Introduction: The places and spaces of news audiences

Having the means to access “news” at any moment without much hassle likely changes the experience of journalism for many people. Beyond this, one might even say that the way we interact with information on a daily basis transforms through this phenomenon. Considering such changes in what is often referred to as “everyday life” provides a useful starting point for research into media use. It guides us towards a number of considerations, from how we structure our day through certain habits and patterns of media consumption; to the development of technology and the formation of new rituals; to shifting dynamics of communicative flows across societies and their impact; and to the processes whereby the emergent becomes the familiar. Obviously such analyses are not bound to the disciplinary confines of media studies and the term “everyday life” enjoys a rich, if vague and complicated, twentieth-century history.1 Indeed, a quick Google Scholar search of “everyday life” takes us on a whirlwind interdisciplinary tour of academia, from sociology to cultural studies, psychology to political science, anthropology to economics. There is good reason for this, in that thinking through consistency and change—patterns and disruptions—across the passage of time forms the analytic foundation for much scientific research. But while “everyday life” adorns the cover of many a noted book (e.g. Goffman 1959; de Certeau 1984), a comparable term is almost nowhere to be found. “Everywhere life” not only draws the Google equivalent of a blank stare, even writing it down or saying it aloud feels a little awkward. This is almost certainly no discursive anomaly but is rather indicative of the subjugation of spatial thinking to temporal analysis within academia (Soja 1989). While space has been “treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical. Time, on the other hand, was richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Foucault 1980, 70). Journalism studies is not immune from this tendency. Yet if we want to understand much of what makes media use meaningful for people, it is important to accentuate not only its everydayness, but its everywhereness as well.