School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemYoung children's haptic media habitus(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2020-10-28)Young children’s engagement with digital media centres on their embodied relations, shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality, and mobility of tablets and smartphones. This chapter draws on ethnographic observation of young children’s mobile media practices in family homes to explore the embodied dimensions of digital media interfaces, while engaging with user interface and mobile app developer literature, and phenomenologically informed cultural theory. It reveals the emergence of a ‘haptic habitus’: the cultivation of embodied dispositions for touchscreen conduct and competence. Configured by both cultural and commercial operations, this habitus involves context, user interface studies, and the design of gestural input.
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ItemDiscourses, dispositifs, and dispositions in young children's mobile media use(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019)Focusing on the digital lives of children aged eight and under, and paying attention to their parents and educators, this book showcases research findings from the UK, Denmark, Turkey, Indonesia and Australia.
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ItemPostdigitality in Children’s Crossmedia Play: A Case Study of Nintendo’s Amiibo Figurines(Palgrave Macmillan, 2019-02-21)This book examines the rise of internet-connected toys and aims to anticipate the opportunities and risks of IoToys before their widespread diffusion.
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Item"Adapt or Die": The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety(Routledge, 2019-06-11)Funeral directors shot themselves in the foot over cremation, and cemeteries got splattered with the blood.
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ItemThe postdigital playground: Children’s public play spaces in the smart city(Routledge, 2020)This chapter examines the integration of children’s public play spaces into the infrastructures of the smart city. While prior research has focused on personal mobile devices, this chapter examines deliberate design interventions that digitally augment children’s play spaces. Drawing on perspectives from children’s geography and game studies to conceptualise childhood play in the smart city, the chapter highlights the sometimes-contradictory relations that emerge. These contradictions arise in the smart city through the digital augmentation of spaces historically and culturally designated as play spaces. We introduce the notion of the postdigital to emphasise the blurring of boundaries of digital and nondigital play in children’s playgrounds and conceptualise the integration of playgrounds into digital infrastructures in relation to the broader impact that the smart city has on the uses of public space. This chapter explores this ongoing integration of playgrounds into the smart city through two recent examples of interactive play designs that digitally augment public playgrounds and parks: HybridPlay and Disney Fairy Trail. These examples of postdigital play in public playgrounds are analysed in terms of their functionality, representation and online reception. Operating along a broader trajectory of smart city infrastructures characterised by the blurring of discrete spaces of sociality, these examples of postdigital play highlight tensions associated with the cultural sensibilities and historical meanings attached to public play spaces, digital technologies and childhood.
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ItemSenses and Sensors of Sleep: Digital Mediation and Disconnection in Sleep Architectures(Oxford University Press, 2021-01-01)
This chapter analyzes sleep technology products designed to mediate and modulate patterns of sleep. Products analyzed include sleep-tracking applications and wearable devices for customizing personal phases of sleep architecture, and “smart” bedroom systems that use sensors and Internet connectivity to monitor and automate sensory environments to optimize the architectural spaces of sleep. Drawing on theories of digital disconnection, this chapter highlights how historical and theoretical notions of sleep as a site of subjective, social, and technological disconnection are reworked by contemporary media technologies. The now ubiquitous use of smartphones in bed reflects ongoing demands for digital participation and productivity. Yet such arrangements are unevenly distributed, with disconnective sleep technologies operating as a form of privilege and distinction for those who have the resources to reshape the architectures of personal sleep rhythms and spaces.
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemMethodological and ethical concerns associated with digital ethnography in domestic environments: participation burden and burdensome technologies(Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)This chapter reflects on methodological and ethical issues arising in a digital ethnography project conducted in domestic environments. The participatory aims of the methodological approach required participants to produce a series of videos exploring domestic digital environments. The videos were then uploaded using an ethnographic software application. Early in the project it became evident that researchers had limited control over important aspects of the technology, and that the technology itself was having disruptive effects in households. Further, although the study was designed to be engaging and playful for participants, the tasks of producing the videos was perceived by some participants as requiring onerous levels of creativity and digital media literacy. The chapter discusses these methodological and ethical issues, and how they were largely resolved.
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ItemOvercoming the tyranny of distance? High speed broadband and the significance of place(University of Adelaide, 2016)This paper examines how HSB is configured in the production of place through the services provided by the National Broadband Network (NBN) across 22 technologically and geographically diverse households by drawing out properties of connectedness and distinction. In this paper, which reports on preliminary data from a longitudinal ARC-funded research project, we are particularly interested to examine how HSB intersects with the other spatial elements that make place meaningful for our participants. We take the standpoint that the uptake and appropriation of a technological innovation, such as HSB, is a process – not an event. We seek to examine the dynamics of this process, what HSB means for the ‘tyranny of distance’ and what HSB means for the significance of place.
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ItemMobilising Children: The role of mobile communications in child mobility(Routledge, 2017)This edited collection brings together different accounts and experiences of children s health and wellbeing in urban environments from majority and minority world perspectives.