Working Together Apart through Embodiment

Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR

Serialised Novels in the Polish Emigré Press in the USA, 1881–1918

This article discusses serialised novels published before 1918 in the Polish émigré press in the United States of America. These works were a popular feature of dailies and weeklies, but the periodicals’ regular financial difficulties meant that it was books published several years or indeed several decades earlier in Europe which were most often serialised. Consequently, most of the works that appeared in the periodicals failed to reflect contemporary literary trends while also overlooking subjects relevant to the everyday lives of Poles abroad. Still, the prevailing patriotic and historical themes complemented the values that many editorial boards subscribed to.

Digital transformation of everyday lives of older Swiss adults: use of and attitudes toward current and future digital services

Digital (consumer) services, such as ticket machines, self-checkout, and online reservations, have become increasingly important in modern society. Studies on adoption of these services and openness to using future public digital services (e.g., online voting, online taxes, electronic patient records) have mostly focused on younger adults or nonrepresentative samples among older adults. Therefore, two important questions remain that can best be addressed with representative sampling: To what extent do older adults use or are willing to use current and future digital services in their everyday lives? How do older adults evaluate the ease of use of these services?. The study included data on use of current and future digital services among a large Swiss sample of 1149 people age 65 years and older (mean age: 74.1 years, SD: 6.69). Descriptive and multivariate analyses showed that (a) established services such as cash machines were used more often than new services, such as self-checkout apps or machines. (b) Perceived ease of use is related to age, socioeconomic status, health, and interest in technology. (c) Only 8.9% had an overall positive attitude toward these digital services, and this attitude was predicted by age, gender, socioeconomic status, and interest in technology. (d) Participants were more often open to filing taxes online than voting online, and openness was predicted by age, income, and interest in technology. Today, mainly older adults with a high interest in technology use digital services. Nevertheless, potential for greater use is evident.

Living While Being Watched

The process of surveillance has now become a part of our everyday lives. It is futile to expect that an entity would not be surveilled. It is also quite likely that there will be interest in greater opportunities to surveil others. In these situations, there needs to be better awareness of the ways in which surveillance occurs and to remember that the object of surveillance is the narrative, which is to some extent in the control of the surveilled entity. At the same time, the watcher needs to consider what needs to be watched and make the appropriate arrangements of watching. In the end, the key to surveilling is to do it in a stealthy way, without it being discovered that surveillance is happening.

Struggling to ‘do family’ during COVID-19: evidence from a German mixed-methods study

Applying the concept of doing family, which centres on the organisation of, and the practices in, families’ everyday lives, our research questions focus on the efforts mothers and fathers undertake to keep everyday life going during the pandemic. We analysed two-wave panel data of the project ‘Growing up in Germany’, and conducted 20 in-depth interviews with mothers and fathers in order to examine their strategies in detail. Our findings confirm gender and other important differences, and reveal three major strategies to reconcile caring obligations with demands from paid work before and during the crisis.

Making Women Pay

In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.

Household Workers Profile System

Estancia is well-known throughout the country as a commercial fishing center, so much so that it shares the name Alaska of the Philippines. It is located in the northern part of the province and is 131 kilometer’s (81 mi) from the provincial capital, Iloilo City. Estancia is politically subdivided into 25 barangays. According to the 2015 Census, it has a population of 48,546 people. This accounted for 2.51% of the total population of Iloilo province, or 0.64 percent of the Western Visayas region's total population. As technology advances, so do the hectic schedules that leave little time for household chores. Aside from tasks, there are other aspects of our everyday lives that are significant. People don't have enough time to take care of their homes, so hiring a housekeeper can assist. Many families place too much emphasis on word-of-mouth referrals and basic background employment.

Daylong Mobile Audio Recordings Reveal Multitimescale Dynamics in Infants’ Vocal Productions and Auditory Experiences

The sounds of human infancy—baby babbling, adult talking, lullaby singing, and more—fluctuate over time. Infant-friendly wearable audio recorders can now capture very large quantities of these sounds throughout infants’ everyday lives at home. Here, we review recent discoveries about how infants’ soundscapes are organized over the course of a day. Analyses designed to detect patterns in infants’ daylong audio at multiple timescales have revealed that everyday vocalizations are clustered hierarchically in time, that vocal explorations are consistent with foraging dynamics, and that some musical tunes occur for much longer cumulative durations than others. This approach focusing on the multiscale distributions of sounds heard and produced by infants is providing new, fundamental insights on human communication development from a complex-systems perspective.