Media technology

Children’s television is an important and heavily researched subject area that has a long and outstanding tradition. However, while there are a lot of academic works on the content of children’s programming and the production aspect, the issue of children as a specific group of audience is addressed less frequently, and often in a very one-sided way of looking at the risks and benefits of children’s media practices.

This research is taking an audience approach to the study of children’s television, particularly focusing on children’s viewing practices and the use of multifunctional media devices in the home. The findings will come from a recent and original qualitative study of families, their everyday viewing practices and attitudes towards television and media technologies. The paper will argue that the study of children’s viewing habits have the potential to transform the way we think not only about children’s television, but also about television as a medium more generally, as there is evidence to suggest that family viewing practices are indeed undergoing a transformation. The paper will demonstrate that when it comes to children’s viewing, the discussion of television is no longer simply about the ‘telly’, but rather about ‘screens’, with children living in increasingly multimedia homes, using a variety of media devices for a variety of media practices that often compete, overlap and conflate. This paper aims to show that in the context of the home and children’s viewing, what we mean by television is changing, with the boundaries around the medium, its content and technology often blurring.

The dissertation’s aim is to explore the everyday relevance media artifacts have for young children. It discusses and further develops analytical concepts that are committed to taking the children’s perspectives on possibilities and limitations of such artifacts seriously. These conceptual developments are rooted in the author’s participation in a daycare practice in Berlin, Germany. The daycare’s situational approach precisely attempted to draw on the children’s everyday life experiences so as to engage in problem-oriented learning projects, on media artifacts and beyond.

When analyzing the situated problems the children experienced in relation to both the pedagogical-educational arrangement of the daycare as well as subjectively relevant media artifacts, it emerges that their personal struggles are connected to broader societal contradictions. For instance, their problems with specific artifact-arrangements are interrelated with the staff’s, the parents’, and the researcher’s struggles. Children’s struggles with media artifacts are therefore not analyzed in isolation, but as part of the daycare’s sociomaterial interplay.

The dissertation explores and analyzes this interplay, so as to conclude that sociomaterial arrangements must be understood as inextricably intertwined with the process of conducting everyday life. Sociomaterial arrangements such as media artifacts are maintained and transformed by all practice participants. They all contribute in unique ways to upholding and changing jointly shared arrangements through conflictual collaboration, irrespective of their age. Daycare and other learning institutions should therefore systematically promote collaborative explorations of media-related struggles across age thresholds.

Σε περιόδους πολέμου, ο ρόλος του δημοσιογράφου επαναπροσδιορίζεται, καθώς το καθήκον του για ενημέρωση των πολιτών συγκρούεται με τους σκοπούς της εκάστοτε κυβέρνησης, η οποία θα χρησιμοποιήσει τα μέσα για να προωθήσει τη δική της ατζέντα. Ως αποτέλεσμα, τα μέσα έχουν χρησιμοποιηθεί ως πομποί
προπαγάνδας, ως πηγές ενίσχυσης της εθνικής συνείδησης και ως υποκινητές γνώμης. Με την ανάπτυξη της τεχνολογίας, το πεδίο της κάλυψης των πολέμων εξελίχθηκε και προσαρμόστηκε, έτσι ώστε νέοι τρόποι και μέθοδοι συλλογής, επεξεργασίας, ανάλυσης και εν τέλει παρουσίασης της πληροφορίας ανέκυψαν, με διαφορετικές πτυχές της δημοσιογραφίας να προσφέρουν πάντοτε διαφορετικές απεικονίσεις της πραγματικότητας.

Ambient & Pervasive Design is a second-year course following a practice-oriented vision on Human-Centred Creative Technology to educating Internet of Things (IoT) development techniques, teaching students to work with sensors and effectors on the Arduino platform with a minimum of theory and a maximum of hands-on expercience. The paper describes the setup and design of the course as a practical hands-on course to introduce and familiarise students with all the basic techniques for IoT applications and prototypes.

This article complicates the popular contention that “Grindr is killing the gay bar” by using qualitative interviews with Grindr users and a diverse literature on urban development. To better understand the factors that have gone into the changing face of the gayborhood and the closing of gay bars, this article encourages stakeholders to focus on a democratic approach to these technologies and considers Grindr and similar apps along with many other factors that affect urban development.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Frage, ob die Behauptung, die digitale Revolution habe unseren Glauben an die Wahrheit fotografischer Bilder erschüttert bzw. digitale Bilder hätten uns in eine post-fotografische Ära katapultiert, wirklich der Realität entspricht. In diesem Zusammenhang wird zunächst einmal der Unterschied zwischen der Aufzeichnungsoptik der herkömmlichen Fotografie und der digitalen Fotografie herausgearbeitet, um sodann darauf einzugehen, dass Fotografien bereits lange vor der digitalen Wende Eingriffen unterzogen wurden. Anhand zweier Beispiele aus England (Schneiden und Kleben, Henry Peach Robinson und Inszenieren und Typisieren, Thomas John Barnardo) wird gezeigt, dass der fotografische Realismus mehr oder weniger permanent Krisen unterworfen war, in denen die soziale Konstruktion der Fotografie überprüft, differenziert oder bekräftigt wurde. Beide Beispiele verdeutlichen, dass die Beziehung von Fotografie und Wahrheit im Laufe der Mediengeschichte differenzierter verhandelt worden ist, als die Digitalitätsdebatte unterstellt hat. Wichtig ist, dass technische und gesellschaftliche Komplexität aufeinander bezogen werden anstatt sie zu konfrontieren, so dass Technik und Gesellschaft sich wechselseitige Möglichkeitsräume eröffnen.

The aim of the present article is to map the territory of the contemporary audio-visual cinematic avant-garde, which arose at the very moment of celluloid’s passage from mass use to obsolescence. The first group of films bears witness to the avant-garde’s ongoing interest in the formal organisation of sound/image-relationships. If one of the main concerns of sound in conventional film is to ‘naturalize’ the image, experimental film is interested instead in an anti-naturalistic use of sound. Films without sound or even without images (which still can be called ‘films’), the use of audiovisual polysemy, asynchronous or even synchronous sound as well as the visualization of code-based music are all means of revealing the constructed nature of the cinesonic event. But to pursue a productive reading of the contemporary cinematic avant-garde we have to broaden the scope beyond the formal level and lend an ear to the sounding of film’s material and its technological base. With the second group of films discussed we will enter the realm of the sound of technology itself, while the third group points out the creative potential of optically synthesized sounds. The fourth and last group, live generated sounds and images, attests to the agility of current projection performances.

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts.

The Borders & Territories research group is proud to announce the release of the proceedings of the international conference ‘Mediating the Spatiality of Conflicts’ that was held on November 6-8, 2019 at the Faculty of Architecture of the TU-Delft. The conference was organized in collaboration with the Department of Architecture, the Architecture Theory group and the Landscape Architecture Department of Sheffield University. The event was partially sponsored by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship [Project Transurbicide, ID 798115], led by Aleksandar Staničić.
The Conference Proceedings compiles an edited selection of contributions presented at the conference, including keynotes by Caren Kaplan (UC Davis) and Pelin Tan (Bard College); nineteen research papers by emerging and established academics in the fields of architecture, urbanism, sociology, media studies and artistic practices; reflections and examples of media and artworks exhibited at the conference; short insights on the workshops ‘Photogrammetry’ and ‘3D Semantic Data Modelling’; an essay on the film screening program presented at Lumen Filmhuis; as well as one example of ongoing PhD research carried out within the B&T research group.
The Conference Proceedings are introduced and edited by Armina Pilav (Sheffield University), Marc Schoonderbeek, Heidi Sohn and Aleksandar Staničić (TU Delft), with the assistance of Lucija Grofelnik.

About half a decade ago when the idea of smart glass technology was still promising, popular opinion had it that by the year 2020, this interactive technology would have gained so much advancement as a mainstream consumer product and these products became more fashionable, socially acceptable and functional. However, the result from this study has shown that the smart glasses concept has been a rather slow one. Smart glasses are still not mainstream consumer products. Rather, they are specialized tools mainly adopted by the industry for various tasks despite their shortcomings. This paper investigates the field of smart glass technology, providing both an overview of existing products and their application, and also revealed 5 major areas in which smart glasses cannot be easily accepted as consumers product while providing a a research road map for future research work in the usage and acceptance of smart glass technologies for consumers product.

This book, which analyzes the internal and external environment of the media industry, compiles scientific articles, written by 33 authors coming from 13 diverse countries, emphasizing the complex and multifaceted nature of the industry, of the business and of the media economy. The authors got more than 130 detailed definitions of relevant concepts from the  business and media technology area, having quoted in their articles more than 720 books, monographs, articles and research papers. This workintends, on one hand, to emphasize the necessity from the companies and the media consumers side, to define strategies that allow to give an answer to the appearing of the new media. On the other hand, itintends to adopt and adapt relevant business frames and concepts for the economic and technologic analysis of media markets.

Black Mirror es una distopía televisiva que pone al espectador contra las cuerdas,
lo destrona de su confortable sillón y le obliga a tomar conciencia del asfixiante
futuro digital que le espera; y siempre con la angustia latente de que pueda
acontecer algo inesperado ante el porvenir. Episodio tras episodio, este retablo
narrativo se convierte en «el Libro de Job» del homo tecnologicus, solo que en
este caso Dios no parece responder.

En estas páginas, académicos de distintas disciplinas se confabulan para re-visitar
la teleserie y darnos pistas que nos permitan ahondar un poco más en nuestro
mundo, tanto el presente como el que está por venir.

Circulation of television programs in file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent is one of the many developments in the era of media convergence prompting a renewal of television's place in the popular imagination. Scholarly study of file-sharing tends to focus on movies and music, keeping TV marginal despite its heavy circulation in P2P networks. By considering its cultural implications as revealed in the discourses of P2P TV sharers, this essay's aim is to understand TV file-sharing as one term in the negotiation of television's value during the contemporary period. It is especially concerned with understanding the ethical theories of file-sharing participants. It situates these within the context of television's shift from low, mass culture to a more legitimated status; from a freely accessible public good to a private good for which one must enter into terms of commercial exchange; and from a national/local form of culture to a global, cosmopolitan experience.

This article revisits the long tail phenomenon, a dozen years after it was first articulated as a model for the digital media economy. As this article illustrates, both the research evidence and the evolution of industry practice have demonstrated that the long tail phenomenon has failed to take hold to the extent expected. This article outlines the interconnected technological, institutional and economic factors that explain the decline of the long tail, and considers the implications of this decline for media policy and media research.

Considers cinema as a dispersed field of practices in the south asian context, with different temporalities and durations, and shifting geographical contours. Draws on research on the persistence of the bioscope, archaic technologies of film projection, as well as more contempotary ways digital forms offer small scale, or micro-cinematic, forms of articulation. Also looks at the longer history of cinematic assemblage in the south asian context.

The historiography of natural-resource extraction, especially in colonial contexts, is often torn between two temptations: to represent these histories in narratives commencing with discovery, and thus rupture; or to render them in tales of continuity and thus an identity that transcends history. In the increasingly common scenarios of deindustrialization, these twin temptations are sutured together via the figure of return. Thus, accounts of postin-dustrial life often construe it as a return to forms of life that preceded capital-intensive industrial practice, and are written in the idiom of the "artisanal." In doing so, they mistake a mere form of appearance, which is to say an image of the past, for its repetition, effac-ing the degree to which the materialities of industrialization shape, as both shadow and impress, the corporeal gestures and unconscious habits of those who inhabit its ruins. At the same time, and in an era of memory studies, truth commissions, and heritage projects, people who inhabit the spaces of deindustrialization often believe that they can survive the destruction of their life-worlds only by giving themselves to be seen in the form of an image that resembles the past, and in a museological register. In this essay, based on two decades of field research in the areas of deep-level mining in South Africa, and an ongoing documentary film project with informal migrant miners called zama-zamas, I attempt to find another form and method for producing a historical and dialectical anthropological understanding of postindustrial life. The essay is an experiment in narrative that attempts to redeem a photographic and cinematographic tradition that is often culpable of reproducing the above-named temptations. The essay thus weaves together forms of the close-up-a gesture that seeks to get hold of history by means of an image-with contemplative reflections based in the temporally extended accounts of those who inhabit the ruins of deep-level gold mines. In so doing, I propose a means of rethinking historiographical practice in the context of an always already vanishing present.

The recent growth of journalism education around the globe offers new ways for media development organizations to work with budding journalists in places where the media sector is struggling. Improved communications technology and emerging international standards for quality journalism mean top universities outside the United States can be partners in training younger journalists before they enter the work force.

Mobile dating applications play a prominent role in Chinese gay men's social lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 participants, this study explores how urban gay singles in China develop social relationships on dating apps. It reveals that relationship development is often driven by casual conversations, which are not motivated by clear pragmatic purposes. Casual conversations tend to unfold around common hobbies or experiences, serving as a source of sociability, or satisfaction in socializing itself. In contrast to casual conversations, two forms of conversations are deemed highly instrumental and undesirable: one is the sex-oriented conversation aimed at immediate sexual encounters; the other is the interrogative conversation in which people ask private questions in a nonreciprocal and rigid way. Besides craving sociability, users "relationalize" casual sex by perceiving it as a form of social connection and endowing it with the potential to foster a relationship. This is also reflected in users' preference for sexual partners with whom they can hold a conversation. Users also exploit the affordances of different media platforms and capture the relationship potential by platform switching. They switch to the mainstream media platform WeChat for more synchronous communication and to collect more identity cues from each other. Platform switching also signals willingness for relationship development and mutual trust. Nevertheless, users keep going back to dating apps for new possibilities for social relationships.

Introduction. The media ecosystem is governed by a new economy where traditional media are losing their hegemonic position to technologic companies. Despite the growing presence of these companies in media products and services, there are few academic studies examining their transformation from a structural perspective. Methods. This article provides a complete analysis of the Internet giants Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft (GAFAM), which allows us to assess their impact on the media. Based on the review of scientific literature, the specialised press and corporate and institutional reports, the article examines the increasing connection between GAFAM and media content, as well as their capacity to establish patterns that shape the future development of the cultural and creative industries in the digital economy. Results. The results confirm that GAFAM play a central role in the digital economy and identify the key concepts of development for the media industries operating within this ecosystem

This book demonstrates how media technologies shape amateur sports and how some of these sports are modified. The author uses an innovative measuring approach to analyze how people use media technologies in conjunction with sports and how their relationship with physical activity is affected by the ever-present influence of the media.

Chapter 1: Theory of Media Saturation


Chapter 2: Media Saturation of Physical Activity: Quantitative Approaches


Chapter 3: Qualitative Measurement of Physical Activity Media Saturation. Dominating Forms of Physical Activity and Popular Technologies


Chapter 4: Qualitative Measurement of Media Saturation of Physical Activity. Niche Forms of Physical Activity and Niche Technologies


Chapter 5: Desaturation of Physical Activity

The Internet seems to promise the producers of zines-independent publications characterized by idiosyncratic themes, low circulation, irregular frequency, ephemeral duration, and noncommercial orientation-an irresistible alternative to the medium of print. However, this study finds that many zine editors have resisted migrating to the Web and that those who have published online remain ambivalent toward this new communication technology, in large part due to perceived deficiencies vis--vis their established circulation rituals. I argue, based on in-depth interviews, that interactivity is a mental and social characteristic of these self-publishers, who believe that paper and xerography work better to achieve their goals of hands-on participation in a subcultural community.

Un regard anthropologique sur l’industrie culturelle, 2.
Les œuvres produites par l’industrie culturelle ont la réputation de « seulement » divertir, mais on évitera ici de faire leur procès aussi bien que leur apologie. C’est une autre approche qui est proposée, centrée sur la technique et inspirée par l’anthropologie symétrique de Bruno Latour. L’article met ainsi face à face culture broadcast (côté industrie) et culture grassroots (côté public). D’un côté, l’industrie doit jongler avec le désir de contrôler économiquement les œuvres et le risque de voir les clients fuir si ce contrôle débouche sur une trop grande standardisation. De l’autre, le public bénéficie d’une certaine agentivité face à ces œuvres, déjà célébrée par la vague américaine des Cultural Studies ; mais cette agentivité est limitée par des questions techniques, plus rarement prises en compte par ces études. L’un des exemples choisi pour illustrer la discussion est la déclinaison du Roi Lion par la société Disney.
When produced by the cultural industry, films and tv shows tend to only entertain, at least according to their academic reputation. But instead of consolidating this reputation or to break it, the essay is centered on technique and inspired by Bruno Latour’s symmetric anthropology. At this light, broadcast culture proceedings are compared to grassroots culture habits. On one side, the industry must deal with a desire to economically control its manufactured items and a fear to see the spectators go away when the consequence of this control is an excessive standardisation. On the other side, spectators have got some agency (American Cultural Studies have described it at length) but this agency suffers from technical limits (less often described). The main example discussed in the essay is the way the Disney Company offers a variety of looks of The Lion King.

Günümüzde özellikle Web 2.0 teknolojilerindeki gelişmeler; internette
etkileşim ve geri besleme özelliklerinin daha etkili hale gelmesine, sosyal medya
platformlarının giderek daha fazla kullanıcıya ulaşmasına, gündelik hayatın sanal
ortama akmasına zemin hazırlamıştır. Bu yeni dünyadaki benliğin inşası daha
kolay, daha gösterişli ve daha magazinseldir. Bu çalışmada tek çocukları olan
bir çiftin özellikle çocuklarının doğduğu ve kendilerinin Instagram’da daha aktif
olduğu 2016-2022 seneleri içindeki paylaşımları üzerinden Instagram sayfaları
analiz edilmiştir. 100 binden fazla takipçiye sahip olan bu çiftin kimliklerini nasıl
ortaya koydukları, sayfalarındaki paylaşımlarının hangi motivasyonla beslendiği
ve mahremiyete ilişkin sorunların analiz edildiği çalışmada sanal etnografya
tekniğinden faydalanılmıştır. Çalışmanın sonunda özellikle anne, baba, ebeveyn
olmak gibi etiketlerin kitlelerin dikkatini çektiği, “çocuk bakımında rol almaya
istekli, sorumlu baba” figürünün takibi daha da arttırdığı, hesaplardaki aşk, evlenme,
çocuk bakım sorunları, eş iş paylaşımı sorunları, boşanma, boşanma sonrası yeni
sevgili bulma” gibi magazinsel içeriklerin sayfayı daha ilgi çekici hale getirdiği
tespit edilmiştir. Ayrıca mahremiyetini sergilerken, gelen olumsuz yorumlara tepki
gösteren çiftin Instagram’ın ticari “işbirliği” olanaklarını da her gün kullandıkları
bulgusundan hareketle, özel hayatın sosyal medyanın ticarileşmesinde bir malzeme
haline geldiği, özel hayata ilişkin keskin eleştirilerin dahi bunun önüne geçemediği
ortaya konmuştur

Promoting public knowledge about climate is important for garnering support for climate-change policy, and researchers have begun to study the effectiveness of new technologies as learning tools. News organizations are increasingly producing immersive journalism, including virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), and this study tests whether VR news can be an effective tool for learning about climate change. Based on results from a controlled, in-person laboratory experiment comparing an immersive VR news story to 360°-video and text-with-images versions, we find no main effects on the learning outcomes. However, we do find indirect effects on cognitive elaboration, which are conditional on preexisting knowledge about climate change. Results are discussed in light of their implications for theory about learning in multimedia environments, as well as their implications for the science of science communication. Scientific issues such as climate change are at the forefront of politics and policy making in democratic societies around the world, and particularly in the United States, where public opinion about climate change is divided, and climate denial has become a full-blown political stance for one of the two major parties (Funk & Kennedy, 2020). In this context, increasing knowledge about climate change and other scientific issues is important CONTACT Matthew Barnidge

“Put Harry on the Horn”—from the opening call announcing the death of Laura Palmer, and the later arrival of agent Dale Cooper, introduced speaking to Diane on his voice recorder, sonic and other media devices play key roles in the television series Twin Peaks. Telephones, for example are purveyors of both tragedy and comedy, from the complicated switching operations in the police station overseen by Lucy, to Sarah Palmer collapsing into melodramatic grief as she intuits the death of her missing daughter through the silence at the other end of the line. Inevitably, from a 21st Century perspective of ubiquitous mobile devices, such communications take on added pathos and strangeness and yet this paper will argue that such communications and media are already made strange and foregrounded in the series, pointing to the way the town of Twin Peaks itself functions as a kind of telecommunications network, with portals to the other dimensions of the black and white lodge. Similarly, Cooper’s voice recorder not only provides a kind of immanent narration, as he communicates with the often evoked but never perceived Diane, but also in more than one scene operates as a sensor, as its voice activation mechanism picks up the relayed speech of Waldo, the Mynah bird who, before his untimely death, also operated as a kind of recording device, the re-recording of which constitutes a strange form of remediation in Grusin and Boulter’s terms. The doubling of agent Cooper and Laura Palmer is at least partly achieved by the fact that they are both producers of recordings, in Laura’s case through the cassette recordings she makes for Dr Jacoby whose post mortem circulation and retrieval drives much of the first season’s investigation of her murder. Finally phonographs are a much more ghostly entity in the world of Twin Peaks, whether the endlessly looping one discovered at Jacques Renault’s lodge, presumably still playing from the night of Laura Palmer’s murder, to the record player on which Leland is obsessively playing jazz numbers that he dances to frenetically, provoking Sarah at one point to tear the needle from the groove, perhaps sensing that these grooves lead inevitably towards fatal and violent consequences. In supporting roles it is important to also mention other sonic devices like the Double R’s mysterious jukebox and its dreamy organ music, a range of often malfunctioning microphones, and various deployments of music from the live (at the Roadhouse and Great Northern), to the non-diegetic, to the recording process itself in the session conducted by James, Donna and Madeleine.
This paper will argue that these sonic technologies, alongside more (audio)visual ones such as flickering fluorescent lights, video, and the television sets that seem to only play Invitation to Love,  are crucial to the world of Twin Peaks, and constitute this world as both a communications network with portals to the unknown, and an accumulation of recordings of ghosted voices and entities, perhaps finding its ultimate expression in the backwards reprocessed speech in the Black Lodge. This lodge can be understood as a space in which there are nothing but recordings, albeit now on a cosmic/spiritual/demonic level. Using a media archaeological approach to these devices in the series, it will argue that they were already operating by a media archaeological logic, generating the world of Twin Peaks as a haunted archive of sonic and other mediations.