Presence 2005: the eighth annual international workshop on presence, 21-23 September, 2005 University College London (Conference proceedings)

OVERVIEW (taken from the CALL FOR PAPERS) Academics and practitioners with an interest in the concept of (tele)presence are invited to submit their work for presentation at PRESENCE 2005 at University College London in London, England, September 21-23, 2005. The eighth in a series of highly successful international workshops, PRESENCE 2005 will provide an open discussion forum to share ideas regarding concepts and theories, measurement techniques, technology, and applications related to presence, the psychological state or subjective perception in which a person fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in an experience, including the sense of 'being there' experienced by users of advanced media such as virtual reality. The concept of presence in virtual environments has been around for at least 15 years, and the earlier idea of telepresence at least since Minsky's seminal paper in 1980. Recently there has been a burst of funded research activity in this area for the first time with the European FET Presence Research initiative. What do we really know about presence and its determinants? How can presence be successfully delivered with today's technology? This conference invites papers that are based on empirical results from studies of presence and related issues and/or which contribute to the technology for the delivery of presence. Papers that make substantial advances in theoretical understanding of presence are also welcome. The interest is not solely in virtual environments but in mixed reality environments. Submissions will be reviewed more rigorously than in previous conferences. High quality papers are therefore sought which make substantial contributions to the field. Approximately 20 papers will be selected for two successive special issues for the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. PRESENCE 2005 takes place in London and is hosted by University College London. The conference is organized by ISPR, the International Society for Presence Research and is supported by the European Commission's FET Presence Research Initiative through the Presencia and IST OMNIPRES projects and by University College London

Participation and Advocacy in Community Media

Community media is less well funded, supported and researched than other forms of media, and yet it holds considerable potential as a transformative experience and as an agent for social change. This thesis explores how the process of participation in community media represents an opportunity for reinvigorated democratic and civic conversations about issues of concern to local communities, particularly in relation to the idea of participation and advocacy. This thesis contests mainstream media studies discourse by asserting that it is in paying attention to the lived experience and the accomplishments of people acting in lifeworlds and intimate social networks, rather than simply looking at texts, legal frameworks and institutions, that it is possible to develop a wider understanding of changes in media and digital media production situations, particularly those defined by notions of participation, activism and agency. The study uses an ethnographically-informed mixed-methods design that incorporates participant observation, interviews and reflexive engagement. It is founded on principles of pragmatically in-formed symbolic interactionism, which suggest that it is possible to attend to the unfolding of human actions and understandings as they are accomplished in the collective expression of community life that are shaped by neutral social processes. This thesis therefore contributes to an underdeveloped area of media analysis, signalling opportunities for further study and evaluation of the developments of community media at a time of significant change and social reorientation

Everyday economics: ideas new and old from lay theories of economic life

This project explores divergences and parallels between lay theories of economic life as experienced and developed in two virtual worlds – Final Fantasy XI (FFXI) and Second Life (SL) – and academic theories from sociology and anthropology as well as economics. My intent is not a critique of economics, but a suggestion that other economic sociologies are possible, and to provide points of departure and ideas for such alternative configurations. Exploration of lay theories is organised around four key conceptual categories – value, exchange, money and markets – which were suggested by participants' accounts and economic organisation within each field site. Respondents' theories offer polyphonic, heteroglossic approaches to economic life that sometimes diverge substantially from academic conceptualisations. Lay theories examined in this research emphasising plurality and multiplicity – especially with respect to monies – going so far as to suggest a radical reorganisation of economies based on monies rather than markets. When lay theories from each category are pieced together, they reveal a social imaginary of boundless abundance, strong reliance upon practices as ways of knowing about and theorising economic life, and strange parellels with studies of “primitive” cultures. This dissertation is based on comparative ethnographies of two disparate virtual worlds, FFXI and SL, which offer different slant-wise views of contemporary capitalist, consumer societies. Final Fantasy XI is a proprietary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) created, owned and maintained by Square-Enix, while Second Life (SL) is a free-form, nonproprietary, three-dimensional virtual world created and maintained in a laissezfaire fashion by Linden Lab. Fieldwork consisted of participant observation, one-on-one interviews, group interviews with FFXI respondents and analysis of fan-made media and corporate texts

A Critical Analysis of Age-friendly Community Initiatives

Problem: As aging and urbanization trends converge, developing “age-friendly community initiatives” (AFCIs) has become a global movement and important policy area, aspiring to support people’s desires to age in place regardless of age, income, or ability level. This project interrogated how AFCIs have been operationalized in practice and in the lived experiences of older people. Methods: Situational analysis was a theory-methods package used to compare the conceptual frames undergirding AFCIs with expert knowledges and lay perspectives. Historical and literature reviews, participant observations, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with thirteen AFCI experts and seventeen older adults asked to chronicle their everyday lives using disposable cameras. Findings: The rational dreams of AFCIs and material realities of aging in place are misaligned. Older adults elucidated a moving tension between the daily interiority of identity and contingencies of a changing environment that produces a sensation characterized as the uncanny. The vicissitudes of life and precariousness of their positionalities exposed tactics for “passing” as creative forms of resistance to their expulsion from society. This revealed how there are normative structures around which formal systems or institutions involved with AFCIs could impinge upon older adults; highlighting society’s interest in ensuring they remain healthy and safe, lest they be a threat to themselves or burden on others. This project illuminated how aging in place finds meaning through the quotidian; the mundanity of this work is the crux of its poignancy. AFCIs form a biopolitical paradigm because they not only seek to rework boundaries between bodies and environments, they operate as modes of individual and population governance for the sake of health; yet, struggle to find ways to preserve the inclusion of older people in the ongoing social system. This project contributes to gerontological discourse and has theoretical and policy implications for aging in place inequities

Passbook

Passbook is a nostalgic novel that considers the meaning of love and family on the edge of a post-mortal near future. As the era of austerity enters its third decade, a social media platform—the eponymous Passbook—allows the living to interact with the dead, and changes the landscape of longevity forever. Wyatt Simmons, a young underemployed college graduate, finds himself locked out of the American Dream by suppressed wages, strangled career opportunities, and overwhelming debt. While coping with the un-deaths of his mother and sister, and estrangement from his financially-comfortable careerist father, Wyatt perseveres in a dissatisfying relationship of necessity with his long-time girlfriend Sara Grayson, and uses what little money he can scrounge to try and catapult himself into the spotlight of the Lego Corporation, his dream employer. At work, he meets Pepper Boswick, a wisecracking children’s clothing store salesperson by day and a legendary professional gamer by night, and the two of them hatch a plan to bust Wyatt, and his grand Lego project, out of Sara’s apartment. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure named Kilroy—half internet-age demagogue, half mad-genius—has his own plans for Wyatt’s generation and the gridlocked gerontocracy of Passbook. The novel operates in a tragic-comedic mode, with elements of both satirical-nostalgic humor and profound disillusionment. Rather than make the easy jab at generational conflict and us-vs.-them thinking, Passbook enmires Wyatt in a shifting tangle of duty to his family (many of whom are “Posterity” users of Passbook, meaning they are deceased and therefore functionally immortal), to his own generation (friends, coworkers, and girlfriends, who he most relates to) and to himself (in the form of a hopeless struggle to grow up in a world of work that seems not to need or want him). Wyatt’s relationship with his father takes center-stage in the novel’s second half, as his work- and love-lives collapse around him, and force him to confront his grievances, some real and some imagined, with the man, the family, and to an extent the larger era that raised him

The structure and experience of childhood and adolescence: an anthropological approach to socialization

Becoming human is becoming social and this thesis explores the nature of the socialization process through the presentation of material derived from anthropological fieldwork with adolescents in the north-east of England. In contrast to more traditional approaches, it suggests that an adequate understanding of how socialization occurs, rather than merely what occurs, can only be achieved through focusing directly upon the experiences of those undergoing the socialization process itself and upon how they articulate these experiences. In this respect the adoption of the anthropological fieldwork technique of participant observation is shown to be critical. It allows access to the experience of socialization, rather than simply its later effects, through exploring the temporal rhythms of the socialization process made manifest in life-cycle categories. These categories, it is argued, structure the progressive awareness and understanding reached by children as they mature through providing them with the time and space for the creation of their own culture - the culture of ' doing nothing '.With the theoretical insights gained from a semantic approach to the study of social life this culture is interpreted as a conceptual context whereby children themselves conduct their own rite de passage to adulthood. Through analysis of the concepts of time and space; linguistic performance and nickname usage; the body as an expressive medium and the social construction of gender, a distinctive cultural style emerges which represents an active deconstruction and reinterpretation of adult social order by children. This pervasive style of ' doing nothing ' provides a single underlying form for a multiplicity of contents : motifs of transformation constantly reappear in different domains and provide a coherent semantic system through which children gain knowledge of their own futures. Within this approach, then, socialization is no passive imitation ; rather, it emerges as an active and creative learning process in and about the world

Environmental direct action : making space for new forms of political community?.

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