This book intertwines phenomenological fieldwork with a wide range of Heidegger’s writings to explore how our everyday uses of mobile media technologies permit a unique avenue to rediscover poiēsis, our creative cultivation that is simultaneously a bringing forth, a revealing. Shining a light on poiēsis better allows us to see how human beings are, at their core, dwellers that disclose worlds and cultivate meaning. In our chaotic modern world, our ability to appreciate this foundational feature of our existence seems to be fading from view. Such forgetting has fractured our confidence; we increasingly question, doubt, and struggle with what unfolds before us. This book thus argues that we ought to look towards our intimate and recursive mobile media practices as the avenue for which we can revitalize poiēsis, as doing so allows us a purview into how we are always situated in a meaningful locale, playing an imperative role in its continued cultivation.

Can behaviour on social media predict future purchase patterns? Can what we click on social media foresee which political party will we vote for? Can the information we share on our wall foretell the next series I might want to watch? Can the likes on Instagram and Facebook predict the time one will spend on digital platforms in the next hour? The answer is no longer science fiction. It points to the ability of mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to be able to deliver specialised advertising services to highly targeted audience segments controlled by the billions of devices that flood our daily lives. At the same time, it highlights a more relevant problem: can social media guide, suggest or impose a certain behaviour or thought? Everything seems to indicate that they can do it. Predictive Technology in Social Media comprises 10 essays that reflect on the power of the predictive technology of social media in culture, entertainment, marketing, economics and politics. It shows, from a humanistic and critical perspective, the predictive possibilities of social media platforms, as well as the risks this entails for cultural plurality, everyday consumption, the monopolistic concentration of the economy and attention, and democracy. The text is an invitation to think, as citizens, about the unbridled power we have ceded to digital platforms. A new voice to warn about the greatest concentration of communicative power ever seen in the history of humanity.

Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and strengthen local advocacy groups. The world watched as activists used social media to organize protests during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution. Many governmental and community organizations changed their mission and function as they adopted new digital tools and practices. This book examines the use of “civic media”—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners from a variety of organizations offer analyses and case studies that explore the theory and practice of civic media. The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a “debt resistance” movement to government service delivery ratings to the “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.

Shows how digital media connects people to their lived environments Every day, millions of people turn to small handheld screens to search for their destinations and to seek recommendations for places to visit. They may share texts or images of themselves and these places en route or after their journey is complete. We don’t consciously reflect on these activities and probably don’t associate these practices with constructing a sense of place. Critics have argued that digital media alienates users from space and place, but this book argues that the exact opposite is true: that we habitually use digital technologies to re-embed ourselves within urban environments. The Digital City advocates for the need to rethink our everyday interactions with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Drawing on five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of “re-placeing,” Germaine R. Halegoua shows how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to turn urban spaces into places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through timely narratives of everyday urban life, Halegoua argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Howard Rheingold -- Overview /Martin Rieser -- Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media /Erkki Huhtamo -- The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers' Actions /Susanne Jaschko -- Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space /Martin Rieser -- Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces /Adriana de Souza e Silva -- Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions /Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt -- Towards a Language of Mobile Media /Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot -- Snapshots from Curating Mobility: (If you build it, they won't necessarily come) /Beryl Graham -- Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks /Martin Rieser -- Digital Media and Architecture--An Observation /Anke Jacob -- Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City's Invisible Communication Sphere /Mirjam Struppek -- Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY /Debbi Lander -- 'A Fracture in Reality': Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation /Andrea Zapp -- What makes mediascapes compelling?:Insights from the Riot! 1831 case-study /Josephine Reid and Richard Hull -- Hopstory: A study in place-based, historically inspired narrative /Valentina Nisi and Glorianna Davenport -- The Media Portrait of Liberties: A Non-linear Community Portrait /Valentina Nisi , Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport -- Loca: 'Location Oriented Critical Arts' /Drew Hemment , John Evans , Mika Raento and Theo Humphries -- Invisible Topographies /Usman Haque -- Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space /Jonah Brucker-Cohen -- Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space /Paul Sermon -- Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art /Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau -- The Living Room /Victoria Fang -- tunA and the Power of Proximity /Arianna Bassoli -- Engagement with the Everyday /Margot Jacobs -- Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology /Cati Vaucelle -- Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup. /Anthony Rowe -- The Emotional Wardrobe /Lisa Stead , Petar Goulev , Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani -- Social Fashioning and Active Conduits /Katherine Moriwaki -- Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy /Laura Beloff -- Flirt and Mset /Fiona Raby -- Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift /Teri Rueb -- Blast Theory /Matt Adams -- Mixed Reality Lab /Steve Benford -- The Politics of Mobility /Drew Hemment -- Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction /Joey Berzowska -- Heart on Your Sleeve /Annie Lovejoy -- Contributor Biographies -- Glossary -- Selected Bibliography Books and Articles.

Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate.

Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of “the digital age” by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital experience, critically examining the intersection of the digital to new concepts and practices across a wide range of fields from design to politics. In this fully revised edition, Digital Anthropology reveals how the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life around the world. Combining case studies with theoretical discussion in an engaging style that conveys a passion for new frontiers of enquiry within anthropological study, this will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in theory of anthropology, media and information studies, communication studies and sociology. With a brand-new Introduction from editors Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, as well as an abridged version of the original Introduction by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, in conjunction with new chapters on hacking and digitizing environments, amongst others, and fully revised chapters throughout, this will bring the field-defining overview of digital anthropology fully up to date.