Introduction: habit, crisis and new media

Abstract

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016), argues that our media become more important when they appear to be of no importance—when they move from the “new” to the “habitual”.  The author interprets the integration of social networks in our habits as a defining concept of the present. With the pandemic moment, contemporary modes of existence made such mediations emerge as globally evident. The exposed fragilities of real, organic life now seem to be mediated through the digital existence and technological mediation of the new usual media. In the context of the pandemic, “life on the screen” becomes the canon of contemporary existence.
This issue of Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens brings together articles, interviews and visual essays on the mediations of the new usual media, focusing on the individual or the small collective, which relate to this perspective of digital intimacy in the contemporary.