Everyday (Virtual) Life

Abstract

The concept of everyday life has been central to the discourse of critical theory at least since the early 1960s when Henri Lefebvre devoted several volumes to elaborating the idea. 1 In this essay I shall review the category of the everyday and test its critical capacities in the current context, when information machines or media have been disseminated widely in places like the home and the street, perhaps undermining the boundary between the quotidian and the extraordinary, the private and the public. I shall argue that the media transform place and space in such a way that what had been regarded as the locus of the everyday can no longer be distinguished as separate from its opposite. This change operates to nullify earlier notions of the everyday but also opens the possibility for a reconfigured concept of daily life which might yet contain critical potentials. 2

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