Pub Date : 2023-09-27DOI: 10.1177/13548565231203983
Farley J Joseph
Music Streaming Services (MSS) have recently emerged as the main format for showcasing and monetizing sound recordings by record labels and artists in the international recorded music sector. In the Caribbean, however, stakeholders have been slow to adopt and integrate these digital music platforms into their overall recorded music strategies. Within this context, this paper explores the key economic opportunities and challenges associated with the late adoption of the platform-based streaming music model. Using self-administered structured interviews with nine regional experts from the three major music markets, as well as an analysis of audio-visual and digital materials and review of documents, the information is derived using a qualitative research approach, supported by a grounded theory strategy of inquiry. The findings illustrate that on one hand there is cautious optimism with respect to the potential for the re-construction of revenue streams, due to stronger royalty inflows associated with new uses of music in the digital arena. The extent to which this is realized contends with the quantum of royalty payouts actually received by rights-holders and their overall willingness to licence their rights to MSS. Additionally, MSS provides the platform for rights-owners to reach glocal audiences. However, this is reliant on the content and user-friendly features embedded in the platforms and the readiness of regional artists to be discovered and monetized via third party playlists.
{"title":"Streaming forward: Adoption considerations for the major recorded music markets in CARICOM","authors":"Farley J Joseph","doi":"10.1177/13548565231203983","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231203983","url":null,"abstract":"Music Streaming Services (MSS) have recently emerged as the main format for showcasing and monetizing sound recordings by record labels and artists in the international recorded music sector. In the Caribbean, however, stakeholders have been slow to adopt and integrate these digital music platforms into their overall recorded music strategies. Within this context, this paper explores the key economic opportunities and challenges associated with the late adoption of the platform-based streaming music model. Using self-administered structured interviews with nine regional experts from the three major music markets, as well as an analysis of audio-visual and digital materials and review of documents, the information is derived using a qualitative research approach, supported by a grounded theory strategy of inquiry. The findings illustrate that on one hand there is cautious optimism with respect to the potential for the re-construction of revenue streams, due to stronger royalty inflows associated with new uses of music in the digital arena. The extent to which this is realized contends with the quantum of royalty payouts actually received by rights-holders and their overall willingness to licence their rights to MSS. Additionally, MSS provides the platform for rights-owners to reach glocal audiences. However, this is reliant on the content and user-friendly features embedded in the platforms and the readiness of regional artists to be discovered and monetized via third party playlists.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135536394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-27DOI: 10.1177/13548565231203981
Stephanie Hill
In August 2019, a mass shooter in the United States posted a violent manifesto to the anonymous forum 8chan prior to his attack. This was the third such incident that year and afterwards hosting and security services conceded to calls to drop 8chan as a client, pushing 8chan to the margins of the accessible internet. This article examines the deplatforming of 8chan as a public relations crisis, contributing to understanding ‘governance by shock’ (Ananny and Gillespie 2016) by examining who is shocked and their power to turn shock into online regulation. Online platforms and media attention created opportunities to study how the deplatforming was justified, drawing on the theoretical framework of economies of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) and controversy mapping methods. The examination finds: (1) that this case of deplatforming indicates the openness of infrastructure-as-a-service companies to external challenges over content, rather than hegemonic control. (2) That regulatory gaps, including the broadness of U.S. free speech laws, made these companies, rather than legal processes, the relevant authority. (3) That framing responsibility as following the law – as Cloudflare attempted to do – misunderstands the importance of normative principles, voluntary measures, and contestation in governing online content, underselling the value of policy-making at other levels. The success of the campaign to deplatform 8chan affirms the significance of PR crises in the regulation of online content, rewarding deplatforming as a political tactic for civil society groups and online networks pushing for governance in regulatory gaps. However, the significance of normative enforcement in this case underlines the difficulties of this semi-voluntary style of governance. While normative opposition to violence contributed to 8chan’s deplatforming, other normative oppositions contribute to deplatforming vulnerable users, as in the moral panics that drive the deplatforming of sexual content ( Tiidenberg 2021 ) and feed suspicion over the ideological application of deplatforming. The ambivalence of PR crises as a strategy for influencing platform governance underlines the need for clarity in policy-making at multiple levels.
2019年8月，美国一名大规模枪手在袭击前在匿名论坛8chan上发布了一份暴力宣言。这是该年发生的第三起此类事件，之后托管和安全服务机构迫于要求放弃8chan客户的呼声，将8chan推到了可访问互联网的边缘。本文将8chan的平台化作为一场公共关系危机进行了研究，通过研究谁受到了冲击，以及他们将冲击转化为网络监管的能力，有助于理解“冲击治理”(Ananny and Gillespie 2016)。利用价值经济的理论框架(Boltanski and Thevenot 2006)和争议映射方法，在线平台和媒体关注为研究去平台化是如何被证明是合理的创造了机会。研究发现:(1)这种去平台化的情况表明，基础设施即服务公司对内容的外部挑战持开放态度，而不是霸权控制。(2)监管缺口，包括美国言论自由法律的宽泛性，使这些公司，而不是法律程序，成为相关权威。(3)将责任定义为遵守法律——就像Cloudflare试图做的那样——误解了规范原则、自愿措施和争议在管理在线内容中的重要性，低估了其他层面决策的价值。取消8chan平台运动的成功，证实了公关危机在网络内容监管中的重要性，让取消平台成为公民社会团体和在线网络在监管缺口中推动治理的一种政治策略。然而，在这种情况下，规范执行的重要性突显了这种半自愿治理风格的困难。虽然对暴力的规范反对导致了8chan的去平台化，但其他规范反对也导致了弱势用户的去平台化，比如道德恐慌推动了性内容的去平台化(Tiidenberg 2021)，并引发了对去平台化的意识形态应用的怀疑。公共关系危机作为一种影响平台治理的战略所存在的矛盾心理，突显了在多个层面上明确决策的必要性。
{"title":"‘Definitely not in the business of wanting to be associated’: Examining public relations in a deplatformization controversy","authors":"Stephanie Hill","doi":"10.1177/13548565231203981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231203981","url":null,"abstract":"In August 2019, a mass shooter in the United States posted a violent manifesto to the anonymous forum 8chan prior to his attack. This was the third such incident that year and afterwards hosting and security services conceded to calls to drop 8chan as a client, pushing 8chan to the margins of the accessible internet. This article examines the deplatforming of 8chan as a public relations crisis, contributing to understanding ‘governance by shock’ (Ananny and Gillespie 2016) by examining who is shocked and their power to turn shock into online regulation. Online platforms and media attention created opportunities to study how the deplatforming was justified, drawing on the theoretical framework of economies of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) and controversy mapping methods. The examination finds: (1) that this case of deplatforming indicates the openness of infrastructure-as-a-service companies to external challenges over content, rather than hegemonic control. (2) That regulatory gaps, including the broadness of U.S. free speech laws, made these companies, rather than legal processes, the relevant authority. (3) That framing responsibility as following the law – as Cloudflare attempted to do – misunderstands the importance of normative principles, voluntary measures, and contestation in governing online content, underselling the value of policy-making at other levels. The success of the campaign to deplatform 8chan affirms the significance of PR crises in the regulation of online content, rewarding deplatforming as a political tactic for civil society groups and online networks pushing for governance in regulatory gaps. However, the significance of normative enforcement in this case underlines the difficulties of this semi-voluntary style of governance. While normative opposition to violence contributed to 8chan’s deplatforming, other normative oppositions contribute to deplatforming vulnerable users, as in the moral panics that drive the deplatforming of sexual content ( Tiidenberg 2021 ) and feed suspicion over the ideological application of deplatforming. The ambivalence of PR crises as a strategy for influencing platform governance underlines the need for clarity in policy-making at multiple levels.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135537436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-22DOI: 10.1177/13548565231200827
Shirley Druker Shitrit, Chaim Noy
New media platforms offer diverse modes of mediation of every day and tourist places and communities. Spatial social media now augment older forms of mediation, partly by enabling contributions from ‘ordinary’ users, who create and share spatial discourses. This study examines the discursive construction of peripheral places, produced through user-generated content. Employing qualitative methodology, we sample and analyze 1,053 texts, shared on Google Maps in southern regions of Israel. The key conclusions suggest that compared to traditional media discourses depicting peripheral spaces in Israel, the findings demonstrate a shift from homogeneous depictions to more diverse and multilayered ones. Digital affordances result in more actors and stakeholders partaking in discursive construction, including private and institutional local players, visitors and tourists. Theoretical contributions are offered to the field of digital placemaking, by considering the subjective, evaluative and ideological layers that augment geographical data digital maps provide (‘bottom-up’ perspective), and to the fields of study of marginalized peripheral and rural communities and tourism crisis in peripheral (post-Coronavirus) locations.
{"title":"‘Come support the locals!’: mediating peripheral spaces on Google maps via user-generated content","authors":"Shirley Druker Shitrit, Chaim Noy","doi":"10.1177/13548565231200827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231200827","url":null,"abstract":"New media platforms offer diverse modes of mediation of every day and tourist places and communities. Spatial social media now augment older forms of mediation, partly by enabling contributions from ‘ordinary’ users, who create and share spatial discourses. This study examines the discursive construction of peripheral places, produced through user-generated content. Employing qualitative methodology, we sample and analyze 1,053 texts, shared on Google Maps in southern regions of Israel. The key conclusions suggest that compared to traditional media discourses depicting peripheral spaces in Israel, the findings demonstrate a shift from homogeneous depictions to more diverse and multilayered ones. Digital affordances result in more actors and stakeholders partaking in discursive construction, including private and institutional local players, visitors and tourists. Theoretical contributions are offered to the field of digital placemaking, by considering the subjective, evaluative and ideological layers that augment geographical data digital maps provide (‘bottom-up’ perspective), and to the fields of study of marginalized peripheral and rural communities and tourism crisis in peripheral (post-Coronavirus) locations.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136015471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-18DOI: 10.1177/13548565231203103
Alexis Shore
{"title":"Book review: The private is political: Networked privacy and social media by Alice Marwick","authors":"Alexis Shore","doi":"10.1177/13548565231203103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231203103","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135206231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-16DOI: 10.1177/13548565231199980
Martin J Riedl, Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, Jessica R Collier, Jacob Gursky, Katie Joseff, Samuel Woolley
The use of geolocation data by political campaigns is often the subject of media concern. Research has investigated the role of data in and use by political campaigns, but less attention has been paid to digital political strategists largely responsible for decisions behind the assemblage and mining of voter databases to deliver micro-targeted messages on behalf of political campaigns. In this study, we conducted interviews with 14 leading industry professionals in the United States to examine the common scenarios and associated concerns of using geolocation data to target voters. Our findings reveal that geolocation data are an important asset in political campaigns, but their value is contingent on additional factors. Concerns regarding geolocation data, as interviewees suggested, may at times be influenced more by the popular media narratives than the true reality of data, their scope, and associated capabilities. Our results point to geolocation data’s greatest usefulness to campaigns not in their own right, but when data are paired with other insights about voters’ behaviors. Ultimately, the lack of industry regulation reveals discrepancies in best practices and raises concerns over the potential misuse of geolocation data in the political space.
{"title":"The role of geolocation data in U.S. political campaigning: How digital political strategists perceive it","authors":"Martin J Riedl, Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, Jessica R Collier, Jacob Gursky, Katie Joseff, Samuel Woolley","doi":"10.1177/13548565231199980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199980","url":null,"abstract":"The use of geolocation data by political campaigns is often the subject of media concern. Research has investigated the role of data in and use by political campaigns, but less attention has been paid to digital political strategists largely responsible for decisions behind the assemblage and mining of voter databases to deliver micro-targeted messages on behalf of political campaigns. In this study, we conducted interviews with 14 leading industry professionals in the United States to examine the common scenarios and associated concerns of using geolocation data to target voters. Our findings reveal that geolocation data are an important asset in political campaigns, but their value is contingent on additional factors. Concerns regarding geolocation data, as interviewees suggested, may at times be influenced more by the popular media narratives than the true reality of data, their scope, and associated capabilities. Our results point to geolocation data’s greatest usefulness to campaigns not in their own right, but when data are paired with other insights about voters’ behaviors. Ultimately, the lack of industry regulation reveals discrepancies in best practices and raises concerns over the potential misuse of geolocation data in the political space.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135306285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-15DOI: 10.1177/13548565231201597
Christopher Moore, Jasmyn Connell
An online persona is a public presentation of a human or non-human actor such as organisations and locations, digital objects, artificial intelligence, and media texts. This article provides an analysis of the online persona of the Australian satirical comedy podcast, Ja'miezing. Written, directed, performed, and produced by comedian Chris Lilley, Ja'miezing is a narrative podcast series that features the intimate details of the post-high school life of the character Ja’mie. The podcast launched following Lilley’s online cancellation which resulted in his previous mockumentary television shows being removed from Netflix and the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s video-on-demand service, ABC iview. The study builds on the five dimensions of persona – public, mediatised, performative, collective, and value – by drawing on contributions from podcast studies to better understand the unique features and practices of podcast personas. It seeks to untangle the complex interplay between the intertextual and intercommunicative connections of podcast producer, host, character, platform, and audience micropublics as they contribute to the online presentation of the podcast’s persona. The article highlights the potential of podcast personas as a unique form of a non-human online persona that requires further investigation. This approach also has implications for how to consider other forms of mediated communication with online personas.
{"title":"Ja’miezing’s Podcast Persona: Intertextual and Intercommunicative","authors":"Christopher Moore, Jasmyn Connell","doi":"10.1177/13548565231201597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231201597","url":null,"abstract":"An online persona is a public presentation of a human or non-human actor such as organisations and locations, digital objects, artificial intelligence, and media texts. This article provides an analysis of the online persona of the Australian satirical comedy podcast, Ja'miezing. Written, directed, performed, and produced by comedian Chris Lilley, Ja'miezing is a narrative podcast series that features the intimate details of the post-high school life of the character Ja’mie. The podcast launched following Lilley’s online cancellation which resulted in his previous mockumentary television shows being removed from Netflix and the Australian Broadcast Corporation’s video-on-demand service, ABC iview. The study builds on the five dimensions of persona – public, mediatised, performative, collective, and value – by drawing on contributions from podcast studies to better understand the unique features and practices of podcast personas. It seeks to untangle the complex interplay between the intertextual and intercommunicative connections of podcast producer, host, character, platform, and audience micropublics as they contribute to the online presentation of the podcast’s persona. The article highlights the potential of podcast personas as a unique form of a non-human online persona that requires further investigation. This approach also has implications for how to consider other forms of mediated communication with online personas.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"204 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135396546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/13548565231201774
Maja Nordtug, Lars EF Johannessen
Telepresence robots are increasingly used in schools as a way of including students who are unable to be physically present in the classroom with other students. The use of such robots is intended not just to help students follow their education but also to serve a social purpose. However, the extent to which the robots actually afford socializing needs to be explored further. This article analyzes how, to what extent, for whom, and under what circumstances the telepresence robot AV1 affords social contact for the heterogenous group of homebound Norwegian upper secondary school students. Building on Jenny Davis’ mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances, we focus on how AV1 affords for different students in specific circumstances. Our analysis draws on interviews with 11 upper secondary school students in Norway and finds that individual traits and circumstances such as health issues and social networks are important aspects when assessing whether a technology affords socializing. Based on our findings, we argue for expanding the mechanisms and conditions framework to include not just its current focus on perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy, but also the users’ emotions.
{"title":"The social robot? Analyzing whether and how the telepresence robot AV1 affords socialization","authors":"Maja Nordtug, Lars EF Johannessen","doi":"10.1177/13548565231201774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231201774","url":null,"abstract":"Telepresence robots are increasingly used in schools as a way of including students who are unable to be physically present in the classroom with other students. The use of such robots is intended not just to help students follow their education but also to serve a social purpose. However, the extent to which the robots actually afford socializing needs to be explored further. This article analyzes how, to what extent, for whom, and under what circumstances the telepresence robot AV1 affords social contact for the heterogenous group of homebound Norwegian upper secondary school students. Building on Jenny Davis’ mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances, we focus on how AV1 affords for different students in specific circumstances. Our analysis draws on interviews with 11 upper secondary school students in Norway and finds that individual traits and circumstances such as health issues and social networks are important aspects when assessing whether a technology affords socializing. Based on our findings, we argue for expanding the mechanisms and conditions framework to include not just its current focus on perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy, but also the users’ emotions.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135981653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-06DOI: 10.1177/13548565231199981
Tim Highfield, Kate M Miltner
This paper conceptualises platformed solidarity, describing how platforms change their affordances to support particular social justice causes, sometimes temporarily, and often in response to current events. Such actions allow platforms to perform their support of different interests in response to issues such as racial and gender equality or pro-democratic aims, among other examples. In each case, a specific feature of the platform is modified to visibly promote support, altering how their users experience these spaces. In doing so, these interventions highlight how major platforms demonstrate their politics, raising questions about the differences between the politics that they publicly portray and policies they enact. This paper explores platformed solidarity through an extended examination of Twitter hashflags, typically temporary visuals attached to hashtags of particular commercial, social, and political interests and offering affective emphasis to selected content. While the bulk of hashflags are commercial products, created in partnership with brands to encourage engagement and promotion of a campaign or product, there have been a number of hashflags for major events and causes, from elections to selected social justice campaigns. We suggest that examples of platformed solidarity can elucidate what global platforms see as their role and influence in public communication. However, this raises important questions about what causes, events, and groups are deemed worthy of platformed solidarity? What values do they represent and how – if at all – are these supported by platforms’ policy decisions regarding the same issues? We suggest that, whether cynical or well-intentioned, these surface-level interventions do not always necessarily align with higher-order corporate priorities and decision-making. As such, we suggest that platformed solidarity is a corporate tactic that can have overlap with considerations of ‘woke capitalism’, where visible gestures towards causes and issues are made but underpinned by platforms’ missions to maintain high user numbers, grow engagement, and profit.
{"title":"Platformed solidarity: Examining the performative politics of Twitter hashflags","authors":"Tim Highfield, Kate M Miltner","doi":"10.1177/13548565231199981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199981","url":null,"abstract":"This paper conceptualises platformed solidarity, describing how platforms change their affordances to support particular social justice causes, sometimes temporarily, and often in response to current events. Such actions allow platforms to perform their support of different interests in response to issues such as racial and gender equality or pro-democratic aims, among other examples. In each case, a specific feature of the platform is modified to visibly promote support, altering how their users experience these spaces. In doing so, these interventions highlight how major platforms demonstrate their politics, raising questions about the differences between the politics that they publicly portray and policies they enact. This paper explores platformed solidarity through an extended examination of Twitter hashflags, typically temporary visuals attached to hashtags of particular commercial, social, and political interests and offering affective emphasis to selected content. While the bulk of hashflags are commercial products, created in partnership with brands to encourage engagement and promotion of a campaign or product, there have been a number of hashflags for major events and causes, from elections to selected social justice campaigns. We suggest that examples of platformed solidarity can elucidate what global platforms see as their role and influence in public communication. However, this raises important questions about what causes, events, and groups are deemed worthy of platformed solidarity? What values do they represent and how – if at all – are these supported by platforms’ policy decisions regarding the same issues? We suggest that, whether cynical or well-intentioned, these surface-level interventions do not always necessarily align with higher-order corporate priorities and decision-making. As such, we suggest that platformed solidarity is a corporate tactic that can have overlap with considerations of ‘woke capitalism’, where visible gestures towards causes and issues are made but underpinned by platforms’ missions to maintain high user numbers, grow engagement, and profit.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81039801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-05DOI: 10.1177/13548565231199957
Morten Bay
This article explores the democratic implications of the wide adoption of XR (eXtended Reality) technologies, drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political theory and her concept of common reality. Arendt argues that the intersubjective construction of a common reality is what enables the establishment of factual truth and that both are prerequisites for a functional democracy. Without them, ideology can be established as truth by anti-democratic forces with power over media outlets, paving a path toward totalitarianism. This article argues that XR technologies can be used to inhibit the construction of a common reality through the same individualization of media experiences that has been shown to impede democratic processes in the social media context. The companies generating increased revenue through individualized micro-segmentation are now also vying for dominance in the XR media arena. It is argued in this article that such individualization can impede the co-construction of a common reality and a factual truth because XR media are hyper-persuasive and capable of altering an individual’s overall perception of reality. The viability of such platform-controlled individualization in XR is demonstrated through an Arendt-based critique of four properties related to XR technologies: Hypertargeted personalization, false memory creation, reality indistinguishability, and predictive processing theory. Based on these analyses, the article concludes that XR policy and regulation must consider how XR gives platforms unprecedented persuasive powers as they become capable of altering a user’s reality perception remotely and how, per Arendt, this may threaten democracy.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-05DOI: 10.1177/13548565231199967
I. Kuznetcova, Shantanu Tilak, Ziye Wen, Michael Glassman, Eric Anderman, Tzu-Jung Lin
Immersive storytelling (IST) is usually conceptualized within the framework of technologically immersive tools such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While these tools offer some unique features (such as visual fidelity, interactivity, and embodied, first-person perspective), their level of technological immersion (based on the system’s objective qualities) might not directly translate to the psychological immersion experienced by the user. Such tools also tend to require access to digital or financial resources unavailable to many schools. We propose a low-tech alternative approach leveraging storytelling’s power for learning through affordable, accessible, and familiar classroom technology – Google Slides. We used the Participatory Learning framework to generate curricular design principles that aim to create a sense of psychological immersion through active participation in technology-mediated storytelling. In this design case study paper, we describe the design of a 10-day unit on Native American history implemented across nine teachers’ elementary school classrooms in the US. We examine the interplay between pedagogical and technological constraints in the design process, the role of the theoretical framework in the design, and conclude by detailing future directions for research on low-tech immersive storytelling environments.
{"title":"Making immersive storytelling accessible: Interactive low-tech implementation in elementary school civic learning","authors":"I. Kuznetcova, Shantanu Tilak, Ziye Wen, Michael Glassman, Eric Anderman, Tzu-Jung Lin","doi":"10.1177/13548565231199967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231199967","url":null,"abstract":"Immersive storytelling (IST) is usually conceptualized within the framework of technologically immersive tools such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While these tools offer some unique features (such as visual fidelity, interactivity, and embodied, first-person perspective), their level of technological immersion (based on the system’s objective qualities) might not directly translate to the psychological immersion experienced by the user. Such tools also tend to require access to digital or financial resources unavailable to many schools. We propose a low-tech alternative approach leveraging storytelling’s power for learning through affordable, accessible, and familiar classroom technology – Google Slides. We used the Participatory Learning framework to generate curricular design principles that aim to create a sense of psychological immersion through active participation in technology-mediated storytelling. In this design case study paper, we describe the design of a 10-day unit on Native American history implemented across nine teachers’ elementary school classrooms in the US. We examine the interplay between pedagogical and technological constraints in the design process, the role of the theoretical framework in the design, and conclude by detailing future directions for research on low-tech immersive storytelling environments.","PeriodicalId":47242,"journal":{"name":"Convergence-The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75766253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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