Personal Media

In critical scholarship, personal media tend to refer to media technologies and their uses by individuals rather than to institutions or companies. Critical research on personal media taken cumulatively shows how personal media are embedded in relations and discourses of power, in relations to authorities, in relations to peers, and in relations between groups (digital natives vs. other groups), and how they are important to citizenship. Moreover, personal media do not refer only to individual technologies and their use but are also, by definition, about sociability and the embeddedness of individual use in networks of various kinds. In short, critical scholarship on personal media finds them to have far-reaching positive and negative implications, entwined with other kinds of influences and factors—social, political, economic, and cultural.