Tama Leaver

Artificial Culture is an examination of the articulation, construction, and representation of "the artificial" in contemporary popular cultural texts, especially science fiction films and novels. The book argues that today we live in an artificial culture due to the deep and inextricable relationship between people, our bodies, and technology at large. While the artificial is often imagined as outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of humanity, paradoxically, artificial concepts are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas and labor. The artificial can thus act as a boundary point against which we as a culture can measure what it means to be human. Science fiction feature films and novels, and other related media, frequently and provocatively deploy ideas of the artificial in ways which the lines between people, our bodies, spaces and culture more broadly blur and, at times, dissolve.

Building on the rich foundational work on the figures of the cyborg and posthuman, this book situates the artificial in similar terms, but from a nevertheless distinctly different viewpoint. After examining ideas of the artificial as deployed in film, novels and other digital contexts, this study concludes that we are now part of an artificial culture entailing a matrix which, rather than separating minds and bodies, or humanity and the digital, reinforces the symbiotic connection between identities, bodies, and technologies.

Children continuously reinvent digital technologies in ways that serve their purposes and passions. Natalie Coulter starts the collection by considering a range of ways in which social and cultural discourse constructs the notion of the child, children, and childhood. Children’s informal learning around digital media often takes place within the home. Eschewing one-dimensional and one-way research, where the power is almost entirely in the hands of the researcher, the chapter demonstrates that not only is it possible to build reciprocal inclusive research partnerships with children and their families, but it leads to better research and more reliable outcomes. Willett and Richards\u27s chapter explores the value of combining reflective observation and interviews with children on the one hand and working with children as participant researchers on the other. Discussions of marketing, commodification, and privacy inevitably raise the issue of children\u27s rights, and particularly the...

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the importance of streaming within the context of commercial transmedia strategies. While cinemas have remained closed, studios have used streaming to extend audience engagement, and experiment with transmedia strategies attached to large intellectual properties. This paper seeks to determine how the pandemic affected transmedia and a shift to streaming. Drawing from key scholarly transmedia theory, and industry insights into transmedia best practice, this paper analyses the release of Marvel’s WandaVision and Zack Snyder’s Justice League and maps them against the larger transmedia strategies being used by Disney and Warner Bros. to create the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and DC Extended Universe (DCEU), respectively. This research demonstrates that streaming has become the critical component of commercial transmedia. Marvel are using streaming to enhance the integrity of one consistent storyworld. DC are placing greater priority on character tha...

A person’s location is, by its very nature, ephemeral, continually changing and shifting. Locative media, by contrast, is created when a device encodes a users’ geographic location, and usually the exact time as well, translating this data into information that not only persists, but can be aggregated, searched, indexed, mapped, analysed and recalled in a variety of ways for a range of purposes However, while the utility of locative media for the purposes of tracking, advertising and profiling is obvious to many large corporations, these uses are far from transparent for many users of mobile media devices such as smartphones, tablets and satellite navigation tools. Moreover, when a new mobile media device is purchased, users are often overwhelmed with the sheer number of options, tools and apps at their disposal. Often, exploring the settings or privacy preferences of a new device in a sufficiently granular manner to even notice the various location-related options simply escapes many new users. Similarly, even those who deactivate geolocation tracking initially often unintentionally reactivate it, and leave it on, in order to use the full functionality of many apps. A significant challenge has thus arisen: how can users be made aware of the potential existence and persistence of their own locative media? This chapter examines a number of tools and approaches which are designed to inform everyday users of the uses, and potential abuses, or locative media; PleaseRobMe, I Can Stalk U, iPhone Tracker and the aptly named Creepy. These awareness-raising tools make visible the operation of certain elements of locative media, such as revealing the existence of geographic coordinates in cameraphone photographs, and making explicit possible misuses of a visible locative media trail. All four are designed as pedagogical tools, aiming to make users aware of the tools they are already using. In an era where locative media devices are easy to use but their ease occludes extremely complex data generation and potential tracking, this chapter argues that these tools are part of a significant step forward in developing public awareness of locative media, and related privacy issues.

Artificialities: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Culture <br> Subjectivity, Embodiment and Technology in Contemporary Speculative Texts This thesis is an examination of the articulation, construction and representation of 'the artificial' in contemporary speculative texts in relation to notions of identity, subjectivity and embodiment. Conventionally defined, the artificial marks objects and spaces which are outside of the natural order and thus also beyond the realm of subjectivity, and yet they are simultaneously produced and constructed by human ideas, labor and often technologies. Artificialities thus act as a boundary point against which subjectivity is often measured, even though that border is clearly drawn and re-drawn by human hands. Paradoxically, the artificial is, at times, also deployed to mark a realm where minds and bodies are separable, ostensibly devaluing the importance of embodiment. Speculative texts, which include science fiction and sim...

Until relatively recently the ability to exploit new data for open access books was restricted to large publishers or content aggregators with the resources to invest in its collection, management, and analysis. However, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Alkim Ozaygen and Tama Leaver describe how barriers to engaging with data are falling, with open access monograph publishers now having growing access to data relating to usage and engagement. Such readily available data can help smaller OA publishers understand how individual titles are performing, where scarce promotion resources might best be deployed, and how a press is performing on its social mission.

This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on the developers and players of Pokémon GO through the lens of nostalgia. Focusing on the game as a nostalgic text that works to remediate physical and social spaces, we examine how gameplay has changed in response to players’ restricted mobility and isolation during the 2020 global pandemic. The release of Pokémon GO in 2016 was a watershed moment in the development of mobile augmented reality games. Building on a popular culture franchise familiar to many, it fused cutting-edge technology with memories of the past. Previous studies suggest playing Pokémon GO is associated with dreamlike nostalgia for childhood adventures. But these experiences were intimately linked with physical movement, proximity to others, and the exploration of outdoor spaces. Confined to their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, once free-roaming players are now being encouraged to embrace isolated, sedentary play. There is an additional layer of nostalgia in ope...

Introduction Many social media tools and services are free to use. This fact often leads users to the mistaken presumption that the associated data generated whilst utilising these tools and services is without value. Users often focus on the social and presumed ephemeral nature of communication – imagining something that happens but then has no further record or value, akin to a telephone call – while corporations behind these tools tend to focus on the media side, the lasting value of these traces which can be combined, mined and analysed for new insight and revenue generation. This paper seeks to explore this social media contradiction in two ways. Firstly, a cursory examination of Google and Facebook will demonstrate how data mining and analysis are core practices for these corporate giants, central to their functioning, development and expansion. Yet the public rhetoric of these companies is not about the exchange of personal information for services, but rather the more utopia...

BACKGROUND As the majority of Twitter content is publicly available, the platform has become a rich data source for public health surveillance, providing insight into emergent phenomena, such as vaping. Although there is a growing body of literature that has examined the content of vaping-related tweets, less is known about the people who generate and disseminate these messages, and the role of e-cigarette advocates in the promotion of these devices. OBJECTIVE To identify key conversation trends and patterns over time, and discern the core voices, message frames and sentiment surrounding e-cigarette discussions on Twitter through a content analysis of tweets posted and retweeted by Australian users. METHODS Data were collected through TrISMA (Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis), a contemporary technical and organizational infrastructure for the tracking of public communication by Australian users of social media, via a list of 15 popular e-cigarette related terms. RES...

The moment of birth was once the instant where parents and others first saw their child in the world, but with the advent of various imaging technologies, most notably the ultrasound, the first photos often precede birth (Lupton, 2013). In the past several decades, the question is no longer just when the first images are produced, but who should see them, via which, if any, communication platforms? Should sonograms (the ultrasound photos) be used to announce the impending arrival of a new person in the world? Moreover, while that question is ostensibly quite benign, it does usher in an era where parents and loved ones are, for the first years of life, the ones deciding what, if any, social media presence young people have before they’re in a position to start contributing to those decisions. This chapter addresses this comparatively new online terrain, postulating the provocative term intimate surveillance, which deliberately turns surveillance on its head, begging the question whet...

While social media is, by definition, about connecting multiple people, many discussions about social media platforms and practices presume that accounts and profiles are managed by individual users with the agency to make fully-informed choices about their activities. When discussing children, especially younger children, their agency is at times characterised as partial, or emerging, but with the presumption that with sufficient time they will eventually reach the same (presumed) status and ability as adult users (Livingstone & Third, 2017). At the other end of life, at the moment of death, the social media traces and online presences that persist after a user has passed away also present challenges in terms of agency. While there is an increasing push to include some sort of instructions about digital property in wills, these instructions are currently few and far between. Some platforms have deployed algorithmic solutions which have begun to address the reality of deceased users...

Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. To more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people and the way those decisions are being shaped, this article focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celebrity and influencer parents. The article begins by contextualizing these parental practices within the literature on surveillance, with particular attention to online surveillance and the increasing importance of affect. It then gives a brief overview of work on pregnancy mediation, monitoring on social media, and via pregnancy apps, which is the obvious precursor to examining parental sharing and monitoring practices regarding babies and infants. The examples of parental monitoring and parental mediation will then build on the idea of “inti...

This paper argues that expanding the scope of social media studies to examine birth and early life at one end, and death and memorialisation at the other, demonstrates that social media is never just about an individual, but also the way individuals are always already joined together as families, groups, communities and more. Mapping these ends of identity also reveals more of the nuances of everyday social media use and its impact.

Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shifting the stereotype of gaming away from that of hardcore, dedicated play to that of activities that fit into everyday life. Social, Casual and Mobile Games explores the rapidly changing gaming landscape and discusses the ludic, methodological, theoretical, economic, social and cultural challenges that these changes invoke. With chapters discussing locative games, the new freemium economic model, and gamer demographics, as well as close studies of specific games (including Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and Ingress), this collection offers an insight into the changing nature of games and the impact that mobile media is having upon individual...

An Education in Facebook? examines and critiques the role of Facebook in the evolving landscape of higher education. At times a mandated part of classroom use, at others an informal network for students, Facebook has become an inevitable component of college life, acting alternately as an advertising, recruitment and learning tool. But what happens when educators use a corporate product, which exists outside of the control of universities, to educate students? An Education in Facebook? provides a broad discussion of the issues educators are already facing on college campuses worldwide, particularly in areas such as privacy, copyright and social media etiquette. By examining current uses of Facebook in university settings, this book offers both a thorough analytical critique as well as practical advice for educators and administrators looking to find ways to thoughtfully integrate Facebook and other digital communication tools into their classrooms and campuses

While social media research has provided detailed cumulative analyses of selected social media platforms and content, especially Twitter, newer platforms, apps, and visual content have been less extensively studied so far. This paper proposes a methodology for studying Instagram activity, building on established methods for Twitter research by initially examining hashtags, as common structural features to both platforms. In doing so, we outline methodological challenges to studying Instagram, especially in comparison to Twitter. Finally, we address critical questions around ethics and privacy for social media users and researchers alike, setting out key considerations for future social media research.

Introduction The revolutionary zeal with which Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, were embraced in 2012 ostensibly situated online education as completely new, unprecedented, and entirely disruptive for the status quo of higher education (Pappano, 2012). Yet only a year later revelations of incredibly low completion rates (Pretz, 2014) and poor learning outcomes (Perez-Harnandez 2014) led to questions about whether the appeal and lifespan of MOOCs as a concept was already terminal (Strauss, 2013; Yang, 2013). While the rise and fall of MOOCs have both been radically overdetermined – they are an emerging if largely unpolished form of mass education, but certainly one that is here to stay in some form for the conceivable future – it is equally if not more important to recognise that teaching and learning utilising and via networked digital communication tools has a history as long as the World Wide Web itself (Kent & Leaver, 2014). Moreover, as the largest online social network ...

Roberto Benigni’s 1997 fi lm La Vita è Bella (Life is Beautiful) was met with mixed reactions, from popular acclaim evinced in the fi lm’s 1998 Academy Award, to accusations launched by both academic historians and the popular press of sentimentalising the Holocaust. This article situates Benigni’s movie within its fi lmic context and explores La Vita è Bella in comparison with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Linda Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. I argue that far from sentimentalising experiences of the Second World War, Benigni develops the cinematic structure of a fable to purposefully avoid representing the worst atrocities. Absence is an essential element of La Vita è Bella, allowing Benigni to present a fi lm which resonates with the idea that non-representation is the most signifi cant strategy a fi lm can deploy and that when used to its fullest effect it emphasises the idea that ‘Silence is the most powerful cry.’ In effect, the fi lm thus devel...

In past decades, the notion of information filtering was primarily associated with censorship and repressive, non-democratic countries and regimes. However, in the twenty-first century, filtration has become a widespread and increasingly normalised part of daily life. From email filters—designating some messages important, some less important, and others not worth reading at all (spam)—to social networks—with Facebook and Twitter harnessing social ties to curate, sort and share media—through to the biggest filtering agents, the search engines—whose self-professed aims include sorting, and thus implicitly filtering, all our information—filters are inescapable in a digital culture. However, as filtering becomes ubiquitous and normalised, are citizens en masse becoming too accepting or, worse, largely ignorant, of the power these filters hold?

Ever since William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru ...

The Elf on the Shelf (EotS) has become—as well as being a best-selling book and toy of the same name—a cultural phenomenon. As a Christmas tradition, the EotS only dates back to 2005, but has quickly gained hold in homes across the world. For the marketers of EotS, it’s also a huge money-spinner, earning millions worldwide. Originally self-published as a book by a retired teacher in 2005, the EotS book now sells with an EotS toy who sits on the shelf and, according to its story, reports back to Santa any ‘naughty or nice’ behaviour of the resident children. The EotS resides in many homes and schools pre-Christmas, giving parents and teachers leverage in the lead up to Christmas. EotS can also be viewed as a more sinister societal surveillance tool, normalising the panopticon and making parents complicit with the concept of omnipresent spying. While ‘magical’ rather than technological, EotS could nevertheless be seen as normalising and promoting a parentally-endorsed surveillance (and consumer) culture. Simultaneously, the EotS also has become both a chore and a source of fun for parents of Santa believers globally, as parents (mostly mothers) each night change the Elf’s location and position.

This article introduces a Special Issue on the topic of infancy online, addressing a range of issues, including representation, privacy, datafication, and children’s rights. The 7 articles included map important arenas of emerging research which highlight a range of increasingly urgent questions around the way infants are situated online, the longer term ramifications of infant online presences, and the ways in which infants and young children participate as users of online media.

Background Vaping is a relatively new practice, and therefore its symbolic meanings and social practices are yet to be fully understood, especially within Australia where the practice is strictly regulated. This study aimed to examine vapers motivations for use, reinforcing influences, and association with the vaper subculture. Methods Working from a constructivist epistemology and a symbolic interaction framework, in-depth interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 37 current (89%) and former (11%) adult vapers, 70% male, mean age of 32.5. Data was analysed via thematic analysis. Results Vapers largely started vaping to quit smoking and underwent common experiences during their initiation phase. Subsequently, vapers tended to adopt one of two dominant identities, that of the ‘cloud chaser’ or the ‘substitute’, which some users moved between during different stages of their vaping career. The social and symbolic meaning of e-cigarettes and vaping varied and involved concep...

Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discourses, and anxieties similarly characterising Hollywood’s “synthespians” at the turn of the twenty-first century; the legacy of “virtual idols” in East Asia (also known as “Vocaloids” in Japan); and the latter’s recent democratisation by a new generation of “vTubers” across video-sharing sites. Recognising this cross-medium migration of virtual celebrity—from anime, video games and blockbuster cinema to the participatory web—this paper adopts a platform-specific lens to highlight the affordances, cultures and vernaculars of specific social medi...

Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms, specifically Google and Facebook”; following a period of consultation that saw substantial public relations campaigning from Google, Facebook, and other content platforms to question the aims and effectiveness of the proposed code, the NMBC bill was sent to federal Parliament in December 2020. Google and Facebook both threatened to remove their services from Australia, or remove Australian news content from their platforms, if the NMBC passed in its original form. Such threats were regarded ...

Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analysis of TikTok, WeChat, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook. Because of the book-length analyses preceding the panel, we are able to distill what is distinct and recognizable about these platforms – what we call ‘platform specificities’ and demonstrate how these specificities are shaping not only the experiences of the users of those platforms, but the social media ecosystem more broadly. The panel contributes to the ongoing discussion regarding platform power, social media and ways of making sense of social media, painting in board strokes plausi...

An old adage about the internet goes “Don’t Read The Comments”. It is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (Phillips 2015). “Don’t Read The Comments” has become an internet meme. Alongside parody websites (i.e. @AvoidComments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in search of ludicrosity has become an internet genre in and of itself. This comprises the likes of meme factory ‘The Straits Times Comment Section’ which collates absurd comments from users on a specific newspaper’s Facebook page (STcomments n.d.), as well as internet celebrity troll commentators like ‘American Ken’ M (Know Your Meme n.d.) and Singaporean ‘Peter Tan’ (Yeoh 2018), who post comments on a network of social media and fora in stealthily satirical ways that have even been co-opted for advertorials (Vox 2016). Such vernacular practice ...

While talk shows and reality TV are often considered launching pads for ordinary people seeking to become celebrities, we argue that when children are concerned, especially when those children have had viral success on YouTube or other platforms, their subsequent appearance(s) on television highlight far more complex media flows. At the very least, these flows are increasingly symbiotic, where television networks harness preexisting viral interest online to bolster ratings. However, the networks might also be considered parasitic, exploiting viral children for ratings in a fashion they and their carers may not have been prepared for. In tracing the trajectory of Sophia Grace and Rosie from viral success to The Ellen Show we highlight these complexities, whilst simultaneously raising concerns about the long-term impact of these trajectories on the children being made increasingly and inescapably visible across a range of networks and platforms.

As the global number of human internet users passes 3 billion, and the number of things with unique IP addresses passes an estimated 15 billion, the widespread establishment of computational technologies signals a reality in which digital media are now firmly embedded, increasingly ordinary, and often invisible within cultural and material life. The digital spaces we inhabit and experience are now highly stabilized and structured, organized through regimes of commerce and datafication, and populated by content and users whose lives began already networked in digital forms of production, distribution and consumption. Yet, at the same time, the reconfiguration of internet infrastructures, connectivity, and interfacing expressed in protocols like IPv6, projects such as internet.org, and concepts like the ‘internet of things’ or ‘natural user interface’ signal processes of digital expansion that simultaneously draw our attention to conditions of ongoing change in computational technolog...

Technology enabling resurrection and reanimation of the dead has long been a theme in popular culture, and in science fiction (SF) in particular. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823), generally considered the beginning of SF as a genre (Freedman, 2000), tells the tale of a scientist who harnesses technology and electricity to reanimate an entity stitched together from the remains of the recent dead. However, it is telling that Victor Frankenstein is now generally considered a metaphor for the arrogance of scientists who fail to consider the harmful potential of their work. While rarely as dramatic as stories of resurrection, Tony Walter (Walter, 2015) has convincingly argued that for thousands of years every communication technology, from etching in stone and cave paintings onward, has been used to communicate with the dead in some fashion. It comes as no surprise, then, that technology start-ups and entrepreneurs are attempting to harness digital technologies, social media, and netwo...

(With Tim Highfield) While many studies explore the way that individuals represent themselves online, a less studied but equally important question is the way that individuals who cannot represent themselves are portrayed. This paper outlines an investigation into some of those individuals, exploring the ends of identity – birth and death – and the way the very young and deceased are portrayed via the popular mobile photo sharing app and platform Instagram. In order to explore visual representations of birth and death on Instagram, photos with four specific tags were tracked: #birth, #ultrasound, #funeral and #RIP. The data gathered included quantitative and qualitative material. On the quantitative front, metadata was aggregated about each photo posted for three months using the four target tags. This includes metadata such as the date taken, place taken, number of likes, number of comments, what tags were used, and what descriptions were given to the photographs. The quantitative data gives also gives an overall picture of the frequency and volume of the tags used. To give a more detailed understanding of the photos themselves, on one day of each month tracked, all of the photographs on Instagram using the four tags were downloaded and coded, giving a much clearer representative sampling of exactly how each tag is used, the sort of photos shared, and allowed a level of filtering. For example, the #ultrasound hashtag includes a range of images, not just prenatal ultrasounds, including both current images (taken and shared at that moment), historical images, collages, and even ultrasound humour (for example, prenatal ultrasound images with including a photoshopped inclusion of a cash, or a cigarette, joking about the what the future might hold). This paper will outline the methods developed for tracking Instagram photos via tags, it will then present a quantitative overview of the uses and frequency of the four hashtags tracked, give a qualitative overview of the #ultrasound and #RIP tags, and conclude with some general extrapolations about the way that birth and death are visually represented online in the era of mobile media.

[See the full paper that resulted from this presentation above in the papers section.]

Tim Highfield and Tama Leaver

Social media platforms for content-sharing, information diffusion, and publishing thoughts and opinions have been the subject of a wide range of studies examining the formation of different publics, politics and media to health and crisis communication. For various reasons, some platforms are more widely-represented in research to date than others, particularly when examining large-scale activity captured through automated processes, or datasets reflecting the wider trend towards ‘big data’. Facebook, for instance, as a closed platform with different privacy settings available for its users, has not been subject to the same extensive quantitative and mixed-methods studies as other social media, such as Twitter. Indeed, Twitter serves as a leading example for the creation of methods for studying social media activity across myriad contexts: the strict character limit for tweets and the common functions of hashtags, replies, and retweets, as well as the more public nature of posting on Twitter, mean that the same processes can be used to track and analyse data collected through the Twitter API, despite covering very different subjects, languages, and contexts (see, for instance, Bruns, Burgess, Crawford, & Shaw, 2012; Moe & Larsson, 2013; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012)

Building on the research carried out into Twitter, this paper outlines the development of a project which uses similar methods to study uses and activity on through the image-sharing platform Instagram. While the content of the two social media platforms is dissimilar – short textual comments versus images and video – there are significant architectural parallels which encourage the extension of analytical methods from one platform to another. The importance of tagging on Instagram, for instance, has conceptual and practical links to the hashtags employed on Twitter (and other social media platforms), with tags serving as markers for the main subjects, ideas, events, locations, or emotions featured in tweets and images alike. The Instagram API allows queries around user-specified tags, providing extensive information about relevant images and videos, similar to the results provided by the Twitter API for searches around particular hashtags or keywords. For Instagram, though, the information provided is more detailed than with Twitter, allowing the analysis of collected data to incorporate several different dimensions; for example, the information about the tagged images returned through the Instagram API will allow us to examine patterns of use around publishing activity (time of day, day of the week), types of content (image or video), filters used, and locations specified around these particular terms. More complex data also leads to more complex issues; for example, as Instagram photos can accrue comments over a long period, just capturing metadata for an image when it is first available may lack the full context information and scheduled revisiting of images may be necessary to capture the conversation and impact of an Instagram photo in terms of comments, likes and so forth.

This is an exploratory study, developing and introducing methods to track and analyse Instagram data; it builds upon the methods, tools, and scripts used by Bruns and Burgess (2010, 2011) in their large-scale analysis of Twitter datasets. These processes allow for the filtering of the collected data based on time and keywords, and for additional analytics around time intervals and overall user contributions. Such tools allow us to identify quantitative patterns within the captured, large-scale datasets, which are then supported by qualitative examinations of filtered datasets.

References
Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2010). Mapping Online Publics. Retrieved from http://mappingonlinepublics.net
Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2011, June 22). Gawk scripts for Twitter processing. Mapping Online Publics. Retrieved from http://mappingonlinepublics.net/resources/
Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K., & Shaw, F. (2012). #qldfloods and @ QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods. Brisbane. Retrieved from http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf
Moe, H., & Larsson, A. O. (2013). Untangling a Complex Media System. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 775–794. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.783607
Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication, 62, 266–282. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01630.x

From social media to CCTV cameras, surveillance practices have been largely normalised in contemporary cultures. While sousveillance – surveillance and self-surveillance by everyday individuals – is often situated as a viable means of subverting and making visible surveillance practices, this is premised on those being surveyed having sufficient agency to actively participate in escaping or re-directing an undesired gaze (Albrechtslund, 2008; Fernback, 2013; Mann, Nolan, & Wellman, 2002). This paper, however, considers the challenges that come with what might be termed intimate surveillance: the processes of recording, storing, manipulating and sharing information, images, video and other material gathered by loved ones, family members and close friends. Rather than considering the complex negotiations often needed between consenting adults in terms of what material can, and should, be shared about each other, this paper focuses on the unintended digital legacies created about young people, often without their consent. As Deborah Upton (2013, p. 42) has argued, for example, posting first ultrasound photographs on social media has become a ritualised and everyday part of process of visualising and sharing the unborn. For many young people, their – often publicly shared – digital legacy begins before birth. Along a similar line, a child’s early years can often be captured and shared in a variety of ways, across a range of platforms, in text, images and video. The argument put forward is not that such practices are intrinsically wrong, or wrong at all. Rather, the core issue is that so many of the discussions about privacy and surveillance put forward in recent years presume that those under surveillance have sufficient agency to at least try and do something about it. When parents and others intimately survey their children and share that material – almost always with the very best intentions – they often do so without any explicit consideration of the privacy, rights or (likely unintended) digital legacy such practices create. A legacy which young people will have to, at some point, wrestle with, especially in a digital landscape increasingly driven by ‘real names’ policies (Zoonen, 2013). Inverting the overused media moral panic about young people’s sharing practices on social media, this paper argues that young people should be more concerned about the quite possibly inescapable legacy their parents’ documenting and sharing practices will create. Ensuring that intimate surveillance is an informed practice, better educational resources and social media literacy practices are needed for new parents and others responsible for managing the digital legacies of others.

Present 1 February 2014 at the Surveillance, Copyright, Privacy: The end of the open internet Conference at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

While social media services including the behemoth Facebook with over a billion users, promote and encourage the ongoing creation, maintenance and performance of an active online self, complete with agency, every act of communication is also recorded. Indeed, the recordings made by other people about ourselves can reveal more than we actively and consciously chose to reveal about ourselves. The way people influence the identity and legacy of others is particularly pronounced when we consider birth – how parents and others ‘create’ an individual online before that young person has any identity in their online identity construction – and at death, when a person ceases to have agency altogether and becomes exclusively a recorded and encoded data construct. This seminar explores the limits and implications for agency, identity and data personhood in the age of Facebook.

The hugely successful franchise Angry Birds by Finnish company Rovio is synonymous with the new and growing market of app-based games played on smartphones and tablets. These are often referred to as ‘casual games’, highlighting their design which rewards short bursts of play, usually on mobile media devices, rather than the sustained attention and dedicated hardware required for larger PC or console games. Significantly, there is enormous competition within the mobile games, while the usually very low cost (free, or just one or two dollars) makes a huge ranges of choices available to the average consumer. Moreover, these choices are usually framed by just one standardised interface, such as the Google Play store for Android powered devices, or the Apple App store for iOS devices. Within this plethora of options, I will argue that in addition to being well designed and enjoyable to play, successful mobile games are consciously situated within a social network market.

The concepts of ‘social network markets’ reframes the creative industries not so much as the generators of intellectual property outputs, but as complex markets in which the circulation and value of media is as much about taste, recommendations and other networked social affordances (Potts, Cunningham, Hartley, & Ormerod, 2008). For mobile games, one of the most effective methods of reaching potential players, then, is through the social attentions and activity of other players. Rovio have very deliberate in the wide-spread engagement with players across a range of social media platforms, promoting competitive play via Twitter and Facebook, highlighting user engagement such as showcasing Angry Birds themed cakes, and generally promoting fan engagement on many levels, encouraging the ‘spreadability’ of Angry Birds amongst social networks (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). In line with recognising the importance of engagement with the franchise, Rovio have also taken a very positive approach of unauthorised merchandising and knock-offs, especially in China and South-East Asia. In line with Montgomery and Potts’ (2008) argument that a weaker intellectual property approach will foster a more innovative creative industries in China, rather than attempting to litigate of lock down unauthorised material, Rovio have stated they see this as building awareness of Angry Birds and are working to harness this new, socially-driven market (Dredge, 2012). As Rovio now license everything from Angry Birds plush toys to theme parks, social network markets can be perpetuated even by unauthorised material, which builds awareness and interest in the official games and merchandising in the long run. Far from a standalone example, this paper argues that not only is Rovio consciously situating Angry Birds within a social network market model, but that such a model can drive other mobile games success in the future.

References
Dredge, S. (2012, January 30). Angry Birds boss: “Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business.” The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/jan/30/angry-birds-music-midem
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York and London: New York University Press.
Montgomery, L., & Potts, J. (2008). Does weaker copyright mean stronger creative industries? Some lessons from China. Creative Industries Journal, 1(3), 245–261. doi:10.1386/cij.1.3.245/1
Potts, J., Cunningham, S., Hartley, J., & Ormerod, P. (2008). Social network markets: a new definition of the creative industries. Journal of Cultural Economics, 32(3), 167–185. doi:10.1007/s10824-008-9066-y

While the technical infrastructure of the internet means that distribution of any screen-based digital media should be able to happen almost instantaneously, different distribution regions and release dates for films, dvds, computer games, and television shows all highlight the persistence of ‘distance’ in particular ways in the early twenty-first century. Moreover, while some media creators seek to innovate and harness the possibility of global simultaneous release dates, many of the big media owners and distributors are actively litigating and promoting legislation to further reinforce distance as a political and commercial division. Under the auspices of copyright protection, the recent SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) acts attempted to regulate and control a global internet within the US, while the US-led ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) similarly aims to make copyright protection, including the division of the world into different distribution regions, even more robust and, from many perspectives, more draconian and backward-looking. Despite recent research which clearly demonstrates that the largest factor influencing unauthorised file-sharing of feature films is the delay between release dates in different countries (Danaher & Waldfogel, 2012), media creators continue resort to litigation and political lobbying rather than create innovative global distribution methods.

Dedicated media fans have always been at the forefront of social practices centred on timely viewing of television series and films, and thus also often early adopters in unauthorised file sharing when that has been the most effective way to view their chosen media products (Jenkins, 2006). However, the desire to participate in global conversations about media has become more and more mainstream. Sporting events such as the Football World Cup, the Olympic Games, and Hollywood events such as the Academy Awards attract global conversations in real-time via Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms (Bruns, 2011). Indeed, while these large-scale events used to be outliers, today more and more television viewing, for example, involves social viewing practices, including discussions on Twitter, Facebook or other, bespoke, television viewing apps on the increasingly important ‘second screen’ of a tablet. Building on existing work which posited the tyranny of digital distance in relation to television distribution and fan viewing practices (Leaver, 2008) this paper will argue that the mainstreaming of social viewing practices is yet another reason why media industries need to move away from delayed, segmented media releases wherever possible.

To illustrate the need to rethink regional distribution, this paper will examine the impact of Australian production company Matchbox Pictures, approaching AFACT (the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) after detecting unauthorised peer-to-peer distribution of their mini-series The Slap in Europe. AFACT’s inquiries resulted in international police efforts leading to the closure of the popular file-sharing community Diwana.org which hosted mainly Australian television content for an expatriate audience. In a letter posted after their forced closure, the administrators of Diwana.org claimed Matchbox Pictures “caused the destruction of a 40,000 strong vibrant international community that took active pleasure in sharing content that generally was completely unavailable to them.” While Dwiana.org was not authorised to distribute most of the content shared via their website, the point that there are no legal ways whatsoever to access this material (ever, in many cases) is an important one, and does beg the question as the value of forcing this website to close when a more innovative and commercially-minded approach would have been to find ways to monetize the clear demand of expatriate Australian viewers for domestic television. Using a case study of litigation around The Slap, and several other examples, this paper will argue that the legal reinforcement of distance in the era of informatic media can be usefully conceptualised as the tyranny of digital distance, where ‘digital distance’ highlights the inherent contradictions in a global digital economy operating along national distribution patterns. Far from protecting industries, the emphasis on litigation, legislation and creating digital distance, it is argued, does existing industries more harm than good, and normalises practices of unauthorised file-sharing to the point where ‘piracy’ is the norm, not the exception.

References
Bruns, A. (2011, March 2). Twitter Spoils the Oscars Party for Channel Nine. Mapping Online Publics. Retrieved from http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2011/03/02/twitter-spoils-the-oscars-party-for-channel-nine/
Danaher, B., & Waldfogel, J. (2012). Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1986299
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (illustrated ed.). NYU Press.
Leaver, T. (2008). Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance. Media International Australia, (126), 145–154.

While the curriculum, lecturers and tutors teaching Internet Communications via Open Universities Australia (OUA) have been engaging with students for several years using Twitter (see Leaver, 2012), in the past Facebook had been largely left alone since this was viewed as a more casual space where students might interact with each other, but not with teaching staff. However, in the last two years, more and more students have created groups to use Facebook as a discussion space about their units, often attracting a significant proportion of students from that unit. While these groups are important, of even more interest is the establishment of the group called the ‘Uni Coffee Shop’. Unlike the unit-specific groups, the Coffee Shop group, established by two Internet Communications students but open to anyone studying online via OUA, affords group support, social connectivity and a persistent online space for conversation which does not disappear or grow stagnant when students complete a specific unit.

This paper will outline an investigation into the effectiveness of the Uni Coffee Shop group as a student-created space for engagement and informal learning. Three modes of inquiry were used: a textual analysis of the common topics of discussion in the group over several months; a quantitative survey of members of the Coffee Shop group; and several follow-up qualitative interviews with Coffee Shop group members, including the two students who administer the group.  In addition, the paper includes the perspectives of teaching staff who have been invited to join the group by students and who, at times, answer specific questions and engage with students in a less formal manner. In detailing the results of these mechanisms, this paper will argue that fostering student-run spaces of engagement using Facebook can be a very effective means to create spaces of engagement and informal learning (Krause & Coates, 2008; Greenhow & Robelia, 2009); the support students give each other can persist over the length of an entire degree; and teaching staff engaging with students in their space, often on their terms, can create a better rapport and a stronger sense of connectivity over the length of a student’s entire degree (and potentially beyond). A student-run Facebook group also provide a space where teaching staff and students can interact using the affordances of Facebook without staff having to explicitly ‘friend’ students (something many staff are reluctant to do for a range of reasons).

References

Greenhow, C., & Robelia, B. (2009). Informal learning and identity formation in online social networks. Learning, Media and Technology, 34(2), 119 - 140.

Krause, K., & Coates, H. (2008). Students’ engagement in first‐year university. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 33(5), 493-505. doi:10.1080/02602930701698892

Leaver, T. (2012). Twittering informal learning and student engagement in first-year units. In A. Herrington, J. Schrape, & K. Singh (Eds.), Engaging students with learning technologies (pp. 97–110). Perth, Australia: Curtin University. Retrieved from http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au/R?func=dbin-jump-full&local_base=gen01-era02&object_id=187303

While the early years of online interaction were often framed by notions of identity play, anonymity, pseudonymity and multiplicity, the last five years have seen many of these playful boundaries collapsing with online and offline identity no longer presumed to be easily separable. The dominance of Facebook as the social networking service, and their firm insistence on ‘real’ names and identities has been one of the clearest causes and indicators of this shift. However, once online and offline identity are more firmly attached to real names, an individual’s web presence becomes harder and harder to escape. Moreover, while notions like ‘Identity 2.0’ (Helmond, 2010), ‘the networked self’ (Papacharissi, 2010) and others tend to emphasise at least some degree of agency, the persistence of digital information and the permanence of names suggests it is timely to revisit the ends of identity where the agency of the named individual is less, if at all, applicable.

At one end, identity fragments can be created even before an individual is born, from Facebook updates, blogs and photos detailing attempts to get pregnant, through to ultrasounds images and the like. Early childhood too, can often be documented online by parents who embrace every recording technology possible, both capturing and often sharing online every smile, every outfit and all those initial milestones of development. While most parents consider some degree of security when posting information about children, many of these digital traces persist and can often be easily (re-)attached to the children in question later in life. This initial digital contextualisation and the power of parents and others to ‘set up’ the initial web presence of individuals before they are active participants online deserves greater attention. Victor Mayer-Schonberger (2009), for example, has proposed that information online, including social information, should come with an expiry date, after which digital identity fragments are automatically erased. While an admirable strategy, implementation of such a proposal in a widespread enough manner to be useful would be very challenging.

At the other end of identity, the question of what happens to our digital selves when we die is also increasingly important. While our corporeal forms are subject to entropy and decay, the same is not necessarily true of online identities. From blog posts and social networking profiles to photographs and more personal files, the need to ‘do something’ with digital identity fragments is increasingly pressing. In some instances the keys to digital identities (our passwords) are being left in wills as part of individuals’ estates, but far more often this question is left unasked until an individual has died. Facebook, for example, had to institute the possibility to allow family members to memorialise or delete the Facebook profiles of deceased loved ones after many people reported Facebook suggesting they ‘reconnected’ with recently deceased relatives and friends.

This paper will outline some initial ways that our ‘ends of identity’ might be conceptualised, including a brief review of current approaches, with the intention of outlining an emerging research project which examines the impact of digital identity creation which is not readily controlled by the individual whose identity is being created or transformed.

References

Helmond, A. (2010). Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software. www.annehelmond.nl , PDF: http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf.

Mayer-Schonberger, V. (2009). Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age . Princeton University Press.

Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.). (2010). A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites . Routledge.

Love it or hate it, everyone has heard of the Wikipedia. Explore most topical subjects on popular search engines like Google and the relevant Wikipedia entry will almost always be in the first few items returned. And far from a flash in the pan, on January 15 2010, the Wikipedia celebrated its ninth birthday, now encompassing more than 10 million articles spanning over 250 different languages. Yet, for teachers and academics the Wikipedia can be a constant source of concern as students increasingly start (and, in the worst cases, end) research on a new topic with a quick peruse of the Wikipedia entry. The biggest concern comes from the core premise of the Wikipedia: it’s an online encyclopaedia that can, literally, be edited by anyone. Yet for all of the fashionable talk of crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowds, most educators prefer their students to be using sources which have more authority and reputation behind them. But is that concern warranted, and given that the Wikipedia is slowly finding a home in classrooms across Australia, what do teachers really need to know about the Wikipedia?

A film about writing a piece of software and two lawsuits about who really owns that software doesn’t sound like blockbuster material, but that’s exactly the premise behind The Social Network (2010) penned by Aaron Sorkin, of West Wing fame, and directed by David Fincher, best known for Fight Club (1999). Despite the seemingly dry premise, powered by Sorkin’s amazing dialogue and Fincher’s eye for pacing and casting, the film has done remarkably well, largely embraced by critics, and for a film in which nothing blows up and no one gets shot at, it has taken an impressive $175 million (U.S.) at the global box office thus far. Of course, the real story is about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator and co-founder, and how more than half a billion people have voluntarily used the software he wrote to share their personal details and lives, in the process making Zuckerberg a billionaire many times over. It’s fair to say that the portrayal of Zuckerberg is far from sympathetic, but what’s a little more disturbing is how the depiction of Zuckerberg’s social awkwardness and moral ambiguity seems designed to paint all Facebook users with the same generational brush.

Short article about the Australian-made film Benjamin Sniddlegrass and the Cauldron of Penguins which began life as a throw-away one line comment in a film review on a radio show and a year later was a fan-made feature film complete with digital download a niche cinema screenings. A tale of convergence, digitisation and all that.

Launched by Finnish game developers Rovio in December 2009, Angry Birds is the most popular smartphone application or app to date, with over 140 million downloads worldwide, including both paid and advertising-supported free versions on a range devices. Taking advantage of the low-cost digital distribution platforms for mobile devices such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace, Angry Birds costs, if anything, only a tiny fraction of the price of a PC or console game. The time commitment required to play the game is much smaller, too, with Angry Birds to some extent a harbinger of a raft of casual games which aim to be easy to understand, easy to play, encourage repeated use and have high levels of feedback and reward. Equally important, Angry Birds and other mobile media are increasingly ubiquitous not just because of their widespread use, but because that use can occur anywhere. Those wasted moments at bus stops, in waiting rooms, on the subway or while half-watching a television show can now be spent catapulting enraged birds toward the smug egg-stealing pigs and the various bizarre structures in which they hide. Given the popularity of Angry Birds, it’s hardly a surprise that a huge array of different remixes have emerged featuring the characters, story and music from the game.