Digital Cultures, Lived Stories and Virtual Reality

Description

This book focuses on the meaning and experience of digital practice, emerging from work in the world of business and drawing on recent anthropological thinking on digital culture. Tom Maschio suggests that the digital is a space of a new "story culture" and considers the lived experience of new technologies. The chapters cover: storytelling in journalism and business with the new technology of virtual reality, the emerging meanings of social media and community building in the digital space, the uses and meanings of visual imagery online, and the cultural meanings of smartphone technology use and the "mobile life." The book incorporates ideas from humanistic anthropology and phenomenology in order to bring business problems into alignment with human concerns and desires, and to show the application of anthropological ideas to real-world issues. As well as anthropologists, the book will be valuable to business students and professionals interested in the digital realm. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Acknowledgements 1. Story cultures: Toward a humanistic understanding of online experience and digital technologies in business contexts: Practical and theoretical considerations of a business anthropologist Gloss on organizing themes and claims Book form 2. A new story moment: Lived stories and the experience of virtual reality How the study was conducted Lived story Lived stories: Embodiment and participation in VR Respondent reactions to 360 video and to being in an HTC Vive Headset: Perception and VR Emotional meaning and authenticity in VR and journalistic credibility Emotional management and VR How users navigate VR content: The analogy of ritual VR as liminal space: The magic circle analogy Navigating VR content: Being in the present moment The experience of place in VR The empathy paradigm and VR Empathy and the suffering subject Ethics: VR and the journalist's dilemma A new story culture and the allure of VR for early adopters ( and ) Conclusion: Anthropological gloss Gloss on some of the study's other applications 3. Earnestness and the commonplace: Visual storying in the digital space Introduction How we carried out the study The visual sensorium, arresting imagery, the bricoleur, the commonplace The concept of arresting imagery Arresting images/iconographic images Visual bricoleurs Commercial imagery and the bricoleur Synaptic play Visual imagery, social media and the commonplace Weaving meaning into images of the everyday Placemaking and the commonplace The commercial and communicative significance of the commonplace and of placemaking The spirit of the gift: Sharing visual imagery and the energy exchange Lifeways and the pursuit of beauty among different age groups Place and self Self-enhancement Co-authorship and the social/relational self Using visual imagery and visual social media to express the "individuated self" Commitment to an interest, a profession, a craft The pursuit of beauty The beauty of childhood and parenthood Concluding remarks on noticing 4. Gift economies and play of social media: The new social in social media platforms Introduction The social media vanguard Identity projects and the idea of a creative community in social media Learning social media, finding a voice through participation Individualism/relationalism: Finding a voice with others help Social media and the ethnographic example of a gift economy What is a gift economy? From mass to personal messaging: In social media the most effective messaging is personal peer messaging Consumption/shopping and social media Creative mixing and matching and cultivating different sides of oneself From long form to short form in social media Social media platforms as different conceptual structures, different language games Some brief comments on the creative work of different social media platforms Facebook The two sides of Twitter: Creativity and destruction Transformations in Twitter language The creative work of Instagram and other visual social media platforms Spotify Pinterest TikTok, SnapChat, Vine Waze: Mapping and driving as collaborative projects Money and social media: Venmo Summary: Interpretations of meanings and trends in social media—social media platforms and play spaces 5. Play narratives: Mobile technologies and the play of time and place Business problems Who was interviewed: The structure of the project Play, smallness, toys, and smartphones The symbolism of the small in the consumer world Play and places Smartphone scripts and analogies: Building a dwelling place, the architecture of happiness: Mapping and exploring a space Self-inscription and a sense of the local: Place-making Serendipity and the play of time: Multiple temporalities Routine and time's cycle in the mobile life Rejoining the mobile life: Inaugural time Episodic time and event time Social gregariousness and time Time and the play of search: Consumption in the mobile/digital life Playing with tablets The spontaneous gesture and tablets Children-centered households Children-centered households and tablets Conclusion 6. From epic to romance: Digital play narratives in Singapore The Singaporean self and the mobile life In Sync: The self and social media in Singapore Rejoining the mobile life: Empathy and emotional alignment The kiasu spirit versus the kampong spirit Memoryscapes: The symbolism of land and food in Singapore Exploration, play, and the digital life in Singapore Creating a digital play space for the self (Singaporean digital play) Family and the digital life Tablets Brief chapter summary 7. The ritual transmission of news and the transition to digital story creation: The transition to digital news and its discontents Business objectives and anthropological objectives: Opening gloss The ritual dimension of news and story creation in the era of digital journalism Convergence culture and reading culture considered as challenges to journalists How people read today: The new news literacy Narrative forms today Digital journalism and its discontents Journalistic drive Balancing journalistic drive with audience feedback and metrics All digital news sites Innovative and traditional story creation Being mission and data driven Local news online The developing ecology of digital news Bibliography Index