The civic and social implications of over-the-top television

Through the lenses of Apparatgeist Theory and the Theory of Networked Publics, this dissertation examines the civic and social implications of the contemporary television ecosystem, focusing on the phenomenon of binge-watching as it relates to political participation and empathic concern. Results of an online survey, including quantitative and qualitative measures, indicate that binge-watching television is a statistically significant factor in positively shaping political participation, both online and offline, regardless of the genre consumed. That said, news and informational programming served as the most powerful genre in predicting political participation. Additionally, this dissertation considers the role of empathy within the binge-watching ecosystem, as informed by the Theory of Narrative Empathy; most strikingly, results suggest that empathic concern relates negatively with binge-watching, regardless of genre consumed. However, the process of talking about the television shows binged proved to be a positive and statistically significant contributor to political participation, political discourse, as well as other-oriented dimensions of empathy. Implications and potential directions for future research and theory development are discussed

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies

Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: https://openmonographs.org.Interactivity and Agency: Making-Common and the Limits of Difference -- Dance in Public: Of Common Spaces -- A World from a Crowd: Composing the Common -- Screen Sharing: Dance as Gift of the Commo

Audio beacon technologies, surveillance and social order

This thesis explores audio beacon technology with the aim of elucidating the implications of this technology for the individual in contemporary society. Audio beacons are hidden inside digital devices. They emit and receive high frequency audio signals which are inaudible to the human ear, thereby generating and transmitting data without our knowledge. The motivation for this research is to raise awareness of the prevalence of audio beacon technologies and to explore their implications for contemporary society. The research takes an interdisciplinary approach involving – 1) a survey of audio beacon technology, 2) a contextualization in terms of contemporary theories of surveillance and control and 3) an interpretation in terms of 20th century dystopian literature. The hidden surveillance and privacy of this technology is examined mainly through the humanistic perspective of George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. The general conclusion formed is that audio beacon technologies can serve as a surveillance method enhancing authoritarian and exploitative regimes. To mitigate the negative impacts of audio beacons, this research proposes two types of solutions – 1) individual actions that will have an immediate effect and 2) governmental legislation that can improve privacy in the longer term. Both of these solutions cannot happen without a raised public awareness, towards which this research hopes to make a contribution. Finally, this research introduces the notion of a \u27digital paradox\u27 in which the dystopian worlds of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are brought together in order to characterize surveillance and control in contemporary society

How has the development of digital methods, technical hardware and scientific knowledge changed the industry and culture of screen media

Technology and contemporary trends are becoming more integral in how the UK screen media industries operates, thus meaning their sense of participation in screen culture can become influential in welcoming new creatives into the wider screen sector. In regard to the screen industries in Britain, this influence can be especially seen in film related areas such as film journalism, film production, and film distribution. While the influence of contemporary technologies on screen media and culture has continued the widespread interest in film as a medium for cinephiles, fans and aspiring creatives alike, it has democratised these areas by creating more accessible tools and resources, on the other hand it has also questioned, impacted, and arguably benefitted the ways in which they function today. In comparison to the near century old age of the medium itself, this dynamic situation has only materialised over the last decade, showing it is a very current and new area of film discourse in need of constant input in order to keep up with its constant developments. This thesis, on the development of digital methods, technical hardware and scientific knowledge, aims to explore how contemporary technology and technological trends have changed the industry and culture of screen media, by focusing on film journalism, the filmmaking industry, and key types of film distribution, such as film festival events, in a predominantly British based context. Key research methods will be used to help recognise and consider the positive and negative effects of these trends, and in doing so will identify these effects through questionnaire data, interviews, and grounded research, and then explain the subsequent impacts these changes could impose on these areas and on film as a general medium

Towards a definition of Web 2.0 - a comparative study of the 'wiki', 'blog' and 'social network' as instances of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 was a phrase coined in 2004 to describe the characteristics of web sites which survived the original Dot-com crash. Despite the discussion of this phenomenon in a wide variety of both academic and mass media sources, itʼs exact definition remains unclear. The relative contributions of technology and social participation to this phenomenon are particularly confused. The primary aim of this research report is to provide a clear and comprehensive definition of Web 2.0. This definition is determined through a combined social and technological analysis of blogs, wikis and social network sites, through their particular manifestations in Boing Boing, Wikipedia and Facebook respectively. It is the finding of this research that Web 2.0 is primarily the result of a natural evolution from Web 1.0 technologies and attitudes, and that Web 2.0 is essentially a social phenomenon. This research provides separate definitions for Web 2.0 technologies and Web 2.0 platforms. A Web 2.0 technology is any technology that aids and encourages simple intuitive user interaction through an architecture of participation. These technologies enable user feedback, and are thus constantly improved and exist within the ethos of a perpetual beta. Web 2.0 technologies embrace re-mix and mash-up philosophies. A Web 2.0 platform is a read-write Web platform designed to enable and encourage User Generated Content and interaction. These platforms can be built with any set of technologies, and their primary characteristics are social in nature, but the platforms must allow users to interact with the technology at either an open-source, network or appropriation level. These platforms become more powerful and richer the greater the number of people using the platform, and ultimately result in the formation of Web 2.0 communities

An Industry of Indies: The New Cultural Economy of Digital Game Production

An Industry of Indies builds upon foundational questions concerned with the constitution, operations, changes, disruptions, and borders of the global digital games industry. Although scholars have engaged with the dynamics of the video game industry, few have analyzed the emergence of indie games over the last decade and the impact of these small games on the always already shifting terrain of this industry. During this period, the video game industry has been confronting a wave of changes wrought by continually emerging technologies, player expectations, and a generation of small game developers who have challenged particular industry practices and dogmas, even as they also provide value to the industry’s largest video game publishers and platform holders. An Industry of Indies examines a range of independent, marginal, and alternative digital game production cultures across the globe, from commercial indie games to radical avant-garde games, and delineates the cultural and economic relationship of each to the global economy of digital game production and consumption. This dissertation argues that despite the desire for real subversion amongst various indie development communities, an underlying neoliberal logic drives many of their entrepreneurial business practices. Even as many commercial indie developers distinguish their workplace practices, design approaches, and development ethos from the mainstream, corporate industry, most still rely on the same ideologies of bootstrap individualism and free market politics that undergird the dominant industry. Furthermore, even those developers who distance themselves from the industry, usually accompanied by a feminist and/or Marxist critique of industry practices or output, necessarily have to rely on venture capital funded startup companies like Patreon in order to connect with their fans and earn a living within a capitalist system with which they disagree – a sad irony not lost on them. Within this greater context, the indie developer becomes a point of struggle between notions of the counter-hegemonic creative artist and the idea of the success-driven technology startup company, with the concepts of passion, art, and sustainability suturing the two perspectives together. This project employs a middle-range media industries approach to describe and analyze the operations of indie developers within the global digital games industry, specifically an approach that combines interdisciplinary elements of cultural studies, discourse analysis, political economy, and feminist media studies. That is, this dissertation articulates the organization, operations, and agents of the commercial video game industry, in its largest and smallest forms, in order to describe how independent and alternative development cultures fit within larger systems of capital exchange, from commercial shops to solitary producers. It offers three significant interventions, primarily in the areas of media industries studies and game studies. An Industry of Indies examines indie games not only as alternative art or politics but as cultural products within complex, global ecologies of exchange; it focuses on the industry’s smallest companies rather than its largest corporations; and it interrogates the boundary-policing strategies within media industries, arguing that commonly conceived barriers between amateur and professional media producers are, in fact, fluid and wavering, dependent on constantly shifting discourses and industrial practices, policies, and standards

Antisemitic Memes and Naïve Teens: Qualitative and Quantitative Impacts of the Internet on Antisemitism, the Evolution of Antisemitism 2.0, and Developing Adaptable Research Methodologies into Online Hate, Abuse, and Misinformation

This thesis posits that the advent of the internet has resulted in qualitative and quantitative changes to antisemitism, particularly in the period since web 2.0. Comparing online antisemitism with other forms of online abuse, this thesis demonstrates limits in the research on broader manifestations of online discrimination due to inconsistent methodologies and quantities of research. A key consideration is how online antisemitism both differs and intersects with broader manifestations, including cyberbullying, cyber-racism, and abusive conspiracy movements. Through consideration of these intersections, the broader history of antisemitism, and the functions of internet technology, profiles of major online sources for antisemitism are presented. Beyond illustrating how the internet has changed antisemitism alongside other manifestations of abuse and discrimination, this thesis also develops and tests a research model that can be adapted to different fields and disciplines. Simulated online conversations between young adults and a Holocaust denier evaluate how effective young adult web users are at recognising, researching, responding to and refuting antisemitism online, and what tools can be designed to assist them. Antisemitism has undergone significant qualitative and quantitative change due to the internet and now reaches more young people who are ill-equipped to resist its online manifestations. While expertise in the specific nature of antisemitism is needed to tackle this problem, the response can involve adaptable methodologies of benefit to the study of online hate more broadly. There is benefit in collaboration across researchers, fields, and disciplines to provide holistic explanations and solutions to some common aspects of online hate, abuse, and misinformation

A chance for the community to affect game development: Incorporating player feedback to game development during Early Access

The goal of this thesis is to research how Early Access affects game development, and how player feedback affects the development and design of the games in question. In this thesis I will explain why Early Access is used (or why it might not be the right development choice), how developers handle transparency during it, which methods are used in communicating with the audiences and what types of feedback is implemented in the development and design of the game. I will explain how the players could affect the game design in the case of my research participants, and how Early Access affected the development process of those participants. Background research was done in an exploratory way, using both academic and non-academic sources, such as game developer interviews available online. After forming a base where I cover Early Access in general, and where I explain it as a part of a game development process, I conducted my own research using a survey and interviews. I then analyzed the data with a thematic analysis. Combining the survey answers and the interviews, a total of eight participants took part in this research. All of them are game developers, who have worked with an Early Access title. Thematic analysis was then used to raise themes from the data, and five themes were selected. These themes cover the reasons to use Early Access, strategies to give out information and gather information from the players, and incorporating gathered feedback to the development and design of the game. Early Access was felt to be a good development choice when the developers were uncertain about some aspects of their game, or if they wanted to get feedback from the players to make the game better suited for players. Other reasons for using Early Access were mainly funding and marketing. All of the participants agreed that feedback was one of the main reasons to use Early Access, and thus they all had systems to communicate with their players. Different tools for transparency and informing players are listed in this thesis, as well as the ways the participants gathered feedback. Lastly, I discuss what type of feedback was incorporated to the game designs of the participants’ games, and what limitations the developers had (i.e., what feedback was not taken into consideration). According to this research, Early Access is a viable solution for some game developers and for certain types of games, but it requires a lot of work and transparency. With Early Access the game in development might be better suited for the players after the release, and some participants said that Early Access is the ‘right way’ to develop games. However, that requires commitment to communicate with the players. The developers need to adjust to the open development practices and set clear limits and restrictions for preventing things like tiredness, burnout, or work and personal life mixing. If executed correctly and managing the communications with the players in an orderly manner, Early Access is a suitable solution in creating games with the players, and the players have a chance to affect the game in a direction they would want it to go