516 research outputs found
The future of media plurality in the UK - Ofcom’s report to the Secretary of State on the Media Ownership Rules and our next steps on media plurality (2021)
Helping consumers get better deals: A review of the impact of end-of-contract notifications and pricing commitments by broadband and mobile providers (2018)
Video-sharing platform guidance - Guidance for providers on measures to protect users from harmful material (2021)
Grammatical understanding, literacy and text messaging in school children and undergraduate students: a concurrent analysis
Recent research has demonstrated that use of texting slang when text messaging does not appear to impact negatively on children and young people's literacy and may even benefit children's spelling attainment. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of text messaging on children's and young people's understanding of grammatical forms. This study examined the interrelationships between 243 children and undergraduate students' grammatical violations made when text messaging and their performance on assessments of spoken and written grammatical understanding, orthographic processing and conventional spelling ability. The children were found to make significantly more capitalisation and punctuation errors, and to use unconventional punctuation more frequently that the adults, when the length of their messages was taken into account. For the primary and secondary school children there was no relationship between the tendency to make grammatical violations when texting and their understanding of conventional grammar or orthography. For the young adult sample, there was some evidence of an association between the tendency to make capitalisation and punctuation errors when texting, and poorer performance in selecting the grammatically correct orthographic representation of a pseudoword. This relationship remained after controlling for individual differences in undergraduates' IQ and spelling ability. Overall, there is little evidence that ungrammatical texting behaviour is linked to grammatical understanding or knowledge of orthographic representations of language in children. However, there is some evidence that young adults' violation of grammatical conventions when texting may be linked to limited understanding of grammatically-related orthographic conventions
'When I click "ok" I become Sassy – I become a girl.' Young people and gender identity: Subverting the ‘body’ in massively multi-player online role-playing games
This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis.This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a five-year ethnographic study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. In particular, the article discusses digital gender practices and considers the potential that these games offer for their young users to engage in alternate gender identities. We argue that these digital spaces offer spaces for the imagination and can enhance agency and, potentially, resistance. However, digital identity is simultaneously no ‘liberated space’ and it incorporates norms and practices that often mirror those of the material world. We argue that this ‘porosity’ is an important tool through which young people come to understand gender identity
Media pluralism: What matters for governance and regulation?
Media pluralism is valued in most jurisdictions because it contributes to a well-informed citizenry. The authors examine what media policy and regulatory levers appear to affect five types of citizen knowledge across the European Union. They conclude that concentration of titles matters more than ownership in newsprint; and that neither type of concentration matters in broadcasting in the same way, but the regulatory regime for public service broadcasting does, particularly for political knowledge
Peering over the shoulders of giants?
‘Open’ is a highly-visible cultural trend of the early twenty-first century. A brief scan of anewspaper or quick Internet search reveals it as a prefix to learning, source, standard, data,knowledge, democracy, access, repository, innovation, government, science and probablymore. The expectations of the broadband generation – young people born around the turn ofthe century – for openness and instant, on‑demand access to information affect research asmuch as any other social activity. As the world’s population of digital residents – those whosee the Web as the place where they express opinions, form relationships, develop an identityand belong to a community – grows, the expectation that the Web will be the place whereinformation is created and communicated will grow alongside them
The digital divide: Patterns, policy and scenarios for connecting the ‘final few’ in rural communities across Great Britain
The Internet can bestow significant benefits upon those who use it. The prima facie case for an urban-rural digital divide is widely acknowledged, but detailed accounts of the spatial patterns of digital communications infrastructure are rarely reported. In this paper we present original analysis of data published by the UK telecommunications regulator, Ofcom, and identify and reflect on the entrenched nature of the urban-rural digital divide in Great Britain. Drawing upon illustrative case vignettes we demonstrate the implications of digital exclusion for personal and business lives in rural, and in particular remote rural, areas. The ability of the current UK policy context to effectively address the urban-rural digital divide is reviewed and scenarios for improving digital connectivity amongst the ‘final few’, including community-led broadband, satellite broadband and mobile broadband, are considered. A call is made for digital future proofing in telecommunications policy, without which the already faster urban areas will get ‘faster, fastest’ leaving rural areas behind and an increasingly entrenched urban-rural divide
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