ICT 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Participant Observation, Thick Description
10 Sep 2018
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Document Summary
How everyday objects tell stories about their owners. Artifacts as a companion to emotion and a provation to thought (turkle) Not what technology can do for us, but what it can do to us. The study of human cultures and communities. In-depth description of everyday life and practice, including its meaning for practitioners. Participant observation, field study, interviews, collecting objects and documents from the field. Artifacts, practices, social structures and relationships, language, etc. Context in which objects, organizations, and actions can be interpreted. A way of thinking, feeling and believing. A set of standardized orientations to recurrent problems. Webs of significance that humans have constructed. Social analysis and interpretation from direction of exceedingly extended acquaintances and extremely small matters. Technology inhabits the inner life and becomes charged with meaning. The meaning of the object comes from its history, social connections, context of use, etc. Technology and its meaning are socially, historically, culturally and discursively constructed.
