Media practices are the talk of the town. Hardly any conference or syllabus that does not include notions of practice or praxis. Sometimes, this choice of words is accidental and could easily be replaced by other terms like action or activity. Yet increasingly often, references to media practices and people practicing media entail far-reaching conceptual and methodical implications. Sometimes, they are spelled out in terms of performance and praxeology, with respect to habitus and ritual, or in reference to a duality of agency and structure. Sometimes, they remain implicit.
In any case, the notion of media practices seems alluring and opens up an array of useful tenets to think with. What is missing, however, is a concise overview of what to expect from the notion and the horizon of axioms and assumptions it opens up. Rightly because it has become a common trope in media and communication, and in fact in many other areas of the social sciences and humanities, it seems pertinent to clearly spelled out its theoretical fundamentals and implications, to identify its methodological stance, and to draw out avenues for practice-inclined studies. The book is exactly doing this. The book provides an accessible introduction to media practices. It states what they are and it draws out how different approaches to think and conceptualize practices relate to each other, what strengths and challenges are associated with them, what implications they have for understandings of media and media users and how scholars can analyze media practices empirically. Our book offers these theoretical and methodological reflections in a compact form by a.) bringing together current debates on media practices from different fields of research and inquiry; b.) systematically discussing the fundamental lines of tension in practice-inclined scholarship about the agency of people, things, and technologies and about the significance of the material and symbolic dimensions of media. A further focus is c.) on the discussion of empirical methods for studying what people and media are doing, on capturing digital media practices, and on how to unpack their elements.