Language, Media and Community in the Information Age

This article argues that the electronically mediated communication contributes to the construction of new, mediated forms of communities which are based on the synthesis of virtual and physical communities. The appearance of these new forms of communities leads to a new conceptualization of the relation between self and community. The aim of this article, on the one hand, is to show that with the mediatization of communities, our concept of community becomes more complex. On the other hand, in this essay I consider the assump - tion that the medium of the mediatization and new conceptualization of community is a specific, pictorial language of electronically mediated communication

The media, animal conservation and environmental education

Editoria

Mass media destabilizes the cultural homogeneous regime in Axelrod's model

An important feature of Axelrod's model for culture dissemination or social influence is the emergence of many multicultural absorbing states, despite the fact that the local rules that specify the agents interactions are explicitly designed to decrease the cultural differences between agents. Here we re-examine the problem of introducing an external, global interaction -- the mass media -- in the rules of Axelrod's model: in addition to their nearest-neighbors, each agent has a certain probability $p$ to interact with a virtual neighbor whose cultural features are fixed from the outset. Most surprisingly, this apparently homogenizing effect actually increases the cultural diversity of the population. We show that, contrary to previous claims in the literature, even a vanishingly small value of $p$ is sufficient to destabilize the homogeneous regime for very large lattice sizes

More playful user interfaces: an introduction

In this chapter we embed recent research advances in creating playful user interfaces in a historical context. We have observations on spending leisure time, in particular predictions from previous decades and views expressed in Science Fiction novels. We confront these views and predictions with what has really happened since the advent of computers, the Internet, Worldwide Web and sensors and actuators that are increasingly becoming integrated in our environments and in devices that are with us 24/7. And, not only with us, but also connected to networks of nodes that represent people, institutions, and companies. Playful user interfaces are not only interesting for entertainment applications. Educational or behavior change supporting systems can also profit from a playful approach. The chapter concludes with a meta-level review of the chapters in this book. In this review we distinguish three views on research and application domains for playful user interfaces: (1) Designing Interactions for and by Children, (2) Designing Interactions with Nature, Animals, and Things, and (3) Designing Interactions for Arts, Performances, and Sports

Sparrows can't sing : East End kith and kinship in the 1960s

Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by the late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in the East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career spanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl in the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage and the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, often selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences (Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre Workshop subsequently became better known for their appearances on film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material for the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television commercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre Workshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice which she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32). The hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer, in some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t Sing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in Britain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the urban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration, I shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular community’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and for its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques (recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic delivery in performance

Children’s reading with digital books: past moving quickly to the future

Digital books, such as e-books, story apps, picture book apps, and interactive stories, are narratives presented on touchscreens with multimedia and interactive features. Evidence suggests that early reading of print versus digital books is associated with different patterns of parent–child engagement and children’s outcomes. Parents’ verbal scaffolding, children’s age, and the congruence between a book’s narrative and its interactive and multimedia features are three documented process variables that explain the difference between reading print and digital books. To maximize the added value of digital books for children, we need to study the interaction among the characteristics of parents, children, and books; we also need to target these interactions through interventions and through collaborations between designers and researchers

Media life

Review of the book 'Media Life' by Mark Deuze

Common Extra House Lab: Recipes for Citizenship in Transition or the Domestic-collective Usage of the Common Good

Este artículo describe acciones que simulan mejoras en el modo de habitar de redes de ciudadanos. El marco formativo es el último curso de arquitectura llamado Common Extra House Lab. En este no se fomenta la distinción entre aula, laboratorio y ciudad. Lo doméstico y su espacio público inmediato (el extra-house) constituyen el punto de partida para nuevos experimentos sociotécnicos. La metodología resultó ser experimental para lo habitual del marco académico y produjo una colección de acciones y formatos de foros híbridos que gestionaban personas, tecnologías, escenarios y recursos, que acabaron formulándose como recetas para una ciudadanía en transición y se convirtieron en el legado para el siguiente curso.This article describes actions that have led to progress in ways of living in citizen networks. The training framework is the last architecture course called Common Extra House Lab, in which it was encouraged to consider that there is no distinction between classroom, laboratory, and city. The domestic and its immediate public space (the extra-house) are the starting point for new socio-technical experiments which could be considered experimental comparing them with academic standards, producing hybrid forums managed by people, technologies and resources. They ended up becoming recipes for citizens in transition and turned into the legacy for the next course