Material Becoming

A review of Dianna Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010) and William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011)

Situating social games in the everyday: an Australian perspective

This paper explores some of the ways in which social games - games played with others through social network sites such as Facebook - are situated within the everyday. It argues that social games are more than just games; they perform a range of interactive and integrative functions across and within people's lives and therefore need to be investigated as such. Social games en-able spaces for and practices of creative expression, and identity management. They also form a mechanism through which relations can be enacted and maintained across and outside of the game environment. This argument requires the researcher to consider the panoply of ways in which people integrate social games within their lives and everyday practices. Part of a larger project, this paper explores some findings from an exploratory survey of Australian game play-ers about their management and integration of game play within the everyday with a particular focus on gender

A non-linear model of information sharing practices in academic communities

A new model of information sharing practices in academic communities is based on Latour's circulatory system of scientific facts, and some elements of Foster's non-linear model of information-seeking behavior. The main proposition of this model is that information-sharing practices and context simultaneously shape each other. The proposed model supports Foster's conceptualization of information practices as non-linear processes, but its emphasis on the interdependence between context and information practices provides a more effective means to capture complex negotiations involved in information-sharing practices. The proposition is that the major reason for nonlinearity in information practices is a continuous shifting of actors' interests, pressures, and concerns. Capturing these dynamic relations becomes possible through this model. The model also offers a way to generate a number of research questions and hypotheses, and as such it could be a useful tool for empirical studies on information sharing in academic communities

Playing the Game, or Not: Reframing Understandings of Children’s Digital Play

Everybody seems to have an opinion about the value, risks and opportunities of children playing digital games. Popular media conveys messages to parents and the public alike of addicted, violent, desensitised, and anti-social children and of the privacy risk of back end data collection. Educationalists waver between seeing digital games as hindering more positive educational, social and physical activity, or as being a new way to engage students and improve learning outcomes. Parents are in fear of the ‘dangers’ of gaming and screen time yet enticed by the educational promise and the entertainment value of keeping their children occupied. Game developers see opportunities for data collection, surveillance and for nudging children’s behaviour and purchases. Many of these fears, hopes, and hype are replaying older tropes that circulate around any new technology, media forms and associated changes in practices, but are amplified further by having children as their central focus. Indeed, all of these stakeholders in children’s futures have particular understandings of what is good for children and what an ideal child should be. Yet children are not docile bodies who simply have things happen to them: they subvert, appropriate and innovate. This paper is a call for an exploration of what and how children’s digital gaming looks like from a child’s perspective and for a reframing of understanding children’s digital play as a result

Interruptions: Reconsidering the Immaterial in Human Engagements with Technology

This paper explores conceptions of the immaterial in human engagements with technology and technological systems. It employs two different theories of interruption, one technical and the other philosophical, as a means to examine the renegotiations of human-technology relationships that occur when a system, previously considered immaterial and judged inconsequential, reveals itself as significant. Two examples, the Millennium bug and Facebook’s provision of Open Graph, are used to illustrate people’s sudden recognition of the operation of underlying technological systems. This paper considers these moments as interruptions in order not only to analyse people’s reappraisal of the perceived immateriality of the technologies, but also to emphasise the value of recognising their consequence and apparent agency

Transparency and the ubiquity of information filtration?

In past decades, the notion of information filtering was primarily associated with censorship and repressive, non-democratic countries and regimes. However, in the twenty-first century, filtration has become a widespread and increasingly normalised part of daily life. From email filters—designating some messages important, some less important, and others not worth reading at all (spam)—to social networks—with Facebook and Twitter harnessing social ties to curate, sort and share media—through to the biggest filtering agents, the search engines—whose self-professed aims include sorting, and thus implicitly filtering, all our information—filters are inescapable in a digital culture. However, as filtering becomes ubiquitous and normalised, are citizens en masse becoming too accepting or, worse, largely ignorant, of the power these filters hold

Community, communication, collaboration: Scholarly practice in transformation

This paper reports on the results of a survey and focus groups exploring the use of the Internet by academic staff and research students at Curtin University of Technology for the purposes of scholarly communication. The survey included questions regarding the respondents' formal and informal scholarly communication practices and the way in which these have changed as the result of access to the Internet. The survey also asked a range of questions regarding respondents' use of library services, the frequency of their use of these services, and the manner in which their use of the library had been impacted by the increasing availability of Internet based access to services and collections. Whilst focus group discussions suggested some ambivalence towards the enabling potential of ICTs on scholarly communication, the evidence gathered indicates the extent to which research and communicative practice is changing and the resultant impact on scholarly communities. The paper concludes with some preliminary observations about changes to scholarly communities and the opportunity this offers for academic librarians to enhance their role in the development of research literate communities

Entering Farmville: Finding Value in Social Games

Social games—games that operate within social network sites (SNS) and draw on a user’s social graph—are a rapidly growing phenomena. According to AppData’s facebook applications report, Zynga’s social game, Farmville, as at the 15th March 2012, had 29,100,000 monthly active users (MAU) and 5,800,000 daily active users (DAU). The site also lists Farmville as no. 7 on the App leaderboard, and Zynga, the game designer, as no. 1 on the developer leaderboard with 245,429,908 MAU’s. These are not small numbers and clearly indicate a level of engagement and correspondingly, of revenue generation that warrant closer examination. However, the value of social gaming is far from just economic, with the experiences of game-play, and the broader social interactions possible surrounding social games, potentially creating value for the game company and players themselves in a number of different ways. This paper will explore the experience of the Zynga game Farmville, with particular focus on the question of value. Primary evidence will be drawn from the ethnographic experiences of one of the authors who spent several months immersed in Farmville as an explicitly positioned ethnographic researcher (as part of a larger ARC Linkage grant on social gaming on the internet). In order to situate these findings, this paper will also provide a brief history of the games leading to Farmville and explore the broader context of value creation in social games