Haunting Hands

Reviews / Votes

The significance of mobile media is marked not by their ubiquity but by their deep embedding in everyday life, and evolving practices around of mortality, memory, and memorialization make this vividly clear. We could not hope for better guides to this complicated topic than Kathleen Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth. Subtle and sophisticated, Haunting Hands shows in intimate detail how media connect us - and shape our experience at the same time. * Paul Dourish, Chancellor's Professor of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine * I am haunted by this book. By the challenge to write a review that gives justice to the complex connections analysed. By the temptations to take the well-developed central concepts and apply them further. In Haunting Hands we see an anthropological and social-constructivist cross-disciplinary take on the omnipresence of mobile media in everyday life. The authors describe the basic importance of rituals for sensemaking and cultural embeddedness, and how the mobile devices (especially smart phones and tablets) become intimate companions. The authors develop a convincing argument about how our use of handheld devices is at once connected to tradition and established rituals and at the same time reshaping and reinventing those rituals. * Stine Gotved, European Journal of Communication *