Digital Play: The challenge of researching young children\u27s Internet use

Children’s Internet use is rapidly changing. Tweens\u27 (9–12) usage patterns now resemble those of teenagers five to six years ago, and younger children’s (5–8) usage is approaching that of tweens. Primary school aged children are increasingly engaging in virtual worlds with social network functions (game sites such as Club Penguin, Minecraft or Webkinz). These digital public spaces carry with them opportunities as well as risk. With policy resources often targeting high school children, there is a need to map the benefits, risks and competencies associated with these trends, and develop recommendations for parents and policy makers. This paper analyses the ethical challenges posed in a new research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Digital Play:Social network sites and the well-being of young childre

Work Integrated Learning and Business Education: A Legitimate Reverse Mapping Approach?

This paper investigates whether work integrated learning (WIL) can be effectively implemented by using students existing workplace experiences (full-time or part-time). Students had to be in a work placement as a precondition for unit enrolment. The learning outcomes focussed on the ‘authenticity’ and relevance of University based learning when mapped against students ‘real world’ work experiences. Students were asked to reassess, question and integrate their individual (and collective) work-based experiences and acquired ‘real life’ knowledge against their business-based university learning. Students concluded that the learning topics had provided critical and personally useful insights into their own and the wider work environment. The learning experience(s) also led to a deeper and more engaged, as well as critical questioning of, university learning

Digital Play: The Challenge of Researching Young Children’s Internet Use

Children’s Internet use is rapidly changing. Tweens\u27 (9–12) usage patterns now resemble those of teenagers five to six years ago, and younger children’s (5–8) usage is approaching that of tweens. Primary school aged children are increasingly engaging in virtual worlds with social network functions (game sites such as Club Penguin, Minecraft or Webkinz). These digital public spaces carry with them opportunities as well as risk. With policy resources often targeting high school children, there is a need to map the benefits, risks and competencies associated with these trends, and develop recommendations for parents and policy makers. This paper analyses the ethical challenges posed in a new research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Digital Play: Social network sites and the well-being of young children

Firewatch: Use of Sattelite Imagery by Remote\ud Communities in Northern Australia for Fire Risk\ud Communications.

This paper presents the contextual background and early findings from a new research project funded by the Australian Research Council titled Using community engagement and enhanced visual information to promote FireWatch satellite communications as a support for collaborative decision-making. FireWatch (provided by Landgate in Western Australia) is an internet-based public information service based on near real time satellite data showing timely information relevant to bushfire safety within Australia. However, it has been developed in a highly technical environment and is currently used chiefly by\ud experts. This project aims to redesign FireWatch for ordinary users and to engage a remote community in Northern Australia in this process, leading to improved decision making surrounding bushfire risk

The panopticon kitchen: the materiality of parental surveillance in the family home

This article examines the production and performance of parental surveillance of children’s internet activities within the family home. Through an analysis of qualitative interviews in the family homes of children aged from five to twelve years, the manner in which parents are positioned as ‘instruments of surveillance’ and the materiality of this surveillance are discussed. Parents’ worldly surveillance of their younger children’s internet use in Australian family homes can often be likened to Foucault’s panopticon, where the site of central inspection is often the family kitchen. This is because the physical positioning of spatial dimensions in the standard Australian home lends itself to panopticon surveillance of children. Communal living areas provide a site where the mechanisms of fixing and containing subjects (children) can be carried out. The use of these communal family spaces lends itself to watchtower-style monitoring, where the parental gaze is always possible and where children tend to assume that, and act as if, they are being watched. This is not to say, however, that children’s resistance and/or negotiation represent any lesser part of the power relationships within the panopticon kitchen

Multiply-mediated households : Space and power reflected in everyday media use

This study investigates how contemporary Australian families incorporate the consumption of multiple media technologies within their home environments. It uses an approach similar to David Morley\u27s (1986) Family Television where he explored the consumption of television programs in the context of everyday family life. He viewed the household (or family) as the key to constructing understandings of the television audience; where there were gendered regimes of watching, and where program choice often reflected existing power relationships in the home. However since then (a time when most families had only one television set) the media environment of many homes has changed. The addition of multiple television sets, along with newer digital technologies such as computers and game consoles, has introduced a new dynamics of social space within the household. Therefore, the family living room, with its erstwhile shared television culture, has become a less critical site of domestic media consumption. With the migration of television sets and new digital technologies to other spaces in the home, claims over time and space have become even more intimately involved with the domestic use of media technologies. Consequently, this study critically analyses the relationship between media consumption and the geographical spaces and boundaries within the home. Drawing upon interviews with all family members, this thesis argues that the incorporation of multiple media technologies in many households has coincided with significant changes to the spatial geography of these homes, along with a rearticulation of gendered and generational power relationships. Extra media spaces in bedrooms, hallways, home offices and \u27nooks’ have freed up the lounge room, possibly allowing for more harmony and accord within the family, but also reducing the amount of time the family spends together. At the same time the newer media spaces become additional sites for gendered and generational conflict and tension. This study uses an audience ethnography approach to explore and analyse media consumption at the micro level, that of the individual within the household/family. Twenty-three in-depth conversational interviews and observations of children and adults living in six technologically rich households in suburban and regional areas of Western Australia formed the basis of this thesis. Themes and issues that emerged from this qualitative research process include the gendered nature of screens in children\u27s bedrooms, the extent to which a media-rich bedroom culture is evident in Australia, the existence of a masculine gadgeteer culture within some families in the study, the social construction of gaming as a gendered (boy) culture, gendered pathways on the Internet and the reintegration of adult acknowledge-based work into the family home. The thesis also addresses digital divide issues relating to inequities in access, technical and social support, motivation and the quality of new digital technologies available in the home

Discursive constructions of the internet of toys

The Internet of Toys (IoToys) refers to the small subset of the Internet of Things often marketed to children and their caregivers as smart toys. These toys include many of the affordances of screen-based, networked technologies, packaged as children’s everyday playthings. Thus, Hello Barbie uses voice recognition and cloud-based computing combined with artificial intelligence procedures to craft meaningful responses to children’s statements and engage them in quasi-naturalistic conversation. Other IoToys also include image recognition and geo-locational data collection. Such toys can also be constructed in different ways that represent the perspectives of the speaker and circumstances of use. Thus Germany’s Federal Network Agency announced in February that it classified the My Friend Cayla doll (a competitor to Barbie) as an ‘illegal espionage apparatus’ because ‘under German law it is illegal to manufacture, sell or possess surveillance devices disguised as another object’. The IoToys facilitates both commercial relations and income streams for the manufacturers and/or associated organisations, such as marketing agencies, software providers and voice analytics services. These streams of income can include advertising to children through the connected toy, the collection, analysis and monetisation of children’s data and the sale of the toy itself. Buying the toy also involves long-term contractual agreements that transfer legal responsibility for the collection, analysis and distribution of children’s data onto their parents. This effectively gives commercial entities the authority to continue and conceivably expand upon data-collecting and data-sharing procedures. This article analyses the discursive construction of the future IoToys using textual analysis of media resources that provide stakeholder perspectives on this emerging field. It argues that, given their status as an emerging category of human–computer interaction devices, objects that can be classified as part of the IoToys currently occupy a controversial and contested media industries space, raising many regulatory and policy questions that children themselves are not equipped to consider or take into account

Your neighbours are your friends : An investigation into microgeographical exchanges in the remote northwest of Australia between 1987-2012

This paper addresses intersections of communication, technology and geography in remote areas of Western Australia. It uses verbatim accounts from fieldwork bracketing decades of communication development to explore changes and constants in the micro-geographical exchange strategies of people living in the remote northwest of Australia. It articulates the continuing irony that the Australians who most need reliable and effective communications are those who experience the greatest difficulty in accessing them. We contend that geographical isolation and continuing problems with the reliability and reach of communication technologies in remote Western Australia have cultivated a robust community in which flexibility, resilience and interdependence redress, to some degree, the vulnerability remote communities often experience—especially in times of stress or crisis. The paper includes historical interviews from the 1980s and contemporary (2012) interviews carried out as part of an ARC Linkage-funded project, 2012-14, with industry partner Landgate, a Western Australian government entity

Towards a natural history of internet use? Working to overcome the implications for research of the child-adult divide

Using a metaphor borrowed from the biological sciences, this paper discusses a ‘natural history’ of Internet use. As ‘digital natives’ many of today’s teenagers and young people have grown up and matured interacting with the Internet from an early age. Research about young people’s Internet use tends, however, to focus on the protection of minors. Young people, 16 years or older, are often excluded from noncommercial research about how young people grow into more mature patterns of Internet use. This paper highlights how parents with teenagers are building dynamic models of their children’s engagement with the Internet as they mature. Parents reported changes in the level of their children’s Internet use as they age and they envisage further changes as their children mature. We also identify the variety of ways in which parents support their children’s developing Internet skills that anticipate and respond to Internet risks and excessive Internet use

FireWatch: Community engagement and the communication of bushfire information

Successive bushfire inquiries in Australia have called for authorities to more effectively harness and disseminate bushfire information. Recommendations from these inquiries suggest a new approach to bushfires involving greater co-ordination, in which home dwellers, emergency fire services and government work more closely together and acknowledge that education, safety, planning and emergency management can be effective responses to the threat of bushfire. Policymakers and community members are seeking to revise bushfire protocols and access new sources of authoritative information, which may help guide public responses. Nonetheless, the effective communication of information regarding bushfires still seems to be problematic (Department of Justice, 2013). This paper reports on findings from an ARC-funded research project, titled Using Community Engagement and Enhanced Visual Information to Promote FireWatch Satellite Communications as a Support for Collaborative Decision-Making. The project investigated the fire information communications environment of remote Australia in order to develop a suitable, user-friendly bushfire information website. Using a ‘communicative ecologies’ framework, this paper analyses findings from interviews held in 2012 and 2013 with community members living in the remote area of Kununurra, Western Australia. Interviewees described a fragile ‘communicative ecology’ where the coverage or reach of different communications technologies is variable, and where there are reception and compatibility problems. They also expressed disappointment and frustration about the lack of fire information in times of bushfire – as well as a lack of operational transparency and effective community engagement on the part of emergency organisations