Books
Palgrave, 2020
This book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and di... more This book investigates young children’s everyday digital practices, embodied digital play, and digital media products – such as mobile applications, digital games, and software tools. The book provides a critical and collective perspective on the ways young children’s mobile media culture is currently being reshaped.
The chapters draw on research that extends from the household to social media platforms and public spaces. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting, and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.
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Oxford University Press, 2020
At the turn of the twenty-first century, typical households were equipped with a landline telepho... more At the turn of the twenty-first century, typical households were equipped with a landline telephone, a desktop computer connected to a dial-up modem, and a shared television set. Television, radio and newspapers were the dominant mass media. Today, homes are now network hubs for all manner of digital technologies, from mobile devices littering lounge rooms to Bluetooth toothbrushes in bathrooms--and tomorrow, these too will be replaced with objects once inconceivable.
Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software--all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.
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Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn, commemorate and interac... more Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn, commemorate and interact with the dead through digital media. It maps the historical and shifting landscape of digital death, considering a wide range of social, commercial and institutional responses to technological innovations. The authors examine multiple digital platforms and offer a series of case studies drawn from North America, Europe and Australia. The book delivers fresh insight and analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and media studies. It is key reading for students and scholars in these disciplines, as well as for professionals working in bereavement support capacities.
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Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
Surveillance & Society, 2023
Families are increasingly using new apps and devices that provide detailed information about the ... more Families are increasingly using new apps and devices that provide detailed information about the location and activities of children and other family members. While typically performed for benevolent reasons such as maintaining child safety, tracking technologies like Life360 and Find My iPhone raise concerns about snooping and surveillance. This paper examines parental behaviours and attitudes towards this controversial practice via an online survey that collected 112 responses from parents of children aged 5-18. A significant number of parents reported using tracking tools. Parents' views about the practice were sometimes ambivalent and in disagreement. Perspectives variously included: defending geo-tracking as conducive to child wellbeing and family management and logistics, contesting the language of surveillance used to describe it, and opposing the use of these technologies as antithetical to child independence and choice. After exploring such themes, the paper identifies and critically discusses the socio-ethical issues of changing family norms associated with powerful child monitoring technology, child autonomy and consent, and the normalisation of geo-tracking and surveillance. The discussion employs Helen Nissenbaum's (2009) concept of contextual integrity to evaluate family and child privacy and to illuminate the socio-ethical complexity of this evolving technological practice.
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Historical Social Research, 2023
Digital sleep tracking has become part of everyday life via smartphones with in-built sensors, de... more Digital sleep tracking has become part of everyday life via smartphones with in-built sensors, dedicated sleep tracking software, and a range of peripherals. In a context of mediatised and managed sleep, this paper seeks to schematise the scope of consumer technologies, products, and media taking shape in the sleep industry. We outline a five-part taxonomy of sleep media technology: instrumentalisation of sleep data; augmentation of bedroom material; routinisation of sleep atmosphere; hacking of sleep rhythms; and finally, modulation of neurological states. We argue these technology types amalgamate to position sleep as incrisis, while concurrently, commodifying this problem with digital 'solutions' intervening at different scales, from the brain to body to bedroom to environment. Emerging from marketing and popular media coverage are new norms of 'good sleep' and 'sleep hygiene', normalising a discussion of 'how' (rather than 'if') digital technologies can measure, datafy, optimise, automate, and bioengineer sleep.
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Death Studies, 2023
Digital technologies are creating new ways for visitors to engage with cemeteries. This article p... more Digital technologies are creating new ways for visitors to engage with cemeteries. This article presents research into the development of digital cemetery technologies, or cemtech, to understand how they are reimagining memorial spaces. Through a systematic review of examples of cemtech in online records, academic literature, patents, and trade publications, we developed a typology of cemtech according to four characteristics: application type, technical components, target users, and development status. Analysis of the application types resulted in five higher-level themes of functionality or operation-Wayfinding, Narrativizing, Presencing, Emplacing, and Repurposing-which we discuss. This typology and thematic analysis help to identify and understand the development of cemetery technology design trajectories and how they reimagine possibilities for cemetery use and experience.
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Television & New Media, 2023
This paper unearths the archeology of reaction media across cinema, television and the Internet. ... more This paper unearths the archeology of reaction media across cinema, television and the Internet. We show how reaction content exists in high and low modes, tracing their reoccurrence and remediation from art-house and horror in cinema, to television soap opera, to animated GIFS, and YouTube compilations. Because reactions can be readily repackaged and resourced, we argue that they are a form of inter-media; operating in-between media text and media reception; in-between narrative and sensation; in-between authenticity and performativity; and in-between entertainment and resource. Reaction media are a form of sensory media with material properties. The textual and aesthetic richness of reaction content informs their persistent function, allowing for generative repurposing by internet users as a form of cultural expression and also operating as a rich resource of content able to be repackaged by professional content creators for producing economic value.
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Convergence, 2022
This article contributes to research on children's YouTube, online video genres and media consump... more This article contributes to research on children's YouTube, online video genres and media consumption practices by focusing on genres that take shape at the intersection of digital media content and embodied sensation and in particular 'oddly satisfying' (OS) videos. This type of content has become popular on YouTube, where examples of satisfying and OS content include the manipulation or movement of a range of colourful or tactile materials such as slime, kinetic sand or icing a cake. To document the evolution and key characteristics of this genre, we analyse YouTube videos using content analysis methods. Our findings show the characteristics of this sensory genre can be understood through the concept of visual tactility, which highlights the synaesthetic feel of watching these videos. Further, we identify and examine how OS videos demonstrate ambiguities in children's YouTube content, audiences and regulation by overlapping with other sensory genres and more adult content, such as ASMR. This analysis thus situates this sensory genre in relation to the developing study of children's YouTube entertainment industries and media regulation.
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First Monday
Given access to huge online collections of music on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple ... more Given access to huge online collections of music on streaming platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music, users have become increasingly reliant on algorithmic recommender systems and automated curation and discovery features to find and curate music. Based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 15 active users of music streaming services, this article critically examines the user experience of music recommendation and streaming, seeking to understand how listeners interact with and experience these systems, and asking how recommendation and curation features define their use in a new and changing landscape of music consumption and discovery. This paper argues that through daily interactions with algorithmic features and curation, listeners build complex socio-technical relationships with these algorithmic systems, involving human-like factors such as trust, betrayal and intimacy. This article is significant as it positions music recommender systems as active a...
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New Media & Society, 2021
Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can... more Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These ne...
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Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technolo... more Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
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First Monday, 2019
This article contributes to the critical analysis of sleep and its technological mediation by ana... more This article contributes to the critical analysis of sleep and its technological mediation by analysing how sleep is modulated through mobile applications. Drawing on an analysis of the features in the most popular sleep apps in the Apple App store, this paper investigates the dominant types of sleep apps available for everyday use. We analyse how their functions implicate sleeping bodies within new patterns of management and optimisation. We show how sleep apps remediate the monitoring technologies of the sleep science lab to make claims of accuracy and efficacy. However, the analysis also reveals how sleep apps go beyond simply monitoring sleep patterns by directly intervening in and mediating sleep-wake rhythms. This occurs through two key acoustic features common within sleep apps — ‘smart wake up’ alarms and ‘brainwave entrainment’ sound frequencies. We show how these features operate to organise transitions between waking and sleeping states. In doing so, we argue that these functions draw on histories or genealogies of both acoustic media and sleep science in the attempt to optimise the practices and rhythms associated with sleeping bodies.
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Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2016
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Mortality, 2015
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A touchscreen media habitus explores embodied dimensions of young children’s touchscreen media us... more A touchscreen media habitus explores embodied dimensions of young children’s touchscreen media use by drawing on qualitative research with parents and families, and from analysis of user interface (UI) and mobile app developer literature, which encodes touchscreen interaction through the design constraints and possibilities of gesture input techniques. Connecting this research and analysis with phenomenologically informed cultural theory, particularly as it relates to research on mobile technologies, this chapter describes the emergence of a form of digital dexterity that is understood through the concept of touchscreen habitus. That is, the cultivation of young children’s embodied dispositions, conduct, and competence towards mobile- and touch-based media technologies.
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First Monday, 2019
In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public ... more In this paper, we analyse false death announcements of public figures on social media and public responses to them. The analysis draws from a range of public sources to collect and categorise the volume of false death announcements on Twitter and undertakes a case study analysis of representative examples. We classify false death announcements according to five overarching types: accidental; misreported; misunderstood; hacked; and hoaxed. We identify patterns of user responses, which cycle through the sharing of the news, to personal grief, to a sense of uncertainty or disbelief. But we also identify more critical and cultural responses to such death announcements in relation to misinformation and the quality of digital news, or cultures of hoax and disinformation on social media. Here we see the performance of online identity through a form that we describe, following Bourdieu as ‘platform cultural capital’.
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Convergence, 2018
Introduction It is now commonplace for infants and toddlers to inhabit household media environmen... more Introduction It is now commonplace for infants and toddlers to inhabit household media environments characterised by the presence of multiple and mobile touchscreen devices. Within these contemporary haptic media habitats, young children are interfacing with tablet computers and mobile phones through both guided design and situated play in ways that were restricted by past computer interfaces such as keyboards, mice, and game controllers. A key dimension of young children's mobile media engagement and play centres on their embodied relations, and how these are shaped with and through the interfaces, materiality, and mobility of haptic media.
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We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood ... more We investigate the ways young children’s use of mobile touchscreen interfaces is both understood and shaped by parents through the production of YouTube videos and discussions in associated comment threads. This analysis expands on, and departs from, theories of parental mediation, which have traditionally been framed through a media effects approach in analyzing how parents regulate their children’s use of broadcast media such as television within family life. We move beyond the limitations of an effects framing through more culturally and materially oriented theoretical lenses of mediation, considering the role mobile interfaces now play in the lives of infants through analysis of the ways parents intermediate between domestic spaces and ‘networked publics’.
We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of ‘naturalness’: the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.
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Web platforms such as Facebook and Google have recently developed features which algorithmically ... more Web platforms such as Facebook and Google have recently developed features which algorithmically curate digital artefacts composed of posts taken from personal online archives. While these artefacts ask people to fondly remember their digital histories, they can cause controversy when they depict recently deceased loved-ones. We explore these controversies by situating algorithmic curation within the media ethics of grief, mourning and commemoration. In the vein of media archaeology, we compare these algorithms to similar work done by skilled professionals using older media forms, drawing on interviews with Australian funeral slideshow curators. This professional commemorative labour makes up part of a broader, institutionalised system of 'death work', a concept we take from thanatology. Through the media ethics of death work we critique the current shortcomings of algorithmic memorials and propose a way of addressing them by 'coding ethically'.
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The chapters draw on research that extends from the household to social media platforms and public spaces. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting, and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.
Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software--all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles
We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of ‘naturalness’: the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.
The chapters draw on research that extends from the household to social media platforms and public spaces. Moving across these interconnected sites, this book explores how young children are currently configured as consumers, users, and subjects of mobile media technologies. These arrangements of media use are analysed through a conceptual lens of digital dexterity, which locates children’s capacities to use mobile media interfaces and digital products not simply in terms of physical skills or developmental capacities, but importantly, through the design and affordances of mobile technologies and touch-based interfaces, cultures of interactive play and digital parenting, and economies of digital platforms and technology product design.
Tracing the origins of these digital developments, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal. The authors synthesize household interviews, technology tours, remote data collection via mobile applications, and more to offer readers groundbreaking insight into domestic media consumption. Chapters use original case studies to empirically trace the adoption, use, and disposal of technology by individuals and families within their homes. The book unearths social and material accounts of media technologies, offering insight into family negotiations regarding technology usage in such a way that puts technology in the context of recent developments of digital infrastructure, devices, and software--all of which are now woven into the domestic fabric of the modern household.
We propose the concept of intermediation, which builds on insights from critical interface studies as well as cultural industries literature to help account for these expanded aspects of digital parenting. Here, parents are not simply moderating children’s media use within the home, but instead operating as an intermediary in contributing to online representations and discourses of children’s digital culture. This intermediary role of parents engages with ideological tensions in locating notions of ‘naturalness’: the iPad’s gestural interface or the child’s digital dexterity.
of the deceased continues to interact with the living through a human surrogate; the emergence of autonomous and semi-autonomous software enabling the dead to use social media to intervene in current events; and finally the operation of algorithmic presence services like Eterni.me, where artificial intelligence creates a re-enlivened form of the deceased. Situating these examples in relation to sociological, anthropological and cultural literature foundational to ideas of distributed personhood
and posthumous symbolic immortality, we suggest that digital codes and computational texts stand as key sites for contemporary forms of ‘distributed personhood’, including posthumous personhood.
Drawing on interface analysis, promotional discourses, and videos of play on YouTube, this analysis highlights how Amiibo are framed as a means to envelop children in Nintendo’s crossmedia ecosystem by reinforcing a physical connection between child, toy, software, platform, and intellectual property. Informed by the concept of postdigital play, we account for this reciprocal dynamic between children’s everyday play and the branded world of IoT products, and we point to emerging questions around children’s data literacies.
play experiences into physical objects, by turning attention to the production of play and practices of literacy that emerge through more distributed gaming interfaces involving entanglements of diverse devices, bodies, and materials.
This situation is however, changing rapidly as mobile and touchscreen devices become more prominent in the spaces through which toddlers and babies move, learn and act. Mobile devices are often left within reach of very young children, and touchscreens are more amenable to gestural manipulation by small fingers than keyboards or controllers (Buckleitner, 2011; Hourcade et al., 2015). In this paper, we report on the findings of an ongoing study into entangled relations between very young children, mobile touchscreen technologies, play and parenting.
field of Human-Computer Interaction can usefully be
understood as existing within 4 distinct research paradigms.
We provide our rationale for developing these paradigms
and discuss their significance in the context of the inaugural
CHI Play conference.
argue for its importance in the study of contemporary
digital game play. We draw on findings from a range of
studies to highlight the interplay between screen ecologies,
game design, and registers of engagement. We discuss how
game play is increasingly mediated by multiple screen
configurations, and in turn, how the design of different
games are suited to or appropriated within these different
screen ecologies. From this analysis we propose a number
of modalities of game-engagement that we argue will assist
further HCI research into game design and player
experience research.
Discussion of significant objects generated considerable emotion in the participants. We identified objects of comfort and routine, objects that exhibited status, those that fostered independence and connection, and those that symbolized relationships with loved ones. These findings lead us to consider implications for the design of interconnected objects.
This report considers these issues with regard to a broad spectrum of digital media products and services, paying particular attention to questions of access, rights, and ownership for those wishing to bequeath them, or for those wanting to manage someone else’s digital legacy. This research on digital legacies draws from a mixed-method approach that includes an overview of literature on death and memorialisation in a digital context; terms of service and policies of leading social media platforms and telecommunications companies; and interviews with key informants.
This report gives a background and context to the increasingly important practices associated with managing digital legacies, including issues to do with privacy and property and consumer rights, managing digital archives and legacies, and memorialisation online. It provides some practical advice on creating and managing a digital legacy, covering issues in bequeathing key digital media types, and points to future issues, implications, and resources in this area.
This report forecasts key strategic issues for practitioners in industry, government, and education to invest in to position Australia at the forefront future innovations and evolutions of 3D printing practice. We hope to encourage collaborative civic and economic innovations that ensure the imagined 3D
printing ‘revolution’ can be transformed into wide reaching material benefits.
Our findings draw from extensive interdisciplinary research that saw the research team analyse data from collaborative learning/maker-spaces; interviews with industry leaders, academics and social commentators; and visualizations/maps of the evolving use of 3D printed objects made through
social network analysis (SNA) of the world’s largest public 3D Printed object design repository.