Travelling with mobile machines

Contemporary social life is increasingly characterised by various practices involving mobile machines and humans that enact multiple forms of travel. Thus, there emerges a question as to whether such practices change the patterns of conducting social life. This thesis begins with identifying crucial aspects in social life that have gone through significant changes. By adopting the metaphor of passages, social life and various socio- technological processes of organising machines are examined to identify the crucial importance of enacting travel, time, places and sociality. To further explore these aspects, the research draws on the material obtained through crafting socially and technologically mediated methods, including various forms of interviews and observations conducted in Taiwan during July and December, 2006. Passages that enable the travel with digital cameras, Wi- Fi signals and satellite navigation systems are examined in this thesis to characterise crucial ways in which social life is performed. Interactions between humans and machines are reconsidered so as to demonstrate how co-construction, negotiation, improvisation and modification are crucial mechanisms in enacting different forms of travel. Through the research, diversified and complex ordering of social life is examined by exploring the dynamic interactions between innovative and omnipresent machines and heterogeneous assemblages of machines and social entities. By examining how various passages are enacted and how social life is reconfigured, this thesis argues that there emerges a crucial intensification of embodied interactions with mobile machines. With these interactions, a series of significant reshaping of the relationships between machines, bodies, places, temporalities and social connections is unfolding and thus the patterns of conducting social life are constantly being reconfigured through incorporating existing practices and developing new ones.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo