Media Practice Theory: Key Ideas and Approaches

This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to media practice theory and everyday media use. It brings much-needed clarity by explaining what media practice theories mean, how they have evolved, been applied, and why they matter.

The book maps the intellectual foundations of practice theory, drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein, Giddens, and Bourdieu and showing how these diverse perspectives converge around understanding social life through enacted practices. Applied to media, this highlights what people do with communication technologies, how routines shape communication, and how digital platforms structure everyday life. With examples from journalism, organizational communication, social media cultures, and AI-driven processes, it connects theory to case studies while outlining practical research methods including ethnography, observation, situation analysis, and digital mapping. The book addresses fundamental tensions in practice scholarship regarding agency of people, things, and technologies, and material versus symbolic dimensions of media.

Media Practice Theory is an essential resource for students, educators, and researchers working in the broad fields of communication and media studies, journalism, and media production as well as those who engage with (digital) media and communication in areas such as sociology, political science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and management studies.

Christian Pentzold is Professor and Chair of Media and Communications in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Leipzig University.

Peter Gentzel is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Communication Research in the Department of Media Studies and Art History and an associate member of the Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Wolfgang Reißmann is currently a trainee in the Open Science Department at Leipzig University Library. Previously, he was employed as a communication and media scholar at the universities of Leipzig, Erfurt, Siegen and Freie Universität Berlin.