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

Social critics and artificial intelligence experts have long prophesized that computers and robots would soon relegate humans to the dustbin of history. Many among the general population seem to have shared this fear of a dehumanized future. But how are people in the twenty-first century actually reacting to the ever-expanding array of gadgets and networks at their disposal? Is computer anxiety a significant problem, paralyzing and terrorizing millions, or are ever-proliferating numbers of gadgets being enthusiastically embraced? Machines that Become Us explores the increasingly intimate relationship between people and their personal communication technologies.In the first book of its kind, internationally recognized scholars from the United States and Europe explore this topic. Among the technologies analyzed include the Internet, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, networked homes, smart fabrics and wearable computers, interactive location badges, and implanted monitoring devices. The authors discuss critical policy issues, such as the problems of information resource access and equity, and the recently discovered digital dropouts phenomena.The use of the word become in the book's title has three different meanings. The first suggests how people use these technologies to broaden their abilities to communicate and to represent themselves to others. Thus the technologies become extensions and representatives of the communicators. A second sense of become applies to analysis of the way these technologies become physically integrated with the user's clothing and even their bodies. Finally, contributors examine fashion aspects and uses of these technologies, that is, how they are used in ways becoming to the wearer. The conclusions of many chapters are supported by data, including ethnographic observations, attitude surveys and case studies from the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Finland, and Norway. This approach is especially valuable

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?