School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Young children's haptic media habitus
    Nansen, B ; Green, L ; Holloway, D ; Stevenson, K ; Leaver, T ; Haddon, L (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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    The postdigital playground: Children’s public play spaces in the smart city
    Nansen, B ; APPERLEY, T ; Leorke, D (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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    Senses and Sensors of Sleep: Digital Mediation and Disconnection in Sleep Architectures
    Nansen, B ; Mannell, K ; O’Neill, C ; Jansson, A (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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    Automating Digital Afterlives
    Fordyce, R ; Nansen, B ; Arnold, M ; Kohn, T ; Gibbs, M ; Jansson, A ; Adams, PC (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.