Inside the Digital Revolution

In this work, Bridgette Wessels offers a unique insight into the ways in which core public institutions and powerful organizations develop digital communications and services within the public realm. The book draws on her ethnographic research with the London Metropolitan Police Service during their engagement in an innovative project to improve communication with the public using digital technology. As one of the largest, most advanced and highly respected police services in the world, working in a socially, culturally and demographically complex city, the Metropolitan Police Service offers a highly revealing case study of technology and the human processes which it is designed to serve. The ethnographic research is used to develop a new theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between social action and technological change, addressing the way in which technology is socially shaped and culturally informed. The book also discusses the role of ethnography as a tool for researching complex multi-perspective, multi-sited networks of the innovation of digital technologies as forms of communication in late modern western society.

Bridgette Wessels is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her writing and research focuses on the social and cultural dynamics of the internet and ICT.

List of Acronyms; List of Pseudonyms; Technical Glossary; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 The Problem of Defining 'Project Digital'; Chapter 3 The Cultural Dynamics of Technological Change; Chapter 4 Putting the Researcher in the Field; Chapter 5 The Cultural History of Programme Digital and Project ATTACH in the MPS; Chapter 6 Phase One of the Relations of Production; Chapter 7 Phase Two of the Relations of Production; Chapter 8 The Construction of a Digital Services Narrative at European, National and Regional Levels; Chapter 9 Narratives of Service Provision in the Metropolitan Police Service; Chapter 10 Participation between Service Providers and Residents; Chapter 11 Police Work and Everyday Life; Chapter 12 Conclusion;