Trust in the digital world - the return of the kings of old

Drawing principally on examples and literature from the Anglosphere, the author argues that the high salience given to "trust" and "trustworthiness" in recent scholarly literature, and which (notably in Putnam's work) attributes declining trust to a widely mistrusted mass media does not acknowledge the trustbuilding potential (realised in some instances) of interactive "Web 2.0" applications. Drawing on O'Neill's proposal that trust inheres in dialogue and mutual checking and verification, the author argues that "Web 2.0" media provide a variety of instances where the "dialogic" character of "Web 2.0" has established and enhanced trustworthiness. He argues normatively for a combination of "Web 2.0" interactivity and the adoption and implementation of self-regulatory codes in order to enhance the trustworthiness of the media

Democratic Replay: Enhancing TV Election Debates with Interactive Visualisations

This paper presents an online platform for enhancing televised election debates with interactive visualisations. Election debates are one of the highlights of election campaigns worldwide. They are also often criticised as appearing scripted, rehearsed, detached from much of the electorate, and at times too complex. Democratic Replay enhances videos of election debates with a collection of interactive tools aimed at providing a replay experience centred around citizens' needs. We present the system requirements, design and implementation, and report on an evaluation based on the ITV Leaders' Debate from the 2015 UK General Election campaign

Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World

Details strategies for realizing healthy local information ecologies through for-profit and nonprofit media; higher education and community institutions; emphasis on relevance, research, and revenues; and government support. Includes case summaries

A review of the evidence on the use of ICT in the Early Years Foundation Stage

This report reviewed existing evidence on the potential of technology to support the development of educational policy and practice in the context of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Reference is made to the use of ICT by young children from aged birth to five years and its potential impacts, positive and negative on their cognitive, social, emotional educational, visual and physical development

Open-standards rich media mobile platform & rapid deployment service creation tool

This paper builds upon the work carried out by Brunel University in the field of "Fast Prototyping And Semi-automated User Interface And Application Generation for Converged Broadcast and Cellular Terminals" [1]. This work involved the development of a service creation application for interactive services on mobile devices and methodologies and tools to speed up and deskill the deployment process. This paper aims at further enhancing these tools and presents an enhanced open standards reference platform for mobile digital TV and rich media services. By using a Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG)-driven Java MIDP application (as opposed to bitmapped raster graphics-driven MHP), rich media services can be broadcast to mobile devices running various Java-supported platforms with a user interface scalable to any screen size. Moreover, the Rich Media Mobile Browser is integrated into a service creation tool, therefore enabling rapid testing and deployment of rich mobile media services. The following sections detail the motivation behind the need for a platform which allows for rich media play-out on mobile devices, along with the rich media mobile viewing application and the tools used to create and test rich media with speed and ease

Reservoir hill and audiences for online interactive drama

This paper analyses the interactive experiences constructed for users of the New Zealand online interactive drama Reservoir Hill (2009, 2010), focusing both on the nature and levels of engagement which the series provided to users and the difficulties of audience research into this kind of media content. The series itself provided tightly prescribed forms of interactivity across multiple platforms, allowing forms of engagement that were greatly appreciated by its audience overall but actively explored only by a small proportion of users. The responses from members of the Reservoir Hill audience suggests that online users themselves are still learning the nature of, and constraints on, their engagements with various forms of online interactive media. This paper also engages with issue of how interactivity itself is defined, the difficulties of both connecting with audience members and securing timely access to online data, and the challenges of undertaking collaborative research with media producers in order to gain access to user data

Online Video Contest Effects on Brand and Ad Attitudes

This research investigates how online video contests (OVCs) affect brand image, as measured by brand and advertisement attitudes. After conducting a pre-test to discover an appropriate product for the Generation Y target market, we ran an experiment examining OVCs, television, and magazine ad’s effects on multi-item measures of brand and advertisement attitudes. One hundred twenty-one subjects were randomly assigned to one of the three test conditions. The OVC significantly resulted in positive brand attitudes for the hedonic dimension such as feelings and attractiveness of the brand. For the more functional characteristics, OVCs did not influence brand attitudes. OVCs also produced positive advertising attitudes in terms of clarity, but other dimensions of advertising attitudes were unchanged. We also compared the OVC to the more traditional media of TV and magazines. OVCs produced more positive brand attitudes in terms of feelings than both TV and magazines. For the advertising attitude measure, OVCs produced significantly higher ratings than TV for feelings, attractiveness, and entertainment. There were no significant differences between OVCs and magazines for advertising attitudes. Our findings suggest that marketers can use OVCs effectively if the benefits of the product are hedonic in nature. Functional benefits may not prove as effective in enhancing OVC brand and ad attitudes. Marketers must determine their promotional goals before putting an OVC into practice

(De)convergence in TV: a comparative analysis of the development of Smart TV

Against the backdrop of media convergence, Smart TVs are developing rapidly in large parts of the world. Smart TV refers to the integration of broadband Internet and social media features into TV sets. From a media business perspective, the proliferation of Smart TV services may put pressure on the market structure of the TV landscape, and urge for new business models in order to capture the dynamics of media convergence. By means of a comparative analysis in four European markets (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), the development of Smart TV is sketched in terms of viewing patterns, business models and standardization. The conclusion is that national TV markets are evolving quite differently, so that service providers must adapt their marketing strategies to reflect local market conditions. Hence, the success of Smart TV ultimately depends on the local package of value-added services and the amount of strategic partnerships with content owners, TV broadcasters and pay-TV operators