Ethnography and Communicative Ecology: local networks and the assembling of media technologies

The Information Systems Research Forum

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17 November 2005, 12noon - 1.30pm, Studio Ciborra, Fifth Floor, Tower One

Don Slater, Department of Sociology, LSE

Drawing on ethnographies of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and poverty in South Asia and West Africa, this paper considers analytical frameworks for thinking about the 'impacts' of ICTs on specific locations.

The paper proposes the concept of 'communicative ecology' as a way of avoiding isolating individual technologies and searching for their discrete effects. Instead, communicative ecology, as a methodological approach, is concerned to assemble the full range of (symbolic and material) communicative resources, and the (social and technical) networks into which they are organised, in order to identify communicative structures, constraints and potentials. This approach also represents an attempt to engineer a conjuncture between media studies, actor network theory, sociology of consumption and material culture studies.

Please note the seminar is open to all and is free of charge. Places will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis.

For any further queries regarding this seminar please contact Emma Keys, research coordinator, e.s.keys@lse.ac.uk.

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