Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow investigates the Walkman’s influence on public space, our relationship to electronic personal devices, and the fears and exhilaration induced by new technologies (as well as the nostalgia attached to old ones).

Popular Science gives our readers the information and tools to improve their technology and their world. The core belief that Popular Science and our readers share: The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.

This book provides information that will make it possible for technicians and electronics hobbyists to service audio faster, more efficiently, and more economically. This makes it more likely that consumers will choose not to discard their faulty products, but will have them restored by a trained professional.

The term 'Popular Music' has traditionally denoted different things in France and Britain. In France, the very concept of 'popular' music has been fiercely debated and contested, whereas in Britain and more largely throughout what the French describe as the 'Anglo-saxon' world 'popular music' has been more readily accepted as a description of what people do as leisure or consume as part of the music industry, and as something that academics are legitimately entitled to study. French researchers have for some decades been keenly interested in reading British and American studies of popular culture and popular music and have often imported key concepts and methodologies into their own work on French music, but apart from the widespread use of elements of 'French theory' in British and American research, the 'Anglo-saxon' world has remained largely ignorant of particular traditions of the study of popular music in France and specific theoretical debates or organizational principles of the making and consuming of French musics. French, British and American research into popular music has thus coexisted – with considerable cross-fertilization – for many years, but the barriers of language and different academic traditions have made it hard for French and anglophone researchers to fully appreciate the ways in which popular music has developed in their respective countries and the perspectives on its study adopted by their colleagues. This volume provides a comparative and contrastive perspective on popular music and its study in France and the UK.

Popular Science gives our readers the information and tools to improve their technology and their world. The core belief that Popular Science and our readers share: The future is going to be better, and science and technology are the driving forces that will help make it better.

How important are the media? How is culture changing? How is ordinary life being transformed? How do we belong? This ground-breaking book offers a new approach to the understanding of everyday life, the media and cultural change. It explores the social pattern of ordinary life in the context of recent theories and accounts of social and cultural change. Brian Longhurst argues that our social and cultural lives are becoming increasingly audienced and performed and that activities in everyday life are changing due to the ever-growing importance and salience of the media. These changes involve people forging new ways of belonging, where among other things they seek to distinguish themselves from others. In Cultural Change and Ordinary Life, Longhurst evaluates changes in the media and ordinary life in the context of large-scale cultural change, especially with respect to globalization and hybridisation, fragmentation, spectacle and performance, and enthusing or fan-like activities. He makes the case that analysis of the media has to be brought into a more thorough dialogue with other forms of research that have looked at social processes. Cultural Change and Ordinary Life is key reading for students and researchers of sociology, media studies, cultural studies and mass communication.

Urban ethnography is the firsthand study of city life by investigators who immerse themselves in the worlds of the people about whom they write. Since its inception in the early twentieth century, this great tradition has helped define how we think about cities and city dwellers. The past few decades have seen an extraordinary revival in the field, as scholars and the public at large grapple with the increasingly complex and pressing issues that affect the ever-changing American city-from poverty to the immigrant experience, the changing nature of social bonds to mass incarceration, hyper-segregation to gentrification. As both a method of research and a form of literature, urban ethnography has seen a notable and important resurgence. This renewed interest demands a clear and comprehensive understanding of the history and development of the field to which this volume contributes by presenting a selection of past and present contributions to American urban ethnographic writing. Beginning with an original introduction highlighting the origins, practices, and significance of the field, editors Mitchell Duneier, Philip Kasinitz, and Alexandra Murphy guide the reader through the major and fascinating topics on which it has focused -- from the community, public spaces, family, education, work, and recreation, to social policy, and the relationship between ethnographers and their subjects. An indispensable guide, The Urban Ethnography Reader provides an overview of how the discipline has grown and developed while offering students and scholars a selection of some of the finest social scientific writing on the life of the modern city.