Decalogue Five: A Short Film about Killing, Sin, and Community

Decalogue Five tells the story of Waldemar Rekowski (Jan Tesarz), a jaded taxi driver, Piotr Balicki (Krzysztof Globisz), an idealistic, newly-licensed attorney, and Jacek Lazar (Mirosław Baka), a young and troubled drifter, whose lives intersect with one another as a result of fate, or contingent circumstance, or some combination of both. With brutal detail and detachment, the film depicts Jacek’s seemingly aimless wanderings through Warsaw, his senseless killing of Waldemar, his interactions with Piotr (his court-appointed attorney), and his eventual execution after a failed defense in court. Like other films within the Decalogue series, Five illustrates what happens when human beings are forced to confront ethical dilemmas (and thus are forced to confront themselves as responsible moral decision makers) in a world that seems to offer little in the way of moral direction, meaning, purpose, and community with others. Discussing the overarching aim of the Decalogue series as a whole, Krzysztof Kies´lowski refers to the sense of alienation, aimlessness, and loneliness that often describes the human conditio

Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

From Time to Quality Time: Making Every Moment Count

This fact sheet includes suggestions for ways to maximize time with loved ones though transforming moments together into quality time

The Pleasures and Perils of Technology in Intimate Relationships

Technologies have rapidly become pervasive parts of people's lives and relationships. Within intimate couple relationships, partners may use technologies for many functions, including communicating, sharing affection, planning, and learning about one another. There is growing recognition that these functions can create both positive and negative outcomes for couples. The purpose of this study was to conduct an in-depth examination of the potential positive and negative impacts of technology for intimate couple relationships. Data from an electronic survey of 225 undergraduate and graduate university students were subject to content analysis procedures to identify themes in participants’ perspectives toward the impact of technology on their relationships—both beneficial and deleterious. The counseling and research implications of the identified themes are addressed

Assessing the effect of mobile word-of-mouth on consumers : the physical, psychological and social influences

Mobile technologies enable users to discover and research products anytime, anywhere. Mobile devices allow consumers to create and share content based on physical location, facilitate seamless interactions, and provide context-relevant information that can better satisfy users’ needs and enhance their shopping experience. As consumers increasingly rely on mobile devices to search information and purchase products, they need immediate, updated, informative and credible opinions in concise forms. Meanwhile, marketers face unprecedented opportunities for mobile marketing, making ever important for them to understand the mobile word-of-mouth and its effect on the purchase behaviors of consumers on the mobile platform vs. those on other devices. Drawing from the media richness theory and the principle of compensatory adaptation, study one performs sentiment analysis of online product reviews from both mobile and desktop devices by analyzing over one million customer reviews from Dianping.com. We find that mobile reviews are naturally shorter, contain more adverbs and adjectives, and have smaller readership and less votes of helpfulness. The product ratings from mobile reviews are more polarized yet the average valence of mobile reviews is higher. By comparison, desktop reviews contain more pictures and are rated more helpful. Lastly, pricy products receive more desktop reviews than mobile ones. Study two draws from the construal level theory and posit that WOM from mobile devices reflects closer psychological distances (temporal and social), thus constitutes a lower construal level than that from desktop computers. Using a dataset of over one million product reviews from Dianping.com, we assess the value of online product reviews from mobile devices in comparison with those from the desktop computers. Our findings show that WOM is more helpful when it is socially and temporally closer to the users and this effect is amplified when using mobile devices, which bring the mental construal to a low level and make others’ opinions more relevant. Further, we show that product type moderates the effect of online reviews in that m-WOM is more influential for hedonic products and its value for the utilitarian consumption is the lowest. Study three deploys the observational learning theory to examine the effect of WOM across the mobile and desktop devices on the purchase behavior of online promotional offers. The findings suggest that the effect of WOM on the purchase of promotion offers varies significantly across the platforms, product categories, and discount rates. These findings help better understand the strengths, limitations and the effect of m-WOM as marketers attempt to offer consumers context-sensitive and time-critical promotions through mobile devices and make a significant contribution to the literature on interactive marketing. These studies render meaningful implications for theory development about the role of mobile technologies in marketing and can assist practitioners formulating effective promotional strategies through the electronic channels via mobile and desktop devices

Media(ting) Between Generations: Common Sense and Perceptions of New Media by Young People and Teachers

The wide spread of mobile communication devices, the expansion of social media and participatory media platforms, the ease to edit, share and produce media content, indicate a trend of change in the media system that influences the production and consumption of knowledge and generates new paths for the young\u2019s identity construction. This raises necessary questions about the ways not only young, but also the education agencies \u2013 school in particular \u2013 relate to these transformations, starting from taking into account the production of common sense on the use, risks and opportunities of the media. Based on these considerations, in this paper, we will discuss the results of a qualitative case study carried out in the Veneto Region (Italy) on upper secondary school students and teachers in order to detect and compare the perception that young and educators have of the media, trying to identify boundaries or land on which to build exchange opportunities for dialogue between the generations

Humour as social dreaming:Stand-up comedy as therapeutic performance

Stand-up comedy binds dramatic cultural spectacle to ritualised, intimate exposure. Examining ‘case’ examples from live comic performance, this paper describes stand-up as a kind of social dreaming. The article proposes a theoretical frame drawing on Thomas Ogden’s notion of ‘talking as dreaming’ and psychoanalytic accounts connecting humour and melancholia. Locating the stand-up comedian’s propensity for humour in a specialist capacity to hone, display and process traumata, the paper characterises stand-up as a performative oscillation evoking paranoid-schizoid and depressive anxieties. A psychosocial gloss places stand-up as a cultural resource in the service of the popular-as-therapeutic. The paper articulates complementarities between Henri Bergson’s formulations on the function of laughter and an emergent object relations account in order to help to recognise ‘containing’ and ‘cultural-restorative’ aspects of much stand-up, understood as contemporary psychosocial ritual

The effects of technology on interpersonal relationships among Rowan University students ages 18 - 25

The purposes of this study were to (a) determine how young adults are communicating with each other and (b) understand what is driving them to communicate using different methods of communication. After completing a literature review, the researcher conducted primary research using survey instruments and interviews. What people are trying to communicate determines how they are going to relay messages. The urgency of a message affects how respondents answer the message