This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalogue of ever proliferating but discrete technologies. As a consequence, with polymedia the primary concern shifts from the constraints imposed by each individual medium to an emphasis upon the social, emotional and moral consequences of choosing between those different media. As the choice of medium acquires communicative intent, navigating the environment of polymedia becomes inextricably linked to the ways in which interpersonal relationships are experienced and managed. Polymedia is ultimately about a new relationship between the social and the technological, rather than merely a shift in the technology itself. Until not so long ago most people wishing to communicate at a distance had a limited choice of media at their disposal, mainly expensive international phone calls or letters. As a result, the choice of medium was largely the result of constraints of access and
The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long--distance communication and there is an increasing optimism among Filipino government agencies and telecommunications companies about the consequences of mobile phones for transnational families. This article draws on comparative research with UK--based Filipina migrants -mainly domestic workers and nurses -and their left--behind children in the Philippines. Our methodology allowed us to directly compare the experience of mothers and their children. The article concludes that while mothers feel empowered that the phone has allowed them to partially reconstruct their role as parents, their children are significantly more ambivalent about the consequences of transnational communication.
This paper argues that, contrary to his own claims, Callon's work amounts to a defence of the economists' model of a framed and abstracted market against empirical evidence that contemporary exchange rarely if ever works according to the laws of the market. I start with an example from an Indian village, which shows how other societies also try to frame particular genres of exchange to protect themselves from other varieties of exchange. But both there and within capitalism the frame is precisely a moral system of how exchange ought to be carried out. I then use the example of car purchasing to suggest the highly entangled world of actual exchange within capitalism both between the exchange partners and also between consumers and commerce more generally. Indeed, the actual case studies in Callon's The Laws of the Markets seem to support this conclusion rather than the model put forward in his own introduction and conclusion. These studies, as others cited here, suggest the centrality of entanglements also for higher-level exchanges, such as stock markets and corporate take-overs, and not just for shoppers or other individual actors. As an alternative to Callon I brie y summarize an argument published elsewhere, called 'virtualism', in which I examine the increasing ability of economists and other agents of abstract models such as audit and consultancy to transform the world into closer approximations of their theories and models. I suggest this provides a more fruitful way of understanding the growth and power of abstraction in the contemporary economy.
This article contends that the study of consumption is often subsumed within an ideological concern to castigate society for its materialism at the expense of an alternative morality that emerges from an empathetic concern with poverty and the desire for greater access to material resources. Examples are given of the benefits that accrue to populations from an increased quantity of goods in certain circumstances. An anti-materialist ideology is favoured by associating consumption with production rather than studying consumers themselves and their struggles to discriminate between the positive and negative consequences of commodities. The form of morality attacked here is also associated with a generalized critique of Americanization that tends to appropriate on behalf of the United States all blame and thereby agency for regressive global and local developments. The Americanization thesis also tends to ignore the contribution of much of the rest of the world to the production of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism, and to deny the authenticity of regional consumer culture. Parallels are drawn with E.P. Thompson's essay The Poverty of Theory and its critique of similarly disengaged ideological critiques that led academics away from the study of experience. Key wordsAmericanization q consumer culture q materialism q morality q poverty IF 20 YEARS AGO THE TOPIC OF CONSUMPTION was unduly neglected across all the disciplines, today our problem seems as much constituted by a deluge of writing about our relationship with goods as by the flood of goods themselves. I want to argue, however, that this flood of writings may only amount to a trickle of insights into the nature of consumption, Journal of Consumer Culture
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