Digital Lives In The Global City

Digital technologies have transformed how, where, and when we communicate, love, learn, produce, and consume. Digital Lives in the Global City examines the entanglements of urban life as digital infrastructures connect us across vast distances while also merging work with personal time and space, increasing the power of financial institutions, and enhancing state and corporate surveillance capacities. This nuanced exploration engages with a wide range of issues: the conditions of migrant work in Singapore, the question of digital debt in Toronto, the rise and fall of illegal buildings in Mumbai, and targeted policing in New York. In the process, it reveals the profound connections between digital technologies and the social life of global cities.

Digital technologies have transformed how, where, and when we communicate, love, learn, produce, and consume. Digital Lives in the Global City examines the entanglements of urban life as digital infrastructures connect us across vast distances while also merging work with personal time and space, increasing the power of financial institutions, and enhancing state and corporate surveillance capacities. This nuanced exploration engages with a wide range of issues: the conditions of migrant work in Singapore, the question of digital debt in Toronto, the rise and fall of illegal buildings in Mumbai, and targeted policing in New York. In the process, it reveals the profound connections between digital technologies and the social life of global cities.

We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars. This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life: Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics. Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics. Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work. The authors provide: • Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines • Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field • An outline of future directions for researching digital life. Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.

Istanbul explores how to live with difference through the prism of an age-old, cutting-edge city whose people have long confronted the challenge of sharing space with the Other. Located at the intersection of trade networks connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, Istanbul is western and eastern, northern and southern, religious and secular. Heir of ancient empires, Istanbul is the premier city of a proud nation-state even as it has become a global city of multinational corporations, NGOs, and capital flows. Rather than exploring Istanbul as one place at one time, the contributors to this volume focus on the city’s experience of migration and globalization over the last two centuries. Asking what Istanbul teaches us about living with people whose hopes jostle with one’s own, contributors explore the rise, collapse, and fragile rebirth of cosmopolitan conviviality in a once and future world city. The result is a cogent, interdisciplinary exchange about an urban space that is microcosmic of dilemmas of diversity across time and space.

This book explores digital artists’ articulations of globalization. Digital artworks from around the world are examined in terms of how they both express and simulate globalization’s impacts through immersive, participatory and interactive technologies. The author highlights some of the problems with macro and categorical approaches to the study of globalization and presents new ways of seeing the phenomenon as a series of processes and flows that are individually experienced and expressed. Instead of providing a macro analysis of large-scale political and economic processes, the book offers imaginative new ways of knowing and understanding globalization as a series of micro affects. Digital art is explored in terms of how it re-centers articulations of globalization around individual experiences and offers new ways of accessing a complex topic often expressed in general and intangible terms. The Work of Art in a Digital Age: Art, Technology and Globalization is analytic and accessible, with material that is of interest to a range of researchers from different disciplines. Students studying digital art, film, globalization, cultural studies or digital media trends will also find the content fascinating.

Digital Participation through Social Living Labs connects two largely separate debates: On the one hand, high speed internet access and associated technologies are often heralded as a means to bring about not only connectivity, but also innovation, economic development, new jobs, and regional prosperity. On the other hand, community development research has established that access by itself is necessary but not sufficient to foster digital participation for the broadest possible range of individuals. Edited by leading scholars from the fields of education, youth studies, urban informatics, librarianship, communication technology, and digital media studies, this book is positioned as a link to connect these debates. It brings together an international collection of empirically grounded case studies by researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds. They advance knowledge that fosters digital participation by identifying the specific digital needs, issues and practices of different types of communities as they seek to take advantage of access to digital technologies. Collectively, these cases propose new ways for enabling residents to develop their digital confidence and skills both at home and in their local community, particularly through a ‘social living labs’ approach. The book is organised around key focus areas: digital skills enhancement, youth entrepreneurship, connected learning, community digital storytelling, community-led digital initiatives and policy development. Highlights that high speed internet is necessary that high speed internet access is necessary but not sufficient to resolve digital divides and foster social inclusion; Brings together international, empirically grounded case studies to identify digital needs, issues and practices of different communities, and contextualises these with expert comment; Presents contributions from multiple disciplines, with most chapters incorporating more than one disciplinary background; Gives insight on the place of the digital in contemporary society; Illustrates the innovative potential of social living labs to foster digital learning and participation in a variety of community contexts.

Living the Global City (1996) was a landmark text in the field of Global Studies, offering an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. In this new collection Eade and Rumford draw together scholars whose work has engaged with the original volume over the last 15 years and the result is a unique and thematically coherent collection of essays which both complements the original book and challenges some of its core assumptions. Re-Living the Global City both pays homage to a key text and pushes its agenda into important new areas. After reflecting upon how debates in the field have developed since the original publication, the contributors seek to drive the debate forward through discussion of contemporary themes and issues such as borders and bordering, social movements, community and global connectivity. They consider the ways in which the city produces different experiences of globalization for different people and examine the various accounts of the ways in which new forms of sociality are definitive of contemporary globalization and cosmopolitanism. Drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines including international relations, politics, sociology, urban studies and anthropology, this work will be of great interest to all students and scholars of global studies and globalization.