Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces

by Hirsch,Eric; Hirsch,Eric

• ISBN13: 9780415069908
• ISBN10: 0415069904
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1992-10-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Consuming Technologiesopens 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, cruciallyembeddded in the structures and dynamics of our consumer culture.

Table of Contents

List of contributors
Foreword: The mirror of technology
Acknowledgements
Introduction	p. 1
Conceptual and thematic issues
Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household	p. 15
The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power	p. 32
The desire for the new: its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism	p. 48
Information and communication technologies in the home
The shape of things to consume	p. 67
Explaining ICT consumption: the case of the home computer	p. 82
Personal computers, gender and an institutional model of the household	p. 97
The meaning of domestic technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations	p. 113
Living-room wars: new technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption	p. 131
Contextualizing home computing: resources and practices	p. 146
Appropriations
The Young and the Restless in Trinidad: a case of the local and the global in mass consumption	p. 163
The Amish and the telephone: resistance and reconstruction	p. 183
Regimes of closure: The representation of cultural process in domestic consumption	p. 195
The long term and the short term of domestic consumption: an ethnographic case study	p. 208
Postscript: Revolutionary technologies and technological revolutions	p. 227
Index	p. 234
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