Immediate & Habitual: The Elusiveness of Mediation

With the increased networking of our digital world, media technologies—once stable apparatuses of communication—have dissolved into new ecologies.

Being composed of and affected by human and nonhuman actors, users and machines, fleshy bodies and digital objects, such media ecologies overcome previously conceived separations and dichotomies between culture and technology. How does this ongoing yet unnoticeable shift transform our everyday life? And what renders the processes behind media technology today so elusive? During this keynote conversation, two prominent Media Studies scholars shed light on these questions from different angles. Richard Grusin emphasizes the role of a new immediate, radical, and ubiquitous form of mediation that transcends communication, affecting future-oriented events. Wendy Chun stresses the importance of the habitual character of media technologies today, through which media becomes part of our lives, and in reverse our lives become part of a new technological culture.