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The article argues the importance of intermediality as a concept for research in mobile communication and media. The constant availability of several, partially overlapping channels for communication (texting, calls, email, Facebook, etc.) requires that we adopt an integrated view of the various communicative affordances of mobile devices in order to understand how people choose between them for different purposes. It is argued that mobile communication makes intermediality especially central, as the choice of medium is detached from the location of stationary media and begins to follow the user across all contexts of daily life.

Artiklen diskuterer spørgsmålet om, hvilke konsekvenser det har for hverdagslivet, at de fleste danskere inden for de seneste 10-15 år har fået både mobiltelefon, SMS og e-mail, og er begyndt at bruge dem flittigt. Artiklen bestemmer de personlige medier teoretisk med udgangspunkt i de typer af
kommunikation, de understøtter og introducerer livsførelsesbegrebet som hverdagssociologisk ramme for analysen af, hvordan de personlige mediers potentialer indlejres i forskellige typer af hverdagsliv. Artiklen eksemplificerer den teoretiske og analytiske tilgang med en række analyser fra en interviewundersøgelse. Fundene fra analysen understreger behovet for at se på de personlige medier som et samlet system af muligheder, der er tilgængeligt for den enkelte og demonstrerer, at folk med forskellig livsførelse tager de personlige mediers muligheder til sig på karakteristiske måder.

Søgeord: Interpersonel kommunikation, mobile medier, medieret kommunikation, hverdagsliv, livsførelse.

ENGELSK ABSTRACT:
Rasmus Helles: The New Media of Everyday Life

This article discusses the role of personal media in everyday life. During the last 10-15 years, a large proportion of the Danish population has adopted new media technologies for interpersonal communication: Mobile phones (including SMS), e-mail and a number of other new media. These are all personal, both in terms of the communication they facilitate and by the fact that they are individually owned and operated. This article defines personal media in terms of the communication they support, and introduces the concept of "conduct of everyday life" as a sociological framework for the analysis of integration of these personal media in everyday life. The article exemplifies this theoretical and analytical approach with findings from an empirical analysis of the use of personal media in everyday life. These findings underline the need to take an integrative view of personal media, and demonstrate how people with different manners of everyday life appropriate personal media in different and characteristic ways.

Key words: Interpersonal communication, mobile communication, mediated communication, the conduct of everyday life.

In the article, we argue that the advent of data mining techniques and big data in media and communication studies present problems that involve fundamental methodological questions, requiring us to revisit existing ways in which the link between theory, operationalization and data are explained and justified. We note that the discourse of instrumental optimization that surrounds big data clouds epistemic debates about their appropriate integration in scholarly explanations, and argue that a discussion of these problems can usefully depart from a distinction between the two main types of data mining models (supervised and unsupervised). We argue that both types pose specific challenges and give examples of ways they have been productively overcome. In particular, we argue that while big data approaches have introduced novel opportunities for research, they have fundamentally been incorporated into media and communication studies in ways that comply with existing, prototypical explanatory schemes. Our examples link specific empirical studies to general strategies of scientific explanation, focusing on neo-positivist, critical realist and interpretivist explanations.

Social media have been associated with the coming of many-to-many forms of communication, but they also depend on many-to-one communication: bit trails or metadata that the users of digital media leave behind and which serve to structure future communications. Departing from a communicative rather than a technical understanding of metadata, this article discusses the place of many-to-one communication in the modus operandi of social media. Speaking into the system, users engage with media that are social in distinctive ways and, thus, participate in the structuration of particular forms of society, with or without their knowledge and consent. The rights and responsibilities of the users of social media can be addressed with reference to a principle of habeas data, which complements both habeas corpus and the classic freedoms of expression and access to information.

Twenty-five years ago, Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch proposed a model for studying television as a cultural forum, as the most common reference point for public issues and concerns, particularly in American society. Over the last decade, the internet has emerged as a new communicative infrastructure and cultural forum on a global scale. Revisiting and reworking Newcomb and Hirsch's classic contribution, this article: first, advances a model of the internet as a distinctive kind of medium comprising different communicative genres — one-to-one, one-to-many as well as many-to-many communication; and, second, the article presents an empirical baseline study of their current prevalence. The findings suggest that while blogs, social network sites and other recent genres have attracted much public as well as scholarly attention, ordinary media users may still be more inclined to engage in good old-fashioned broadcasting and interpersonal interaction. Despite a constant temptation to commit prediction, future research is well advised to ask how old communicative practices relate to new media.

Global Internet use is circumscribed by local political and economic institutions and inscribed in distinctive cultural practices. This article presents a comparative study of Internet use in China, the United States, and five European countries. The empirical findings suggest a convergence of cultures, specifically regarding interpersonal communication, alongside characteristic national and sociodemographic configurations of different prototypes of human communication. Drawing on the classic understanding of communication as a cultural process producing, maintaining, repairing, and transforming a shared reality, we interpret such configurations as cultures of communication, which can be seen to differ, overlap, and converge across regions in distinctive ways. Looking beyond traditional media systems, we call for further cross-cultural research on the Internet as a generic communication system joining global and local forms of interaction.

This Special Section takes stock of a shift toward an integrated and global digital media environment with a set of articles comparing and contrasting the social uses of the Internet in China, Europe, and the United States. Departing from James Lull's typology of the social uses of television, the articles address both general media use patterns and the specific private and public uses to which the Internet is put in these different social and cultural contexts. A concluding commentary by Lull serves to place current communicative practices in historical perspective and to suggest implications for future research.

Today, websites operate in a modular fashion, outsourcing the surveillance and datafication of users to outside companies, along with security functions, video hosting, and so on. These third-party services (TPSs) function as key enablers of the web, with respect to functionality and the monetization of user activity. Departing from critical data studies and media systems analysis, the article contributes to understanding TPS infrastructures by placing these in a wider context of markets, cultural differences and regulation. Through a study of top-150 websites from the 28 EU countries, the article demonstrates how the use of TPSs varies between different parts of the region and different types of sites, and traces this variation to issues of language, regulatory traditions and differences in online businesses. These insights may inform current debates about surveillance capitalism and big data, by linking different forms of commodification of users' behavioural data to broader social and cultural structures.