Technically Together: Reconstructing Community in a Networked World (MIT Press)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.63 (823 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 026203638X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 328 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-10-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. Taylor Dotson is Assistant Professor of Social Science at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
(Brian Martin, Professor, University of Wollongong; author of Technology for Nonviolent Struggle) . At once visionary and grounded -- a cogent path through the polarized debates over social networking technologies and an indispensable guide toward communitarian technological society. (Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions)Technically Together is a valuable, pathbreaking, and necessary book analyzing the connections between technology and community, and also contributes to the project of rebuilding community via attention to technology
If social interaction by social media has become "the modern front porch" (as one sociologist argues), offering richer and more various contexts for community and personal connection, why do we often feel lonelier after checking Facebook? For one thing, as Taylor Dotson writes in Technically Together, "Try getting a Facebook status update to help move a couch or stay for dinner." Dotson argues that the experts who assure us that "networked individualism" will only bring us closer together seem to be urging citizens to adapt their social expectations to the current limits of technology and discouraging them from considering how technologies could be refashioned to enable other ways of relating and belonging.Dotson characterizes different instantiations of community as "thick" or "thin," depending on the facets and manifestations of togetherness that they encompass. Dotson argues that technology could support multifaceted communities if citizens stopped accepting the technological status quo and instead demanded more from their ever-present devices.. He examines a range of systems, organizations, and infrastructures -- from suburban sprawl and smartphones to energy grids and