Curating Digital Lives

This book examines engagements of daily practices on different types of digital platforms and devices to present a local understanding of geographies of consumption in the digital age from a non-Western perspective and to understand the connections between local cultures and activities in the global development of digital technologies.

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Within a digital context in contemporary consumer societies, Curating Digital Lives: Consumer Cultures, Digital Platforms, and Everyday Practices draws on practice theories to explore Chinese urban residents’ lived experiences of digital platforms in their ordinary lives, in order to map digital geographies of consumption at micro scales. Using the conception of “curation,” this book teases out the engagements of daily practices within different types of digital social media platforms and devices to understand the connections between local cultures and activities in the global development of digital technologies. The empirical discussions in this book address how urban residents curate their digital geographies of consumption in various urban spaces on a daily basis, how urban consumers embrace and resist the digital cultures shaped by online platforms and the data these platforms produce, and the social and environmental impacts generated by the digitalization or platformization of consumption. Through these discussions, Chen Liu provides insights on digitalized and platform-mediated daily practices, including eating in/out, traveling, living with smart home technologies, buying and selling things, and using social media in urban China.