Supporting autonomy for people with dementia living in nursing homes:A rapid realist review

Background For people with dementia living in nursing homes, autonomy is important. However, they experience difficulty with being heard as an autonomous person, as well as with expressing their preferences and choices. The question is how to support their autonomy. Objective Despite extensive efforts to support autonomy in daily care for people with dementia living in nursing homes, we do not know exactly what works for whom, in which context, how and why. The objective of this realist review is to explore what is known in literature on autonomy support interventions for people with dementia in nursing homes. Design A rapid realist review of literature. Review methods To understand how autonomy is supported, a realist approach was applied that entailed identifying the research question, searching for information, performing a quality appraisal, extracting data, synthesizing the evidence and validating the findings with a panel of experts. Causal assumptions were derived from articles found in four bibliographic databases (PubMed, PsychInfo, Cochrane and CINAHL) leading to context (C)–mechanism (M)–outcome (O) configurations. Results Data extraction from the included articles ultimately resulted in sixteen CMO configurations on four themes: a. preferences and choice: interventions for supporting autonomy in nursing homes and their results, b. personal characteristics of residents and family: people with dementia and their family being individuals who have their own character, habits and behaviors, c. competent nursing staff each having their own level of knowledge, competence and need for support, and d. interaction and relationships in care situations: the persons involved are interrelated, continuously interacting in different triangles composed of residents, family members and nursing staff. Conclusion The findings showed that results from interventions on autonomy in daily-care situations are likely to be just as related not only with the characteristics and competences of the people involved, but also to how they interact. Autonomy support interventions appear to be successful when the right context factors are considered

The economics of free: freemium games, branding and the impatience economy

The gaming industry has seen dramatic change and expansion with the emergence of ‘casual’ games that promote shorter periods of game play. Free to download, but structured around micro-payments, these games raise the complex relationship between game design and commercial strategies. Although offering a free gameplay experience in line with open access philosophies, these games also create systems that offer control over the temporal dynamics of that experience to monetise player attention and inattention. This article will examine three ‘freemium’ games, Snoopy Street Fair, The Simpsons’ Tapped Out and Dragonvale, to explore how they combine established branding strategies with gameplay methods that monetise player impatience. In examining these games, this article will ultimately indicate the need for game studies to interrogate the intersection between commercial motivations and game design 2 and a broader need for media and cultural studies to consider the social, cultural, economic and political implications of impatience

Breaking Open the Black Boxes: media archaeology, anarchaeology and media materiality

An essay on the emergent methodology of media archaeology, in relation to the material turn in approaches to digital media. In particular, this article advocates taking up Siegfried Zielinski's concept of 'anarchaeology', but in a different sense to the way it was originally proposed, in order to emphasise the political potentials of a media (an)archaeological methodological approach

"We can remember it for you": location, memory, and commodification in social networking sites

This article explores the spatial self through the performative aspects of location sharing and geotagging in the process of self-representation on social networking sites (SNSs). Based on the legacy of early experimentations with location-based technologies for social interaction, the article asserts that the representation of location in SNSs has more temporal than spatial attributes. The article explores the immediacy of networks and the different kinds of temporality encountered in SNSs to address the commodification of geotagged content uploaded on SNSs. Location-based data are valuable commodities bought and sold in the market. Therefore, the act of archiving memories on SNSs is commodified and performed within the predetermined functions and actions set within the SNSs’ interfaces. SNSs devise ways to keep users constantly interacting with the present moment in time and simultaneously create memories of the recent past while disclosing personal data that companies use for profit

Mediating the Presence of Others: Reconceptualising Co-Presence as Mediated Intimacy

Drawing insight from queer and media studies, this article analyses data from the UK study Adults’ Media Lives. The authors claim that this study reveals the significance of people’s intimate relationships to their media practices, highlighting in particular how people’s media practices mediate the ‘presence’ of others. The authors put forward the concept of mediated intimacy to capture both the cultural intimacy people have with media and the mediation of intimacy by media practices. Mediating intimacy has implications for normative conceptions of intimate life, including the significance of ‘time’ to the values of ‘home’ and ‘work’

Tracing scientist's research trends realtimely

In this research, we propose a method to trace scientists' research trends realtimely. By monitoring the downloads of scientific articles in the journal of Scientometrics for 744 hours, namely one month, we investigate the download statistics. Then we aggregate the keywords in these downloaded research papers, and analyze the trends of article downloading and keyword downloading. Furthermore, taking both the download of keywords and articles into consideration, we design a method to detect the emerging research trends. We find that in scientometrics field, social media, new indices to quantify scientific productivity (g-index), webometrics, semantic, text mining, open access are emerging fields that scientometrics researchers are focusing on.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Game Workers and the Empire: Unionisation in the UK Video Game Industry

This article investigates some of the key debates that have emerged within the nascent union organising project Game Workers Unite, with a specific focus on its UK branch (GWU UK). The analysis is based on a period of participatory observation and a series of interviews with board members of GWU UK. This article evaluates Game Workers Unite (GWU) in relation to other recent attempts at unionising the game industry. It concludes that the strategies adopted to counter the hyper-visibility and individualisation of the game worker are key contributions of GWU in contemporary video game labour. This article draws on the work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games to evaluate the historical specificity of GWU and the importance of the organisation for the contemporary video game industry

From Indymedia to Anonymous: rethinking action and identity in digital cultures

The period following the social mobilizations of 2011 has seen a renewed focus on the place of communication in collective action, linked to the increasing importance of digital communications. Framed in terms of personalized ‘connective action’ or the social morphology of networks, these analyses have criticized previously dominant models of ‘collective identity’, arguing that collective action needs to be understood as ‘digital networking’. These influential approaches have been significantly constructed as a response to models of communication and action evident in the rise of Independent Media Centres in the period following 1999. After considering the rise of the ‘digital networking’ paradigm linked to analyses of Indymedia, this article considers the emergence of the internet-based collaboration known as Anonymous, focusing on its origins on the 4chan manga site and its 2008 campaign against Scientology, and also considers the ‘I am the 99%’ microblog that emerged as part of the Occupy movement. The emergence of Anonymous highlights dimensions of digital culture such as the ephemeral, the importance of memes, an ethic of lulz, the mask and the grotesque. These forms of communication are discussed in the light of dominant attempts to shape digital space in terms of radical transparency, the knowable and the calculable. It is argued that these contrasting approaches may amount to opposing social models of an emerging information society, and that the analysis of contemporary conflicts and mobilizations needs to be alert to novel forms of communicative practice at work in digital cultures today