Growing Up Digital: Control and the Pieces of a Digital Life

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected Digital media files have the potential to persist across time in ways that analog files of the same types do not. This persistence follows from the relatively new potential to learn of the existence of such files and to physically locate copies, and it means that such files may follow us across the whole of our lives, appearing and reappearing at the most inopportune moments. They are indexed, stored, and accessible due to the architecture of the digital age. This chapter shows how this persistence can be pernicious across time, with the potential for normal youthful experimentation to have long-lasting effects when embedded into digital media. It acknowledges that the law does not address this problem, and proposes both a broadening of our acceptance of the youthful acts that may be embedded in digital media, as well as giving more legal control to those whose youths are so embedded

Machinima interventions: innovative approaches to immersive virtual world curriculum integration

The educational value of Immersive Virtual Worlds (IVWs) seems to be in their social immersive qualities and as an accessible simulation technology. In contrast to these synchronous applications this paper discusses the use of educational machinima developed in IVW virtual film sets. It also introduces the concept of media intervention, proposing that digital media works best when simply developed for deployment within a blended curriculum to inform learning activity, and where the media are specifically designed to set challenges, seed ideas, or illustrate problems. Machinima, digital films created in IVWs, or digital games offer a rich mechanism for delivering such interventions. Scenes are storyboarded, constructed, shot and edited using techniques similar to professional film production, drawing upon a cast of virtual world avatars controlled through a human–computer interface, rather than showing real‐life actors. The approach enables academics or students to make films using screen capture software and desktop editing tools. In student‐generated production models the learning value may be found in the production process itself. This paper discusses six case studies and several themes from research on ideas for educational machinima including: access to production; creativity in teaching and learning; media intervention methodology; production models; reusability; visualisation and simulation

On Avatar: digital commerce as activist pedagogy?

Contemporary media allow digital environments to function as transnational classrooms, a multidimensional public sphere accessible to people with Internet connection. This generates ethical dilemmas, including the right to represent groups with incomplete civic rights and restricted access to representational centers. James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)–Amazon Watch–International Rivers (Amazon Watch, n.d.) marriage responds to this phenomenon through uses of digital communication as both profitable enterprise and activist means. The film narrated the interplanetary corporate destruction of another moon’s—Pandora—ecosystem and civilization for its natural resources. But in search of interesting locales to photograph, Avatar’s computer generating image professionals stumbled upon the tribes of the Amazonian rainforest whose culture and livelihood face extinction due to a government-backed multibillion project to build the Belo connexions • international professional communication journa

Beyond: collapsible tools and gestures for computational design

Since the invention of the personal computer, digital media has remained separate from the physical world, blocked by a rigid screen. In this paper, we present Beyond, an interface for 3-D design where users can directly manipulate digital media with physically retractable tools and hand gestures. When pushed onto the screen, these tools physically collapse and project themselves onto the screen, letting users perceive as if they were inserting the tools into the digital space beyond the screen. The aim of Beyond is to make the digital 3-D design process straightforward, and more accessible to general users by extending physical affordances to the digital space beyond the computer screen

Tac-tiles: multimodal pie charts for visually impaired users

Tac-tiles is an accessible interface that allows visually impaired users to browse graphical information using tactile and audio feedback. The system uses a graphics tablet which is augmented with a tangible overlay tile to guide user exploration. Dynamic feedback is provided by a tactile pin-array at the fingertips, and through speech/non-speech audio cues. In designing the system, we seek to preserve the affordances and metaphors of traditional, low-tech teaching media for the blind, and combine this with the benefits of a digital representation. Traditional tangible media allow rapid, non-sequential access to data, promote easy and unambiguous access to resources such as axes and gridlines, allow the use of external memory, and preserve visual conventions, thus promoting collaboration with sighted colleagues. A prototype system was evaluated with visually impaired users, and recommendations for multimodal design were derived

Emotion work via digital visual communication: A comparative study between China and Japan

Through the smartphone, the production and circulation of digital visual media have become as costless and accessible as audio and text-based communication. It would be challenging to be a contemporary ethnographer without engaging with digital practices which in Japan and China at least, tend towards being highly visual. Digital visual communication is recognised in literature as an effective and accessible form of communication, with an increasing number of studies in the field of digital anthropology, media studies and Internet studies exploring the consequences of digital images on social media. There is a pressing need to understand local forms of visual communication in the digital age, where the visual has become an essential part of daily communication. This article deals particularly with the rise of visual digital communication among older adults in China and Japan. Drawing on 16-month ethnographies conducted simultaneously between 2018 and 2019 in China and Japan, this article contributes to the discussion of visual communication in light of this semiotic shift happening online, which is then contextualised within people’s offline lives. The ethnographies in both China and Japan find that, first of all, visual communication via digital media enables more effective and efficient phatic communication and emotion work. In addition, the ethnographies point to a question about ‘authenticity’ in interpersonal communication. The ethnographies show that in some cases, the deployment of visual communication via the smartphone is not so much about being able to express ‘authentic’ personal feelings but rather, in being able to effectively establish a digital public façade according to social norms

The Digital Turn:How the Internet Transforms Our Existence

The Digital Turn provides a helicopter view of digital media and their impact on our lives. It explains how the ever-growing flood of digital media affects our understanding of the world. The book analyses the world of Twitter, Apple, Facebook and Google and describes how our digitally-enhanced biotope alters our behaviours, social interactions, the economy, and culture as a whole. It explains the mechanisms and consequences of engaging in online spaces and investigates how we can avoid losing grip of our identity, friendship, social engagement, and eventually life at large. The book offers an accessible means for attaining a better understanding of the ways digital media influence our existence. It is a compact guide to becoming media literate and to preparing us for the advanced digital services that are yet to come. This makes the book an indispensable aid for every twenty-first century citizen

Pengaruh Era Digital Terhadap Pengembangan Pembelajaran Mandarin

The purpose of this research is to know the influence of the digital age on the development of Mandarin learning. This research is descriptive research with a survey method. The subjects in this study were third-year students from the University of North Sumatra majoring in Chinese Literature, totaling 35 respondents. The results of the study found that the availability of various digital media presenting various learning content in Mandarin makes Mandarin more accessible and learned by its enthusiasts. Efficiency is the reason why learning Mandarin through digital media is growing very rapidly. Hence, it can be said that the digital age has greatly influenced the development of Mandarin.Keywords: Digital Age; The Development;  Mandarin Learnin

Mapping digital media: digital television, the public interest, and European regulation

Discussion of digital television has focused on switch-over dates, set-top boxes and the technical and economic implications of switch-over. This paper, by contrast, focusses on public interest obligations and citizenship values such as freedom, access, universality, political pluralism and content diversity. Petros Iosifidis distinguishes broadly between public interest priorities as understood in western Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. After assessing some obvious benefits of digital TV (extra channels, converged communications, enhanced interactivity and mobility), he argues that the public interest outcomes from the introduction of new technologies like the internet and digital TV will depend on how people use them, for new technology is only a vehicle by means of which public interest goals can be achieved. He then considers digital TV penetration data from across Europe, as well as the status of national digital switch-over plans, stressing that northern Europe is much more advanced in this regard than southern and eastern-central Europe. Outlining the pros and cons of digital switch-over for the public, Dr Iosifidis contends that universality and accessibility can best be ensured by maintaining public service media, which have been—and should continue to be—important conveyors of freely accessible and reliable information. Countries where television has been dominated by state broadcasters should use the new technology and in particular digital switch-over to create independent non-profit channels at both local and national levels, to foster a competitive environment and political pluralism