Heather Horst

Introduction: media, culture, and change across the Pacific

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 12-11-2019

DOI: 10.1177/0163443719884057

Abstract: This essay introduces the a collection of articles in a special issue focused upon ‘Media, Culture and Change across the Pacific’. It foregrounds the importance of media in reconfiguring our relationships to different categories of place. It asks the following: When does media drive culture change and when might it even act as a conservative force? How do different forms of media, with different patterns of ownership, authorship, and participation, shape social action and cultural personhood?

Framing Fashion

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 09-05-2022

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170884-9

Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 04-2021

DOI: 10.1177/1461444820953517

Abstract: Solid-state drives, Bluetooth capabilities, smartphones, “the cloud,” social media platforms, and other digital technologies have fundamentally altered how we share and store digital materials. This article sets an agenda for understanding how people manage the proliferation of digital material in their everyday lives through a close examination of the strategies and rituals different people around the world employ to organize, curate, or delete digital materials. Drawing upon findings from 11 articles, it contextualizes contemporary forms with digital media and technologies with existing cultural practices of sharing and storing in relation to wider social and cultural systems and infrastructures such as household and family, logistics, health, government, and governance. We argue that the proliferation of platforms, changes in temporalities, and the emergence of different forms of digital labor have fundamentally shaped the ways in which we share and store digital material.

We just 'SHAREit'

Publisher: Wiley

Date: 08-2022

DOI: 10.1111/TAJA.12444

Abstract: This article examines how the use of mobile phones and associated software creates and sustains regionally erse urban communities. There is an interdependent connection between music that is highly participatory and locally relevant, and processes involved in sustaining key social relationships across a variety of groupings. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phones are used for musical purposes in ways that specifically put certain processes to work to sustain these social phenomena. This connects people with transnational software‐based commerce through social media, local telecommunications companies and phone manufacturers. That results in the navigation of ecologies and economies of data, hardware and software that work in local urban circumstances. In the case of data, we demonstrate how modes of exchange and reciprocity tied to social relationships exhibit similarities with informal economies of tobacco and betelnut. With social groups, the church‐based community perspective provides urban ex les of communities that cross regions, and extended family networks. This ethnographic perspective shows how increasingly global technologies are used in urbanite Melanesia in ways that sustain longstanding values and practices, while also incorporating identities and associations around changing urban, national and international circumstances.

Digital housekeeping: Living with data

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 04-2021

DOI: 10.1177/1461444820953535

Abstract: The availability and affordability of memory and other services formats to store digital material has proliferated over the past 15 years. Making, sharing and storing digital material is now a mundane practice that is part of a broader ecology of living with different kinds of data. This article examines routines of managing networked technologies in the home: digital housekeeping through three core practices of sharing and storing everyday data. The first, what we will call tidying, involves the everyday routines of cleaning up the mess of data through practices such as syncing material ‘in the cloud’, creating inboxes and manually moving digital data such as pictures and videos to ‘folders’. The second set of practices comprises more periodic, but deeper forms of sorting, spring cleaning. During digital spring cleaning, the focus is upon decluttering digital data by disposing, editing and other forms of curation whereby digital materials can be ‘located’ when desired in the future. The final set of practices, moving house, consists of the shift or relocation of digital data from one device or service to another. Depending upon the age and functioning of the device or service, this often involves changes in format to render digital data useful into the future, the realisation of lost data, as well as an additional assessment of the value of moving such digital material. Through fine-grained attention to the ways in which households live with digital materials, this article considers the engagement with and consequence of everyday data in our lives.

Compassion and Virtue: Social media-enabled bartering in Fiji during COVID-19

Publisher: Western Sydney University

Date: 22-06-2021

DOI: 10.51142/ISSUES-JOURNAL-4-1-3

Abstract: This essay explores the emergence of the BFBF and how this online group made ‘bartering’ and other practices of exchange central to surviving Covid-19. We analyse the posts and discussions of BFBF participants in 2020. We are interested in the way moderators and participants position this contemporary way of conducting bartering as an alternative to market trade that has deep cultural roots in Fiji. Such forms of exchange have serious implications for the study of digital practices and relational systems of exchange in Fiji and beyond.

The algorithmic silhouette

Publisher: Routledge

Date: 30-09-2022

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175605-51

5G and the digital imagination: Pacific Islands perspectives from Fiji and Papua New Guinea

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 14-09-2023

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X231199815

Gendered and generational dynamics of domestic automations

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 21-07-2021

DOI: 10.1177/13548565211030451

Abstract: Automation in the home is often presented as a value neutral process which makes life easier, more efficient and more productive. As recent research on the introduction of domestic technologies has revealed, these technologies are rarely value neutral and often work to reinforce gender dynamics in the household. This article examines the gendered and generational dimensions of how smart and automated technologies are being integrated into homes. Drawing upon 3 years research conducted between 2015 and 2017 in 11 households in Melbourne, Australia, we examine how households manage the storing and transfer of digital material and digital devices (images, videos and files from smartphones, tablets and laptops). Digital materials move within households and between different family members, and these processes are governed by often unstated rules, including changes in the life course. By examining the relationships between gendered and generational roles and automation in the household, we highlight the importance of smaller scale interpersonal relationships, which influences the negotiation of automation in emotionally laden contexts of families. Automated decision making may both support and challenge gendered norms around technology ownership and management.

An ethnography of Bitcoin: Towards a future research agenda

Publisher: Telecommunications Association Inc.

Date: 31-03-2016

DOI: 10.18080/JTDE.V4N1.49

Abstract: Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are a recent socio-technical innovation that seeks to disrupt the existing monetary system. Through mundane uses of this new digital cash, they provide a social critique of the centralized infrastructures of the banking industry. This paper outlines an ethnographic research agenda for this new digital frontier of social practice and exchange and the human affordances of engaging with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Firstly we argue that the use of Bitcoin can be seen as acts of social resistance and a form of social mobility that harnesses the emergent, serendipitous and dynamic properties of digital community. We then outline the disruptive nature of borderless, affordable and instantaneous international transfers within social practice. Finally, we identify the possible permutations of trust that may be found in the technical affordances of Bitcoin and how these relate to user (pseudo)anonymity, cybertheft, cyberfraud, and consumer protection. Bringing together these three key areas we highlight the importance of understanding the ordinary (rather than extra-ordinary) uses of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. We contend that focusing upon users interactions with Bitcoin as a system and culture will shed light upon mundane acts of socio-technical disruption, acts that critique and provide alternative financial exchange practices to the economic and regulatory financial infrastructures of the centralised banking industry.

Introduction: Imaginaries of Asian media infrastructures

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Date: 22-10-2021

DOI: 10.1177/1329878X211026989

Abstract: This Special Issue examines the relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures. Through a specific focus on the Asian region, the four articles contained herein demonstrate how these imaginaries span, transform and proliferate various boundaries. They also create new regimes of visibility and present a range of ethical dimensions for those who use them and the companies and governments that regulate the infrastructures. These include dating and video sharing apps, digital money transactions and erging historical accounts of communications technologies. Such erse ex les demonstrate how media infrastructures and the media content they carry enable the production of imaginaries and meaning.

University Of California, Irvine

Location: United States of America

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RMIT University

Location: Australia

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University Of Melbourne

Location: Australia

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University Of California, Berkeley

Location: United States of America

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University Of Sydney

Location: Australia

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University Of Southern California

Location: United States of America

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University Of Minnesota

Location: United States of America

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University Of California Santa Barbara

Location: United States of America

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Western Sydney University

Location: Australia

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Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP140103773

Start Date: 2014

End Date: 04-2019

Amount: $452,500.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP150100973

Start Date: 04-2016

End Date: 10-2022

Amount: $215,378.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP120200705

Start Date: 12-2012

End Date: 12-2016

Amount: $290,621.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Discovery Projects - Grant ID: DP200101998

Start Date: 04-2020

End Date: 03-2025

Amount: $294,500.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

Mobilising Media For Sustainable Outcomes In The Pacific Region

Start Date: 2012

End Date: 2015

Funder: Australian Research Council

Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP130100848

Start Date: 05-2014

End Date: 07-2018

Amount: $232,160.00

Funder: Australian Research Council

ARC Centres Of Excellence - Grant ID: CE200100005

Start Date: 08-2020

End Date: 08-2027

Amount: $31,783,576.00

Funder: Australian Research Council