Literature Review: The Internet and Information Technology
This literature review engages with recent explorations of the relationship between the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the formation of communities. These communities are understood as being comprised of actors both in online and offline settings. The four sections below explore how social scientists have understood the uptake of digital communication technologies over the last 20 years by individuals and groups. They appraise and critique a portion of this body of work, in an attempt to better theorise how the terms ‘online’ and ‘offline’ operate in our research project more broadly. The literature included in this document has thus been chosen for its role in interrogating the concept of ‘connectivity’. Further, the review argues that a limited theorisation of connectivity, such as a binary dualism of being either online or offline, fails to take into account the complexity of the human-technology relationship in contemporary everyday life.
This review will also contain a section on the methodological concerns that arise from this field of research. In so doing, it should provide a strong basis for the fieldwork portion of the scoping study, and provide literatures and debates for the project moving forwards. It emphasises the importance of work that understands how technologies are being used by individuals and groups to form and experience community. However, it argues that this thinking also needs to be augmented by methods that consider the role of connectivity in everyday life – and not just usage habits of research participants.
This review will also contain a section on the methodological concerns that arise from this field of research. In so doing, it should provide a strong basis for the fieldwork portion of the scoping study, and provide literatures and debates for the project moving forwards. It emphasises the importance of work that understands how technologies are being used by individuals and groups to form and experience community. However, it argues that this thinking also needs to be augmented by methods that consider the role of connectivity in everyday life – and not just usage habits of research participants.
Literature Review: Situating Contemporary Craft
In thinking about the term craft and the practices of making that are often described with this term, it helps to look briefly at what the key thinkers within this world are saying about it before beginning to critically explore the term, the practices and the makers’ lives further. Thus, we see that craft historians provide an invaluable basis for understanding the intellectual roots of craft in European and American practices. At the same time, they frequently avoid critical analysis of the social and cultural systems of value that underpin craft, and particularly the ‘goodness’ of craft itself, and thus the work of anthropologists, neuro-biologists, and others are used as invaluable perspectives on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of craft practice across time and geographic areas without resorting to the cultural baggage and old arguments that permeate art v. craft discussions.
Literature Review: Social Network and Policy Perspectives
The literature on complexity, social networks and craft helps understanding the sector as range of interconnected activities.
