How to do things with media

Media are typically understood, in research and in common parlance, as forms of representation – ways and means of rendering diverse aspects of reality in either factual or fictional formats. This chapter focuses on the broader and deeper social structures that are the products, in part, of innumerable distributed acts of communication: Representations and interactions that produce, maintain, repair, and transform reality over time and, increasingly, across space. It lays out different forms of capital, as they relate to human communication, drawing on the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu. The chapter explores an empirical account of the complex process in which communication is capitalized, drawing on the Peoples' Internet surveys to characterize the agency that people exercise daily online as parents, partners, citizens, consumers, patients, religious subjects, and more. It broadens the perspective to consider digital, analog, as well as embodied forms of communication as resources in tackling both mundane choices and pressing dilemmas of everyday life.