Showing papers on "Digital media published in 2015"

Digital inequalities and why they matter

Abstract: While the field of digital inequality continues to expand in many directions, the relationship between digital inequalities and other forms of inequality has yet to be fully appreciated. This article invites social scientists in and outside the field of digital media studies to attend to digital inequality, both as a substantive problem and as a methodological concern. The authors present current research on multiple aspects of digital inequality, defined expansively in terms of access, usage, skills, and self-perceptions, as well as future lines of research. Each of the contributions makes the case that digital inequality deserves a place alongside more traditional forms of inequality in the twenty-first century pantheon of inequalities. Digital inequality should not be only the preserve of specialists but should make its way into the work of social scientists concerned with a broad range of outcomes connected to life chances and life trajectories. As we argue, the significance of digital inequalities is...

RAISE: a raw images dataset for digital image forensics

Abstract: Digital forensics is a relatively new research area which aims at authenticating digital media by detecting possible digital forgeries. Indeed, the ever increasing availability of multimedia data on the web, coupled with the great advances reached by computer graphical tools, makes the modification of an image and the creation of visually compelling forgeries an easy task for any user. This in turns creates the need of reliable tools to validate the trustworthiness of the represented information. In such a context, we present here RAISE, a large dataset of 8156 high-resolution raw images, depicting various subjects and scenarios, properly annotated and available together with accompanying metadata. Such a wide collection of untouched and diverse data is intended to become a powerful resource for, but not limited to, forensic researchers by providing a common benchmark for a fair comparison, testing and evaluation of existing and next generation forensic algorithms. In this paper we describe how RAISE has been collected and organized, discuss how digital image forensics and many other multimedia research areas may benefit of this new publicly available benchmark dataset and test a very recent forensic technique for JPEG compression detection.

Health promotion in the digital era: a critical commentary

Abstract: A range of digitized health promotion practices have emerged in the digital era. Some of these practices are voluntarily undertaken by people who are interested in improving their health and fitness, but many others are employed in the interests of organizations and agencies. This article provides a critical commentary on digitized health promotion. I begin with an overview of the types of digital technologies that are used for health promotion, and follow this with a discussion of the socio-political implications of such use. It is contended that many digitized health promotion strategies focus on individual responsibility for health and fail to recognize the social, cultural and political dimensions of digital technology use. The increasing blurring between voluntary health promotion practices, professional health promotion, government and corporate strategies requires acknowledgement, as does the increasing power wielded by digital media corporations over digital technologies and the data they generate. These issues provoke questions for health promotion as a practice and field of research that hitherto have been little addressed.

Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945

Abstract: Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.

The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

Abstract: When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is also just as true - environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow for human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence - from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google - The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us. Peters' book will not only change how we think about media but will provide a new appreciation for the day-to-day foundations of life on earth we so often take for granted.

Internet, News, and Political Trust: The Difference Between Social Media and Online Media Outlets

Abstract: What is the relationship between Internet usage and political trust? To answer this question, we performed a cross-sectional analysis of Eurobarometer survey data related to 27 countries and a supervised sentiment analysis of online political information broadcast during the Italian debate on the reform of public funding of parties. The results disclose the differences between Web 1.0 websites and Web 2.0 social media, showing that consumption of news from information/news websites is positively associated with higher trust, while access to information available on social media is linked with lower trust. This has implications for the debate on social media as a public sphere and for the tension between professional and citizen journalism.

Big Data, Digital Media, and Computational Social Science: Possibilities and Perils

Abstract: We live life in the network. We check our e-mails regularly, make mobile phone calls from almost any location ... make purchases with credit cards ... [and] maintain friendships through online social networks. ... These transactions leave digital traces that can be compiled into comprehensive pictures of both individual and group behavior, with the potential to transform our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies.

Multiple public spheres of Weibo: a typology of forms and potentials of online public spheres in China

Abstract: The advent of online media, and particularly social media, has led to scholarly debates about their implications. Authoritarian countries are interesting in this respect because social media might facilitate open and critical debates that are not possible in traditional media. China is arguably the most relevant and interesting case in this respect, because it limits the influx of non-domestic social media communication, has established its own microcosm of social media and tries to closely monitor and control it and censor problematic content. While such censorship is very effective in some instances, however, it fails to shut down all open debates completely. We analyse the pre-eminent Chinese social media platform – Sina Weibo – and present a typology of different kinds of public spheres that exist on this platform in which open and critical debates can occur under specific circumstances: Thematic public spheres include phenomena of common concern, such as environmental pollution or food safety; short-...

Social media and mobiles as political mobilization forces for young adults: Examining the moderating role of online political expression in political participation

Abstract: A web survey of college students was conducted to examine whether online political expression moderates the effects of political media use on political participation. Results showed that online political expression enhanced the effects of political mobile apps, traditional offline and online media, and social media on political participation. Implications are discussed for a mobilizing role of online media in the democratic process for young adults.

Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics

Abstract: In the last two decades, both the conception and the practice of participatory culture have been transformed by the new affordances enabled by digital, networked, and mobile technologies. This exciting new book explores that transformation by bringing together three leading figures in conversation. Jenkins, Ito and boyd examine the ways in which our personal and professional lives are shaped by experiences interacting with and around emerging media.Stressing the social and cultural contexts of participation, the authors describe the process of diversification and mainstreaming that has transformed participatory culture. They advocate a move beyond individualized personal expression and argue for an ethos of doing it together in addition to doing it yourself.Participatory Culture in a Networked Era will interest students and scholars of digital media and their impact on society and will engage readers in a broader dialogue and conversation about their own participatory practices in this digital age.

Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method.

Abstract: This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society (STS) and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2015

Abstract: This year's report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of over 20,000 online news consumers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Brazil, Japan and Australia. This year's data shows a quickening of the pace towards social media platforms as routes to audiences, together with a surge in the use of mobile for news, a decline in the desktop internet and significant growth in video news consumption online.

Owning The City: New Media And Citizen Engagement In Urban Design

Abstract: Over the last few years, the term “smart cities” has gained traction in academic, industry, and policy debates about the deployment of new media technologies in urban settings. It is mostly used to describe and market technologies that make city infrastructures more efficient, and personalize the experience of the city. Here, we want to propose the notion of “ownership” as a lens to take an alternative look at the role of urban new media in the city. With the notion of ownership, we seek to investigate how digital media and culture allow citizens to engage with, organize around and act upon collective issues to engage in co-creating the social fabric and built form of the city. Taking ownership as the point of departure, we wish to broaden the debate about the role of new media technologies in urban design from an infrastructural to a social point of view, or from “city management” to “city making”.

Select drag and drop operations on video thumbnails across clip boundaries

Abstract: A computer-implemented method includes displaying, within a user interface in a digital media system, a media pane, and a project pane, displaying, within the media pane, a thumbnail group representing a media item, the thumbnail group comprising one or more thumbnails, enabling a user to select, from the thumbnail group, a segment of the media item, and enabling a user to transfer the selected segment to the project pane.

The myth of ‘us’: digital networks, political change and the production of collectivity

Abstract: This article examines critically the claims that digital networks (digital media infrastructures, especially social media platforms) fundamentally change the conditions of politics over the longer term. Without doubt digital networks enable faster political mobilization, accelerated cycles of action, and some new forms of collectivity, but how consequential is this in the longer term when set alongside other longer term consequences of a digitally saturated environment? The author argues that some leading accounts of digital media's contributions to political change operate with a thin account of the social, the sort of thin account that historically has been supplemented by media's mythical accounts over the past century of their role in supplying social knowledge. In the digital age, even the most detailed and rigorous accounts of digital networks' contributions to political action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 2013) fail to show that those networks also facilitate longer term political action that builds...

Identity and Agency

Abstract: Identity is a complex and multifaceted construct that, when considered within a binary, digital environment, is divided into two constituent and occasionally conflicting parts: the collection of information that relates to a single entity (digital identity) and the representation of the self-identity in the digital space (online identity). This entry primarily considers the latter, including the ways it is expressed in an anonymized space – both at an individual and a social level – and the structures that inhibit and support its expression. It also explores the necessary role in digital identity in creating the online environments that make up the technologically mediated world, and the negotiations currently debated between social science, philosophy, law, and computer science for creating an identity-rich and safe digital media. Keywords: anonymity; Big Data; digital identity; game characters, avatars, and identity; networked individualism; online identity; possible selves

Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-Representation

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Postfeminism, Girls and Young Women, and Digital Media PART I: SEXUAL SELF-REPRESENTATIONS 3. Heterosexy Images on Social Network Sites 4. Girls, Sexting and Gender Politics PART II: VALUABLE AND DEVALUED SELVES 5. Postfeminist Self-Making: Textual Self-Representation and the Performance of "Authentic" Young Femininity on Social Network Sites 6. Digital Girls in Crisis? Seeking Feedback and Representing Pain in Postfeminist Networked Publics Afterword: Notes on Visibility and Self-Exposure

The Conceptualization of Digitally Networked Participation

Abstract: The conceptualization and measurement of political participation has been an issue vibrantly debated for more than 50 years. The arrival of digital media came to add important parameters to the deb...

Media: A Catalyst for Resilience in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth.

Abstract: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth have the potential for considerable resilience. Positive media representations may mediate negative experiences and foster self-esteem, yet the relationship between resilience and both traditional offline and new online media remains underaddressed for this population. This grounded-theory exploration of media-based resilience-building activities by LGBTQ youth (n = 19) indicated four themes that media use enabled: coping through escapism; feeling stronger; fighting back; and finding and fostering community. Data are embedded to evidence thematic findings and incorporate participant voices. The importance of considering the media within contemporary LGBTQ youth's ecological framework to capture their resilience is considered.

Toward New Journalism(s)

Abstract: Research indicates that information sharing and conversational uses of online media by journalists, news organizations, and individual users render complex and networked social awareness systems that evolve beyond traditional ecologies of journalism. This essay examines the form of news “prodused” through networked platforms that converge broadcast and oral traditions of storytelling into contemporary news practices. Synthesizing existing research, I argue that the shape news takes on is affective, the form of production is hybrid, and that spaces produced discursively through news storytelling frequently function as electronic elsewheres, or as social spaces that support marginalized and liminal viewpoints. Affective news streams are defined as news collaboratively constructed out of subjective experience, opinion, and emotion all sustained by and sustaining ambient news environments. They provide liminal layers to storytelling, but also a way for storytelling audiences to feel their own place into a dev...

Book Review: The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics:

Abstract: digitalization and digitization culture digitally pleased to share a draft of an article daniel kreiss and i are working on for the upcoming international encyclopedia of communication theory and philosophy we think this compliments some of the great work being done through the digital keywords project especially digital and analog we would appreciate any comments you care to give, critical questions for big data provocations for a the era of big data has begun computer scientists physicists economists mathematicians political scientists bio informaticists sociologists and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people things and their interactions, why david sometimes wins leadership organization and why david sometimes wins tells the story of cesar chavez and the united farm workers groundbreaking victory drawing important lessons from this dramatic tale since the 1900s large scale agricultural enterprises relied on migrant labor a cheap unorganized and powerless workforce

How Media Literacy Supports Civic Engagement in a Digital Age

Abstract: Young people are making active use of the Internet in ways that may or may not contribute to civic engagement. Whereas some scholars believe that civic engagement arises naturally from digital media use, others believe that media literacy education is needed to provide the cognitive and social scaffolding that systematically supports civic engagement. Research with a sample of 400 American high school students explores the relationship between participation in a media literacy program, academic ability, frequency of Internet use, information-gathering motives, news and advertising analysis skills, and the intention toward civic engagement. Findings show that students in a selective-admission media literacy program have substantially higher levels of media knowledge and news and advertising analysis skills than other students. Participation in a media literacy program was positively associated with information-seeking motives, media knowledge, and news analysis skills. Moreover, information-seeking motives...

Remix Culture and English Language Teaching: The Expression of Learner Voice in Digital Multimodal Compositions

Abstract: A number of scholars maintain that the affordances of digital media to easily copy, edit, and share digital content has led to the development of a remix culture in which the amateur creation of cultural artifacts—often remixes, mashups, or parodies based on the creative works of others—has proliferated. At the same time, in TESOL there is increasing interest in engaging students with processes of digital multimodal composition, focusing not only on language proficiency as it is traditionally conceived but also on the strategic use of multimodal resources and collaborative tools to reach a wide authentic audience on the Internet. One issue which such approaches must face is the tendency for some students to draw upon and remix existing creative works in their digital compositions. In particular, the issue is whether this practice of remix promotes or compromises the expression of learner voice. This article considers these questions by examining the multimodal compositions of students in a course in English for science at a Hong Kong university. The analysis generates a theoretical model of remix practices, which can be applied to the teaching and evaluation of multimodal compositions in English language courses.

New Media but Same Old Tricks: Food Marketing to Children in the Digital Age

Abstract: 'New media' refers to digital technologies, which offer unmatched opportunities for food companies to engage with young people. This paper explores the emergence of food marketing using new media, the potential impact of this marketing on young people, and current and potential policy responses to limit exposure to these promotions. Foremost in any informed policy discussion is the need for robust evidence to demonstrate the need for intervention. In this case, such evidence relates to the extent of children's exposures to commercial food promotions via new media, and the nature of these promotions. Approaches to, and challenges of, collecting and assessing these data are discussed. There is accumulating evidence that food marketing on new media is increasing and influences children's food preferences and choices. The impact of integrated campaigns, which reinforce commercial messages across multiple platforms, and of new media, which engage personally with potential consumers, is likely to be greater than that of traditional marketing.

Video games, cognitive exercises, and the enhancement of cognitive abilities

Abstract: In this review we explore the emerging field of cognitive training via distinct types of interactive digital media: those designed primarily for entertainment (‘video games’) and those created for the purpose of cognitive enhancement (‘cognitive exercises’). Here we consider how specific design factors associated with each tool (e.g., fun, motivation, adaptive mechanics) and the study itself (e.g., participant expectancy, dose effects) can influence cognitive enhancement effects. We finally describe how the development of hybrid interventions that capitalize on strengths of each type of interactive digital media are anticipated to emerge as this field matures.

The social media transformation process: curating content into strategy

Abstract: Purpose – Social media is an engaging area of research that is rapidly evolving. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how corporations should effectively utilize this new media as a marketing channel. The key to any successful communication strategy is matching the message to the target audience and achieving customer engagement. Two important target audience variables were identified as crucial when determining an organization’s social media communications strategy: the level of brand relationship, and the level of category involvement. Design/methodology/approach – Depth interviews were initially employed, followed by questionnaires, and then computer assisted content analysis was performed on 723 online media articles relating to social media marketing to identify semantic and conceptual relationships. Findings – Research from both a customer and corporate perspective led to insights into how organizations can develop their social media strategies in order to transform their brand message from bein...

Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife

Abstract: There is a contradiction at the heart of digital media. We use commercial platforms to express our identity, to build community and to engage politically. At the same time, our status updates, tweets, videos, photographs and music files are free content for these sites. We are also generating an almost endless supply of user data that can be mined, re-purposed and sold to advertisers. As users of the commercial web, we are socially and creatively engaged, but also labourers, exploited by the companies that provide our communication platforms. How do we reconcile these contradictions? Feminism, Labour and Digital Media argues for using the work of Marxist feminist theorists about the role of domestic work in capitalism to explore these competing dynamics of consumer labour. It uses the concept of the Digital Housewife to outline the relationship between the work we do online and the unpaid sphere of social reproduction. It demonstrates how feminist perspectives expand our critique of consumer labour in digital media. In doing so, the Digital Housewife returns feminist inquiry from the margins and places it at the heart of critical digital media analysis.