Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care

Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care
Author: Paul Byron
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2020-11-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429592434

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This book explores how digital media can extend care practices among friends and peers, researching young people’s negotiations of sexual health, mental health, gender/sexuality, and dating apps, and highlighting the need for a multifocal approach that centres young people’s expertise. Taking an "everyday practice" approach to digital and social media, Digital Media, Friendship and Cultures of Care emphasises that digital media are not novel but integrated into daily life. The book introduces the concept of "digital cultures of care" as a new framework through which to consider digital practices of friendship and peer support, and how these play out across a range of platforms and networks. Challenging common public and academic concerns about peer and friendship influences on young people, these terms are unpacked and reconsidered through attention to digital media, drawing on qualitative research findings to argue that digital and social media have created important new opportunities for emotional support, particularly for young people and LGBTQ+ people who are often excluded from formal healthcare and social support. This book and its comprehensive focus on friendship will be of interest to a range of readers, including academics, students, health promoters, educators, policymakers, and advocacy groups for either young people, LGBTQ+ communities, or digital citizenship. Academics most interested in this book will be working in digital media studies, health sociology, critical public health, health communication, sexualities, cultural studies, sex education, and gender studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology

The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology
Author: Deana A. Rohlinger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2022
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0197510639

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Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new Information and communications technologies (ICTs) as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or other-worldly, these tools and technologies were framed as extraordinary. But digital media are now mundane, thoroughly embedded - and often unquestioned - in everyday life. Digital ICTs are enmeshed in health and wellness, work and organizations, elections, capital flows, intimate relationships, social movements, and even our own identities. And although the study of these technologies has always been interdisciplinary - at the crossroads of computer science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communications - never has a sociological perspective been more valuable. Sociology has always excelled at helping us re-see the normal. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology is a perfect point of entry for those curious about the state of sociological research on digital media. Each chapter reviews the sociological research that has been done thus far and points towards unanswered questions. The 34 chapters in the Handbook are arranged in six sections which look at digital media as they relate to: theory, social institutions, everyday life, community and identity, social inequalities, and politics & power. More than ever, the contributors to this volume help make it a centralizing resource, pulling together the various strands of sociological research focused on digital media. In addition to providing a distinctly sociological center for those scholars looking to find their way in the subfield, the volume offers top sociological research that provides an overview of digital media to explain our quickly changing world to a broader public. Readers will find it accessible enough for use in class, and thorough enough for seasoned professionals interested in a concise update in their areas of interest.

Algorithmic Intimacy

Algorithmic Intimacy
Author: Anthony Elliott
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2022-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150954982X

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Artificial intelligence not only powers our cars, hospitals and courtrooms: predictive algorithms are becoming deeply lodged inside us too. Machine intelligence is learning our private preferences and discreetly shaping our personal behaviour, telling us how to live, who to befriend and who to date. In Algorithmic Intimacy, Anthony Elliott examines the power of predictive algorithms in reshaping personal relationships today. From Facebook friends and therapy chatbots to dating apps and quantified sex lives, Elliott explores how machine intelligence is working within us, amplifying our desires and steering our personal preferences. He argues that intimate relationships today are threatened not by the digital revolution as such, but by the orientation of various life strategies unthinkingly aligned with automated machine intelligence. Our reliance on algorithmic recommendations, he suggests, reflects a growing emergency in personal agency and human bonds. We need alternatives, innovation and experimentation for the interpersonal, intimate effort of ongoing translation back and forth between the discourses of human and machine intelligence. Accessible and compelling, this book sheds fresh light on the impact of artificial intelligence on the most intimate aspects of our lives. It will appeal to students in the social sciences and humanities and to a wide range of general readers.

Foster Youth in the Mediasphere

Foster Youth in the Mediasphere
Author: Milissa Deitz
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2022-11-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031179536

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This book considers the impact of digital media and technology on lived experience for young people in foster care. While the extent and intricacies of foster care—known as out-of-home care (OOHC) in Australia, where this study takes place—are not widely understood by the general public, youth in care might struggle to construct a personal identity that goes beyond reflecting the stereotypes and stigma by which they are often recognised. In today’s digital environment, media can play a significant role in any individual’s developing sense of self, identity, and belonging. Deitz and Sheridan Burns examine OOHC through the lens of networked media environments and investigate the conditions that encourage belonging and resilience in order to establish the role that digital technology can play in supporting those conditions for individuals, family networks, and the care sector.

Postdigital Performances of Care

Postdigital Performances of Care
Author: Liam Jarvis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350272124

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Covid-19 has been described as a 'digital pandemic'. But who might the characterisation of the pandemic as 'digital' leave behind? This timely book reconsiders the pandemic as 'postdigital', examining tensions between a growing postdigital attitude of disenchantment with digital technologies and the increasing reliance on adapted modes of online practice mid-lockdown in both performance-making and healthcare. What emerged amidst the pandemic restrictions was a theatre that was unable to show its face, instead adapting into a variety of 'covid-safe' remote forms of engagement, from 'Zoom plays' to self-generating experiences sent by post. This book explores the ways that both performances and healthcare practices found proxies for direct touch and face-to-face encounters, deconstructing the way that care and resilience were spectacularized by political actors online. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage explore aspects of care in relation to technology, spectacle and facilitation, and how new modes of delivery and the repurposing of theatre spaces that were displaced amidst the mass migration online have been enabling as well as controversial. The variety of case studies assessed includes internet memes, online films, performances of everyday resilience through social media and participatory theatre productions, including Thaddeus Phillips' Zoom Motel, Coney's Telephone and Nightcap's Handle with Care.

Mediatisation of Emotional Life

Mediatisation of Emotional Life
Author: Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-04-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000589358

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This volume brings together an international team of authors to investigate a wide range of issues concerning the fundamental role of media technologies in shaping contemporary emotional life. Chapters explore key aspects of the mediatisation of emotional life, feelings and interpersonal relations: love, intimacy, loneliness, friendship, family relations, erotic, sexual and romantic experiences. The authors explain the key aspects of strong user–media relationships and human relationships based on media use and investigate problems such as the formation of identity based on social media, the role of communication applications and the effects of mobile and locative media on our relationships, as well as artificial intelligence, on our perception of our emotions. With a focus on new media, the book also draws on the scope of traditional media that express and shape emotions, taking into account the classic approaches to emotionality of messages from the perspective of film creators and recipients. This cutting-edge collection will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication studies, especially digital media and new technologies, psychology, pedagogy, sociology of everyday life and cultural studies. Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

LGBT+ Youth and Emerging Technologies in Southeast Asia

LGBT+ Youth and Emerging Technologies in Southeast Asia
Author: Benjamin Hanckel
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2023
Genre: Digital media
ISBN: 9819943949

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This book investigates the ways in which emerging digital technologies are shaping and changing the worlds of sexuality and gender diverse youth in Southeast Asia. Primarily focused on the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, the book examines the potential of digital technologies to enhance wellbeing in and across these contexts. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic field research, interviews, survey data, and online content analysis, the book examines the design and use of websites and content by and for LGBT+ youth. The book innovatively interrogates the design of transnational digital wellbeing initiatives, alongside the digital practices of those the technologies are designed for. It illustrates not only the (im)possibilities of technological design, but also the capacity for design to participate in what Hanckel calls '(trans)national digital wellbeing' processes. He asks us to consider the ways that global technologies are contextual -- a paradox that is explored throughout the book. The analysis extends important discussions in youth research, contributing to a greater understanding of how LGBT+ youth are engaging new technologies to participate in identity-making, health and wellbeing, as well as political action. It also considers implications for digital wellbeing and digital health promotion efforts globally with young people who experience marginalisation. In doing so the book makes a critical contribution to understanding the ways that transnational digital interventions get deployed and (at times) incorporated into youth practices.

The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health

The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health
Author: Jacinthe Flore
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2023-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9819943221

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The Artefacts of Digital Mental Health focuses on smartphone apps, wearables devices, and ingestible sensors, which are at the centre of research, development, and investment in mental health and digitalisation. The book aims to examine digital mental health through three artefacts that are defined by their ubiquity, everydayness, popularity, innovation and hype, and emergent qualities. It engages with theoretical approaches to technology, mental health, and wellbeing informed by Science and Technology Studies, sociological studies of health and mental health, and sociomaterialism. The book brings together different theories of mental health, subjectivity, the body, care, and digitalisation alongside biodigital artefacts as exemplars of transformations in digital mental health.

Happiness and Domestic Life

Happiness and Domestic Life
Author: Maria Teresa Russo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2022-08-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000602877

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This book uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between the quality of domestic life and the home environment, in its material and relational dimension, with individual and social happiness, in the context of current changes. The theme of happiness and well-being is framed within two significant changes, themselves affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic: the relationship between the individual’s quality of life and engagement within the community, and the role of new technologies in everyday life. The authors highlight the relational nature of happiness and the centrality of the home environment in its promotion. Three dimensions of psychosocial well-being in the home are analysed: the personal one, consisting of a sense of stability, intimacy and sharing; the social one, which considers the domestic environment as a place for civic education and, in times of pandemic, the site of professional activity and the physical one, consisting of spaces, services and architectural styles. This book is ideal for readers who wish to cross disciplinary boundaries and explore the topic of domestic happiness in its different facets. The target audience is both professional researchers and advanced graduate and undergraduate students. Chapter 12 of this book is now OA on www.taylorfrancis.com under Creative Commons licens CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.

What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research?

What Do We Know About the Effects of Pornography After Fifty Years of Academic Research?
Author: Alan McKee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000632253

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This book presents an innovative cross-disciplinary report on research across the humanities and social sciences about the relationship between pornography and its consumers. For policy makers and the wider public it can be difficult to obtain a clear understanding of the current state of knowledge on pornography and its relationships with audiences, due to the often-contradictory nature of research spanning the various and politically diverse academic disciplines. The cross-disciplinary expertise of the author team has engaged in an extensive examination of the findings of academic research in the area in order to explain, in a clear and accessible style, the most important conclusions about the relationship of pornography to Healthy Sexual Development. This short and accessible overview is suitable for students and scholars in Psychology, Sexual Health, Film Studies, Sex Education, Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Media Studies and Cultural Studies.