In-home Entertainment Research Articles

SOCIAL INTERACTION WITH FRIENDS AND COGNITIVE FUNCTION: BENEFITS OF SPENDING TIME TOGETHER AND GIVING A HELPING HAND

Abstract Despite the burgeoning literature linking social integration and cognitive function, studies that focus on the potential cognitive benefits associated with friendships are limited. Using eight waves of nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study (1998-2012), we investigated whether two distinct forms of social interaction with friends—(1) getting together for a chat/social visit and (2) providing informal helping to friends—were associated with cognitive function (assessed with a modified version of the Telephone Interview for Cognition Status) among individuals aged 50 and older (person N = 29,951) over a 14-year observation period. Multilevel models revealed robust evidence for within-person linkages between both forms of social interaction with friends and better cognitive function. The study findings are discussed in the context of declining social interaction with one’s friends reported over the past several decades in the United States, which are partly driven by increasing leisure trends characterized by in-home entertainment.

Changes in Stadium Sports Spectators Customer Experiences

Over the centuries, in most countries of the world, stadiums have changed and evolved, and with it, the behaviour and ways of experience of their visitors and spectators have certainly transformed. With improvements in-home entertainment systems and internet connectivity occurring all the time, sports fans have a greater capacity to build themselves a viewing experience that fits their preferred specifications, right in the comfort wherever they are: airplane, hotel, office, or their own room. Subsequently, sports stadiums are in the process of challenge and technological evolution, including implementation of various innovations. It attempts to create smooth, strong impressive experience and appeals to attract spectators out of their mediatory watching and to bring them into the stadium, wherever it is situated. In the current paper we investigate and review the critical areas and identify the phenomena of transformations addresses to deliver a next-generation stadium experience that is affective enough to compete with the cost, comfort, impressions benefits of “mobile” spectatorship (Thomson, Potter, 2017). A multidimensional content analysis (Tharenou, 2010) of collected data let us outline the key area of stadium technological transformation, referring to the customer-centric approach (McAlexander et al., 2002; Zaky & Neely, 2018). We define and outline the key areas of changes in SSCX in order to better predict their nature, courses and impact, projecting future perspective research directions.

Call for papers

IEEE COMMUNICATIONS MAGAZINE FEATURE TOPIC: ENTERTAINMENT EVERYWHERE: System and Networking Issues in Emerging Network-Centric Entertainment Systems BACKGROUND: The experience of bringing the Internet into our lives deeply is now shared by millions of people. Take the USA, for example. It is reported that more than a fifth of American households has a high-speed, always-on, Internet access, and an increasing number of them is exploiting wireless technologies to distribute the broadband connection throughout the rooms of their homes. With such a high-speed, always-on, connection a drastic revolution is coming in the way people watch movies and news, listen to music, and play games. This change has been driven fundamentally by two dominant factors: First, the technological advances of computer-based digital multimedia technology (high quality video and sound) have provided consumers with good motivations to upgrade their home entertainment systems (e.g., from mechanical VHS tape drives to digital DVD). Second, (wireless) networking technologies have enabled the possibility to shift what they first consumed on their desktop PC in the office to their digital TV equipment in the living room, as well as to the front pockets in their jackets. All these mean that in an entertainment-equipped house we might easily find a broadband entertainment center built on the top of a Cat-6 Ethernet cable infrastructure or on a Wi-Fi network. Such an entertainment platform might be comprised, for example, of a connection from the computer to the digital stereo or the TV devices, as well as of an interconnected PlayStation2 or XBox governed by programmable TiVo equipment for online play. In essence, what is really new, nowadays, is that we know what tomorrow's entertainment technology will bring to us: a "magic box" where every game ever thought, every movie ever made, every song ever sung, plus news, sport events and shows, will be available for instant enjoyment with just one click on a button. While interest for conducting research in this area was moderate for a long time, recently, instead, great opportunities have arisen in academia, as well as in industry, for developing researches in the field of computer-based entertainment systems, especially focused on the provision of networking and system support to entertainment. Obviously, all these exciting technological advances have raised a number of interesting research questions: How can the Internet native language (i.e. the TCP/IP protocol) take over this complex scenario for scaling the delivery of entertainment contents to very large numbers of users? How can digital entertainment be delivered efficiently to small devices such as PDAs and cell phones? How can new system development styles, like the peer-to-peer style for example, have influence on the architecture of computer-based entertainment systems? How can the employed protocol be integrated to optimize the distribution of entertainment contents? SCOPE OF CONTRIBUTIONS: This Feature Topic solicits paper submissions from all researchers involved in the field of computer-based entertainment to provide an opportunity to publish state-of-the art original papers. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Networking and System Support for Entertainment Systems Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Entertainment Wireless Multimedia for Entertainment Networked Systems for Music and Movie Distribution Architectures, Platforms and Protocols for Networked Multiplayer Games Games on Mobile and Resource-constrained Devices Games and Wireless Technologies Networked In-Home Entertainment Systems Networked In-Car/Flight/Train Entertainment Systems Interactive TeleVision and Interactive Digital Storytelling Networked Technologies for Sport and Entertainment Wearable Networked Technologies for Entertainment Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality Technologies for Entertainment Integration and Interoperability Issues in Entertainment Systems Prospective authors should e-mail their manuscripts as a postscript or pdf attachment to the guest editors by November 01, 2004. (Please see http://www.comsoc.org/~ci for the authors guidelines.) The following is the timetable for this feature topic publication: SCHEDULE FOR SUBMISSIONS: Manuscript Submission: November 01, 2004 Acceptance Notification: January 15, 2005 Final Manuscript Due: March 01, 2005 Publication Date: May 2005 Guest Editors Barcin Kozbe Ericsson Inc, 11121 Willows Rd, NE Suite 101 Redmond, WA 98052 USA barcin.kozbe@ericsson.com

Defining Phonography: An Experiment in Theory

Phonography can be taken to define a period in our relation to music, a period marked by a distinct set of attitudes, practices, and institutions made possible by a particular technology, phonograph.1 The age of phonography came into being with popularization of phonograph as in-home entertainment, cultural medium, and educational tool. With popularization of digital recording and playback techniques (CD, DAT, DCC, etc.), end of age of phonography is at hand. In one of those luminous phrases more often quoted than understood, Hegel said that the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with onset of dusk.2 By this he meant that an era or civilization can be understood only as it begins to disappear from scene of history. Death, for Hegel, is price of intelligibility. Hence there is always something both mournful and belated about historical understanding. We believe that small differences in media of recorded music are not mere trifles for fetishist but have large cultural consequences. The death of vinyl LP is an event of potential civilizational significance and deserves to be mourned properly. This essay is in part a meditation on those graveyards of recorded sound that fill shelf space in our living rooms. Precisely how coming and going of phonography matters is yet to be seen, perhaps partly because LP's death is yet incomplete. The recent analog renaissance may mean return of vinyl in full force;3 it may also be a passing retro phase of fashion cycle that only shows how dead vinyl is. But before speculating on nature of age, we must define nature of technique. This essay discusses phonography as a technology and social practice in contrast to pre-phonographic era and post-