School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemFacebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online(Melbourne University Press, 2012)
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ItemSelfies at Funerals: Remediating rituals of mourning(Association of Internet Researchers, 2014)
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ItemNo Preview Available#funeral(Association of Internet Researchers, 2014)In this paper we highlight preliminary findings from a study at the intersection of Instagram use and funerary practices. This study analyses photographs tagged with “#funeral” and contributes to research into death and digital media by extending the focus from social networking sites such as Facebook to consider the photo-sharing application Instagram, and how different media platforms are connected with the physical event of funerals. By categorizing photos tagged with “#funeral” on Instagram we show how media architecture and use shapes a complex ecology of grieving practices, with distinct differences from practices that have coalesced around other social media platforms. We consider the collision of digital culture and traditional memorializing practices, and suggest the need for further work that attends to the variety of social media being mobilized in death, grieving and commemoration, as well as to the ways platforms become entwined with physical places and rituals.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe Restless Dead in the Digital Cemetery(Praeger Publishers, 2014)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDwelling with media stuff: latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2011-08)Extending research into material, media, and cultural geographies of the home, our interest turns to the spatiotemporality of dwelling with information and communication technologies. We pose a number of questions: How do inhabitants and their media stuff adapt to the more rigid physical spaces of a building? How does the building respond to the more rapid changes to dwelling produced by this media stuff? And how are these differing times synchronised? In answer to these questions we present four case studies of homes in Melbourne, Australia, each representative of a particular strategy of synchronisation. They are: the found home, the imagined home, the designed home, and the renovated home. We identify logics informing these homes: the first naturalises the choices made, the second rationalises choices, and the third is one in which dwelling and (re)building are intertwined.
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ItemUsers and non-users of next generation broadband(Association of Internet Researchers, 2013)
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ItemDIGITAL LITERACIES AND THE NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK: COMPETENCY, LEGIBILITY, CONTEXT(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2013-05)This article reports on findings from an ethnographic study of fifteen participant households in North Hobart and Midway Point, Tasmania. Key themes emerging from this research have been gathered up and presented through the metaphor ‘digital literacy’. The first half of the article is concerned with developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the notion, or metaphor, of digital literacy. The second half tests these understandings against our research. In our conversations with the people of North Hobart and Midway Point, we found evidence of digital illiteracy, and also evidence of the weaknesses of digital literacy as an explanatory trope. We group these findings using three themes: the presence of instrumental literacy; the illegibility of the NBN and its HSB services; and structural conditions limiting the acquisition of the NBN and its HSB services. These draw upon the digital literacy metaphor, but make its shortcomings clear, and the latter two in particular extend the metaphor from a personal deficit model to one that embraces technologies and social structures.
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ItemASYNCHRONOUS SPEEDS: DISENTANGLING THE DISCOURSE OF 'HIGH-SPEED BROADBAND' IN RELATION TO AUSTRALIA'S NATIONAL BROADBAND NETWORK(UNIV QUEENSLAND PRESS, 2014-05)This article analyses the substantive problems related to the term ‘high-speed broadband’ in relation to the implementation of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). It argues that an understanding of speed in relation to broadband must take into account a complex assemblage of infrastructure networks, communication devices, software, location, user subjectivity and political input. Within this assemblage are varied definitions, discourses and materialities of speed that do not necessarily synchronise. Instead, speed is subject to asynchronous perceptions and implementations, which impact on the potential of the NBN. With the aim of contextualising and problematising the understanding of speed in relation to the NBN, this article explores four key points: first, how the perception of speed is dependent not so much on technical performance, but on the subjectivities of internet experience; second, how the term ‘broadband’ is politically shaped, especially in the context of the Coalition government's alternative multi-technology mix plan; third, how the assemblage of different social, technical and political actants that constitute high-speed broadband determines the perception of speed; and finally, how asynchronous speeds of broadband implementation and adoption may impact on the potential benefits of the NBN.