Consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces / edited by Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Foreword: The mirror of technology / Marilyn Strathern -- Introduction / Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch -- Pt. I. Conceptual and thematic issues. Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household / Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, and David Morely ; The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power / Cynthia Cockburn ; The desire for the new: its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism / Colin Campbell -- Pt. II. Information and communication technologies in the home. The shape of things to consume / Ian Miles, Alan Cawson and Leslie Haddon ; Explaining ICT consumption: the case of the home computer / Leslie Haddon ; Personal computers, gender and an institutional model of the household / Jane Wheelock ; The meaning of domestic technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations / Sonia Livingstone ; Living-room wars: new technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption / Ien Ang ; Contextualizing home computing: resources and practices / Graham Murdock, Paul Hartmann and Peggy Gray -- Pt. III. Appropriations. The young and the restless in Trinidad: a case of the local and the global in mass consumption / Daniel Miller ; The Amish and the telephone: resistance and reconstruction / Diane Zimmerman Umble ; Regimes of closure: the representation of cultural process in domestic consumption / Tim Putnam ; The long term and the short term of domestic consumption: an ethnographic case study / Eric Hirsch ; Postscript: revolutionary technologies and technological revolutions / Jonathan Gershuny.

"Consuming Technologies opens for analysis some crucial but rarely examined areas of social, cultural, and economic life. At its core is a concern with the complex set of relationships that mark and define the place of the domestic in the modern world, and an explanation of the relationship between the domestic and public spheres as they are mediated by consumption and technology. Debate over the commodification and privatization of everyday life has been preoccupied with the impact of technological change on established social structures and cultural values. Yet much of the discussion has lacked any substantive empirical work on the understanding of modern industrial society: on the nature of consumption, and the contradictory significance of the domestic sphere. The contributors address these questions in a series of essays, suggesting that in essence, information and communications technologies require us to see them as social and symbolic as well as material objects, crucially; embeddded in the structures and dynamics of our consumer culture."--Publisher description.

Machine converted from AACR2 source record.