Technical Mediation Research Articles

Parenting in the Digital Age: Mediation Strategies as a Preventive Factor against Cyberbullying on Social Media among Saudi Parents

This study investigated the role of parental mediation strategies employed by parents in Saudi Arabia as a preventive factor against adolescents’ engagement in cyberbullying and cybervictimization within social media. It also examined the role of age, gender, and educational level of parents as moderators. Using an online survey, the sample consisted of 389 parent participants and their adolescent child, aged between 12 and 17. Results show that active, restrictive, and internet safety mediation strategies significantly predict a decrease in cyberbullying and cybervictimization, while a technical mediation strategy significantly predicts an increase. Results also show that parents’ age moderates the relation between active and internet safety mediation and adolescents’ engagement in cyberbullying. Parental gender also did not moderate the relation between parental mediation strategies and adolescents’ engagement in cyberbullying and cybervictimization, whereas parents’ educational level moderates the relation between restrictive, monitoring, and technical mediation strategies and adolescents’ engagement in cyberbullying.

Re-thinging Embodied and Enactive Psychiatry: A Material Engagement Approach.

Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting a material engagement approach to embodied and enactive psychiatry. We propose that the material engagement approach can change the geography of the debate over the nature of mental disorders and through that help to develop theoretical and practical insights that could improve management and treatment for various psychiatric conditions. We investigate the potential role of Material Engagement Theory (MET) in psychiatry using examples of aetiologically different mental illnesses (schizophrenia and dementia) in respect of their shared phenomenological manifestations, focusing particularly on issues of memory, self-awareness, embodiment and temporality. The effective study of socio-material relations allows better understanding of the semiotic significance and agency of specific materials, environments and technical mediations. There is unrealised potential here for creating new approaches to treatment that can broaden, challenge or complement existing interventions and practices of care.

Influence of different parental mediation strategies on adolescents’ hedonistic smartphone use: Parent–adolescent reports

Hedonistic smartphone usage refers to smartphone activities for instant gratification and pleasure; increased hedonistic use is associated with perceived stress, problematic smartphone usage, and smartphone addiction among adolescents. Parents naturally intervene in adolescents’ screen media use through various mediation strategies, including active mediation of safety, restrictive mediation, monitoring mediation, and technical mediation, to reduce potential negative impacts and online risks. This study aims to identify the relationship between parental mediation strategies and adolescents’ hedonistic smartphone use using the data from 447 adolescents and 432 parents. This study also explores the consideration of a new mediation technique, participatory learning mediation, in the parental mediation model. Multiple regression results revealed positive and negative associations between different parental mediation strategies and adolescents’ hedonistic smartphone use, with restrictive mediation having no effect.

Patient-initiated video consultations: A qualitative study on reasons for patient-booking in Danish general practice.

This qualitative study explores when and why patients book video consultations through an online booking platform within the context of Danish general practice and how the technology affects patients' use of this consultation type. We conducted thirteen semi-structured interviews with patients from the same general practice who were experienced users of video consultations scheduled through the clinic's online booking platform. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis and drawing on actor-network theory and Bruno Latour's concept of technical mediation as an analytical framework. We introduce the concept of "hybrid patients," highlighting how values tied to video consultation that motivates patients to book them emerge through technical mediation in the network between patients, general practitioners (GPs) or practice staff, and the video technology. We identified three emerging values: efficiency, control and diminished presence. Video consultation affords efficient consultations that save patients' time. It mediates patients' sense of control when they experience certainty concerning their health issues. Video consultation mediates diminished presence that increases relational distance. However, it simultaneously allows for efficiency and emotional distance between patients and their GP, and between patients and their health issues. When initiating the use of video consultation, the patient plays an active and conscious role in adjusting to the mediated values (efficiency, control and diminished presence) linked to this form of consultation. These emerging values are context-specific, and patients employ them based on their individual requirements. Patients trust their GPs to prevent severe or vulnerable topics from being discussed in a video consultation.

‘NOT LIKE OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS’? BEREAL AND THE REMEDIATION OF LIVENESS IN THE PLATFORM ENVIRONMENT

‘Social media’ represent a dynamic technological environment, in which emerging platforms make use of comparisons to existing apps to construct their own reputation. This is the case of BeReal – a platform that allows users to share pictures once a day, and only when triggered by a notification. In this paper, I combine digital technography and the platform walkthrough method to examine how BeReal deploys antagonistic discourse towards dominant media to promise a more authentic experience. In so doing, I frame the platform as evoking, appropriating, and remediating (Bolter and Grusin 2000) notions of mediated liveness – not only when it comes to a promised ‘real-time’ connection but also referring to particular ways of ‘being there’, sharing experiences, and having ‘real’ experiences through technological mediation. This discussion matters because it demonstrates how claims of immediacy and of a direct access to ‘reality’ are manifested and negotiated in contemporary sociotechnical practices. In this context, BeReal’s version for “platformized authenticity” – the co-option of ‘the authentic’ to advance platforms’ growth and commercial goals – is a process marked by a recursive, cyclical negotiation between technical mediation and claims of liveness.

Media regulation strategies in parents of 4- to 16-year-old children and adolescents: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundSince children can only control and limit their own media use to a limited extent, it is often the parents who regulate their children’s media use. However, there is insufficient research on which strategies they use and on how these strategies are related to socio-demographic and behavioral parameters.MethodsThe parental media regulation strategies co-use, active mediation, restrictive mediation, monitoring, and technical mediation were assessed in a sample of 563 four- to 16-year-old children and adolescents from middle to high social strata participating in the German cohort study LIFE Child. We investigated cross-sectional associations with socio-demographic characteristics (age and sex of child, age of parent, and socio-economic status (SES)) and other behavioral parameters of children (media use, ownership of media devices, engagement in extracurricular activities) and their parents (media use).ResultsAll media regulation strategies were applied frequently, with restrictive mediation occurring most frequently. Overall, parents of younger children and of boys mediated media use more frequently, while we observed no differences depending on SES. Regarding child behavior, the ownership of a smartphone and a tablet/personal computer/laptop was associated with more frequent technical restriction, while screen time and engagement in extracurricular activities was not associated with parental media regulation. In contrast, parental screen time was related to more frequent co-use and less frequent use of restrictive and technical mediation.ConclusionParental regulation of child media use is influenced by parental attitudes and a perceived need for mediation (e.g., in younger children or children owning internet-enabled devices) rather than child behavior.

Imagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014

ABSTRACT The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthropological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.

Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

Internet : une simple révolution technologique

In the 1990s and 2000s, the growth of the Internet ushered in a technological revolution which enabled the use of new communication media. This went hand in hand with the diffusion of a powerful imaginary (free access, freedom transparency) which is, however, misleading since technologies do not determine by themselves how people use them. It is therefore necessary to think, at the same time, about technical mediation and social mediation. The Internet has also fostered new forms of cultural expression and unprecedented collaborative practices among users. But it remains a hierarchical world – hence the need to put the idea of a « cultural revolution » into perspective.

What do parents know about children's risky online experiences? The role of parental mediation strategies

Parental knowledge of children's whereabouts is an important aspect of parenting that is associated to positive outcomes (e.g., less problem behaviors). In the current digital world, knowledge of children's online activities gains importance. Yet, little is known about its accuracy and associations to parental mediation, i.e., parenting strategies specifically targeted at children's usage of digital technologies, and other parenting factors. This study investigated parents' objective knowledge (comparisons of children's and parents' reports) and perceived knowledge (parents' subjective feelings) of online risky activities in a sample of 2946 parent-child dyads (67.5% mothers, adolescents' age 11–16, 50.2% males) representative of Czech households with children. The level of parental knowledge varied across online activities. Parents were well informed about adolescents' less risky and more frequent activities, e.g., gaming, but often underestimated the occurrence of more risky and potentially more harmful experiences, e.g., cyberhate victimization. Parental support and active mediation were associated with higher perceived, and objective knowledge, whereas restrictive mediation and the child's demographics were not related to either. Technical mediation and monitoring were associated with higher perceived knowledge but technical mediation was connected with lower objective knowledge and monitoring had no relation to it, suggesting that these strategies can provide a false sense of security rather than keeping parents informed about children's online experiences. The results underscore the importance of a positive family environment and highlight the differences between perceived and objective parental knowledge.

A View From Nowhere

In cinematic experience, a view from nowhere appears in an instituting moment – neither in time nor out of time, but part of time itself – when a camera reflex lifts the viewer’s perception out of somewhere and into the infinite time of the film. We argue that the view from nowhere found in Birt Acres’s film Rough Sea at Dover – a fifteen-second shot of waves breaking against a sea wall in Dover, England in 1895 – transcends all attempts to turn it into a view from somewhere, as an empty space that carries the auratic trace of the past into the present through phase shifts of technical mediation. In Simondon’s terms, the view from nowhere opens up possibilities of becoming all ways at once in the reflexive capacity of the human organon. Following Stiegler’s organological technics, we identify the capture of perception by the apparatus of recording and playback in the digitally automated algorithm as a threat to the reflexive capability of the organon to see otherwise in the creative individuation opened up in the phase-shifting process. Our analysis triggers a switch from an anthropocentric to a neganthropic-ecological mode of seeing in which the auratic trace of the event of waves crashing against the pier is seen in an inhuman view from nowhere that carries the threat of automatized systems in which human noesis – self-reflexive capacity – is eclipsed by machines. By seeing otherwise, the eclipse by machines is reversed to reveal the complex becoming of the film in its materiality as a work of creative individuation.

Technicity and the Virtual

This article outlines an eco-operational theory of technical mediation that centers on Gilbert Simondon’s notion of technicity. The argument is that technical apparatuses do the work of concepts. However, the eco-operational viewpoint completely alters the status of concepts: what they are, where they are, and what they do. Technicity, as understood here, concerns the efficacious action and operational functioning of a broad range of apparatuses (including living bodies and technical machines), which are conceived as adaptive mediators. The focus on technicity provides a new notion of the virtual, that of the operationally real, which resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s while also marking a new direction. What is more, by approaching mediation in terms of technicity, the eco-operational framework offers a novel understanding of concept or generality that stakes out a middle path between Kantian representational generality and Deleuzian concrete singularity.

“To Speak As an Oracle of Christ”: Bishop G. E. Patterson and the Afterlives of Ecstasy

AbstractThis article attends to the musical afterlife of the late Bishop Gilbert Earl Patterson, a Pentecostal minister who, at the time of his death, served as presiding bishop of the largest African American Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ. In it, I theorize the nexus of faith, media, and sound that lifted Bishop Patterson to the heights of ecclesial power during his lifetime, while laying the groundwork for a pervasive posthumous presence: broadcast religion. Placing Patterson's life-long preoccupation with various modes of technical mediation in conversation with his extremely musical approach to preaching, I will show that Bishop Patterson's technophilic Pentecostalism takes an enchanted view of devices like microphones, radios, televisions, and cameras, understanding each as a channel through which spiritual power can flow. As Patterson's voice and broadcasting infrastructure produce intimacy with countless scriptural scenes, they commingle mediation and immediacy, cultivating an enduring affect that I refer to as afterliveness. Transcending any single homiletic event, afterliveness depends on sermonic sound reproduction, effected by Patterson through both the practice of recording and through ecstatic acts of musical repetition, a set of recurring musical procedures that endow the bishop's ministry with an eternal pitch.

Science, knowledge and society in times of pandemic:

This article deals with the new configurations of information and communication in the domain of health knowledge in Brazil, by the intercurrence of two concomitant factors: the increasingly powerful increment of technical mediations in the digital environment; the health crisis caused by the pandemic of the new coronavirus - the SARS-CoV-2. To study the domain at this critical moment, we considered the scientific society that represents it - the Brazilian Association of Collective Health (Abrasco) - and the way it promoted communication among peers in the scientific field and between them and society, through the "Abrasco Agoras", a set of webinars bringing together researchers, professionals, health authorities, representatives of organizations and social movements to discuss the issues related to the pandemic moment. We started with a theoretical treatment of Domain Analysis, to then approach the new modalities of scientific info-communication in the era of E-science and pandemic. The results of the analysis of a sample of the "Abrasco Agoras" show that the intensive use of digital devices and the accelerated rhythm of scientific knowledge production demand reflections on the health domain that take into account the very way of functioning of the scientific field, the status of researchers and health professionals, the processes of production, mediation, diffusion and appropriation of knowledge, the modes of information and communication among peers and between peers and society.

Far-Right Digital Vigilantism as Technical Mediation: Anti-Immigration Activism on YouTube

Far-Right Digital Vigilantism as Technical Mediation: Anti-Immigration Activism on YouTube

Embodied parallelism and immersion in virtual reality gaming

This article argues that virtual reality produces a sense of immersion through embodied parallelism – a technical mediation in which the embodied gestures and movements of a player must correspond to what is represented within a VR game, a correspondence which relies on, but exceeds the visual and requires strange requirements for both player (in terms of their gestures and movements) and game (in terms of including particular limits that police the movements of the player’s body). Attending to embodied parallelism refuses several longstanding assumptions about how virtual reality technologies, and media in general, generate the feeling of immersion – namely, the idea that immersion ‘disembodies’ in some way, or denies the existence of physical space beyond the boundary of a mediated simulation. Immersivity is premised on an explicit engagement with – and not exclusion of – both the physicality of the body and the physicality of a medium, if in deeply contradictory ways. As a case study to develop this concept, this article discusses the emerging virtual reality genre of ‘physics games’, games including, but not limited to, Blade & Sorcery, Boneworks and Half-Life: Alyx. These games take great lengths to simulate the physics of objects – they require simultaneously intrusive and yet ‘natural’ interfaces, in which the game demands the body to move as if it were manipulating objects that have a specific mass. Becoming ‘good’ at these games depends on the ability to discipline the body and conform to the demands of movement required by the simulation. Immersion, in this context, depends on a willingness to submit to these machinic, embodied demands, relying both explicitly on technical form but deliberately forgetting the materiality of gesture and mediation at the same time. This seeming contradiction, an engagement with both the materiality of gesture and the materiality of medium, is ‘solved’ through embodied parallelism and how it links player and game.

Seeing as Making: Mediation, rhetoric, and the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act

How do material and discursive arrangements, technologies and rhetoric, shape the subjects and objects of medical discourse (Scott & Melonçon, 2017; Selzer & Crowley, 1999)? How are the affordances of material and discursive arrangements seized by political actors? Tackling these and similar questions has been a growing preoccupation in the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine, where researchers have sought better ways of understanding the entanglements of the symbolic and material (Booher & Jung, 2018; Graham, 2009; Jack, 2019; Propen, 2018). A perspicuous case for this research is the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act (UICA), an amendment to the Public Health Service Act mandating that women receive an ultrasound and have its images described to them before having abortions. Three US states have a version of this law, with over twenty others having laws similar to the UICA (Guttmacher Institute, 2019, n.d.). Through this law, antiabortionists are able to construct a kairotic situation through the mediating capacity of ultrasound where they can use the actual state of affairs (a woman seeking an abortion) to argue through images for a possible future (a woman foregoing abortion). This article analyzes the UICA to understand how the political speech of antiabortionists enrolls the moralizing capacity of ultrasound to construct a kairotic situation to intervene in women’s pregnancies. Starting from studies of actor-networks (Latour, 1983;1999a) and technological mediation (Verbeek, 2011; 2015), and departing to feminist rhetorical science studies (Booher & Jung, 2018; Frost & Haas, 2017) and rhetorical approaches to imagery and visualization (Propen, 2018; Roby, 2016; Webb, 2009), I argue that not only do translation processes and technical mediation distribute agencies; they construct the very situations where agencies are constituted. This study can widen our understanding of how political entities appropriate the rhetorical capacities of technology and discourse to translate their politics into legislature.

Mediated Democracy – Linking Digital Technology to Political Agency

Although the relationship between digitalisation and democracy is subject of growing public attention, the nature of this relationship is rarely addressed in a systematic manner. The common understanding is that digital media are the driver of the political change we are facing today. This paper argues against such a causal approach und proposes a co-evolutionary perspective instead. Inspired by Benedict Anderson's “Imagined Communities” and recent research on mediatisation, it introduces the concept of mediated democracy. This concept reflects the simple idea that representative democracy requires technical mediation, and that the rise of modern democracy and of communication media are therefore closely intertwined. Hence, mediated democracy denotes a research perspective, not a type of democracy. It explores the changing interplay of democratic organisation and communication media as a contingent constellation, which could have evolved differently. Specific forms of communication media emerge in tandem with larger societal formations and mutually enable each other. Following this argument, the current constellation reflects a transformation of representative democracy and the spread of digital media. The latter is interpreted as a “training ground” for experimenting with new forms of democratic agency.

Technical mediation and digital technologies in construction practice

ABSTRACT Digital technologies and users of these technologies interact with each other in different ways. This study explores the influence of this interaction on users’ behavior in construction practice: where and how do digital technologies in construction interact with their users, and what is their effect? The theory of technical mediation is applied to understand these influences. This theory deepens the analysis of human-technology interactions by adding that humans and technologies co-shape each other. Based on a literature review and studies of construction projects, technologies such as Building Information Modelling, Radio Frequency Identification, and Augmented/Virtual Reality are studied. Mediating effects of these technologies are analyzed from two perspectives: from which side does technology grasp the human body, what are the force and visibility of these impacts? It is shown that digital technologies in construction practice play different ‘actant’ roles by influencing or directing users in certain directions: digital technologies become natural extensions of the body (physical influence), function as ‘quasi-others’ (cognitive influence) or determine possible human–technology interactions through a ‘decisive’ design (contextual influence). Different preconditions for successful implementing and using these technologies can be related to these actant roles.

Poéticas de arquivo como práticas urbanas: três gestos de pesquisa no arquivo do Laboratório de Fotodocumentação Sylvio de Vasconcellos

Este texto apresenta três gestos de pesquisa (ampliar, desmontar e desviar) que realizamos no arquivo fotográfico do Laboratório de Fotodocumentação Sylvio de Vasconcellos, a fim de evidenciar aspectos que instituem um campo de debates em torno da cidade, da técnica e do cotidiano. Operamos com fontes provenientes do Serviço de Fotodocumentação da Escola de Arquitetura da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, majoritariamente dos anos de 1954 a 1964. Os gestos de pesquisa, enquanto poéticas, experimentam modos de “fazer o arquivo falar”. E provocam ruídos quando colocam em discussão a vida ordinária capturada por meio da fotografia e as implicações dessa mediação técnica na prática da cidade e na construção de representações e discursos. Ao perfurarem o dispositivo do arquivo patrimonial e incidirem na trama histórica em torno do popular, esses gestos vislumbram atualizações críticas em torno do descarte e são também práticas urbanas na medida em que instauram outros modos de ver a cidade (ou des-vê-la, nos termos de Manoel de Barros e Rita Velloso).