Book Review: Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor by Esther Milne

Abstract

cative practices simultaneously personal, intimate, explicit, and open to interpretation. The author further argues that media accounting allows individuals to gain meaningful insights about the mundane and ordinary that could easily be overlooked, about others, about ourselves, in novel ways, ultimately evoking the notion of the “qualified self” in direct juxtaposition with the “quantified self.” While datafication is related to both the qualified and the quantified self, the qualified self takes on a special sociocultural significance when it prioritizes a bidirectional influence between people and the media and an interpersonal scope of unpacking representations of selfhood through media experiences. The author chooses to emphasize what people do with the media over the media technology or platform itself, and cautions us that the nature of media accounting is highly contextual. She reminds us that it is “meaning,” not “patterns” that we should pay close attention to, and that in the presence of ever-changing media, people’s media practices are certainly not created by new technologies (see also Jenkins et al., 2013). Thanks to this sharp analytical approach, the book centers the importance of contextual parameters to identify and analyze everyday mediated practices, whether in the domains of the digital or analog. The author’s rich findings and analysis offer an incisive and nuanced perspective on the complex relationship between digital media and media accounting. The book’s insights also foreground the significance of mapping personal and intimate media histories to further interrogate media practices in contemporary society. Nonetheless, clearly written and drawn on scholarly literature from media, science and technology, and feminist studies, this book will undoubtedly be useful to both scholars and students engaging with mobile media, digital media, media history, and cultural studies.