how are we to understand the cultural significance of individualized media technologies such as the Walkman, the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone?

How are we to understand the cultural significance of individualized media technologies such as the Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone

The point of cultural studies is particularly pragmatic . It is a means of generating knowledge about the structures we live in , and the knowledge it generates is meant to be used . British cultural studies started out developing methodologies for the textual analysis of representations - what may look like a clearly academic interest . This however , was just one step along a road which has lead to many destinations and applications

for example , it has lead to important interventions into the formation of cultural policy on urban design media regulation , the arts industries or multiculturalism . As part of this journey British cultural studies has developed a distinctive mode of research , a mode which allows it to meet its objectives of analysing the articulation between cultural processes and structures in specific historical conjunctures . This work will deal , then , with cultural studies and in particular : how are we to understand the cultural significance of individualized media technologies such as the Walkman the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone . The contributors to these cultural studies demonstrate the prima facie evidence that times are changing owing to such devises as the Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone . Communication among teenagers is more intense , and novel forms of intimacy and distancing emerge . Relationships between teens and parents are altered by the existence of the mobile phone . In social relationships among adults , mobile communication leads to different forms of coordination , cooperation and conflict . The organizational structure of businesses is changing as well . In the physically mobile but socially in touch ' workforce , corporate managers must deal with new forms of supervision , while employees must deal with new forms of monitoring . Questions of folkways , norms and cultures of adoption and opposition also arise (Back 1996 . New forms of marketing and advertising emerge that prey on the human consciousness . This work examines a cultural product - the Sony Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone - from a number of perspectives . The work discusses how the products have been represented in advertising and thus how it is implicated in the construction of particular identities . This involves for instance , analysing the range of meanings mobilized in particular campaigns - recognizing the cultural specificities in campaigns in particular countries . This is a complex examination involving more specific questions about the marketing and design of the Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone , following through the various models the proliferation of specialized or niche-marketed versions , in to develop a design history of the product . Finally , the adoption of the Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone by subcultural groups as a signifier of resistance or identity leads into the final discussion : how the use of the Walkman , the Blackberry and the Mobile Phone has changed our culture

Theorists of postmodernism suggest that we address the textual thickness and the visual density of everyday life ' in societies saturated with commodified forms of cultural representation . Such...