Wireless Play and Unexpected Innovation

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected. This chapter considers play as leading to unexpected innovation in advanced wireless technologies. It concludes that much of the potential for new media to enhance innovation actually echoes much older patterns, as evidenced by comparisons to wireless history. These are patterns of privilege, particularly class and gender privilege, reinforced by strict intellectual property protections. Detailed case studies are presented of the "wardrivers," young male computer enthusiasts who helped map wi-fi signals over the past decade, and of earlier analog wireless enthusiasts. The chapter offers a solid critique of many present-day celebrations of technology-driven innovation and of the rhetoric of participatory culture

Electronic Literature in China

In her article Electronic Literature in China Jinghua Guo discusses how the reception and the critical contexts of production of online literature are different in China from those in the West despite similar developments in digital technology. Guo traces the development of Chinese digital literature, its history, and the particular characteristics and unique cultural significance in the context of Chinese culture where communality is an aspect of society. Guo posits that Chinese electronic literature is larger than such in the West despite technical drawbacks and suggests that digitality represents a positive force in contemporary Chinese culture and literature

The film of tomorrow: a cultural history of videoblogging

Videoblogging is a form of cultural production that emerged in the early 2000s as a result of the increasing availability of cheap digital recording equipment, new videoediting software, video website hosting and innovative distribution networks across the internet. This thesis explores the close entanglement of culture and technology in this early and under-examined area of media production – most notably in the self-definition and development of a specific community around video practices and technologies between 2004-2009. These videobloggers’ digital works are presented as an original case study of material digital culture on the internet, which also produced a distinctive aesthetic style. The thesis traces the discourses and technological infrastructures that were developed both within and around the community of videobloggers and that created the important pre-conditions for the video artefacts they produced. Through an ethnographically-informed cultural history of the practices and technologies of videoblogging, this thesis engages with the way in which new forms of cultural and technical hybrids have emerged in an increasingly digital age. The ethnographic research is informed by histories of film and video, which contribute to the theoretical understanding and contextualisation of videoblogging – as an early digital community – which has been somewhat neglected in favour of research on mainstream online video websites, such as YouTube. The thesis also contributes to scholarly understanding of contemporary digital video practices, and explores how the history of earlier amateur and semi-professional film and video has been influential on the practices, technologies and aesthetic styles of the videobloggers. It is also shown how their aesthetic has been drawn on and amplified in network culture, mainstream media, and contemporary media and cultural production. Through a critical mapping of the socio-technical structures of videoblogging, the thesis argues that the trajectories of future media and cultural production draws heavily from the practices and aesthetics of these early hybrid networked cultural-technical communities

China's iGeneration

Collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture. This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche

A Network View of Social Media Platform History: Social Structure, Dynamics and Content on YouTube

Social media sites are prone to change from many internal and external causes, yet it is difficult to directly explore their histories in terms of the content itself. Search and browsing features are biased toward new and paid content, archives are difficult to navigate systematically, and their scale makes any observations challenging to contextualize. Here, we present results of an ongoing study of YouTube’s history (currently with more than 76 million videos) using a combination of iterative browsing, network crawling and clustering within and across time periods. Through this method, we are able to identify historical patterns in YouTube\u27s content related to internal and external events. Our approach thus illustrates an adaptation of network analysis for understanding genre evolution in the histories of social media platforms

From hypertext to hype and back again: exploring the roots of social media in the early web

Preprint of chapter from the SAGE Handbook of Social Media (Burgess, Marwick and Poell, eds., 2018). "How should we think of the relationship between social media and the early web, and what can we learn from this history?

New Opportunities for Interest-Driven Arts Learning in a Digital Age

Traditionally in the United States, schools and after-school programs have played a promi-nent part in teaching young people about the arts. Arts education has been waning in K-12 public schools in recent times, however. This is especially true in low-income communities, where public schools have often cut back on arts instruction so they can devote limited public education dollars to subjects such as writing and math that are the focus of high-stakes standardized tests.When we look outside of school, however, we see a strikingly different landscape, one full of promise for engaging young people in artistic activity. What makes this landscape possible is an eagerness to explore that springs from youths' own creative passions -- what we call "interest-driven arts learning" -- combined with the power of digital technology.This report is a step in trying to understand the new territory. It gives a rundown of scholarship in the areas of arts and out-of-school-hours learning; offers a framework for thinking about interest-driven arts learning in a digital age; examines young people's media consumption; provides a survey of youths' creative endeavors online and elsewhere, along with a look at the proliferation of technologies that young people are using in the arts; and concludes with thoughts about challenges and possibilities for the futur

China's iGeneration

Collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture. This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche

Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions: supplementary materials

These supplementary materials accompany the report ‘Web 2.0 technologies for learning: the current landscape – opportunities, challenges and tensions’, which is the first report from research commissioned by Becta into Web 2.0 technologies for learning at Key Stages 3 and 4. This report describes findings from the commissioned literature review of the then current landscape concerning learner use of Web 2.0 technologies and the implications for teachers, schools, local authorities and policy makers