Consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces /
edited by Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch.
- xiii, 241 pages ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
The mirror of technology / Introduction / Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household / The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power / The desire for the new: its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism / The shape of things to consume / Explaining ICT consumption: the case of the home computer / Personal computers, gender and an institutional model of the household / The meaning of domestic technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations / Living-room wars: new technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption / Contextualizing home computing: resources and practices / The young and the restless in Trinidad: a case of the local and the global in mass consumption / The Amish and the telephone: resistance and reconstruction / Regimes of closure: the representation of cultural process in domestic consumption / The long term and the short term of domestic consumption: an ethnographic case study / Postscript: revolutionary technologies and technological revolutions / Marilyn Strathern -- Roger Silverstone Eric Hirsch -- Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, David Morely ; Cynthia Cockburn ; Colin Campbell -- Ian Miles, Alan Cawson Leslie Haddon ; Leslie Haddon ; Jane Wheelock ; Sonia Livingstone ; Ien Ang ; Graham Murdock, Paul Hartmann Peggy Gray -- Daniel Miller ; Diane Zimmerman Umble ; Tim Putnam ; Eric Hirsch ; Jonathan Gershuny. Foreword: and Pt. I. Conceptual and thematic issues. and Pt. II. Information and communication technologies in the home. and and Pt. III. Appropriations.
"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.