Digital Domesticity

Author: Jenny Kennedy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190905816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
At the turn of the twenty-first century, typical households were equipped with a landline telephone, a desktop computer connected to a dial-up modem, and a shared television set. Television, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media. Today, homes are now network hubs for all manner of digital technologies, from mobile devices littering lounge rooms to Bluetooth toothbrushes in bathrooms--and tomorrow, these too will be replaced with objects once inconceivable. Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software--all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.

Digital Diasporas

Author: Radhika Gajjala
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178348117X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
When we work or play through digital technologies – we also live in them. Communities form, conversations and social movements emerge spontaneously and through careful offline planning. While we have used disembodied communication and transportation technologies in the past – and still do – we have never before actually synchronously inhabited these communicative spaces, routes and networks in quite the way we do now. Digital Diasporas engages conversations across a selection of contemporary (gendered) Indian identified networks online: “Desis” creating place through labour and affective network formation in secondlife, Indian (diasporic) women engaged in digital domesticity, to Indian digital feminists engaged in debate and dialogue through Twitter. Through particular conversations and ethnographic journeys and linking back to personal and South Asian histories of Internet mediation, Gajjala and her co-authors reveal how affect and gendered digital labour combine in the formation of global socio-economic environment.

The Routledge Companion to Media and Class

Author: Erika Polson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351027328
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 714

Book Description
This companion brings together scholars working at the intersection of media and class, with a focus on how understandings of class are changing in contemporary global media contexts. From the memes of and about working-class supporters of billionaire "populists", to well-publicized and critiqued philanthropic efforts to bring communication technologies into developing country contexts, to the behind-the-scenes work of migrant tech workers, class is undergoing change both in and through media. Diverse and thoughtfully curated contributions unpack how media industries, digital technologies, everyday media practices—and media studies itself—feed into and comment upon broader, interdisciplinary discussions. They cover a wide range of topics, such as economic inequality, workplace stratification, the sharing economy, democracy and journalism, globalization, and mobility/migration. Outward-looking, intersectional, and highly contemporary, The Routledge Companion to Media and Class is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the intersections between media, class, sociology, technology, and a changing world.

Artificial Intelligence and the City

Author: Federico Cugurullo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100381042X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
This book explores in theory and practice how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with and alters the city. Drawing upon a range of urban disciplines and case studies, the chapters reveal the multitude of repercussions that AI is having on urban society, urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban planning and urban sustainability. Contributors also examine how the city, far from being a passive recipient of new technologies, is influencing and reframing AI through subtle processes of co-constitution. The book advances three main contributions and arguments: First, it provides empirical evidence of the emergence of a post-smart trajectory for cities in which new material and decision-making capabilities are being assembled through multiple AIs. Second, it stresses the importance of understanding the mutually constitutive relations between the new experiences enabled by AI technology and the urban context. Third, it engages with the concepts required to clarify the opaque relations that exist between AI and the city, as well as how to make sense of these relations from a theoretical perspective. Artificial Intelligence and the City offers a state-of-the-art analysis and review of AI urbanism, from its roots to its global emergence. It cuts across several disciplines and will be a useful resource for undergraduates and postgraduates in the fields of urban studies, urban planning, geography, architecture, urban design, science and technology studies, sociology and politics.

Expanding media histories

Author: Sune Bechmann Pedersen
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 9189361687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Book Description
Contemporary media history is a rapidly growing field that extends far beyond traditional studies of technology or institutions such as radio, film, and television. This volume expands the scope further still to analyze ephemeral, mundane phenomena long overlooked by media historiography. In eight original essays, the volume demonstrates the strengths of a broad concept of the media. The first part centers on media systems and media events, with studies of spiritist séances, Gallup polls, the mediated persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the burial of a Swedish elder statesman in 1915. The second part focuses on media materialities and infrastructure such as art replicas, ring binders, tourist guidebooks, and media technology in the IKEA home. Aimed at students and academics alike, Expanding Media Histories offers new empirical research, which engages critically with key concepts in media history today.

Networked Feminisms

Author: Shana MacDonald
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179361380X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
The collection of essays outlines how feminists employ a variety of online platforms, practices, and tools to create spaces of solidarity and to articulate a critical politics that refuses popular forms of individual, consumerist, white feminist empowerment in favor of collective, tangible action. Including scholars and activists from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, these essays help to catalog the ways in which feminists are organizing online to mobilize different feminist, queer, trans, disability, reproductive justice, and racial equality movements. Together, these perspectives offer a comprehensive overview of how feminists are employing the tools of the internet for political change. Grounded in intersectional feminism––a perspective that attends to the interrelatedness of power and oppression based on race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and other identities––this book gathers provocations, analyses, creative explorations, theorizations, and case studies of networked feminist activist practices. In doing so, this collection archives important work already done within feminist digital cultures and acts as a vital blueprint for future feminist action.

Digital Culture & Society (DCS)

Author: Tim Hector
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839463572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.

(Im)mobile Homes

Author: Earvin Charles B. Cabalquinto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197524869
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
The home has been on the forefront of rapid economic, political, social, and technological transformations for many individuals and families across the world. As a country reliant on the exportation of human labor to sustain its national economy, the Philippines exemplifies a valuable case study of the impacts of a globalized and networked society on the everyday dynamics of a transnational family arrangement. Despite ranking among the heaviest Internet users in the world, Filipino citizens are often left with no choice but to navigate digital and transnational environments orchestrated by the uneven distribution of both national and international resources and opportunities. (Im)mobile Homes investigates the role of smartphones, social media channels, and various mobile applications in forging and sustaining intimate ties among dispersed Filipino family members. Examining the digital lifeworlds of transnational Filipino family in Australia, this volume draws on rich ethnographic study to explore the benefits of digital communication as well as the tensions enabled by the influences of socio-cultural structures, socio-economic conditions, technological affordances, and institutional policies and processes on mobile practices. It portrays the physically distributed yet virtually connected nature of the transnational Filipino family through diverse contexts, such as observing family rituals, performing intimate care, and managing crises, and foregrounds their unique strategies in addressing the interruptions of connecting at a distance. Ultimately, this volume underscores how mobile practices of the transnational Filipino family negotiate the pre-existing and broader structural systems that (re)produce marginalization in a digital and global era. Enriched by moving stories of transnational families, (Im)mobile Homes offers a critical lens towards interrogating the possibilities and politics of a home from afar in the digital era.

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media

Author: Amy Shields Dobson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319976079
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
This book explores emergent intimate practices in social media cultures. It examines new digital intimacies as they are constituted, lived, and commodified via social media platforms. The study of social media practices has come to offer unique insights into questions about what happens to power dynamics when intimate practices are made public, about intimacy as public and political, and as defined by cultural politics and pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and geographies. This book forges new pathways in the scholarship of digital cultures by fusing queer and feminist accounts of intimate publics with critical scholarship on digital identities and everyday social media practices. The collection brings together a diverse range of carefully selected, cutting-edge case studies and groundbreaking theoretical work on topics such as selfies, oversharing, hook-up apps, sexting, Gamergate, death and grief online, and transnational family life. The book is divided into three parts: ‘Shaping Intimacy’, ‘Public Bodies’, and ‘Negotiating Intimacy’. Overarching themes include identity politics, memory, platform economics, work and labour, and everyday media practices.

Life in Media

Author: Mark Deuze
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262374617
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
A new way to teach media studies that centers students’ lived experiences and diverse perspectives from around the world. From the intimate to the mundane, most aspects of our lives—how we learn, love, work, and play—take place in media. Taking an expansive, global perspective, this introductory textbook covers what it means to live in, rather than with, media. Mark Deuze focuses on the lived experience—how people who use smartphones, the internet, and television sets make sense of their digital environment—to investigate the broader role of media in society and everyday life. Life in Media uses relatable examples and case studies from around the world to illustrate the foundational theories, concepts, and methods of media studies. The book is structured around six core themes: how media inform and inspire our daily activities; how we live our lives in the public eye; how we make distinctions between real and fake; how we seek and express love; how we use media to effect change; how we create media and shared narratives; and how we seek to create well-being within media. By deliberately including diverse voices and radically embracing the everyday and mundane aspects of media life, this book innovates ways to teach and talk about media. Highlights diverse international voices, images, and cases Uses accessible examples from everyday life to contextualize theory Offers a comprehensive, student-centered introduction to media studies Extensively annotated bibliography offers dynamic sources for further study, including readings and documentary films