About

Co-ordinating editor:  Nicholas Mirzoeff

The New Everyday is a web publication that exists “between a blog and a journal,” also known as “middle state” publishing. It's a chance to learn what you think by writing and then get feedback from the Media Commons community as part of the process of developing your ideas.

The purpose of this Media Commons project is to investigate the everyday in the era of globalized digital media. There are of course no end of sites that discuss the digital. Here we're interested in a set of convergences that seem to be forming something new for which the "new everyday" is a placeholder.

This "everyday" is new both because it is digital and as it is digitized. Take religion, apparently the most ancient of means for regularizing everyday conduct, which has been transformed from the first cassette tapes of Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1970s via the evangelical cable TV channels to the jihadi website or bulletin board.

Or consumption: indexed at every turn by bar-coded data, much shopping is now done or researched on-line.

Or perhaps especially war, now defined as information war by the 2006 counterinsurgency doctrine.

There are many possible ways of approaching this project, ranging from description to analysis and theory. It's always a self-reflexive enterprise, using its object of research to disseminate its ideas. So really the entire site is the "About" section.

Some opening thoughts, in no particular order: first, theory: while policing might in a sense be taken to have defined the everyday in the era of Foucault's disciplinary society, the era of globalized counterinsurgency suggests something other than carefully regulated bodies and populations. In these conflicts, state secrecy, digitized espionage, leaks, state and non-state information war seem to be transforming the very sense of the everyday.

On the "global," with less than 30% of the Internet now in English, despite earlier panics about globalized English, is there still sense in talking about "the" web? What forms does the digitized everyday take for the South as well as the North?

By the same token, the planetary crisis of climate change is both known as a set of digital data and presents a set of challenges to the digital imagination,  to both requiring a transformation of everyday life and threatening its massive disruption.

In short, without rejecting the methods or ideas of the pioneers in this field, it is time to reconsider what work is done by and as the everyday, where and by whom? Just as de Certeau and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies began by a series of investigations that fed back into theory, so does this project imagine itself (in its most ambitious moments) as the creation of a transnational archive of the everyday.

Call for Contributions to The New Everyday

We invite individual contributions and proposals to curate clusters of contributions to this web-based publication that we conceive as being “between a blog and a journal.”

Individual essays or digital media projects that address topics relevant to the site are welcome. It's a good idea to email the editor for advice and so the post can be publicized across Media Commons.

However the most effective format is a group of contributions. Here a curator (or curators) sets the theme or topic for a cluster, solicits contributions and edits them if necessary, remembering the mantra “publish then filter.” .

Above all, nothing is ruled out and each iteration will change the project.

For the time being, we imagine several kinds of contribution in whatever digital format suits the contributor:

If you would like to submit an idea for a cluster, or to publish an individual project, please send an email to tne@mediacommons.futureofthebook.org

 Observations

Patterns of the everyday, textures of everyday life, ongoing transformations, challenges: although these may be shorter clusters/projects, they are among the most crucial in establishing a transnational archive.

 Reportage

A longer, more detailed description of an event, or series of events, whether political, cultural, performative, industrial, recreational or otherwise.

On-the-fly theory

From fragments of method, beginnings of ideas, and small theory “apps,” to methodological approaches to the new everyday and developed theoretical work.