Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology / Edition 1

by James E. Katz

Overview

Social critics and artificial intelligence experts have long prophesized that computers and robots would soon relegate humans to the dustbin of history

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765801586
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	12/31/2002
Pages:	348
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

James E. Katz is professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Rutgers University where he also directs the Center for Mobile Communication Studies. In 2009, he was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Twentieth Century Communications History (Italy). Prior to coming to Rutgers, Katz headed a social science research unit at Bell Communications Research. He has two patents in the telecommunications field and has held fellowships at Harvard and MIT. He is the author of Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life and Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life, published by Transaction.

Table of Contents

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?

Editorial Reviews

"A valuable addition to our growing understanding of the wide-ranging implications of new technologies... Machines That Become Us offers a rich compendium of insights into why we think new machines both 'improve' and 'jumble' our lives." —Steve Woolgar, Chair of Marketing, Said Business School, University of Oxford "Machines That Become Us is very much focused on the empirical understanding of information technologies. This kind of work is sorely needed as such technologies become more and more present in everyday life. James Katz is to be commended for putting together a highly successful volume." —Mark Poster, professor of history, University of California, Irvine "Machines That Become Us represents a major interdisciplinary work... The process of machines 'becoming us' no longer can be left to cognitive or computer sciences alone, but needs a deep, global view focusing on social practices, including everyday changes in human life; that is what Katz's book does with theoretical passion." —Patrizia Calefato, professor, Dipartimento di Pratiche linguistiche e analisi di testi, Universita degli studi di Bari

From the Publisher