Placeless and barrier-free? Connecting place memories online within an unequal society

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 650-662
Author(s):  
Leonie Wieser
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Location ◽  
Memory Mapping ◽  
Digital Skills ◽  
Local Areas ◽  
Online Mapping ◽  
Migration Experiences

Digital media have a significant impact on how individuals and groups relate to their own as well as shared memories. Digital and online memorialisation has the potential to connect a greater number of disparate agents across physical place boundaries. Using the case study of an online mapping project recording women’s migration experiences, this article finds that digital media are indeed used to challenge established place narratives and contest an exclusionary sense of place. This online memory mapping is intended to connect personal memories of local areas across group and place boundaries. Thematic tagging serves as a tool to connect local memories globally. However, these attempts are situated within an unequal society, where resources, time and digital skills are not equally available to all. Offline power relations and social location are thus found to be constitutive of the making of online memory maps and to hinder democratised memory-making of place.

Pedagogical Storytelling Material for Children Regarding Online Safety

2021 ◽  
pp. 216-233
Author(s):  
Rita Brito ◽  
Patricia Dias
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Kindergarten Teachers ◽  
Ministry Of Education ◽  
National Scale ◽  
Digital Animation ◽  
Online Safety ◽  
Digital Skills ◽  
Scaffolding Learning

The Portuguese Ministry of Education developed a collection of three stories for supporting kindergarten teachers in exploring the theme of online safety with preschoolers. These stories were created in book and digital animation formats. The authors took these three stories to three kindergartens to test their efficacy in scaffolding learning and acquisition of digital skills. This exploratory pilot case study revealed several insights worth pursuing in further research: 1) kindergarten teachers acknowledge that children are digitally immersed at home and consider that exploring the theme of online safety with young children is imperative; 2) in spite of enjoying digital media very much, children were more attentive and retained more information when they were told the stories using the books than when they watched the digital animations, claiming that they “connected” more easily with the storyteller. In the future, the research will provide guidelines for the development of more pedagogical materials on online safety and test them in kindergartens on a national scale.

scholarly journals From roadman to royalties: Inter-representational value and the hypercapitalist impulses of grime

2021 ◽  
pp. 174165902110243
Author(s):  
Orlando Woods
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Digital Recording ◽  
Commercial Success ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Ubiquitous Access ◽  
Rap Artists

This paper explores how digital media can cause the representational value of rap artists to be transformed. Ubiquitous access to digital recording, production and distribution technologies grants rappers an unprecedented degree of representational autonomy, meaning they are able to integrate the street aesthetic into their lyrics and music videos, and thus create content that offers a more authentic representation of their (past) lives. Sidestepping the mainstream music industry, the digital enables these integrations and bolsters the hypercapitalist impulses of content creators. I illustrate these ideas through a case study of grime artist, Bugzy Malone, who uses his music to narrate his evolution from a life of criminality (selling drugs on the street; a ‘roadman’), to one in which his representational value is recognised by commercial brands who want to partner with him because of his street credibility (collecting ‘royalties’). Bugzy Malone’s commercial success is not predicated on a departure from his criminal past, but the deliberate foregrounding of it as a marker of authenticity. The representational autonomy provided by digital media can therefore enable artists to maximise the affective cachet of the once-criminal self.

Texts: A Case Study of Joint Action

SATS ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nivedita Gangopadhyay ◽  
Alois Pichler
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Joint Action ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Joint Actions ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Abstract Our linguistic communication often takes the form of creating texts. In this paper, we propose that creating texts or ‘texting’ is a form of joint action. We examine the nature and evolution of this joint action. We argue that creating texts ushers in a special type of joint action, which, while lacking some central features of normal, everyday joint actions such as spatio-temporal collocation of agency and embodiment, nonetheless results in an authentic, strong, and unique type of joint action agency. This special type of agency is already present in creating texts in general and is further augmented in creating texts through digital media. We propose that such a unique type of joint action agency has a transformative effect on the experience of our sense of agency and subjectivity. We conclude with the implications of the proposal for social cognition and social agency. The paper combines research in philosophy of mind with the emerging fields of digital humanities and text technology.

scholarly journals Gender Essentialism in Chinese Reality TV: A Case Study of You Are So Beautiful

2021 ◽  
pp. 152747642110272
Author(s):  
Altman Yuzhu Peng
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Reality Tv ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Chinese Context ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Tv Production

This article provides a feminist analysis of Chinese reality TV, using the recent makeover show— You Are So Beautiful (你怎么这么好看) as a case study. I argue that the notion of gender essentialism is highlighted in the production of You Are So Beautiful, which distances the Chinese show from its original American format— Queer Eye. This phenomenon is indicative of how existing gender power relations influence the production of popular cultural texts in post-reform China, where capitalism and authoritarianism weave a tangled web. The outcomes of the research articulate the interplay between post-socialist gender politics and reality TV production in the Chinese context.

Exploring ‘digital placemaking’

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-578
Author(s):  
Germaine Halegoua ◽  
Erika Polson
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Media Use ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Broad Framework ◽  
The Many ◽  
And Control ◽  
Connected Spaces

This brief essay introduces the special issue on the topic of ‘digital placemaking’ – a concept describing the use of digital media to create a sense of place for oneself and/or others. As a broad framework that encompasses a variety of practices used to create emotional attachments to place through digital media use, digital placemaking can be examined across a variety of domains. The concept acknowledges that, at its core, a drive to create and control a sense of place is understood as primary to how social actors identify with each other and express their identities and how communities organize to build more meaningful and connected spaces. This idea runs through the articles in the issue, exploring the many ways people use digital media, under varied conditions, to negotiate differential mobilities and become placemakers – practices that may expose or amplify preexisting inequities, exclusions, or erasures in the ways that certain populations experience digital media in place and placemaking.

scholarly journals Resituating the political in cultural intermediary work: Charity sector public relations and communication

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942199423
Author(s):  
Anne M Cronin ◽  
Lee Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Cultural Intermediary ◽  
Cultural Intermediaries ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

Drawing on a case study of public relations in the UK charity sector, this article argues that cultural intermediary research urgently requires a more sustained focus on politics and the political understood as power relations, party politics and political projects such as marketization and neoliberalism. While wide-ranging research has analysed how cultural intermediaries mediate the relationship between culture and economy, this has been at the expense of an in-depth analysis of the political. Using our case study as a prompt, we highlight the diversity of ways that the political impacts cultural intermediary work and that cultural intermediary work may impact the political. We reveal the tensions that underpin practice as a result of the interactions between culture, the economy and politics, and show that the tighter the engagement of cultural intermediation with the political sphere, the more tensions must be negotiated and the more compromised practitioners may feel.

Indigenization in a downgraded continuum: Ideologies behind phonetic variation in Namibian Afrikaans

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Stell
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
African Country ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Variation Patterns ◽  
Standard Models

AbstractThis study generally looks at indigenization in languages historically introduced and promoted by colonial regimes. The case study that it presents involves Namibia, a Subsaharan African country formerly administered by South Africa, where Afrikaans was the dominant official language before being replaced by English upon independence. Afrikaans in Namibia still functions as an informal urban lingua franca while being spoken as a native language by substantial White and Coloured minorities. To what extent does the downranking of Afrikaans in Namibia co-occur with divergence from standard models historically located in South Africa? To answer this question, the study identifies variation patterns in Namibian Afrikaans phonetic data elicited from ethnically diverse young urban informants and links these patterns with perceptions and language ideologies. The phonetic data reveal divergence between Whites and Non-Whites and some convergence among Black L2 Afrikaans-speakers with Coloured varieties, while suggesting that a distinctive Black variety is emerging. The observed trends generally reflect perceived ethnoracial distinctions and segregation. They must be read against the background of shifting inter-group power relations and sociolinguistic prestige norms in independent Namibia, as well as of emergent ethnically inclusive Black urban identities.

scholarly journals Modular Web Portal Approach for Stimulating Home Renovation: Lessons from Local Authority Developments

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 1270
Author(s):  
Minyoung Kwon ◽  
Erwin Mlecnik
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Local Authority ◽  
Case Study Research ◽  
Management Plan ◽  
Web Portals ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Web Portal ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Neutral Information

Web portals have the potential to promote sustainable environmental ideas due to the capacity of digital media, such as easy accessibility, openness, and networking. Local authorities (LAs) are responsible for activating carbon savings in homes, and they are key actors when it comes to providing neutral information to their citizens. Local authority web portals may thus create environmental awareness, particularly regarding owner-occupied single-family home renovation. Nevertheless, the experiences of LAs developing web portals have rarely been studied. Therefore, this paper analyses the development process of various LA web modules and investigates how LAs foster modular web portals to stimulate the adoption of home renovation with parameters to assess LAs’ actions in terms of the management of web-modules development. A homeowner renovation journey model is applied to map current local authority developments. Case study research and interviews were done to analyse and evaluate the adoption of modular web portals developed and tested by six local authorities in four countries in Europe. Based on the development and use of the modular web portal, lessons have been derived emphasising the importance of co-creation, integrating with offline activities, and a strategic management plan.

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