REVITALISING THE CONCEPT OF THE EVERYDAY IN INTERNET RESEARCH

Abstract

In an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the data-grabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive techno-corporations, this panel explores how a focus on situated ordinary practices can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasive digital technologies are experienced in everyday life. It does so via a combination of empirical research and theoretical development in a number of platformised and datafied domains: social media, music and generative AI. Juxtaposition of these topics and approaches, and dialogue between the authors and audience, will, we hope, forefront struggles, disputes, and ambivalences concerning what people actually do with the digital systems that they engage with. As feminist scholars established many years ago, the everyday is trivial and yet profoundly politically charged; ordinary experience is always imbued with power dynamics, hierarchies, asymmetries, and emerging modes of governmentality. Using empirically-based case studies, the panel engages with a tricky question: how can we theorise power and agency while making sense of the textures and poetics of everyday life, if the everyday is precisely in the unremarkable, the unnoticed, in that which escapes our grasp?