Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

Looks at the practices of food and beverage industry marketers in reaching youth via digital videos, cell phones, interactive games and social networking sites. Recommends imposing governmental regulations on marketing to children and adolescents

Advocacy, the Media and You: Change in a Time of Uncertainty

Summarizes panel discussions and key lessons on building advocacy and media skills from an October 2009 convening of the Equal Voice Coalition to support a family-led advocacy movement. Includes strategies for sending out messages with broad appeal

Digital Food Marketing to Children and Adolescents: Problematic Practices and Policy Interventions

Examines trends in digital marketing to youth that uses "immersive" techniques, social media, behavioral profiling, location targeting and mobile marketing, and neuroscience methods. Recommends principles for regulating inappropriate advertising to youth

Modular Audio Platform for Youth Engagement in a Museum Context

The purpose of this thesis is to support museums and other cultural institutes in their mission to attract young visitors by offering engaging experiences. The main goals of the the-sis were to develop a modular and easy-to-use audio story-sharing and audio-augmented reality platform, and evaluate the usefulness of the platform by measuring the level of engagement of participating youth in a workshop context. Design-science research methodology was used for audio platform component development, and mixed-methods were used to study the utility of platform components as case studies. At a more detailed level this means that the expandable and modular platform was developed incrementally one component at a time. When developing Audio Digital Asset Management, action research was used. For the Soundscape Mixer development, combined action research was used until the software was in the α phase after which a separate evaluation method was used in the β phase. For the Audiostory Sharing development de-sign-science research with separate building and evaluation methods was used. After implementation and testing the audio platform also from the usability angle, we moved on to engagement research. Workshops were organized in order to demonstrate the usage of the audio platform. During the workshops engagement was researched using mixed method, namely quantitative self-report questionnaires and qualitative methods in the form of observations. We have succeeded in developing a modular and versatile audio platform. All of the hardware is commonly used including Android phones. Software-wise the backend system is based on open source components. As the backend system provides relevant APIs, new mobile applications can be developed by third parties. In parallel, a concept was also developed, which helps to reach the young target audience and helps to measure the level of engagement. For this purpose, the student engagement structure has been applied in order to find out the level of engagement in workshops where the audio platform is a vital part. As a final summary, the results are promising. There is a general-purpose audio platform, which is modular, expandable and affordable for cultural institutions, and there is a concept to reach young people and a measurement instrument to measure the level of engagement in an audio-related workshop context.Väitöskirjan tavoitteena oli kehittää modulaarinen ja helppo käyttöinen tietojärjestelmä, mikä tukee äänitarinoiden jakamista sekä äänimaisemien rakentelua ja kokemista. Toisena tavoitteena oli arvioida, miten koukuttavia kokemuksia nuorille syntyy työpajoissa, missä tätä tietojärjestelmää hyödynnettiin. Väitöskirjan tarkoitus on tukea museoita ja muita kulttuurilaitoksia houkuttelemaan nuoria kävijöitä tarjoamalla nuorille mahdollisuus kokea kulttuurilaitoksen tarjonta osallistavalla tavalla. Olemme onnistuneet kehittämään modulaarisen ja laajennettavan ääniin keskittyvän tietojärjestelmän. Palvelinohjelmisto perustuu avoimeen lähdekoodiin ja nuorille käyttäjille tarkoitetut mobiilisovellukset on kehitetty Android puhelimille. Järjestelmä tarjoaa avoimet rajapinnat, mikä mahdollistaa myös kolmansien osapuolien uusien mobiilisovellusten kehittämisen kulttuurilaitosten tarpeisiin. Tietojärjestelmän rinnalla kehitimme työpajakonseptit. Työpajoilla on pedagogiset tavoitteet, mikä mahdollistaa yhteistoiminnan koulujen kanssa. Työpajojen arviointiin sovelsimme kasvatustieteiden puolelta ”student engagement” tutkimusta, jolloin kykenemme arvioimaan ja mittaamaan osanottajien kokemuksia perustuen heidän käyttäytymiseen, tunnetiloihin sekä kognitiiviseen oppimiseen. Järjestimme kuusi työpajaa, missä tietojärjestelmä oli keskeisessä roolissa. Neljä työpajaa järjestettiin Suomessa eri-ikäisille ja eri kansallisuuksista tuleville osanottajille. Kaksi työpajaa järjestettiin Puolassa. Perustuen näistä työpajoista kerättyihin kokemuksiin voimme sanoa, että tulokset olivat lupaavia iästä ja kansallisuudesta riippumatta. Saimme sovellukset toimimaan sujuvasti ja nuoret innostumaan sovellusten avulla. Innostuksen määrän saimme selville kehitetyllä mittausmenetelmällä. Suurin osa työstä on tehty osana Luova Eurooppa rahoitteista People’s Smart Sculpture hanketta. Hankkeen saksalaiset partnerit hyödynsivät äänimaisemasovellusta osana kaupunkisuunnittelua, mikä voisi olla yksi jatkotutkimuksen aihe

Reimagining Culture With Youth: Relationship and Representation in Culturally Centered Learning Environments

This dissertation intends to develop an understanding of how culturally centered learning environments impact youth’s relationship with culture. Working alongside a multicultural team of researchers, educators, and designers who came together with a shared goal of designing curricular activities to engage sixth graders with culture, I followed 12 sixth graders for a school year to understand their development of relationships with culture. I (re)conceptualize the holistic process of learning and engagement with culture as Ti-Wu and propose a cultural learning model that helps us understand how youth develop multiple relationships with culture. I further share how multimedia technology mediates youth’s relationship with culture through remixing and reimagining. This dissertation has implications for the ways in which we can (1) design a culturally centered learning environment to engage youth with culture and support the development of diverse relationships with culture, (2) develop youth’s relationship with culture through designing multimedia learning activities in formal learning environments, and (3) decenter Western-oriented research discourse on cultural learning and development

The People's Smart Sculpture

The People’s Smart Sculpture (PS2) panel discusses future oriented approaches in smart media-art, developed, designed and exploited for artistic and public participation in the change and re-design of our living environment. The actual debate about a smart future is not taking into account any idea of media art as an instrument for to realize the social sculpture, mentioned by Beuys [1] or as social sculpture itself. The People’s Smart Sculpture is the only large scale Creative Europe media-art project (2014-2018) in this context. It fosters participative-art and collaborative media-art-processes. The artistic results and the open approaches of the project will be discussed by 5 panelists from 5 countries. The project itself is constituted by 12 project-partners in 8 European countries with more than 350 artists and creatives from 29 countries worlwide. The approach works on two levels: the implementation of cultural participation-projects by media-artists and the ongoing optimization of the art and participation aspects. PS2 integrates diverse groups of people to participate in the non-institutional set up of structures for the people´s re-design of their urban,societal and living environment. Artists, citizens, creatives with a new user's perception and new skills are able to „medialize“ the Cultural Revolution of art, culture, society and science: into spaces of a new public

Optical Heritage Museum: An Interactive Touch

Optical Heritage Museum (OHM) was established in 1983 with the aim to preserve, promote and display historical artifacts of the optics industry and educate all of its vital role optics has played in societal development. Over the years, the museum has grown in its physical space along with exhibit development to engage audiences in innovative, effective methods. Clark University’s School of Professional Studies department and curator of Optical Heritage Museum, Mr. Whitney’s Whitney, have establish a collaboration that has spanned over two semesters with the goal to support and aid in improving OHM. Our capstone group was assigned the task of improving marketing strategies for OHM, which altered its focus on developing strategies and knowledge on improving the museum’s interactivity amongst its exhibits

Dancing to the Partisan Beat: A First Analysis of Political Communication on TikTok

TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service, whose popularity is increasing rapidly. It was the world's second-most downloaded app in 2019. Although the platform is known for having users posting videos of themselves dancing, lip-syncing, or showcasing other talents, user-videos expressing political views have seen a recent spurt. This study aims to perform a primary evaluation of political communication on TikTok. We collect a set of US partisan Republican and Democratic videos to investigate how users communicated with each other about political issues. With the help of computer vision, natural language processing, and statistical tools, we illustrate that political communication on TikTok is much more interactive in comparison to other social media platforms, with users combining multiple information channels to spread their messages. We show that political communication takes place in the form of communication trees since users generate branches of responses to existing content. In terms of user demographics, we find that users belonging to both the US parties are young and behave similarly on the platform. However, Republican users generated more political content and their videos received more responses; on the other hand, Democratic users engaged significantly more in cross-partisan discussions.Comment: Accepted as a full paper at the 12th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci 2020). Please cite the WebSci version; Second version includes corrected typo