Media as Data Extraction: Towards a New Map of a Transformed Communications Field

The communications field must challenge traditional understandings of media in the face of a transformation in the dynamics of capitalism that prioritizes the generation of value from data based on continuous surveillance. New advertising and data-processing developments mean that while the term media may continue to attach to the distribution of narratives, researchers must now conceive it as the convergence of message-circulation technologies with data-extraction-and-analysis technologies that are linked to everyday objects increasingly typical of our new mobile personalization era. In fact, nothing less than a radical revision of the boundaries of the communications field is required to adequately address the fundamentally altered social and economic order emerging from this ferment in the field of everyday life itself.