Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Germaine R. Halegoua
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Digital City ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Cautionary Tales

This chapter provides an overview of the territory and arguments that The Digital City explores. In recent work on digital and mobile media technologies, scholarly perspectives have broadened to recognize positive associations between digital media and experiences of place. Humans and machines are no longer readily perceived as mutually exclusive categories, nor are they treated as separate considerations for designers of everyday experience. People work with technologies to move through and experience places. This book aims to illustrate and analyze the ways actors are actually using digital technologies and practices to re-embed themselves within urban space and to create a sense of place for themselves and others. Although there are copious cautionary tales around the potential for digital media to dissociate or liberate us from the confines of physical locations, we’ve lacked careful attention to the ways people actually use digital media to become placemakers. Creating and controlling a sense of place is still the primary way that we connect with our environments, interact with others, and express our identities. The Digital City offers a new theoretical framework for thinking about our relationship to digital media by reconceptualizing common, everyday interactions with digital media as placemaking activities.

scholarly journals Mobile bystanders and rubbernecks, disaster tourists, and helpers. Towards a theoretical framework for critically studying action possibilities at accident sites

2021 ◽  
pp. 205015792098482
Author(s):  
Linus Andersson ◽  
Ebba Sundin
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
News Media ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
Media Practices

This article addresses the phenomenon of mobile bystanders who use their smartphones to film or take photographs at accident scenes, instead of offering their help to people in need or to assist medical units. This phenomenon has been extensively discussed in Swedish news media in recent years since it has been described as a growing problem for first responders, such as paramedics, police, and firefighters. This article aims to identify theoretical perspectives that are relevant for analyzing mobile media practices and discuss the ethical implications of these perspectives. Our purpose is twofold: we want to develop a theoretical framework for critically approaching mobile media practices, and we want to contribute to discussions concerning well-being in a time marked by mediatization and digitalization. In this pursuit, we combine theory from social psychology about how people behave at traumatic scenes with discussions about witnessing in and through media, as developed in media and communication studies. Both perspectives offer various implications for normative inquiry, and in our discussion, we argue that mobile bystanders must be considered simultaneously as transgressors of social norms and as emphatic witnesses behaving in accordance with the digital media age. The article ends with a discussion regarding the implications for further research.

Mad Practices and Mobilities Bringing Voices to Digital Ethnography

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-236
Author(s):  
Cherry Baylosis
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Practices

Abstract There is a claim that digital media technologies can give voice to the voiceless (Alper 2017). As Couldry (2008) points out it is now commonplace for people - who have never done so before - to tell, share and exchange stories within, and through digital media. Additionally, the affordances of mobile media technologies allow people to speak, virtually anytime and anywhere, while the new internet based media sees that these processes converge to allow stories, information, ideas and discourses to circulate through communicative spaces, and into the daily lives of people (Sheller/Urry 2006). The purpose of this paper is to discuss a methodological framework that can be used to examine the extent that digital media practices can enable voice. My focus is on people ascribed the status of mental illness - people who have had an enduring history of silencing and oppression (Parr 2008). I propose theories of mobilities, and practice, to critically examine voice in practices related to digital media. In doing this, I advocate for digital ethnographic methods to engage these concepts, and to examine the potential of voice in digital mobile media. Specifically, I outline ethnographic methods involving the use of video (re)enactments of digital practices, and the use of reflective interviews to examine every day routines and movements in and around digital media (Pink 2012). I propose that observing and reflecting on such activities can generate insights into the significance these activities have in giving voice to those who are normally unheard.

Notes on Technology Devices in Research: Negotiating Field Boundaries and Relationships

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Mainsah ◽  
Lin Prøitz
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
Field Boundaries

This article explores the consequences of ethnographic practice when social and mobile media are used both as tools for research and sites of study. We draw on incidents from our fieldwork practice to reflect on the research intimacies that are produced when digital media technologies bring different spheres of researchers’ worlds in close proximity. We show how managing the unstable rhythms and temporal structures of ethnographic fieldwork practice might involve dispensing a considerable amount of affective energy.

A Naturalistic Investigation of Media Multitasking While Studying and the Effects on Exam Performance

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Exam Performance ◽  
Media Multitasking ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
High Level ◽  
Naturalistic Investigation

The present study investigated the use of multiple digital media technologies, including social networking platforms, by students while preparing for an examination (media multitasking) and the subsequent effects on exam performance. The level of media multitasking (number of simultaneous media technologies) and duration of study were used as predictors of exam performance in a sample of 441 college students. Analysis of the data indicated that students with low level of media multitasking (0–2 digital technologies) scored significantly better on the exam than students with a high level of media multitasking (7 or more digital technologies). There were no significant difference in the duration of study time between low-level media multitaskers and high-level media multitaskers.

Considering Chronos and Kairos in Digital Media Rhetorics

2014 ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Rose Kelly ◽  
Meagan Kittle Autry ◽  
Brad Mehlenbacher
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Digital Spaces ◽  
New Media Technologies

Any account of the rhetoric of digital spaces should begin not with the provocation that rhetoric is impoverished and requires fresh import to account for new media technologies, but instead with a careful analysis of what is different about how digital technologies afford or constrain certain utterances, interactions, and actions. Only then might one begin to articulate prospects of a digital rhetoric. This chapter examines the importance of time to an understanding the rhetoric of digital spaces. It suggests that rhetorical notions of kairos and chronos provide an important reminder that it is the rhetorical situation, along with rhetorical actors at individual to institutional levels, that construct the discursive spaces within which people participate, even in digitally-mediated environments.

Internet Intimacy: Authenticity and Longing in the Relationships of Millennial Young Adults

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 626-641 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristen Dalessandro
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Media Technologies

In this paper, I use interviews with forty-two millennial young adults in the United States to explore their understandings of the role of digital media technologies in their relationship lives. Despite coming of age in an increasingly digitized society, these young adults have a complicated view of using digital technologies to forge and sustain their relationships. They contrast the pitfalls of their own digitally mediated relationships with those relationships that are created and sustained without the influence of digital technologies. They assume the latter to be more organic, natural, less prone to trouble, and authentic, and often characterize the influence of digital technologies as impeding their ability to find good relationships. However, while projecting their relationship worries onto digital technologies helps young adults resolve their larger anxieties about intimate relationships, it may also have unintended consequences for how young adults think about social relationships and technological progress more broadly.

The Digital City

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Germaine Halegoua
Keyword(s):  
Urban Communities ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Digital City ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Locative Media ◽  
Creative Placemaking ◽  
The City

The Digital City focuses on the interface of people, urban place, and the role that digital media play in placemaking endeavors. Critics have understood digital media as forces that alienate and disembed users from space and place. This book argues that the exact opposite processes are observable: many different actors are consciously and habitually using digital technologies to re-embed themselves within urban space. Five case studies from cities around the world illustrate the concept of “re-placeing” by showing how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation technologies, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to reproduce abstract urban spaces as inhabited places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through clear and accessible language and timely narratives of everyday urban life, the author argues that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media while highlighting our own awareness of the places where we find ourselves and where our technologies find and place us. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis of everyday digital media practices and technologies, this book expands practical and theoretical understandings of the ways urban planners envision and plan connected cities, the role of urban communities in shaping and interpreting digital architectures, and the tales of the city produced through mobile and web-based platforms. Digital connectivity is reshaping the city and the ways we navigate through it and belong within it. How this happens and the types of places we produce within these networked environments are what this book addresses.

scholarly journals THE VISCERAL EMBODIMENT OF DIGITAL PLEASURES

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Smith ◽  
Jenny Davis ◽  
Alexia Maddox ◽  
PJ Patella-Rey
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
A Site ◽  
Affective Intensity

This panel explores digital pleasures that arise through the entanglement of bodies and digital technologies. Focusing on the digital structures and affordances that facilitate seeking, receiving and giving pleasure we analyse the ways in which intimacy is not only interactive, but also profoundly embodied. Haraway’s work in particular highlights the importance of taking seriously the nexus of human bodies and technologies and attending to the ways in which technologies not only deliver and mediate pleasure, but potentially expand upon our capacity to experience it. This panel explores how mediated practices engage the body as a site of pleasure and embodied affective intensity. Within this frame, we suggest that digitally mediated pleasures, while widely consumed, still have a hint of the ‘fringe’ or ‘subversive’. As well as proposing a theoretical framework for understanding embodied digital pleasures, this panel also examines specific examples of digital pleasure from sex to drugs and sound. To date the research corpus has largely focused upon the micro-social interactions of digital intimacies. This emphasis on relational intimacy puts the body into the background of the digitally mediated encounter and limits the ways in which we can talk about embodiment, sex and pleasure online. Embodied pleasure is intrinsic to the human condition, and digital media is deeply embedded in contemporary life. How these intersect is a key piece of the puzzle of what it means to be human in contemporary society.

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

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