Digital Media Practices Research Articles

“Strike with visual bullets”: Digitalized deep play and floating emotional public sphere in the Bilibili bullet comments

The bullet comment refers to a real-time built-in comment system attached to online video services on the Chinese Internet. It provides a mechanism transforming online spectatorship into an “audiencing” experience. This study interviews 16 bullet comment users to explore the digital media practices in bullet comments. We argue that the “audiencing” subjects are involved as players in the imagined communities through emotional invitations, implicit cultural “contract,” and diverse textual hijacking strategies. It is a digitalized subject deep play with the stake of cultural interpretation mastery. Based on space discourse deep play, the bullet comment forms a floating emotional public sphere through the flexible technological infrastructure, sustained subject involvement mechanisms, adaptable playing strategies, and a strategic discourse evolution. Its openness helps youth generate a sense of place to express their subjectivities in response to social pressures and paternalistic rhetoric in an alternative manner. This study provides a new perspective on the Chinese youth culture and online public sphere research.

Living Journals: introducing a new digital participatory approach to study young children’s digital media practices

ABSTRACT Researching daily activities of young children poses methodological challenges that necessitate diverse approaches for effective inquiry. This method article introduces a new digital participatory research method – Living Journals – to study young children's everyday digital media practices at home in Azerbaijan. Employing this method, mothers actively produced multimodal data in situ, responding to prompts sent by the researcher, which were subsequently turned into journals in print and digital formats. Utilising these journals, participant families were encouraged to provide commentary on their respective journals and those of other participating children. This method has a significant capacity to yield metatextual, multivocal, multimodal, and multifunctional data, thereby enhancing the richness of the dataset and facilitating nuanced interpretations. Delving into the intricacies of the method and its advantages, the article elaborates on its procedures, significance, and limitations. The method emerges as a valuable approach, offering a participatory and contextually sensitive means for remotely generating data, allowing researchers to develop textually and visually rich datasets.

Chronotopes of Transnational Literacies: How Youth Live and Imagine Social Worlds in their Digital Media Practices

AbstractThis study explores the transnational literacies that contribute to creating online social connections among migrant youth that may support their development and navigation of life across countries. We examine how social connectedness is semiotically constructed through time–space framing among two youth of Chinese descent who were participants of a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. We build on the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) and scholarship of transnational literacies to understand the space–time dimensions of digital literacy practices, specifically how youth create the spatiotemporal context or frame of reference for their actions and positionings with others across geographical distances. Using a case study approach with data from interviews and observations, we analyzed how the youth depicted their transnational social relations within particular time–space frames. Qualitative and discourse analyses of the youths' narrative accounts show that they positioned themselves in proximity with their transnational peers within particular time–space contexts that supported their actions and emotions, and how they made sense of events, issues, practices, and their own identities as transnational individuals. The youths' ideas of schooling and education, and attunement to nationalistic ideologies, were developed through multiple chronotopes in their social connections across countries. This study offers implications for how an attention to the transnational spatiotemporal frame of youths' discourse and narrative may give us a more nuanced understanding of the subjectivity, knowledge, and perspective they derive from their experiences of movement and connection across borders.

Digital Images Translating Climate Justice Online to inspire Transformative Ecological Visions of World Order from the Margins

Abstract This paper aims to study alternative visions of the world as they emerge creatively through digital media storytelling about floods, forest fires, and consequences of climate change that emerge within transnational climate justice activist networks and their digital media practices of translation and visual storytelling. Focusing on intersectional digital media practices among Fridays for Future (FFF) activists in Germany, it highlights the importance of marginalized voices and their transnational visions of world order and affective connections of solidarity that contest established world climate politics as insufficient. I conceive of questions of cultural and political translation as at the heart of understanding how critical voices from the margin become visible within broader, transnational public spaces due to intersectional (digital) media debates and public deliberation about climate change. I focus on the FFF movement in Germany and the visual practices of online media activists in translating perceived marginalized voices and political visions toward the spotlight of digital conversation within FFF Germany’s joint (trans)national, publicly accessible online spaces. Findings discuss how FFF alternative Telegram channels practice intersectional storytelling of floods, earth, and ecological transformation to make visible the critical agency of activists from the most affected peoples and communities engaged in protesting against extractivism and protecting nature in the Global South.

Frontline Knowledge: Digital Media Literacy of Older Adults in Ukraine

Digital media literacy becomes crucial in modern conflict zones, as conflicts are increasingly digitized and hyperconnected. While a dangerous environment raises the need for orientation, propaganda and fakes discourage audiences’ sense-making efforts. Older adults often experience digital and social exclusion and might be vulnerable to mis- and disinformation. Previous research, focusing mostly on Western Europe, has studied digital media practices of older adults, however, there is very little knowledge on digital media literacy skills and needs of older adults in conflict zones. Drawing on eight focus groups, this article explores Ukrainian older adults’ challenges and compensation strategies during the digitized war. An inductive-qualitative analysis identifies three main factors that shape digital practices and dictate the literacy needs of Ukrainian older adults: (a) (lack of) access, grounded in material infrastructure and social ties; (b) self-(in)efficacy that often stems from pre-convictions about one’s agency and position in society; and (c) resilience that becomes crucial in the situation of continuous exposure to (mediated) violence. This research contributes to the understanding of the media literacy needs of older adults and lays the foundation for developing digital literacy study programs in conflict zones.

Exploring Parents’ Everyday Experiences With Digital Media: Barriers and Opportunities for Digital Inclusion

This article presents qualitative research findings on parents’ digital media practices. Through 32 in-depth interviews with parents of 0–6-year-olds in French-speaking Belgium, the study addresses digital inclusion by exploring the diverse ways parents experience and benefit (or not) from digital media. Our research uncovers the dual nature of digital media use in parenting, presenting both advantageous and problematic outcomes across four dialectical dimensions. Our work sheds light on how digital media can (a) offer informational support or constitute an informational challenge, (b) provide emotional assistance or cause emotional struggles, (c) grant access to social support or contribute to social pressures, and (d) serve as a tool for the daily organisation or complicate daily life. Our article also investigates the factors associated with either positive or negative outcomes. We show the role of personal, situational, social, and normative factors. To conclude, we identify strategies for childcare and parenting support professionals to promote digital inclusion among parents by addressing barriers to positive experiences and outcomes related to the use of digital media. By integrating the outcomes of parents’ experiences with digital media into discussions of digital inclusion, this article contributes to a comprehensive approach to promoting digital equity beyond questions of access and skills. It calls for user-centric strategies that consider the diverse experiences and concrete outcomes associated with digital media use and emphasises the importance of supporting parents and families regarding these tools.

Show-and-Tell: An Interface for Delivering Rich Feedback upon Creative Media Artefacts

In this paper, we explore an approach to feedback which could allow those learning creative digital media practices in remote and asynchronous environments to receive rich, multi-modal, and interactive feedback upon their creative artefacts. We propose the show-and-tell feedback interface which couples graphical user interface changes (the show) to a text-based explanations (the tell). We describe the rationale behind the design and offer a tentative set of design criteria. We report the implementation and deployment into a real-world educational setting using a prototype interface developed to allow either traditional text-only feedback or our proposed show-and tell feedback across four sessions. The prototype was used to provide formative feedback upon music students’ coursework resulting in a total of 103 pieces of feedback. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data obtained through interviews and focus groups with both educators and students (i.e., feedback givers and receivers). Recipients considered show-and-tell feedback to possess greater clarity and detail in comparison with the single modality text-only feedback they are used to receiving. We also report interesting emergent issues around control and artistic vision, and we discuss how these issues could be mitigated in future iterations of the interface.

대학생의 비판적 미디어 리터러시 역량과 디지털 뉴스 이용의 관계

This study aims to examine the media literacy and digital media practices of university students who are digital natives and Generation Z. This study diagnosed critical media literacy among university students, investigate their daily digital news use, and analyzed the relationship between critical media literacy levels and digital news use.
 The analysis on the data of university students’ critical media literacy and digital news use showed that their media literacy levels are quite high, but their media practices are not. They perceived the credibility of social media as a source of information to be moderate and believed it to be trustworthy in attractiveness rather than qualifications or expertise. Nonetheless, they reported that social media is the primary source of news in their daily lives.
 The main implication of this study is that the goals of media literacy education for university students should include the ability to transfer their media literacy skills into everyday media practices. This research may contribute to increase of the interest of researchers in the area of university media literacy education.

Subterfuge: a parental strategy for mediating young children’s digital media practices in Azerbaijan

ABSTRACT The present study introduces the ways in which parents mediate young children’s digital media practices in Azerbaijan, a former Soviet country. This study reveals a new parental mediation strategy – subterfuge, which refers to parents’ indirect communication about digital media restrictions with their children. With this approach, parents blame digital devices or internet connectivity for limiting children’s access. Using the strategy, parents prefer indirect interference with their children's digital practices to avoid upsetting or confronting them. The strategy is explained through parental ethnotheories – parents’ cultural beliefs and values about childrearing. The study calls for adding parental ethnotheories to research on parental mediation in digital environments. Findings presented here originated in a study involving five families with a five-year-old child through family visits and the living journals method developed specifically for this study.

Content Quality of YouTube Videos About Metastatic Breast Cancer in Young Women: Systematic Assessment.

Young women with metastatic breast cancer (MBC) are part of a digitally connected generation yet are underserved in terms of information needs. YouTube is widely used to find and identify health information. The accessibility of health-related content on social media together with the rare and marginalized experiences of young women with MBC and the digital media practices of younger generations imply a considerable likelihood that young women with MBC will seek information and community on the internet. This study aims to assess the content quality of MBC YouTube videos and to identify themes in the experiences of young women with MBC based on YouTube videos. A systematic assessment of MBC YouTube videos using the search term "metastatic breast cancer young" was conducted in August 2021. The search was performed in an incognito browser and with no associated YouTube or Google account. Search results were placed in order from most to least views. Title, date uploaded, length, poster identity, number of likes, and number of comments were collected. Understandability and actionability were assessed using the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT); information reliability and quality were assessed with DISCERN. Themes, sponsorships, and health care professionals' and patients' narratives were reported. A total of 101 videos were identified. Of these, 78.2% (n=79) included sponsorships. The mean PEMAT scores were 78.8% (SD 15.3%) and 43.1% (SD 45.2%) for understandability and actionability, respectively. The mean DISCERN score was 2.44 (SD 0.7) out of 5. Identified themes included treatment (n=67, 66.3%), family relationship (n=46, 45.5%), and motherhood (n=38, 37.6%). YouTube videos about young women with MBC are highly understandable but demonstrate moderate rates of actionability, with low reliability and quality scores. Many have a commercial bias. While web-based materials have limitations, their potential to provide patient support is not fully developed. By acknowledging their patients' media habits, health care professionals can further develop a trusting bond with their patients, provide a space for open and honest discussions of web-based materials, and avoid any potential instances of confusion caused by misleading, inaccurate, or false web-based materials.

Digital Media Practices: Exploring the Challenges of Graphic Design Students in Senior High Schools in Ghana

The development and introduction of digital technology for the past three decades have affected every aspect of human life. Since the introduction of digital technology in schools and colleges, most Graphic Design(GD) students have had difficulties making use of these digital technologies for their various artistic expressions. Therefore, exploiting the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the visual arts classroom has been rather challenging for students. This study thus set out to explore the challenges of Graphic design students in Senior High Schools (SHS) in Ghana. The study was conducted quantitatively. It employed the purposive sampling methodology to select four Senior High Schools where Visual Arts is studied in the Ho Municipality in the Volta Region of Ghana. The simple random sampling method was used to select 400 students from the four schools to answer the designed questionnaire. The result revealed that GD students do not involve computer applications in design knowledge to enhance creativity in the Visual Arts class because they were not taught how to use the computer application software for their practical work. It is recommended that there is a need to investigate to know the factors affecting the proper integration of ICT in the learning of Visual Art at the SHS level. Secondly, students should be trained to use ICT software to do Graphic Design work in the classroom. Keywords: Graphic Design, Digital Technology, Visual Art Education, Computers.

The Use of Digital Media Tools in Nigeria: A Panacea against Gender Discrimination, Female Journalists Representation and Participation in Journalism

Globally, the use digital tools in media practice have bridged the gap between the existing dichotomy (Male and Female) in journalism. It has revolutionized news coverage by eliminating the need for traditional procedures and protocols associated with professional journalism, such as being physically present on the field for balanced and newsworthy reportage. Moreover, digital media tools have reduced gender-based discrimination in media organizations, which used to assign men to more physically demanding roles while relegating women to menial tasks. Despite this paradigm shift orchestrated by digital media, female journalists are still being relegated to the extent that only few female journalists rise to the top in organizational hierarchical placement. In Nigeria, female journalists continue to face barriers such as unequal opportunities and unfair treatment in media organizations. One of the major issues is the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in media organizations. In this regard, this research present four major fronts from scholarly researches using Textual Analysis to identify the extent and effects of gender discrimination against female journalists in digital media practice in Nigeria; examine factors that contribute to gender discrimination against female journalists in media practice in Nigeria; assess the impact of gender discrimination on the representation and Participation of female journalists in digital media practice in Nigeria and explore the strategies female journalists in Nigeria use to overcome gender discrimination in digital media practice

Digital Craft

Does craft correlate to care? To quality? What is the relationship between time and craft, and is the speed of culture openly antagonistic to its values? To speak meaningfully about craft in the twenty-first century, we must have a clear and shared set of terminologies defined relationally. If we examine craft positioned alongside other concepts such as art, skill, tradition, material, process, and community, then we can establish a plural and generative framework highly relevant to complex creative practices today. I am most interested in focusing on digital craft as a central meeting place for creative practice and the pervasive technological mediation of our lives. This study aims to establish a foundational vocabulary that allows us to investigate the intersection of craft with digital media. Theorists across both fields—and some who have sought to bridge this divide—have proposed various organizing principles to better make sense of the apparent contradictions between technologically mediated and more traditional material practices. Still, we have not yet arrived at a critical mass recognizing digital craft as legible and necessary rather than a peripheral novelty. This study examines the relationships between ‘craft’ and ‘the digital’ as demonstrated through the prominent theories of influential scholars and analysis of leading practitioners. A greater consideration of craft within digital media studies will draw out persistent discrepancies between skilled production and directorial agency while a greater consideration of the digital within craft theory will challenge historical ideas of tactility and presence and further clarify the function of craft as body knowledge. This study will be qualitative in nature as I attempt to understand how craft has been theorized and what motivating factors and key variables have produced these interpretations. It will identify key issues at hand while using an exploratory research design to conduct a survey of key texts within craft theory and digital media studies to explore these ideas in context. Existing theorization provides the basis of this investigation as I seek to increase our shared language around digital craft and establish possibilities for future research within the field. To pose a question such as “what is craft?” seems fraught with the impossibility of resolution, since the very term itself speaks to plurality rather than singular essence, given the diversity of potential interpretive models. Instead, I propose exploring craft through a relational framework, arriving not at fixed definitions but instead articulating ways of thinking with craft particular to the context at hand. Ideas of ‘craft’ and ‘the digital’ are mutually transforming each other. We do not yet have an adequate vocabulary to understand the relationship between craft and digital media due, in part, to the many meanings these terms communicate. How have researchers and practitioners previously understood their intersection? To better articulate what we say when we say ‘craft’ we must reassess the relationship of skill, tradition, experimentation, and process to the field as well as to digital media practices.

Digital Art Design and Media Practice Integrating CAD and Virtual Reality Technology

Digital Art Design and Media Practice Integrating CAD and Virtual Reality Technology

The ‘Logics’ of Public Diplomacy: In Search of What Unites a Multidisciplinary Research Field

Summary A decade ago, Matt Armstrong noted that the War on Terror set the scene for US public diplomacy (PD) to be heavily focused on security. Other countries have focused their PD on image promotion, relationship-building or cultural relations. As digital media practices have slowly been adopted by the majority of foreign ministries, the logics governing social and digital media have also been increasingly internalised into diplomatic practice. Lacking in current PD research is a theory of the ‘logics’ that drive and motivate public diplomacy. This article explores the application of ‘PD logics’ as a theoretical framework for interpreting the ways in which foreign policy priorities, such as securitisation, trade promotion and strategic partnerships, shape PD practices. With a particular focus on the most recent wave of social and digital media adoption practices, this article establishes a theory of ‘PD logics’ that could provide new avenues for developing theories of public diplomacy.

NEW MEDIA, INTERNET AND DIGITAL MEDIA: A NEW TRENDS IN ADVERTISING INDUSTRY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (STUDY OF OMEL ARTS AND ADVERTISING AGENGY)

The study investigates the impact of new media, internet, and digital media as a new trend in advertising industry in developing countries. A total of 60 questionnaires were used in collecting data for the study and descriptive methodology was adopted and SPSS and Pearson product moment correlation was used to test the formulated hypotheses. The study’s findings showed that, there is significant impact of new media in advertising industry as it ensures return on investment, creativity and innovations in the industry and effective planning and execution of media campaign. Based on the findings of the study concluded that new media, internet and digital media assist the advertising agencies in innovating good quality advertisements ,ensures companies and customers interaction and conveyed messages fast to the specified target audience ,and is wider reach .The study recommended that ,advertising agencies in developing countries should adopt the use of internet advertising ,new and digital media as one of the marketing communication tools in developing countries and policy on creativity and innovations in new digital media and internet advertising using innovative and sophisticated digital technologies .Also ,world Federation of advertisers must ensure collaboration and co-operation of developed and developing countries advertising regulators so as to tap wealth of knowledge and experiences in new digital media practices and usage regarding new media ,internet advertising and digital media.

Digital media practices among infants and toddlers based on Filipino mothers’ self-reports

The dramatic increase in the touchscreen exposure of very young children has raised issues regarding the potentials and perils that digital media practices bring to children’s development. This research aimed to examine the touchscreen practices among infants and toddlers based on mothers’ self-reports, focusing on amount of screen time and its predictors, type of media content consumed, and maternal motivations and involvement in the regulation of touchscreen use. Questionnaires were administered to 124 mothers, whose children ages six to 42 months used tablets and smartphones. Results revealed an early onset of children’s touchscreen use. The children’s overall screen time averaged nearly two hours daily, and they frequently used the touchscreen device to watch video shows. Evaluations of the type of content of shows viewed suggested that the mothers seemed to deliberately choose shows that were more educational than non-educational. The child’s age, the parent’s active and diversionary mediation strategies, and the perceived maternal benefits of children’s touchscreen were found to predict screen time. The implications of the results for parenting in the digital age were discussed.

Mobilität und Tuning-Prozesse. Zur Reorganisation materiell-sensorischer Praktiken blinder Fußgänger:innen durch digitale Medien

The mobility of blind people with long canes is currently increasingly reorganised by elements such as smartphones, voice output, apps or headphones and in this respect represents a digital media practice that requires learning, practice and a knowledge-based coordination of simultaneous practices, bodily techniques and heterogeneous things. This paper explores this form of mobility and elaborates its distributed sensory character. Locomotion flanked by long canes, smartphones and headphones is described with Pickering (1995) as a tuning process that is situated and practically produced and proves to be constitutive for the production of urban space in terms of urban practices.

“Doing Community”: Digital Hyperlocal Media as Care

The popularisation of digital media technologies, from the Internet to diverse social media networks, has enabled ordinary citizens to become digital hyperlocal media participants in various localities. The current study examines digital hyperlocal media practices in Seoul from an ontological, ethical and political perspective of care. There is convergence in how digital hyperlocal media constitute a singular form of caring-with, particularly by practicing truth by, for, and of themselves in a locality. In our analysis, care-of-us ethics featured in digital hyperlocal media are actualised in five interrelated elements of ‘space, collectivity, communication, work, and product’—that is, (1) creating and dwelling (space), (2) hosting and joining (collectivity), (3) listening and speaking (communication), (4) shifting and overlapping (work), and (5) versatility and vernacularity (product). Digital hyperlocal media is an incubation (not perfection) of the local public sphere, in which participants, both producers and audiences, are connected as immanent (not established) members of the public, and create threads of potential (not completed) public opinions.

On the Road: Emergent Spatiality in #Vanlife

‘Vanlife’ is a term utilised on social media sites, including YouTube, to denote images and videos that represent a lifestyle centred around long-distance travel using converted vans. The Vanlife phenomenon demonstrates the potential for networked culture and storytelling to combine to create emergent spaces, fostered not only by individual digital media objects but also the connected digital networks they occupy. In this article I ask how digital media practices are used by Vanlife travellers in order to construct such emergent spaces, and what the characteristics of these spaces might be. This investigation has a particular focus on the capacity for the creative practices used to tell visual stories online to combine representations of ‘real world’ experiences and environments, with the individual and communal desires, rhetoric and, at times, fictions, of the burgeoning Vanlife alternative lifestyle. Taking a netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), and guided by Henri Lefebvre’s trialectic model of space (1974), I conduct analysis of a set of Vanlife YouTube videos and explore the construction of different layers of spatiality as well as the productive tensions that arise between these. As Vanlifers undertake and document their freewheeling travels, their production of spaces serves to establish the unending road trip as a viable alternative lifestyle. Vanlife videos also work to formulate new cultural and aesthetic dimensions for the areas their creators explore, destabilising and redefining the meanings of the spaces, experiences and communities its travellers encounter. Equally, the idealised spaces of Vanlife are themselves disrupted by jarring intrusions from the external world and its everyday problems, a tension that further illustrates the continually negotiable nature of spatial meanings and highlights the role digital media might play in accentuating and accelerating this fluidity.