School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemRepresenting alkaline hydrolysis: a material-semiotic analysis of an alternative to burial and cremation(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)Alkaline hydrolysis can lay claim to being a resource-efficient, effective, economical and environmentally sound method of final body disposition, relative to burial and cremation. On technical grounds it may have much to recommend it, however, like many other technical innovations, its take-up is hindered by the fact that it lacks a clear position in the public imagination. For this position to take shape, an understanding of just what it is and what it offers is required by proponents in the funeral industry who advise the bereaved, as well as by the material representations of the alkaline hydrolysis technologies themselves. In this article, we describe and analyse four extant alternative material and discursive forms of alkaline hydrolysis and how they variously occupy the fraught space where morality, death and marketing converge. Currently, each of the four forms of alkaline hydrolysis struggle to represent themselves in a public narrative that conveys their different ontologies and their competitive advantage, relative to burial and cremation, and this paper describes some key rhetorical and technical aspects of these struggles.
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ItemRobot death care: A study of funerary practice(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-07)Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
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ItemNo Preview Available‘Don’t mess with my algorithm’: Exploring the relationship between listeners and automated curation and recommendation on music streaming services(University of Illinois Libraries, 2022-01-01)Given access to huge online collections of music on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, users have become increasingly reliant on algorithmic recommender systems and automated curation and discovery features to find and curate music. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 15 active users of music streaming services, this article critically examines the user experience of music recommendation and streaming, seeking to understand how listeners interact with and experience these systems, and asking how recommendation and curation features define their use in a new and changing landscape of music consumption and discovery. This paper argues that through daily interactions with algorithmic features and curation, listeners build complex socio-technical relationships with these algorithmic systems, involving human-like factors such as trust, betrayal and intimacy. This article is significant as it positions music recommender systems as active agents in shaping music listening habits and the individual tastes of users.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSynchronizing multi-perspectival data of children's digital play at home(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-07-03)Studying digitally mediated play presents challenges in terms of how to view and record both the on-screen action and player’s bodies in physical space. Carrying out this research in a socially and technologically diverse range of family households poses further challenges, common to ethnographic media research in general. In this paper, we describe a method for generating richly detailed views of 6–8 year old children’s digital play with the game Minecraft, on a range of devices and in a range of household configurations. We explain the process undertaken in our own research, highlighting the need for flexibility and a collaborative approach between participants and researchers. We argue that collecting multi-perspectival recordings of digital play provides data that has the potential to greatly aid understanding of digital playworlds.
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ItemMedia, mortality and necro-technologies: Eulogies for dead media(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2023-08)Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.
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ItemVisual tactility: 'Oddly satisfying' videos, sensory genres and ambiguities in children's YouTube(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2022-12)This article contributes to research on children’s YouTube, online video genres and media consumption practices by focusing on genres that take shape at the intersection of digital media content and embodied sensation and in particular ‘oddly satisfying’ (OS) videos. This type of content has become popular on YouTube, where examples of satisfying and OS content include the manipulation or movement of a range of colourful or tactile materials such as slime, kinetic sand or icing a cake. To document the evolution and key characteristics of this genre, we analyse YouTube videos using content analysis methods. Our findings show the characteristics of this sensory genre can be understood through the concept of visual tactility, which highlights the synaesthetic feel of watching these videos. Further, we identify and examine how OS videos demonstrate ambiguities in children’s YouTube content, audiences and regulation by overlapping with other sensory genres and more adult content, such as ASMR. This analysis thus situates this sensory genre in relation to the developing study of children’s YouTube entertainment industries and media regulation.
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Item"What are you Bringing to the Table?": The Something Awful Let's Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-05-01)Within the last decade, Let’s Plays, recordings of gameplay with commentary by the person playing, have grown in popularity and attention. The current research examining Let’s Plays has focused on the contemporary popularity of the phenomenon on YouTube. However, the origins of Let’s Plays as an influential media practice have not been fully investigated. In order to address this gap, we conducted a series of interviews with 34 creators from the Something Awful LP subforum—commonly identified to have originated the media form. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed using concepts of serious leisure studies and cultural/subcultural capital. As a form of serious leisure culture, the members of the Something Awful LP community displayed motivations related to extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, such as increased sense of self-worth and recognition. The analysis of this Serious leisure culture highlights how this subculture was subsequently adopted by larger YouTube communities.
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ItemLet's play something awful: a historical analysis of 14 years of threads(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-04-03)The Something Awful Let’s Play subforum is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the Let’s Play (LP) media phenomenon. LPs typically involve people recording themselves playing games while providing commentary. LPs are an important media form in themselves as well as being an important antecedent to many contemporary and popular media forms such as live streaming, esports and speed-running. An examination of the Something Awful LP subforum can contribute to an understanding of the origins of LPs and the community that created them. In this paper, we report on a study of the Something Awful LP subforum and describe the kinds of engagement the community participates in the top threads, as well as looking to see if there are specific individuals responsible for guiding the subforum overall. We collected data from the thousands of public threads posted in the LP subforum, from its inception in 2007 to the end of 2020. The analysis of these postings presented in this paper draws on previous understandings of the behavioral roles, forms of engagement, and policing of practices that often occur on internet forums as part of the regulation and organization of associated online communities. Our results show that the LP subforum was not dominated by a small minority of users that dictated the community’s LP posting, recording and commentary practices, and that the content of the specific threads was much more important in determining what forms of LPs became popular.