Larissa Hjorth

an introduction to new media

Games and gaming

Tania Lewis

Heather Horst

John Postill

Sarah Pink

Jo Tacchi

Lecturers, request your electronic inspection copy This sharp, innovative book champions the rising significance of ethnographic research on the use of digital resources around the world. It contextualises digital and pre-digital ethnographic research and demonstrates how the methodological, practical and theoretical dimensions are increasingly intertwined. Digital ethnography is central to our understanding of the social world; it can shape methodology and methods, and provides the technological tools needed to research society. The authoritative team of authors clearly set out how to research localities, objects and events as well as providing insights into exploring individuals’ or communities’ lived experiences, practices and relationships. The book: Defines a series of central concepts in this new branch of social and cultural research Challenges existing conceptual and analytical categories Showcases new and innovative methods Theorises the digital world in new ways Encourages us to rethink pre-digital practices, media and environments This is the ideal introduction for anyone intending to conduct ethnographic research in today’s digital society.

Principles and Practice

Digital Ethnography

Jolynna Sinanan

Kana Ohashi

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self and informal practices of care at distance as part of contemporary household dynamics.

Kinship through Data

Digital Media Practices in Households

Jean Burgess

Ingrid Richardson

The iPhone represents an important moment in both the short history of mobile media and the long history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman of the 1980s, it marks a juncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle and sociality require rearticulation. this book explores not only the iPhone’s particular characteristics, uses and "affects," but also how the "iPhone moment" functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change. In the iPhone moment, this study considers the convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhone—as a symbol, culture and a set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile media—the essays collected here explore the most productive theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture and networked communication in the twenty-first century.

Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone

Studying Mobile Media

Gerard Goggin

In light of emerging forms of software, interfaces, cultures of uses, and media practices associated with mobile media, this collection investigates the various ways in which mobile media is developing in different cultural, linguistic, social, and national settings. Specifically, contributors consider the promises and politics of mobile media and its role in the dynamic social and gender relations configured in the boundaries between public and private spheres. The collection is genuinely interdisciplinary, as well as international in its range, with contributors and studies from China, Japan, Korea, Italy, Norway, France, Belgium, Britain, and Australia.

From Telecommunications to Media

Mobile Technologies

Adriana de Souza e Silva

Klare Lanson

In this companion, a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of contributors and editors examine the rapidly expanding, far-reaching field of mobile media as it intersects with art across a range of spaces—theoretical, practical and conceptual. As a vehicle for—and of—the everyday, mobile media is recalibrating the relationship between art and digital networked media, and reshaping how creative practices such as writing, photography, video art and filmmaking are being conceptualized and practised. In exploring these innovations, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art pulls together comprehensive, culturally nuanced and interdisciplinary approaches; considerations of broader media ecologies and histories and political, social and cultural dynamics; and critical and considered perspectives on the intersections between mobile media and art. This book is the definitive publication for researchers, artists and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media art, covering digital media and culture, internet studies, games studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, media and communication, cultural studies and design.

The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art

Michael Arnold

Locating intimacies of place and gender (Seoul) -- Spectres of mobile intimacy: mobile media in crisis management of 3.11 (Tokyo) -- The place of intimate visualities: Ba ling hou, LBS and camera phones (Shanghai) -- Intimate distance: sociality and identity in the face of diaspora (Manila) -- Generations, mobile intimacy and political affect (Singapore) -- The place of the domestic: smartphones, women and labour (Melbourne) -- Intimate publics, communities and networks in an age of mobile social media -- Topographies of the intimate: mobile publics in the Asia-Pacific -- Emplaced presences: visual cultures of embodied intimacies -- Conclusion: intimacies of the social, mobile and local.

Online at Asia Pacific

The last decade has witnessed the rise of the cell phone from a mode of communication to an indispensable multimedia device, and this phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of mobile communication studies in media, cultural studies, and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media seeks to be the definitive publication for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize the increasingly convergent areas surrounding social, geosocial, and mobile media discourses. Features include: comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing mobile media; wide-ranging case studies that draw from this truly global field, including China, Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as Europe, the UK, and the US; a consideration of mobile media as part of broader media ecologies and histories; chapters setting out the economic and policy underpinnings of mobile media; explorations of the artistic and creative dimensions of mobile media; studies of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability; up-to-date overviews on social and locative media by pioneers in the field. Drawn from a range of theoretical, artistic, and cultural approaches, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media will serve as a crucial reference text to inform and orient those interested in this quickly expanding and far-reaching field.

The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media

Anne M. Harris

Gretchen Coombs

Kat Jungnickel

Creative Practice Ethnographies focuses on the intersection of creative practice and ethnography and offers new ways to think about the methods, practice, and promise of research in contemporary interdisciplinary contexts. How does creative practice inform new ways of doing ethnography and vice versa? What new forms of expression and engagement are made possible as a result of these creative synergies? By addressing these questions, the authors highlight the important roles that ethnography and creative practice play in socially impactful research. This book is aimed at interdisciplinary researchers, scholars, and students of art, design, sociology, anthropology, games, media, education, and cultural studies.

Creative Practice Ethnographies

Hugh Davies

Digital games are one of the most significant media interfaces of contemporary life. Games today interweave with the social, economic, material, and political complexities of living in a digital age. But who makes games, who plays them, and what, how and where do we play? This book explores the ways in which games and game cultures can be understood. It investigates the sites, genres, platforms, interfaces and contexts for games and gameplay, offering a critical overview of the breadth of contemporary game studies. It is an essential companion for students looking to understand games and games cultures in our increasingly playful and ‘gamified’ digital society.

Understanding Games and Game Cultures

The computer games industry has rapidly matured. Once a preoccupation only of young technophiles, games are now one of the dominant forms of global popular culture. From consoles such as Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Xbox, to platforms such as iPhones and online gaming worlds, the realm of games and their scope have become all-pervasive. The study of games is no longer a niche interest but rather an integral part of cultural and media studies. The analysis of games reveals much about contemporary social relations, online communities and media engagement. Presenting a range of approaches and analytical tools through which to explore the role of games in everyday life, and packed with case material, Games and Gaming provides a comprehensive overview of this new media and how it permeates global culture in the twenty-first century.

An Introduction to New Media

Games and Gaming

Ethnographies of Play and Creativity

Exploring Minecraft

Dean Chan

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific

Linda Williams

Kristen Sharp

How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues through digital and visual media are riddled with irony, because the resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste associated with digital devices contribute to environmental damage and climate change. Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region—a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media. Screen Ecologies shows how new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. It investigates such topics as artists' exploration of alternative ways to represent the environment; regional stories of media innovation and climate change; the tensions between amateur and professional art; the emergence of biennials, triennials, and new arts organizations; the theme of water in regional art; new models for networked collaboration; and social media's move from private to public realms. A generous selection of illustrations shows a range of artist's projects.

Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

Screen Ecologies

"Games have becomes embedded in our daily acrivities and Ambient Play shows how this affects our creative and ludic practices in everyday life"--

Ambient Play

Kathleen M. Cumiskey

Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves. The ubiquity of digital specters is particularly evident in mobile media spanning smartphones, iPads, iPhones, or tablets. Mobile media entangle various forms of social, online and digital media in specific ways that are both intimate and public, and yet the use of mobile media in contexts of loss has been relatively overlooked. Haunting Hands seeks to address this growing and important area by helping us to understand the relationship between life, death, and our digital after-lives.

Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Haunting Hands

Sam Hinton

Exploring questions of both exploitation and empowerment, Understanding Social Media provides a critical conceptual toolbox for navigating the evolution and practices of social media. Taking an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach, it explores the key themes and concepts, going beyond specific platforms to show you how to place social media more critically within the changing media landscape. Updated throughout, the Second Edition of this bestselling text includes new and expanded discussions of: Qualitative and quantitative approaches to researching social media Datafication and algorithmic cultures Surveillance, privacy and intimacy The rise of apps and platforms, and how they shape our experiences Sharing economies and social media publics The increasing importance of visual economies AR, VR and social media play Death and digital legacy Tying theory to the real world with a range of contemporary case studies throughout, it is essential reading for students and researchers of social media, digital media, digital culture, and the creative and cultural industries.

Understanding Social Media

Olivia Khoo

While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.

Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia

Esta obra es el resultado del rico e innovador trabajo que realizan los miembros del Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) de la RMIT University, Australia. Un trabajo agudo e innovador que defiende la creciente importancia de la investigación etnográfica sobre el uso y las implicaciones de los recursos digitales que moldean la forma en que vivimos hoy en día. Contextualizan la investigación etnográfica digital y predigital y demuestran cómo las dimensiones metodológicas, prácticas y teóricas están cada vez más interrelacionadas. La etnografía digital es fundamental para obtener una comprensión bien informada, contextualizada y conceptualmente fundamentada de nuestros nuevos mundos digitales; lo que condiciona y obliga a repensar la metodología y las herramientas tecnológicas necesarias para investigar en estas realidades. Este experto equipo de investigadoras e investigadores despliega una nueva sensibilidad y expone claramente cómo investigar situaciones, objetos y eventos; proporciona ideas para explorar las experiencias, las prácticas y las relaciones vividas por los individuos o las comunidades. Una obra que: Define los conceptos centrales en esta nueva rama de la investigación social y cultural. Desafía las categorías conceptuales y analíticas existentes. Presenta métodos nuevos e innovadores. Teoriza el mundo digital de nuevas maneras. Nos anima a repensar las prácticas predigitales, los medios de comunicación, las redes sociales y los entornos digitales. Un volumen repleto de buenos y claros ejemplos de investigación y perspectivas teóricas claras, lo que le convierte en una obra fundamental y desafiante para cualquier persona interesada en comprender la diversidad y complejidad digital en la vida cotidiana y que pretenda realizar investigaciones etnográficas en la sociedad actual.

Larissa Hjorth

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