Digital Death: The Failures, Struggles and Discourses of the Social Media Spectacle

Celebrities have always capitalized upon various media to give voice and substance to their own mute causes. From Live Aid to PBS fundraisers, they have utilized their public personae to support the downtrodden, sick and underprivileged. However, in December of 2010, when Alicia Keys and over a dozen other celebrities banded together to raise money for World AIDS Day by eradicating their Twitter and other social media profiles, their much-hyped campaign to raise one million dollars fell short of its goal by nearly half. This paper explores the discourses surrounding the Digital Death Pseudo-Event, and the effects of the disjuncture between the real and digital self when the Celebrity Spectacle is moved from traditional media to the social sphere. Consumer awareness of that gulf ultimately precluded the Digital Death campaign\u27s ability to succeed, not only as a fundraiser, but also as a media spectacle. Ultimately, such revelations point to the inherent natures of social media to promote a certain type of celebrity spectacle that does not conform uniformly to the celebrity of traditional media

Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism

More than ever before we’re consuming news in strange contexts; mixed into a stream of holiday photos on Facebook, alongside comedians’ quips on twitter; between Candy Crush and transit directions on our smartphones. In this environment designers can take liberties with the form of the news package and the ways that audiences can interact. But it’s not just users who are invited to experiment with their news: in newsrooms and product development departments, developers and journalists are adopting play as design and authoring process. Maxwell Foxman‘s new Tow Center report, Play The News: Fun and Games in Digital Journalism is a comprehensive documentation of this world

American Attitudes Towards Jews in America

The Adolph and Ruth Schnurmacher Lecture in Judaic Studies… A lecture by Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and Author of Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1238/thumbnail.jp

Playing with Virtual Reality: Early Adopters of Commercial Immersive Technology

This dissertation examines early adopters of mass-marketed Virtual Reality (VR), as well as other immersive technologies, and the playful processes by which they incorporate the devices into their lives within New York City. Starting in 2016, relatively inexpensive head-mounted displays (HMDs) began to be manufactured and distributed by leaders in the game and information technology industries. However, even before these releases, developers and content creators were testing the devices through “development kits.” These de facto early adopters, who are distinctly commercially-oriented, acted as a launching point for the dissertation to scrutinize how, why and in what ways digital technologies spread to the wider public. Taking a multimethod approach that combines semi-structured interviews, two years of participant observation, media discourse analysis and autoethnography, the dissertation details a moment in the diffusion of an innovation and how publicity, social forces and industry influence adoption. This includes studying the media ecosystem which promotes and sustains VR, the role of New York City in framing opportunities and barriers for new users, and a description of meetups as important communities where devotees congregate. With Game Studies as a backdrop for analysis, the dissertation posits that the blurry relationship between labor and play held by most enthusiasts sustains the process of VR adoption. Their “playbor” colors not only the rhetoric and the focus of meetups, but also the activities, designs, and, most importantly, the financial and personal expenditures they put forth. Ultimately, play shapes the system of production by which adopters of commercial VR are introduced to the technology and, eventually, weave it into their lives. Situating play at the center of this system highlights that the assimilation of digital media is in part an embodied and irrational experience. It also suggests new models by which future innovations will spread to the public

Evolutionary approaches to sexually transmitted infections

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87105/1/j.1749-6632.2011.06078.x.pd

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Games Coverage and its Network of Ambivalences

It's as tough a time as ever for game critics, who seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place—an industry that acts as gatekeepers to most of the information they cover and an increasingly combative readership. Because of these tensions, an exploratory study was conducted first of the emergence of game criticism and the historical role of critics in creating the conception of gamer identity and, second, the effect of that identity on critics’ self-perception of their profession. We find that throughout the late 1980s and the end of the 20th century the game press was complicit in reinforcing the notion of the hardcore, primarily male “gamer,” while at the same time wrestling with their role as mediators between the industry and audience to which they were beholden. Through a subsequent study of articles and public meta-criticism by prominent figures in the field, we describe a network of ambivalences over the basic elements of their practice—particularly style, content, and format—as well as what motivates their daily work. In order to cope with these ambivalences, game critics, in recommending changes to their craft, rely not on the occupational ideology—or a common set of shared professional values—but instead their personal background and ancillary careers. Finally, after reviewing this network of ambivalences and its effect on games writing, we suggest critics make efforts toward establishing a common critical authority for their field, particularly as their occupation enters the mainstream

Slow epidemic extinction in populations with heterogeneous infection rates

We explore how heterogeneity in the intensity of interactions between people affects epidemic spreading. For that, we study the susceptible-infected-susceptible model on a complex network, where a link connecting individuals $i$ and $j$ is endowed with an infection rate $\beta_{ij} = \lambda w_{ij}$ proportional to the intensity of their contact $w_{ij}$, with a distribution $P(w_{ij})$ taken from face-to-face experiments analyzed in Cattuto $et\;al.$ (PLoS ONE 5, e11596, 2010). We find an extremely slow decay of the fraction of infected individuals, for a wide range of the control parameter $\lambda$. Using a distribution of width $a$ we identify two large regions in the $a-\lambda$ space with anomalous behaviors, which are reminiscent of rare region effects (Griffiths phases) found in models with quenched disorder. We show that the slow approach to extinction is caused by isolated small groups of highly interacting individuals, which keep epidemic alive for very long times. A mean-field approximation and a percolation approach capture with very good accuracy the absorbing-active transition line for weak (small $a$) and strong (large $a$) disorder, respectively

Probing the C-H Activation of Linear and Cyclic Ethers at (PNP)Ir

Interaction of the amido/bis(phosphine)-supported (PNP)Ir fragment with a series of linear and cyclic ethers is shown to afford, depending on substrate, products of α,α-dehydrogenation (carbenes), α,β-dehydrogenation (vinyl ethers), or decarbonylation. While carbenes are exclusively obtained from tert-amyl methyl ether, sec-butyl methyl ether (SBME), n-butyl methyl ether (NBME), and tetrahydrofuran (THF), vinyl ethers or their adducts are observed upon reaction with diethyl ether and 1,4-dioxane. Decarbonylation occurs upon interaction of (PNP)Ir with benzyl methyl ether, and a mechanism is proposed for this unusual transformation, which occurs via a series of C−H, C−O, and C−C bond cleavage events. The intermediates characterized for several of these reactions as well as the α,α-dehydrogenation of tert-butyl methyl ether (MTBE) are used to outline a reaction pathway for the generation of PNP-supported iridium(I) carbene complexes, and it is shown that the long-lived, observable intermediates are substrate-dependent and differ for the related cases of MTBE and THF. Taken together, these findings highlight the variety of pathways utilized by the electron-rich, unsaturated (PNP)Ir fragment to stabilize itself by transferring electron density to ethereal substrates through oxidative addition and/or the formation of π-acidic ligands