RESISTANCE THROUGH ROUTINES - FLOW THEORY AND THE POWER OF METAPHORS

The article cakes as its starting point the widely acknowledged tenden cy within contemporary media studies to shift the focus of interest fr om media texts more and more to the daily contexts of their reception and use. It sees the most extreme expression of this development in th e 'epistemology of the everyday' as put forward in Hermes' recent rese arch programme. Based on a thesis of the 'meaninglessness' of everyday media use, this programme can be viewed as a challenge to critical cu ltural audience research, most notably by implying that the routines o f daily life not only accommodate the media and their genres but at th e same time denude them of their power. In the article this challenge is assessed from the perspective of the critical cultural study of new s reception by examining the untheorized status of the 'everyday' with in ethnographically inspired media studies. Here the metaphorical equa tion of daily life and television viewing with 'flow' is used as a cen tral illustration in order to also assess critically the usefulness of the flow metaphor itself in approaching empirically the use and inter pretation of mass media. The article argues that such a narrow and unr eflexive understanding of everyday activity, experience and meaning ma king forms an obstacle to redeeming the emancipatory and empowering pr omises of an 'epistemology of the everyday'.