Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL, author/editor of 37 books including Tales from Facebook, Digital Anthropology (Ed. with H. Horst), The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (with D. Slater), Webcam (with J. Sinanan), The Comfort of Things, A Theory of Shopping, and Stuff.
This is a very interesting read. It is part of an eleven book series which describe comparative, qualitative, anthropological field work in nine sites around the world. It was done by different anthropologists, who worked together, and did their research at the same time (except for one researcher) so information was comparative. The researchers spent time together for planning and part way through their field work, but researched in different areas around the world.
This volume brings together a summary of the different sites which are described in their separate volumes. This is really interesting because it looks at poly media (people using multiple social medias) and brings in the idea of scalable sociability. It is really interesting for the big picture trends, and differences between the sites. While I may not read all the titles in the series, I am going to read some of other books. The titles are available as free PDFs so that those who participated in the research would be able to read the findings. This is important in reporting back to those who were part of the research. The books are also available as ebooks and in print.
I think this would be interesting reading for people interested in social media or ethnography as a research methodology.
An excellent over view of a series of anthropological studies of how people make social media use for them in nine different countries. Highly recommended.
This book is an interesting read for both anthropology and digital marketing students. It lacks though in detail and scentific reasoning. I suggest to anybody having read it to read other books from this collection, depending on the site he/she is most interested.
"It is obviously going to be hard to predict the future for something as dynamic as social media. The only confident prediction is that much of our future forecasting will turn out to be wrong"
Read this for a class. It was interesting to see how social media is used by different groups around the world, but literally reading the summaries would have given me all I needed to know.