Global Technography

This book develops and employs a new methodology Global Technography to investigate wireless mobility from a sociological and cultural perspective. It illustrates that technologies are created to perform roles to act in everyday life, and this demands an ethnography that can track the social performativity of technology in addition to that of human beings. The book is suitable for graduate and upper level undergraduate courses in methodology, communications, and cultural work dealing with globalization and new digital communications media.

Autorentext

The Author: Grant Kien is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at California State University, East Bay. He received his Ph.D. in communications research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kien's recently published work has appeared in the scholarly journals Qualitative Inquiry and Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, and the AOIR Researcher Annual.

Klappentext

This book develops and employs a new methodology - Global Technography - to investigate wireless mobility from a sociological and cultural perspective. It illustrates that technologies are created to perform roles - to act - in everyday life, and this demands an ethnography that can track the social performativity of technology in addition to that of human beings. The book is suitable for graduate and upper level undergraduate courses in methodology, communications, and cultural work dealing with globalization and new digital communications media.

Zusammenfassung
"This is a powerful, richly nuanced, evocative work; a stunning and brilliantly innovative pedagogical and methodological intervention. It provides ground zero - the starting place for the next generation of scholars who study the self and its technologies, the post-global citizen, ethnography in the mobilized field, humanizing technology in a world without borders or boundaries. [This is] a path-breaking accomplishment by a major new social theorist. In these pages McLuhan meets James Carey in a new performative space." (Norman K. Denzin, College of Communications Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).