Conceptualising the spatial dimension of 'the culture of everyday life' in light of the growing mobile use of connected media

This paper revaluates and elaborates on the (changing) notion of ‘context’ in the study of media audiences. In light of the ethnographic turn in audience research, the focus historically dispersed from mere textual analysis to a socially and spatially embedded understanding of media reception (Livingstone, 2003). For instance, researchers have paid attention to the ‘moral economy’ of media use (Silverstone and Haddon, 1996) and the socio-cultural factors impacting the way people – are able to – give meaning to the media they use. Recently however, changing media use practices enabled by the affordances of new digital and mobile technologies have come to challenge our understanding of this idea of context. Especially “the spatial dimensions of social and cultural processes” (Dahlgren, 2009, p. 151) are gaining increased attention within social sciences. Media practices that once were bound to take place at shared domestic spaces are experienced beyond, increasingly complicating the obscuring boundaries between what is considered public and private. Hence, the spatial dimension involves more than simple geography; it readily becomes a theoretic dimension in a world where ‘space’ can be constituted by communication processes that may be quite different to ‘place’. In this paper, we aim to further investigate the theoretical challenges of this evolution for audience research. This implies striving for a conceptualization of audiences that takes into account their mobility. From a methodological point of view, we raise questions as to how our current methodologies require adaptation to grasp the user as he moves form one socio-spatial context to the other