scholarly journals Toys as Tools for Skill-building and Creativity in Adult Life

Seminar.net ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katriina Heljakka

Previous understandings of adult use of toys are connected with ideas of collecting and hobbying, not playing. This study aims to address toys as play objects employed in imaginative scenarios and as learning devices. This article situates toys (particularly, character toys such as Blythe dolls) as socially shared tools for skill-building and learning in adult life. The interviews with Finnish doll players and analyses of examples of their productive, toy-related play patterns showcased in both offline and digital playscapes reveal how toy play leads to skill-building and creativity at a mature age.The meanings attached to and developed around playthings expand purposely by means of digital and social media. (Audio)visual content-sharing platforms, such as Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube, invite mature audiences to join playful dialogues involving mass-produced toys enhanced through do-it-yourself practices. Activities circulated in digital play spaces, such as blogs and photo management applications, demonstrate how adults, as non-professional ‘everyday players’, approach, manipulate and creatively cultivate contemporary playthings. Mature players educate potential players by introducing how to use and develop skills by sharing play patterns associated with their playthings. Producing and broadcasting tutorials on how to play creatively with toys encourage others to build their skills through play.

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexa K. Fox ◽  
Todd J. Bacile ◽  
Chinintorn Nakhata ◽  
Aleshia Weible

Purpose The present research aims to examine selfie-marketing from a consumer behavior perspective. Creating and sharing selfies are gaining popularity among millennials. The authors seek to understand how this popularity relates to classic research on narcissism and self-concept and to determine the effectiveness of selfie-marketing in visual user-generated content. Design/methodology/approach A mixed methods approach is used across two studies. Study 1’s qualitative exploration uses the grounded theory method by analyzing semi-structured interviews with millennials. The findings produce three research propositions. These propositions are further developed into testable hypotheses in Study 2’s quantitative investigation, featuring analysis of the variance of online survey data collected from millennials. Findings The findings suggest that narcissism positively relates to millennials’ attitudes toward and intent to participate in selfie-marketing on visual content-sharing apps. Results also demonstrate that millennials seek to use selfies to present their self-concepts differently in various visual content-sharing environments. Originality/value The present research is among the first to focus on the importance of self-presentation and narcissism in regard to consumers’ attitudes and behavioral responses toward selfie-marketing. For marketers, this underscores the importance of understanding the unique nature of user-generated visual content on social media.


Author(s):  
Fulpagare Priya K. ◽  
Nitin N. Patil

Social Network is an emerging e-service for Content Sharing Sites (CSS). It is an emerging service which provides reliable communication. Some users over CSS affect user’s privacy on their personal contents, where some users keep on sending annoying comments and messages by taking advantage of the user’s inherent trust in their relationship network. Integration of multiple user’s privacy preferences is very difficult task, because privacy preferences may create conflict. The techniques to resolve conflicts are essentially required. Moreover, these methods need to consider how users would actually reach an agreement about a solution to the conflict in order to offer solutions acceptable by all of the concerned users. The first mechanism to resolve conflicts for multi-party privacy management in social media that is able to adapt to different situations by displaying the enterprises that users make to reach a result to the conflicts. Billions of items that are uploaded to social media are co-owned by multiple users. Only the user that uploads the item is allowed to set its privacy settings (i.e. who can access the item). This is a critical problem as users’ privacy preferences for co-owned items can conflict. Multi-party privacy management is therefore of crucial importance for users to appropriately reserve their privacy in social media.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Ballejo ◽  
Pablo Ignacio Plaza ◽  
Sergio Agustín Lambertucci

AbstractContent published on social media may affect user’s attitudes toward wildlife species. We evaluated viewers’ responses to videos published on a popular social medium, focusing particularly on how the content was framed (i.e., the way an issue is conveyed to transmit a certain meaning). We analyzed videos posted on YouTube that showed vultures interacting with livestock. The videos were negatively or positively framed, and we evaluated viewers’ opinions of these birds through the comments posted. We also analyzed negatively framed videos of mammalian predators interacting with livestock, to evaluate whether comments on this content were similar to those on vultures. We found that the framing of the information influenced the tone of the comments. Videos showing farmers talking about their livestock losses were more likely to provoke negative comments than videos not including farmer testimonies. The probability of negative comments being posted on videos about vultures was higher than for mammalian predators. Finally, negatively framed videos on vultures had more views over time than positive ones. Our results call for caution in the presentation of wildlife species online, and highlight the need for regulations to prevent the spread of misinformed videos that could magnify existing human-wildlife conflicts.


Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072096130
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Bury ◽  
Lee Easton

Social media and content-sharing platforms provide new opportunities for the circulation of not only professional and amateur porn productions but also “pornographic self-representation”. This study examines the interactions that occur when male pornographic self-representation is shared in an inclusive space that welcomes both straight and gay men to post dick pics and gaze/comment on them. Focusing on the Reddit forum, Massive Cock, we conducted a discourse analysis of a selection of posts, comments and account profiles collected over a seven-month period. Based on our findings, we contend that Massive is a homosocial space where homoerotic dick gazing reaffirms and disrupts the heterosexual–homosexual binary. Our findings point to an uneven dynamic in which the majority of the posters perform a straight identity, whereas the majority of commenters perform a gay identity. Their comments serve to disrupt hegemonic masculinity and, in turn, create a space that welcomes mostly straight and bi-curious performances of masculinity. Such performances are possible due to recent cultural shift away from homo-hysteria and towards a more inclusive heteromasculinity. Collectively these performances produce an inclusive “fraternity of the cock”, but it is one which maintains a heterocentric focus and function.


Author(s):  
Letícia Seixas Pereira ◽  
João Guerreiro ◽  
André Rodrigues ◽  
André Santos ◽  
João Vicente ◽  
...  

Image description has been a recurrent topic on web accessibility over the years. With the increased use of social networks, this discussion is even more relevant. Social networks are responsible for a considerable part of the images available on the web. In this context, users are not only consuming visual content but also creating it. Due to this shared responsibility of providing accessible content, major platforms must go beyond accessible interfaces. Additional resources must also be available to support users in creating accessible content. Although many of today's services already support accessible media content authoring, current efforts still fail to properly integrate and guide their users through the authoring process. One of the consequences is that many users are still unaware of what an image description is, how to provide it, and why it is necessary. We present SONAAR, a project that aims to improve the accessibility of user-generated content on social networks. Our approach is to support the authoring and consumption of accessible social media content. Our prototypes currently focus on Twitter and Facebook and are available as an Android application and as a Chrome extension.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Margolies ◽  
J. A. Strub

This article examines two interrelated aspects of Mexican regional music response to the coronavirus crisis in the música huasteca community: the growth of interactive huapango livestreams as a preexisting but newly significant space for informal community gathering and cultural participation at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and the composition of original verses by son huasteco performers addressing the pandemic. Both the livestreams and the newly created coronavirus disease (COVID) verses reflect critical improvisatory approaches to the pandemic in música huasteca. The interactive livestreams signaled an ad hoc community infrastructure facilitated by social media and an emerging community space fostered by Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activists. Improvised COVID-related verses presented resonant local and regional themes as a community response to a global crisis. Digital ethnography conducted since March 2020 revealed a regional burst of musical creativity coupled with DIY intentionality, a leveling of access to virtual community spaces, and enhanced digital intimacies established across a wide cultural diaspora in Mexico and the USA. These responses were musically, poetically, and organizationally improvisational, as was the overall outpouring of the son huasteco music inspired by the coronavirus outbreak. Son huasteco is a folk music tradition from the Huasteca, a geo-cultural region spanning the intersection of six states in central Mexico. This study examines a selection of musical responses by discussing improvisational examples in both Spanish and the indigenous language Nahuatl, and in the virtual musical communities of the Huasteca migrant diaspora in digital events such as “Encuentro Virtual de Tríos Huastecos,” the “Huapangos Sin Fronteras” festival and competition, and in the nightly gatherings on social media platforms developed during the pandemic to sustain the Huastecan cultural expression. These phenomena have served as vibrant points of transnational connection and identity in a time where physical gatherings were untenable.


Crowdsourcing ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1282-1301
Author(s):  
Caroline Rizza ◽  
Ângela Guimarães Pereira ◽  
Paula Curvelo

In June 2011, during the ice hockey Stanley Cup, as the Vancouver Canucks were losing, riots started in downtown Vancouver. Social media were used to communicate between authorities and citizens, including the rioters. The media reporting on these events framed these communications within different narratives, which in turn raised ethical considerations. The authors identify and reflect upon ideas of justice, fairness, responsibility, accountability and integrity that arise in the media stories. In addition they investigate (1) the “institutional unpreparedness” of the Vancouver police department when receiving such quantity of material and dealing with new processes of inquiry such material requires; (2) the “unintended do-it-yourself-justice”: the shift from supporting crisis responders to social media vigilantes: citizens overruling authorities and enforcing justice on their own terms and by their own means through social media and; (3) the “unintended do-it-yourself-society” supported by the potential-of social media's use for prompting people to act.


Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

Malicious political socialbots used to sway public opinion regarding the U.S. government and its functions have been identified as part of a larger information warfare effort by the Russian government. This work asks what is knowable from a web-based sleuthing approach regarding the following four factors: 1) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their ego neighborhoods at 1, 1.5, and 2 degrees; 2) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on the claimed and linked geographical locations of their accounts, their ego neighborhoods, and their #hashtag networks; 3) the ability to identify malicious political socialbot accounts based on their strategic messaging (content, sentiment, and language structures) on respective social media platforms; and 4) the ability to identify and describe “maliciousness” in malicious political socialbot accounts based on observable behaviors on that account on three social media platform types: (a) microblogging, (b) social networking, and (c) crowd-sourced encyclopedia content sharing.


Author(s):  
Antonella Esposito

This study explores the self-organized activities undertaken across Web 2.0 and social media services by individual PhD researchers in their doctoral journey. It aims to add to the emergent body of knowledge reporting the doctoral students' experience in the digital venues for scholarly purposes. This chapter is based upon an international and multi-method research carried out to canvass the variety of social media practices characterizing the PhD researchers' digital engagement. The findings offer a detailed and unprecedented repertoire of individual experiments in taming social media to scholarly tasks. The results suggest that complex negotiations occur between technology and practice, where the tension between the need for supporting existing tasks and the attempt for expanding opportunities for personal development is always at work and prefigures an approach to digital engagement always on the move. Furthermore, the research sparks questions about any institution-led initiatives to support the sort of ‘do-it-yourself' PhD emerging from the participants' narratives.


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