From the families we choose to the families we find online: media technology and queer family making

Since the mid-2000s, a number of Western countries have witnessed an increase in the number of children born into ‘alternative’ or ‘queer’ families. Parallel with this queer baby boom, online media technologies have become intertwined with most people’s intimate lives. While these two phenomena have appeared simultaneously, their integration has seldom been explored. In an attempt to fill this gap, the present article explores the ways in which contemporary queer reproduction is interwoven with online media practices. Importantly, the article does not understand online media as a technology that simply facilitates queer kinship; rather, it argues that online media technology is a reproductive technology in its own right. Drawing on empirical examples of media practices of kinning, such as online shopping for donor sperm and locating ‘donor siblings’ via online fora such as Facebook, the article analyses the merging and intersection of online media and queer kinship. These analyses serve as a foundation for an exploration of contemporary kinship and the development of a new theoretical framework for contemporary queer reproduction. Empirically, the examples are from single women’s (i.e. solo mothers) and lesbian couples’ family making. Using Weston's work on ‘chosen families’ as a backdrop for discussion, the article describes families of choice in light of new online kinship connections. In particular, the article focuses on online-initiated connections between donor siblings and how such connections can re-inscribe biology as important to queer kinship. Furthermore, it closely examines how media technology guides queer reproduction in particular directions and how technology causes becoming as a family.

Regarding the Mains of Others.

The platformed logics of social media favor unique and spectacular content and thus encourage the production and display of unique and spectacular bodies. In the realm of social media, attractive and unattainable bodies have emerged as the norm rather than the exception. This article, however, sets out to investigate how a specific type of spectacular body comes into being by turning to the phenomenon of mukbangs. We explore how excessive food consumption, audiovisual aesthetics, media technologies, and platform logics all become constituents of the spectacular body’s performance. Our analysis will focus on two tendencies: First, the platformed body is distributed and comes into being through its entanglement with nonhuman agents, such as the microphone enhancing eating sounds, the camera and image composition displaying the food’s excessive quantity, and the food’s entanglement with the body through a spectacle of excess. Second, mukbang videos cater to a spectating body ready to be affected by the exceptional body capable of extreme eating and how this bodily performance transcends the medium, and the videos produce disgust or cravings.

Embodied technology use:

For unaccompanied refugee youth, technology occupies a central role in their lives. It helps them when crossing countries, finding a shelter, and accessing education, or even in negotiating family relations online (e.g., Çelikaksoy & Wadensjö, 2017; Marlowe & Bruns, 2020; Morrice et al., 2020). Research with young refugees shows that social media and smart devices have become essential means to resolve many challenges (Kutscher & Kreß, 2018). The aim of our article is to go beyond a utilitarian view of digital technologies and social media in the lives of migrant youth and show how digital actions can be extensions of bodily communications in relation to, for instance, locating the self within new cities, food, music, and religion. We introduce the concept of the migrant platformed body as a site of struggle for unity that brings past and present into continuous discussion in and through the uses of social media technologies.

Enriching Course Content in University With New Media Technologies and Neuro Education

Avoiding technology is the same as staunching the flow of daily life, because it has become a part of our lives. Understanding of media has begun to change as technological tools have taken over daily life to such an extent. The individual, the smallest circle of this change ring, has also started to differentiate in terms of needs and expectations, so education has become the element that needs to be changed most. Classical teaching methods does not appeal to the students anymore. Neuro education and eye tracking methods are pioneer methods to be used in education. By the help of new media, students can visualize the information they have been learning and have a quick understanding of the information they get in the lectures. In this study, the effects of the spread of new media technology in education and how the old understanding of students and teachers are reshaped and adapted to this technology has been explored.

E-Participation in Developing Countries

This chapter on e-participation in developing countries uses Cameroon as a case study to demonstrate the realities of practicing Web 2.0 and social media tools to drive collaborative initiatives between government agencies and citizens in developing countries. The case study was guided by the incentives for e-participation using social media technologies, the tools used by a government to drive such initiatives, the level of participation from citizens, and the challenges and risks faced in implementing these technologies. A study of Cameroon's National Social Insurance Fund (NSIF) confirmed the main incentives of e-participation initiatives in developing countries and the major challenges they face in implementing them.

Populism and Asianization

This chapter will clarify that the recent spread of populism is based on the fact that logical and emotional thinking/behaving are merging, especially in the West. In the West since the era of Greek philosopher Plato, people have tried to separate logic and emotion and have emphasized the superiority of logic to emotion. However, because of the invention and progress of media technologies, recently people's ways of thinking/behaving are becoming emotional. Therefore, the trend of populism could be understood that the people's ways of thinking/behaving in the West are approaching those in Asia. This phenomenon can be called “Asianization.” This means that populism is not a temporal trend but a long-time lasting trend. Also, this chapter will describe how to overcome populism.

User Experience Research, Experience Design, and Evaluation Methods for Museum Mixed Reality Experience

Wearable Mixed Reality (MR) technology is a tool that gives people a new enhanced experience that they have not encountered before. This study shows the process of designing new museum experiences while considering how this technology changes previous museum experiences, what those experiences are, and what people should feel through these experiences. This process was systematically conducted according to the UX design process of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In the analysis step, six types of museum artifact viewing experiences were defined: knowing, restoring, exploring, expanded scale, encountering, and sharing experience through research and user surveys related to the museum experience. In addition, through research analysis related to MR technology, presence, flow, and natural interaction were defined as three essential factors that users should feel in the MR experience. In the synthesis stage, optimized wearable MR experiences were designed and implemented by applying the necessary experience types and essential factors according to the characteristics of each artifact. In the evaluation stage, user experience evaluations such as user experience tests for essential factors in the MR experience, User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) tests for interaction products, and the Visual Aesthetics of Websites Inventory (VisAWI) test for visual experiences from various perspectives were conducted on the developed results. Through these evaluations, users gave positive scores to the design results based on the experience types and essential factors defined in this study. When applying new media technologies such as wearable MR technology, improved technology implementation is important, but an understanding of the applied field must first be obtained, and user analysis must first be thoroughly conducted. This study will be a guide to the systematic development process to be followed when applying wearable MR technology to other fields.