Media Space 20+ Years of Mediated Life

Book excerpt: Media Space: 20+ Years of Mediated Life is loosely divided into three different, but interconnected, approaches to media space research. Each part opens with an introduction that lays out how readers can best approach the book, and provides a basic guide to the theory and research literature, technological developments and other notable events to help contextualize the book. The ‘social ‘ approach uses the rhetoric and methods familiar to a CSCW audience, but moves into actual situations that involve close working bonds, broken trust, shared joy, community building, interpersonal tension, anxiety etc. The section on ‘spatial’ approaches guides the reader through an intellectual landscape of spatiality, the ‘communications’ part is a field guide to sense-making in the as-lived mediated condition, demonstrating that media space sense-making combines an understanding of in-the-moment alongside sense made of existence in the world and reflecting upon it.