ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5796-4578
Current Organisations
Deakin University
,
Melbourne College of Advanced Education
,
University of Melbourne
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Sociology | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Computer-Human Interaction | Communication and Media Studies | Sociology And Social Studies Of Science And Technology | Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies | Communication And Media Studies | Consumption And Everyday Life | Sociological Methodology And Research Methods | Urban Sociology And Community Studies
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Consumption Patterns, Population Issues and the Environment | Telecommunications | Information services not elsewhere classified | Communication Networks and Services not elsewhere classified | Information and Communication Services not elsewhere classified |
Related Links
Publications
The Personal and the Political: Social Networking in Manila
Publisher: Portico
Date: 02-2011
DOI: 10.1162/IJLM_A_00059
Quantifying Changes in the Language Used Around Mental Health on Twitter Over 10 Years: Observational Study (Preprint)
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 19-09-2021
Abstract: ental health challenges are thought to affect approximately 10% of the global population each year, with many of those affected going untreated because of the stigma and limited access to services. As social media lowers the barrier for joining difficult conversations and finding supportive groups, Twitter is an open source of language data describing the changing experience of a stigmatized group. y measuring changes in the conversation around mental health on Twitter, we aim to quantify the hypothesized increase in discussions and awareness of the topic as well as the corresponding reduction in stigma around mental health. e explored trends in words and phrases related to mental health through a collection of 1-, 2-, and 3-grams parsed from a data stream of approximately 10% of all English tweets from 2010 to 2021. We examined temporal dynamics of mental health language and measured levels of positivity of the messages. Finally, we used the ratio of original tweets to retweets to quantify the fraction of appearances of mental health language that was due to social lification. e found that the popularity of the phrase i mental health /i increased by nearly two orders of magnitude between 2012 and 2018. We observed that mentions of i mental health /i spiked annually and reliably because of mental health awareness c aigns as well as unpredictably in response to mass shootings, celebrities dying by suicide, and popular fictional television stories portraying suicide. We found that the level of positivity of messages containing i mental health /i , while stable through the growth period, has declined recently. Finally, we observed that since 2015, mentions of mental health have become increasingly due to retweets, suggesting that the stigma associated with the discussion of mental health on Twitter has diminished with time. hese results provide useful texture regarding the growing conversation around mental health on Twitter and suggest that more awareness and acceptance has been brought to the topic compared with past years.
Intranets, Community, and Social Capital: The Case of Williams Bay
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2003
Abstract: Many people in the Western world are distressed about a perceived loss of community and community values, and it has been argued that the key difference between strong and weak community lies in social capital, that is, networks of civic engagement and norms of generalized reciprocity. In the context of social capital, the article introduces a research project that focuses on a community intranet installed in a new housing development in Melbourne, Australia. The prospects for the success of the community intranet in linking residents to one another, increasing participation in local civic organizations, encouraging reciprocity, and thereby fostering social capital are surveyed in both a priori and empirical terms. The article concludes with the questions to be used in the case study to assess whether these prospects are realized in the case at hand.
Entering the graveyard shift: Disassembling the australian TiVo
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-10-2015
Abstract: This article analyzes the operation and subsequent failure of TiVo in Australia. Drawing on actor-network theory, we unpack the TiVo assemblage throughout our paper, and look at the various human, technical, and institutional interventions that constituted it and constrained its possible futures. This analysis will be conducted by tracing how TiVo attempted to establish itself as a viable social and technical assemblage and assessing its influence on “new locales of regulation, new practices, new ethical stances, and new institutions.” Our approach offers an inclusive analytical lens by considering how a collection of actors—large and small, human and nonhuman—were actively involved in assembling and disassembling the network required by TiVo for an ongoing presence in Australia. It also contributes to a growing body of work that outlines the usefulness of ANT to media studies scholarship.
Robot death care: A study of funerary practice
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-06-2021
Abstract: Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
Media, mortality and necro-technologies: Eulogies for dead media
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-07-2021
DOI: 10.1177/14614448211027959
Abstract: Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four ex les of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.
Analysing the doctor_patient_computer relationship: the use of video data
Publisher: Portico
Date: 12-2006
The social life of the dead and the leisured life of the living online
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Date: 2018
The Semiotics of Logo
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-1995
DOI: 10.2190/X1GL-P442-PWLN-Y7Y1
Abstract: Logo is a computer language that has been located in a variety of classrooms, in a variety of experimental settings, and has been examined and interpreted from the perspective provided by a variety of discursive frames. Logo is also a sign, and Peirce's construction of iconic, indexical, and symbolic sign functions are used in this article to link Logo to one particular frame, labelled “progressive education” for the purposes of this article. It is argued that an explication of Logo's sign function contributes to the debate about Logo in so much as it allows discussants to either proceed within a common frame of language, presuppositions and constructions, or, if coming from different epistemological directions, allows discussants to challenge the language, presuppositions and constructions of opposing frames.
The many faces of the computer: An analysis of clinical software in the primary care consultation
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2012
DOI: 10.1016/J.IJMEDINF.2012.01.004
Abstract: Almost all general practitioners in Australia now use a computer for some part of the consultation, and mostly use one of eight clinical software applications. There has been little research into the impact of clinical software on the clinical consultation. Clinical software broadly functions in two ways: it replaces the paper record of the patient's history of health and clinical contacts within the general practice, and it communicates directly to the doctor in various ways about outstanding clinical actions. This paper draws on Goffman's notion of "face" to explore the way in which the actions, visual presentation, and interactions between general practitioners, patients and the computer can imbue the software with its own "face" in the consultation. Analysis of 141 consultations by 20 doctors (13 men, 7 women), who used one of four medical software applications commonly used in Australian general practice. Consultations were videotaped, tagged, analysed using a hermeneutic framework. All four software packages replicated constitutive elements of the paper health record, such as medical history, current medications, and the patient's social history, but also introduced other content not present in a paper system. They differed in their use of communicative strategies. This necessitated differing interactions between the software and the doctor. The differences in communicative work of each software package led to their different "faces", along a gradient from a relatively passive mode that provided context dependent information in an unobtrusive way, to a relatively active mode that interrupted to provide information and to demand responses. We conclude that the more active the mode of presence of the computer in the consultation, the more patients and doctors may have to adapt their communicative styles in response.
Things, tags, topics: Thingiverse's object-centred network
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Social Practices of 3D Printing: Decentralising Control, and Reconfiguring Regulation
Publisher: Telecommunications Association Inc.
Date: 29-09-2016
Abstract: This paper considers the social practices of 3D printing by comparing consumer perspectives and practices with legal scholarship on intellectual property regimes. The paper draws on data gained through a mixed-methods approach involving participant observation, focus groups, and social network analysis of 3D printing file-sharing practices. It finds that while consumers display a level of naivety about their 3D printing rights and responsibilities, they possess a latent understanding about broader digital economies that guide their practices. We suggest that the social practices associated with 3D printing function through communication networks to decentralise manufacture and reconfigure legal capacities for regulation. The paper concludes by introducing nascent paths forward for policy frames across industry, government and consumer concern to address the opportunities and challenges of 3D printing’s evolving interface with society.
The patient and the computer in the primary care consultation.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 03-2011
Consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 2014
Critical Mass and Self-Sustaining Activity
Publisher: IGI Global
Date: 2005
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59140-575-7.CH024
Abstract: Recent studies of community networks (CNs) have provided optimistic views of the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) to support and enhance community life in various ways, in a variety of urban settings (di Maggio, Hargittai, Neuman & Robinson, 2004 H ton & Wellman, 2001 Kavanaugh & Patterson, 2001). Consequently, there is growing interest from the community sector and ICT professionals in facilitating the social appropriation of ICT, and a growing interest from academics in the performance and evaluation of CN technologies.
Are Technologies Innocent? : Part Seven: Conclusion [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 06-2017
Adolescent ambivalence about diabetes technology—The Janus faces of automated care
Publisher: Hindawi Limited
Date: 09-10-2022
DOI: 10.1111/PEDI.13423
Abstract: The Janus face metaphor approach highlights that a technology may simultaneously have two opposite faces or properties with unforeseen paradoxes within human-technology interaction. Suboptimal acceptance and clinical outcomes are sometimes seen in adolescents who use diabetes-related technologies. A traditional linear techno-determinist model of technology use would ascribe these unintended outcomes to suboptimal technology, suboptimal patient behavior, or suboptimal outcome measures. This paradigm has demonstratively not been successful at universally improving clinical outcomes over the last two decades. Alternatively, the Janus face metaphor moves away from a linear techno-determinist model and focuses on the dynamic interaction of the human condition and technology. Specifically, it can be used to understand variance in adoption or successful use of diabetes-related technology and to retrospectively understand suboptimal outcomes. The Janus face metaphor also allows for a prospective exploration of potential impacts of diabetes-related technology by patients, families, and their doctors so as to anticipate and minimize potential subsequent tensions.
The high-tech, post-Fordist school
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 10-1996
DOI: 10.1007/BF01807406
BTF image space utmost compression and modelling method
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 2004
Methodological considerations of digital video observation: Beyond conversation analysis
Publisher: Dialectical Publishing
Date: 08-2010
Broadband in the home pilot study: Suburban Hobart
Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology
Date: 27-02-2011
Proxy users, use by proxy: Mapping forms of intermediary interaction
Publisher: ACM
Date: 07-12-2015
Patchwork network: Spectrum politics, the digital home and installation of the Australian national broadband network
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 12-11-2013
The cultural economy of TiVo in Australia
Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology
Date: 15-11-2011
Computational timeline reconstruction of the stories surrounding Trump: Story turbulence, narrative control, and collective chronopathy
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 08-12-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0260592
Abstract: Measuring the specific kind, temporal ordering, ersity, and turnover rate of stories surrounding any given subject is essential to developing a complete reckoning of that subject’s historical impact. Here, we use Twitter as a distributed news and opinion aggregation source to identify and track the dynamics of the dominant day-scale stories around Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States. Working with a data set comprising around 20 billion 1-grams, we first compare each day’s 1-gram and 2-gram usage frequencies to those of a year before, to create day- and week-scale timelines for Trump stories for 2016–2021. We measure Trump’s narrative control, the extent to which stories have been about Trump or put forward by Trump. We then quantify story turbulence and collective chronopathy—the rate at which a population’s stories for a subject seem to change over time. We show that 2017 was the most turbulent overall year for Trump. In 2020, story generation slowed dramatically during the first two major waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, with rapid turnover returning first with the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder and then later by events leading up to and following the 2020 US presidential election, including the storming of the US Capitol six days into 2021. Trump story turnover for 2 months during the COVID-19 pandemic was on par with that of 3 days in September 2017. Our methods may be applied to any well-discussed phenomenon, and have potential to enable the computational aspects of journalism, history, and biography.
The Ethics of Multiplayer Game Design and Community Management
Publisher: ACM
Date: 06-05-2021
Broadband in the Burbs: NBN Infrastructure, Spectrum Politics and the Digital Home
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 23-08-2011
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.400
Abstract: The convergence of suburban homes and digital media and communications technologies is set to undergo a major shift as next-generation broadband infrastructures are installed. Embodied in the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network (NBN) and the delivery of fibre-optic cable to the front door of every suburban home, is an anticipated future of digital living that will transform the landscape and experience of suburban life. Drawing from our research, and from industry, policy and media documents, we map some scenarios of the NBN rollout in its early stages to show that this imaginary of seamless broadband in the suburbs and the transformation of digital homes it anticipates is challenged by local cultural and material geographies, which we describe as a politics of spectrum. The universal implementation of policy across Australia faces a considerable challenge in dealing with Australia’s physical environment. Geography has always had a major impact on communications technologies and services in Australia, and a major impetus of building a national broadband network has been to overcome the “tyranny of distance” experienced by people in many remote, regional and suburban areas. In 2009 the minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), Stephen Conroy, announced that with the Government’s NBN policy “every person and business in Australia, no-matter where they are located, will have access to affordable, fast broadband at their fingertips” (Conroy). This ambition to digitally connect and include imagines the NBN as the solution to the current patchwork of connectivity and Internet speeds experienced across the country (ACCAN). Overcoming geographic difference and providing fast, universal and equitable digital access is to be realised through an open access broadband network built by the newly established NBN Co. Limited, jointly owned by the Government and the private sector at a cost estimated at $43 billion over eight years. In the main this network will depend upon fibre-optics reaching over 90% of the population, and achieving download speeds of up to 100 Mbit/s. The remaining population, mostly living in rural and remote areas, will receive wireless and satellite connections providing speeds of 12 Mbit/s (Conroy). Differential implementation in relation to comparisons of urban and remote populations is thus already embedded in the policy, yet distance is not the only characteristic of Australia’s material geographies that will shape the physical implementation of the NBN and create a varied spectrum of the experience of broadband. Instead, in this article we examine the uneven experience of broadband we may see occurring within suburban regions places in which enhanced and collective participation in the digital economy relies upon the provision of faster transmission speeds and the delivery of fibre “the last mile” to each and every premise. The crucial platform for delivering broadband to the ’burbs is the digital home. The notion of the connected or smart or digital home has been around in different guises for a number of decades (e.g. Edwards et al.), and received wide press coverage in the 1990s (e.g. Howard). It has since been concretised in the wake of the NBN as telecommunications companies struggle to envision a viable “next step” in broadband consumption. Novel to the NBN imaginary of the digital home is a shift from thinking about the digital home in terms of consumer electronics and interoperable or automatic devices, based on shared standards or home networking, to addressing the home as a platform embedded within the economy. The digital home is imagined as an integral part of a network of digital living with seamless transitions between home, office, supermarket, school, and hospital. In the imaginary of the NBN, the digital home becomes a vital connection in the growing digital economy. Communications Patchwork, NBN Roll-Out and Infrastructure Despite this imagined future of seamless connectivity and universal integration of suburban life with the digital economy, there has been an uneven take-up of fibre connections. We argue that this suggests that the particularities of place and the materialities of geography are relevant for understanding the differential uptake of the NBN across the test sites. Furthermore, we maintain that these issues provide a useful model for understanding the ongoing process and challenges that the rollout of the NBN will face in providing even access to the imagined future of the digital home to all Australians. As of June 2011 an average of 70 per cent of homes in the five first release NBN sites have agreed to have the fibre cables installed (Grubb). However, there is a dramatic variation between these sites: in Armidale, NSW, and Willunga, SA, the percentage of properties consenting to fibre connections on their house is between 80-90 per cent whereas in Brunswick, Victoria, and Midway Point, Tasmania, the take-up rate is closer to 50 per cent (Grubb). We suggest that these variations are created by a differential geography of connectivity that will continue to grow in significance as the NBN is rolled out to more locations around Australia. These can be seen to emerge as a consequence of localised conditions relating to, for ex le, installation policy, a focus on cost, and installation logistics. Another significant factor, unable to be addressed within the scope of this paper, is the integration of the NBN with each household’s domestic network of hardware devices, internal connections, software, and of course skill and interest. Installation Policy The opt-in policy of the NBN Co requires that owners of properties agree to become connected—as opposed to being automatically connected unless they opt-out. This makes getting connected a far simpler task for owner-occupiers over renters, because the latter group were required to triangulate with their landlords in order to get connected. This was considered to be a factor that impacted on the relatively low uptake of the NBN in Brunswick and Midway Point, and is reflected in media reports (Grubb) and our research: There was a bit of a problem with Midway Point, because I think it is about fifty percent of the houses here are rentals, and you needed signatures from the owners for the box to be put onto the building (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project). …a lot of people rent here, so unless their landlord filled it in they wouldn’t know (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project). The issue is exacerbated by the concentration of rental properties in particular suburbs and complicated rental arrangements mediated through agents, which prevent effective communication between the occupiers and owners of a property. In order to increase take-up in Tasmania, former State Premier, David Bartlett, successfully introduced legislation to the Tasmanian state legislature in late 2010 to make the NBN opt-out rather than opt-in. This reversed the onus of responsibility and meant that in Tasmania all houses and businesses would be automatically connected unless otherwise requested, and in order to effect this simple policy change, the government had to change trespass laws. However, other state legislatures are hesitant to follow the opt-out model (Grubb). Differentials in owner-occupied and rental properties within urban centres, combined with opt-in policies, are likely to see a continuation of the connectivity patchwork that that has thus far characterised Australian communications experience. A Focus on Cost Despite a great deal of public debate about the NBN, there is relatively little discussion of its proposed benefits. The fibre-to-the-home structure of the NBN is also subject to fierce partisan political debate between Australia’s major political parties, particularly around the form and cost of its implementation. As a consequence of this preoccupation with cost, many Australian consumers cannot see a “value proposition” in connecting, and are not convinced of the benefits of the NBN (Brown). The NBN is often reduced to an increased minimum download rate, and to increased ISP fees associated with high speeds, rather than a broader discussion of how the infrastructure can impact on commerce, education, entertainment, healthcare, and work (Barr). Moreover, this lack of balance in the discussion of costs and benefits extends in some instances to outright misunderstandings about the difference between infrastructure and service provision: …my neighbour across the road did not understand what that letter meant, and she would have to have been one of dozens if not hundreds in the exactly the same situation, who thought they were signing up for a broadband plan rather than just access to the infrastructure (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project) Lastly, the advent of the NBN in the first release areas does not override the costs of existing contracts for broadband delivered over the current copper network. Australians are often required to sign long-term contracts that prevent them from switching immediately to the new HSB infrastructure. Installation Logistics Local variations in fibre installation were evident prior to the rollout of the NBN, when the increased provision of HSB was already being used as a marketing device for greenfield (newly developed) estates in suburban Australia. In the wake of the NBN rollouts, some housing developers have begun to lay “NBN-ready” optic fibre in greenfield estates. While this is a positive development for those who a purchasing a newly-developed property, those that invest in brownfield “re-developments,” may have to pay over twice the amount for the installation of the NBN (Neales). These varying local conditions of installation are reflected in the contractual arrangements for installing the fibre, the installers’ policies for installation, and the processes of installation (Darling): They’re gonna have to do 4000 houses a day … and it was a solid six months to get about 800 houses hooked up here. So, logistically I just can’t see it happening. (anon. “Broadband in the Home” project) Finally, for those who do not take-up the free initial installation offer, for whatever reason, there will be costs to have contractors return and connect the fibre (Grubb Neales). Spectrum Politics, Fibre in the Neighbourhood The promise that the NBN will provide fast, universal and equitable digital access realised through a fibre-optic network is challenged by the experience of first release sites such as Midway Point. As evident above, and due to a number of factors, there is a likelihood in supposedly NBN-connected places of varied connectivity in which service will range from dial-up to DSL and ADSL to fibre and wireless, all within a single location. The varied connectivity in the early NBN rollout stages suggests that the patchwork of Internet connections commonly experienced in Australian suburbs will continue rather than disappear. This varied patchwork can be understood as a politics of spectrum. Rod Tucker (13-14) emphasises that the crucial element of spectrum is its bandwidth, or information carrying capacity. In light of this the politics of spectrum reframes the key issue of access to participation in the digital economy to examine stakes of the varying quality of connection (particularly download speeds), through the available medium (wireless, copper, coaxial cable, optical fibre), connection (modem, antenna, gateway) and service type (DSL, WiFi, Satellite, FTTP). This technical emphasis follows in the wake of debates about digital inclusion (e.g., Warschauer) to re-introduce the importance of connection quality—embedded in older “digital ide” discourse—into approaches that look beyond technical infrastructure to the social conditions of their use. This is a shift that takes account of the various and intertwined socio-technical factors influencing the quality of access and use. This spectrum politics also has important implications for the Universal Service Obligation (USO). Telstra (the former Telecom) continues to have the responsibility to provide every premise in Australia with a standard telephone service, that is at least a single copper line—or equivalent service—connection. However, the creation of the NBN Co. relieves Telstra of this obligation in the areas which have coverage from the fibre network. This agreement means that Telstra will gradually shut down its ageing copper network, following the pattern of the NBN rollout and transfer customers to the newly developed broadband fibre network (Hepworth and Wilson). Consequently, every in idual phone service in those areas will be required to move onto the NBN to maintain the USO. This means that premises not connected to the NBN because the owners of the property opted out—by default or by choice—are faced with an uncertain future vis-à-vis the meaning and provision of the USO because they will not have access to either copper or fibre networks. At this extreme of spectrum politics, the current policy setting may result in households that have no possibility of a broadband connection. This potential problem can be resolved by a retro-rollout, in which NBN fibre connection is installed at some point in the future to every premises regardless of whether they originally agreed or not. Currently, however, the cost of a retrospective connection is expected to be borne by the consumer: “those who decline to allow NBN Co on to their property will need to pay up to $300 to connect to the NBN at a later date” (Grubb) Smaller, often brownfield development estates also face particular difficulties in the current long-term switch of responsibilities from Telstra to the NBN Co. This is because Telstra is reluctant to install new copper networks knowing that they will soon become obsolete. Instead, “in housing estates of fewer than 100 houses, Telstra is often providing residents with wireless phones that are unable to connect to the Internet” (Thompson). Thus a limbo is created, where new residents will not have access to either copper or fibre fixed line connections. Rather, they will have to use whatever wireless Internet is available in the area. Particularly concerning is that the period of the rollout is projected to last for eight years. As a result: “Thousands of Australians—many of them in regional areas—can expect years of worse, rather than better, Internet services as the National Broadband Network rolls out across the country” (Thompson). And, given different take-up rates and costs of retro-fitting, this situation could continue for many people and for many years after the initial rollout is completed. Implications of Spectrum Politics for the Digital Home What does this uncertain and patchwork future of connectivity imply for digital living and the next-generation broadband suburb? In contrast to the imagined post-NBN geography of the seamless digital home, local material and cultural factors will still create varied levels of service. This predicament challenges the ideals of organisations such as the Digital Living Network, an industry body comprised of corporate members, “based on principles of open standards and home networking interoperability [which] will unleash a rich digital media environment of interconnected devices that enable us all to experience our favorite content and services wherever and whenever we want” (Vohringer). Such a vision of convergence takes a domestic approach to the “Internet of things” by imagining a user-friendly network of personal computing, consumer electronics, mobile technologies, utilities, and other domestic technologies. The NBN anticipates a digital home that is integrated into the digital economy as a node of production and consumption. But this future is challenged by the patchwork of connectivity. Bruno Latour famously remarked that even the most extensive and powerful networks are local at every point. Although he was speaking of actor-networks, not broadband networks, analysis of the Australian experience of high-speed broadband would do well to look beyond its national characteristics to include its local characteristics, and the constellations between them. It is at the local level, importantly, at the level of the household and suburb, that the NBN will be experienced in daily life. As we have argued here, we have reason to expect that this experience will be as disparate as the network is distributed, and we have reason to believe that local cultural and material factors such as installation policies, discussions around costs and benefits, the household’s own internal digital infrastructure, and installation logistics at the level of the house and the neighbourhood, will continue to shape a patchworked geography of media and communications experiences for digital homes. References Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN). National Broadband Network: A Guide for Consumers. Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) and ACCAN, 2011. Barr, Trevor. “A Broadband Services Typology.” The Australian Economic Review 43.2 (2010): 187-193. Brown, Damien. “NBN Now 10 Times Faster.” The Mercury 13 Aug. 2010. ‹www.themercury.com.au/article/2010/08/13/165435_todays-news.html›. Conroy, Stephen (Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy). “New National Broadband Network”. Canberra: Australian Government, 7 April 2009. ‹www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/media/media_releases/2009/022›. Darling, Peter. “Building the National Broadband Network.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.3 (2010): 42.1-12. Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE). “Impacts of Teleworking under the NBN.” Report prepared by Access Economics. Canberra, 2010. Edwards, Keith, Rebecca Grinter, Ratul Mahajan, and David Wetherall. “Advancing the State of Home Networking.” Communications of the ACM 54.6 (2010): 62-71. Grubb, Ben. “Connect to NBN Now or Pay Up to $300 for Phone Line.” The Sydney Morning Herald 15 Oct. 2010. ‹www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/connect-to-nbn-now-or-pay-up-to-300-for-phone-line-20101015-16ms3.html›. Hepworth, Annabel, and Lauren Wilson. “Customers May Be Forced on to NBN to Keep Phones.” The Australian 12 Oct. 2010. ‹www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/customers-may-be-forced-on-to-nbn-to-keep-phones/story-fn59niix-1225937394605›. Howard, Sandy. “How Your Home Will Operate.” Business Review Weekly 25 April 1994: 100. Intel Corporation. “Intel and the Digital Home.” ‹tandards/case/case_dh.htm›. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Neales, Sue. “Bartlett Looks at ‘Opt-out’ NBN.” The Mercury 28 July 2010. ‹www.themercury.com.au/article/2010/07/28/161721_tasmania-news.html›. Spigel, Lynn. “Media Homes: Then and Now.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4.4 (2001): 385–411. Thompson, Geoff. “Thousands to Be Stuck in NBN ‘Limbo’.” ABC Online 26 April 2011. ‹www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/04/26/3200127.htm›. Tietze, S., and G. Musson. “Recasting the Home—Work Relationship: A Case of Mutual Adjustment?” Organization Studies 26.9 (2005): 1331–1352. Trulove, James Grayson (ed.). The Smart House. New York: HDI, 2003. Tucker, Rodney S. “Broadband Facts, Fiction and Urban Myths.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 60.3 (2010): 43.1 to 43.15. Vohringer, Cesar. CTO of Philips Consumer Electronics (from June 2003 DLNA press release) cited on the Intel Corporation website. ‹tandards/case/case_dh.htm›. Warschauer, Mark. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Wilken, Rowan, Michael Arnold, and Bjorn Nansen. “Broadband in the Home Pilot Study: Suburban Hobart.” Telecommunications Journal of Australia 61.1 (2011): 5.1-16.
SCHOOLS, LAPTOP COMPUTERS AND POST‐FORDISM
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-1994
The Sleep Loss Insult of Spring Daylight Savings in the US Is Observable in Twitter Activity
Publisher: Research Square Platform LLC
Date: 18-02-2021
DOI: 10.21203/RS.3.RS-198809/V1
Abstract: Sleep loss has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and an increase in accidents, all of which are among the leading causes of death in the United States. Population-scale sleep studies have the potential to advance public health by helping to identify at-risk populations, changes in collective sleep patterns, and to inform policy change. Prior research suggests other kinds of health indicators such as depression and obesity can be estimated using social media activity. However, the inability to effectively measure collective sleep with publicly available data has limited large-scale academic studies. Here, we investigate the passive estimation of sleep loss through a proxy analysis of Twitter activity profiles. We use \Spring Forward" events, which occur at the beginning of Daylight Savings Time in the United States, as a natural experimental condition to estimate spatial differences in sleep loss across the United States. On average, peak Twitter activity occurs 15 to 30 minutes later on the Sunday following Spring Forward. By Monday morning however, activity curves are realigned with the week before, suggesting that the window of sleep opportunity is compressed in Twitter data, revealing Spring Forward behavioral change.
Are Technologies Innocent?: Part Six: The Dilution of Responsibility Argument [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 03-2017
Sentiment and structure in word co-occurrence networks on Twitter
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 14-02-2022
DOI: 10.1007/S41109-022-00446-2
Abstract: We explore the relationship between context and happiness scores in political tweets using word co-occurrence networks, where nodes in the network are the words, and the weight of an edge is the number of tweets in the corpus for which the two connected words co-occur. In particular, we consider tweets with hashtags #imwithher and #crookedhillary, both relating to Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016. We then analyze the network properties in conjunction with the word scores by comparing with null models to separate the effects of the network structure and the score distribution. Neutral words are found to be dominant and most words, regardless of polarity, tend to co-occur with neutral words. We do not observe any score homophily among positive and negative words. However, when we perform network backboning, community detection results in word groupings with meaningful narratives, and the happiness scores of the words in each group correspond to its respective theme. Thus, although we observe no clear relationship between happiness scores and co-occurrence at the node or edge level, a community-centric approach can isolate themes of competing sentiments in a corpus.
Night shifts: Some situated dimensions of student technology use
Publisher: ACM
Date: 08-12-2008
Ratioing the President: An exploration of public engagement with Obama and Trump on Twitter
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 14-04-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0248880
Abstract: The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in the use of social media by politicians, most notably exemplified by the 45th President of the United States (POTUS), Donald Trump. On Twitter, POTUS messages consistently attract high levels of engagement as measured by likes, retweets, and replies. Here, we quantify the balance of these activities, also known as “ratios”, and study their dynamics as a proxy for collective political engagement in response to presidential communications. We find that raw activity counts increase during the period leading up to the 2016 election, accompanied by a regime change in the ratio of retweets-to-replies connected to the transition between c aigning and governing. For the Trump account, we find words related to fake news and the Mueller inquiry are more common in tweets with a high number of replies relative to retweets. Finally, we find that Barack Obama consistently received a higher retweet-to-reply ratio than Donald Trump. These results suggest Trump’s Twitter posts are more often controversial and subject to enduring engagement as a given news cycle unfolds.
Overcoming the tyranny of distance? High speed broadband and the significance of place
Publisher: University of Adelaide Press
Date: 31-12-2016
DOI: 10.20851/PUBLICS-12
Ludic Ethics: The Ethical Negotiations of Players in Online Multiplayer Games
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 31-10-2020
Abstract: This study introduces the ludic ethics approach for understanding the moral deliberations of players of online multiplayer games. Informed by a constructivist paradigm that places players’ everyday ethical negotiations at the forefront of the analysis, this study utilises a novel set of game-related moral vignettes in a series of 20 in-depth interviews with players. Reflexive thematic analysis of these interviews produced four key themes by which participants considered the ethics of in-game actions: (1) game boundaries, (2) consequences for play, (3) player sensibilities, and (4) virtuality. These results support the conceptualisation of games as complex ethical sites in which players negotiate in-game ethics by referring extensively – although not exclusively – to a framework of ‘ludomorality’ that draws from the interpreted meanings associated with the ludic digital context.
Are Technologies Innocent?: Part Three: The Passive Instrument Argument [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 06-2016
Time, space and technology in the working-home: An unsettled nexus
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 23-06-2010
Methodological and ethical concerns associated with digital ethnography in domestic environments: Participant burden and burdensome technologies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Date: 2016
Cybernetic Lenses for Designing and Living in a Complex World
Publisher: ACM
Date: 29-11-2022
Domestic orchestration: Rhythms in the mediated home
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2009
Abstract: The steady proliferation of media and connectivity reconstitutes domestic rhythms in ways that make them emergent, relational, negotiated, and multiple. In an attempt to capture some of the entangled dynamics characteristic of contemporary domestic chronometrics (time-measured), chronaesthetics (time-felt) and chronomanagement (time-ordered), we use the terms ‘reticular rhythms’ and ‘technologies of reticulation’. In our analysis of interviews with five families over three years we identify four interrelated forms of reticular rhythms that together constitute the rhythms of contemporary domestic life. These four are: a polyphonic drone, a polychronic dissonance, an asynchronous consonance, and an orchestrated performance. Each of these forms of rhythm are described and illustrated.
Dwelling with media stuff: Latencies and logics of materiality in four Australian homes
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.1068/D11709
Abstract: Extending research into material, media, and cultural geographies of the home, our interest turns to the spatiotemporality of dwelling with information and communication technologies. We pose a number of questions: How do inhabitants and their media stuff adapt to the more rigid physical spaces of a building? How does the building respond to the more rapid changes to dwelling produced by this media stuff? And how are these differing times synchronised? In answer to these questions we present four case studies of homes in Melbourne, Australia, each representative of a particular strategy of synchronisation. They are: the found home, the imagined home, the designed home, and the renovated home. We identify logics informing these homes: the first naturalises the choices made, the second rationalises choices, and the third is one in which dwelling and (re)building are intertwined.
Are Technologies Innocent?: Part Four: The \Dumb Instrument\ Argument [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 09-2016
Cybernetics and contemporary philosophies of technology
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 06-2014
Mainstreaming the Digital Revolution
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 1999
Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-09-2015
HOUSEHOLD DIGITAL MEDIA ECOLOGIES - METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS FOR FOSTERING RESEARCHER-PARTICIPANT TRUST
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 31-10-2019
DOI: 10.5210/SPIR.V2019I0.10995
Abstract: In this paper, we describe a research methodology we have developed, based upon digital ethnography approaches, and which used mobile devices, digital ethnographic software and creative data collection activities. Our approach, refined over the course of a number of interconnected research projects, addressed these difficulties through a staged process – utilising traditional ethnographic techniques, but augmenting them with something more novel: the “domestic probe”. In essence, the domestic probe comprised a box of equipment given to the household to use in order to record and interpret their use of domestic technologies. In more recent work, we extended our participatory approach through the use of digital media, such as by using iPad minis pre-loaded with a data collection software tool, Ethnocorder. As we argue in this paper, these approaches carry three specific trust-related methodological benefits (and challenges): the foster trust in us as researchers trust in our participants as co-researchers and, as a result of this mutual researcher-participant trust, insight and a productive point of entry into discussing participant "domestication" of, and trust in, various household technologies.
The internet as non-biomedical milieu: Production of alternative health techno-social spaces and the persistence of marginalised medical practices
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2021
The shocklet transform: a decomposition method for the identification of local, mechanism-driven dynamics in sociotechnical time series
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 07-02-2020
DOI: 10.1140/EPJDS/S13688-020-0220-X
Abstract: We introduce a qualitative, shape-based, timescale-independent time-domain transform used to extract local dynamics from sociotechnical time series—termed the Discrete Shocklet Transform (DST)—and an associated similarity search routine, the Shocklet Transform And Ranking (STAR) algorithm, that indicates time windows during which panels of time series display qualitatively-similar anomalous behavior. After distinguishing our algorithms from other methods used in anomaly detection and time series similarity search, such as the matrix profile, seasonal-hybrid ESD, and discrete wavelet transform-based procedures, we demonstrate the DST’s ability to identify mechanism-driven dynamics at a wide range of timescales and its relative insensitivity to functional parameterization. As an application, we analyze a sociotechnical data source (usage frequencies for a subset of words on Twitter) and highlight our algorithms’ utility by using them to extract both a typology of mechanistic local dynamics and a data-driven narrative of socially-important events as perceived by English-language Twitter.
‘Stood to rest’: reorientating necrogeographies for the 21st century
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-2021
How the world’s collective attention is being paid to a pandemic: COVID-19 related n-gram time series for 24 languages on Twitter
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 06-01-2021
DOI: 10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0244476
Abstract: In confronting the global spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic we must have coordinated medical, operational, and political responses. In all efforts, data is crucial. Fundamentally, and in the possible absence of a vaccine for 12 to 18 months, we need universal, well-documented testing for both the presence of the disease as well as confirmed recovery through serological tests for antibodies, and we need to track major socioeconomic indices. But we also need auxiliary data of all kinds, including data related to how populations are talking about the unfolding pandemic through news and stories. To in part help on the social media side, we curate a set of 2000 day-scale time series of 1- and 2-grams across 24 languages on Twitter that are most ‘important’ for April 2020 with respect to April 2019. We determine importance through our allotaxonometric instrument, rank-turbulence ergence. We make some basic observations about some of the time series, including a comparison to numbers of confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 over time. We broadly observe across all languages a peak for the language-specific word for ‘virus’ in January 2020 followed by a decline through February and then a surge through March and April. The world’s collective attention dropped away while the virus spread out from China. We host the time series on Gitlab, updating them on a daily basis while relevant. Our main intent is for other researchers to use these time series to enhance whatever analyses that may be of use during the pandemic as well as for retrospective investigations.
Remembering Things
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-01-2008
Algorithmic memorial videos: Contextualising automated curation
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-11-2018
Abstract: Web platforms such as Facebook and Google have recently developed features which algorithmically curate digital artefacts composed of posts taken from personal online archives. While these artefacts ask people to fondly remember their digital histories, they can cause controversy when they depict recently deceased loved ones. We explore these controversies by situating algorithmic curation within the media ethics of grief, mourning and commemoration. In the vein of media archaeology, we compare these algorithms to similar work done by skilled professionals using older media forms, drawing on interviews with Australian funeral slideshow curators. This professional commemorative labour makes up part of a broader, institutionalised system of ‘death work’, a concept we take from thanatology. Through the media ethics of death work, we critique the current shortcomings of algorithmic memorials and propose a way of addressing them by ‘coding ethically’.
Parenting in the Connected Home
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2006
Are Technologies Innocent? : Part Two: Human Exclusivity - Only Humans Can Be Held to Moral Account [Commentary-Series]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 03-2016
Time, Space and Technology in the Working-Home: An Unsettled Nexus
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.4359097
Remembering Zyzz: Distributed Memories on Distributed Networks
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2016
Digital literacies and the national broadband network: Competency, legibility, context
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2013
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1314700104
Abstract: This article reports on findings from an ethnographic study of fifteen participant households in North Hobart and Midway Point, Tasmania. Key themes emerging from this research have been gathered and presented here through the metaphor ‘digital literacy’. The first half of the article is concerned with developing a critical understanding of what is at stake in the notion, or metaphor, of digital literacy. The second half tests these understandings against our research. In our conversations with the people of North Hobart and Midway Point, we found evidence of digital illiteracy, and also evidence of the weaknesses of digital literacy as an explanatory trope. We group these findings using three themes: (1) the presence of instrumental literacy (2) the illegibility of the NBN and its HSB services and (3) structural conditions limiting the acquisition of the NBN and its HSB services. These three draw upon the digital literacy metaphor, but make its shortcomings clear, and the latter two in particular extend the metaphor from a personal deficit model to one that embraces technologies and social structures.
Are Technologies Innocent?: Part Five: The \Free Will\ Argument [Commentary]
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 12-2016
Allotaxonometry and rank-turbulence divergence: a universal instrument for comparing complex systems
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 19-09-2023
Bones of Contention: Social Acceptance of Digital Cemetery Technologies
Publisher: ACM
Date: 19-04-2023
Design considerations for after death: Comparing the affordances of three online platforms
Publisher: ACM
Date: 26-11-2012
Fame and Ultrafame: Measuring and comparing daily levels of ‘being talked about’ for United States’ presidents, their rivals, God, countries, and K-pop.
Publisher: Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media
Date: 27-02-2022
Abstract: When building a global brand of any kind—a political actor, clothing style, or belief system— developing widespread awareness is a primary goal. Short of knowing any of the stories or products of a brand, being talked about in whatever fashion—raw fame—is, as Oscar Wilde would have it, better than not being talked about at all. Here, we measure, examine, and contrast the day-to-day raw fame dynamics on Twitter for US Presidents and major US Presidential candidates from 2008 to 2020: Barack Obama, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. We assign “lexical fame” to be the number and (Zipfian) rank of the (lowercased) mentions made for each in idual across all languages. We show that all five political figures have at some point reached extraordinary volume levels of what we define to be “lexical ultrafame”: An overall rank of approximately 300 or less which is largely the realm of function words and demarcated by the highly stable rank of ‘god’. By this measure, ‘trump’ has become enduringly ultrafamous, from the 2016 election on. We use typical ranks for country names and function words as standards to improve perception of scale. We quantify relative fame rates and find that in the eight weeks leading up the 2008 and 2012 elections, ‘obama’ held a 1000:757 volume ratio over ‘mccain’ and 1000:892 over ‘romney’, well short of the 1000:544 and 1000:504 volumes favoring ‘trump’ over ‘hillary’ and ‘biden’ in the 8 weeks leading up to the 2016 and 2020 elections. Finally, we track how only one other entity has more sustained ultrafame than ‘trump’ on Twitter: The K-pop (Korean pop) band BTS. We chart the dramatic rise of BTS, finding their Twitter handle ‘@bts twt’ has been able to compete with ‘a’ and ‘the’, reaching a rank of three at the day scale and a rank of one at the quarter-hour scale. Our findings for BTS more generally point to K-pop’s growing economic, social, and political power.
Apathetic Villagers and the Trolls Who Love Them
Publisher: ACM
Date: 02-12-2019
Intranets and Local Community: ‘Yes, an intranet is all very well, but do we still get free beer and a barbeque?’
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Date: 2003
Gravesites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2015
Death and digital media
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 22-11-2017
Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-04-2015
Abstract: This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?
Are Technologies Innocent? : Part One
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 12-2015
Computers in the new consultation: within the first minute.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 25-05-2008
Abstract: Computers are now commonplace in the general practice consultation in many countries and literature is beginning to appear that describes the effects of this presence on the doctor-patient relationship. Concepts such as patient centredness emphasize the importance of this relationship to patient outcomes, yet the presence of the computer has introduced another partner to that relationship. To describe the patient-doctor-computer relationship during the opening period of the consultation. Twenty GPs provided 141 consultations for direct observation, using digital video. Consultations were analysed according to Goffman's dramaturgical methodology. Openings could be described as doctor, patient or computer openings, according to the source of initial influence on the consultation. Specific behaviours can be described within those three categories. The presence of the computer has changed the beginning of the consultation. Where once only two actors needed to perform their roles, now three interact in differing ways. Information comes from many sources, and behaviour responds accordingly. Future studies of the consultation need to take into account the impact of the computer in shaping how the consultation flows and the information needs of all participants.
Content Based Description of Audio in the Context of AXMEDIS
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 2006
Managing the consumption of death and digital media: The funeral director as market intermediary
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-01-2019
DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2018.1522387
Abstract: A growing number of companies are offering digital products and services for use in funerals. Drawing on interdisciplinary research in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, we explore how funeral directors operate as intermediaries for these digital products and services. We critically examine the popular framing of the funeral industry as a "conservative" business and examine how funeral directors actively mediate between their clients and the companies offering innovative products and services. This study provides an account of current developments in the funeral economy as well as a broader narrative about how funeral industry professionals have engaged with technology.
Is technology innocent? Holding technologies to moral account
Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Date: 2008
Blind detection of multiple audio watermarks
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 2001
Home and Away: A Case Study of Students and Social Media in Shanghai
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Date: 2012
#Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2015
Automating Digital Afterlives
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Date: 22-07-2021
DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780197571873.003.0006
Abstract: The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a erse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
The growing amplification of social media: measuring temporal and social contagion dynamics for over 150 languages on Twitter for 2009–2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 31-03-2021
DOI: 10.1140/EPJDS/S13688-021-00271-0
Abstract: Working from a dataset of 118 billion messages running from the start of 2009 to the end of 2019, we identify and explore the relative daily use of over 150 languages on Twitter. We find that eight languages comprise 80% of all tweets, with English, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, and Portuguese being the most dominant. To quantify social spreading in each language over time, we compute the ‘contagion ratio’: The balance of retweets to organic messages. We find that for the most common languages on Twitter there is a growing tendency, though not universal, to retweet rather than share new content. By the end of 2019, the contagion ratios for half of the top 30 languages, including English and Spanish, had reached above 1—the naive contagion threshold. In 2019, the top 5 languages with the highest average daily ratios were, in order, Thai (7.3), Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, and Catalan, while the bottom 5 were Russian, Swedish, Esperanto, Cebuano, and Finnish (0.26). Further, we show that over time, the contagion ratios for most common languages are growing more strongly than those of rare languages.
Cybernetic Funeral Systems
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 22-07-2021
Avatars, characters, players and users
Publisher: ACM
Date: 26-11-2012
Doctor, patient and computer--a framework for the new consultation.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 2009
DOI: 10.1016/J.IJMEDINF.2008.07.002
Abstract: The use of a computer during general/family practice consultations is on the rise across the world, yet little is known about the effect the use of a computer may have on the all important physician-patient relationship. This paper provides a framework for further analysis of computers influence on physician-patient interactions during general practice consultations. This is an observational qualitative study informed by hermeneutics and the phenomenological tradition of Irving Goffman, based in Australian general practice. A single digital video recording of 141 patient encounters over 6 months was made and imported into a tagging software program to facilitate analysis. Through an iterative process several keys and behaviours were described for doctors, patients and the computers in the interaction. Physicians tended to fall into two categories unipolar-those who tend to maintain the lower pole of their body facing the computer except were examination of the patient or some other action demands otherwise, and bipolar-those physicians who repeatedly alternate the orientation of their lower pole between the computer and the patient. Patients tended to demonstrate behaviours that focused on the physician to the exclusion of the computer (dyadic) and included the computer in the consultation (triadic). The computer was also seen to influence the physician-patient interaction passively or actively. In describing and categorising the behaviours of the computer, in addition to the humans in the consultation, a framework is provided for further analytical work on the impact of computers in general practice.
Asynchronous speeds: Disentangling the discourse of 'high-speed broadband' in relation to Australia's National Broadband Network
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-2014
DOI: 10.1177/1329878X1415100116
Abstract: This article analyses the substantive problems related to the term ‘high-speed broadband’ in relation to the implementation of Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN). It argues that an understanding of speed in relation to broadband must take into account a complex assemblage of infrastructure networks, communication devices, software, location, user subjectivity and political input. Within this assemblage are varied definitions, discourses and materialities of speed that do not necessarily synchronise. Instead, speed is subject to asynchronous perceptions and implementations, which impact on the potential of the NBN. With the aim of contextualising and problematising the understanding of speed in relation to the NBN, this article explores four key points: first, how the perception of speed is dependent not so much on technical performance, but on the subjectivities of internet experience second, how the term ‘broadband’ is politically shaped, especially in the context of the Coalition government's alternative multi-technology mix plan third, how the assemblage of different social, technical and political actants that constitute high-speed broadband determines the perception of speed and finally, how asynchronous speeds of broadband implementation and adoption may impact on the potential benefits of the NBN.
Representing alkaline hydrolysis: a material-semiotic analysis of an alternative to burial and cremation
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-02-2023
Quantifying Changes in the Language Used Around Mental Health on Twitter Over 10 Years: Observational Study
Publisher: JMIR Publications Inc.
Date: 30-03-2022
DOI: 10.2196/33685
Abstract: Mental health challenges are thought to affect approximately 10% of the global population each year, with many of those affected going untreated because of the stigma and limited access to services. As social media lowers the barrier for joining difficult conversations and finding supportive groups, Twitter is an open source of language data describing the changing experience of a stigmatized group. By measuring changes in the conversation around mental health on Twitter, we aim to quantify the hypothesized increase in discussions and awareness of the topic as well as the corresponding reduction in stigma around mental health. We explored trends in words and phrases related to mental health through a collection of 1-, 2-, and 3-grams parsed from a data stream of approximately 10% of all English tweets from 2010 to 2021. We examined temporal dynamics of mental health language and measured levels of positivity of the messages. Finally, we used the ratio of original tweets to retweets to quantify the fraction of appearances of mental health language that was due to social lification. We found that the popularity of the phrase mental health increased by nearly two orders of magnitude between 2012 and 2018. We observed that mentions of mental health spiked annually and reliably because of mental health awareness c aigns as well as unpredictably in response to mass shootings, celebrities dying by suicide, and popular fictional television stories portraying suicide. We found that the level of positivity of messages containing mental health, while stable through the growth period, has declined recently. Finally, we observed that since 2015, mentions of mental health have become increasingly due to retweets, suggesting that the stigma associated with the discussion of mental health on Twitter has diminished with time. These results provide useful texture regarding the growing conversation around mental health on Twitter and suggest that more awareness and acceptance has been brought to the topic compared with past years.
Domestic Information and Communication Technologies and Subject-Object Relations: Gender, Identity, and Family Life
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-2006
The Sociology of Associations in Family Research and Practice
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-2006
Analysis of Risks and Attacks on Digital Audio Watermarks
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-2005
Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the Digitization of Grief
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2017
Time, technology, and the rhythms of daily life
Publisher: IEEE
Date: 06-2010
‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding false death announcements on social media and the performance of platform cultural capital
Publisher: University of Illinois Libraries
Date: 02-12-2019
Abstract: In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative ex les. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental misreported misunderstood hacked and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
On the phenomenology of technology: the “Janus-faces” of mobile phones
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2003
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