innovation are all expressed in the executive credo of workforce flexibility which according to Bauman has turned from something to be avoided into a virtue to be learned and practised effortless (2002 24). This flexibility for umpteen is synonymous with li ving in fear of real or perceived job insecurity. Sennett signals how even affluent and highly educated tender professionals fear they are on the edge of losing contain over their lives.This fear is built into their work histories (Sennett, 1998 19). Society today, argues Sennett, uses the feverish development of elastic organisations against the evils of routine. Unlike Handy, he sees little promise in this re-interpretation of uncertainty as the corporate strategy of choice Revulsion against bureaucratic routine and pursuit of flexibility has produced new structures of power and chasten, kinda than created the conditions which set us surplus (ibid. 47). This 3 flexibility stretches out into both work time and non-work time, which distinction has blurred for many, if not most, mess. Adapting to changing management practices, new technologies, and cultivating creativity and talent cannot be inescapably tied to a nine-to-five working weekday, especially considering the ecume nical lack of corporate layment in employee training.With the slow demise of lifelong full-time employment, continuous prying for jobs, preparing for potential future jobs, as well as managing multiple careers more or less simultaneously have become core elements of everyday lifestyle for many. This inevitably must lead to a more inclusive take careing of work as taking place in differing socio-economic settings and as interconnected with many other, often non-work, relationships (Parry et al, 2005).Work comes in many divers(prenominal) shapes and sizes paid and non-paid, voluntary and employed, professional and amateuristic and we depend to be engulfed in it all of the time. Working increasingly includes (re-) schooling and training, unlearning one-time(a) skills magical spell adapting to changing technologies and management demands, moving from project to project, and navigating ones career through an at times bewildering sea of loose affiliations, temporary arrangements, and sexual networks.This intelligence and experience of working has come to line life and modern society. Additionally our understanding of contemporary work-styles by definition includes structural uncertainty and risk, thus framing every aspect of our lives within that particular context. Precarity The key to understanding this brave new world of work is its doubtfulness, characterized by endemic uncertainty and permanent change (Beck, 2000 22-3). The nature of work is changing rapidly in our runaway world some even foresee an end of work in the close future (Rifkin, 2004).However real or perceived the insecurities experiences in our everyday work-styles are, its precarite bleeds into every understanding we have of ourselves and who we are. As colorfully described on the Britain-based website Precarity. Info WHAT IS PRECARITY? Precarity stretches beyond work. It includes ho using, debt, general instability, the inability to make plans. We can talk about the subjugation of l ife under capital, not just the subjugation of labour under capital. Precarity is an instrument of control it is enforced by those with power 4 upon the powerless.We cant choose how we want to live. It engenders competition in social life. It forces us into a Darwinian struggle for existence on a social level. Precarity is the basic condition of individuals in capitalist society. It divides us, and limits opportunities to get together. People are disempowered and social relations break down. 1 If work and life are increasingly indiscernable in the play of the everyday, the key institutions linking their practices to modernity work (or occupations) and the family must overly be seen as undergoing a fundamental shift.With the increasing precariousness of labor and the exponential entry of women into the workforce both work and family have not only changed these core institutions of modern life have thus become merged. Catherine hakeem (2003) signals a shift in likeences towards a daptive or work centered (instead of home centered) lifestyles that cannot be attri hardlyed to societies as a whole, but to particular groups within liquid modern societies especially those who want to keep up with the demands of contemporary consumer culture.The family has become what Anthony Giddens (2003 58-9) calls a shell or, in the words of Beck, zombie institution people and policymakers alike still refer to the family as the primary unit in todays society, even though in its traditional connotation of the nuclear family two married parents and children at home it has all but died. Instead, our families perhaps must be seen as transitory units similar to what Georges Benko describes as non-places like obtain malls or airports.In such spaces existing for temporary convenience and the more or less anonymous exchange of goods, services and information, no one is really anticipate to stick around very long. The family as a traditionally celebrated safe haven from the uncert ain world outside, seems hto have turned itself against the values of vapidness and settling in it has become the place and space for structural coupling and uncoupling (Bauman, 2003).With a divorce rate of roughly 50% in most capitalist economies, a growing recognition of the normalcy of gay and lesbian lifestyles, the exponential increase among city dwellers of predominantly childless peoples like recent immigrants, aging babyboomers, and discharge nesters, and with item-by-items forming 40% or more of the tote up population of countries in North America and Western Europe it must be clear that the implication of family as an institution, like work, has fundamentally changed.In his assessment of the personal consequences of the changing nature of work in our past-paced capitalist economy, Richard Sennett (1998 21) laments how no one becomes a 5 long-term witness to another persons life anymore. Indeed, most of us, rich and poor, are constantly on the move either as economi cally and politically desperate migratory sanspapiers or as highly-skilled pagan entrepreneurs in an globally networked marketplace, where knowledge and information have become the primary form of capital (Drucker, 1993).We are not just on the move from parttime job to flexible contract, nor just from one city to the conterminous country in the particular urban settings of flexible capitalism we withal move from from pink-slip party to even so another social networking event, from rented apartment to leased living space, from fling to affair, and from single-size servings to disposable everything.Our only circumstancesd condition increasingly seems to be the lived experience of being permanently impermanent in the context of constant change, which in turn disables us to bear witness to anything other but our own p sort outs, to be solely solved deploying our individual skills and personal resources (Bauman, 2002 18 Bauman, 2000 72 Bauman, 2005b 33). In the beginning of the 21s t century we are seemingly comme il faut blind to each other, which social fragmentation is exacerbated by the undeniable primacy yet deeply unsettling nature of work in everyday life.Jonathan Gershuny (2000), after equivalence time-use datasets from twenty different countries (including Australia, Finland, The Netherlands and the United States), summarizes the characteristics of modern industrial societies in terms of a continuos growth in the numbers of skilled workers as a balance of all employment, and a growth of time allocated to the production and consumption of sophisticated products and services.Even though we tend to spend more time consuming products and services of the information age, and technologies increasingly augment and automate human labour, this does not mean we are spending less time working, as Jeremy Rifkin (2004) has argued. Quite the opposite new forms of work organization in fact entail intensified demands on the work-time of both permanent and temporary employees ( smith, 1997). The trend towards flexible work started in the 1970s, and has accelerated in the late mid-nineties, coinciding with the rush of an increasingly information-based global economy to the World Wide Web.It is particularly in this sphere of information- and knowledge-based work where the culture of flexible capitalism has sign onn root as the dominant mode of labour organization and where researchers have found both employers and employees in fact preferring a condition of supposed terminal pointless contingent employment (Marler et al, 2002). A boundaryless career reflects a career path that 6 goes beyond the boundaries of single employment settings, and involves a sequence of jobs between different companies and different segments of the labor market. As job security and promotional opportunities within larger organizations decline, individuals may view multiple employer experiences in a positive light because it supports skill development, increases mark etability, shifts career control to the employee, and perhaps results in better matching career and family life-cycle demands. As such, boundarylessness represents a different conception of job security (ibid. , 430).Whereas for most workers in traditional temporary and contingent settings their employment situation is far from ideal, many in the higher skilled knowledge-based areas of the labor market seem to prefer such precarious working conditions, associating this with greater individual autonomy, the acquisition of a wide variety of skills and experiences, and a reduced dependence on a single employer (Kalleberg, 2000). The portfolio work-style of the self-employed information or cultural entrepreneur can thus be characterized by living in a state of constant anxiety, while at the ame time seemingly enjoying a sense of control over ones own career. Bauman warns against overtly optimistic readings of the relative freedom these strand beneficiaries of inevitably unequitable glo balization claim to enjoy, as it is in a horrid and lamentable insecurity that their targeted or collateral victims suspect the major obstacle lies to beseeming free (2005b 38). Freedom and security, often seen as mutually exclusive, thus become ambigious in the context of how different people from different walks of life deal with, and throw away meaning to, the consequences of not having either.It is perhaps the perfect paradox of contemporary liquid life all the trends in todays work-life quite clearly send word a rapid destabilization of social bonds corresponding with increasingly disempowering effects of a frickle and uncertain global high-tech information economy, yet those workers caught in the epicentre of this bewildering shift express a sense of mastery over their lives, interpreting their professional identity in this context in terms of indvidual-level control and empowering agency (du Gay, 1996 Storey et al, 2005).Conditions of real or perceived job insecurity thus do not necessarily mean the workers involved are suffering in silence nor that the anxiety that comes with a boundaryless, largely contingent, and portfolio worklife necessarily must be seen as a blessing in disguise. The convergence of the time and effort we invest in both production (work) and consumption (life) as signaled by Gershuny does suggest that our most common solution to the increasingly anxious and sometimes exciting developments in society is an endless individual and professional mixing of the cultures of working and living, thus indefinitely 7 lurring the boundaries between them. Crucial to this understanding is the credit that not only are we spending more and more time producing information, knowledge, products, things we are also increasingly engaging in acts of consumption. The rate of consumption in society has greatly accelerated over the last few decades. The values, ideals and practices of consumerism tend to be framed in an extremely negative light focu sing for model on the increasing infantilization, mainstreaming and materialism of contemporary consumer cultures.However, consumerism can also be embraced in terms of its transformative potential regarding elitist, top-down, and otherwise non-responsive social institutions such as the political system (cf. the emergence of the citizen-consumer), the economy (cf. the conquest of cool and the marketing of resistance), and the media (Keum et al 2004 Thomas, 1997 Jenkins, 2006). Indeed, the consumptive trend has been particularly visible in the sphere of knowledge and information-related blank services provided by the cultural industries.We spend more and more time and money on entertainment experiences which vary from acquiring consumer electronics to attending multimedia shows, from hoard technological toys to participating in social media online, and from navigating between high cultural (cf. theater, museums, opera) to low cultural (cf. man TV, video backs, tabloids) forms of expression.Indeed, our collective quest towards increasingly compelling and diversify leisure like media-centric experiences has turned us into cultural omnivores attending a play one day, renting a couple of Hollywood blockbuster movies the next reading the latest installment in the Harry Potter (or the Russian Tanya Grotter) book series this week, spending the following weekend building a Website containing associate to all the relevant information about global meteorological and ecological trends online.It certainly seems people have a lot of spare time on their hands if we add up all these activities. However, Gershuny found evidence of what he calls the end of leisure each year we have to work harder in our free time to consume all those things that we have been working harder to produce in our work time (2000 51). Status in society today thus comes with a price time outside of work (whether at home, on the road or in the office) has become a scarce commodity, even though we s eem to spend more of it all the time. Media in Everyday Life The paradox of more time spent simultaneously at production and consumption can be resolved if one takes into active consideration how both spheres of activity have converged in our increased reliance on media in all aspects of life, in turn facilitated by rapid advancements in information and communication technologies. Next to engaging in all kinds of leisure activities to compensate for strains or other drawbacks on occupational work, work and leisure can increasingly be seen as xtensions of each other especially for professionals in the knowledge and information sectors of the economy (Blekesaune, 2005). ane particular effect this spillover effect has had on our everyday lived reality is the ongoing den of people into what can be called personal information spaces at home and at work (which for a significant number of people occupy the same space), within which we only talk to and with ourselves.These spaces can be seen as particular physical environments such as turning parts of the house or apartment into a home theater and home office filled with all kinds of consumer electronics used to consume and produce media content (such as a desktop electronic information processing system with net profit vex and a printer, one or more indorse consoles, a television set, digital video recorder, DVD-player, and anywhere between two to seven loudspeakers).Other exemplars of such personal information spaces include the ensemble of mobile media technologies we fly the coop around us everywhere we go devices that seem to socially isolate us while at the same time connecting us to the rest of the pumped(p) world (using a cellphone, laptop, personalised Digital Assistant, digital camera, walkman, and other more intricate forms of wearable computing that truly put the personal in Personal Computer).Yet these spaces can also be experienced as disembodied as in our ongoing immersion in persistent onl ine environments varying from virtual workspaces (for example through videoconferencing capabilities and company intranets) to massively multiplayer computer games (World of Warcraft, Everquest, Ultima Online), virtual worlds (Second Life, The Sims Online, Active Worlds), and social networking services (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace). The various ways in which the ever-growing numbers of people both young and old engage with each other through these and other media is sometimes taken as new forms of community.Manuell Castells for example describes our intensifying fundamental interactions online as a new form of hypersociability, where the social consists of networked individualism enhancing the capacity of individuals to rebuild structures of sociability from the bottom up (2001 131). 9 Sennetts act of witnessing (or perceived lack thereof) seems to have travel online, where people move in and out of interactive networked environments, managing their multiple virtual selves (cf. avata rs) in persistent gaming, chatting, instant messaging and otherwise connective, digital, and online environments.Market reseach suggests the worldwide number of internet users surpassed one billion in 2005, most of whom access the global computer network from the United States, China, and Japan, with other large user groups in India, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and Spain. 2 profits user penetration is now in the 65% to 75% range for the leading countries. We use internet overwhelmingly for interpersonal communication, whether it is in the context of play, love, or work. And yes, these distinct domains of everyday life dissolve in our interactions online. A prominent place for people to look for or advertise new jobs is Monster. om, a Website, which launched in 1994. The site, which has affiliates in 21 countries around the world, currently boasts a gazillion+ reanimates and has contracts with close to 150. 000 companies. A growing number of singles quickly becoming the dominant spe cies in liquid modern societies seeks and sometimes finds love online. A popular online matchmaking service, Match. com, launched in 1995, currently has more than 15 million members in more than 240 territories on 6 continents, and operates more than 30 online dating sites in 17 local languages. 3 The free online classifieds community at Craigslist. org operates 90 sites in all 50 U.S. states, and 35 countries, reports three billion pageviews per month the extensive majority of which go to job listings. 4 The most successful businesses on the internet like eBay, Yahoo, Google, and Amazon share one fundamental characteristic the product these companies deliver is connectivity, bringing people together to trade, communicate, interact and exchange knowledge, information, goods, and services. However, not just businesses thrive on interaction and connectivity online. The most often used reference guide on the World Wide Web is Wikipedia, a multilingual free-content encyclopedia, w hich started in 2001.The encyclopedia is based on the so-called wikiconcept, which means it is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an internet connection. Wikipedia contains close to four million articles appearing in over 200 language editions, and gets about one million visitors a day. 5 Weblogs are another excellent example of how witnessing has become an increasingly virtual, yet also deeply personal act. Jill Walker provides the following definition 10 A weblog, or *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries consistent in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-1990s, becoming popular as simple and free publishing tools became available towards the turn of the century. Since anybody with a net connection can publish their ow n weblog, there is great variety in the quality, content, and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. 6 At current estimates, the total number of weblogs worldwide comes close to the 30 million mark, with more than 50. 000 postings per hour, and over 70. 000 new weblogs created each day. 7 Indexing research by Susan Herring and colleagues shows how the vast majority (70%) of weblogs are highly personal vehicles for self-expression and empowerment, written almost exclusively by individuals (Herring et al, 2005). However, this kind of individualism in weblogs is in fact quite connective, as bloggers include comment and feedback options with their posts, put up their blogs for free syndication (cf.RSS-feeds), reference and link to other blogs when creating posts, and cut and paste all kinds of content including moving and still images, text, and audiofiles from all over the Web as well as their own original work onto t heir weblog. The area online where the convergence of connectivity, content, creativity, and commercialism reaches its pinnacle is in the realm of computer games. Worldwide, more than 5 million active subscribers participate in massively multiplayer online games. 8 In a massively multiplayer computer game players connect to game servers via internet and interact in real time with other users worldwide.A significant part of this gaming experience consist of meta-gaming in-game communication between gamers, using all kinds of devices such as headsets, chat commands, and in-game player signals. The play of multiplayer games both reproduces and challenges everyday rules of social interaction, as the game environment can be seen both as an extension of real-world experiences and as strictly virtual space (Wright et al, 2002). Yet, meta-gaming is not just about the game it includes any type of social interaction such as talking, loving, and trading. Ted Castranova (2005) for example has shown how we buy, sell and exchange goods and ervices in online games to the extent that such synthetic economies of scale have come to resemble those in real, offline worlds if only because of their crook size. All of these activities must be seen in terms of their concurrence, as we simultaneously engage in them through for example the windowing of computer screens pressing alt-tab gets you from your job resume on Monster to a post on a weblog, from browsing the information in a 11 Wikipedia entry for a presentation to add a book review to Amazon, from a purchase on eBay to an exchange in World of Warcraft.It is important to note how through these interactive, interconnected and networked devices and environments our work- and lifestyles further converge, not only facilitating but rather accelerating the blurring of modern lifes traditional boundaries. Contemporary changes in the economy, politics, society and technology thus get expressed in our increasing concurrent immersion in all kinds of media, which immersion in turn amplifies the convergence of the different spheres of activity in everyday life, blurring the lines between work and non-work, work and leisure, as well as between production and consumption.New Media, Culture and Society At the heart of most if not all of todays new media technologies saturating our work-life environments is their networked character, which interconnectivity has woven itself into the fabric of everyday existence among the majority of the population in European, Australasian, and North-American countries.Although this certainly suggests many people do not have access to such technologies, in the world of knowledge and information work the dominant presence of internet and other networked media cannot be ignored. In whatever shape or form, media bring the world to our doorstep and we bring our world into media. No one is outside anymore, whether by choice or necessity.This also means that the precarity of contemporary life through media extends to each and everyone of us, and cannot be said to be beholden to any particular group, race, class or gender even though lifes current precariousness means different things for different people in different settings. In this context it is both fascinating and indeed hopeful that what characterizes most of the ways we engage with worldwide-networked technologies is the extent to which we seem to be doing so through participatory cooperation.Whether it is the online collaboratively authored encycopedia Wikipedia credible enough to challenge the Brittanica, the open source software movement potent enough to ruffle the feathers of Microsoft, the citizen journalism of Ohmynews powerful enough to influence presidential elections in South Korea, the search engine based on treating relate as user recommendations Google, or the free-for-all online classifieds listings of Craigslist succesful enough to eat away the profits of corporate newspapers in the United Sta tes the bottom line of all of these practices is collaboration, a 12 lourishing collective intelligence particular of cyberculture (Levy, 1997). When asked to explain the worldwide success of Craigslist, founder Craig Newmark hints at collaboration as the key value imbed in the way we use, design and burst meaning to networked information and communication technologies my experience has shown me that most people are essentially good and trustworthy, and want to help each other out.I have been reminded that the rule about treating others the way you want to be treated is a good one. 9 Similarly, the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, base much of their companys success on letting individual employees and users co-develop new and existing applications like Google Scholar or Google Video, which are made available in so-called genus Beta versions first to sollicit suggestions. 0 Considering the commonly voiced concerns of an increasingly fragmented society and a general d ecline in traditional social capital as defined by peoples trust and in politics, institutions such as church and state, and to some extent others, it may be counter-intuitive to claim that a more engaged and participatory culture is emerging (Putnam, 2004).Considering the interactive, globally networked and increasingly participatory nature of new media, it is inspiring to consider a different kind of social cohesion a form of community that is not necessarily based on what Sennett (1992) has perceived as a purified absence of difference, but rather on Castells earlier mentioned notion of hypersociability particular of the network society. Interestingly, none of this participatory or otherwise collective nature of contemporary media is new.Ever since the mid-20th century so-called option media have more or less successfully emerged next to, and sometimes in symbiotic relationships with other forms of community media (Atton, 2001). One could think of pirate receiving set stations , small-scale print magazines, local newspapers and community television stations in the 1960s and 1970s, community-based Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Usenet newsgroups on Internet in the 1980s, and as from the 1990s a wide range of genres on the Web such as community portal sites, group weblogs, voluntary news services, and so on.The emerging new media ecosystem inspires and is inspired by networks of more or less collaborative end-users, creating what Eric von Hippel (2005) calls user-innovation communities, where people increasingly create and share their own products and services. Within the particular context of media organizations and cultural industries, much of this community-oriented and at times participatory content production takes place within the walls of commercial media conglomerates.Henry Jenkins (2006) work on the popular television and movie industries shows how media corporations at least in part must be seen 13 as co-conspirators in the emergence of a partic ipatory media culture, from Star Wars George Lucas encouraging the production and dissemination of fan movies to the producers of reality television show Survivor actively participating in so-called spoiler discussion forums online.This increasingly participatory media enviroment translates itself in the general proliferation of networked computers and Internet connections in the home (and increasingly to handheld mobile devices). Recognition of this culture of participatory authorship has come from software developers where they have introduced the concept of open design. An advanced form of this type of design is the Open Source Movement, based on the principle of shared and collaborative access to and control over software, and using (or rather tweaking) it to improve the product for global use.The videogame industry has since the early 1990s long greetd the necessity of viral marketing and user control in product development by pre-releasing game source code, offering games versions as shareware, and tapping customer communities for input (Bo Jeppesen & Molin, 2003). Participation, not in the least enabled by the real-time association of Internet and however voluntarist, incoherent, and perhaps solely fuelled by private interests can be seen as a principal component of digital culture (Deuze, 2006). Our media nvironment has thus become a key site of how we give meaning to the changing context of how we live, work, and play. Pierre Levy and Jeremy Rifkin are among those who signal an emerging relational or social economy as a direct result from the mechanization, automation, or augmentation of agriculture, industry, and services. Central to this technodeterminist understanding of the global economy would be what Levy calls the production of the social bond through the ongoing development of sophisticated systems of networked intelligence.The centrality of using and making media in everyday life reveals our endless fascination with media with any and all acts of mediation. In this context Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1996) signal a double logic of remediation, embodied in the recombinant trends of media becoming immediate up to the point they disappear, while at the same becoming increasingly hypermediate, pervasive, and ubiquitous in all aspects of everyday life Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying technologies of mediation. It is through our uses of media the difficultities of contemporary culture get articulated, as media have come to dominate every aspect of life. What is relevant to our concerns here is the interrelationship between work-time, leisure14 time, and media-time, making the world certainly a much bigger place than it used to be, while at the same time reducing our lifeworld as we retreat dutifully in our personal information spaces and interact with everyone yet seeing no one.It is especially through media that for most of us the world has become glocalized, as Roland Robertson (1995) would have it, where global products, peoples and ideas are re-appropriated locally and vice versa. It must be clear that media have become central to our understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live. However, as David Croteau and William Hoynes argue, in the twenty-first century, we navigate through a vast mass media environment unprecedented in human history.Yet our intimate familiarity with the media often allows us to take them for granted (2003 5). The enormous extent to which this is true can be exemplified by looking at how people from all walks of life talk about and give meaning to their media use. Contemporary media usage studies in wired countries like the United States, The Netherlands or Finland tend to reveal how people spend twice as much time with media than they think they do. In the United States for example, people spend on average twelve hours per day using media.Media ha ve become such an integrated part of our lives that most of the time we are not even aware we are using media. American researchers describe this kind of almost constant immersion with media technologies and content from multiple sources simultaneously available through shared or shifting attending as concurrent media exposure, rather than popular industryterms such as media multitasking or simultaneous media usage, emphasizing how important it is to avoid implying that our engagement with media is necessarily deliberate or attentive (Papper et al, 2004).We get up in the morning to the sound of the radio-alarm, switch on the television for breakfast, make our first calls using the hand-free set on our way to work, spend most of the day at our desks in front of a computer screen with fax and phone at hand, surf the Web for the latest news, blogposts and shopping deals during lunch hours, watch our preferred sitcoms and sometimes news shows over dinner, and spend the remainder of th e day chatting, emailing and instant messaging online.All of this only consists of the kind of media we choose to use, ignoring advertising and marketing messages, simultaneously reading a magazine or newspaper when zapping or zipping past television channel or commercials, reading billboards along the highway, browsing the headlines of a free daily newspaper while in transit, thoughtlessly scanning through radio stations or songs on our walkman, 15 downloading, upgrading, tweaking, installing and uninstalling software, and so on, and so forth.Liquid Life and Media Work Contemporary life thus involves a complex dance between work, play, media, and life in the context of a rapid-changing glocal context, the boundaries between which spaces, places and spheres of activity and perception have blurred. In short, the lifeworld today can perhaps best be seen as an ongoing remix of sorts, in terms a new language of how we understand and represent the visible world, our knowledge, human his tory, and fellow human beings the language of new media, meta-media, and information culture (Manovich, 2005).As Lev Manovich states, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication (2001 19). The key to understanding our increasing opportunity, propensity or even necessity to more or less collaboratively remix our glocal lived reality is too see this kind of behavior as a way for us to make sense of the growing complexity and uncertainty of the world around us (and in ourselves).Paraphrasing Bauman it is, in other words, a coping mechanism for dealing with the absurdity of life in todays liquid modernity. Liquid modern is a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvigorate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern so ciety, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long (Bauman, 2005b 1).A liquid modern society is one where uncertainty, flux, change, conflict, and revolution are the permanent conditions of everyday life. Bauman makes a compelling argument how this situation is neither modern or post-modern, but rather explains how the categories of existence established and enabled by early, first, or solid modernity are disintegrating, overlapping, and remixing. It is not as if we cannot draw meaningful distinctions between global and local, between work and non-work, between public and private, between conservative and progressive, or between work and life anymore.It is just that these and other key organizing characteristics and categories of modern life have lost their (presumed or perceived) intrinsic, commonly held or consensual meaning. 16 The way we do and understand things is increasingly transformed through and implicated by the way we engage the media in our lives. This in turn make s the media as a business, as in those companies that work to create the content of our media, of central importance to any kind of meaningful analysis of contemporary life.Defining the media as cultural industries, Desmond Hesmondhalgh for example shows their prominence for understanding the human condition and our lived reality as those institutions (mainly profitmaking companies, but also state organisations and non-profit organisations) which are most directly involved in the production of social meaning (2002 11). If the media in the broadest possible sense are the sites of our struggle over meaning and symbolic exchange in society, it ecomes essential to understand the working lives of the people within the cultural industries if only to understand which values, ideas, circumstances and social contexts define those primarily engaged in the production of of the resources and materials all of use use to give meaning to our lives. It is in this context that Bauman discusses the typical charactertics of these professional culture creators, who guard the main burden of the transgressive proclivity of culture and make it their conciously embraced vocation, practising critique and transgression as their own mode of being (2005b 54-5).Bauman implictly addresses the missing link between the particularities of the human condition in the beginning of the 21st century, our seemingly constant immersion in media, and the centrality of work as the defining principle of contemporary lived reality. The missing link is the changing nature of media work in todays digital, global and deeply uncertain age, where media workers must be seen as the directors as well as reflectors of liquid modern life, in which life media have become ubiquitous, pervasive, personalized as well as interactive, participatory, and networked.Media are both the harbingers of change as well as the self-proclaimed guardians of social order as in the case of for example parliamentary journalists and tabloid reporters documenting and thus contributing to the maintenance of the status quo while at the same time signaling the disruptive changes wreaking havoc on it from all sides. Indeed, the popular reality of the media gives rise to what Beck has described as the ongoing modernization of modernity, by emphasizing its core characteristics of risk, uncertainty, and paradox.And it is precisely this risk-taking, adventurous yet deeply self-contradictory nature that has come to define the nature of media work, where senses of risk are constitutive and often pivotal to the whole economic and social basis of cultural entrepreneurship risk being central to choices made not only in business but in the lifeworld more generally (Banks et al, 2000 453). Mediaworkers are 17 ot only interesting in terms of their contribution to the way we give meaning to our shared reality who they are, what they do and how they give meaning to their work can also be seen as an indicator of how an increasin gly significant part of the global economy organizes itself. Media industries are indeed one of the prime accelerators of a global economy, both in terms of its glocalization and its increased immersion in networked information and communication technologies.Media professionals those employed in journalism, marketing communications, advertising, public relations, game design, television and the movie industry embody in their work-styles all the themes of social change in liquid modern times as expressed in this essay, as Simon Cottle for exampe describes how a growing army of media professionals, producers and others work in this expanding sector of the economy, many of them in freelance, temporary, subcontracted and underpaid (and sometimes unpaid) positions They are also often at the forefront of processes of organisational change including new flexible work regimes, reflexive corporate cultures, and the introduction of digital technologies, multimedia production and multiskill ed practices (2003 3). Indeed, Scott Lash and tush Urry (1994) have signaled earlier how the cultural industries have always been post-Fordist avant la lettre, contributing to the culturalization of economic life through a structurating mix of commercially viable yet generic, and innovative, flexible and highly creative production processes.This unique blend of what Bryan Turner (2003 138) describes as the dialectical process of linearity and liquidity in contemporary consumer cultures turns the media as an industry into the core culprit responsible for cookiecutter-style McDonaldization, as well as the main agent in affecting social, technological and economical change. Convergence Culture In todays increasingly digital culture, mediawork can be seen as a stomping ground for the forces of increasingly differentiated production and innovation processes, and the complex interaction and integration between work, life, and play, all of which get expressed in, and are facilitated by, t he rapid development of new information and communication technologies.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000 291) correspondingly argue how the computer and communication revolution of production has transformed laboring practices in such a way that they all tend toward the model of information and communication technologies the anthrolopology of mesh is really a recognition of the new human condition. The new human condition, when seen 18 through the lens of those in the forefront of changes in the way work and life are implicated in our increasingly participatory media production and consumption, is convergent. This convergence is not just a technological process, where different types of media forms audio, video, text and channels print, radio, television are integrated into the computer.Following the work of Henry Jenkins (2004), media convergence must also be seen as having a cultural logic of its own, blurring the lines between production and consumption, between making media and using media, and between active or passive spectatorship of mediated culture Convergence is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottomup consumer-driven process. Media companies are learning how to accelerate the flow of media content across delivery channels to expand revenue opportunities, broaden markets and reinforce viewer commitments. Consumers are learning how to use these different media technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with other users.They are fighting for the right to participate more fully in their culture, to control the flow of media in their lives and to talk back to mass market content. Sometimes, these two forces reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding, relations between media producers and consumers (Jenkins, 2004 37). Pertinent to our concerns here is the ways in which mediaworkers are implicated by this convergence culture so typical of todays media. If convergence is a cult ural logic that at its core integrates all of us in the process of producing mediated experiences, how do the professionals involved give meaning to their productivity, creative autonomy, and professional identity?One way of looking at this focuses on the political economy of increasingly conglomerated, transnational media corporations, emphasizing their role in rationalizing and routinizing production for the (glocal) passel Conglomerates have invested heavily in developing synergistic relationships between their various media holdings, integrating their production processes into convergence systems that yield content for different outlets, crosspromoting programs in different media, and establishing lines of vertical and horizontal integration in production and distribution (Klinenberg & Benzecry, 2005 10). A second approach acknowledges the goals and ideals of contemporary corporate management of global enterprises, but draws our attention more specifically to those people direc tly involved in the process the mediaworkers. Being environmentally conscious, showing a social conscience and being a good corporate citizen are viewed in modern management theory as benefiting the bottom line. But this management-speak hides the growing focus in the media professionsthe cultural boundary spannerson genuine links between modern 19 organizations and the different individuals and groups in society that deal with them (Balnaves et al, 2004 193).Discussion Considering the dominant trends towards cultural convergence of production and consumption both in the way people run their everyday work-lives, and in the way media professionals do their work, it becomes increasingly interesting to observe and understand which values, ideas and ideals get embedded in the globally emerging system of userproducer co-creation. Granted, the media business is unusually fluid and superficial (Sennett, 1998 80). But as I have shown in this essay, so are life, work, and play. And all of th ose activities are expressed in the way we use, co-create, and give meaning to media in our everyday lives. The suggested superficiality and invisibility of the media perhaps belittles the valuable, hypersociable and deeply participatory nature of our interactions within and between them.Indeed, the continuous glocal remix of liquid modernitys working and living conditions can be connected to the way we understand the media. The nature of work within an increasingly liquid, collaborative and convergent culture gets meaning in the media industry through product differentiation, workforce flexibilization, and cross-media integration. Yet it also gets expressed in the various ways in which people use and make media all over the world through prosuming (Toffler, 1980) or produsing (Bruns, 2004) practices, open source-type applications, wiki-based user co-creation, and other examples of convergence culture. I accept the notion that for most of us, life in liquid modernity is fraught wit h risk, uncertaintly, anxiety and flux.However, I feel that our analyses should take the next step, and acknowledge how people give meaning to this new human condition through cultural convergence, participation, and new forms of sociability. It is too simple to argue that the media industries, which are so slavish in all of these contingencies, either reproduce passive spectators or facilitate active, albeit superficial, engagement. The ways we use and give meaning to media, both as professionals and amateurs, show signs of a more complex, or in the words of Jenkins, kludgy culture emerging, one that is built on the core elements of the global risk society and thrives on Baumans liquid life.I call for further investigation of and among those who bear the brunt of this emergence the mediaworkers. 20 References Chris Atton (2001), Alternative Media. London Sage. Mark Banks, Any Lovatt, Justin OConnor, Carlo Raffo (2000), Risk and trust in the cultural industries, Geoforum 31, p. 453 . Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Liquid modernity. Cambridge Polity Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2002), The 20th century the end or a new beginning? Thesis Eleven 70, pp. 15-25. Zygmunt Bauman (2003), Liquid Love On the valetudinarianism of Human Bonds. Cambridge Polity Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2005a), Work, consumerism and the new poor, 2nd edition. London Open University Press. Zygmunt Bauman (2005b), Liquid life. Cambridge Polity Press.Ulrich Beck (2000), The brave new world of work. Cambridge Polity Press. Morten Blekesaune (2005), Working conditions and time use, Acta Sociologica 48 (4), pp. 308-320. Lars Bo Jeppesen, Mans Molin (2003). Consumers as co-developers learning and innovation outside the firm. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 15 (3), pp. 363-383. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (1996), Remediation, Configurations 4 (3), pp. 311-358. Manuel Castells (2000), Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society, British Journal of Sociology 51 (1), pp. 5-24. Manuel Caste lls (2001), The internet galaxy. Oxford Oxford University Press. Ted Castranova (2005). Synthetic worlds.Chicago University of Chicago Press. David Croteau & William Hoynes (2003), Media/Society. Thousand Oaks Pine Forge Press. Mark Deuze (2006), Participation, Remediation, Bricolage Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture, The Information Society 22 (2), pp. 63-75. turncock Drucker (1993), Postcapitalist society. New York Harper Collins. Paul du Gay (1996), Consumption and identity at work. London Sage. Jonathan Gershuny (2000), Changing times. Oxford Oxford University Press. Anthony Giddens (2003), Runaway world how globalization is reshaping our lives. New York Routledge. 21 Catherine Hakim (2003), Models of the family in modern societies.Burlington, Vermont Ashgate Publishing. Charles Handy (1989), The age of unreason. Boston Harvard Business School Press. Susan Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt, Elijah Wright and Sabrina Bonus (2005), Weblogs as a bridging genre, Informa tion, Technology & People 18(2), pp. 142-171. Desmond Hesmondhalgh (2002), The cultural industries. London Sage. Eric von Hippel (2005), Democratizing Innovations. Cambridge MIT Press. Henry Jenkins (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1), pp. 3343. Henry Jenkins (2006), Convergence culture. where old and new media collide. New York New York University Press.Arne Kalleberg (2000), Nonstandard employment relations part-time, temporary and contract work, Annual Review of Sociology 26, pp. 341-365. Heejo Keum, Narayan Devanathan, Sameer Deshpande, Michelle Nelson, and Dhavan Shah (2004), The citizen-consumer media effects at the intersection of consumer and civic culture, Political Communication 21, pp. 369-391. Scott Lash and John Urry (1994), Economies of Signs and Space. London Sage. Pierre Levy (1997). Collective intelligence mankinds emerging world in cyberspace. Translated by Robert Bononno. Cambridge Perseus Books. Lev Mano vich (2005), Understanding meta-media, CTheory 10/26/2005. URL http//www. ctheory. net/articles. spx? id=493. Lev Manovich (2001), The language of new media. Cambridge MIT Press. Janet Marler, Melissa Woodard Barringer, and George Milkovich (2002), Boundaryless and traditional contingent employees worlds apart, Journal of Organizational Behavior 23, pp. 425-453. Robert Papper, Michael Holmes, Mark Popovich (2004), Middletown Media Studies, The International Digital Media & Digital Arts Association Journal 1 (1), pp. 1-56. Jane Parry, Rebecca Taylor, Lynne Pettinger and Miriam Glucksmann (2005), Confronting the challenges of work today new horizons and perspectives, The Sociological Review. Oxford Blackwell Publishing. Robert Putnam (ed. 2004, Democracies in Flux The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society. Oxford Oxford University Press. 22 Jeremy Rifkin (2004), The end of work, 2nd edition. New York Tarcher/Penguin. Roland Robertson (1995), Glocalization Time-space and Homogeneity- heterogeneity, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, Roland Robertson (eds. ), Global Modernities, London Sage. Richard Sennett (1998), The corrosion of character. New York W. W. Norton & Company. Richard Sennett (1992), The uses of disorder personal identity and city life, New York W. W. Norton. Richard Sennett (2005), The culture of the new capitalism. New Haven Yale University Press.Vicki Smith (1997), New forms of work organization, Annual Review of Sociology 23, pp. 315-339. John Storey, Graeme Salaman, and Kerry Platman (2005), Living with enterprise in an enterprise eceonomy freelance and contract workers in the media, Human Relations 58 (8), pp. 1033-1054. Frank Thomas (1997), The conquest of cool business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Talmadge Wright, Paul Briedenbach and Eric Boria (2002), Creative Player actions in fps online video games playing Counter-Strike, Game Studies 2 (2), URL http//www. gam estudies. org/0202/wright. 23 Endnotes 1 2 URL http//ourmayday. revolt. org/precarity. info/info. tm (date accessed 2-12-6). knock against URL http//www. c-i-a. com/pr0106. htm. 3 See URL http//corp. match. com/ baron/newscenter_press_glance. asp. 4 See URL http//www. craigslist. com/about/pr/factsheet. html. 5 See URL http//en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Wikipedia. 6 See URL http//huminf. uib. no/jill/archives/blog_theorising/final_version_of_weblog_definition. html. 7 See URL http//technorati. com/weblog/2006/02/83. html. 8 See URL http//www. mmogchart. com. 9 Phone interview with Craig Newmark, 1 December 2005. 10 See for example the company profile at CBS 60 Minutes at URL http//www. cbsnews. com/stories/2004/12/30/60minutes/main664063. shtml. 24