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.
1. Story Cultures: Toward a Humanistic Understanding of Online Experience and Digital Technologies in Business Contexts
2. A New Story Moment: Lived Stories and the Experience of Virtual Reality
3. Earnestness and the Commonplace: Visual Storying in the Digital Space
4. Gift Economies and Play of Social Media: The New Social in Social Media Platforms.
5. Play Narratives: Mobile Technologies and the Play of Time and Place
6. From Epic to Romance: Digital Play Narratives in Singapore
7. The Ritual Transmission of News and the Transition to Digital Story Creation: The Transition to Digital News and its Discontents
Biography
Thomas Maschio has been a business anthropologist for the past 22 years and head of his own consultancy, Maschio Consulting, since 2004. Prior to that he carried out academic ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea.
"...this volume is full of insights that translate both to the rough and tumble world of business practices and the more abstract world of academic understandings. This is to say that it offers readers insights into common social practices, such as the use of personal devices (for instance, smart phones) or the production of contemporary journalism, that can be utilized by both business practitioners and university-based researchers to think more about the ever-increasing role that digital technology is playing in our lives. As such, I could see this volume being used as a standard textbook in different kinds of social science or business courses, as well as being of interest to those who are simply curious about the intersection between business and anthropology or who want to gain a greater understanding of contemporary digital practices." - Wayne Fife, Journal of Business Anthropology
