Inside the Digital Revolution

Bridgette Wessels offers a unique insight into the ways in which core public institutions and powerful organizations develop digital communications and services within the dynamics of everyday life in the public realm. The book draws on the author's ethnographic research with the London Metropolitan Police Service during their engagement in an innovative project to improve communication with the public using digital technology, in collaboration with public services and technology suppliers from across Europe. 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 the situatedness of technology and the human processes which it is designed to serve. Wessels uses her ethnographic research 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 offers a discussion of the role of ethnography in late modern western society as a tool for researching complex multi-perspective, multi-sited networks of the innovation of digital technologies as forms of communication.