Advances in digital technology have rendered “mediated existence” a routine feature of everyday life. Mediated communication now shapes not only interpersonal relations, but also perception, emotion, and cognition. Media studies, accordingly, is no longer limited to examining the effects of particular tools but has become a foundational part of social theory, informing how we think about the self, others, and the world. Today, research on mediatization and media infrastructure has greatly expanded both the scope and definition of what counts as a medium. With this renewed understanding of media, it is necessary to reconsider the validity of empirical experience, or empeiria, in traditional media studies. Phenomenology, through its deep description of lived experience, or experientia, offers both a theoretical and methodological perspective for understanding mediated experience.

As Edmund Husserl argued, if empiricism holds that all sciences are grounded in intuitive experience free of presuppositions, then phenomenology is the true form of empiricism, because phenomenological description suspends even the authority of modern physics. Husserl criticized the empiricist tendency, represented by David Hume, for reifying experience by reducing it to mere facts, thereby losing sight of the dynamic structure through which experience appears and takes shape.

Phenomenology is a movement of thought rather than a unified academic school. Media phenomenology likewise has a complex intellectual genealogy. Influenced by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, scholars have developed a range of concepts and styles of inquiry to examine how technological media reconstruct human experience—including perception, memory, thought—and to interpret and critique the operation of cultural technologies such as writing, images, computer programs, embodied technologies, and environmental technologies. As Don Ihde noted, Husserl overlooked the role of technology in mediating forms of experience: The same technology can give rise to different experiential modes. Scholars of technological media have therefore largely drawn on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell, or enframing, and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodiment. Yet an analysis that remains at the level of technology’s function and meaning cannot explain how specific modes of experience come into being. The absence of genetic analysis also led Ihde to misread constructivism. Media phenomenology is neither an induction from reified experiential facts nor a functional analysis of how technology determines experiential modes; rather, it is a form of media studies that returns to experience itself.

In an age when nearly everything is mediated, the reification of experience has become harder to detect. British social psychologist Sonia Livingstone observed that media studies’ fascination with users’ data traces has exacerbated its neglect of user experience. This neglect is not limited to administrative research—even critical approaches such as audience commodification theory can reify users’ meaningful actions. Research by Miyase Christensen and André Jansson on mediated surveillance offers a paradigmatic example of media phenomenology. Rather than regarding surveillance simply as the capture of personal data by external power, they examine the “interveillance” embedded in mediated surveillance: the mutual observation, management of self-presentation, and maintenance of ontological security that structure everyday online life, and through which both self-openness and self-closure are constructed.

To describe how mediation constructs experience, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, drawing on Austrian social phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, outlined the possibility of a media phenomenology. Big data and algorithmic analysis may make users visible at the surface level, but they also abstract them into audience profiles by stripping away context, meaning, and subjectivity. Couldry and Jannis Kallinikos therefore argue that social media studies must adopt a critical phenomenological method—one that describes the space in which user experience appears after being reconstructed and obscured through the aggregation of discrete data, while also critiquing the “analytical retreat” produced by platform media.

The information pushed by platforms is not a spontaneous form of appearance per se, but a computational product generated from users’ data traces and then “returned” to them. This form of mediated interaction weakens the empathic exchange and shared attention that characterize face-to-face communication from a second-person perspective, thereby producing structural asymmetries. Couldry and Hepp further propose a materialist phenomenology, which examines the construction of reality by bringing interactive experience together with media materiality. This approach reveals the spatiotemporal experience and figurational order produced through deep mediatization, while also scrutinizing the algorithmic mechanisms of platform media, communicative AI, and other emerging forms of media infrastructure in order to critique the implicit data colonialism embedded within them.

If successive iterations of media technology have become a major force driving the formation and evolution of human lived experience, then returning to experience itself—and understanding it on its own terms—has become an urgent task for research on deep mediatization. Media phenomenology offers a fundamental methodology for that task.

Mao Jiaji is from the College of Social Sciences at Shenzhen University. Yao Xiao’ou is an associate professor from the School of Journalism and Communication at Jinan University.