Introduction to Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media Minitrack

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Young People and Digital Intimacies. What is the evidence and what does it mean? Where next?

The digital age makes new forms of connection possible, enabling ‘digital intimacies’ including the many practices of communicating, producing and sharing intimate content (‘sexting’; selfies; making, viewing and circulating sexual content; using hook-up apps; and searching online for advice about sex). Where young people engage in digital intimacies, policymakers have tended to respond with alarm and commissioned research premised on demonstrating negative outcomes. Young people’s take up of technologies is contrasted with previous generations and ideas of ‘healthy’, ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ sexual development which ignores and marginalises diversity of sexuality and sexual expression, and leads to campaigns that seek to supervise and regulate youth sexuality. This in turn results in legislation and censorship with consequences including blocking websites for sexual abuse support and sexual education. The government has suspended introduction of Age Verification for pornographic websites but is pressing ahead with its ‘Online Harms’ White Paper which plans for broader and more comprehensive regulatory frameworks in the interests of protecting children and young people in online spaces. The UK government has positioned itself as a world leader in developing new regulatory approaches to tackle online harms but the evidence base for those approaches is neither robust nor nuanced enough to respond to the increasing mediatisation of everyday life and sexual identity. This briefing advocates for a broader recognition of young people’s investments in digital intimacies, acknowledging what growing up and learning about sex in the digital age means for young people in order to inform future policy and practice. Policies that are informed by robust research and understandings that accommodate the nuanced practices of digital intimacy will provide the support that young people need and deserve as they navigate their media lives, develop awareness of ethical and unethical behaviour, and what is right for them

Learning within Digital Media: Investigating the Relationships Between Student Citation Networks, Assignment Structures, and Learning Outcomes

Students are comfortable sharing digital content with others, yet the effect of sharing of digital media for learning remains largely unexplored. Building on research in social network analysis and learning analytics, this research explores the use and sharing of digital media in learning activities, analyzing the effects of the design of the learning activities on the resulting networks of students and their cited resources, and exploring relationships between attributes of these citation networks and students’ perceptions of the learning outcomes. Results suggest that the extent to which an assignment is well-structured and converges towards a single solution positively influences the density and clustering coefficient of the resulting citation network, and that these network measures in turn have a positive influence on students’ perceptions of learning from the assignment

Go for it: Where IS researchers aren’t researching

This viewpoint article describes two research topics under-researched by Information Systems (IS) researchers: Robotics and IT addiction. These topics offer great potential for IS researchers in terms of business and societal impacts and it would behoove IS researchers to study them more fully. The aspects of the research topics that are related to IS are discussed and potential research areas and questions are suggested

Go for it: Where IS researchers aren’t researching

This viewpoint article describes two research topics under-researched by Information Systems (IS) researchers: Robotics and IT addiction. These topics offer great potential for IS researchers in terms of business and societal impacts and it would behoove IS researchers to study them more fully. The aspects of the research topics that are related to IS are discussed and potential research areas and questions are suggested