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Of Walking Shoes, Boats, Golf Carts, Bicycles, and a Slow Technoculture

A Technography of Movement and Embodied Media on Protection Island

Royal Roads University, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

April Vannini

European Graduate School, Saas Fee, Switzerland

Drawing on participant observation conducted on Protection Island, British Columbia, this article examines the significance of technologies of movement and, in particular, embodied media. It advances the argument that embodied media (i.e., technologies of transportation) differ significantly from disembodied media (traditional information media and new media). Utilizing media ecology and symbolic interactionist theory, this visual, sensuous, reflexive, poetic, McLuhanesque ethnography shows how the uniqueness of technoculture on Protection Island is due to the unique local patterns of interaction between techniques and technics of movement. Such patterns are conceptualized as "heavy" and "slow," and their consequences for social relationships, and in particular the structure of space, are described and interpreted. Also discussed is the role of technography or ethnography of technology.

Key Words: material culture • mobility • technology • media ecology • body-social aspects

This version was published on October 1, 2008

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 7, 1272-1301 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800408322708


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