Inviting the Audience – Interactive, Participatory, and Social Television in Finland

The television and the ways it has invited the audience to take part have been changing during the last decade. Today’s interaction, or rather participation, comes from multiplatform formats, such as TV spectacles that combine TV and web platforms in order to create a wider TV experience. Multiplatform phenomena have spread television consumption and traditional coffee table discussions to several different devices and environments. Television has become a part of the bigger puzzle of interconnected devices that operates on several platforms instead of just one. This thesis examines the Finnish television (2004–2014) through the notion of audience participation and introduces the technical, thematic, and social linkages as three different phases, interactive, participatory, social, and their most characteristic features in terms of audience participation. The aim of the study is also to focus on the idea of a possible change by addressing the possible and subtler variations that have taken place through the concept of digital television. Firstly, Finnish television history has gone through numerous trials, exploring the interactive potential of television formats. Finnish SMS-based iTV had its golden era around 2005, when nearly 50% of the television formats were to some extent interactive. Nowadays, interactive television formats have vanished due to their negative reputation and this important part of recent history is mainly been neglected in the academic scope. The dissertation focuses also on the present situation and the ways television content invites the audience to take part. “TV meets the Internet” is a global expression that characterises digital TV, and the use of the Web combined with television content is also examined. Also the linkages between television and social media are identified. Since television can nowadays be described multifaceted, the research approaches are also versatile. The research is based on qualitative content analysis, media observation, and Internet inquiry. The research material also varies. It consists of primary data: taped iTV formats, website material, and social media traces both from Twitter and Facebook and secondary data: discussion forums, observations from the media and Internet inquiry data. To sum up the results, the iTV phase represented, through its content, a new possibility for audiences to take part in a TV show (through gameful and textual features) in real-time. In participatory phase, the most characteristic features from TV-related content view, is the fact that online platform(s) were used to immerse the audience with additional material and, due to this, to extend the TV watching enjoyment beyond the actual broadcast. During the Social (media) phase, both of these features, real-timeness, and extended enjoyment through additional material, are combined and Facebook & Twitter, for example, are used to immerse people in live events (in real-time) via broadcast-related tweets and extra-material offered on a Facebook page. This thesis fills in the gap in Finnish television research by examining the rapid changes taken place on the field within the last ten years. The main results is that the development of Finnish digital television has been much more diverse and subtle than has been anticipated by following only the news, media, and contemporary discourses on the subject of television. The results will benefit both practitioners and academics by identifying the recent history of Finnish television.Yleisö mukaan – interaktiivinen, osallistava ja sosiaalinen televisio Suomessa 2004–2014 Television sanotaan läpikäyneen useita muutoksia 2000-luvulle tultaessa, erityisesti digitaalisuuden näkökulmasta.Tutkimus esittelee, miten televisio on aktivoinut ja kutsunut ihmisiä ottamaan osaa TV-tarjontaan – niin teknologian, temaattisen sisällön kuin sosiaalisuudenkin kautta. Suomalaisen TV:n lähihistoriaan kuuluu olennaisena osana interaktiivisen TV-viihteen aikakausi. iTV-viihteellä oli kulta-aikansa v. 2005, jolloin peruskanavien tarjonnasta lähes 50% oli jollakin tasolla interaktiivista. Se piti sisällään SMS-pohjaiset TV-chatit, TV-mobiilipelit sekä interaktiiviset soittovisat. Nykyään lähes kaikki ITV-viihteen muodot ovat hävinneet ruudusta. Kattavaa akateemista tutkimusta ei TV:n viimeisten 10 vuoden ajalta kuitenkaan ole - väitöstyö vastaa tähän tarpeeseen. Tutkimus keskittyy kuitenkin myös TV:n nykytilaan. Nykypäivän interaktio/vuorovaikutus tai pikemminkin osallistuminen näyttäytyy erilaisten multiplatform-formaattien (elävät eri alustoilla samanaikaisesti) myötä. TV-spektaakkelit kutsuvat yleisön ottamaan osaa TV-sisältöön, esim. äänestämällä Idolsissa ja Euroviisuissa tai osallistumalla sisältöihin Internetissä/sosiaalisessa mediassa maksutta. Tutkimusaineisto on monipuolista ja se koostuu muun muassa iTV-formaattien nauhoituksista, Internetsivumateriaalista sekä sosiaalisen median, Facebook ja Twitter, taltioinneista. Lisämateriaalina käytetään keskustelupalstamateriaalia, Internetkysely-dataa ja mediassa esillä olleita artikkeleita. Tutkimusote on laadullinen ja työssä on pääosin toteutettu sisällön analyysia sekä havainnoivaa tutkimusta. Työn päätuloksena esitetään, että suomalaisen digitaalisen television aikakausi on huomattavasti monisyisempi ja monipuolisempi kun on aiemmin ajateltu. Tutkimuksessa käsitelty 10 vuoden ajanjakso voidaan jakaa kolmeen: 1) interaktiivisuuden, 2) osallistavuuden ja 3) sosiaalisen median vaiheisiin. On selvää, että aikakaudet limittyvät keskenään, mutta kukin vaihe pitää kuitenkin sisällään piirteitä, jotka ovat erityisiä juuri sille aikakaudelle. Interaktiivisuuden aikakautta määrittävät tekstiviestipohjainen iTV-viihde eli chatit, mobiilipeleineen ja hyperventiloivine juontajineen. Osallistavuuden aikakaudella Internet alkoi toimia yhä enemmän TV-lähetysten vastinparina tarjoamalla extra-materiaalia ja lisäinformaatiota. Sosiaalisen median myötä mm. Internetin ohjelmakohtaisten keskustelupalstojen luoma sosiaalisuus on siirtynyt live-lähetysten ympärille Twitter-tweettien myötä. Ajankohtaisen materiaalin jako taas on siirtynyt Facebookin piiriin jättäen ohjelmakohtaiset nettisivut lähinnä online-arkistoiksi. Väitöskirja suhtautuu kuitenkin televisioon projisoituihin diskursseihin sekä muutoksen käsitteeseen kriittisesti. Nykypäivän television on usein katsottu, osittain utopistisestikin, kehittyvän yhä vuorovaikutteisempaan ja sosiaalistavampaan suuntaan. Interaktiivisen TV:n kokeiluja on kuitenkin nähty jo television alkuajoista asti ja sosiaalisen median mukaan tulo ei automaattisesti tee TV:n kuluttamisesta sosiaalisempaa. Suomalaisen TV:n lähihistoria ja digitaalisen television aikakausi sisältää huomattavasti monisyisempiä kehitysvaiheita, mitä diskurssien pohjalta esittäytyy. Tämä väitöstyö tarjoaa tärkeän, aiemmin puuttuneen, palasen suomalaisen TV-tutkimuksen nykykentälle ja saatuja tuloksia voidaan hyödyntää niin akateemisessa kuin käytännön konteksteissakin.Siirretty Doriast

CANELC: constructing an e-language corpus

This paper reports on the construction of CANELC: the Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus.3 CANELC is a one million word corpus of digital communication in English, taken from online discussion boards, blogs, tweets, emails and SMS messages. The paper outlines the approaches used when planning the corpus: obtaining consent; collecting the data and compiling the corpus database. This is followed by a detailed analysis of some of the patterns of language used in the corpus. The analysis includes a discussion of the key words and phrases used as well as the common themes and semantic associations connected with the data. These discussions form the basis of an investigation of how e-language operates in both similar and different ways to spoken and written records of communication (as evidenced by the BNC - British National Corpus). 3 CANELC stands for Cambridge and Nottingham e-language Corpus. This corpus has been built as part of a collaborative project between The University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press with whom sole copyright of the annotated corpus resides. CANELC comprises one-million words of digital English taken from SMS messages, blogs, tweets, discussion board content and private/business emails. Plans to extend the corpus are under discussion. The legal dimension to corpus ‘ownership’ of some forms of unannotated data is a complex one and is under constant review. At the present time the annotated corpus is only available to authors and researchers working for CUP and is not more generally available

The Praised, The Loved, The Deplored, The Forgotten : A View into the Wide History of Finnish Games

The history of Finnish games is diverse. It consists not only of commercially successful digital games or board game classics that have knit together generations. Finnish game history is multifaceted both in terms of technologies and execution, as well as content and impact. The reception of games varies: some are highly praised, others become dearly loved, some are deplored and many will simply become forgotten. A game is a versatile format for a variety of works, by different creators and for different types of players.Games are valuable fixtures of cultural histories around the globe. Finnish games are in a precious role in the cultural heritage of Finland. This book offers only a small sample of games. The idea for the book was conceived during an exhibition organised in a local museum during the Nordic DiGRA 2012 conference, Tampere Finland. Four researchers and roughly 20 students joined efforts to build an exhibition to introduce foreign visitors to local games. Game developers, journalists, historians and collectors lent a helping hand in putting everything together. The multiform exhibition reflected the different backgrounds of the members of the team – we ended up opening a diverse view towards Finnish games. Although the exhibition was open only for a short time, the success surpassed all expectations. The work conducted for the exhibition has been updated for this book, and it has served as a basis for the Finnish Museum of Games opened in 2016. Game history is common knowledge, but not always easy to access. It is time to put more effort in recording the history for future generations as well as to trace the paths already forgotten. Games cannot, however, be understood simply by reading – they must be experienced. Hopefully this book will show a guiding light towards understanding games in a wider spectrum and bring everyone closer to the actual experiences

The Media in the Network Society: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship

560 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.Libro ElectrónicoIn the Network Society the development of a new communicational model has been taking shape. A communicational model characterized by the fusion of interpersonal communication and mass communication, connecting audiences and broadcasters under a hypertextual matrix linking several media devices. The Networked Communication model is the informational societies communication model. A model that must be understood also in its needed literacies for building our media diets, media matrixes and on how it’s changing the way autonomy is managed and citizenship exercised in the Information Age. In this book Gustavo Cardoso develops an analysis that, focusing on the last decade, takes us from Europe to North America and from South America to Asia, combining under the framework of the Network Society a broad range of scientific perspectives from Media Studies to Political Science and Social Movements theory to Sociology of Communication.Index of Figures Index of Tables Preface Acknowledgements The Media in the Network Society. Contextualizing the Media in the Network Society; Media, Autonomy and Citizenship 1. The Multiple Dimensions of the Network Society. The Network Society; The Culture of the Informational Societies 2. Societies in Transition to the Network Society. Societies in Transition in the Global Network; Societies in Transitions, Values and Social Well-Being; Media and Social Change in the Network Societies 3. From Mass to Networked Communication: Communicational Models and the Informational Society Communicational Models and the Informational Society. Communicational Globalization in the 20th Century; Mass Media and New Media: the Articulation of a New Communicational Model?; Rhetoric, Accessibility of Information and Narratives Networked Communication 4. A Constellation of Networks: Mass Media, Games, Internet and Telephones. An Entertainment Meta-System in Transition: from Multimedia Games to Television; The New Entertainment Player: Multimedia Games; The Reaffirmation of TV as a Central Element of the Entertainment Meta-System; From Interactive Television to Networked Television 5. Has the Internet Really Changed the Mass Media?. From the End of Journalism to Its Reconstruction; The Information Meta-System and Its Network Organization; Television: the New Online Functions; From Radio Interactivity to Newspaper; Time Management: the Media Network 6. The Massification of the Internet Experience. The New Frontiers and Their Entry Portals; Media, Memory and Filters 7. Media and Citizenship in the Network Society. Mediation of Citizenship and Informational Literacy; The Different Media Ages; Different Media Ages, Different Forms of Citizenship? 8. Mediated Politics: Citizens and Political Parties in Continuous Democracy; An Institutional and Parliamentary; Framework for Continuous Democracy; The Internet as Hostage of Institutional Informational Politics? 9. Media, Mobilization and Protests. Goku vs. The Ministry of Culture: Terràvista, Television and Newspapers; The Closure of RTP2: Television Seen from the Internet; The Pro-East Timor Movement: Human Rights, Mass Media and the Internet; Instrumentalization of the Networked Symbolic Mediation Conclusion: Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship.Browsing, News, Filters and Citizenship Bibliograph

Digital television and the consumer perspective

This report publishes results - papers, findings and proposals - from the Nordic seminar on digital television, Tórshavn September 12-14, 2002 which approached digital television development in the Nordic countries from the point of view of consumers, users and citizens. Organised by the Nordic Advisory Committee on Consumer Affairs, the seminar aimed at initiating a dialogue between consumer organisations and researchers in order to map out research problems and approaches for consumer-led digital television development. The seminar presentations surveyed changes of media consumption in domestic and community contexts, the uses of audience research and insight in programme development, and the need for user-orientation in regulation and policy-making

ICT Update 68: Women and ICTs

ICT Update is a bimonthly printed and on-line magazine (http://ictupdate.cta.int) and an accompanying e-mail newsletter published by CTA. This issue focuses on women and ICTs

E-CRM and CMS systems: potential for more dynamic businesses

Any change in customer’s behaviour affects the customer’s value. In addition, profitability and economic viability also change. Most companies still do not know entirely their customer base characteristics. They find difficult to define criteria that segment their customer base to find high-value customers. They need to focus on target selections to carry on with marketing campaigns which involve high investments. Given the potential of e-CRM and CMS as powerful tools to guide customer-oriented understanding and analysis, greater attention is required. Several companies, operating within the same business and having access to the same information and technology, differ in e-CRM performance. Without sufficient evidence, managers are prone to making investment decisions that are neither efficient nor effective. So it is imperative to base the decision of e-CRM and CMS adoption, on not only their analytical power, but also on economic viability criteria for sustainable business dynamic

Primary school education in the time of covid-19:a literature review

Abstract. The impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic which originated in Wuhan in 2019 has had an unprecedented impact on everyday life over the past year. This is especially true for both students and teachers across the globe, with UNESCO (2020) estimating that school closures had affected over one and a half billion students across the globe at the end of 2020. Due to the pandemic teachers were suddenly forced with little warning, or training to adapt their teaching and pedagogical approaches from face-to-face teaching to distance and hybrid teaching. This thesis examines, via means of a literature review, how well primary school teachers were prepared for this shift, the role of technology in their teaching and the evolution of teaching practises during this shift to distant education. Additionally, support mechanisms available for teachers during this shift to distance teaching were also examined. The theoretical background of the thesis first explores two educational trends, providing a definition, brief history, and different models available. The first educational theory is Computer-Based Education, a framework in which technology serves as a learning tool, facilitating learning through different practices, apps, and multimedia content; the second is distance education, which can simply be defined as “any form of providing education to students who are separated by distance (i.e., who are not physically present in the same space) and in which the pedagogical material is planned and prepared by an educational institution ranging from the first examples of correspondence courses arriving to today’s technology-based synchronous and asynchronous courses. The first research question shows how, despite a very limited number of exceptions, the literature available and the surveys conducted in different areas of the world report a certain degree of insecurity among teachers in switching from face-to-face to distance education for different reasons, such as lack of training, confidence or appliances. The thesis follows with the exploration of the role of technology in distance education and how the teaching practices evolved during social distancing, highlighting how tools such as videoconferencing became widespread in the teaching practices. Concerning changes in teacher education according to the standards of distance education, some pre pandemic frameworks are provided in order to prepare teachers better for ‘emergency remote teaching’ despite the literature on the topic is still limited. In addition to examining the issues facing teachers, several support mechanisms and educational technology solutions were also identified at the regional, national and community level. The private and public sectors have also provided a multitude of Educational technology solutions which teachers have also had the opportunity to utilise in the shift to online teaching

Electronic Banking in Ghana: A Case of GCB Bank Ltd

The introductions of electronic banking products and services have changed the nature and way of financial service delivery to customers in Ghana. The purpose of this study is to gain an insight or a deep understanding into electronic banking products and services that customers subscribe to and to find out from both the bank and its customers perspective the benefits they enjoy and the challenges they are faced with whiles providing and accessing the facilities respectively. The methodology used to conduct this research consisted of questionnaires and interviews to collect data. Non-probability sampling which this research adopted and used provided a range of alternative techniques based on researchers’ subjective judgment. SPSS and Microsoft Excel were used for organizing, analyzing and interpreting the data collected. The population of interest was defined as retail customers of GCB Bank Ltd. The sample size for the study was 200 customers and 25 employees of GCB Bank Ltd. Data collection was conducted in four branches of GCB Bank Ltd in Kumasi. The study found out that ATM services were the most popular among users and constituted the main knowledge of customers as far electronic banking was concerned. It was followed by SMS or mobile banking. Similarly, that electronic banking was convenient and saves customers time was the major benefit for which reason most customers used the banks electronic products and currently persist. As a strategy, awareness of GCB electronic banking products and services is very essential to increase customer knowledge and usage since most of GCBs electronic banking products and services are new in Ghana and particularly to its customers. Effective presentations using all forms of media advertising such as leaflets, brochures, web pages etc will be useful to introduce the products and services to its customers and a wider audience. Finally, a high quality internet infrastructure and other systems support services and IT infrastructure should be provided by GCB since it is one of the primary requirements for electronic banking. Keywords: E-banking, Internet banking, ATM, SMS, PO

BCBU + handbook : a guide to establish virtual cross-border campus for BCBU network

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