摘要：The construction, representation and reproduction of everyday life as a political domain has been
a central theme in the work of Roger Silverstone and constitutes his most important legacy to social
theory. Conceiving everyday life as a site of sense-making and negotiation, of the taken for granted and
the taken by surprise, of finding and making, Silverstone offers us a way out of the false dichotomy
between everyday life as imposed ideology (the dystopian perspective) and resistant populism (the
utopian perspective). In this brief essay, I want to explore the tensions between finding and making
reality in the context of contemporary anxieties about the disconnection of mediated politics from
everyday life. In particular, I want to reflect upon what I consider to be the profound relevance of
Silverstone¡¯s conception of the media as potential space to the burdens of democratic citizenship. The
political domain, in the broadest sense of the circulation and reproduction of power, as well as its
institutional settings and boundaries, were never far from Silverstone¡¯s work; indeed, they were often
accorded a conceptual reverence which regarded the political as the central locus of communicative
contestation. But this was not a domain to which Silverstone paid much explicit attention in most of his
work; perhaps he found its moral thinness unsettling. This essay constitutes an attempt to make this
connection.
