This WordPress site is a living archive of reflections of students of Mark Deuze (currently at the University of Amsterdam, previously at Indiana University and Helsinki University) based on the book Media Life (Polity Press, 2012).
The site gets updated with new material to support the research for book projects, including the Dutch-language sequel (published with Amsterdam University Press in 2018) titled Leven in Media and “Media Love” (in development, contracted with Polity Press, publication date estimated 2022).
Media Life/Living Information is a course for undergraduate and graduate students. The goal is to make people aware of the role that media play in their everyday life, and to develop an ethical as well as aesthetic point of view toward a life as lived in media – to develop a vision of a good life in media.
The key to understanding a ‘media life’ is to see our lives not as lived with media (which would lead to a focus on media effects and media-centric theories of society), but rather in media (where the distinction between what we do with and without media dissolves). On this blog, students reflect on how emotionally invested they are in their media.
Course developed and (generally) taught by Mark Deuze (from 2005 to 2013 at Indiana University Bloomington, in 2014 at the University of Helsinki, from 2014-2016 at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of the University of Amsterdam, and from 2016 onward at the Department of Mediastudies there). The initial outline of the course is available online.
Why I Heart My Media 
Why I Heart media?
Music is very important in my life and media completely changed the availability, as well as the way we are consuming music.
I am a huge fan of collecting vinyl records and media makes it possible for me to take my collection anywhere at anytime. I can transfer the records to MP3 and then store them on my smartphone.
Furthermore, I am able to access an unlimited library of music. Streaming platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud allow us, to listen to nearly every song that has ever been released. And it doesn’t stop there, as it also possible now to identify music through apps like Shazam, which is an amazing invention.
Of course the media’s impact on the music industry is not only positive, as social media becomes more and more important in marketing music, with the consequence of exactly these social networks having more influence on the music industry itself.