Emotions and Digital Well-being. The rationalistic bias of social media design in online deliberations

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations

‘You're kinda passing a test’: A phenomenological study of women's experiences of breastfeeding

Background: Despite an increasing research base about what helps or hinders breastfeeding, there is a dramatic drop in breastfeeding prevalence within the first 6 weeks. Aim: To explore the experiences of breastfeeding women. Methods: This study used interpretive phenomenology to research the experiences of 22 women who had all breastfed their youngest baby for at least 11 days. Data were collected using in-depth interviews when the women's babies were between 3-6 months of age. Thematic analysis was used to analyse findings. Findings: The women described tensions and mixed messages regarding breastfeeding, and contradictions between public health messages promoting breastfeeding and the support received to continue breastfeeding. The women also described how these approaches and messages affected their breastfeeding experiences, and how they managed breastfeeding as a result. Conclusions: The findings from this study revealed a patriarchal healthcare support system for breastfeeding whereby the women felt under surveillance and expected to perform to a prescribed ideal, but also a lack of support for exclusive breastfeeding after the initial postnatal period. These findings have clear implications for practice and policy

Education and older adults at the University of the Third Age

This article reports a critical analysis of older adult education in Malta. In educational gerontology, a critical perspective demands the exposure of how relations of power and inequality, in their myriad forms, combinations, and complexities, are manifest in late-life learning initiatives. Fieldwork conducted at the University of the Third Age (UTA) in Malta uncovered the political nature of elder-learning, especially with respect to three intersecting lines of inequality - namely, positive aging, elitism, and gender. A cautionary note is, therefore, warranted at the dominant positive interpretations of UTAs since late-life learning, as any other education activity, is not politically neutral.peer-reviewe

Algorithmic paranoia and the convivial alternative

In a time of big data, thinking about how we are seen and how that affects our lives means changing our idea about who does the seeing. Data produced by machines is most often 'seen' by other machines; the eye is in question is algorithmic. Algorithmic seeing does not produce a computational panopticon but a mechanism of prediction. The authority of its predictions rests on a slippage of the scientific method in to the world of data. Data science inherits some of the problems of science, especially the disembodied 'view from above', and adds new ones of its own. As its core methods like machine learning are based on seeing correlations not understanding causation, it reproduces the prejudices of its input. Rising in to the apparatuses of governance, it reinforces the problematic sides of 'seeing like a state' and links to the recursive production of paranoia. It forces us to ask the question 'what counts as rational seeing?'. Answering this from a position of feminist empiricism reveals different possibilities latent in seeing with machines. Grounded in the idea of conviviality, machine learning may reveal forgotten non-market patterns and enable free and critical learning. It is proposed that a programme to challenge the production of irrational preemption is also a search for the possibility of algorithmic conviviality

Building the field of health policy and systems research: framing the questions.

In the first of a series of articles addressing the current challenges and opportunities for the development of Health Policy & Systems Research (HPSR), Kabir Sheikh and colleagues lay out the main questions vexing the field

Influence of Future Time Perspective on Involvement: an Approach With Two Studies

The aim of this research is to extend current knowledge of older consumers' behaviour, focusing on involvement and future time perspective. Furthermore, we propose recommendations for customer approaches in the context of colon cancer prevention, as older consumers increasingly face new challenges in the realm of medical decision-making

Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Children’s Fiction.

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism

A Complexity Architecture for Information Technologies: a Three-Year Didactic Experiment

One medium-term strategy for helping in the management of complexity is the introduction of a conceptual complexity component in the very centre of university curricula. In very few areas is the growth of complexity as evident as in the information technologies (ITs), the focus of the work presented in the current paper. We have therefore developed an integrated way of tackling the specific field of information technologies by means of an approach,to complexity. The content of this paper describes the guidelines of our research effort, placing an emphasis on informatics. Concepts of complexity based on the system metaphor have been substantially drawn upon in this exercise and are thus presented in some detail. Also described is a didactic experiment conducted by the author and designed to provide a new and integrating approach to University curricula for future professionals. The students' "discovery" of complexity is the focal point of the experiment. The findings of this effort are encouraging and call for the continuation and expansion of this experiment

Open education and critical pedagogy

This paper argues for a revaluation of the potential of open education to support more critical forms of pedagogy. Section I examines contemporary discourses around open education, offering a commentary on the perception of openness as both a disruptive force in education, and a potential solution to contemporary challenges. Section II examines the implications of the lack of consensus around what it means to be open, focusing on the example of commercial and proprietary claims to openness commonly known as ‘openwashing’. Section III uses Raymond’s influential essay on open source software ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as a framework for thinking through these issues, and about alternative power structures in open education. In Section IV an explicit link is drawn between more equal or democratic power structures and the possibility for developing pedagogies which are critical and reflexive, providing examples which show how certain interpretations of openness can raise opportunities to support critical approaches to pedagogy