Can we imagine a world without media? Over the years I have asked my students to spend time without engaging in any forms of media: TV, films, radio, social media and advertising. At first I suggested they do this for a week, which they struggled to do. I have incrementally reduced the amount of time I ask them to spend without media to the point that I ask them now only to try 24 hours. But this is still a real challenge for them to achieve. Indeed, the longest periods they have generally been able to manage have consisted of switching off a phone for a shift at work, and, crucially, not switching it back on during their break. But just try spending 24 hours switching off your phone. We are more intensely electronically connected than ever before. We can instantly locate our nearest and dearest. Law enforcement agencies can track and monitor everything that we say and everything that we send. Advertising agencies know our preferences and target us accordingly, and as the Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed, media, business and politicians have access to more targeted and detailed levels of personal information about us than ever before. Media also provided the platform for women to speak out in #MeToo.

Media are not just technologies of communication, but systems of communicating values and beliefs. It is through media that we find out what is happening in the world. Media is where our social norms and values are shaped and reflected back to us. Media tell us who we are and who it is possible to be, as individuals and as a society. In essence, media is ubiquitous and whether we like it or not ‘shapes the limits of our imagination’. People construct meaning out of the world they interpret as they actively or passively engage with it. The images and narratives that we read, hear and see, in and through our media, define how we think and talk. So in the context of MeToo/#MeToo we see a reflection of the ways in which gender is perceived and communicated in Western society. In repoliticizing sexism it is useful to think about the role of media; not only in how media present and represent to us images of women, but the ways in which media construct a sensibility.