Parental mediation, YouTube’s networked public, and the baby-iPad encounter:mobilizing digital dexterity

This study collected a sample of YouTube videos in which parents recorded their young children utilizing mobile touchscreen devices. Focusing on the more frequently viewed and highly-discussed videos, the paper analyzes the ways in which babies’ ‘digital dexterity’ is coded and understood in terms of contested notions of ‘naturalness’, and how the display of these capabilities is produced for a networked public. This reading of the ‘baby-iPad encounter’ helps expand existing scholarly concepts such as parental mediation and technology domestication. Recruiting several theoretical frameworks, the paper seeks to go beyond concerns of mobile devices and immobile children by analyzing children’s digital dexterity not just as a kind of mobility, but also as a set of reciprocal mobilizations that work across domestic, virtual and publically networked spaces

Infants, interfaces, and intermediation: digital parenting and the production of 'iPad baby' videos on YouTube

We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through the production of YouTube videos and discussions in associated comment threads. This analysis expands on, and departs from, theories of parental mediation, which have traditionally been framed through a media effects approach in analyzing how parents regulate their children’s use of broadcast media, such as television, within family life. We move beyond the limitations of an effects framing through more culturally and materially oriented theoretical lenses of mediation, considering the role mobile interfaces now play in the lives of infants through analysis of the ways parents intermediate between domestic spaces and networked publics. We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of “naturalness:” the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity

Users and non-users of next generation broadband

This paper explores the contexts and motivations that underpin the uptake of Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN). The findings are drawn from a mixed-methods research study of households using surveys and interviews conducted in 2011 and 2012 in an early release site of the NBN rollout. Whilst use and non-use have traditionally been treated as questions of digital access, inequality and exclusion, there is evidence for emerging forms of non-use characterized by more critical and discriminating approaches. We contribute to this evidence, but our findings suggest that use and non-use of high speed broadband do not occur in isolation or as an expression of individual choice, but as part of increasingly dense household media ecologies of digital infrastructures, devices, services and knowledge

Death and the internet: consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies

The team of Melbourne University researchers examined licencing policies, terms of use agreements and copyright law, and interviewed a range of people, including funeral directors, religious workers, internet content and service providers, as well as estate planning lawyers. The project identified a range of ownership and access issues, and found that many online \u27assets\u27 are left exposed or stranded after death. The researchers concluded that more Australians should include digital registers in, or with, their wills and these should contain passwords and account locations so that material can then be distributed by the Executor or other designated person. A website was also created as part of the project and provides useful tips and information on preparing a digital register. Visit it here: www.digitalheritage.net.a

NEW RULES: YOUNG CHILDREN’S TOUCHSCREEN HABITUS

The increasing prevalence of touchscreen and mobile devices in homes has brought computing and the internet into the lives of toddlers and babies. Not only are such devices mobile and liable to enter toddlers’ reach, but their natural user interfaces allow gestural manipulation and navigation. Drawing from ongoing qualitative research with families and children aged from 0 to 5 in their domestic media settings in Melbourne, Australia, this paper reports on young children’s embodiment and enculturation of dispositions towards touchscreen media by developing the concept of ‘touchscreen habitus’

Sleep mode: Mobile apps and the optimisation of sleep-wake rhythms

This article contributes to the critical analysis of sleep and its technological mediation by analysing how sleep is modulated through mobile applications. Drawing on an analysis of the features in the most popular sleep apps in the Apple App store, this paper investigates the dominant types of sleep apps available for everyday use. We analyse how their functions implicate sleeping bodies within new patterns of management and optimisation. We show how sleep apps remediate the monitoring technologies of the sleep science lab to make claims of accuracy and efficacy. However, the analysis also reveals how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in and mediating sleep-wake rhythms. This occurs through two key acoustic features common within sleep apps — ‘smart wake up’ alarms and ‘brainwave entrainment’ sound frequencies. We show how these features operate to organise transitions between waking and sleeping states. In doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories or genealogies of both acoustic media and sleep science in the attempt to optimise the practices and rhythms associated with sleeping bodies

‘SMART WAKE UP’ AND ‘BINAURAL BEATS’: SLEEP APPS AND THE ACOUSTIC MODULATION OF SLEEP-WAKE RHYTHMS

Sleep has become a site of daily monitoring via internet technologies, including mobile applications and wearable devices, as part of a wider normalisation of internet economies and cultural practices of self-tracking and datafication. This article contributes to the critical analysis of datafied sleep by analysing features in the most popular sleep apps. This analysis revealed a diverse range of functions for tracking and analysing sleep patterns, as well as features to promote relaxation and rest. In doing so, sleep apps remediate the monitoring technologies of the sleep science lab – polysomnography, actigraphy – to make claims for accuracy and efficacy. Yet, the analysis also revealed how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in sleep-wake rhythms through two key acoustic features: the ‘smart wake up’ alarm function, and the ‘binaural beats’ sound frequency function. We show how these features operate to organise transitions between waking and sleeping states by directly intervening in and modulating sleep-wake rhythms. In doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories of both sleep science and acoustic media in attempts to optimise the rhythms associated with sleeping bodies. &nbsp