This article examines how maps in location-based mobile games are used as surfaces on which players can inscribe their whereabouts and other local information while being on the move. Using different examples of location-based games (LBGs) to which the map is central, our main argument is that such cartographical LBGs foreground the fluidity of mapping and emphasize the performative aspects of playing with maps. As such, we wish to move away from a conception of maps as representational texts and will show that it is far more productive to approach such cartographical games as processual and navigational practices. Instead of conceiving maps in such games as ‘mimetic interfaces’ (Juul, 2009), they should therefore be approached as what we will call navigational interfaces. To understand them as such, we will combine perspectives from game studies with non-representational understandings of maps as technological and spatial practices as developed in human geography and science and technology studies. By doing so, we wish to instigate a productive interdisciplinary debate about the relation between play and mapping as to deepen our understanding of LBGs as cultural cartographical practices.
YouTube’s increasing convergence with television extends to the notion of flow. The platform’s revising and reshaping of television flow theorized by Raymond Williams ((1974) Television. London: Routledge.), which is produced through the combined work of users and algorithms, enables diverse cultural representations to come into contact. This diversity creates relational juxtapositions that become meaningful through human interpretation. The algorithms that are entrenched in YouTube’s business models and designed to monetize the work of users may also circulate divergent versions of a cultural practice. That YouTube flow can produce diverse cultural representations is demonstrated by a case study of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony, a Turkish intangible heritage practice safeguarded by UNESCO; official heritage narratives put forward by the nation-state of Turkey through UNESCO are challenged by other narratives on the platform.
Based on online observation of communication in a web-based weight loss forum, this article identifies the relevance of confession and absolution as characteristics of online interactions. Our close study of forum messages, arranged as web diaries open to comments from participants, shows that self-blaming posts elicited absolutional replies. With a primary interest in those personal posts which had a confessional character, we identified three aspects of absolution in replies: collective, prospective and supportive. Of special sociological interest is how online interaction in the forum challenges the concept of ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman, 1971) as a basic social norm for interaction in public spaces. Rather, absolutional attention defines the interactional order within the forum, in which diary authors receive feedback on their accounts of challenges, problems and failures. Studying online communication in detail may contribute to an important theoretical refinement of interactionist sociology, which currently strongly rests on studies from pre-Internet times.
User-based research into the lived experiences associated with smartphone camera practices – in particular, the taking, storing, curating and sharing of personal imagery in the digital media sphere – remains scarce, especially in contrast to its increasing ubiquity. Accordingly, this article’s detailed analysis of open-ended questionnaires from ‘millennial’ smartphone users elucidates the varied experiential, compositional and technological aspects associated with smartphone imagery in everyday life. It argues that the associated changes do more than just update previous technologies but rather open space up for emergent forms of visual communication. Specifically, our close interpretive reading indicates four key factors underlying the moments privileged when using smartphone cameras, namely: they deviate from the mundane, are related to ‘positive’ emotions, evince strong social bonds and encompass a future-oriented perspective. Relatedly, in terms of photographic composition, visual content tends to circulate around: the social presence of others, boundedness of event, perceived aesthetic value and intended shareability. Our findings question certain formulations about the gradual disappearance of media from personal consciousness in a digital age. If ceaselessness is a defining characteristic of the current era, our analysis reveals that the use of smartphone cameras is indicative of people affectively and self-consciously deploying the technology to try to arrest the ephemerality of daily life, however fleetingly. This article thus pinpoints the theoretical and methodological value of research approaches moving beyond a narrow focus on the usage patterns to uncover the spatio-temporal specificities shaping (and being shaped by) smartphone imagery and its communicative resonances.
This article analyses media production projects run by football supporters in Brazil. From in-depth interviews and analysis of the material produced by fans of a singular club, Clube Atlético Mineiro (also known as Atlético-MG or Galo, its nickname), the article explores the ways supporters appropriate the journalistic language and create innovative narratives that enrich and pluralize the media environment. Formats vary from blogs to running web radios with regular programming. Motivations for engaging in the projects are also diverse, from improving writing skills to helping the club. The supporters and initiatives here considered promote innovative approaches especially in three ways: (1) placing ordinary supporters at the centre of their narratives; (2) adopting unconventional methods of reportage that challenge the dependency of journalism on regular productive routines and that are able to provide unusual angles of sport-related stories; and (3) creating texts that resort less to the increasingly rational and bureaucratic language that has notably characterized sporting chronicles over the past few decades. Besides, these texts and their parallel circuits of fan production have played an important role in sustaining contemporary alternative football fan cultures in an increasingly hypercommodified football context.
This article aims to identify the relationship between video games and neoliberal values. To fulfil this aim, it analyses the covers of the 20 top-selling video games in the United States each year from 2010 to 2014 (a total of 80 different games). Video game covers are a type of paratext, that is, texts that accompany another text to promote it and to guide its reading. Thus, video game covers choose and highlight some of the games’ features over others, and by doing that they construct a discourse. In this article, it is argued that regardless of genre, the covers analysed convey and promote neoliberal values, such as freedom and choice, entrepreneurship, consumption and accumulation of goods, customization, novelty, individualism and meritocracy. This promotion of neoliberal values is combined with an appeal to the concerns of ‘risk society’. Thus, the covers of the top-selling video games play on fears linked to the new context created by the economic crisis while at the same time legitimizing the neoliberal ideal of the ‘enterprising self’ as a model for dealing with it.
The connective potentials of digital media have been positioned as a key part of a contemporary museum visitor experience. Using a sociology of translation, we construct a network of visitor experiences using data from a digital media engagement project at a large and multi-sited museum in the United Kingdom. These experiences relate to (dis)connections with the museum, museum objects and other visitors. Through this analysis, we disclose the often contradictory roles of the non-human, including and going beyond the digital, as contributors to the success and failure of attempts to change museum visitor experiences through engagement activities rooted in narratives of participation and connectivity.
While it has been acknowledged that convergence is a multidimensional phenomenon, the convergence of media production processes has received little attention from researchers so far. In this article, we address this research gap with a qualitative study of production processes in different types of media. Our starting point is that independent of the media type, common product characteristics can be identified, that promote success in the audience market. We ask whether the same is true for process characteristics; whether there are converged processes that promote audience success independent of the media type. The study is based on n = 39 interviews in the German-speaking markets. Our findings provide a differentiated result: We do find similarities in the processes along the lines of product characteristics; however, the project phase is an important influencer. While processes in the development phase are more converged, production and distribution still demand distinct processes for different media types. In general, we can confirm studies that find a reluctance of media practitioners towards convergence, which often remains an underfunded and cost-oriented brain child of the top management.
The authors analyzed 300 stories about adolescents’ friendship challenges in order to explore the roles of digital technologies in contemporary friendship conflicts. An initial round of analysis facilitated the identification and subsequent classification of stories by five commonly described challenges: betrayal, isolation, meanness and harassment, concern about a Friend, and Maintenance Challenges. Drawing on previously identified features of exchanges in and through digital contexts, including scalability, persistence, replicability, and anonymity, the role of technology was then explored in the context of the five friendship challenges. Scalability, leveraging the affordance of efficiently reaching a broad audience, was the most common way technology amplified friendship challenges. However, technology also often functioned solely as the medium for communication. Additionally, adolescents described difficulties related to sexting as a contemporary friendship challenge. Implications for supporting youth in their friendships are discussed.
There is a wide range of interest in gamification – with game design elements being used in an increasing number of non-game contexts. Yet, despite these developments, there has been little interest from the academic community in the potential opportunities that gamification presents in the research context. Law in Children’s Lives is an innovative project that has explored the use of a specially designed tablet-based game, Adventures with Lex, as a data collection tool. The game, developed using participatory design techniques, has been used as a means to investigate children’s perceptions of the law in their everyday lives. This article presents a case study of the processes and challenges involved in the development of the game which leads to a discussion of the implications of this study for the wider use of game-based research.
This article builds on an analysis of Sea and Spar Between by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland and Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer to examine print and digital forms of writing through resonance, replication, and repetition. It explores the plastic and textual space of the page and screen and focuses more specifically on the composition of fragments and the way they can be apprehended by readers. Conversely, digital borrowing is not a mechanical process of self-identical recurrence, and like its print counterpart, it is a gesture of differenciation and a play of singularities (Deleuze). In investigating the entanglement of a work with a source text, this article also explores how creative gestures initiate a "floating" space as theorized by Jean-Francois Lyotard, that is, a space at once rigid and flexible where the reader is both bound and floating.
Prior research examines the effects of a strong market orientation on a news organization, looking at both content and journalists’ perceptions. But recent technology allows for more weakly market-oriented newsrooms, an under-researched area of inquiry. This study, utilizing long-form interviews with 23 journalists at digital news organizations with weak market orientations, examines journalist perceptions of market orientation. The data show that journalists perceive positive effects of this orientation on their organization through more time for stories, more ability to engage with the audience and more overall autonomy. However, the journalists believe negative effects include a lack of innovation, an unstable funding structure, and a lack of perceived credibility from the audience. These results are discussed through the lens of market theory for news.
Released in late 2015 for the Wii U console, Super Mario Maker (SMM) is an extension of Nintendo’s two-dimensional (2-D) ‘Super Mario’ series that offers the ability to create new stages using a suite of level design tools. However, despite initial appearances, I argue that SMM is not a Super Mario level maker, per se. The game creates a complex web of relations between professional and amateur design that simultaneously venerates Nintendo’s designers and provides a platform for the creation of designs informed by an ethos standing in opposition to the principles it espouses. On one hand, appropriating the products and modalities of ROM hacking allows Nintendo to demonstrate its awareness of its games as they are played and played with while simultaneously neutralizing the practice of ROM hacking which it codifies as an ‘illegal’ act of software piracy. Most interestingly, however, is how Nintendo balances the celebration and reinforcement of its core design principles of player advocacy, inclusivity and accessibility alongside the altogether more ruthless, even openly hostile, designs evident in the genre of ROM hacks known as ‘Kaizo’ designs. That Nintendo explicitly showcases such levels in its promotional materials for SMM seems, prima facie, utterly at odds with its game design principles and the celebratory nature of the SMM package. However, following Wilson and Sicart’s (2010) work on ‘Abusive Game Design’, I suggest that SMM operates as a ‘dialogical’ platform. By foregrounding the level creators’ identities and their status as amateur designers, SMM allows and encourages the production of ‘unfair’ level designs, while simultaneously sanctifying Nintendo’s authorial principles and the underlying player-centric design ethos of the Super Mario canon. As such, in addition to operating as a totemic object celebrating Super Mario’s 30-year anniversary, SMM can be read as part of Nintendo’s project to reclaim Mario as an object of design.
Intertwining Irish history and generations of Irish American family histories in a work of polyphonic electronic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish Poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata, streams and fountains, and Irish and Irish American song, From Ireland with Letters (2010 - 2016) is an epic electronic manuscript told in the public space of the Internet. Situating the work in the contexts of Irish public literature and of public electronic literature, this paper explores both the work itself and issues of public electronic literature and in the process both divulges little known Irish American histories and suggests the potential for the public literature telling of narrative and poetry on the Internet.
This article explores the opportunities and implications for new digital writing in transmedia performance environments. This article centres on the experimental Pervasive Theatre project (Assault Events 2014, commissioned by futuredream funded through Arts Council England), which explored the potential of online social tools to create a multimedia, collaborative and participatory work situated across multiple platforms. This project brought together researchers, artists, writers, technologists and practitioners from the interdisciplinary fields of digital writing, transmedia and performance to explore ways to develop narratives that weave together physical and online worlds, blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy, audience and performers in a way that would be exciting, immersive and participative. The project looked at different performative spaces including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vines, exploring how these platforms could support the delivery of original narrative performance. This transmedia approach informed and shaped the digital writing practice, instigating new modes of working. Four aspects were of particular interest and will be explored in this article – how new writing can emerge from within online spaces rather than being translated onto them; how characteristics of different online social platforms inform style and content; how social media platforms can be used to develop narrative and character through creative collaboration with performers; and finally, how online social spaces enable the digital writer to develop a narrative framework through which audiences frame their own meaning.
Radio is a resilient medium. As in different countries around the world celebrations are being planned to mark the 100th anniversaries of the first regular domestic radio services, early predictions of its demise have so far been proven wrong. Radio transmission remains overwhelmingly analogue in a world where digital switchover of television currently preoccupies many governments and audiences alike.
Music-streaming services embed social features that enable users to connect to one another and use music as social objects. This article examines how these features are experienced within negotiations of music as personal and social through the acts of sharing music and of following others. The analysis relies on 23 focus-group interviews with 124 Spotify and/or Tidal users and a mixed-method study including music-diary self-reports, online observation and interviews with 12 heavy users. Our findings suggest that users incorporate social awareness in non-sharing, selective-sharing and all-sharing approaches with strong, weak and absent ties. These ties are characterized by different configurations of social and music homophily. Negotiations of music as personal and social shape how music-streaming services are experienced.
Scholarship on digital identity has historically reflected a Protean discourse, framing arguments in terms of fluidity and constraint. After explicating the Protean discourse that has framed critical approaches to digital identity, this article exposes how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), in order to justify its centralized authority of the Domain Name System, itself mobilizes a Protean discourse, representing digital identity as a finite supply of water in need of proper management. From its formation in 1998 until 2009, when the US Department of Commerce effectively released the corporation from its official supervision, ICANN assembled a regime for the management of digital identity, which is itself an infrastructure for a global identity industry. By adopting an infrastructural disposition, this article situates global Internet governance in relation to the academic corpus on digital identity, interrogating the discursive conditions by which we have come to understand ourselves in relation to the Internet’s most basic addressing schema, the enclosures within which all virtual communities congregate.
As one of the first social media franchises, Lonelygirl15 (LG15) played a surprisingly important role in transforming YouTube into a legitimate storytelling platform and a site of cultural production worthy of commercial attention. While LG15 has been hailed as one of the first community-based storytelling initiatives that harnessed the power of participatory culture, the anxiety of creating an economically sustainable story led to the careful management of fan efforts and the strict definition of the boundaries of the LG15 canon. In this article, I argue that LG15 demonstrates one of the most worrisome aspects of YouTube’s monetization strategies, the commodification of labour in which advertisers and media companies exploit users for profit. This exploitation does not necessarily come in the form of loss of monetary value but through the alienation of fans from their productive labour. As such, the production of LG15 presents a powerful critique of convergence culture. It demonstrates that the movement of fans to the centre of cultural production does not necessarily mean empowerment but may also suggest exploitation.
The role of new digital media in politics has often been discussed for individual countries and technologies, or at a general level. So far, there are few studies which compare countries and treat new media in the context of the media system as a whole, including traditional and new digital media. The main contribution of this article is to compare two countries at the extremes of the political spectrum and with quite different media systems, the United States and Sweden. It synthesizes what is known to date about digital media in these two cases, including about the uses of Twitter, Facebook and other new media. The article discusses the shortcomings of existing analyses of political communication and of how digital media work in a way that is different from traditional or mass media. The argument is that new media expand input from people into the political systems only at the margins, where they can circumvent established agenda setting and gatekeeping mechanisms. The article develops a framework for understanding digital media which highlights how they extend and diversify the public sphere, even as this sphere is monitored and managed, and still faces the constraint of the limited attention devoted to political issues.
In November 2015, the BBC Trust gave its final approval for BBC Three to cease broadcasting on television in the United Kingdom and become an online-only entity. The decision is a landmark moment in the history of BBC Television and has significant implications for BBC planning in relation to the continued transition from broadcast television to streaming and download services. In this article, the original proposals for moving BBC Three online are assessed and discussed within the wider context of current BBC policy. It is argued that the rationale used for moving BBC Three online is based on arguments that vary in the extent to which they are backed by evidence. It is also argued that the plans have significant regulatory implications for the future of BBC Television and for the television licence fee in the United Kingdom.
Analysis of survey responses gathered from 92 television time shifters reveals varying attitudes and behaviors toward spoilers. Throughout this essay, we argue that spoiler avoiders embrace post-network era reception practices but use network era norms to evaluate their own experience and regulate the television conversations around them. We see, however, an erosion of those network era norms in people who either use spoilers to enhance their narrative pleasure or who do not actively police television conversations around them. These findings suggest that television conversation norms and individual evaluations of narrative pleasures are slower to evolve than reception patterns. Our study brings convergence culture questions of narrative pleasure, discursive patterns, active audience behaviors, and contested grounds of power to the surface.
The rise in self-publishing, digital folk culture and social media participation, have revolutionized reading and writing practices. Readers can directly contact their favourite authors, and publishers, through social media and become authors, and publishers, themselves. One of the outcomes of digital reading and writing is that writing is now becoming more democratic: traditional publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers of culture. The popularity of social writing platform Wattpad is a recent example of how a new generation of influential and innovative writers is entering the publishing arena. This also demonstrates that there is a demand for authorship without the intervention from publishers. Despite this, traditional notions of authorship, ownership and control are prevalent in contemporary publishing hindering the true potential of creativity. The disharmony between the rise of the amateur author and the control of the traditional publisher is confronted in the digital public sphere. Consequently, issues such as authority and influence are mediated during the activities and interactions that take place on social media and other online platforms. Established authority figures, such as famous authors or well-known publishers, that exert authority and influence in the traditional sphere, can shift this authority and influence to the digital world; however, this sphere is also occupied by emerging networks of influencers, such as emerging authors or micro-celebrities, who gain popularity as a result of specific trends, in specific domains, at specific times. This article will examine how new and established authors are using social platforms, and social media, to publish their writing, build communities and extend their dialogue with readers and other writers. A netnographic study of Wattpad will identify which authors are the influencers and innovators in social publishing. Consequently, this article will underscore the increasing importance of social networks and social relationships in 21st century publishing.
The virtual or online community was considered by Mark Poster (1995) to be central to what he called the second media age, marked as distinct from the first media age by new modes interactivity and subjectivity afforded by internet technologies. Community is also central to participatory culture, the study of which began at the cusp of the second media age. This paper critically examines the technocultural formation of online community in the context of fandom and its relationship to specific platforms from Usenet to Tumblr. Based on the analysis of interview data collected from participatory fans (n = 33), I argue that not all platforms enable community formation. While the participants had a sense of community as members of listservs, Yahoo groups and LiveJournal, the same was not true of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, even though they afforded a number of fannish pleasures. These findings raise questions as to the ongoing centrality of online community in the late second media age.
The 2015 General Election in the United Kingdom was the first to take place in the United Kingdom with Twitter as an important part of the social media landscape. This pilot project looked at 16 constituencies along England’s South Coast in order to investigate what impact, if any, Twitter had had on both the campaign and the result and to investigate the efficacy, or otherwise, of using Twitter as a tool for studying election campaigns in terms of candidate and local party activism. On the basis of an analysis of almost half a million tweets, the analysis concluded that there appeared to be a correlation between the rate at which parties and/or candidates responded to incoming tweets and their relative electoral performance but this was not demonstrable for all parties (it applied in particular to Labour and UK Independence Party candidates). In addition, high rates of reply also appeared to have a positive impact on constituency turnout figures. The findings are not yet conclusive but suggest that Twitter could be a good indicator of general levels of local party activism. The research also sought to understand how candidates used Twitter differently and established a number of candidate ‘classifiers’. It also investigated the issues agenda that was dominating Twitter conversations during the campaign and found that Twitter’s agenda was closer to the public’s than was that of the national media. The research also monitored the regional and local media in the 16 constituencies and discovered that their issues agenda was closer still to the public’s. Overall, it is difficult to conclude that Twitter had a major impact on the election campaign and result.
Whilst social media like Twitter and Facebook carry with them the potential for the practice of journalism, novelties like these are also associated with adaptation difficulties – perhaps especially when it comes to the interactive capabilities that services like these afford. This study employs a multi-method approach to study the different uses of Twitter and Facebook by one media company – the Swedish public service broadcaster (PSB) Sveriges Television – during the 2014 election year. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative data, we find that Twitter was used more extensively and in a comparably more interactive fashion than Facebook. Hence we suggest Twitter, used more for interaction, functions as a ‘chat room’; whilst Facebook, used more for broadcasting messages, can be viewed as functioning like a ‘showroom’. As Twitter is often associated with societal elites in the Swedish context, it raises a question about the suitability for a PSB to engage to such a degree on this particular platform.
Multichannel networks (MCNs) are intermediary companies that sell advertising, cross-promote affiliated YouTube channels, and develop video brands. They have often been criticized as driving YouTube’s commercialization, a seemingly recent phenomenon that sees hithertho informal practices of video making and sharing being increasingly formalized. This article challenges such beliefs about YouTube’s sudden makeover, based on archival evidence that allows to reconstruct YouTube’s long commercial history and on fresh field study data relating to one specific MCN and its content providers. Debunking the myth of ‘cocreation’, the article uses simple analogies – market, infrastructure, and franchise – to describe how MCNs contribute to establish asymmetrical relations between users and emergent industry systems online. It demonstrates how MCNs since 2006 have streamlined and standardized production inputs, reorganized cost per mille–based ad sales, and redefined the value of video in line with a more general financialization of media markets. The methodological framework for this empirical inquiry into YouTube’s first decade is based on economic sociology and infrastructure studies, and the argument itself framed by critical research on ‘connected viewing’, a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.
The potential of the Internet to act as a global distribution outlet for screen content has long come into conflict with the nationally focused strategies of producers, broadcasters, governments and Internet service providers. Online viewing therefore acts as a useful case study for interrogating how tensions between ‘global’ and ‘local’ manifest within an increasingly digitized media landscape. This article examines the online viewing markets in three countries at different stages of digital maturity (South Korea, Brazil and India) to consider how online viewing has evolved in each. It then examines audience questionnaire and interview data generated in each country to explore how viewers are making sense of and valuing online viewing services. By interrogating all three samples before focusing specifically on India in more detail, it examines two tensions within the global expansion of online film and television distribution: between global trends and local infrastructures and between the ideals of online viewing services and the grounded realities of their daily use.
During the past decade, digital distribution has brought about major changes in the ways that states regulate, corporations profit from, and people consume media content in places around the world. These technological and industrial shifts have also catalyzed an important area of inquiry in media studies, leading to investigations of ‘connected viewing’ defined by Holt and Sanson as a ‘broader ecosystem in which digital distribution is rendered possible and new forms of user engagement take shape’. Most scholarly research on connected viewing has focused on postindustrial contexts in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Few have considered these practices in developing contexts such as rural sub-Saharan Africa, where energy infrastructure is underdeveloped and media devices are scarce. Adopting a user-centered approach, this article situates the concept of connected viewing in rural Zambia and explores how remote communities with very limited resources access and produce media content across various platforms. The research is based upon 6 weeks of fieldwork in Macha, Zambia, in 2012 and 2013. It begins with a descriptions of the ways people energize media devices in Macha and proceeds to a discussion of three exemplary connected viewing scenarios: (1) the daisy-chaining of satellite TV services, (2) the streaming of YouTube videos, and (3) the production and distribution of local music video. Far from a model of ‘video on demand’ typical in most postindustrial settings, Machan distribution practices generate more occasional, collective, and limited experiences of television that are scaled to local capacities, enabled by an amalgam of technologies, and frequently interrupted by power outages and network failures. Despite this, underserved rural Zambian audiences are pushing connected viewing practices forward in ways that the region’s telecom and media companies are not by innovating cross-platform tactics for (re)distributing audiovisual content in conditions of energy, bandwidth, and economic scarcity.
How has YouTube evolved as a cultural and commercial infrastructure? What institutional forms has it produced? The present article takes up these questions through a discussion of multichannel networks (MCNs) and their role within the digital video system. MCNs are a new breed of intermediary firm that link entrepreneurial YouTubers with the advertising, marketing and screen production industries. This article considers the functions of MCNs vis-à-vis the existing constellation of screen industry professions, including talent agents, managers and media buyers, who perform similar functions offline. Combining structural analysis of the MCN industry with an assessment of its cultural impacts, I show how Google’s decision to open the YouTube back-end to third-party intermediaries is subtly changing the digital video ecology.
In recent years, the spread of mobile communication devices such as smartphones has been markedly rapid. With this technological diffusion, mobile health (mHealth) has become an increasingly important issue. In particular, there is an increasing interest in smartphone apps improving public health. Although there is increased availability of mobile devices and health apps, little is known about motivational factors predicting health app adoption and use. The aim of this study was to identify motivational factors that predict the adoption and use of health apps (i.e. health app engagement). To identify the motivational factors, 391 college students were surveyed and survey questions considered the effects of media exposure to health information, interpersonal communication on health issues, and psychological factors (e.g. attitude, usefulness, peer norm, and self-efficacy) on health app engagement. Our results confirm the effect of attitude (β = 0.36) and usefulness are (β = 0.33) on mHealth App usage. Furthermore, we found that age (β = 0.11) and reading news articles about health (β = 0.13) predict mHealth App usage. Theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.
This article focuses on the role web application programming interfaces (APIs) play in the television (TV) industry’s social media efforts. Web APIs are coding interfaces that allow different databases of information to communicate with one another. The widespread implementation of web APIs as a standard for information sharing offers a way for TV companies to more easily cobble together a presence in connected viewing environments. In this light, web API acts as, what Joshua Braun calls, ‘transparent intermediaries’ that actively shape the range of possibilities available in these types of intermedial partnerships. I explain web APIs before showing how they relate to media studies through the TV show Psych’s forays into designing social media experiences. Additionally, I will explain how web API-connected digital environments are used to facilitate what Tiziana Terranova calls soft control as web APIs embody Web 2.0 ideologies that celebrate information sharing between businesses that track audience attention.
In attempting to break with a ‘fall from grace’ narrative that may structure analysis of the rapid professionalization and monetization of previously amateur online video content on the main global platform, YouTube, this article outlines histories of key institutions in the new screen ecology as outcomes of the increased interpenetration of very different, often clashing industry cultures. Google/YouTube, Apple’s iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo! and Facebook (‘NoCal’) are largely Internet ‘pure-play’ companies, whilst Hollywood’s incumbents (‘SoCal’) practice time-honoured mass media and premium content strategies. The ‘history of the present’ of the new screen ecology is the history of the clash of these cultures. The less than 10-year history of Google’s YouTube can be written as a history of Google seeking to come to terms with the conditions of possibility for entertainment, content and talent development from its base as an IT company dedicated to scale, automation, permanent beta, rapid prototyping and iteration. These efforts reflect both continuities and contestations with traditional media models, particularly business models. As emerging intermediaries in the middle of the convergent space between NoCal and SoCal, multichannel networks’ (MCNs’) placement sees them needing to innovate on both the NoCal and SoCal side. On the former side, MCNs are attempting to provide value-added services superior to basic YouTube analytics, with programmatics and pioneering attempts at management of scale and volume. On the latter side, they are managing a quite different class of entry- to mid-level talent, who bring successful audience development and clear ideas about the roots of their success with them. The new screen ecology is a space of unimagined scale and scope of flourishing online creativity and culture, which is at the same time turbulent and precarious for creators and MCNs alike.
Television (TV) has always been the focus of continuous debate around its shifting social practices, involving and challenging all established main agents, from content producers to brands, corporations, regulators and audiences (
This article examines the views expressed by Australians relating to unauthorized digital access to the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. A detailed analysis is undertaken of the online responses to a 2013 Facebook post by the United States Ambassador to Australia, chastizing Australians for their ‘illegal’ behaviour. This analysis is used to critique the dominant framing of the activities of file-sharing, torrenting and unauthorized downloading as criminal and those involved in the activity as being influenced by sociological factors. In contrast, the research found that many of the justifications for these behaviours contained in the Facebook comments demonstrated an informed critique of the market mechanisms at work in the distribution networks.
Hacking is now a widely discussed and known phenomenon, but remains difficult to define and empirically identify because it has come to refer to many different, sometimes incompatible, material practices. This article proposes genealogy as a framework for understanding hacking by briefly revisiting Foucault’s concept of genealogy and interpreting its perspectival stance through the feminist materialist concept of the situated observer. Using genealogy as a theoretical frame, a history of hacking will be proposed in four phases. The first phase is the ‘prehistory’ of hacking in which four core practices were developed. The second phase is the ‘golden age of cracking’ in which hacking becomes a self-conscious identity and community and is for many identified with breaking into computers, even while non-cracking practices such as free software mature. The third phase sees hacking divide into a number of new practices even while old practices continue, including the rise of serious cybercrime, hacktivism, the division of Open Source and Free Software and hacking as an ethic of business and work. The final phase sees broad consciousness of state-sponsored hacking, the re-rise of hardware hacking in maker labs and hack spaces and the diffusion of hacking into a broad ‘clever’ practice. In conclusion, it will be argued that hacking consists across all the practices surveyed of an interrogation of the rationality of information technocultures enacted by each hacker practice situating itself within a particular technoculture and then using that technoculture to change itself, both in changing potential actions that can be taken and changing the nature of the technoculture itself.
In 2004, a new movement began. It was one that promised democratization of media production tools and the means to freely distribute work. Using domestic tools and open source software, the pioneers threatened to disrupt the top-down media ecosystem that we were used to. That movement was podcasting. In the 10 years that have passed since we first heard the word ‘podcast’ thousands of podcasts have started, audiences have grown steadily, technologies have evolved and the medium has become increasingly professionalized. By 2015, the medium had become a significant talking point through the success of podcasts such as Serial, Start-up and WTF, suggesting that podcasting may have reached maturity.
The era of multiplatform media and big data provide new opportunities to reconsider data access by media companies. Outlined here is the discussion surrounding data access from media institutional logic and user-centric perspectives in the contexts of digitalization and big data. The discussion includes technological affordances that can be geared toward users or that merely reinforce media companies’ prominence. However, limitations of information architecture lie in its structure and the inability to facilitate navigation by users across multiple content streams. Media companies concentrate access around their own cross-platform content. Despite technological feasibility, media companies continue to choose cross-platform architecture that is structurally limiting to users. Cross-platform conceptual limits are discussed within the context of the broader socioeconomic landscape of mass media digitalization and big data.
Amid growing calls for greater collaboration between journalism and computer programming, this article examines a salient case study that reveals processes of communication, exchange, and work production at the intersection of these social and occupational worlds. We focus on a key stage of the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership – namely, an online ‘Learning Lab’ through which 60 individuals sought to coordinate around a shared interest in the innovation of journalism through open-source software. Drawing on the science and technology studies concepts of trading zones and boundary objects, we explore how distinct understandings about news and technology converged, diverged, and ultimately blended around three thematic ambitions: making news more process-oriented, participatory, and socially curated. This window onto boundary negotiations in journalism provides a glimpse into the future development of news and its norms and values, as programmers and their ethics assume a greater role in the journalistic field – in the very heart of some of its leading institutions.
This study aimed to determine the characteristics of ‘newspaper-led convergence’ with broadcast stations by examining how convergence affects the production and distribution of news content. Newspaper-led convergence with broadcast stations occurs in converged newsrooms, where newspapers have superior overall abilities to broadcast stations; thus, one-sided help from newspaper to broadcast stations is more typical than vice versa. This study incorporated both surveys and in-depth interviews with journalists from three South Korean multimedia groups that have maintained newspaper-led convergence since late 2011. It has been approximately 3 years since these convergences; thus, this study outlined characteristics of the initial stage of convergence. The results indicated several asymmetries in terms of workload perceptions, multiple skills, cultural clash, and content quality among different media reporters. Unlike previous studies, psychological and cultural issues were not found to be obstacles to newspaper-led convergence. Based on these findings, this study concluded with suggestions for media firms that aim to converge newsrooms.
In his Information Age trilogy, Manuel Castells documents the transformation of economic power by means of network affordances. In more recent work, he has built an account of the linking of economic power with cultural and political power through ‘Murdochization’ or ‘the networking of networks’. Whilst Castells’ account of power has thus developed to acknowledge the integration of economic, cultural and political interests within networks, his account of ‘counterpower’ remains largely focused on cultural and political resistance in the form of protest. Here we explore a case of economic counterpower, the unauthorized livestreaming of digital sports broadcasts. Analysis of this particular case (of counterpower) is particularly significant, given the centrality of Murdochization in Castells’ account of power in the network society. Emerging out of, alongside, and in response to the growth of, Murdochized digital media sports networks, we explore the scope and limits of livestreaming as a form of economic counterpower and counter-Murdochization. In this article, we document Castells’ theory of network power, the centrality of Murdochization to that account, and the centrality of monopoly control over digital sports broadcasting to Murdochized media empires. The scope and resilience of alternative streaming media in switching live sports programming from pay to view to free sharing is then examined. The failure to date of all attempts to prohibit free streams shows the ongoing viability of such economic counterpower. However, whilst dominant actors cannot eliminate economic counterpower, where dominant actors choose not to broadcast, no switching of content can take place.
This article sheds light on the formation of the Nordic game industry between 1990 and 2005. The first long-lasting game development companies within the region emerged in the early 1990s and one of the factors for the advent of a Nordic industry was the subculture surrounding the demoscene. By selecting three companies in Finland, Norway and Sweden, we look at the transition from subculture into formal companies. The study is informed by an oral history approach, supplemented by a variety of other sources, including industry reports, mainstream press stories and online materials. The article argues that the presence of the demoscene in the Nordic region had an influence on the game companies, but the transition from hobbyism to professional work processes was not straightforward or simple. However, without the demoscene, the game companies would have had a difficult time finding interested and qualified employees.
In this article, I compare the origins and early development of the Occupy movement with that of the Spanish 15M, the Indignados or ‘outraged’, movement. How movements are integrated into longer lived global networks has been insufficiently studied. The ‘hyperlink’ can serve as a material representation of more durable affiliations between entities with a shared collective identity, in this case, activist Web sites, reflecting underlying network structures. Combining qualitative analysis of movement identities and narratives with analysis of hyperlinking patterns provides a more holistic understanding of the interrelations between the 15M and Occupy movements. I argue that the similarities in the structural hyperlinked network properties of the 15M and Occupy movements and their transnational interlinkages can be explained in part by commonalities in the two movements’ collective identities and dominant narratives.
This article analyzes young preteens’ uses and understandings of virtual world games, with a focus on the structures that create different online experiences. The study involved working with a group of 28 children aged 8 to 10 years. Data analyzed in this article are paper-based activities, semistructured interviews, and field notes. The article investigates dominant constructions of children as ‘not yet complete’ and as ‘active, knowing beings’ (Cook, 2005). These dichotomous constructions are explored across the literature concerning children and virtual world games, particularly in relation to online risks and opportunities. The analysis focuses on ways data collected for this project challenge constructions of children as either at risk or active and empowered. The analysis reveals that many children’s online engagements in virtual world games are casual (i.e. they are not investing time or money in the games) and structured by factors such as age, socioeconomic status, and Internet access. The article suggests that studies of children online need to distinguish between different digital childhoods, particularly in relation to research and policy suggestions.
Television (TV) audiences are increasingly using portable communication technologies to multitask, look up information online, check social network sites, and comment on the programs being watched. Although multitasking can distract audiences away from the TV content, the use of a second screen in a manner that complements the mass communication content is a unique phenomenon that may lead to positive outcomes. This study, based on survey data collected from a national stratified random sample (N = 1417), supports a theoretical model linking frequency of complementary simultaneous media use to engagement, which in turn mediates incidental learning. Findings may be useful for mass communication scholars and practitioners seeking to understand the effects of dual electronic media use.
This article explores the growing importance of algorithms in digital culture and what they could mean for the visibility and interpretation of culture as a whole. Taking Google as a prime example of a company that participates in widespread information overload whilst simultaneously providing some algorithmic answers to it, we show how it exhibits four different regimes of justification: the techno-scientific, economic, political and moral–aesthetic. These efforts to gain legitimacy operate as a network that is both highly performative and adaptive. For instance, Google builds on and translates such justifications in order for its Project Glass to be widely, if not universally, accepted. But there is another influential mode of performativity at work: the mounting criticism of the device. In the 18 months following the public announcement of Glass, we have observed the media phenomenon and passionate debate it has sparked. What Glass represents is being contested on multiple grounds, and this, in turn, indicates that its meanings will likely remain profoundly ambiguous for some time to come.
This article explores processes of co-creation in the media industry, particularly in the context of magazine media brands. We discuss the content and practices of creative collaboration between editorial teams and online audience communities. Based on two empirical case studies using analytical interviews and focus group discussions, we introduce a new model and framework for analysing co-creative processes. The model of co-creative collaboration is focused on three areas of media work: production, marketing and development. We conclude that co-creative processes between editorial teams and audience communities have a definite impact on the future of media work and media management. Importantly, the work of editorial teams is transformed from content production through creating platform concepts to coordinating, managing and nurturing audience communities.
Since the mid-2000s, the ebook has stabilized into an ontologically distinct form, separate from PDFs and other representations of the book on the screen. The current article delineates the ebook from other emerging digital genres with recourse to the methodologies of platform studies and book history. The ebook is modelled as three concentric circles representing its technological, textual and service infrastructure innovations. This analysis reveals two distinct properties of the ebook: a simulation of the services of the book trade and an emphasis on user textual manipulation. The proposed model is tested with reference to comparative studies of several ebooks published since 2007 and defended against common claims of ebookness about other digital textual genres.
This article examines the methods through which the formal and emotional components, embedded in the photo sharing and social networking application Instagram, are utilized as a propaganda tool to cultivate solidarity with promoted agendas. The test case is Instagram photos posted on the official Web site of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The article juxtaposes two conceptual systems, the one shared by the members of Instagram and a system based on presuppositions regarding the ideologies, values, and emotional attitudes shared by Israeli Instagram users toward the IDF. This juxtaposition is made possible, thanks to the resemblance found between the aesthetic and emotional aspects of Instagram and the ideological and emotional aspects emphasized by IDF. Three main interrelated motifs demonstrate the article’s argument: soldiers as civilians/photographers in momentary disguise, army and nature, and admiration for appearances of weapons.
Apart from the exchanging of information, an important role of conversation and communication is to promote social harmony through the maintenance of relationships. This is referred to as the ‘phatic’ function of communication. Indeed, digital communications technologies, and social media in particular, have been lauded for their potential to promote activism and social change through ‘raising awareness’ of injustices, their ability to motivate people into political action and the facility to organize and coordinate that action for maximum effect. In this article, I build upon previous arguments, which suggested that the rise of social networking demonstrated that online culture and communication had become increasingly phatic and less dialogic. Here I use previous empirical work to challenge the above claims of digital politics enthusiasts. I then suggest an alternative theoretical account of the function of digital media activism which better suits these empirical findings. I suggest that digital politics demonstrates a rise of ‘phatic communion’ in social media. Incorporating Heidegger’s notion of ‘idle talk’, I further suggest that the rise of a phatic online culture in social media activism has atrophied the potential for digital communications technologies to help foster social change by creating a conversational environment based on limited forms of expressive solidarity as opposed to an engaged, content-driven, dialogic public sphere.
What do social media users think about social media data mining? To date, this question has been researched through quantitative studies that produce diverse findings and qualitative studies adopting either a privacy or a surveillance perspective. In this article, we argue that qualitative research which moves beyond these dominant paradigms can contribute to answering this question, and we demonstrate this by reporting on focus group research in three European countries (the United Kingdom, Norway and Spain). Our method created a space in which to make sense of the diverse findings of quantitative studies, which relate to individual differences (such as extent of social media use or awareness of social media data mining) and differences in social media data mining practices themselves (such as the type of data gathered, the purpose for which data are mined and whether transparent information about data mining is available). Moving beyond privacy and surveillance made it possible to identify a concern for fairness as a common trope among users, which informed their varying viewpoints on distinct data mining practices. We argue that this concern for fairness can be understood as contextual integrity in practice (Nissenbaum, 2009) and as part of broader concerns about well-being and social justice.
Ever since their appearance in the early 1990s, hypertext novels were presented as the pinnacle of digital aesthetics and claimed to represent the revolutionary future of literature. However, as a literary phenomenon, hypertext novels have remained marginal. The article presents some scientifically derived explanations as to why hypertext novels do not have a mass audience and why they are likely to remain a marginal contribution in the history of literature. Three explanatory frameworks are provided: (1) how hypertext relates to our cognitive information processing in general; (2) the empirically derived psychological reasons for how we read and enjoy literature in particular; and (3) the likely evolutionary origins of such a predilection for storytelling and literature. It is shown how hypertext theory, by ignoring such knowledge, has yielded misguided statements and uncorroborated claims guided by ideology rather than by scientifically supported knowledge.
This article outlines the relationship between Big Data and sport in the network society. Critiquing the hype associated with Big Data, it is explained that modern sport informs the historical rise of this technological phenomenon, serving as a social and cultural site where the accelerating privatization and commodification of statistics and statistically generated information occurs. These developments deliver increased entertainment options for fans of many professional men’s sports and an unprecedented number of performance indicators for selected coaches, athletes and pundits. However, the information technology infrastructure and resources required to generate real-time data are adding to widening inequalities between elite ‘data-rich’ sports and comparatively impoverished ‘data-poor’ sports, including many women’s competitions. It is argued that a collective fascination with the digital sublime obscures the complex interaction between corporate power, digital data markets, history and culture, and contributes to inequalities that demand ongoing attention and critique.
In the last decade, large public screens and globally organized public viewing areas (PVAs) have become increasingly significant elements of media events, expanding the possibilities for mass audiences to collectively watch events together in real time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in connection with the British Royal wedding (2011) and the London Olympics (2012), this article explores the ‘sociality’ of public space broadcasting, focusing on interactions and performances of identity by people gathered for collective viewing in the city centres of London, Birmingham and Manchester. The analysis shows that public space broadcasting mobilizes a variety of social identities and performances, spanning from ‘relaxed’ forms of engagement to more fannish articulations of nationality, cosmopolitan hybridity and spectacle participation. Geographical location and structural embedding strategies clearly impinge on public performances within PVAs. The article concludes that the degree of commercialization and presence of journalists and other media professionals are particularly central external drivers of performativity in connection with public consumption of media events.
The 3D high frame rate version of Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit film was touted as offering one of the most realistic and engaging movie-going experiences to date, its innovative projection technologies promising to greatly enhance viewers’ sense of immersion in the fantastical world of Middle-earth. However, our empirical research suggests the specific combination of technologies in The Hobbit had paradoxical perceptual and experiential effects. Whereas the groundbreaking hyperrealistic aesthetic enhanced both spectacular and narrative immersion for many viewers, a significant number experienced this same visual aesthetic as unconvincing and distracting and as undermining suspension of disbelief. In this article, we identify key factors contributing to polarization among Hobbit viewers on aesthetic grounds and offer empirical insights into how emerging cinematic technologies may be reshaping film spectatorship.
Crisis mapping has emerged as a method of connecting and empowering citizens during emergencies. This article explores the hyperbole behind crisis mapping as it extends into more long-term or ‘chronic’ community development practices. We critically examined developer issues and participant (i.e. community organization) usage within the context of local communities. We repurposed the predominant crisis mapping platform Crowdmap for three cases of community development in Canadian anglophone and francophone. Our case studies show mixed results about the actual cost of deployment, the results of disintermediation, and local context with the mapping application. Lastly, we discuss the relationship of hype, temporality, and community development as expressed in our cases.
While plenty of research have provided useful insights into political parties’ use of Twitter, comparably few efforts have focused on the arguably more popular Facebook service. This article presents a comparative approach, detailing similar functionalities on each platform and providing statistical analyses of the social media activities undertaken by Swedish political parties during the 2014 elections. Moreover, the types of attention and feedback received by these parties are analyzed, suggesting that while sizable parties are not necessarily the most ardent at using their social media presences, they receive the most attention. The study largely complements previous research, suggesting that larger actors receive the bulk of new media attention on both platforms – with some internal variation. However, the role of the right-wing populist Sweden Democrats is clearly felt throughout, suggesting the apparent prowess of controversial parties in the online context.
As televised news content is no longer being solely produced by professionals and consumed by family members staring at the box, the traditional television industry has entered a new era. This article introduces a set of theoretical propositions relating to the industry’s responses to such changes and, in particular, to the implementation of networked technologies and social media in television news organizations. The technological frames analytic lens was used to identify journalists’ assumptions and expectations about technology use and to explain the outcomes of technological and professional change in the journalistic environment. Through interviews conducted with journalists working for television news desks in Israel, we show that the interviewees’ perceptions of the technologies, the role of their organization, and the essence of their profession provide a meaningful explanation of the actual implementation of networked technologies. The findings resolve the contradiction between potential contribution of the emerging technologies and their limited use in journalistic organizations.
This exploratory study examined a news episode in a single market as a case study aimed at teasing out elements associated with journalism and audience convergence. This study found four conditions present when the audience converged. The conditions were a spark, or ignition event, that has the potential to arouse dialogue, journalism that makes the broader public aware of such an event, a sufficient mass of audience commentary to create debate, and a channel through which the debate can occur. This process represents a convergence of different public spheres, where audiences overlap and interact across platforms, taking with them bits and pieces from other public spheres to create a new one, a converged conversation. Further, this study found that audience convergence stayed within the confines of the journalism channels that offered initial coverage of the event, suggesting journalism as a key element in the creation of such a space, but, once created, journalism is no longer the curator.
New communication technologies bring about new ways for political groups and movements to mobilize and organize. A consequence of this might be that established interpretations of and attitudes towards social movements may have to be revisited, for example, when it comes to their internal constitution and their modes of working. This interview case study looks at the digital activist cluster Telecomix and its interventions during the Arab Spring. The study addresses how the network used technological and communicational infrastructures and platforms and how it was organizationally affected by these. By using concepts such as ‘one media bias’, ‘media ecology’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘cognitive praxis’, the article aims to conceptualize how the identity of a movement and its technological infrastructure mutually constitute each other.
The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of gameplay. Free to download, but structured around micropayments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetize player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetize player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience.
This article investigates the relationship between the television industry and participatory audiences through a rhetoric of empowerment that frames audience engagement in particular ways. I focus on how contests based on the creation of user-generated content are utilized in the industry–audience relationship; here my primary case studies are the use of user-generated video contests for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and The Office. I explore how these shows try to produce and harness the activity of participatory audiences. Further, I argue that an emphasis on understanding the regimes of value for participants is key to understanding these experiments in digital audience retention.
Interactive media board games reflect a changing media culture. Converging media text and technology with game play mechanics and rules, these board games exist as a hybrid form of game and media. In this article, I examine interactive paratextual board games – games based on media products that utilize other forms of media to produce random or immersive experiences. While previous discussions of media franchising investigates game paratexts through industrial and economic shifts, I explicate aesthetic, ludic, and textual concerns of cult franchises through an analysis of three interactive board games, namely, Isaac Asimov’s Robot VCR Mystery Game, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive VCR Board Game, and the Indiana Jones DVD Adventure Game. Ultimately, I argue that these interactive paratextual board games manifest, reflect, and augment early convergence culture characteristics, revealing that interactive board games exemplify contemporary new media characteristics.
Drawing upon in-depth interviews with young smartphone users, as well as socioeconomic analyses, this study examines a localized media landscape emerging with the smartphone and its applications (apps). With particular reference to young Koreans’ engagement with the popular local app platform, KakaoTalk, the study explores how smartphone technology is reimagined in a local context. The KakaoTalk-scape shows that smartphones and their apps are articulated with community-based local modes of communication and the rhythm of urban space. It also demonstrates that media convergence occurs not only between different media platforms but also between global and local media practices.
The possibility of relatively anonymous communication involving no physical proximity means that Internet discussion forums offer opportunities for cross-gender communication that do not necessarily violate Saudi Arabian rules for behavior. This article studies participation in a public discussion forum for expatriate Saudi students. Building on a previous article that established the extent to which participants disclose their gender in the forum, it investigates the extent to which participants take advantage of the opportunity for mixed communication online, their attitudes towards it, and their reactions when it occurs. It analyzes in detail the cross-gender exchanges that occur in the corpus, together with remarks made by participants about this issue, in order to determine the circumstances under which mixed communication is seen as appropriate in this forum.
Critical accounts of Facebook as a channel for marketing communication have predominantly focused on the social network’s ability to provide marketers with free user-generated content and with detailed consumer data that allow them to target advertising to specific audiences. Although this article includes such activities, it extends the discussion to concentrate on the under-researched topic of how Facebook creates value for marketers by exploiting sociality in general. Taking the practices of Australian alcohol brands as an instructive case, this article critically examines how these brands strategically employ Facebook to manage their connections with consumers’ identity making practices and engage with the mediation of everyday life. We argue that Facebook works not just as a platform to harvest data but also as a platform to manage the circulation of affect and creation of social connections around brands. This is particularly important in the case of alcohol brands since some social media engagement practices allow for circumventing regulatory regimes by prompting connections between mediations of drinking culture and the brand that would not be possible in other media channels.
Can a robot waste a day away watching clouds? Aesthetics as a means to approach the world is a form of control until recently limited to humans. This essay uses two works by New Zealand artist Douglas Bagnall to examine the relationship between machines, information and aesthetics. I discuss how Bagnall’s Film-making Robot (
This article examines the rhetoric of Twitter.com in order to gain insight into the company’s normative self-understanding, or ethos. From a business ethics perspective, we analyze Twitter’s ethos in relation to debates around democratic communication and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Partly thanks to its CSR strategy, Twitter has acquired the critical mass of users necessary to successfully establish a robust and financially viable social network. Despite its success, however, we argue that Twitter does not sufficiently address three ethical implications of its strategy: (1) from an ethical perspective, Twitter mainly seems to employ an ‘instrumental CSR’ ethos that fails to properly recognize the moral rights, responsibilities, and strategic challenges of corporate actors with regard to their stakeholders; (2) this issue becomes all the more pressing because online social networks to a certain extent have taken on the role of quasi-governmental bodies today, regulating what their users can and cannot do, thus raising questions of accountability and legitimacy; and (3) in Twitter’s case, this leads to normative tension between the site’s rhetoric, which is centered around civic motives, and the way its Terms of Service and licensing policies seem to favor its commercial stakeholders over its noncommercial ones.
The current article explores patterns of identity development in virtual worlds, with the aim of introducing a conceptual model of virtual identity. Despite the rapid spread of virtual environments, no model has been developed to date that fully captures this complex entity. Rather than taking a purely social approach, as has been the dominant trend in most prior work, the structural elements used in this current framework incorporate several dimensions and approaches identity as a conglomerate of personal, social, relational and material aspects. Building on an extensive body of the available literature, with the current conceptual model, we intend to provide a comprehensive base on which to further expand theoretically as well as empirically in future work-related concerning identity in virtual worlds.
Although now used for a wide range of functions such as education, marketing and political commentary, blogs were originally a space for narrating personal life stories and have much in common with autobiography and diary genres. This article examines (in)fertility blogs written by women trying to conceive, arguing that blogging helps women to renegotiate their experiences of femininity when motherhood is denied or difficult. To do this, I focus on blogs as a space for knowledge production, creating a new paradigm for fertility information which challenges both the doctor/patient power dynamic and traditional discourses concerning fertility. I show how bloggers use their blogs to ‘make sense’ of their (in)fertility experiences by looking at the distinctive content, style and format of their blogs. Finally, the knowledge produced in the blogs is problematized by ‘situating’ them within a broader sociohistorical framework.
This article explores the views of Indian journalists on media convergence in a context where the print media is thriving and Internet penetration is relatively low. Findings show that many journalists do not view convergence as a matter of survival as the print media remains robust. The lack of a strong revenue model for multimedia journalism also contributes to dampening enthusiasm about convergence among many journalists. However, forms of tactical convergence such as cross promotion of content among outlets owned by the same media conglomerate are becoming common. Coordination among journalists working on multiple platforms is more visible in the case of breaking news events than other areas. The desirability of multi-platform delivery by the same reporter is strongly contested among Indian journalists. Overall, journalists working at smaller organizations are more supportive of convergence than those working for large ones with an established reputation in a particular medium. Finally, the study indicates that any effort at introducing convergence in Indian newsrooms must take into account the strength and reach of the print media in the country.
This article examines media freedom in Indonesia, an age where the media landscape is being remade by convergence. Media scholars are debating the implications of this trend for media freedom, with some believing it is opening new possibilities for a greater range of voices to be heard and others identifying new threats it poses. The Indonesian case, where media freedom is viewed as threatened, shows how technological convergence has led to commercial convergence. This article explores how convergence is both contributing to and undermining media freedom in Indonesia. It will do so through an in-depth analysis of the current trends in the Indonesian media industry.
This study explores the rationales by which citizens both embrace and resist the notion of using peer-to-peer digital platforms to circulate persuasive political messages. Drawing upon 25 in-depth interviews with US adults who used Twitter to link to the popular YouTube video Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? I discuss the extent to which they imagine their online activities to be potentially influencing others in certain desired ways and thus constituting an instrumental form of political participation. The resulting analysis focuses on the complex and uneasy relationship between this media-spreading activity and a marketing-like model that positions social media users as microlevel participants in aggregate campaigns to shape public opinion. While some who engage in this activity enthusiastically embrace goals of persuasion, others opt for alternative conceptual frameworks, such as fostering citizenship by informing others and sparking deliberative dialogue, that seemingly avoid the manipulative connotations of political marketing.
Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture that highlights its potential for more democratic, more inclusive mediascapes, asserting that corporate media producers have an economic incentive to listen to the suggestions and demands made by its fans. This article questions who is able to lay claim to titles like ‘fan’ or ‘gamer’, how those titles are being contested along gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed lines, what happens when new groups lay claim to those titles, and how some fans are reacting to the loss of their privileged relationships with content producers. I look at fan responses to North American game developer BioWare’s decision to diversify games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age II by adding the option to play as a gay male character. I discovered that what was often framed by fans as a desire to prevent politics from leaking into gaming and ruining its unique attractions manifested as the maintenance of a heterocentric construction of the gamer identity.
The Walkman and iPod have often been viewed as individualizing technologies. People use these forms of mobile media to impart a sound track of their own choosing over their experience of physical space. However, newer mobile projects have examined the links that tie mobile media and sound to experiences of movement. These projects focus on the collaborative construction of shared soundscapes through mobile media, in a sense responding to the individualizing tendencies of dominant auditory mobile media. This article draws from literature in sound studies, media studies, and locative media art to examine these relatively new forms of what we call social soundscaping. Through our analysis, we show the potential for new mobile sound practices that allow for the more participatory production of public soundscapes.
This study examines how a file sharing system affects its users’ sense of community (SOC). It was expected that the file sharing system would increase members’ knowledge about and participation in the file sharing network which, in turn, would increase their SOC. The aim of this study was to identify the barriers that hinder community building in file sharing networks, by examining how use of a specific network – Direct Connect++ (DC++) – affects its users’ SOC. It was our hypothesis and expectation that extended use of file sharing system would increase members’ knowledge about, and participation in, the file sharing network, and this in turn would increase their SOC. However, although DC++ was found to have a number of properties that coincide with the theories of SOC, two barriers were found that hindered DC++ from working as a genuine community. These barriers were related to anonymity and elitism among community members. The findings challenge previous idealistic theories about the development of an SOC but nonetheless demonstrate the positive effects of network membership.
Consumers have access to an increasingly wide variety of devices and modalities to communicate with others. The concept of enriched presence information helps users to harness such complexity by showing which device and modality is currently being preferred by their contacts. Operators can offer enriched presence information by utilizing recently developed converged communication standards like Rich Communication Suite–Enhanced (RCS-E). The present article tests the usefulness of enriched presence features for two prototype applications built upon RCS standards. A quasi-experiment shows that users become more positive about the usefulness of enriched presence information after trying out the two applications. Whilst findings suggest operators should introduce services that offer enriched presence information, our troublesome and lengthy prototyping process indicates that operators will not get the services to the market in time to hold off Internet players offering similar functionality.
Internet use among young people in multicultural societies is differentiated according to socioeconomic and cultural factors, one of which is their ethnic background. This study is concerned with the unreported case of Cyprus – the last divided country in Europe, with most Greek Cypriots living in the south and most Turkish Cypriots living in the northern part of the island. The study explores two main questions: First, are online experiences of young people in Cyprus shaped by socioeconomic factors, such as gender, education, and income? Second, is ethnicity a defining factor regarding the kinds of activities young people undertake online? Analysis of data obtained by a representative sample survey of about 350 young adult Cypriots aged 18–24 in both communities suggests the existence of a ‘reverse digital divide’, as the more disadvantaged community engages more often in expression, association, and learning online. This finding provides support for the diversification hypothesis that suggests a compensatory or remedial use of the Internet by disadvantaged youths.
Intangible spaces exist as a particular gathering together of influences, including those of people, things, locations and technologies. They are fascinating for thinking about how technologies influence cinematic space. This discussion of digital three-dimensional (3D) technologies in Hugo and the image maximum (IMAX) format in The Dark Knight uses paratexts to elaborate on this idea. Paratexts released in conjunction with Hugo are used to introduce an understanding of digital 3D cinematic space as something that is built as opposed to recorded. Those of The Dark Knight show film-makers encountering unexpected spaces arising from their use of IMAX technologies. By paying attention to the parameters of intangible space in The Dark Knight, the IMAX format is configured not as seamlessly immersive but as a location that offers multiple points of engagement for an audience. Both these examples demonstrate how thinking in terms of relationality, mediation and entanglement describes a cinematic space given shape by and through technologies.
Scholars have observed the influence of online and offline media use on the promotion of political and civic engagement. Findings indicate a positive correlation between media use and participation. This study moves beyond such effect on participation. Using data from an original national US survey, this article explores the effects of News Platform Preference Scale – a construct that measures the contrast between online and traditional news use in a continuum – on participatory behaviours. Controlling for usual online and offline media use, results show that a preference for digital media has strong positive effects over political and civic participation, suggesting these media may indeed be different.
The rise in use of social media platforms as tools of communication has presented journalists with an abundance of opportunities and challenges in equal measure. These platforms have enabled journalists to engage directly with their readers and develop new forms of interactivity, both pertinent and banal in nature. By analysing the content of multiple social media profiles at two daily regional newspapers in the United Kingdom, it has been possible to determine how interactivity between journalists and readers is being shaped. This article has identified a spectrum of interactivity, which indicates that individual journalists are engaging with their readers in an informal, personal and reciprocal manner via social media platforms. This is in contrast to the formal approach being taken by their associated media companies that are transferring traditional top–down forms of communication from the offline world to the online world. Research for this article was conducted via interviews and content analysis.
This article addresses digital three dimensions (3D) by aligning it with the industrial strategy of the reboot. On the one hand, studios seek to create textual novelty by restarting blockbuster franchises through a return to the characters’ origins. On the other hand, studios, hardware manufacturers, and theater owners – often led by technological auteurs such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson – have embraced a strategy of technological novelty by seeking to upgrade the moviegoing experience. Both forms of novelty reinforce each other and, in turn, promote what is described as a new form of storytelling that should be understood as a ‘reboot cinema.’
Stereoscopic cinema and new media ask us to consider the screen; not just the screen in the movie theatre auditorium but also the hard-bodied screens of computer monitors, television sets and hand-held devices that can produce three-dimensional (3D) images. While stereoscopy’s multiple optical illusions suggest that objects are within reach of our fingertips or that we are situated in 3D landscapes that stretch back to infinity, these embodied moments are fleeting, ephemeral and transitory. In each case, there is no longer a viewing body opposite, and at a distance from, the screen but constant reconfigurations of a shared screen space. Through particular attention to moments of negative parallax (wherein the content of the moving image appears to come towards the audience), this article addresses the implications that these points have for a fundamental ontology of the 3D film.
While the commonly received wisdom in scholarship of early stereoscopy asserts that it fell victim to photography’s success and eventually ‘died’ in the late 1930s, this article calls for a less determinist reading of stereoscopy’s place in media culture. Such a change requires the recognition that stereoscopy is a technique applicable across media, not a continually dying and reborn medium. Arguing that the stereograph laid some of the groundwork for the ‘cinema of attractions’ before it suffered from cinema’s capacity to supply precisely such spectacular modes of visual engagement on a grander sale, this article suggests that there is much to be taken from understanding early stereoscopy as a prototypical attraction. In the current context, in which not just three-dimensional (3D) cinema but also 3D television and 3D gaming all offer new forms of stereoscopic attraction, the content of early spectacular stereocards offers a wealth of source material with which to understand a newly resurgent form.
Using a case study of the British pay television (TV) service Sky 3D, this article considers the current barriers to mainstream adoption of stereoscopic three-dimensional TV (3D TV). Exploring the history of 3D TV technology and the public discourse around 3D on TV, the article argues that the digital 3D TV aesthetic remains rooted in two-dimensional production models and restrictive genres/formats that stifle 3D storytelling and experimentation. Given these current limitations in broadcast content and the continuing influence of home electronics manufacturers, the article argues that 3D TV will struggle to have more than a fluctuating appeal in the consumer marketplace.
Those observing the proliferation of three-dimensional (3D) films in US theaters wonder whether 3D will become ‘the new normal’ – the way that most films are produced and watched. Although skeptics abound, no one can answer this question with certainty now. But, if we consider this phrase from a different angle, it promises a more immediately revealing analysis of contemporary 3D cinema. Despite its appearance of born-again novelty, 3D has quickly established a highly codified stylistic repertoire. This repertoire is evidenced in the relationship that 3D US feature films have to classical Hollywood and contemporary film and image-making strategies. As it achieves its spatial effects, 3D obeys, wrestles with, and amplifies certain standard aspects of storytelling, visual style, and genre. Studying recent movies, including blockbusters, this article argues that 3D’s mixture of media heritages distills a highly conventionalized 3D aesthetic or a new stylistic normal.
Social filtering – the selective engagement with people, communication and other information as a result of the recommendations of others – has always taken place. However, the possibilities of the Internet combined with the growth of online social networking activities have enabled this process to become rapidly more extensive, easier and potentially problematic. This paper focuses on the analysis of the politics of social filtering through social network sites. It argues that what is needed is both a closer examination and evaluation of these processes and also the development of a framework through which to begin such an evaluation. There is also a second intent: to (re)assert the argument that any analysis necessarily needs to take into account and critique the development, implementation and use of technologies (this includes the software, algorithms and code) themselves as well as the people that build and use them.
A 5-year case study of an established regional newspaper in Britain investigates journalists about their perceptions of convergence in digital technologies. This research is the first ethnographic longitudinal case study of a UK regional newspaper. Although conforming to some trends observed in the wider field of scholarship, the analysis adds to skepticism about any linear or directional views of innovation and adoption: the Northern Echo newspaper journalists were observed to have revised their opinions of optimum Web practices, and sometimes radically reversed policies. Technology is seen in the period as a fluid, amorphous entity. Central corporate authority appeared to diminish in the period as part of a wider reduction in formalism. Questioning functionalist notions of the market, the study suggests cause and effect models of change are often subverted by contradictory perceptions of particular actions. Meanwhile, during technological evolution, the ‘professional imagination’ can be understood as strongly reflecting the parent print culture and its routines, despite pioneering a new convergence partnership with an independent television company.
The authors systematically investigate the evolution of the modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the associated changes in protest – related tactics employed by two main stakeholders in the contemporary contentious political processes – dissenters and incumbent political authorities. Through in-depth investigation of the cyberprotest cases in the former Soviet states of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, which occurred during the last decade, a coherent outline is developed of the co-evolution of the ICT-enabled protest tactics of the main counterparts in the contemporary political struggle in these countries. Particularly, it was found that there were at least three highly distinguishable levels of development of modern ICTs and the associated types of protest-related tactics employed by the main stakeholders in these events. It was established that as soon as the authorities were able to effectively counteract the previous ICT-enabled tactics by the dissenters, new developments in modern ICTs always empowered the latter to devise new effective strategies to overcome previously successful counterrevolutionary measures of the political authorities.
This one-year cyber-ethnography examines identity presentations and interpretations of 346 Facebook users. The social–psychological theoretical framework used drew specifically from symbolic interaction, Goffman’s performance of self, and schema theory. Generally, Facebookers sought social acceptance with their presentations. Primary findings indicate that the Facebookers present over-simplified imagery to reduce ambiguity and align with specific social groups. This study asked Facebookers to respond to strangers’ Facebook profiles, and the responses showed that due to the glut of identity-related information on the site, interpretations are heavily reliant on schemas. Online interview participants indicated several basic categories of identity performance that were used to assess others. Furthermore, online interview participants felt confident giving detailed descriptions of strangers’ personalities based on only a few minutes of viewing their profiles.