Consuming Technologies

Table of Contents

List of contributors

Foreword: The mirror of technology / Marilyn Strathern

Acknowledgements

Introduction / Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch 1

Pt. I Conceptual and thematic issues

1 Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household / Roger Silverstone, Eric Hirsch, David Morley 15

2 The circuit of technology: gender, identity and power / Cynthia Cockburn 32

3 The desire for the new: its nature and social location as presented in theories of fashion and modern consumerism / Colin Campbell 48

Pt. II Information and communication technologies in the home

4 The shape of things to consume / Ian Miles, Alan Cawson, Leslie Haddon 67

5 Explaining ICT consumption: the case of the home computer / Leslie Haddon 82

6 Personal computers, gender and an institutional model of the household / Jane Wheelock 97

7 The meaning of domestic technologies: a personal construct analysis of familial gender relations / Sonia Livingstone 113

8 Living-room wars: new technologies, audience measurement and the tactics of television consumption / Ien Ang 131

9 Contextualizing home computing: resources and practices / Graham Murdock, Paul Hartmann, Peggy Gray 146

Pt. III Appropriations

10 The Young and the Restless in Trinidad: a case of the local and the global in mass consumption / Daniel Miller 163

11 The Amish and the telephone: resistance and reconstruction / Diane Zimmerman Umble 183

12 Regimes of closure: The representation of cultural process in domestic consumption / Tim Putnam 195

13 The long term and the short term of domestic consumption: an ethnographic case study / Eric Hirsch 208

Postscript: Revolutionary technologies and technological revolutions / Jonathan Gershuny 227

Index 234