Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology

Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology in Global Societies

Leopoldina Fortunati, Raul Pertierra, & Jane Vincent (Eds.)


Description
Migrants and diaspora communities are shaped by their use of information and communication technologies. This book explores the multifaceted role played by new media in the re-location of these groups of people, assisting them in their efforts to defeat nostalgia, construct new communities, and keep connected with their communities of origin. Furthermore, the book analyses the different ways in which migrants contribute, along with natives, in co-constructing contemporary societies – a process in which the cultures of both groups are considered. Drawing on contributions from a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics, it offers a more profound understanding of one of the most significant phenomena of contemporary international societies – the migration of nearly a billion people worldwide - and the relationship between technology and society.

Citation:

Fortunati, L., Pertierra, R., & Vincent, J. (Eds.). (2012). Migration, diaspora and information technology in global societies. New York, NY: Routledge. 

Taken For Grantedness

Taken For Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication into Society

Rich Ling


Overview
Why do we feel insulted or exasperated when our friends and family don’t answer their mobile phones? If the Internet has allowed us to broaden our social world into a virtual friend-net, the mobile phone is an instrument of a more intimate social sphere. The mobile phone provides a taken-for-granted link to the people to whom we are closest; when we are without it, social and domestic disarray may result. In just a few years, the mobile phone has become central to the functioning of society. In this book, Rich Ling explores the process by which the mobile phone has become embedded in society, comparing it to earlier technologies that changed the character of our social interaction and, along the way, became taken for granted. Ling, drawing on research, interviews, and quantitative material, shows how the mobile phone (and the clock and the automobile before it) can be regarded as a social mediation technology, with a critical mass of users, a supporting ideology, changes in the social ecology, and a web of mutual expectations regarding use. By examining the similarities and synergies among these three technologies, Ling sheds a more general light on how technical systems become embedded in society and how they support social interaction within the closest sphere of friends and family


About the Author
Rich Ling is Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Senior Research Scientist at the Telenor Research Institute near Oslo, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author of New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (MIT Press, 2008).

Citation:

Ling, R. (2012). Taken for grantedness: The embedding of mobile communication into society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.