Digital services, platforms and arrangements are often promoted as smooth and convenient, smart or intelligent. When introduced, devices can appear utterly fascinating or awkward, even disquieting. Eventually, however, they soon disappear in the muddle of everyday life. This is how Mundania takes form. Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand technological change. Scholar-artist Robert Willim deftly unpacks the interplay between everyday life and the immense complexity of technological infrastructures. Offering imaginative new insights into our relationship with technology, this book will appeal to readers in a range of fields from science and technology and media studies to the arts.

Digital services, platforms and arrangements are often promoted as smooth and convenient, smart or intelligent. When introduced, devices can appear utterly fascinating or awkward, even disquieting. Eventually, however, they soon disappear in the muddle of everyday life. This is how Mundania takes form. Based on original research, this book uses the concept of mundania to better understand technological change. Scholar-artist Robert Willim deftly unpacks the interplay between everyday life and the immense complexity of technological infrastructures. Offering imaginative new insights into our relationship with technology, this book will appeal to readers in a range of fields from science and technology and media studies to the arts.

What happens when economies 'heat up'? This book looks at the 1990s, years of intense economic experimentation, when buzz words such as 'network society', 'the experience economy', 'creative cities' and 'glocalization' were everywhere. A fascinating perspective on 'The New Economy' emerges as the authors explore the worlds of coolhunters, biotech brokers, career coaches, software entrepreneurs and event managers and tackle such questions as: - how is magic used in the quest for newness and change? - what happens when cultural techniques such as branding and styling colonize new arenas? - what turns out to be just a flash-in-the-pan and what has a lasting impact? This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how economies operate in periods of rapid transformation.

What happens when economies 'heat up'? This book looks at the 1990s, years of intense economic experimentation, when buzz words such as 'network society', 'the experience economy', 'creative cities' and 'glocalization' were everywhere. A fascinating perspective on 'The New Economy' emerges as the authors explore the worlds of coolhunters, biotech brokers, career coaches, software entrepreneurs and event managers and tackle such questions as: - how is magic used in the quest for newness and change? - what happens when cultural techniques such as branding and styling colonize new arenas? - what turns out to be just a flash-in-the-pan and what has a lasting impact? This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how economies operate in periods of rapid transformation.

Ethnography has become something of a buzzword in recent years. It is talked about and invoked in disciplines ranging from anthropology and ethnology to literature, history, business administration and design studies. Textbooks that teach ethnography tend to imbue students with the impression that ethnography is a mode of systematic investigation by which the researcher gets closer to the realities of people's everyday lives. But how straightforward are these processes in reality? As ethnography spreads into new folds of research both within and without the academy, the contributions in this volume demonstrate the manner in which field methods are adjusting, transforming or taking new forms altogether. If textbooks might lead students to believe that observations and interviews are the grounds upon which "good" ethnography can regularly be produced, the authors in this volume take as their point of departure the realisation that ethnography is being used in a multitude of different contexts which forces them -- and us as readers -- to question the "regularities" and "irregularities" of their own work.