Media and mood work: Routines, daydreams and micro-moves

The intensive discussions of the digitalization of everyday life in the decades around 2000 often focused on how media invaded the home, reorganizing many mundane activities and sociabilities, creating new dependencies and skills of multitasking, as well as dangers of mental overload. Easily forgotten was how the new digital life was based upon a platform of domesticated media use created earlier. This chapter looks at the pre-digital media life between 1930 to 1960 in Sweden, when people learned new skills, listening to the radio and the gramophone, going to the movies, and leafing through an abundance of magazines. In everyday mood work, mobility and media were intertwined in new ways, creating new combinations of moving bodies and roaming minds.