Modeling Memes: A Memetic View of Affordance Learning

This research employed systems social science inquiry to build a synthesis model that would be useful for modeling meme evolution. First, a formal definition of memes was proposed that balanced both ontological adequacy and empirical observability. Based on this definition, a systems model for meme evolution was synthesized from Shannon Information Theory and elements of Bandura\u27s Social Cognitive Learning Theory. Research in perception, social psychology, learning, and communication were incorporated to explain the cognitive and environmental processes guiding meme evolution. By extending the PMFServ cognitive architecture, socio-cognitive agents were created who could simulate social learning of Gibson affordances. The PMFServ agent based model was used to examine two scenarios: a simulation to test for potential memes inside the Stanford Prison Experiment and a simulation of pro-US and anti-US meme competition within the fictional Hamariyah Iraqi village. The Stanford Prison Experiment simulation was designed, calibrated, and tested using the original Stanford Prison Experiment archival data. This scenario was used to study potential memes within a real-life context. The Stanford Prison Experiment simulation was complemented by internal and external validity testing. The Hamariyah Iraqi village was used to analyze meme competition in a fictional village based upon US Marine Corps human terrain data. This simulation demonstrated how the implemented system can infer the personality traits and contextual factors that cause certain agents to adopt pro-US or anti-US memes, using Gaussian mixture clustering analysis and cross-cluster analysis. Finally, this research identified significant gaps in empirical science with respect to studying memes. These roadblocks and their potential solutions are explored in the conclusions of this work

FROM INTERACTION TO INTERACTION: EXPLORING SHARED RESOURCES CONSTRUCTED THROUGH AND MEDIATING CLASSROOM SCIENCE LEARNING

Recent reform documents and science education literature emphasize the importance of scientific argumentation as a discourse and practice of science that should be supported in school science learning. Much of this literature focuses on the structure of argument, whether for assessing the quality of argument or designing instructional scaffolds. This study challenges the narrowness of this research paradigm and argues for the necessity of examining students' argumentative practices as rooted in the complex, evolving system of the classroom. Employing a sociocultural-historical lens of activity theory (Engestrӧm, 1987, 1999), discourse analysis is employed to explore how a high school biology class continuously builds affordances and constraints for argumentation practices through interactions. The ways in which argumentation occurs, including the nature of teacher and student participation, are influenced by learning goals, classroom norms, teacher-student relationships and epistemological stances constructed through a class' interactive history. Based on such findings, science education should consider promoting classroom scientific argumentation as a long-term process, requiring supportive resources that develop through continuous classroom interactions. Moreover, in order to understand affordances that support disciplinary learning in classroom, we need to look beyond just disciplinary interactions. This work has implications for classroom research on argumentation and teacher education, specifically, the preparation of teachers for secondary science teaching

Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality

Building upon a process-and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities. A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality -- primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies -- reveals patterns in youth's information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation. Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure

A general definition of malware

International audienceWe propose a general, formal definition of the concept of malware (malicious software) as a single sentence in the language of a certain modal logic. Our definition is general thanks to its abstract formulation, which, being abstract, is independent of--but nonetheless generally applicable to--the manifold concrete manifestations of malware. From our formulation of malware, we derive equally general and formal definitions of benware (benign software), anti-malware ("antibodies" against malware), and medware (medical software or "medicine" for affected software). We provide theoretical tools and practical techniques for the detection, comparison, and classification of malware and its derivatives. Our general defining principle is causation of (in)correctness

The Psychosocial Reality of Digital Travel

This open access book takes a fresh look at the nature of the digital travel experience, at a time when more and more people are engaged in online social interaction, games, and other virtual experiences essentially involving online visits to other places. It examines whether these experiences can seem real to the virtual traveller and, if so, under what conditions and on what grounds. The book unpacks philosophical theories relevant to the feeling of being somewhere, emphasising the importance of perception and being-in-the-world. Notions of place are outlined, based on work in tourism studies, human geography, and other applied social fields, with an aim to investigate how and when different experiences of place arise for the traveller and how these relate to telepresence – the sense of being there in another place through digital media. Findings from recent empirical studies of digital travel are presented, including a survey from which the characteristics of “digital travellers” are identified. A review of selected interactive design trends and possibilities leads to the conclusion, which draws these strands together and looks to the future of this topical and expanding field

Learning through techno-human entwinement: Implications for the adoption of technologies drawn from agricultural and ICT interventions in the Philippines

In developing countries, such as the Philippines, there is great concern among educational, government and non-government organizations regarding the implementation of agricultural technologies delivered through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), at both regional and national levels. While these types of introduced technologies are discussed in the literature of organizational practice, they are largely absent in studies of management and informal education. This study seeks to address this paucity by investigating the entwinement (i.e. process of interweaving) of humans and this type of introduced technologies through the theoretical perspectives of sociomateriality (i.e. interweaving of human and technologies) and sensemaking (i.e. giving meaning to experience). More specifically, it examines how farmers learn through a process of interweaving with one specific intervention – use of ICT to learn agricultural technologies. Using the theoretical perspective of sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2008; Leonardi, 2012) to examine farmers’ views on the affordances of interventions, this study illustrates how their learning is bound up in an ever-deepening entwinement with the technology through which it is delivered. In addition, this study investigates the processes, which lead to its adoption, through the perspective of sensemaking (Weick, 2005). Conducted as an ethnographic case study, this research draws on observations of farmers’ practices for over four months in two Farmers Information and Technology Services (FITS) centres in Region XI, in the Philippines. These centres aimed to deliver agricultural technologies through ICT. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. Participants included 32 farmers, two FITS managers, an instructional designer, five FITS/village staff members, a farmer scientist, and three community and farmer group leaders. As to the findings related to the possibility of an action to an object, it indicates that participant’s perspectives can be grouped in three distinct ways namely: as a bundle of technical features inherent in the properties of technological tools (e.g., sending email, viewing diseases), as design features of the services provided and as relations between these features. These perspectives appear to build on one another, resulting in ongoing improvement and the emergence of new technologies, routines, affordances, and the altered perception of new constraints. This expansion of perception results in a shift from individual to group affordances. Through the perspective of sensemaking (Weick, 2005), this study identifies two types of sensemakers among the farmers: minimal sensemakers and reflective sensemakers. It also reveals two new influences, previously unrecognized in the literature which resulted to limited sensemaking: a) external affordances (e.g., subsidies) and b) the emergence of a cultural trait, “gaya-gaya” (i.e. imitation). Moreover, these results further illustrate how the sensemaking process is made visible when viewed from a sociomaterial perspective. Using the assumptions of the sociomaterial perspective that learning is made visible in practice, this study found that participants progressed through three stages, namely: figuring, configuring and reconfiguring. Findings indicate that during ‘figuring’, the farmers engaged in various learning processes by observing others and engaging in verbal exchanges (e.g., linking new abstract ideas with material objects, organizing ideas, and verbal referencing). In ‘configuring’, farmers learned by experimentation, storytelling, group learning and the integration of sociomaterial objects in farming routines. During ‘reconfiguring’, farmers engaged in experimentation that focused on the creation of new knowledge and understanding, and the manipulation of new artefacts. The findings of this study are vital for understanding how an individual’s perspectives, sensemaking and ways of learning lead to adoption. It contributes to the literature new insights into the process of entwinement between individuals and interventions using the perspectives of sociomateriality and sensemaking in the context of informal education in a developing country

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 1

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 1

Concepts of relevance in a semiotic framework applied to ISAD (information systems analysis and design).

Relevance is the critical criterion for valuing information. The usual requirements of valuable information resources are their accuracy, brevity, timeliness and rarity. This thesis points out that relevance has to be explicitly recognised as an important quality of information. Therefore, the theory of signs is adopted to enable a systematic study of the problem of relevance according to the branches of semiotics in order to clarify the concept of information. Relevance has several meanings according to the various disciplinary approaches including phenomenology, law, logic, information science, communication and cognition. These different concepts are discussed and criticised in two chapters. A new approach is proposed in which a universal concept of relevance is considered as an affordance. Therefore, all the approaches to relevance can be applied within the broader approach of the analysis of affordances. This approach not only encompasses all the underlying characteristics of relevance, it is also compatible with the assumptions of the logic of norms and affordances (NORMA). NORMA semantic analysis is used as a basis on which concepts of relevance are applied semiotically. Two case- studies are selected for testing these concepts which results in a guideline for practical application in a semiotic framework. The results from these case-studies confirm the practical importance of these concepts of relevance which can be systematically used in the analysis and design of information systems. It also reaffirms the underlying characteristics of relevance which exist in the context of social reality

Social media usage and entrepreneurial development amongst 18- to 25-year-olds in Hail, Saudi Arabia

The recent transformation endorsed by the Vision 2030 development plan in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has instigated a negotiation of modern values and norms in a youthful conservative nation. The rise of social media usage in Saudi Arabia and specifically in Hail has enabled these negotiations due to considerable technological advancement and its adoption by a youthful nation where almost 72% of the population are below the age of 35. The Saudi social media scene has not only become a recognisable career path, driven by the vast economic and socio-cultural reform, but a space where intersections of a power dynamic is visible and complex.Two main theoretical approaches have been adopted to examine and explore social media usage and entrepreneurial development. The first approach is Bourdieu’s work of field, habitus, and capital (1977, 1984, 1986) and more recent scholarly work on social, cultural, economic, and symbolic capitals. The second approach is informed by scholarship on presentational culture, new media, and social media studies. Although both theoretical approaches are from a western viewpoint, the experiences of Saudi youth provide new insight into the contextual negotiations between old values and norms and modernity in an era of development. In this qualitative study, the data will speak for themselves through the experiences and perspectives of social media users and entrepreneurs explored across an open-ended survey, focus groups and semi-structured interviews. While this work is focused on Saudi, it offers lessons and insights for other similar nations, or even for the west. The study raises questions relating to how Hail’s young men and women who maintain old values will utilise social media platforms to navigate and negotiate their online identity into an online entrepreneurial identity. Furthermore, having a diverse sample for each method – for instance, influencers and micro-celebrities from both rural and urban backgrounds – enabled me to capture different dimensions of the same entrepreneurial process. This entrepreneurial process identified different identity constructions and identity performances and crosschecking these practices with Hail’s young men and women demonstrates the complex ways in which the Saudi social media entrepreneur can participate in and contribute to the attention economy in this new Saudi era