Enjoying machines

The dominant feature of modern technology is not how productive it makes us, or how it has revolutionized the workplace, but how enjoyable it is. We take pleasure in our devices, from smartphones to personal computers to televisions. Whole classes of leisure activities rely on technology. How has technology become such an integral part of enjoyment? In this book, Barry Brown and Oskar Juhlin examine the relationship between pleasure and technology, investigating what pleasure and leisure are, how they have come to depend on the many forms of technology, and how we might design technology to support enjoyment. They do this by studying the experience of enjoyment, documenting such activities as computer gameplay, deer hunting, tourism, and television watching. They describe technologies that support these activities, including prototype systems that they themselves developed. Brown and Juhlin argue that pleasure is fundamentally social in nature. We learn how to enjoy ourselves from others, mastering it as a set of skills. Drawing on their own ethnographic studies and on research from economics, psychology, and philosophy, Brown and Juhlin argue that enjoyment is a key concept in understanding the social world. They propose a framework for the study of enjoyment: the empirical program of enjoyment.

1. Why is Pleasure Important?: Why do we need to look at pleasure? -- A program -- A preview of the chapters -- 2. What is Enjoyment?: Pleasure is worldly -- Pleasure is a skill -- Pleasure is ordinary -- Pleasure is felt -- The empirical program of enjoyment -- 3. Play, Games, and Enjoyment : Concepts of game studies -- Counter-Strike: Shooting as if it matters -- Playing with animals: Big-game hunting -- Contrasting games and hunting -- 4. Enjoyment in the Literature : Enjoyment as an event in the brain -- Happiness in economics and psychology -- The philosophy of happiness and the good life -- The fear of happiness in classic sociological writing -- Psychoanalysis of the enjoyment society -- Leisure studies -- Fun in human-computer interaction -- 5. Pleasure in Family and Friends : Locating the family -- Friendship -- Pleasures of family and friends -- 6. Mobility and the Flaneuring Experience : The concept of the flaneur -- Tourism as enjoyment -- Flaneuring and the pleasure of driving -- Technologies of flaneuring -- Recovering enjoyment in mobility -- 7. Media -- Television: The box at the end of the couch -- Producing televised enjoyment experiences -- 8. Toward a Society o…