Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies最新文献

{"title":"Social media and platform work: Stories, practices, and workers’ organisation","authors":"Júlia Vilasís-Pamos, Fernanda Pires, Rafael Grohmann, Willian Fernandes Araújo","doi":"10.1177/13548565241227391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241227391","url":null,"abstract":"This article introduces the special issue, ‘Social Media and Platform Work: Stories, Practices, and Workers’ Organisation’. In recent years, platform labour studies have increasingly focused on how the growing platformisation of labour has changed work activities, labour processes, work organising, identities, and collectivities. The literature has highlighted the role of media, communication, and social media in platform labour, but more research is needed on these interrelationships. Precisely, the analysis of platform work is necessary due to its complexity and interest in political, economic, social, cultural, and health terms. Throughout the special issue, different contributions are presented that analyse how the emergence of these new jobs brings a set of inequalities that complexify the notion of ‘work’ and dilute workers’ rights, leading to a precarious situation. The use of social media plays a crucial role in the platformisation of labour as it enables the creation of social relationships between workers but also opens the door to communicating, disseminating their work, and even learning informally and about their work. However, the use of social media can also lead to a precarious combination of platform work and content creation – or cultural production. In this regard, it is worth noting to analyse and approach the relationship between platform work and social networks precisely by addressing both perspectives, considering possible vulnerabilities derived from these situations and situations of precariousness.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"33 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139875802","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":"The making of critical data center studies","authors":"Dustin Edwards, Z. Cooper, Mél Hogan","doi":"10.1177/13548565231224157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231224157","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, the authors demonstrate how the data center has become a key site, object, and metaphor for interdisciplinary scholarship of the internet. While the data center is a fabrication of engineering, computer science, and cognate fields, it has been the critical gaze of scholars outside of those industries. Together, this scholarship has established the field of Critical Data Center Studies. Critiques of the data center – often thought of more generally as ‘internet infrastructure’, and more evocatively as ‘the cloud’ – have emerged from the social sciences, humanities, journalism, and the arts. The authors do this by answering questions about the current social, cultural, political, and environmental landscapes of the data center. Scrutiny of the foundational imaginaries of the internet, real estate deals by Big Tech, the industry’s enabling policies, their connections to energy and other public infrastructure – among many other factors – serves, at the very least, to situate the data center as a media object, as more than simply a material infrastructure, as more than data warehouse, and as more than ‘the cloud’. Further to this, the authors reflect on how the data center has been and continues to be studied, and why critical interventions have been so fruitful within a vast array of disciplines – from history and anthropology, to media studies, information studies, and science & technology studies – for shifting the focus from questions of infrastructural visibility to questions that weave together concerns of efficiency, policy, popular culture, and planetary devastation.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"133 49","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139604909","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":"Slantwise disengagement: Explaining Facebook users’ acts beyond resistance/internalization of domination binary","authors":"Venetia Papa, Theodoros Kouros","doi":"10.1177/13548565241227396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241227396","url":null,"abstract":"This theoretical and empirical investigation builds upon the concept of ‘slantwise behavior’ to further complicate notions of the ‘digital disengagement’ of subjects within technological infrastructures such as Facebook. It has been previously suggested that the ubiquity of the data privacy paradox is the most common reason for disengagement practices. Our study contributes to this discussion by examining subjects’ disengagement on Social Network Sites (SNS). While numerous concepts concerning disconnection and disengagement from SNS have been conceptualized by media theorists, largely based on a binary construct of resistance or domination, our work proposes an alternative conceptualization of subjects’ disengagement. By employing a qualitative methodological approach and using 30 semi-structured interviews to capture subjects’ discursive patterns, we illustrate that disengagement on Facebook can be seen as a hybrid reaction and a complex phenomenon in which certain disconnection practices cannot be easily classified as resistance practices or as indications of the internalization of domination but rather are best understood as slantwise behaviors, that is, actions that may unintentionally lead to obfuscation.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"12 46","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139523703","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":"‘People don’t buy art, they buy artists’: Robot artists – work, identity, and expertise","authors":"Daniel Ashton, Karen Patel","doi":"10.1177/13548565231220310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220310","url":null,"abstract":"This article critically examines the construction of the artistic identity and career of Ai-Da, ‘the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist’. Engaging with scholarship on posthumanism and creative assemblages, and creative work, identity and expertise, this article conceptualises Ai-Da's distinctive positioning and focuses on the practices used to construct a creative worker identity and career. The article uses qualitative content analysis to examine journalistic coverage, promotional and presentation activities, exhibitions and performances, and social media postings over a four-year period from Ai-Da’s first launch to international visibility. The analysis shows how Ai-Da is positioned as a high-profile, border crossing artist, engaging in debates about Artificial Intelligence (AI), art, and the environment. It considers the creative assemblage of Ai-Da as a humanoid robot artist, the creator Aidan Meller and the team working with him, and the wider contextual factors of aesthetic expertise, networks and knowledge of art worlds which have shaped Ai-Da's artistic identity and career trajectory. The focus on how Ai-Da signals expertise on social media helps to frame the specific techniques used to speak about and for Ai-Da on social media platforms and wider media coverage. This includes articulating inspiration, showcasing artistic processes and cultivating audience relationships. In concluding, the implications of connecting critical perspectives on creative work with developments in art, AI and robot artists are explored: firstly, for understanding how the practices for constructing an artistic identity shape the development of robot artists; secondly, for understanding how developments in art and AI can frame reflections on artistic identity and careers.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"44 15","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139533740","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":"Sociohistorical development of sim racing in European and Asia-Pacific esports: A cross-cultural qualitative study","authors":"Florian Lefebvre, Ville Malinen, Veli-Matti Karhulahti","doi":"10.1177/13548565231222172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231222172","url":null,"abstract":"With the accelerated growth of the sim racing industry over the last few years, research on the phenomenon has started to emerge. Nonetheless, the history of sim racing remains unmapped. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating the development in sim racing in Europe and in Asia-Pacific between 1997 and 2021. Twenty four semi-structured interviews were carried out with experts representing sim racing associations, event organizers, and teams from Europe and Asia-Pacific. Data were analyzed using an inductive-deductive codebook approach. The results show the evolution of sim racing throughout five sociohistorical stages, which demonstrate how sim racing emerged as a hybrid of esports and motorsports and has kept evolving since ‘in-between’ their respective actors until today. The findings suggest that the slow evolution of sim racing has been particularly dependent on networked sociocultural actors, while positively affected by uncontrollable events like the COVID-19 pandemic. As a key implication, we find that the history of sim racing differs from that of esports by its multifaceted dependence on the motorsports ecosystem.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"39 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139385028","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":"The ethical dilemma of modding digital games: A literature review of the creation and distribution of mods","authors":"Pedro Reisinho, Rui Raposo, Nelson Zagalo","doi":"10.1177/13548565231223933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231223933","url":null,"abstract":"In parallel with the rapid growth of the digital games market, the modding phenomenon has been gaining momentum. Mod culture, a manifestation of the convergence and the remix cultures, emerges as a way to adapt digital games to the needs of their players and incorporate content from other media, such as books, movies, or series, into the game world. This systematic literature review aims to discuss the ethical considerations of modding by understanding its impact on the overall gaming experience and comprehending how players and game companies perceive and respond to modders’ motivations. 15 studies from various scientific fields were analysed. Overall, mods impact the gaming experience in a variety of ways, ranging from educational purposes to deeper social concerns. While modders find motivation to create mods stemming from a myriad of reasons, including leisure and self-improvement, the stance taken by game companies, gaming communities, and players tends to discourage them from developing new mods and deter new modders who aspire to contribute with creative content. In conclusion, it remains important to recognise that specific ethical dilemmas linked to mod culture require in-depth debate to reach a consensus. Furthermore, other aspects demand more stringent scrutiny to ensure that we can all benefit from the enriching playground of personal experimentation and exploration that modding offers in this contemporary era of convergence.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"11 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139167567","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":"Where were you when Facebook went out? Experiences of involuntary disconnection from social media","authors":"Linus Andersson, Martin Danielsson","doi":"10.1177/13548565231223488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231223488","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021, an event that affected approximately three billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 Swedish university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection caused by the outage was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life. It also points to some correlations between general social media use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"29 17","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139167262","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":"An audience studies’ contribution to the discoverability and prominence debate: Seeking UK TV audiences’ ‘routes to content’","authors":"Catherine Johnson, Matt Hills, Laurie Dempsey","doi":"10.1177/13548565231222605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231222605","url":null,"abstract":"Despite discoverability and prominence emerging as crucial to contemporary industry and policy debates in relation to online and internet-distributed television, there remains relatively little rich, qualitative data about how contemporary audiences discover content. This article addresses this gap through empirical audience research focused on the ‘routes to content’ through which UK audiences find and decide what television to watch. Defining television broadly to include all forms of video content accessed in the home, we argue for the importance of thinking about discoverability as an audience activity, not just an industrial strategy. Building on TV audience studies’ longer history and more recent literature on engagement, media literacy, algorithms and technological affordances in contemporary media platforms, we argue for new understanding of the imaginaries shaping people’s habitual viewing activities. The article proposes four new concepts for thinking about discoverability as an audience activity. First, we explore technological affordances and default behaviour, developing the concept of the negotiated-null affordance to explain how technological affordances can be rendered invisible by habitual behaviours. Second, we focus on algorithmic literacies and propose a new dissonant algorithmic imaginary to explain our participants’ ambivalences towards algorithmic personalisation. Third, we unpack the dynamics of access that emerge in our participants’ negotiations of television technologies, services and content. Fourth, we examine the role of word of mouth and promotional paratexts, theorising a second-order algorithmic imaginary to help us understand how these forms of communication can often, themselves, be subject to algorithmic processes. In doing so, we argue for the need for further qualitative research that looks beyond the ‘savvy’ consumers that dominate audience research in order to unpack the technological, industrial, cultural and social processes that shape people’s routes to content in a platform-dominated media landscape.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"186 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139173640","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":"NFTs applied to the art sector: Legal issues and recent jurisprudence","authors":"Wei Jia, Bin Yao","doi":"10.1177/13548565231199966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199966","url":null,"abstract":"Responding to the necessity of scarcity and uniqueness in the digital format, NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) have recently gained much attention in cultural industries, especially video games and the art market. Faced with the digital paradigm shift and the challenge of dematerialization, creators started to use NTFs in order to emulate the concept of rarity for displaying, promoting, and monetizing their works in digital environments. An NFT is a certificate of ownership implemented through encrypted metadata pointing to a unique copy of a digital file. Likewise, NFTs enable the tokenization of a large array of digital, or even physical, assets. For this reason, they are used to facilitate the digitalization of contents heavily dependent on copyright and scarcity. Non-Fungible Tokens represent an emerging reality of significant economic, social, and cultural importance, which also raises important legal issues especially concerning the very nature of the NFT, as property or license, and the usage of copyrighted contents or trademarks. Indeed, the most frequent legal issues with NFTs are related to the attribution and exploitation of the Intellectual Property (IP) rights of the underlying content or litigations about non-contractual matters (i.e., theft). Litigious cases affecting NFTs most often take on an international dimension due to the decentralized nature of the technology on which they are developed, distributed on servers hosted in a multitude of countries, as well as the business practices of trading platforms that connect users from all over the world. Consequently, the principles of Private International Law (PIL) are applied to solve legal conflicts. This study focuses on the resolution of litigations related to NFTs in the three countries leading the global art markets: the US, the UK, and China. The analysis focuses on the application of international private law in relation to recent jurisprudence concerning conflicts involving NFTs and artworks.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"45 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139174724","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":"Camera Phantasma: Reframing virtual photographies in the age of AI","authors":"Michael Peter Schofield","doi":"10.1177/13548565231220314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220314","url":null,"abstract":"The recent advent of virtual photography and artificial intelligence (specifically AI photography and diffusion models), presents a major challenge to both photographers and photography theory. All our common-sense assumptions about the ontology of the image now seem to be falling apart. Are these interlopers really photography? Can we hear the final death knell for the erstwhile medium in this era of ever-increasing media convergence and virtualisation? This practice-led investigation of these new media forms draws on the author’s recent creative work in virtual photographies, and similar interventions by other photographers and new media artists, seeking to augment and expand their practice using these new tools, whilst querying what photography really means today. From in-game photography to virtual exploration using Google Street View, to AI photography using the latest denoising diffusion models (such as Midjourney), there are surprising commonalities to explore between them, linking these new practices of image-making firmly back to traditions of lens-based photography. Rather than seeking a detailed map of this difficult new terrain, or a definitive ontology of emerging virtual photographies, the author reframes the discourse around practice, examining both photography as an evolving set of practices and also notions of media hauntology – specifically the spectral ways in which new media technologies are always haunted by prior practices and modes of communication. The importance of the frame to both traditional photography and new practices of virtual photography, is suggested as a vital and persistent dimension in photographic authorship. With that authorship increasingly contested by new generative methods, easy appropriation and AI image-making, the act of framing may become the best litmus test we have, for whether or not a photograph should be considered ‘real’ or valued.","PeriodicalId":505001,"journal":{"name":"Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies","volume":"1177 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139177009","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}