Living on Cybermind


Book Description

Cybermind is an Internet mailing list, originally founded in 1994 to discuss the issues and problems of living online. It proved exceptionally fertile and is still going strong thirteen years later. This book is an ethnographic investigation which follows Cybermind members in their daily lives on the List, and explores the ways they look at the world, argue, relate online life to offline life, use gender, and build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive history of an Internet group ever published, it includes detailed analyses using List members' own words and commentary, and develops a unique theory of the relationship between culture, the problems of communication, and the ongoing processes of categorisation. Living on Cybermind illustrates how behaviour is affected by the organisation of communication, and how people deal with the paradoxes involved in resolving ambiguity and truth in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.




Letters, Postcards, Email


Book Description

In this original study, Milne moves between close readings of letters, postcards and emails, and investigations of the material, technological infrastructures of these forms, to answer the question: How does presence function as an aesthetic and rhetorical strategy within networked communication practices? As her work reveals, the relation between old and new communication systems is more complex than allowed in much contemporary media theory. Although the correspondents of letters, postcards and emails are not, usually, present to one another as they write and read their exchanges, this does not necessarily inhibit affective communication. Indeed, this study demonstrates how physical absence may, in some instances, provide correspondents with intense intimacy and a spiritual, almost telepathic, sense of the other’s presence. While corresponding by letter, postcard or email, readers construe an imaginary, incorporeal body for their correspondents that, in turn, reworks their interlocutor’s self-presentation. In this regard the fantasy of presence reveals a key paradox of cultural communication, namely that material signifiers can be used to produce the experience of incorporeal presence.




Cyberidentities At War


Book Description

Conflicting parties worldwide increasingly use the Internet in a strategic way, and struggles carried out on a local level achieve a new dimension. This new kind of medialization results in a conflict’s expansion into global cyberspace. Based on ethnographic research on the online activities of Christian and Muslim actors in the Moluccan conflict (1999–2003), this study investigates processes of identity construction, community building and evolving conflict dynamics on the Internet. In contributing to conflict and Internet research, this study paves the way for a new cyberanthropology. A newly added epilogue outlines the directions in which the situation in the Moluccas has continued and discusses the advances and developments of theoretical and methodological concerns presented in the 2005 German edition.




Email and the Everyday


Book Description

An exploration of how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning our everyday domestic and work lives. Despite its many obituaries, email is not dead. As a global mode of business and personal communication, email outstrips newer technologies of online interaction; it is deeply embedded in our everyday lives. And yet—perhaps because the ubiquity of email has obscured its study—this is the first scholarly book devoted to email as a key historical, social, and commercial site of digital communication in our everyday lives. In Email and the Everyday, Esther Milne examines how email is experienced, understood, and materially structured as a practice spanning the domestic and institutional spaces of daily life. Email experiences range from the routine and banal to the surprising and shocking. Drawing on interviews and online surveys, Milne focuses on both the material and the symbolic properties of email. She maps the development of email as a technology and as an industry; considers institutional uses of email, including “bureaucratic intensity” of workplace email and the continuing vibrancy of email groups; and examines what happens when private emails end up in public archives, discussing the Enron email dataset and Hillary Clinton's infamous private server. Finally, Milne explores the creative possibilities of email, connecting eighteenth-century epistolary novels to contemporary “email novels,” discussing the vernacular expression of ASCII art and mail art, and examining email works by Carl Steadman, Miranda July, and others.




Social Information Research


Book Description

Social Information Research, co-edited by Gunilla Widen and Kim Holmberg communicates current research looking into different aspects of social information as part of information behaviour research. There is a special emphasis on the new innovations supporting contemporary information behavior and the social media context within which it can sit.




Being Ethnographic


Book Description

Full of practical 'how to' tips for applying theoretical methods - 'doing ethnography' - this book also provides anecdotal evidence and advice for new and experienced researchers on how to engage with their own participation in the field - 'being ethnographic'. The book clearly sets out the important definitions, methods and applications of field research whilst reinforcing the infinite variability of the human subject and addressing the challenges presented by ethnographers' own passions, intellectual interests, biases and ideologies. Classic and personal real-world case studies are used by the author to introduce new researchers to the reality of applying ethnographic theory and practice in the field. Topics include: - Talking to People: negotiations, conversations & interviews - Being with People: participation - Looking at People: observations & images - Description: writing 'down' field notes - Analysis to Interpretation: writing 'out' data - Interpretation to Story: writing 'up' ethnography Clear, engaging and original this book provides invaluable advice as well as practical tools and study aids for those engaged in ethnographic research.




Crisis, Movement, Management: Globalising Dynamics


Book Description

Globalised neo-liberalism has produced multiple crises – social, ecological, political. In the past, crises of global order have generated large-scale social transformations, and the current crises likewise hold a transformative promise. Social movements become a crucial barometer, in signalling both the demise and rise of political formations and programs. Elite strategies, framed as crisis management, create their own disordering side-effects. Experiments in movement strategy gain greater significance, as do contending elite efforts at repressing, managing or displacing the fall-out. In this book we investigate both movements and management in the face of crisis, taking crisis and unanticipated consequences as a normal state-of-play. The book enquires into the winners and losers from crisis, and investigates the movement-management nexus as it unfolds in particular localities as well as in broader contexts. The book deals with some of the most pressing conflicts of our time, and produces a range of theoretical insights: the ubiquity of crisis is seen as not only a hallmark of social life, but a way into a different kind of social analysis. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.




New Literacies: Everyday Practices and Social Learning


Book Description

“Like a compass guiding you to what’s important and why in this rapidly evolving field, this new edition is utterly stimulating but also thoughtful and measured.” Daniel Cassany, Literacy Researcher and Teacher, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain "Essential reading for those interested in new and emerging literacy practices, New Literacies maps the contours of on- and off-line participation and how it is transforming learning and communication. This book provides the necessary theoretical background and illustration of practice for a radical re-appraisal of how we think about literacy and literacy education." Guy Merchant, Professor of Literacy in Education,Faculty of Development and Society, Sheffield Hallam University The new edition of this popular book takes a fresh look at what it means to think of literacies as social practices. The book explores what is distinctively 'new' within a range of currently popular everyday ways of generating, communicating and negotiating meanings. Revised, updated and significantly reconceptualised throughout, the book includes: Closer analysis of new literacies in terms of active collaboration A timely discussion of using wikis and other collaborative online writing resources Updated and expanded accounts of digital remix and blogging practices An explanation of social learning and collaborative platforms for social learning A fresh focus on online social networking A new batch of discussion questions and stimulus activities The importance of social learning for becoming proficient in many new literacy practices, and the significance of new media for expanding the reach and potential of social learning are discussed in the final part of the book. New Literacies 3/e concludes by describing empirical cases of social learning approaches mediated by collaborative learning platforms. This book is essential reading for students and academics within literacy studies, cultural or communication studies and education.




From ‘Carbon Democracy’ to ‘Climate Democracy’?


Book Description

What are the democratic requirements for effective climate action? how can ‘climate democracy’ be conceptualised? Liberal democracies emerged on the back of fossil fuels, creating what Tim Mitchell called ‘carbon democracy’. Three decades of climate policy have affirmed the controlling influence of fossil fuel interests. Runaway climate change now threatens the very foundations of social life. Today we face a very clear democratic question, of whether the fossil fuel sector has the right to determine the planet’s climate future. Achieving global energy transformation at the scope and scale needed requires a democratic transformation, to overcome the stranglehold. This book examines these requirements. It debates the political constituencies, agendas and institutions that are emerging from climate crisis, comparing evidence of emergent themes. New claims are emerging, for ‘green deals’, ‘climate justice’, ‘energy justice’, ‘energy democracy’ and ‘de-growth’, reflecting a new intensity of contestation as climate change impacts deepen. This book will be of great relevance to students, researchers and policymakers with an interest in comparative politics, democracy studies, climate change and environmental policies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.




Property, Place and Piracy


Book Description

This book takes the concept of piracy as a starting point to discuss the instability of property as a social construction and how this is spatially situated. Piracy is understood as acts and practices that emerge in zones where the construction and definition of property is ambiguous. Media piracy is a frequently used example where file-sharers and copyright holders argue whether culture and information is a common resource to be freely shared or property to be protected. This book highlights that this is not a dilemma unique to immaterial resources: concepts such as property, ownership and the rights of use are just as diffuse when it comes to spatial resources such as land, water, air or urban space. By structuring the book around this heterogeneous understanding of piracy as an analytical perspective, the editors and contributors advance a trans-disciplinary and multi-theoretical approach to place and property. In doing so, the book moves from theoretical discussions on commons and property to empirical cases concerning access to and appropriation of land, natural and cultural resources. The chapters cover areas such as maritime piracy, the philosophical and legal foundations of property rights, mining and land rights, biopiracy and traditional knowledge, indigenous rights, colonization of space, military expansionism and the enclosure of urban space. This book is essential reading for a variety of disciplines including indigenous studies, cultural studies, geography, political economy, law, environmental studies and all readers concerned with piracy and the ambiguity of property.