Product Description: Media technologies have played a central role in shaping ideas about home life over the last two centuries. Changing Media, Homes and Households explores the complex relationship between home, householders, families and media technologies by charting the evolution of the media-rich home, from the early twentieth century to the present...read more

We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not. The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics. Digital Sociology is essential reading not only for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies.

The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression.But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering "technology for people," popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement.

Product Description: “It is simply too much” is a common complaint of the modern age. This book looks at how people and institutions deal with overflow - of information, consumption or choices. The essays explore the ways in which notions of overflow – framed in terms of excess and abundance or their implicit opposites, scarcity and dearth – crop up in a number of contexts such as sociological and economic theory, management consulting, consumer studies, and the politics of everyday life...read more

Product Description: Through empirical material as well as theoretical discussions, this book explores developments in gender-technology relations from the 1980s to today. The author draws on her long-lasting research in the field, providing insight in both historical and more recent discussions of gender in relation to computers and computing...read more

Product Description: From the everyday and unnoticed to the newsworthy and cutting edge, technology is undoubtedly a fundamental element of our daily lives. While saving us time and effort, it can also shape our environment, mediate our relationships, and simultaneously solve problems and create new ones...read more

Product Description: This challenging book, with excellent contributions from international social scientists, focuses on the link between body and memory that specifically refers to the use of digital technologies. Neuroscientists know very well that human beings automatically and unconsciously organize their experience in their bodies into spatial units whose confines are established by changes in location, temporality and the interactive elements that determine it...read more

Product Description: Organization theory and management studies tend to underrate the importance of technological resources in accomplishing organized activities. In organizations, a wide variety of technologies are mobilized on a day-to-day basis to accomplish organized activities...read more

Product Description: This book examines connections between personal, relational and material matters in everyday life in the context of broader and long standing social problems. It explores the connections between mundane practices in the reproduction of our bodies and our relations with those we live with, and the technological practices that inform daily life...read more