scholarly journals Creative Craft-Based Textile Activity in the Age of Digital Systems and Practices

Leonardo ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Kenning
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Digital Systems ◽  
Creative Potential ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Media Technologies

Domestic craft-based textile activities, such as knitting, crochet, hand weaving and lace making, are often viewed as being of limited creative potential. The perceived lack of creativity arises, in part, out of the extent to which these activities copy, reproduce and re-create existing pattern forms and use preexisting templates. This paper reports on the findings of an experimental research project that explored the creative potential of crochet lace making using digital media, technologies and practices. It provides critical analysis of how new technologies, practices and theoretical frameworks have implications for ongoing domestic craft-based textile activities.

scholarly journals Comparing Digital Protest Media Imaginaries: Anti-Austerity Movements in Greece, Italy & Spain

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliano Treré ◽  
Sandra Jeppesen ◽  
Alice Mattoni
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Independent Media

This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semi­structured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to present a comparative critical analysis of digital protest media imaginaries. After examining the different socio-political and protest media contexts of the three countries translocally, our critical analysis emphasizes the emergence of three different imaginaries: in Spain the digital protest media imaginary was technopolitical, grounded in the politics and political economies of communication technologies emerging from the free culture movement; in Italy this imaginary was techno-fragmented, lacking cohesion, and failed to bring together old and new protest media logics; and finally in Greece it was techno-pragmatic, envisioned according to practical objectives that reflected the diverse politics and desires of media makers rather than the strictly technological or political affordances of the digital media forms and platforms. This research reveals how pivotal the temporal and geographical dimensions are when analyzed using theoretical perspectives from both communications and social movement research; moreover it emphasizes the importance of studying translocal digital protest media imaginaries as they shape movement repertoires of contention and communication; both elements are crucial to better understanding the challenges, limitations, successes and opportunities for digital protest media.

Negotiations

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-200
Author(s):  
Arnold Michael
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Parenting Strategies ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Parents And Children ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Face

This chapter examines the various ways digital media technologies and devices are embedded and embodied in the everyday activities of parents and children working, playing, educating, socializing, and entertaining in the home. Through this century, we have visited many families and have talked with them about their experiences and their parenting strategies in the face of new technologies. In this chapter, we identify the major strategies and stances and contextualize their nuances and subtleties vis-à-vis the particulars of the family relationships. We also place our findings in the context of the literature on families and technology use, relating the particularities of the vignettes to observations derived from quantitative and larger-scale studies.

scholarly journals The Medium is the Marketplace: Digital Systems and the Intensification of Consumption

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee McGuigan ◽  
Graham Murdock
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Mobile Devices ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Digital Systems ◽  
Surplus Value ◽  
De Se ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking Marx’s analysis as the point of departure, and drawing on a range of concrete examples, this article argues that rather than concentrating on the “new” forms of social and economic intercourse animated by digital media, and especially internet-enabled mobile devices, critical analysis needs to trace the ways in which digital consumption is intensifying the progressive integration of marketing, marketplaces, and forms of payment that have been central to the generation of surplus value and the maintenance of “business as usual,” from the emergence of the modern consumer system at the turn of the twentieth century.Cet article a recours d’abord à l’analyse de Marx puis à un éventail d’exemples concrets pour soutenir que l’analyse critique, plutôt que de se concentrer sur de « nouvelles » formes d’interaction sociale et économique engendrées par les médias numériques, y compris en particulier parmi ces derniers les appareils mobiles avec accès internet, a besoin de recenser les manières dont la consommation numérique est en train d’intensifier l’intégration graduelle du marketing, des marchés et des modes de paiement qui ont été au centre de la création de plus-value et du maintien du statu quo à partir de l’émergence du système de consommation moderne au début du vingtième siècle.

scholarly journals Exploring the Liminal between the Virtual and the Real

2015 ◽  
pp. 51-62
Author(s):  
Dew Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Real ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Digital Material ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Semantically Enhanced

The creative application of digital technologies is accelerating as artists, designers and technologists continue to experiment and explore ways to create new aesthetic fields, semantically enhanced communication and innovative relations between people and machines. Our virtual worlds meet the real material world through the interdisciplinary research of computer scientists, digital media technologists, artists, designers and culture theorists. This chapter explores ways of bringing the virtual to the real through a range of differing conceptual positions and research approaches while demonstrating the creative interplay of variable media and online platforms for producing liminal works which cross the boundary between the analogue and the digital. The intent is to provide insights and examples of creative practice employing new technologies in innovative and unusual ways to generate exciting new work and offer new pathways for digital media research and development. The chapter presents relevant theoretical frameworks and examples of current practice in the area of digitally enabled transitional spaces for artists, theorists and curators, as well as researchers working both in the field and beyond to those working with new technologies, social media platforms, and digital/ material culture.

scholarly journals Exploring the Liminal Between the Virtual and the Real

2018 ◽  
pp. 322-332
Author(s):  
Dew Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
The Real ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Digital Material ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Semantically Enhanced

The creative application of digital technologies is accelerating as artists, designers and technologists continue to experiment and explore ways to create new aesthetic fields, semantically enhanced communication and innovative relations between people and machines. Our virtual worlds meet the real material world through the interdisciplinary research of computer scientists, digital media technologists, artists, designers and culture theorists. This chapter explores ways of bringing the virtual to the real through a range of differing conceptual positions and research approaches while demonstrating the creative interplay of variable media and online platforms for producing liminal works which cross the boundary between the analogue and the digital. The intent is to provide insights and examples of creative practice employing new technologies in innovative and unusual ways to generate exciting new work and offer new pathways for digital media research and development. The chapter presents relevant theoretical frameworks and examples of current practice in the area of digitally enabled transitional spaces for artists, theorists and curators, as well as researchers working both in the field and beyond to those working with new technologies, social media platforms, and digital/ material culture.

Is technological change a devourer of jobs?

2017 ◽  
pp. 111-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Kapeliushnikov
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Employment Growth ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Employment Effects ◽  
Technological Unemployment ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
Task Sets ◽  
The Impact

The paper provides a critical analysis of the idea of technological unemployment. The overview of the existing literature on the employment effects of technological change shows that on the micro-level there exists strong and positive relationship between innovations and employment growth in firms; on the sectoral level this correlation becomes ambiguous; on the macro-level the impact of new technologies seems to be positive or neutral. This implies that fears of explosive growth of technological unemployment in the foreseeable future are exaggerated. Our analysis further suggests that new technologies affect mostly the structure of employment rather than its level. Additionally we argue that automation and digitalisation would change mostly task sets within particular occupations rather than distribution of workers by occupations.

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.

Operational analysis: A method for observing and analyzing digital media operations

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482199864
Author(s):  
Kathrin Friedrich ◽  
A S Aurora Hoel
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Task Orientation ◽  
Operational Analysis ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Robotic Radiosurgery ◽  
Middle Range ◽  
Operational Models ◽  
Media Research ◽  
Media Applications ◽  
Tracking Devices

Interventional digital media applications such as robotic surgery, remote-controlled vehicles or wearable tracking devices pose a challenge to media research methodologically as well as conceptually. How do we go about analyzing operational media, where human and non-human agencies intertwine in seemingly inscrutable ways? This article introduces the method of o perational analysis to systematically observe and critically analyze such situated, interventional and multilayered entanglements. Against the background of ongoing efforts to develop operational models for understanding digital media, the method of operational analysis conceptually ascribes to media technologies a real efficacy by approaching them as adaptive mediators. As an operational middle-range approach, it allows to integrate theoretical discussions with considerations of the situatedness, directedness, and task-orientation of operational media. The article presents an analytical toolbox for observing and analyzing digital media operations while simultaneously testing it on a particular application in robotic radiosurgery.

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