Acting on media technologies and infrastructures: expanding the media as practice approach
Over recent years, media as practice has emerged as a fruitful framework for exploring what people do with media. After reviewing the current state of research, this commentary argues that there is need to widen our understanding and to advance our conceptualisation of media practices. It seems no longer overstated to say that almost any form of political engagement today relates in one way or another to media technologies and infrastructures. As a consequence, media are increasingly sites of an active political struggle in their own right. To bring these developments into dialogue with media practice research, ‘acting on’ is introduced as a lens through which we can investigate the opportunities and limitations of actors’ practices related to media technologies and infrastructures for political engagement.