scholarly journals In the Footsteps of Smartphone-Users Traces of a Deferred Community in Ingress and Pokémon Go

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Ganzert ◽  
Theresa Gielnik ◽  
Philip Hauser ◽  
Julia Ihls ◽  
Isabell Otto
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Shape Spaces ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Cultural Processes ◽  
Pokémon Go ◽  
Temporal Dimensions

Abstract In this article, the authors carry out conceptual and theoretical reflections on smartphone communities by closely investigating two apps: Ingress (Niantic 2012) and Pokemon Go (Niantic 2016). While the games’ narratives fabricate reasons for the players to move, it is the Smartphone - understood as an open object between technological and cultural processes - that visualizes and tracks players’ movements and that situates and reshapes the devices, the users and their surroundings. A central aspect is that the ‘augmented’ cities that become visible in the apps are based on the traces of others: other processes and technologies, as well as other players. These traces of practices and movements structure the users’ experience and shape spaces. Traces are necessarily subsequent and we therefore develop the concept of a deferred (smartphone) community and analyse its visibility within the apps. By close reading the two case studies, we examine potential “smartphone communities” in their temporal dimensions, as well as their demands and promises of participation. In order to gain a perspective that is neither adverse to new media nor celebratory of assumed participatory community phenomena, the article aims to interrogate the examples regarding their potential for individuation/ dividuation and community building/dissolution. In doing so, the games’ conditions and the impositions placed on the players are central and include notions of consent and dissent. Drawing upon approaches from community philosophy and media theory, we concentrate on the visible aspects smartphone-interfaces. The traces left by the various processes that were at work become momentarily actualized on the display, where they manifest not as a fixed community, but as a sense of communality.

scholarly journals Making School Children’s Participation in Planning Processes a Routine Practice

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Jenny Stenberg ◽  
Lasse Fryk
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Routine Practice ◽  
Close Collaboration ◽  
Regular Process ◽  
Children’S Participation ◽  
Planning Processes ◽  
Children's Participation

Children’s participation in planning has been investigated to some extent. There are, however, unexplored topics, particularly concerning what is needed for children’s participation to become a regular process. Based on case studies in Sweden, this article draws some conclusions. It is quite possible to organize ordinary processes where children participate in community building, in collaboration with planners, as part of their schoolwork. The key question is how this can be done. Clearly, it needs to occur in close collaboration with teachers and pupils, however it also needs to be implemented in a system-challenging manner. Thus, rather than looking for tools with potential to work in the existing school and planners’ world, it is important to design research that aims to create learning processes that have the potential to change praxis. Hence, it is not the case that tools are not needed, rather that children need to help to develop them.

Involvement shield or social catalyst: Thoughts on sociospatial practice of Pokémon GO

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Humphreys
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Real World ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
The Real ◽  
Game World ◽  
Pokémon Go

Around every new media technology debates circle about whether the technology is bringing people socially closer or pushing us further apart. According to popular press accounts, Pokémon GO players are absorbed into a game world on their phone with no attention or interest in the “real” world around them. But coupled with these accounts are stories of people exploring their neighborhoods and of marriage proposals in the midst of Pokémon hunting. This article puts Pokémon GO into a longer context of mobile technologies and sociospatial practice to explore the kinds of social interactions that can emerge around and through the use of Pokémon GO. In particular, the article explores how people can use the platform as both an involvement shield and social catalyst.

scholarly journals “Okay ladies, now let’s get in formation!”: Music Videos and the Construction of Cultural Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. F. Bertens
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Limited Length ◽  
Diverse Audience

Abstract This paper explores strategies for constructing and perpetuating cultural memory through music videos, using Beyonce’s Formation (2016) and Janelle Monae’s Many Moons (2008) and Q.U.E.E.N. (2013) as case studies. The medium’s idiosyncrasies create unique ways of communicating and remembering, explored here within a framework of Cultural Studies and Memory Studies. Easy dissemination and the limited length of most videos ensure a large, diverse audience. The relative freedom from narrative constraints enables the director to create original imagery, and most importantly, the medium allows an intricate blending of performance and performativity; while the videos evidently are performances, they are strongly performative as well, not only with respect to gender and ethnicity but in significant ways also cultural memory. A close reading of Beyonce’s video Formation shows how she explicitly does the cultural memory of the New Orleans flooding. The videos by Monae are shown to produce counter-memories, relying heavily on the strategy of Afrofuturism. As such, these densely woven networks of visual symbols become palimpsests of black lived experience and cultural memory, passed on to millions of viewers.

User-Driven Content Creation in Second Life A Source of Innovation?

2011 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Sisse Siggaard Jensen
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Open Innovation ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Content Creation ◽  
Service Project ◽  
Symbolic World

In this chapter, Second Life is conceived as an open space and symbolic world of user-driven co-creation of content. The questions asked concern the ways in which the actors of three case studies design, mediate, and remediate their Second Life projects and how the choices they make contribute to user-driven content creation and possibly to innovative practices. To answer these questions, concepts of innovation, in particular closed and open innovation are introduced and motivations for engaging in co-creation are identified. It is suggested that we understand user-driven innovation in a world like Second Life in terms of symbolic reorganization of conceptual frameworks and meaning-making. Subsequently, the concept of remediation is suggested as a way to conceive of mediation in the cases studied. It is shown how difficult it is for actors to co-create, mediate, and remediate thus to generate user-driven innovative practices in two Danish business projects (Wonder DK and Times) and in one public service project (Literary). To conclude the analysis of the case studies, it is suggested that methods of creative co-creation and innovative practices can build on the concept of remediation borrowed from research on new media and redefined in virtual worlds.

The new media landscape.

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Richard W. Benfield
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Use Case ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Presence

Abstract This chapter examines the new media landscape of communities (blogging and podcasting), platforms, and social media that gardens use. Case studies are presented of the social media presence of some UK and US gardens.

The new media landscape.

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Richard W. Benfield
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Use Case ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Presence

Abstract This chapter examines the new media landscape of communities (blogging and podcasting), platforms, and social media that gardens use. Case studies are presented of the social media presence of some UK and US gardens.

Repost or Die

2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Rose Rowson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Social Web ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Image Sharing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociological Approaches ◽  
Personal Devices

This chapter is concerned with the analysis of contemporary, community-based practices surrounding the user-generated deity Safety Kitty on the image-sharing platform Instagram. Users engage with Safety Kitty both as an image and through the associated hashtag #safetykitty to protect themselves from the existential threat of supernatural chain images shared on the platform. This chapter first demonstrates that the use of “magic” as a rhetorical tool by programmers and advertisers to describe the various mysteriously obfuscating and wondrously enabling qualities of information technologies has fallen out of popular use in recent years. Attention is then shifted to magical thinking as manifest within lay users’ participation on the social web. Drawing from early sociological approaches to magic in conjunction with new media theory, this chapter proposes that the Instagram-based rituals associated with protection from supernatural threats is indicative of a collective understanding of the unknowability of the processes behind our personal devices.

Medical Epitome

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-138
Author(s):  
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos
Keyword(s):  
Differential Diagnosis ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Diagnosis And Therapy ◽  
Invasive Techniques

This chapter examines John’s Medical Epitome. The focus here is on the first four of its six books. In contrast to the established view that this work was intended for physicians, it is argued that it was primarily written for philiatroi, intellectuals who were deeply interested in medicine, but not practising physicians themselves. The Medical Epitome, unlike John’s other two works, mainly consisted of material from earlier sources. The analysis of the text starts with a close reading of John’s proem and a discussion of the background of his dedicatee, the Byzantine statesman Alexios Apokaukos. It then shifts to an examination of the work’s structure with the aim of emphasizing John’s intentions in putting together his material. The analysis proceeds by way of a number of case studies focusing on diagnosis and therapy, and goes on to show that John intentionally condensed his material, removing specialized advice, so as to make it appeal to non-expert readers. Thus it is shown, for example, that the absence of details on invasive operations is consistent with the character of his intended readers, who were only able to use non-invasive techniques, such as phlebotomy and arteriotomy. Finally, the particular attention John paid to differential diagnosis, especially as regards eye affections, which is often supplemented with his own advice, is highlighted.

The End of Media

2017 ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andréa Belliger ◽  
David John Krieger
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Network Society ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Media Convergence ◽  
Actor Network

In the network society and the age of media convergence, media production can no longer be isolated into channels, formats, technologies, and organizations. Media Studies is facing the challenge to reconceptualize its foundations. It could therefore be claimed that new media are the last media. In the case of digital versus analog, there is no continuity between new media and old media. A new and promising proposal has come from German scholars who attempt the precarious balance between media theory and a general theory of mediation based on Actor-Network Theory. Under the title of Actor-Media Theory (Akteur-Medien-Theorie) these thinkers attempt to reformulate the program of Media Studies beyond assumptions of social or technical determinism. Replacing Actor-Network Theory with Actor-Media Theory raises the question of whether exchanging the concept of “network” for the concept of “media” is methodologically and theoretically advantageous.

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