Visualising Facebook


Book Description

Since the growth of social media, human communication has become much more visual. This book presents a scholarly analysis of the images people post on a regular basis to Facebook. By including hundreds of examples, readers can see for themselves the differences between postings from a village north of London, and those from a small town in Trinidad. Why do women respond so differently to becoming a mother in England from the way they do in Trinidad? How are values such as carnival and suburbia expressed visually? Based on an examination of over 20,000 images, the authors argue that phenomena such as selfies and memes must be analysed in their local context. The book aims to highlight the importance of visual images today in patrolling and controlling the moral values of populations, and explores the changing role of photography from that of recording and representation, to that of communication, where an image not only documents an experience but also enhances it, making the moment itself more exciting.




Social Media in an English Village


Book Description

Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village, tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study, he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead, the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how ‘English’ their usage has become. He introduces the ‘Goldilocks Strategy’: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot, but ‘just right’.




Doing Visual Ethnography


Book Description

This book is the definitive guide to understanding and doing visual ethnography. Sarah Pink’s landmark text provides you with both the critical theoretical foundations and the creative tools and techniques you need to conduct your own visual ethnography. Covering the material and the digital, and tying key concepts and ideas to real world contexts throughout, this fully updated fourth edition: Provides clear and critical guidance on research planning and ethics Discusses new and emerging technologies, including digitally connected devices and wearable cameras. Introduces contemporary methods such as futures ethnography, distance ethnography, team ethnography, and the use of documentary. Explores the latest theory and practice in photographic and video ethnography. Shows you how visual ethnography can be applied, participatory, and even interventional. A milestone in visual and ethnographic research, this book is a must-have for students and researchers across the social sciences. It is an essential invitation, and companion, to doing impactful, creative, and critical visual research.




Social Media in Trinidad


Book Description

Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed regions in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for its residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban town is a place in-between: somewhere city dwellers look down on and villagers look up to. The complex identity of the town is expressed through uses of social media, with significant results for understanding social media more generally. Not elevating oneself above others is one of the core values of the town, and social media becomes a tool for social visibility; that is, the process of how social norms come to be and how they are negotiated. Carnival logic and high-impact visuality is pervasive in uses of social media, even if Carnival is not embraced by all Trinidadians in the town and results in presenting oneself and association with different groups in varying ways. The study also has surprising results in how residents are explicitly non-activist and align themselves with everyday values of maintaining good relationships in a small town, rather than espousing more worldly or cosmopolitan values.




How the World Changed Social Media


Book Description

How the World Changed Social Media is the first book in Why We Post, a book series that investigates the findings of anthropologists who each spent 15 months living in communities across the world. This book offers a comparative analysis summarising the results of the research and explores the impact of social media on politics and gender, education and commerce. What is the result of the increased emphasis on visual communication? Are we becoming more individual or more social? Why is public social media so conservative? Why does equality online fail to shift inequality offline? How did memes become the moral police of the internet? Supported by an introduction to the project’s academic framework and theoretical terms that help to account for the findings, the book argues that the only way to appreciate and understand something as intimate and ubiquitous as social media is to be immersed in the lives of the people who post. Only then can we discover how people all around the world have already transformed social media in such unexpected ways and assess the consequences




Visualising far-right environments


Book Description

This volume presents ground-breaking analyses of how the far right represents natural environments and environmentalism around the globe. Images are not simply pervasive in our increasingly visual culture – they are a means of proposing worlds to viewers. Accordingly, the book approaches the visual not as something ‘extra’ or ‘illustrative’ but as a key means of producing identities and ‘doing politics’. Putting visuality centre stage and covering political parties and non-party actors in Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the United States, contributors demonstrate the various ways in which the far right articulates natural environments and the rampant environmental crises of the twenty-first century, providing essential insights into such multifaceted politics.




Presto Sketching


Book Description

Do you feel like your thoughts, ideas, and plans are being suffocated by a constant onslaught of information? Do you want to get those great ideas out of your head, onto the whiteboard and into everyone else’s heads, but find it hard to start? No matter what level of sketching you think you have, Presto Sketching will help you lift your game in visual thinking and visual communication. In this practical workbook, Ben Crothers provides loads of tips, templates, and exercises that help you develop your visual vocabulary and sketching skills to clearly express and communicate your ideas. Learn techniques like product sketching, storyboarding, journey mapping, and conceptual illustration. Dive into how to use a visual metaphor (with a library of 101 visual metaphors), as well as tips for capturing and sharing your sketches digitally, and developing your own style. Designers, product managers, trainers, and entrepreneurs will learn better ways to explore problems, explain concepts, and come up with well-defined ideas - and have fun doing it.




The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories Approaches Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled. This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.




Internet Studies


Book Description

This book considers the lessons learnt so far from the emergence of the Internet and the development of the field of Internet studies, whilst also considering possible directions for the future. Examining broad media theories and emerging theorisations around the Internet specifically, it explores the possibility of the development of an Internet theory in the future. A comprehensive overview of the field, Internet Studies considers key issues of social importance that the study of the Internet draws upon, such as the role of the Internet in civic participation and democratisation, the development of virtual communities, digital divides and social inequality, as well as Internet governance and policy control. At the same time, it examines the role of the Internet in social research and the development of highly interdisciplinary and rapidly developing Internet research. Hence, this volume maps key areas of certainty and uncertainty in the field of Internet studies and, as such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication, sociology and social research methods.




Visualising Business Transformation


Book Description

Business transformation typically involves a wide range of visualisation techniques, from the templates and diagrams used by managers to make better strategic choices, to the experience maps used by designers to understand customer needs, the technical models used by architects to propose possible solutions, and the pictorial representations used by change managers to engage stakeholder groups in dialogue. Up until now these approaches have always been dealt with in isolation, in the literature as well as in practice. This is surprising, because although they can look very different, and tend to be produced by distinct groups of people, they are all modelling different aspects of the same thing. Visualising Business Transformation draws them together for the first time into a coherent whole, so that readers from any background can expand their repertoire and understand the context and rationale for each technique across the transformation lifecycle. The book will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers involved in change, whether that is by creating change models themselves (strategists, architects, designers, engineers, business analysts, developers, illustrators, graphic facilitators, etc.), interpreting and using them (sponsors, business change managers, portfolio/programme/project managers, communicators, change champions, etc.), or supporting those involved in change indirectly (trainers, coaches, mentors, higher education establishments and professional training facilities).