{"title":"The smartphone’s role in the contemporary backpacking experience","authors":"E. Silas, A. Løvlie, Rich Ling","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.491","url":null,"abstract":"In this study we explore the smartphone’s role in the contemporary international backpacking experience. This paper will examine backpackers’ perceived changes in mediated interaction and personal attitudes towards phone use in co-present situations pre-trip, on-trip, and post-trip. John Urry and Jonas Larsen’s theory on tourist performances as well as Cody M. Paris et al.’s experiences of technology induced anxieties and tensions while traveling provide a conceptual framework for the analysis. A sample of 11 backpackers were interviewed at youth dormitories in Indonesia and Malaysia. Post-trip interviews were conducted primarily online through Skype. The findings suggest that there is an ideal of staying offline while traveling. Yet, backpackers report connecting daily with their smartphones and reveal a travel-time legitimacy for sharing updates and receiving attention on social media. After the trip, backpackers perceived a reduction in their own phone use and an increased tolerance for others’ phone use in their presence.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128359432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Algorithmic love: “Quit playin’ games with my <3”","authors":"C. Cambre","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.486","url":null,"abstract":"Some of the rich history of the <3 is laced with myths and monsters, and reveals this particular cipher is anything but a trivial emoticon: rather, its ambiguous affective weight makes it an ideal interface for the ineffable. This conceptual essay is an exploration through a different approach to the traditional visual essay. Here, the author-composed photo-collages function as a meditation on a theme by pondering and theorizing along with the text, ideas of the heart emoticon in the fractal matrix of sign types, with some of the multiple possibilities and implications associated with its use by both individuals and corporations. Paralleling the subject/object relations figured forth through the Medusa myth, with the idea that not knowing about the algorithmic influences on the <3 of intimate digital messaging may serve to turn the subject into an object. This paper thus calls for algorithmic literacies, broadly conceived as agility in critically discerning how decision-making is presented to the individual in matters of the <3.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"252 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134041435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Let me be your TV’ (Phillips 1996, 1)","authors":"Elke Rentemeister","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.485","url":null,"abstract":"Video abstract \u0000Mobile media enable immediate and continuous connections as well as ubiquitous pro-ducing, sharing and consuming of audio-visual material. This article analyses the con-ceptualisation of ultra-short media forms and media convergence on Vine. The article is based mainly on the analysis of examples of the Vine users Thomas Sanders, the NBA and the America’s Funniest Home Videos, illustrating the aesthetics and content ena-bled by ultra-short communications. The term para-social interaction, as applied by Horton and Wohl (1956) in the context of mass media, is adapted to Vine as social me-dia, highlighting the performance of intimacy in communication mediated with digital tools.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114924381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Happy #monthsary babe! Vernacular readings and practices of monthsaries among young couplings on social media","authors":"C. Abidin","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.483","url":null,"abstract":"Video abstract \u0000Romantic monthsaries, or monthly commemorations of the date on which a couple first got together, are increasingly practiced by young couples and archived on social media. As a form of visually oriented practice, monthsaries are fraught with vernacular readings, perceptions, and practices. This paper investigates the practice of monthsaries among ‘young couplings’, which I define as the experiences of young people’s partnering practices in their teenage years and/or their initial experience of early partnering regardless of the age of first coupling, in which young couples do not yet have any formal status, are unable to experience domestic living together, and have limited opportunities to be alone and intimate. In the absence of any scholarly precedence and adopting a Grounded Theory approach, this paper is an exploratory study that approaches monthsaries through internet folk knowledge, forum threads and visual displays of monthsaries on Instagram.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133435660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mediated Storytelling Practices and Productions: Archival Bodies of Affective Evidences","authors":"Jamie A. Lee","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.484","url":null,"abstract":"Video abstract \u0000Through hands-on work collecting digital video oral histories for the Arizona Queer Archives, bodies and bodies of knowledge in ongoing affective states of simultaneous becoming and unbecoming can be observed and encountered. Both interviewing and storytelling techniques in select oral histories are considered here to stress the salient and affective processes of mediation and (un)becoming that unfold in front of and behind the camera as part of the production of digital archival stories and subsequent access to streaming technologies. In order to explore the details of archival production, the oral history interview is understood here as a space of both intimate and public storytelling—an affective assemblage. This paper introduces archives as affective multimodalities that work to tenderly hold and structure bodies, technologies, and stories especially as these come together and apart in states of (un)becoming.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"241 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132343669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Together While Apart? Mediating Relationships and Intimacy. An Introduction.","authors":"Pat Prieto, Mia Schreiber","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.481","url":null,"abstract":"Video abstract \u0000This special issue of Networking Knowledge - Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN seeks to explore how interpersonal relationships are mediated in contemporary contexts. Digital technologies and the practices associated with them enable us to interact with our social network of support in seemingly easy ways: we just need to use the touch of a finger on a mobile phone screen to show that we care. It does, however, also take only the same effort and the same fingertips to enact hate. Acts of disaffection, often crystallized as revenge, originate, in nests and corners of intimacy (Bachelard 1958, p.XXXVII), and when disseminated widely can be fatal1. Recently, acts of disaffection, or rather hate, - especially against diffuse, imagined collectives such as “the refugees” - have also appeared in the more public realms of forums, comments sections of online news, or social media feeds. A perception of anonymity might result in ‘disinhibition effects’ (Suler 2004) and sometimes quite extreme forms of hate speech (Gelber & McNamara 2016), which poses new challenges for media education and online governance. \u0000Interrogating the pragmatics of mediated affect and disaffection is a necessity. In mediated interpersonal relationships, the intimate and the emotional are often subjected to a set of infrastructures, called affordances by others (Wright and Parchoma, 2011), as well as to set of practices. The contributions that make up Together While Apart? highlight the emotive dimension of mediated communication. The common thread of all contributions to this issue is the focus on how relationships, intimacy, and (dis)affect are constituted and negotiated through media.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127243034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“It seems like it has always been with us!”: Introducing media technology into children’s lives and family interpersonal relationships","authors":"K. Frolova","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.96.469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.96.469","url":null,"abstract":"Research on children and media often focuses on the risks surrounding children’s use of media technology and parents’ attempts to control, manage and limit it. However, while our knowledge of parental mediation styles and strategies is extensive, our understanding of what motivates parents and other members of the family to encourage children to use media technology is far from being comprehensive. Using qualitative data from an original empirical study of UK families and their media use, this article explores why parents and other relatives, such as grandparents, see value in children’s use of media, and how they encourage children to use media technology and maintain an ongoing relationship with it, introducing it into children’s lives and family interpersonal relationships from the early months of infancy.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125707415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Describing the Archive: Preservation of Space, Time and Discontinuity in Photographic Sequences","authors":"J. Birkin","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.95.457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.95.457","url":null,"abstract":"The important relationship between the material arrangement of the archive and its accompanying catalogue is discussed and rationalised from a position inside the institution, from where I argue that an understanding of physical and contextual relationships between interconnecting units is critical to the spatiotemporal understanding of the archived image. The archive catalogue list is determined by the original order of the archive material and is subsequently central to the maintenance of order, functioning as ‘detector’ and ‘effector’ (Hood and Margetts 2007). There is a consideration of the comparatively new concept of original order from its development in the late 1880s publication known as the ‘Dutch Manual’. This manual for archivists emphasised recordkeeping without anticipating specific future use, a methodology that still persists today. The diachronic nature of archival ordering systems, dependant as it is on collection and use by original owners, is examined alongside important questions of narrativity and storytelling in photographic collections.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"53 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123194424","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Data-PSST Seminar Series Report","authors":"Abi Blyth","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.95.464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.95.464","url":null,"abstract":"This is a report into a series of multi-disciplinary seminars funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) over an 18 month period. Following the Snowden revelations in June 2013, assessing transparency, security, privacy, surveillance and trust have become integral themes, something the seminar series has sought to achieve by creating a series of key policy recommendations and further research questions.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116103048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Media Policy, Media Reform and Media Power: An Interview with Des Freedman","authors":"S. Dawes, D. Freedman","doi":"10.31165/NK.2016.95.461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31165/NK.2016.95.461","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, Des Freedman discusses his work as an activist in the Media Reform movement, as a critic of media policy, and as a theorist of media power. Freedman explains his approach to media power as a material and relational property, distinguishing it from liberal pluralist, cultural studies and political-economic approaches. Discussing media power in the context of the recent BBC charter review process and the earlier Leveson Inquiry into the ethics of the British press, Freedman clarifies his proposal for a research focus on ‘non-decisionmaking’ in the policy field. Ultimately, he explains how guiding principles, programmes of action, and an understanding of the contradictory nature of media power are all necessary to bring about revolutionary reform.","PeriodicalId":299414,"journal":{"name":"Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131048564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}