Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology

ISBN-13: 9781412806213 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 350 str.

James E. Katz

Opis

Social critics and artifi cial intelligence experts have long prophesized that computers and robots would soon relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Many among the general population seem to have shared this fear of a dehumanized future. But how are people in the twenty-fi rst century actually reacting to the ever-expanding array of gadgets and networks at their disposal? Is computer anxiety a signifi cant problem, paralyzing and terrorizing millions, or are ever-proliferating numbers of gadgets being enthusiastically embraced? Machines that Become Us, now in paperback, explores the increasingly intimate relationship between people and their personal communication technologies.

Spis treści

1: Introduction; 1: Theoretical Perspectives; 2: Do Machines Become Us?; 3: Understanding Information and Communication Technology and Infrastructure in Everyday Life: Struggling with Communication-at-a-Distance; 4: Domestication and Mobile Telephony; 5: Communication Technology and Sociability: Between Local Ties and “Global Ghetto”?; 6: The Human Body: Natural and Artificial Technology; 2: National and Cross-Cultural Studies; 7: Digital Divides of the Internet and Mobile Phone: Structural Determinants of the Social Context of Communication Technologies; 8: Social Capital and the New Communication Technologies; 9: Information and Communication Technology in Russian Families: Results of Sociological Research; 10: Face and Place: The Mobile Phone and Internet In the Netherlands; 11: Computer Anxiety Among “Smart” Dutch Computer Users; 12: The Social Context of the Mobile Phone Use of Norwegian Teens; 13: Two Modes of Maintaining Interpersonal Relations Through Telephone: From the Domestic to the Mobile Phone; 14: Culture and Design for Mobile Phones for China; 3: Subcultures, Technologies, and Fashion; 15: Outwardly Mobile: Young People and Mobile Technologies; 16: Breaking Time and Place: Mobile Technologies and Reconstituted Identities; 17: Crossbreeding Wearable and Ubiquitous Computing: A Design Experience; 18: Mobile Telephony, Mobility, and the Coordination of Everyday Life; 19: Soft Machine; 20: Aesthetics in Microgravity; 21: Piercings Tattoos, and Branding: Latent and Profound Reasons for Body Manipulations; 22: “Perhaps It is a Body Part”: How the Mobile Phone Became an Organic Part of the Everyday Lives of Finnish Children and Teenagers; Coda; 23: Bodies, Machines, and Communication Contexts: What is to Become of Us?

O autorze

James E. Katz