Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-235) and index.

1. Introduction -- Phenomenology and Politics -- Principal Aims and Claims -- 2. Professional Media amid Change and Hysteresis -- Journalism’s Perennial Crisis -- Journalism’s Multiple Futures -- Temporal Phenomenologies: How Journalists Experience Change -- Journalism in a Changing World -- Journalism in the Arab World -- 3. Empirical Perspectives: Arab Journalists Debate the Upheavals -- Arab Journalists Tweet the Uprisings -- Analysing Florid Language -- Deliberation and Wrestling -- Breaking News -- 4. Change and Hysteresis in Cairo -- 5. Flux and Atrophy in Beirut -- 6. Anti-Politics, Populism and Social Media -- Anti-Politics and Populism -- The View from Political Science -- Theorizing Media Cynicism -- Populism and the Politics of Popular Culture -- A Question of Trust -- Being in the World with, and through, Media -- 7. The Politics of Change: Media, Protest and Conflict -- Mediated Engagement with Protest -- Protest in the Media -- The Phenomenology of Mediated Protest -- Audiences of Protest and Conflict -- Experiencing Distant Worlds with, and through, Media -- 8. Facebook Revolutions? Understanding the Work That Social Media Do -- Mass Self-Communication -- Imagination, Creativity and Performance -- The Myth of Generative Structurelessness -- The Complicity of Academic Discourse -- 9. Living in Interesting Times: The Work of Experience, Engagement and Identity -- Media Witnessing and Subjective Recognition -- Provisional Selves: Implications for Audience Engagement with Distant Others -- Harnessing Change: The Possibilities of Dissensus.

For centuries scholars have fretted about the gulf that exists between the enormity of historical change and the banality of people’s everyday lives. This is said to be exacerbated in our media saturated age, immersed as we have become in an endless stream of sensations and distractions. In response, media theorists and practitioners alike try to come up with new ways of breaking through people’s complacency and waking them up to the reality or what’s going on out there. Drawing on both philosophy and an investigation of what people actually do with media, this book takes aim at that conventional wisdom and opens up new ways of thinking about media and the way we experience change. For politics, journalism, activism and humanitarianism, the upshot is that we shouldn’t be trying to provoke moments of revelation amongst publics and audiences, but to understand what is really at stake in the way the present endlessly unfolds in everyday life.