Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Clicker games“

Student-centered learning intends to increase student participation. Biology subject is a broad scope and has a level of abstract concepts. Active learning has the potential to maximize the learning process of biology subjects. The purpose of the research is to describe the implementation and strategies of active learning applied to biology learning in higher education. The method used descriptive and systematic review. Selecting articles used the ERIC database. The search was carried out with predetermined categories, then a manual selection of the article to ensure the selected one. There are nine journals with nineteen articles analyzed at the higher education level of biology subject matter. This study's results, the implementation of active learning strategies, require support from lecturers and university stakeholders so that active learning runs effectively. An Active learning strategy used in biology material in higher education consists of the use of low-cost technology (virtual cell learning module) to high cost (SCALE-UP, clicker), low-cost learning without involving technology (card games, card organisms, kinesthetic physical models, 5E lesson plan, and pre-class reading guide) to outside the classroom (field training). The university's role and the understanding of lecturers in implementing active learning strategies have a crucial role in determining student learning outcomes. Lecturers and university stakeholders need to build cooperation, including a learning policy system and classroom implementation.

Background Numerous mobile health (mHealth) apps have been developed to support smokers attempting to quit smoking. Although these apps have been reported to be successful, only modest improvements in the quit rate have been measured. It has been proposed that efforts to improve user engagement and retention may improve the quit rate further. Owing to the high cost of smoking-related disease, it is considered worthwhile to pursue even small improvements. Objective The aim of this study was to test a novel smartphone app that leverages premium currency strategies developed by the mobile games industry in an attempt to improve engagement and retention with a smoking cessation intervention. Methods We designed and developed a smoking cessation app called “Quittr” in line with previously developed smoking cessation mHealth apps. In addition to this established framework, we added a stand-alone fully featured city-building clicker-style game called “Tappy Town,” and a premium virtual currency called “QuitCoins.” The user earns QuitCoins for using the app in a way that contributes positively toward their quit attempt, and they can redeem these coins in Tappy Town for bonuses. To establish whether these features improved engagement and retention, we ran a 5-month randomized controlled trial where the intervention group had the full app with the extra games features, while the control group had the standard app only. Recruitment was performed via web-based advertising. Participants (N=175) had no direct contact with the researchers or other support staff. Results No significant differences in terms of engagement, retention, or smoking outcomes were found between the control and intervention groups. However, survey data indicated that the majority of the participants valued Tappy Town (10/17, 59%) and the QuitCoins rewards system (13/17, 77%). Usage data also suggested that Tappy Town was widely played and was generally appealing to users (mean total time spent in app, control group: 797 seconds vs intervention group: 3502 seconds, P<.001). Analysis of the results suggests that users in the intervention group may have been negatively affected by the aspects of the chosen design, and some theories were explored to explain this unexpected outcome. Conclusions Although the novel features of the Quittr app failed to improve the key outcomes measured in this study, there were enough positive indications to warrant further exploration of the concept. Additional research will be required to identify and correct any design flaws that may have adversely affected our participants before a follow-up study can be completed. Trial Registration Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Register ACTRN12617000491369; https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=372661&isReview=true

Game as media education to introduced, delivering and teaching about knowledge by presenting the information that contains education materials through digital game. Many education field has been adapted into game as media educations, like history, arithmetic, etc. Social and environmental issues also can be adapted into a game to overcome the issues.Climate change, an issues that being world concern. Not only the impacts that being concern, the causes of climate change as important as the impacts. Minimizing behavior that can worsen climate change it also means minimizing climate change effect. One of education games has been created to educate people about climate change, inform about climate change itself and the way to minimizing the effects.In this paper will discuss about education games: CLICHE. Game which explain concisely the cause and some action to minimizing climate change cause through digital game play that will has impact to lessening the climate change effects.

Many studies show that video games require attentive and interpretive capacity to generate complex cognitive skills in the gamer and they can be transferred to other contexts, such as school. In this paper, the authors do not aim to investigate the contents of the player's thinking, but rather his/her way of thinking. In this scenario the teacher becomes a worlds' maker, who provides his/her students with the tools allowing them to partake in the co-building of multi-tiered worlds, which requires not only the ability to get access to intangible information but also a skillful management of media interfaces. In this way, the click of the mouse becomes the action par excellence that allows each individual to contribute synergistically to the realization of the digital habitats. The ultimate goal is to search, in the learning processes activated by the video games in both the authors and the lemming, those features that make the learner a self-knowledge builder. Such “socio-cultural grammar” influences the writing and interpretation of messages, turning every individual into an author, who's often unaware of the “scriptwriting culture” that inhabits all the possible media worlds.

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders and their educators. Its learning material are books of stories and games. The games are specialised into smart games, which stimulate inference-making for story comprehension, and relaxing games, which stimulate visual perception and not story comprehension. The paper focuses on smart games. It first describes the TERENCE system architecture, thus delves into the design of smart games starting from the requirements and their automated generation, by highlighting the role of the reasoning module therein. Finally, it outlines the manual revision of the generated smart games, and ends with short conclusions about the planned improvements on the automated generation process.

Abstract Released in 2017, the game Detention by the Taiwanese indie developer Red Candle Games gained great domestic success and made a name for itself among gamer communities worldwide. Providing an English-language localization upon its release, the 2D point-and-click horror game is set in the 1960s during Taiwan’s “White Terror” era. The story follows a ghost girl bound to the school she attended and unravels her tragic story. With such a specific temporal and spatial background, the game has a wide range of cultural references, potentially preventing non-Taiwanese players from being immersed in the game. This paper aims to examine industry practices within the theoretical framework of translation studies and understand, with the case of Detention, how culturalization operates at different levels. Through the lens of loss and gain, this paper also discusses how certain cultural connotations are lost in localization to retain the immersive game experience as an overall gain.

We consider a game-theoretic model of information retrieval with strategic authors. We examine two different utility schemes: authors who aim at maximizing exposure and authors who want to maximize active selection of their content (i.e., the number of clicks). We introduce the study of author learning dynamics in such contexts. We prove that under the probability ranking principle (PRP), which forms the basis of the current state-of-the-art ranking methods, any betterresponse learning dynamics converges to a pure Nash equilibrium. We also show that other ranking methods induce a strategic environment under which such a convergence may not occur.

This study, using an observational design, assessed the effect of digital educational games on students’ intention to quit smoking. Specifically, a series of digital games were developed to encourage smoking cessation and enhance students’ engagement with the material. Three determinants of engagement were tested: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived satisfaction. Usability assessments were performed using a structured questionnaire and usability-testing software (Morae). Most students reported that the games were easy to use (73.3–93.3%), useful (60.0–83.3%) and satisfactory (66.7–70.0%). After using the games, approximately half (46.7–53.3%) reported that they intended to quit smoking. After controlling for gender and age, multiple regression analysis revealed that only perceived usefulness statistically significantly contributed to intention to quit (β = 2.38, p < 0.05). ‘Taiko Drumming’ showed the highest number of mouse clicks (67.23), and the lowest time between inputs (7.88 s). It also received the most positive feedback (17 marks). These findings show that integrating learners’ experiences into the development of learning material can improve learning effectiveness.

This paper presents a study of the most successful games during the last 34 last years (1986 – 2019). We observed that the 100 most ranked games are represented by 16 genres (adventure, role-playing, shooter, platform, puzzle, strategy, hack and slash/beat 'em up, real time strategy, turn-based strategy, point-and-click, indie, racing, sport, fighting, arcade and simulator). These genres are then compares to show which genres are more attractive for players. As a result, we observed that 6 genres among the 16 represent the most ranked games (adventure, RPG, shooter, platform, puzzle, and strategy). They represent 0.83 of the successful games. This allowed us to recommend to combining the others genres with the 6 selected genres. Also, we analyzed the evolution of the 16 games genres during the last 34 years. We observed that some genres have a great success until the past decades, but they haven’t a success in this decade. Game designers and researchers in the field of games may rethink about how to add attractive elements in the genres non-successful in this decade. Also, we observed that some genres like the indie games haven’t a great success in the past decades, but they have an important increased success in this decade. This may encourage the decision makers and the game designer to invest on these genres.

We present and explore the fruitfulness of “first-person cinematographic videogames,” a game model we have devised for the promotion of cultural, environmental, and territorial heritage. To support and foster the development of these type of games, we have developed a Web-based user-friendly authoring environment, extensively presented in the article. While employing standard first-person point-and-click game mechanics, the game model's distinctive feature is that the game environment is not based on a digital reconstruction (3D model) of the real-world settings but on cinematographic techniques combining videos and photos of existing places, integrating videoclips of mostly practical effects to obtain the interactivity typical of the first-person point-and-click adventure games. Our goal with such a game model is to mobilise mechanisms of engendering affection for real-world places when they become settings of the game world, arousing in the player forms of affection, attachment, and desire to visit them.

In this paper, we present an intelligent support End-User Developers (EUDevs) in creating plot lines for Point and Click games on the web. We introduce a story generator and the associated user interface, which help the EUDev in defining the game plot starting from the images providing the game setting. In particular, we detail a pipeline for creating such game plots starting from 360 degrees images. We identify salient objects in equirectangular images, and we compose the output with other two neural networks for the generation: one generating captions for 2D images and one generating the plot text. The provided suggestions can be further developed by the EUDev, modifying the generated text and saving the result. The interface supports the control of different parameters of the story generator using a user-friendly vocabulary. The results of a user study show good effectiveness and usability of the proposed interface.

With the continuous development of computer technology, the technology in designing and developing 3D games has been more and more mature. Compared to the traditional ones, 3D games present more real screen effects and stronger visual impact due to its adopting the concept of stereo space coordinates, increasing the arbitrariness of space operation and its own attraction. By applying media video technology to 3D table tennis games, players can hit the ball with the racket to implement the move of the ball in the game scene. To achieve the ball’s real-time depiction, every frame in the game must be updated. An outstanding 3D game cannot be developed without an excellent 3D game engine. The complex graphic algorithm of the game is encapsulated in modules efficiently while simple and effective SDK interface, powerful editor and matching third-party plug-ins are provided externally. Meanwhile, it possesses the function in network, database and script, etc, making the development of 3D games easier and of high quality. Numerous UI (graphical interfaces) are offered in the whole game to help players understand and learn the game. The game is operated so easily that it can be well played only through click, which simplifies the fussy operation of regular ones and provides players with more enjoyment.

The article develops the analysis of recurrent kitschy motifs in poetry and prose by Justyna Bargielska. This authoress consciously and intensively takes advantage of pop-cultural kitsch, kitsch connected to maternity and femininity, sacrokitsch and consolatory kitsch used in mourning practices. She derives many fetishized objects from these areas and transforms them into private talismans; she also borrows many established pop-cultural visions that serve her heroines to create their identity, but sometimes these patterns become a costume for individual fears and phantasies. The term ‘kitschism’ was invented by Bargielska herself and it suggests intellectual distance towards the figures and requisites used. The writer’s attitude towards kitschy cliches is developed as a dialectical movement of attraction and repulsion, and is not meant to overthrow dominant stereotypes; this approach is often similar to camp strategies, yet it extends beyond ludic or ironic games. Bargielska is interested mainly in the anthropological aspect of kitsch, which is situated between the individual and the community. The writer tests the usefulness of cliches while confronting her heroines with the most serious subjects, like death, love or loss.

Considering the changes in media consumption, many well-known brands decided to invest in product placement. Companies apply various strategies of placing the brand inside the media programming, not only in movies or television programs but also in social media, computer games and music videos. Present paper is aimed on investigate the influence of chosen product placement strategy on product placement effectiveness and is based on literature review. Research on product placement in movies shows that a mixed type of placement which encompass visual presentations of a branded product, company name or logo, and verbal reference to the embedded brand is better remembered in comparison to only visual product placement. There are also recognized product placement strategy based on various plot-relation level. According to research made in computer games, higher brand and game congruity result in better attitude but a brand incongruent with the game plot is better remembered. The authors also frequently mention about product placement visibility. Prominent placement in movies and computer games led to worse brand attitudes, is perceived as more disruptive, less realistic and interferes with the plot than subtle placement. The advantage of prominent placement in both medias and video sharing sites is better influenced on brand remembering. When it comes to social media, product placement takes a form of written placement or video placement. Some studies proved that video placement exert greater impact on attitude, better brand impression and cause higher users’ intention to click. Similarly in computer games it can be listed animated or as a static ads. In quoted study, brand recognition for the animated billboards was significantly higher than for static billboards and attitudes toward the animated ads were better.

ABSTRACTElectronic picture storybooks often include motion pictures, sounds, and background music instead of static pictures, and hotspots that label/define words when clicked on. The current study was designed to examine whether these additional elements aid word learning and story comprehension and whether effects accumulate making the animated e-book that also includes hotspots the most promising device. A sample group of 136 4- and 5-year-old kindergarten children were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: static e-books, animated e-books, interactive animated e-books, and a control group. In experimental conditions, four on-screen stories were each presented four times during a 4-week intervention period. Children in the control condition played nonliteracy related computer games during the same time. In all conditions, children worked independently with the computer programs. Strong treatment effects were found on target vocabulary originating from the story. Pupils gained most in vocabulary after reading interactive animated e-books, followed by (noninteractive) animated e-books and then static e-books. E-books including animations and interactivity were neither beneficial nor detrimental for story comprehension. Findings suggest that electronic storybooks are valuable additions in support of the classroom curriculum with interactive animated e-books being the best alternative.

The rapid development in new technologies and media and widespread access to the Internet is changing how people teach and learn. Recognizing the potential of technology, schools and universities are placing more content online from fully deliverable courses to course catalogs, course registration, and college admissions. People are able to gain access to a multitude of information with one click. Online learning environments range from authentic, real-time environments to simulations, as well as 2D and 3D virtual environments. This paper explores the use of a 2-dimensional, narrative-based, virtual learning environment (VLE) created by doctoral students to orient potential students to their university departments’ degree programs, faculty, and course offerings. After exploring the environment, participants were surveyed about their experiences. Findings include validation of the instrument, possible correlations relating to learning through games, engagement, and game design. Emerging themes and suggestions for future research are presented in this paper.

Research Problem: The purpose of this research synthesis is to identify new opportunities for smell-enabled games based upon current olfactory research, and to present early game concepts that have emerged from our empirical assessments. Literature Review: We briefly summarize key projects in the history of scent technologies for film and media. Human-Computer Interaction researchers have also explored a number of uses for scent delivery in interactive digital media. Recent developments in olfactory psychology and neuroscience research suggest that a fruitful avenue for exploration is to develop learning games that expand olfactory capacity. Methodology: We have conducted two studies of computer-based perceptual and cognitive olfactory tasks. Mixture perception experiment: We designed a perceptual experiment where the task was to correctly estimate the intensity of odor components in a blend of coffee and tea. Blended odors were presented to 10 healthy adults by means of a computer-controlled olfactometer. Following each stimulation, the participant used a computer interface to estimate the intensity of components of the blend. Event-based memory experiment: We have developed a digital olfactory version of the children’s game “Memory.” The game interface consists of 32 white squares that are presented in a grid pattern on the screen and that, when participants click on them, triggers the release of one of eight possible smells from the olfactometer. Fifteen healthy adult participants were tested in 10 laboratory sessions distributed over three weeks. Results and Conclusions: Our empirical results suggest that smell training through learning games holds promise as a means of improving cognitive function. The results of our event-based memory experiment suggest that both olfactory and visual memory capacities might have benefitted from olfactory game training. The results of our mixture perception experiment indicate that binary odor mixtures might provide a suitable starting point for perceptual training, and we suggest that a smell-enabled game might include adaptive difficulty by progressively introducing more complex mixtures. We have used event-based memory and mixture perception as “olfactory targets” for game mechanic development, and present early design concepts for “Smelly Genes” and “Scenter.” Finally, we discuss future directions and challenges for this new, interdisciplinary research topic.

This research focuses on identifying learning trajectories expressed among children playing a learning-to-learn computer game and examining the relationships between the learning trajectories and individual characteristics such as developmental age, prior knowledge, and instruction type (adult- and/or computer-assisted, or no instruction). Each child in the sample (N = 184; ages 2.6–4.2 years) repeatedly played the game, resulting in 13 measurements. At each measurement, we registered 7 aspects of mouse behavior such as error frequency, mouse click frequency, and reaction times. Based on those data, we identified 6 types of learning trajectories with multilevel latent class growth analysis. The types appeared significantly related to developmental age, prior knowledge, and type of instruction. Furthermore, prior knowledge appeared the best predictor; specifically among children with moderate prior knowledge having received instruction was associated with better performances than no instruction. The results support the conclusion that children at risk have a high probability of showing benefits in their learning-to-learn skills while playing this educational computer game. However, more adapted games, with more variation and adult-assisted instruction, would also benefit children with uninhibited behavior.

Abstrak- Berkembangnya teknologi yang berbasis mobile sekarang ini sudah sangat maju dan sering dipakai untuk dunia Information Technology (IT), bisnis, pendidikan dan media pembelajaran. Teknologi handphone yang saat ini berkembang pesat salah satunya adalah sistem operasi Android mobile (Android OS). Android adalah sistem operasi berbasis Linux yang dirancang untuk perangkat mobile layar sentuh yang memungkinkan perangkat lunak bebas dimodifikasi dan didistribusikan oleh pembuat perangkat, operator nirkabel dan pengembang aplikasi. Salah satu editor dalam pemrograman android adalah APP Inventor .App Inventor merupakan aplikasi web sumber terbuka yang awalnya dikembangkan oleh Google, dan saat ini dikelola oleh Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). App Inventor memungkinkan pengguna baru untuk memprogram komputer untuk menciptakan aplikasi perangkat lunak bagi sistem operasi Android. Dengan adanya kemudahan dalam pembuatan program yang disediakan oleh App Inventor yang tidak diharuskan lagi untuk menuliskan koding. Semua fasilitas itu bisa digunakan dengan menggunakan klik drag menggunakan blog diagram. Maka peneliti mengambil kasus game bola tangkis dalam penelitian ini. Kata kunci : Game Bola Tangkis, Android, App Inventor Abstract- The development of mobile-based technology is now very advanced and often used for the world of Information Technology (IT), business, education and learning media. Mobile technology is currently growing rapidly one of them is the Android mobile operating system (Android OS). Android is a Linux-based operating system designed for touch-screen mobile devices that allows free software to be modified and distributed by device makers, wireless carriers and app developers. One of the editors in android programming is APP Inventor. Appper Inventor is an open source web application originally developed by Google, and is currently managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). App Inventor allows new users to program computers to create software applications for the Android operating system. With the ease of making the program provided by App Inventor that no longer required to write coding. All facilities that can be used by using click drag using blog diagram. So researchers took the case of badminton games in this study. Keywords : Badminton Games, Android, App Inventor.

The proposed interactive game application of cooking Malay traditional cuisines is a game designed to teach teenagers aged 12 to 24 years old in the cooking. There were a bunch of interactives cooking game applications on the internet, except for Malay cuisine games. This game is created to attract teenagers to making Malay traditional cuisine in interactive and fun ways. In this game, the user needs to follow the storyline in the game. Then, in the early game, they were given a list of ingredients to make some Malay cuisines. The player will be given the customer’s requested food picture. Then the players need to click the right ingredients in making of the requested food by customer. If the player picks the wrong ingredients, then need to pick the ingredients from the start again. Next, this game concept is casual. With the time given, the players need to complete the order with minimum specific score to move forward to next stage. If they achieve the best result, the player will gain extra money and extra time bonus in the game. This game created with a different type of menus based on every chapter of the story. This game can attract teenagers to learn about cooking and the ingredients used in the food. This game is created to educate teenager yet entertain them at the same time.

This article analyzes the problem of national identity and populism in the context of modern public administration. The study of populism is important due to the social procurement from interested subjects of the political environment who use populism for the realization of their programmes and power contest. At the same time, the populist category of «people» – the keepers of all merits, top priorities, the standard of good and evil – that is quite popular today in Ukraine originates from the Ukrainian national democratic movement of the 19th cent. characterized by distinctive populism elements. New Ukrainian national movement took it over as the part of the intellectual legacy from its historical predecessors, all the more so, because it was, as mentioned before, necessary in the period of the final attack on communism. The problem of national identity is quite popular in Ukrainian scientific society. This is due to the fact that on the one hand, the definition of Ukrainian identity can be a theoretic way to create a nation state, another ideological cliche that some politicians use to invent new arguments in their power games. The populism strategy is a constant reflection on particular things going on in society. It is some sort of system protection and unification of certain symbols useful for the populists. Moreover, it is a characteristic feature of working on human consciousness in the process and historical self-development in the context of ideological norms. There is always a «combination instinct» in populism. From a psychological point of view, it is the instinct responsible for the ability of people to analyze their relations and bonds with the world and give certain associations, that is to connect one things with others. Ukrainian society has to find effective ways of political development once again.

We designed a serious game, MolWorlds, to facilitate conceptual change about molecular emergence by using game mechanics (resource management, immersed 3rd person character, sequential level progression, and 3-star scoring system) to encourage cycles of productive negativity. We tested the value-added effect of game design by comparing and correlating pre- and post-test misconceptions, interaction statistics, and engagement in the game with an interactive simulation that used the same graphics and simulation system but lacked gaming elements. We tested first-, second-, and third-year biology students' misconceptions at the beginning and end of the semester (n = 526), a subset of whom played either the game (n = 20) or control (n = 20) for 30 minutes prior to the post-test. A 3x3 mixed model ANOVA revealed that, while educational level (first-, second-, or third-year biology) did not influence misconceptions from pre-test to post-test, the intervention type (no intervention, simulation, or game) did (p<.001). Pairwise comparisons showed that participants exposed to the interactive simulation (p = .007), as well as those exposed to the game (p<.001), lost significantly more misconceptions in comparison to those who did not receive any intervention, while adjusting for educational level. A trending difference was found between the simulation group and the gaming group (p = .084), with the gaming group resolving more misconceptions. Quantitative analysis of click-stream data revealed the greater exploratory freedom of the control simulation, with greater accessibility to individuals who do not play games on a regular basis. However, qualitative analysis of gameplay data showed that MolWorlds-players experienced significantly more instances of productive negativity than control-users (p<.001) and that a trending relationship exists between the quality of productively negative events and lower post-test misconceptions (p = .066).

Objective – To explore children’s Internet searching at home in order to make recommendations to designers, researchers, educators, and parents on how to assist children in becoming search literate through understanding children’s search roles. Design – Qualitative, exploratory study. Setting – Children’s homes in the urban areas of Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Subjects – 83 children (28 children were age 7, 29 were age 9, and 26 were age 11). 41 of the children were female and 42 were male. Parents of the children were also included in the study. 77% of the parent interviews were carried out with mothers, 15% were with fathers, and 8% were with both parents together. Methods – The authors conducted qualitative interviews both with the parents and the children. Parents were interviewed first and the interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. The interviews covered computer rules, children’s experience in searching, searching habits, and areas of frustration. Interviews with the children covered questions about frequency of computer use and reasons for searching. These interviews were video recorded and transcribed. After the interview, the children were asked to complete five search tasks, which were video recorded, and were asked if they had successfully completed the task and why they clicked the link results. The researchers also took notes throughout the interviews and search tasks. The researchers were able to analyze 80 transcripts from the children and 75 transcripts from the parents. The interview transcripts were coded using inductive, qualitative coding starting with open coding to identify categories of children’s search roles. The transcripts from the children interviews were coded three times by one researcher and the coding was verified by another researcher. The transcripts then were coded again using the code book developed by the first researcher. The researchers completed axial and selective coding to refine their search role categories. The researchers also analyzed the data in order to identify behaviours that distinguished the categories from each other. The same coding process was used for the parent interview transcripts. The results from the analysis of the parent interviews were used to verify findings from the children transcripts. Main Results – Children searching at home show seven different searching roles: developing, domain-specific, power, nonmotivated, distracted, rule-bound, and visual, with each search role being delineated by specific behaviors and/or abilities. Triggers for searching change as children age, with younger children searching based on personal interests while older children search for school-related information. Children rely on summaries shown on the results page, as well as familiarity with known websites, in deciding which links to click. Children are interested in both moving and still image results, with visual searchers, power, and distracted searchers frequently mentioning images in their interviews. Power searchers, those with the ability to use keywords and with an understanding of search engines, discussed less influence on their searches than others. Parents have more influence over younger children while school has more influence over older children. Parents helped and influenced their children’s searching in varied ways including demonstrating and offering advice for searching and setting rules for searching. Children often reported frustration with their searches, which was also reported by parents. Most of the children were unable to complete the complex search task as they were unable to separate the query into multiple parts. Few gender differences in searching were found, although researchers reported that games were a trigger for boys more often than girls, and boys declined to search more than girls. Girls were more influenced in their searching than boys and stopped searching due to boredom more often than boys. Conclusion – The authors suggest that the findings can help search engine designers, researchers, educators, and parents to assist children in becoming search literate. Designers should enable scaffolded, assisted searching in order to help searchers, especially with separating out multiple parts of a complex question and with encouraging fact-checking. Educators and parents can coordinate their efforts to more effectively help children overcome searching frustrations and challenges. Researchers could replicate the study to validate the search roles discovered by the authors and also extend the study to focus on searching in regards to gender and use of other devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in English; abstract also in Chinese. The purpose of this study was to investigate school administrators’ knowledge of appropriate instructional practices in physical education. For this study 130 k-12 school administrators from two states in the United States were surveyed regarding their knowledge of appropriate instructional practices in physical education. University Institutional Review Board granted approval to conduct this study. Surveys were sent electronically to the school administrators to take. At the completion of the survey the school administrators were able to click a submit button and have the surveys returned to the researchers. It was found that school administrators identified dodge ball, relay races and elimination tag as an appropriate instructional practice. Also, full-sided games (30 students divided into two teams) were appropriate for students to participate in. These instructional practices are considered inappropriate for students to participate in. The implications of this study are to inform school administrators what practices are appropriate and inappropriate. It is hoped that physical educators and school administrators will work together to see that appropriate instructional practices are taught in physical education, thus benefitting students to become competent in their participation in physical activity. 本研究的目的是探討學校管理者對體育的教學實踐知識。在這項研究中，邀請兩個州份的130位 K-12學校行政人員進行調 查，並獲大學機構審查委員會准許進行這項研究。調查以電子方式發送給學校管理者採取。結果發現，學校的管理者確定躲避球和接力賽作為適當的教學實踐。希望體育教師和學校管理者將共同努力，看到合適的體育教學實踐，從而惠及學生參與體能活動。

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Existing GCP training is geared primarily towards researchers conducting drug, device, or biologic clinical trials, and largely ignores the unique needs of researchers conducting social and behavioral clinical trials. The purpose of this project was to develop a comprehensive, relevant, interactive, and easy to administer GCP eLearning course for social and behavioral researchers. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: As part of the ECRPTQ project funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), a Social and Behavioral Work Group of ~30 experienced social and behavioral investigators and study coordinators was formed to develop GCP training for social and behavioral researchers. Existing GCP training programs were reviewed to identify relevant content that should be included as well as gaps specific to social and behavioral clinical trials where new content would need to be developed. In total, 9 specific modules—Introduction, Research Protocol, Roles and Responsibilities, Informed Consent Communication, Confidentiality/Privacy, Recruitment/Retention, Participant Safety/Adverse Event Reporting, Quality Control/Assurance, and Research Misconduct—were identified by the work group and the content was mapped to competency domains defined by the ECRPTQ project, as well as International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) GCP principles. Several investigators and study coordinators were identified as content experts for each module topic. Working with an instructional designer, these experts defined learning objectives and outlined content relevant for both study coordinators and investigators for inclusion in the modules. The curriculum was developed using Articulate Storyline that is SCORM 1.2 compliant making the course usable to the widest audience. The course was designed to be administered on laptop or desktop computers and is accessible for individuals with hearing or viewing impairments. To maximize learning, instructional designers used creative treatments including: narration to guide learners or offer tips; short video scenarios to introduce topics; interactive activities, such as drag and drop games and “click to learn more information”; knowledge checks with feedback; resources, including downloadable job aids; end of module quizzes, and documentation of course completion. The full curriculum takes 2–4 hours to complete, with individual modules taking 30 minutes to complete. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Pilot testing to evaluate the effectiveness of the eLearning course is underway at 5 sites: University of Michigan, Boston University, University of Rochester, University of Florida, and SUNY Buffalo. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This eLearning course provides relevant, comprehensive GCP training specifically for social and behavioral researchers. Unlike existing GCP training that is geared towards drug and device researchers, this course includes scenarios and examples that are relevant to social and behavioral researchers. The engaging, interactive nature of this course is designed to improve learning and retention, resulting in improved job performance. In addition, the modules are designed for both investigators and clinical research coordinators, thus eliminating the need for different training modules for different study team members.

This paper examines the youngest video games genre, the so called idle (incremental) game, also referred to as the passive, self-playing or clicker game, which seems to challenge the current understanding of digital games as systems, based on a human-machine interaction where it is the human who actively engages with the system through meaningful choices. Idle games, on the other hand, tend to play themselves, making the player’s participation optional or, in some cases, entirely redundant. Interactivity and agency – qualities extensively theorised with reference to digital games – are questioned in the context of idling. In this paper the author will investigate the self-contradictory genre through the lens of interpassivity, a concept developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek to describe the aesthetics of delegated enjoyment. This contribution aims at introducing interpassivity to a wider Game Studies community, and offers an alternative perspective to reflect upon digital games in general and self-playing games in particular.

Nowadays, the use of digital games for educational purposes becomes increasingly popular. The immersive environment of a digital game causes pleasant feelings to players motivating them to participate more actively in the learning process. However, there is a variety of educational games in terms of graphics and mechanics, and each player prefers to play different game categories. For maximizing the learner’s engagement and educational results, the incorporation of the same educational content into multiple games’ categories is the solution. Nevertheless, the update of the educational content in all games increases complexity. In this paper, a mechanism that uses web services and achieves the portability of the same educational content in two completely different categories of mobile games (a point-and-click game and a virtual reality game) is presented. The gain of this innovative work is that the same educational content and mechanism can be accessible by any game’s category and platform taking advantage of the game’s characteristics, in order to motivate the student to participate in the learning process and increase her/his engagement in it. The evaluation of the presented system indicates that the integration of the same educational content to different games has a positive effect on educational results.

Editors' Introduction There is no question that games have operated as a cultural enigma for media and cultural studies. And there have been many attempts to categorise what is actually going on with electronic games. On a straightforward level with the amount of carnage that is associated with shooter games, the number of "accidents" that occur in simulation games from car-racing to jet-fighter pilot activity, and the usual 3 lives of the standard video, arcade, and computer game it seems eminently reasonable to see that the first forays into its study were from those seeking answers and relationships to violent society-ills. Psychologists and criminologists have provided by far the largest pool of literature over the last 20 years about electronic games and have worked on correlations between the simulated gameworld and real-life. Similarly, because the background of so many critical analysts of games is from studies of film and television, it makes sense that there have been many only moderately successful attempts at overlaying theories of the subject and narrative for working out the machinations of gameplay. One of our contributors has tried to write about the frustration of this experience of linking games to past cultural theories, and failed. Instead, he has created a game that isolates on the squarepeg-roundhole quality of games/gameplay and their linkages with theory. Jesper Juul in his "Game Liberation" challenges us to identify the uniqueness of the object of study and thereby pushes us to create a new variation that underpins the pleasure/pain repetition of the game experience. The player is a game theorist, tired and true, who like Juul wants to isolate on the special quality of the game for critical analysis and therefore must eliminate the conjectures that might emanate from these past cultural theories and envelope the game. Of course, this reading of the game can't be done while you are playing. You (at least the three "lives' that constitute "you" in the game) have to keep shooting to blast away these imperial theories that try to colonise gameplay; through that process of playing the game you gain an insight into the experiential quality of games. If you ever attain the fourth level you have the ultimate pleasure of eliminating what Juul has called the pathology theories and achieve what everyone wants: their name in lights in the game's "Hall of Fame". You are invited in this final "article" of the game issue to strip everything back and play the game. Click here to play "Game Liberation"... Citation reference for this article MLA style: Jesper Juul. "Game Liberation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/liberation.php>. Chicago style: Jesper Juul, "Game Liberation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/liberation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Jesper Juul. (2000) Game Liberation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/liberation.php> ([your date of access]).

The “Game Hack” Scam (GHS) is a mostly unreported cyberattack in which attackers attempt to convince victims that they will be provided with free, unlimited “resources” or other advantages for their favorite game. The endgame of the scammers ranges from monetizing for themselves the victims time and resources by having them click through endless “surveys”, filing out “market research” forms, etc., to collecting personal information, getting the victims to subscribe to questionable services, up to installing questionable executable files on their machines. Other scams such as the “Technical Support Scam”, the “Survey Scam”, and the “Romance Scam” have been analyzed before but to the best of our knowledge, GHS has not been well studied so far and is indeed mostly unknown. In this paper, our aim is to investigate and gain more knowledge on this type of scam by following a data-driven approach; we formulate GHS-related search queries, and used multiple search engines to collect data about the websites to which GHS victims are directed when they search online for various game hacks and tricks. We analyze the collected data to provide new insight into GHS and research the extent of this scam. We show that despite its low profile, the click traffic generated by the scam is in the hundreds of millions. We also show that GHS attackers use social media, streaming sites, blogs, and even unrelated sites such as change.org or jeuxvideo.com to carry out their attacks and reach a large number of victims. Our data collection spans a year; in that time, we uncovered 65,905 different GHS URLs, mapped onto over 5,900 unique domains.We were able to link attacks to attackers and found that they routinely target a vast array of games. Furthermore, we find that GHS instances are on the rise, and so is the number of victims. Our low-end estimation is that these attacks have been clicked at least 150 million times in the last five years. Finally, in keeping with similar large-scale scam studies, we find that the current public blacklists are inadequate and suggest that our method is more effective at detecting these attacks.

This study discusses the students who use the Ping Mobile Legends online game feature, the method used is quantitative descriptive method and tested using Rank Sperman correlation. The research sample are Djuanda University communication science students consisting of 20 users of the Mobile Legends online game. The results of the study shows that (1) Users often use the Ping feature because it is only a click away, (2) The ping feature is often used by team players because it is easy, (3) The ping feature is the most favorite feature of every player, (4) The ping feature can smooth the game only with a click. The ping feature is very superior compared to other features and has the largest interpretation number 4 and is categorized well. Keywords: Ping Features, Online Games, Students, Mobile Legends.

As the presence of technologies becomes more apparent in every corner of our lives, interaction and user-centered design can be a vital tool in addressing target groups with special needs. Within the realm of education, this research proposes enhanced, user-friendly hypermedia applications for young children so they can be proficient enough to handle web-based interfaces and easily interact with content. The issue of how graphic content and visual design can be tailored for both the user and the content will be dealt with by examining the implementation of enhanced computer games interfaces for children. Research will be centered on the interaction design applied in creating instructions (referred to as intros) in gaming, the navigation icons needed by early learners while moving through hypermedia tasks and the understanding of the different backgrounds to recognize the type of game they are working on (e.g. matching, click and color, drag and drop, and the like). Evaluation through recorded observation of young learners´ interactions during class sessions detects trouble spots which consequently lead us to rethink navigation and interaction elements for the purpose of improving communication on the final product.

Not many students (and teachers) like to study (andteach) literature. Reading, analysing and interpreting a literarywork may be a time-consuming and exhausting task especiallyfor those who are not bookworms. How can teachers motivatestudents to read literary works and make them develop criticalthinking? In the age of digital natives where everything startsand ends with a “click” on the swift keyboard, this seems to be afar-fetching undertaking. However, the use of audio-visualdevices and various online educational tools in teaching both –foreign language and literature – might trigger motivation andencourage the learning process. The aim of this paper is toidentify, explore and analyse innovative approaches to foreignlanguage acquisition, more precisely, the English languageteaching and learning, by using literature (prose and poetry) asan unconventional teaching tool. Apart from the works ofclassical literature, the creative works of pop culture such asfilms, TV series, video games and songs will be used as apowerful means of breaking boundaries, learning andintegrating, studying and having fun.

J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is appalled to learn that his lover is a victim of incest in Robert Towne and Roman Polanski’s definitive, yet subversive film Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). Similarly, Ethan Mars (Pascale Langdale), the hero of the electronic game Heavy Rain (David Cage, 2010), is equally devastated to find his child has been abducted. One a cinema classic of the detective genre, the other a sophisticated electronic game: both ground-breaking, both compelling, but delivered in contrasting media. So, what do Chinatown and Heavy Rain have in common from the writer’s point of view? Can the writer of games learn from the legacy of film storytelling yet find alternative rules for new media? This article attempts to answer these questions making reference to the two works above to illuminate the gap between games writing and traditional screenwriting scholarship.Western commercial cinema has evolved to place story centrally and Chinatown is an example of a story’s potential as film art and entertainment concurrently. Media convention derives from the lessons of previous relatable art forms such as pictorial art, literature and architecture in the case of film; board games and centuries of physical gaming in the case of games design. Therefore, the invention of new media such as online and electronic gaming relies, in part, on the rules of film. However, game play has reassessed screenwriting and its applicability to this new media rendering many of these rules redundant. If Marshall McLuhan’s adage “the medium is the message” is correct, then despite the reliance of one medium on the traditions of its predecessor, gaming is simply not cinema. This article considers writing for games as axiomatically unconventional and calls for radical reinventions of storytelling within the new media.In order to investigate games writing, I will first revisit some of the rules of cinematic construction as inherited from an original Aristotelian source (Cleary). These rules require: a single focussed protagonist driving the plot; a consistent story form with narrative drive or story engine; the writer to avoid the repeated dramatic beat and; a reassessment of thematic concerns for the new technology. We should also investigate game-centric terminology such as “immersion” and “agency” to see how electronic gaming as an essentially postmodern phenomenon reciprocates, yet contrasts to, its cinematic predecessor (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Must the maker of games subscribe to the filmmaker’s toolbox when the field is so very different? In order to answer this question, I will consider some concepts unique to games technology, firstly, the enduring debate known as ludology versus narratology. Gaming rhetoric since the late 1990s has questioned the efficacy of the traditional film narrative when adapted to game play. Players are still divided between the narratologists’ view, which holds that story within games is inevitable and the ludologists’ opinion, which suggests that traditional narrative has no place within the spatially orientated freedom of game play. Originally espousing the benefits of ludology, Janet H Murray argues that the essential formalism of gaming separates it from narrative, which Aarseth describes as representing “'colonialist' intrusions” on game play (46). Mimetic aspects inherited from narrative principles should remain incidental rather than forming an overarching hegemony within the game (Murray, "Last Word"). In this way, the ludologists suggest that game development has been undermined by the persistence of the narrative debate and Murray describes game studies as a “multi-dimensional, open-ended puzzle” worth solving on its own terms (indeed, cinema of attractions compelled viewers for thirty years before narrative cinema became dominant in the early twentieth century.Gaming history has proved this argument overblown and Murray herself questions the validity of this spurious debate within game play. She now includes the disclaimer that, ironically, most ludologists are trained in narratology and thus debate a “phantom of their own creation” (Murray, "Last Word"). This implies a contemporary opposition to ludology’s original meaning and impacts upon screenwriting principles in game making. Two further key concepts, which divide the medium of game entirely from the art of cinema are “immersion” and “agency” (Murray, Hamlet 98/126). Murray likens immersion to the physical sensation of being “submerged in water” pointing out that players enjoy the psychologically immersive phenomenon of delving into an undiscovered reality (Murray, Hamlet 98). Although distinct from the passive experience of cinema viewing, this immersion is like the experience of leaving the ordinary world and diving into the special world as Christopher Vogler’s screenwriting theory suggests. The cinema audience is encouraged to immerse themselves in the new world of Gittes’s Chinatown from the comfort of their familiar one. Similarly, the light-hearted world of the summer home contrasts Heavy Rain’s decent into urban, neo-noir corruption. Contrary to its cinematic cousin, the immediacy and subjectivity of the new media experience is more tangible and controllable, which renders immersion in games more significant and brings us to the next gaming concept, agency.To describe agency, Murray uses the complex metaphor of participatory dance, with its predetermined structures, “social formulas” and limited opportunities to change the overall “plot” of the dance: “The slender story is designed to unfold in the same way no matter what individual audience members may do to join the fun” (Hamlet 126-27). In electronic gaming, time-honoured gaming traditions from chess and board games serve as worthy predecessors. In this way, sophisticated permutations of outcome based on the player’s choice create agency, which is “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, Hamlet 126). Bearing this in mind, when narrative enters game play, a world of possibility opens up (Murray, Hamlet).So where do the old rules of cinema apply within gaming and where is the maker of games able to find alternatives based on their understanding of agency and immersion? McLuhan’s unconventional scholarship leads the way, by pointing out the alternativity of the newer media. I consider that the rules of cinematic construction are also often disregarded by the casual viewer/player, but of utmost importance to the professional screenwriter.Amongst these rules is the screenwriting convention of having a single protagonist. This is a being fuelled with desire and a clear, visually rendered, actively negotiated goal. This principle persists in cinema according to Aristotle’s precepts (Cleary). The protagonist is a single entity making decisions and taking actions, even if that entity is a collection of individuals acting as one (Dethridge). The exploits of this main character (facing an opposing force of antagonism) determine the path of the story and for that reason a clear, single-minded narrative line is echoed in a single story form (McKee). For example, the baffling depth of meaning in Chinatown still emanates from protagonist J.J. Gittes’s central determination: to solve the crime suggested by the Los Angeles water shortage. The audience’s ability to identify and empathise with Gittes is paramount when he discovers the awful perversion his love interest, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), has been subjected to. However, the world of Chinatown remains intriguing as a string of corruption is revealed though a detective plot fuelled by our hero’s steadfast need to know the truth. In this way, a single protagonist’s desire line creates a solid story form. Conversely, in computer games (and despite the insistence of Draconian screenwriting lecturers who insist on replicating cinematic rules) the effect of a multiple protagonist plot still allows for the essential immersion in an imaginative world. In Heavy Rain, for example, the search for clues through the eyes of several related characters including a hapless father, a hangdog, ageing detective and a hyper-athletic single mother still allows for immersion. The player/interactor’s actions still create agency even as they change avatars from scene to scene. The player also negotiates for mastery of their character’s actions in order to investigate their situation, facts and world. However, each time the player switches their character allegiance, they revert to square one of their potential identification with that character. Indeed, in Heavy Rain, the player keenly aware of the chilling effect generated by the father losing his child in a busy shopping mall, but then another avatar steps forward, then another and the player must learn about new and unfamiliar characters on a scene-by-scene basis. The accumulative identification with a hero like Chinatown’s Gittes, begins with an admiration for his streetwise charm, then strengthens through his unfolding disillusionment and is cemented with Polanski’s brilliant invention: the death of Evelyn Mulwray replete with its politico-sexual implications (Polanski). However, does this mean cinematic identification is superior to game play’s immersion and agency? McLuhan might argue it is not and that the question is meaningless given that the “message” of games is axiomatically different. Traditional screenwriting scholarship therefore falters in the new medium. Further, Heavy Rain’s multi-protagonist miasma conforms to a new breed of structure: the mosaic plot, which according to Murray mirrors the internet’s click and drag mentality. In this sense, a kaleidoscopic world opens in pockets of revelation before the player. This satisfies the interactor in a postmodernist sense: an essential equality of incoming information in random, nonlinear connections. Indeed electronic games of this nature are a triumph of postmodernism and of ludology’s influence on the narratologist’s perspective. Although a story form including clues and detection still drives the narrative, the mosaic realisation of character and situation (which in a film’s plot might seem meandering and nonsensical) is given life by the agency and immersion provided by gaming (Truby).Back in traditional screenwriting principles, there is still the need for a consistent and singular story form providing a constant narrative drive (McKee). As mentioned, this arises from the protagonist’s need. For example a revenge plot relies on the hero’s need for vengeance; a revelation plot like Chinatown hinges on detection. However, first time screenwriting students’ tendency to visualise a story based unconsciously on films they have previously seen (as a bricolage of character moments arranged loosely around a collection of received ideas) tends to undermine the potential effectiveness of their story form. This lack of singularity in filmic writing indicates a misunderstanding of story logic. This propensity in young screenwriters derives from a belief that if the rendered filmic experience means something to them, it will necessarily mean something to an audience. Not so: an abandoned story drive or replaced central character diminishes the audience’s enjoyment and even destroys suspension of disbelief. Consequently, the story becomes bland and confusing. On investigation, it appears the young screenwriter does not realise that they are playing out an idea in their head, which is essentially a bricolage in the postmodern sense. Although this might lead to some titillating visual displays it fails to engage the audience as the result of their participation in an emotional continuum (Hayward). In contradistinction to film, games thrive on such irregularities in story, assuming radically different effects. For example, in cinema, the emotional response of a mass audience is a major draw card: if the filmic story is an accumulation of cause and effect responses, which steadily drive the stakes up until resolution, then it is the emotional “cathexis” as by-product of conflict that the audience resonates with (Freud 75; Chekhov). Does this transfer to games? Do notions such as feeling and empathy actually figure in game play at all? Or is this simply an activity rewarding the interactor with agency in lieu of deeper, emotive experiences? This final question could be perceived as anti-gaming sentiment given that games such as Heavy Rain suggest just such an emotional by-product. Indeed, the mechanics of gaming have the ability to push the stakes even higher than their cinematic counterparts, creating more complex emotionality in the player. In this way, the intentional psychological malaise of Heavy Rain solicits even greater emotion from players due to their inherent act of will. Where cinema renders the audience emotional by virtue of its passivity, no such claim is possible in the game. For example, where in Chinatown, Gittes tortures his lover by repeatedly slapping her, in Heavy Rain the character must actively perform torture on themself in order to solve the mystery. Further, the potential for engagement is extended given there are fourteen possible endings to Heavy Rain. In this way, although the film viewer’s emotional response is tempered by guessing the singular outcome, the multiple endings of this electronic game prevent such prescience (films can have multiple endings, but game mechanics lend the new media more readily to this function, therefore, game books with dice-rolling options are a stronger precedent then cinema).Also effective for the construction of cinema is Aristotle’s warning that the repetition of story and expositional information without rising stakes or any qualification of meaning creates a sense of “dramatic stall” for the audience (Aristotle). This is known as a repeated dramatic story beat and it is the stumbling block of many first time screenwriters. The screenplay should be an inventive effort to overcome escalating obstacles and an accumulative cause and effect chain on the part of the protagonist (Truby). The modern screenwriter for film needs to recognise any repeated beat in their early drafting and delete or alter the repetitive material. What then are the implications of repeated dramatic beats for the game writer? The game form known as “first person shooter” (FPS) depends on the appearance of an eternally regenerating (indeed re-spawning) enemy. In an apocalyptic zombie shooter game, for example, many hordes of zombies die unequivocally without threatening the interactor’s intrigue. Presumably, the antagonists are not intended to pose intellectual opposition for the gamer. Rather, the putrefying zombies present themselves for the gamer’s pugilistic satisfaction, again and again. For the game, therefore, the repeated beat is a distinct advantage. They may come harder and faster, but they are still zombies to be dispatched and the stakes have not necessarily risen. Who cares if this is a succession of repeated beats? It is just good clean fun, right? This is where the ludologists hold sway: to impose principles such as non-repeated beats and rising stakes on the emergence of a world based on pure game play offers no consequence for the FPS game. Nevertheless, the problem is exacerbated in “role play games” (RPG) of which Heavy Rain is an example. Admittedly, the gamer derives effective horror as our hero negotiates his way amongst a sea of disassociated shoppers searching for his lost child. The very fact of gamer agency should abnegate the problem, but does not, it merely heightens the sense of existential hopelessness: turning face after face not finding the child he is searching for is a devastating experience exacerbated by active agency (as opposed to the accepting passivity of cinema spectatorship). The rising panic in the game and the repetition of the faces of impassive shoppers also supports the player’s ongoing disorientation. The iconic appearance of the gruff clown handing out balloons further heightens the panic the gamer/protagonist experiences here. These are examples of repeated beats, yet effective due to player agency. The shoppers only persist until the gamer masters the situation and is able to locate the missing child. Thus, it is the capacity of the gamer to circumvent such repetition, which actually propels the game forward. If the gamer is adept, they will overcome the situation easily; if they are inexperienced, the repetition will continue. So, why apply traditional narrative constrictions on game play within a narrative game?Another crucial aspect of story is theme, which in the young writer reflects a postmodernist fetishisation of plot over story. In fact, theme is one of the first concepts to be ignored when a film student puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) when designing their game. In this way, the themes students choose to ignore resurface despite their lack of conscious application of them. They write plot, and plot in abundance (imperative for the modern writer (Truby)), which the mosaic structure of games accommodates for seamlessly. However, plot is causative and postmodern interpretations do not necessarily require the work of art to “say” anything beyond the “message” trapped in the clichés of their chosen genre (McLuhan). In concentrating on plot, therefore, the young writer says what they are unaware they are saying. At its most innocuous level this creates cliché. At its worst, it erases history and celebrates an attitude of unexamined ignorance toward the written material (Hayward). In extreme cases, student writers of both media support fascism, celebrate female masochism, justify rape (with or without awareness), or create nihilistic and derivative art, which sensationalises violence to a degree not possible within film technology. This is ironic given that postmodernism is defined, in part, by a canny reaction to modernist generation of meaning and cynicism toward the technology of violence. In all this postmodernism, that illusive chestnut known as “originality” (a questionable imperative still haunting the conventional screenplay despite the postmodernist declamation that there is no such thing) should also be considered. Although the game writer can learn from the lessons of the screenwriter, the problems of game structure and expression are unique to the new medium and therefore alternative to film. Adhering to traditional understandings of screenwriting in games is counterproductive to the development of the form and demands new assessment. If gaming students are liberated from narratologist impositions of cinematic story structures, will this result in better or more thoughtful games? Further to the ludologists’ original protestation against the ““colonialist” intrusions” of narrative on game play, film writing must recede where appropriate (Aarseth). Then again, if a ludologist approach to game creation renders the student writer free of filmic dogma, why do they impose the same stories repetitively? What gain comes from ignoring the Aristotelian traditions of storytelling–especially as derived from screen culture? I suggest that storytelling, to echo McLuhan’s statement, must necessarily change with the new medium: the differences are illuminating. The younger, nonlinear form embodies the player as protagonist and therefore should not need to impose the single protagonist regime from film. Story engine has been replaced by player agency and game mechanics, which also allows for inventive usage of the repeated beat. Indeed, postmodern and ludological concerns embedded within mosaic plots almost entirely replace the need for any consistency of story form while still subverting the expectations of modernism? Genre rules are partly reinvented by the form and therefore genre conventions in gaming are still in their infancy. Indeed, the very amorality of nihilistic game designers opens a space for burgeoning post-postmodernist concerns regarding ethics and faith within art. In any case, the game designer may choose the lessons of film writing’s modernist legacy if story is to be effective within the new medium. However, as meaning derives from traditional form, it might be wiser to allow the new medium its own reinvention of writing rules. Given Heavy Rain’s considerable contribution to detective genre in game play by virtue of its applying story within new media, I anticipate further developments that might build on Chinatown’s legacy in the future of gaming, but on the game play’s own terms.ReferencesAarseth, Espen. Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. Aristotle. Poetics. Australia: Penguin Classics, 1997.Chekhov, Michael. Lessons for the Professional Actor. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985.Chinatown. Roman Polanski. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Cleary, Stephen. “'What Would Aristotle Do?' Ancient Wisdom for Modern Screenwriters.” Stephen Cleary Lecture Series, 1 May 2011. Melbourne, Vic.: Victorian College of the Arts.Dethridge, Lisa. Writing Your Screenplay. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2003.Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Middlesex: Pelican, 1984. 65-97.Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2006.Heavy Rain. David Cage. Quantic Dream, 2010.McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. UK: Methuen, 1999. McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 1-18.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster / Free Press, 1997.Murray, Janet H. “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology in Game Studies.” Keynote Address. DiGRA, Vancouver, 17 June 2005.Polanski, Roman, dir. DVD Commentary. Chinatown. Paramount Golden Classics, 2011.Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. London: Boxtree, 1996.

What is game who got game Where's the game In life Behind the game Behind the game I got game She got game We got game They got game He got game -- He Got Game by Public Enemy(From the soundtrack to the 1998 Spike Lee film He Got Game) There is an interesting pattern that develops when a relatively new object of study is broached by cultural studies academics. A reflex response is to defend the reasons why you are giving time to studying these apparently innocuous pastimes. Defenses of television studies twenty-five years ago could have resembled the way that the new forms of games are now being investigated: a preamble of justification -- like an incredibly deep inhalation that has to precede a long-winded exhalation -- would be necessary before launching into the dance of critical analysis. Thankfully our authors have learned and progressed from their forebears at least in this issue (but probably not in every version of game material that you will see flowing outwards in the next few years) and our articles get to the heart of the game, conceptually, analytically and critically. What we're telling you is that this is a remarkable issue that, along with the online re-play conference of 1999, launches the study of games in the contemporary moment of new media game forms and their call and response to previous patterns of play and pastimes. The articles here represent cutting-edge thinking about games and we have, as your humble issue editors, collected those postures and positions in one place. The term pastime to describe playing games has become a bit antiquated, but we'd like to regenerate it here. Our various authors have obviously devoted an incredible number of hours to understanding the games that they describe: contemporary computer games, as much as learning the intricacies of a particular sport, often require an investment of time over weeks and months to achieve sometimes only limited mastery. A pastime has usually been relegated to rainy Saturday afternoons when children (or adults) couldn't work out what do with themselves and were trapped within the confines of the home. To pass the time the old standard board games would appear: from the Victorian Snakes and Ladders to the spirit of proprietorial capitalism of Monopoly; from the war dimensions of Risk and Chess to the mildly headache-producing Scrabble. Passing time could be seen as a description of what childhood has often been about: a transitional reality whose value is always questionable and debatable by others because it is seen as the foundation for the rest of life. Indeed, one element of the moral panic about contemporary computer games is a matter of adults trying to determine whether these games are valuable for their children's future employability in the information economy or a massive waste of time that can never be recovered (Marshall). The pastime, instead of being of peripheral importance has now moved centre-stage in contemporary life through the ubiquity of electronic games and the fact that these games no longer are clearly the province of adolescents but a major cultural reality for a very large population from the ages 5 to 50. The concept of game has similarly migrated, so that most of the authors who have written for this issue have dealt with video and computer games primarily and not with sport or board games or even television game shows, although we have our new and intriguing representative articles from some of these other domains. Several of our authors have been intrigued by how video and computer games have now become metaphors for contemporary life. Certainly recent films have used the game as the new way to deal with the fears and powers of general technological change. In "Flip Horizontal: Gaming as Redemption" José dos Santos Cabral Filho relies on Roger Callois's categories to debate the role of the game in the formation of identity in contemporary culture's continuous debate about the power of technology to determine, and the freedom that technology apparently endows to its users. "The Fortean Continuity of eXistenZ within a Virtual Environment" by Adam Dodd revisits the work of philosopher of the paranormal, Charles Fort, and explores the connections between his ontology of continuity and the movement of signs within a postmodern, virtual, networked environment, analysing Cronenberg's 'game' film eXistenZ and relationships between the body, media, truth and representation. In "Game" Rebecca Farley ponders the concepts of 'game' and 'play' and how these intersect with the values of the society in which games are produced and played, and argues for game theories that recognise the essential element central to all gaming experiences: the player. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics" by Axel Bruns looks at the shifting aesthetic relationship between words and images in new media as exemplified by the Internet, as a focus for an examination of the influences computer gaming has brought to the Internet, and to computing in general. Our tapestry on the game weaves from this larger conceptual pattern into analytical reflection about the aesthetics and narratives in particular games. In "Odyssey Renewed: Towards a New Aesthetics of Video-Gaming", Jason Wilson identifies the limitations of critical approaches that focus mainly on the screen and on-screen events; he calls for an expanded aesthetics of gaming that recognises the possibilities for "hybrid, cyborg players to narrate performance, play and self" and then analyses how players access this in a variety of games. In "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game", Bernadette Flynn takes us on a guided tour through the virtual worlds of the exploration/adventure games Myst and The Crystal Key via the historic, visual structures of art, architecture and cinema, and examines how these past forms and influences are used to establish representational context, and position, and work to orient and narrate players through the ludic space. In "Computer Games and Narrative Progression", Mark Finn examines the varying degrees of success with which theories from existing media have been applied to computer games, and analyses a variety of console games, specifically using the concepts of narrative progression and subject positioning, showing how these are both enforced by the game and negotiated in the complex relationship between game and player. Computer games are highly diverse in terms of game genre, technology, interactivity and the positioning of the player -- physically, narratively, subjectively and ideologically. While certain analyses may be applied to games in general, some of the best work gets into the particularities of gameplay, success, pleasure and expertise. The two following articles each provide an in-depth analysis of a particular game -- how it is structured, how players interact with the game, and the ideological assumptions that are inherent in the game software. "The Fabric of Virtual Reality -- Courage, Rewards and Death in an Adventure MUD" by Daniel Pargman takes us inside the world of the online adventure MUD (Multi-User Domain) in his analysis of the text-based SvenskMUD, which has been running in Sweden for the last nine years. In "Settler Stories: Representational Ideologies in Computer Strategy Gaming" Nick Caldwell examines a real-time strategy (RTS) game, The Settlers, demonstrating how ideological assumptions about culture and production may be actualised in a virtual environment. Our final two articles deal with the fascinating intersection between games and media: how games are used to create media content, and how this repositioning as media spectacle influences and indeed dictates many aspects of the game. In "Technology and Sport" Greg Levine discusses the impact of media broadcast of sporting matches on televised sport through an analysis of Australian Rules football and looks at the broader effects of technological innovation on sport. Carol Morgan examines another meeting of game and media in "Capitalistic Ideology as an 'Interpersonal Game': The Case of Survivor", an analysis of this year's highly popular game show Survivor and the economic and social ideals that are implicit in, and perpetuated by that particular game. Oh, and then there is our final, final submission that you should not miss -- like an extra game level that you haven't discovered yet: this contribution comes from a person who actually failed in his attempt to capture what he wanted to say through an article for submission to the 'game' issue. Jesper Juul, along with 3D graphics by Mads Rydahl, has created a game instead that is designed for your pleasure and for those who have waded through the articles of game theory. It's called "Game Liberation" and its composed of four levels where you as game theorist have to blast away to destroy each theory that tries to colonise games and claim they have worked out their cultural significance. So cool down with a pleasant round of Space Invader-style shoot-em-up after a hard day of facing the faux-titans of media and cultural studies. Experience the zen-zone pleasure of games firsthand without leaving your comfort zone of intellectual gymnastics. We have tried to capture here some of the surface and depth of game culture -- if we can be so bold as to propose a new area of cultural study that is consolidating as a clear and interesting domain of popular culture and intellectual inquiry. As our articles demonstrate game culture does not fit comfortably into past forms of media analysis although there are insights about games that can be teased outwards from their relationship to visual/textual media forms. We invite your comments so that the analytical/critical process initiated by this issue can continue and encourage you to extrapolate outwards through your interventions and contribution on the Media-Culture list associated with M/C. Our authors are thirsty for discussion and debate. Although the issue is not quite like an adventure game, we invite you to point and click and investigate its various threads of game culture. P. David Marshall & Sue Morris -- 'Game' Issue Editors References Marshall, P. David. "Technophobia: Videogames, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics." Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. "Editorial: 'Game'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris, "Editorial: 'Game'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall, Sue Morris. (2000) Editorial: 'game'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

The huge growth of the mobile industry leads to more efficient software to be developed in a mobile phone or android platform. the mobile software and games are now powerful to compete with computer’s software but as it seems the problems will also to be carried out from this enhancement.problems in the sense bug or misbehave of any software that can hang your device.so the Task manager would be needed for mobile devices too, where we can monitor what are all the applications are running and the complete package of informa- tion in one single Application. The Task Manager application shows all the device’s active applications, along with information about:task manager will show how much processor power and cores the app is consuming, and theRAM item shows how much memory of RAM the app occupies. You can use Task Manager to end or turn off tasks that are taking too much CPU time or memory or that any bug containing app. You can click applications you want to stop and then click End Apps button. This project will provide the Active applications ( Applications that are currently running on the device), Installed (Applications that have been installed from the Play Store or any third party provider) RAM manager (Random Access Memory), Storage (Available memory storage), Network uses(Amount of internet data used), GPU ( graphics processing unit), Screen time (time spend on app in day), Internet Speed(speed of connected in- ternet source) and Temperature(temperature of the whole device).

A proposta deste artigo é dupla: em sentido mais amplo, analisar a representação da nova geração, tendo como embasamento teórico os conceitos da trivialidade da essência (Jameson) e do presenteísmo (Maffesoli); como objetivo mais específico, analisar o papel do mouse, do game e da animação no longa de Jorge Furtado Meu tio matou um cara (2004). Serão enfatizados o uso do virtual na construção da “cena do crime”, o desempenho do mouse implícito do protagonista e a estrutura de videogame que perpassa o texto, criando imagens híbridas. Tanto na reconstrução do crime como na seqüência de fotos que provariam a traição da namorada de seu tio, o protagonista, em seu enfoque de adolescente, imagina estar jogando um videogame no computador. Seu mouse parece querer clicar em ícones e abrir janelas a qualquer momento. A representação da interação dos três elementos —mouse, game e animação— retira do contexto o peso conteudístico do tema, que fica reduzido a um exercício de pseudo-detetive, e expõe, em primeiro plano, o universo juvenil, com sua familiaridade em interagir com games. O computador, além de suporte, é elemento essencial na vida da geração “clic-link” e ocupa lugar de destaque como coadjuvante do protagonista. Como referencial teórico, serão usados os conceitos de Vicente Gosciola relacionados aos roteiros nas novas mídias, comentários de Steven Johnson sobre benefícios dos videogames, e as idéias de Scott McCloud quanto à estética do desenho animado e sua relação com os conceitos de verossimilhança, representação e referencialidade, além dos já citados conceitos de Jameson e Maffesoli.

Dear Readers,A couple of months ago I had an opportunity to sit down with children’s literacy advocate Joyce Grant and discuss her popular Gabby series of picture books (click here to watch the video). I was really pleased to have the chance to meet with Grant, especially because two of her popular books, Gabby, Drama Queen and Gabby Wonder Girl, were favourably reviewed by Deakin reviewer Leslie Aitken. I was eager to pursue some questions inspired by Aitken's thoughtful comments, especially her description of Gabby, Drama Queen's plot as “imaginative and complex.” Naturally, I was optimistic that I would enjoy reading the entire Gabby series prior to the interview. Now that I have read the series, I can assure readers that the books are delightful, and teachers will certainly appreciate the teacher’s guide that is freely available online to help elementary students to develop reading, writing, and comprehension skills. I met with Grant at the University of Alberta which was one of her stops on an ambitious tour of Alberta’s schools and libraries to celebrate books and reading during TD Canadian Children’s Book Week. She was scheduled to speak at our institution about her experience teaching kids how to spot fake news, and I was glad to hear that she actively encourages kids to read news on her website teachingkidsnews.com that publishes free daily stories for young readers. The website has lots of important stories that are worth talking about and debating, and as we can all attest, kids need to know how to differentiate between real news and stories that deliberately mislead readers for financial or political gain. Grant also publishes a blog called Getting Kids Reading (gkreading.com) that is chock-full of articles, games, crafts, and ideas to inspire kids to read.Grant was a pleasure to interview, and I hope you will take time to watch the video. Aside from answering several questions about the Gabby series, Grant also tells us about her latest projects and how to get in touch. Our new summer issue is filled with many excellent book recommendations, including some reviews of multimedia resources for kids that resulted from a student assignment in the Multimedia Literacies course offered at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies.Wishing you all a wonderful summer!Best wishes,Robert DesmaraisManaging Editor

On the September 19th, 2013 edition of CBC radio’s “Q”, the opening essay by guest host Kevin Sylvester (himself a “kid’s book” writer) focused on why “kiddy litter” gets such short shrift in Canada compared to other countries. He notes that Winnipeg-born, Toronto-trained Jon Klassen won 2 Caldecott medals this year for “This is not my hat” and “Extra yarn.” Kevin asks, “where is our ‘Canada Reads’ for kids?” and suggests we go to cbc.ca/books and click on “kids.” Hear Kevin’s 2-minute essay (http://www.cbc.ca/q/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2407373814)or read it here and find out what kid’s books he writes to boot: (http://kevinarts.blogspot.ca/2013/09/my-q-opening-essay.html)Speaking of children’s book awards, you might have heard of the Silver Birch awards from the Ontario Library Association that have been around for 20 years. But did you know there was a whole “forest of reading” intended to recognize Canadian authors and books, “contribute to the financial stability of the Canadian publish industry, and provide a literacy enhancement tool? Other tree awards include the Blue Spruce, Red Maple, White Pine, Evergreen, Golden Oak, Tamarac, and Peuplier. This would be a great time to find out more because the 2014 nominees are out with an award presentation planned for May 14, 2014. https://www.accessola.org/OLAWEB/Forest_of_Reading/Welcome/OLAWEB/Forest_of_Reading/Welcome.aspx or www.accessola.com/forestAnother group working to increase the culture of reading in Canada is the National Reading Campaign. They have a new website and media package here: http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/. They gather lots of interesting information including their National Reading Plan which starts, “Reading is essential to the quality of our lives and to our ability to take our place as citizens in a democracy.” There is “research” section devoted to studies about the benefits of reading. Among the various “facts” highlighted for the website: “Reading is 68% better at reducing stress than listening to music, 100% more effective than drinking a cup of tea, and 700% better than playing video games”If you also create children’s literature, you might be interested in CANSCAIP’s Packaging Your Imagination Conference on November 16, 2013 in Toronto. From their website the “Canadian Society of Children’s Authors, Illustrators & Performers (CANSCAIP) presents a day of workshops focused on writing, illustrating & performing for children. Whether you are a beginner, a seasoned professional or somewhere in-between, PYI gives you the opportunity to improve your craft, expand your network of industry professionals, and meet and learn from some of the biggest names in the industry.” http://www.nationalreadingcampaign.ca/events/canscaips-packaging-your-imagination-conference/Finally, the CCBC (Canadian Children’s Book Centre) is another good way to keep up with what’s going on in the ever-expanding (and hard to keep track of) world of Children’s literature especially in Canada. http://www.bookcentre.ca/Here’s to the autumn trees (and squirrels) reminding us to stock up on great books to curl up with when we’re not out enjoying all that winter has to offer.David Sulz, Communications Editor

Whether it is hand held, in a pocket, on a backpack, clipped to a belt, or hidden in a brief case or purse, college students and cellular telephones go together. Communication with fellow students, professors, parents, and everyone else is just a click away. While walking across campus and down the halls of academic buildings, cellular telephones are being used. This research questions in what ways do students use cellular telephones and does this use interfere with or assist in learning and college life? This paper reports the results of a survey of undergraduate business students addressing this question. The objectives were to determine: (1) how much time is spent using a cell phone and which phone features are used most frequently, (2) what students believe concerning the impact of cell phones on learning in the classroom and during study, (3) how often students are in contact with parents on a cell phone, and (4) how much do students pay for cell phone services. The results indicate that 100% of the students own a cell phone. Sixty-six percent of the students use voice calls most frequently and 30% use text messages most often. A total of 55.8% of students report that they spend 3 hours or less on their cell phone daily and 44.8% spend four or more hours daily on their cell phones. Over half of the students report that they have some interaction with their cell phones during class time for every class. Seventy-seven percent state that this cell phone use seldom or never interferes with classroom learning. All of the students (100%) believe that they should be able to receive emergency information over a cell phone during class time. Seventy-six percent believe that cell phones seldom or never assist in classroom learning. However, students report that cell phone use impacts on study time outside of class. Cell phone distractions during study time outside class was reported by 34.6% of the students as happening often or always and an additional 43.5% are sometimes distracted by cell phones during study time. Bad or upsetting news received over a cell phone before class impacts academic performance of 14.2% of the students often or always. Thirty-five percent of the students talk to parents more than once a day and another 23.7% have contact on a daily basis. Therefore, 59.5% report that they have contact with their parents at least once a day. Fifteen percent of the students pay over $100 per month for cell phone service, 28% pay from $75 to $100, 34% spend $51 to $75, and 14% spend $26 to $50 per month. More than 90% of the students report that they have text messaging, calculator, clock, calendar, and appointment reminder on their cell phone. Over 70% have the internet and games. Over 60% have a camera and email. Only 13% have an MP3 music player and 7% have an FM radio.

In the age of digital transformations of images, communications, and storytelling, Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" can be augmented with the corollary that the media is the mix. Digital forms of narrative are not only characterized by their mixed, hybrid forms and content, but their recombinations 1 draw the spectator into the mix in unforeseen ways. By mixing varying degrees of non-linearity and interactivity in what are ultimately animations, digital narratives create new kinds of digital spectatorship. The examples I'll explore here are three films, Conceiving Ada, Gamer, and Time Code. In different yet interconnected ways, each privileges the mix of media over content, or rather, foregrounds the mix as content. These digital narratives divert the reader/spectator/ participant from the traditional ways of making meaning--or at least sense--of narrative. One way to illuminate the examples is to explore how they mix linearity and interactivity. In teaching The Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative, my students and I developed a model for analyzing how different works create new modes of storytelling, and fresh relations of looking at and within the frame.2 Extending some of the terms that Janet Murray develops in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, the diagram posits an x axis of linearity and a y axis of agency.3 Click here for an animated version of this graph. The linearity axis spans narratives from most linear (one plot line that progresses chronologically through time and space to one outcome through a series of cause and effect occurrences represented from a singular point of view) to non-linear (narratives that could be circular, rhizome-shaped, achronological, synchronic, multiple plotlines, multiple points of view, multidimensional).4 The agency axis spans media that call for very little active participation from the reader/spectator/listener to media that demands a high level of interaction. Of course, all "reading" is in some way active, both in the physical acts of seeing and turning pages/clicking a mouse 5 and in comprehending, imagining, remembering, and making meaning. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between page-turning and making choices in a hypermedia work, and Murray uses the term agency to suggest an "active creation of belief" (as opposed to Coleridge's "willing suspension of belief"). Digital environments require that belief be created and reinforced; as William Gibson posited in Neuromancer, the imagined place of cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a social agreement to act as if the places in cyberspace exist. The willing creation of belief is a social agreement that relies on a like-minded community. The more self-reflexive and unconventional the narrative, the more it calls for the will to believe. These examples of digital cinema "interpellate," or hail, their spectators as willing agents in the common project of the creation of belief. The subjectivity that these films seek to create for their viewers is one of being an active, technologically-savvy spectator. Instead of encouraging participation in, to use Guy Debord's phrase, the society of the spectacle, these digital narratives perform a Brechtian function in a distinctly technological manner that derives from the mix of media that is digital cinema. The term "digital cinema" has acquired many meanings, ranging from movies shot on digital video in a manner we associate with film (i.e.: single camera) to digital exhibition of media in digitally-equipped movie theaters and streaming video on the web. Lev Manovich defines digital cinema as "a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."6 Manovich's historical argument suggests commonalities between the earliest moving images and current developments in digital media; animation was marginalized in the development of cinema, and although some of its techniques were adopted by the avant garde, only now animation returns at the very center of digital cinema.7 Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Conceiving Ada explores digital media in both form and content. In the film Emmy, a contemporary computer software engineer, uses technology to make contact with Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language in Victorian England. The narrative moves between Emmy in the present day and Ada in the past as Emmy figures out how to send a software agent into the past to retrieve information. Although the plot doesn't really make sense scientifically, it resonates emotionally; despite the 150 years separating their lives, Emmy and Ada face some of the same issues as women working with technology. Instead of building sets, Leeson developed a technique of blending live action footage shot against a blue screen with digitized photographs of Victorian inns. As she explains in the technical notes of the DVD of the film (and also on the Conceiving Ada website): I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound . . . provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility. The actors and filmmaker collaborated in what amounts to a consensual hallucination: On the set, these images were maneuvered through several computers where mattes were added and images were put into perspective or enlarged. They were then laid onto digital videotape while the actors were performing. Actors could reference their location through a monitor that showed them their "virtual" environment. . . . The immediacy of shooting live action while simultaneously manipulating digitized backgrounds in real time was, remarkably, exhilarating. By mixing past and present, fact and fiction, personal and professional, digital and analog, live action and animation, Conceiving Ada tells its powerful story in both form and content. Although it is not immediately obvious that the sets are virtual rather than actual, much of the story takes place in front of and inside Emmy's computer equipment. There are many shots of Emmy gazing into the computer, trying to make her programs work, and when she does make contact with Ada, she can see her memories and talk with her on the computer screen. The film frame often encompasses the computer screen, so we too see the graphic interfaces Emmy designs and animates. By mixing some of the techniques of video art with film style and the malleability of the digital image, Leeson extends her trailblazing career in many directions at once in a work that is a mix about mix. A representation of intense digital interactivity, Conceiving Ada's heroines, creators, and spectators use technology, and specifically digital imaging technology, to create agency. Like Conceiving Ada, Time Code is also an example of digital cinema that calls attention to the digital techniques used in its production, and enlists its spectators as accomplices in creating the narrative. Time Code is itself the product of improvisation, and uses digital technology to capture "real time." Director Mike Figgis divides the screen into four frames; each quadrant contains a continuous 90-minute take of an unscripted, improvised performance, all shot simultaneously with four Sony Dvcam DSR-130s; the film was blocked out on music paper. Figgis describes his movie as a "black comedy about a 90-minute slice of life in Hollywood," and it takes filmmaking as one of its subjects along with jealousy, infidelity, and a fin-de-siecle philosophical and artistic exhaustion. The audio mix of the theatrical release of the film shifts its emphasis between the quadrants, thus directing the spectator's attention to a certain quadrant. Choosing to focus on a quadrant is a kind of spectator-editing. Looking at the entire frame means seeing a new kind of animation, created by multiple screens, encompassing multiple points of view. (See Time Code clip here.) The film folds in on itself self-reflexively. The plot centers around the intersecting lives of four characters involved personally and/or professionally with Red Mullet, Inc., a movie studio (which is the real-life name of Figgis's production company; see www.red-mullet.com), and becomes increasingly Brechtian as the movie builds to the climactic scene in which a hot young independent filmmaker pitches a movie that, like the one we are watching, splits the screen and follows the interactions between four characters. In what could be taken as a manifesto for digital cinema that counters the "chastity" of DOGME 95 with the passionate embrace of technology, the filmmaker announces, "Montage has created a fake reality. . . . Technology has arrived, digital video has arrived, and is demanding new expressions, new sensations. . . . It's time to say again: Art, Technology: a new union." She shows the studio executives storyboards of how four cameras will follow four characters, who are really four aspects of the same character at different points in their lives. But the filmmaker's passionate and theoretical speech is undercut by the context of black comedy that infuses the film: artistic praxis clashes with business practice, and all the plotlines peak as Stellan Skarsgard's Alex bursts into laughter and exclaims, "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard. . . . Do you think anybody around this table has a clue about what you're talking about?" Figgis assumes his audience does, that Bauhaus, Soviet montage, and Guy Debord are not as foreign to his spectators as they are to the executives; the filmmakers both within and outside the frames show their theoretical orientation. Time Code is the first major work of digital cinema. It creates a new kind of animation based on subjectivity and point of view, and calls for an active creation of belief from the spectator-editor who takes in and ultimately creates the narrative of the film. The DVD extends the spectator's agency even further. Among its special features is a documentary about how the film was shot 15 times, all four cameras operating simultaneously around the actors' improvisation. Figgis chose the fifteenth version for the theatrical release, but also includes the first version on the DVD. Because the making of the film, and how it uses digital technology, is so central to the spectator's experience, the director's commentary and interviews with the cast reinforce the spectator as an active creator of belief and meaning in the film. Moreover, by including a special audio mixing feature, the DVD gives the medium a new level of interactivity. Using the remote control of a DVD player, the spectator/participant can switch between the audio of the different quadrants. Because the audio is a major aspect of directing the spectator's attention (in addition to visual elements such as movement and stasis), being able to make choices in the audio mix is, to use the music metaphor that the film is based on conceptually, to become the conductor of the film.8 The medium is the mix. Like Time Code and Conceiving Ada, the new French film Gamer is also a particularly digital mix. Gamer moves between live action and digital environments as its main character Tony gets the idea for, designs, and then is swindled out of a computer game. The first time the film environment switches to the game environment is when the hero is in a car chase and his car morphs into a game graphic of a car. The shift between a reality created by conventional film style and the unconventional use of game graphics style reveals the main character's subjectivity, for his reality (and other characters' as well) are constructed through their interaction in the playing and making of games. Gamer is aesthetically and viscerally ambitious in the range of live action and computer graphic interfaces it moves between. The adrenalized state of game-playing mixes with a fictionalized account of game design. Gamer succeeds in creating an immersive text about two differently immersive mediums, film and computer games. When the film depicts how live action can be made digital, and both shows and denies the indexicality of the digital image, it explores the nature of digital cinema in a way that is complementary to the projects of Conceiving Ada and Time Code. In addition to fostering new relations of looking, these digital narratives make forays into nonlinearity. Conceiving Ada and Gamer both have discursive plots that revise the conventions of the linear plot, moving between nested narrative frames in time, space, and subjectivity. Time Code is in one way relentlessly linear, but its synchronic depiction of multiple physical and emotional points of view ruptures the cinematic conventions of time and space constructed by the dominant style of continuity editing. Taken separately, these three films hover around the center point of my diagram, raising the issues of agency and linearity that will continue to be at the center of digital narrative. Taken together the films offer a model of digital transformation that points the way to what is bound to be a medium that increasingly involves its audience in thinking about and then participating in increasingly immersive, nonlinear, and interactive experiences. Notes 1. In the “renew” issue of M/C, David Marshall suggests that one of the areas Cultural Studies can look to is how the culture industries that produce “recombinant culture,” make efforts “to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital.” This essay is part of a larger work that attempts to open up some of the avenues suggested by Marshall. P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [22 February 2001] . 2. This diagram is a work in progress. My students and I have had much discussion about what to term the bottom of the agency axis. “Passive” seems too simple, yet other terms we’ve come up with such as structured, controlled, limited, voyeuristic, or (my favorite) enslaved don’t seem to work. Special thanks to my students Elliott Davis, Tom Mannino, and John O’Connell, for such discussions. 3. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1999, esp. 128. 4. For an interesting discussion and diagramming of story shapes, see Katherine Phelps, “Story Shapes for Digital Media.” [3/7/01] < http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/shapes/>. Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-111). 6. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?” http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema.html 7. In a footnote, Manovich makes an interesting point on avant-garde strategies such as collage, painting on film, combining print with animation and live action footage, and combining many images in a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.” Innovative forays into the mix of digital media like my examples illuminate not only the emergence of exceptional techniques but also of innovative narrative and spectatorial strategies. 8. Figgis is using the quadrant method once again in a new film, Hotel, which recently finished production in Florence. During the filming, there was a brilliant site that every day had a new page with the four-quadrant split. In addition to quicktimes of footage of the shoot and the actors in the hotel where the film is set, there were some of the cleverest animations I have ever seen on the web. Unfortunately the site shut down after the shoot finished, but it will be up again in May, most likely at www.filmfour.com/hotel, but check www.red-mullet.com as well.

The negative implications of children’s use of the Internet, particularly their loss of innocence through access to pornography, is a topic frequently addressed in public discussions and debate. These debates often take on a technologically determinist point of view and assume that technology directly influences children, usually in a harmful fashion. But what is really happening in the Australian family home? Are parents fearful of these risks, and if so what are they doing about it? A recent exploration of the everyday Internet lives of Australian families indicates that families manage these perceived risks in a variety of ways and are not overly troubled about this issue. Findings from the research project indicate that Australian parents are more concerned about some children’s excessive use of the Internet than about pornography. They construct the Internet as interfering with time available to carry out homework, chores, getting adequate sleep or participating in outdoor (fresh air) activities. This disparity, between public discourse regarding the protection of children in the online environment and the actual significance of this issue in the everyday lives of Australian families, reflects the domestic dynamics within the “moral economy of the household” (Silverstone et al. 15) whereby family relationships and household practices inform the manner in which technology is consumed within any given household. The research project described here (Family Internet: Theorising Domestic Internet Consumption, Production and Use Within Australian Families) is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and investigates Internet use within Australian homes with specific reference to families with school-aged children. It explores how individual family members make sense of their family’s engagement with the Internet and investigates ways in which the Internet is integrated within Australian family life. Public Debates The relationship between children and technology is often addressed in public debates regarding children’s health, safety, social and educational development. Within these debates technology is usually held responsible for a variety of harmful consequences to children. These technological ‘effects’ range from the decline of children’s social relationships (with both peers and family); through sedentary lifestyles which impinge on fitness levels and the weight (body mass index) of children; to the corruption of children (and their loss of innocence) through access to unsuitable materials. These unsuitable texts include “soft and hardcore porn, Neo Nazi groups, paedophiles, racial and ethnic hatred” (Valentine et al. 157). Other digital technologies, such as computer and video games, are sometimes seen as exacerbating these problems and raise the spectre of the ‘Nintendo kid’, friendless and withdrawn (Marshall 73), lacking in social skills and unable to relate to others except through multi-player games – although this caricature appears far removed from children’s normal experience of computer gaming (Aisbett: Durkin and Aisbett). Such debates about the negative implications of the Internet and video games run simultaneously alongside government, educational and commercial promotion of these technologies, and the positioning of digital skills and connectivity as the key to children’s future education and employment. In this pro-technology discourse the family: …is being constructed as an entry point for the development of new computer-related literacies and social practices in young people … what is discursively produced within the global cultural economy as digital fun and games for young people, is simultaneously constructed as serious business for parents (Nixon 23). Thus, two conflicting discourses about children’s Internet use exist simultaneously whereby children are considered both “technically competent and at risk from their technical skills” (Valentine et al. 157). This anxiety is further exacerbated by the fear that parents are losing control of their children’s Internet activities because their own (the parents’) technical competencies are being surpassed by their children. Such fear may well be based on misleading information, particularly in the Australian context. The Australian Broadcasting Authority’s 2001 Internet@ home report “challenges the popular belief that parents lag behind their children in their interest and proficiency with online technology. Most often the household Internet ‘expert’ is an adult” (Aisbett 4). Nonetheless, this public anxiety is underscored by a concern that parents may not be sufficiently Internet-savvy to prevent their children’s access to pornography and other undesirable Internet content. This leads to the fundamental anxiety that parents’ natural power base will be diminished (Valentine et al. 157). In the case of children’s access to Internet porn it may well be that: although parents still occupy the role of initiated with regard to sexuality, if they are uninitiated technologically then they lose the power base from which to set the markers for progressive socialisation (Evans and Butkus 68). These popular fears do not take into consideration the context of Internet use in the real world—of children’s and parents’ actual experiences with and uses of the Internet. Parents have developed a variety of ways to manage these perceived risks in the home and are not usually overly concerned about their children’s exposure to unsuitable or inappropriate content on the Internet. Families’ everyday experiences of Internet consumption The home Internet is one site where most parents exercise some degree of care and control of their children, supervising both the quantity and quality of their children’s Internet experiences. When supervising their children’s access to particular Internet sites, parents in this study use a variety of strategies and approaches. These approaches range from a child-empowering ‘autonomous’ approach (which recognises children’s autonomy and competencies) to more authoritarian approaches (with the use of more direct supervision in order to restrict and protect children). At the same time children may use the Internet to affirm their autonomy or independence from their parents, as parents in this study affirm: He used to let me see the [onscreen] conversations but he won’t let me see them now. But that’s fine. If I come up and talk to him, he clicks the button and takes the screen off. (Kathy, pseudonyms used for interviewee contributions) Parents who tend to favour a child-empowering approach recognise their children’s autonomy, while at the same time having relatively high expectations of their children’s psychosocial competence and ability to handle a variety of media texts in a relatively sophisticated manner. When asked about her son’s access to adult Internet content, single mum Lisa indicated that Henry (17) had openly accessed Internet pornography a few years earlier. She expected (and allowed for) some exploration by her son. At the same time, she was not overly concerned that these materials would corrupt or harm him as she expected these explorations to be a transitory phase in his life: It doesn’t bother me at all. If he wants to do that then he can do it because he’ll get sick of it and I think initially it was ‘let’s see what we can do’. I remember once, he called me in and says ‘Mum, come and look at her boobs’ and I looked at it and I said ‘it’s disgusting’ or something and walked away and he laughed his head off. But I’ve never come in [lately] and found him looking at that stuff … It’s just not something that I’m … really worried about. It’s up to him (Lisa). As with this exchange, families often use media texts as tools in the socialisation of children. The provision of shared topics of conversation allows for discussions between generations: Such materials serve an agenda-setting role … [playing] an important role in providing a socioemotional context for the household within which learning takes place. Technoculture is consequently a critical tool for socialisation … ICTs also construct a framework on/with which to differentiate one member from another, to differentiate between generations, and to differentiate ways in which power and control can be asserted (Green 58). In this case, Lisa’s comment to her teenage son (‘it’s disgusting’) and her actions (in walking away) doubtlessly provided Henry with a social cue, an alternative attitude to his choice of online content. Further, in initiating this exchange with his mother, Henry is likely to have been making a statement about his own autonomy and transition into (heterosexual) manhood. In his interview, Henry openly acknowledged his earlier exploration of adult porn sites but (as his mother anticipated) he seems to have moved on from this particular phase. When asked whether he visited adult sites on the Internet Henry responded in his own succinct manner: Henry: Like porn and stuff? Not really. I probably did when I was a bit younger but it’s not really very exciting. Interviewer: That was when you first got it [the Internet] or when? Henry: Yeah, [two to three years earlier] all your friends come around and you check out the sites. It’s nothing exciting anymore. Sexual experiences and knowledge are an important currency within teenage boy culture (Holland et al. 1998) and like other teenage boys, Henry and his friends are likely to have used this technology in order to “negotiate their masculinity within the heterosexual economy of [their] peer group social relations”(Valentine et al. 160). In this case, it seemed to be a transitory stage within Henry’s peer (or community of interest) group and became less important as the teenagers grew into maturity. Many children and young people are also exploring the social world of Internet chat, with the potential risk of unwanted (and unsafe) face-to-face contact. Leonie, mother of teenage girls, explained her daughters’ ability to negotiate these potentially unsafe contacts: I suppose you just get a bit concerned about the chat lines and who they’re talking to sometimes but really they usually tell me … [to 17-year old daughter in the room] Like on the chat lines you, when, had that idiot … that one that was going to come over here. Just some idiots on there. A lot of the kids are teenagers. I know Shani’s [14] gotten on there a few times on the chat line and there’s been obviously someone asking them lewd questions and she’s usually blocked them and cut them off …(Leonie). Daughter Shani also discusses her experiences with unsafe (unwanted) Internet contact: “They go on about stuff that you don’t really want to talk about and it’s just ‘No, I don’t think so’” (Shani, 14). Shani went on to explain that she now prefers to use instant messaging with known (offline) friends—a preference now taken up by many teenagers (Holloway and Green: Livingstone and Bober). Electronic media play an important role in children’s transition to adulthood. The ubiquitousness of the World Wide Web, however, makes restriction and protection of children increasingly difficult to realise (Buckingham 84-5). Instead, many parents in this study are placing more importance on openness, consultation and discussion with their children about the media texts they encounter, rather than imposing restriction and regulation which these parents believe may well be “counter-productive” (Nightingale et al. 19). Of greater disquiet to many parents in this study than their children’s access to unsuitable online content is concern about their children’s possible excessive use of the Internet. Parents were typically more concerned about the amount of time some of their children were spending chatting to friends and playing online games. One mother explains: They [my daughters] started to use MSN whilst they were doing school work and obviously kids are able to listen to music, watch television, do a project. They can multi-task without all the confusion that I [would have] but we actually now, they’re not able to do MSN during the school week at all … so we now said to them, “if you want to ring somebody, give them a call, that’s fine, we don’t mind, but during the week no MSN” … we’ve actually restricted them (Stephanie). Parental concern about children’s excessive use of the Internet was most marked for parents of teenage children: adolescence being a time when “rules about media consumption can be an early site of resistance for young adults keen to take more power for themselves and their own lives” (Green 30). Father of two, Xavier, expressed his concern about (what he perceived as) his teenage son’s excessive use of the Internet: Well I think there’s far too much time … Gavin’ll spend a whole day on it. I try to get him to come to the footy on Sunday. No. He’s available for friends [for online gaming and chat on the Internet]. He’ll spend all day on the computer (Xavier). Son Gavin (16), in a separate interview, anticipated that this criticism had been made and felt compelled to counter it: Well he [dad] makes comments like saying I’m not fit enough ‘cause I spent too much time on the computer but I play soccer a lot. Like, I do sport perhaps everyday at school … I mean, I think, such a piece of crap (Gavin). Thus, the incorporation of the Internet into the domestic sphere often sees previously established boundaries (who uses what, when, where and for how long) redefined, challenged, resisted and defended by various family members. In this way the Internet (and other new media) helps shape (and is shaped by) the temporal and spatial boundaries within the home. Conclusion While all parents in the Family Internet study construct the Internet as a site which requires some level of care and control over their children’s online use, they use a variety of approaches when carrying out this supervisory role. Some parents tend to allow for children’s free exploration of the Internet and are relatively confident that their children are able to negotiate adult texts such as pornography in a comparatively sophisticated manner. Other parents, those inclined to protect their children from the dangers of adult content and unsafe Internet contact, choose to monitor and restrict their children’s access to the Internet to varying degrees. More consistent is parental concern about excessive use of the Internet, and the assumption that this displaces constructive use of children’s time. Public anxieties about children’s use of the Internet make assumptions about children’s media practices. Children (and their families) are often assumed to be less able to differentiate between suitable and unsuitable Internet texts and to deal with these potential dangers in a sensible manner. These fears presuppose a variety of negative impacts on children’s and young peoples’ lives which may have little to do with daily reality. Our exploration of families’ everyday experiences of Internet consumption highlights the disparity between public anxieties about Internet use and the importance of these anxieties in the everyday lives of families. The major concern of families – ill-disciplined and excessive Internet use – barely registers on the same scale as the public moral panic over children’s possible access to online pornography. These findings say less about the Internet as a locale in cyberspace than they do about the domestic dynamics of the household, parenting styles, relationships between parent(s) and children, and the sociocultural context of family life. References Aisbett, Kate. The Internet at Home: A Report on Internet Use in the Home. Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Authority, 2001. Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000. Durkin, Kevin and Kate Aisbett. Computer Games and Australians Today. Sydney: Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1999. Evans, Mark and Clarice Butkus. “Regulating the Emergent: Cyberporn and the Traditional Media.” Media International Australia 85 (1997): 62-9. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: >From Alphabet to Cybersex. Crows Nest Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Holland, Janet and Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson. The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power. London: Tufnell Press, 1998. Holloway, Donell and Lelia Green. “Home Is Where You Hang Your @: Australian Women on the Net.” Communications Research Forum. Canberra: Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 2003. Livingstone, Sonia and Magdalena Bober. UK Children Go Online: Listening to Young People’s Experiences. London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2003. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (1997): 70-8. Nightingale, Virginia, Dianne Dickenson and Catherine Griff. “Harm: Children’s Views About Media Harm and Program Classification.” Forum. Sydney, Australia, 2000. Nixon, Helen. “Fun and Games Are Serious Business.” Digital Diversions: Youth Culture in the Age of Multi-Media. Ed. J Sefton-Green. London: UCL Press, 1998. Silverstone, Roger, Eric Hirsch and David Morley. “Information and Communication and the Moral Economy of the Household.” Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces. Eds. Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch. London: Routledge, 1992. 17-31. Valentine, Gill, Sarah Holloway and Nick Bingham. “Transforming Cyberspace: Children’s Interventions in the New Public Sphere.” Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Eds. Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge, 2000. 156 – 93. MLA Style Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green & Robyn Quin. "What Porn?: Children and the Family Internet." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/02_children.php>. APA Style Holloway, D., Green, L. & Quin, R. (2004 Oct 11). What Porn?: Children and the Family Internet, M/C Journal, 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/02_children.php>

For those seeking a diversion from the drudgery of work there are a number of websites offering to take you away. Consider the case of wasteaminute.com. On the site there is everything from flash video games, soft-core pornography and animated nudity, to puzzles and parlour games like poker. In addition, the site offers links to video clips grouped in categories such as “funny,” “accidents,” or “strange.” With its bright yellow bubble letters and elementary design, wasteaminute will never win any Webby awards. It is also unlikely to be part of a lucrative initial public offering for its owner, a web marketing company based in Lexington, Kentucky. The internet ratings company Alexa gives wasteaminute a ranking of 5,880,401 when it comes to the most popular sites online over the last three months, quite some way behind sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Windows Live.Wasteaminute is not unique. There exists a group of websites, a micro-genre of sorts, that go out of their way to offer momentary escape from the more serious work at hand, with a similar menu of offerings. These include sites with names such as ishouldbeworking.com, i-am-bored.com, boredatwork.com, and drivenbyboredom.com. These web destinations represent only the most overtly named time-wasting opportunities. Video sharing sites like YouTube or France’s DailyMotion, personalised home pages like iGoogle, and the range of applications available on mobile devices offer similar opportunities for escape. Wasteaminute inspired me to think about the relationship between digital media technologies and waste. In one sense, the site’s offerings remind us of the Internet’s capacity to re-purpose old media forms from earlier phases in the digital revolution, like the retro video game PacMan, or from aspects of print culture, like crosswords (Bolter and Grusin; Straw). For my purposes, though, wasteaminute permits the opportunity to meditate, albeit briefly, on the ways media facilitate wasting time at work, particularly for those working in white- and no-collar work environments. In contemporary work environments work activity and wasteful activity exist on the same platform. With a click of a mouse or a keyboard shortcut, work and diversion can be easily interchanged on the screen, an experience of computing I know intimately from first-hand experience. The blurring of lines between work and waste has accompanied the extension of the ‘working day,’ a concept once tethered to the standardised work-week associated with modernity. Now people working in a range of professions take work out of the office and find themselves working in cafes, on public transportation, and at times once reserved for leisure, like weekends (Basso). In response to the indeterminate nature of when and where we are at work, the mainstream media routinely report about the wasteful use of computer technology for non-work purposes. Stories such as a recent one in the Washington Post which claimed that increased employee use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter led to decreased productivity at work have become quite common in traditional media outlets (Casciato). Media technologies have always offered the prospect of making office work more efficient or the means for management to exercise control over employees. However, those same technologies have also served as the platforms on which one can engage in dilatory acts, stealing time from behind the boss’s back. I suggest stealing time at work may well be a “tactic,” in the sense used by Michel de Certeau, as a means to resist the rules and regulations that structure work and the working life. However, I also consider it to be a tactic in a different sense: websites and other digital applications offer users the means to take time back, in the form of ‘quick hits,’ providing immediate visual or narrative pleasures, or through interfaces which make the time-wasting look like work (Wagman). Reading sites like wasteaminute as examples of ‘office entertainment,’ reminds us of the importance of workers as audiences for web content. An analysis of a few case studies also reveals how the forms of address of these sites themselves recognise and capitalise on an understanding of the rhythms of the working day, as well as those elements of contemporary office culture characterised by interruption, monotony and surveillance. Work, Media, Waste A mass of literature documents the transformations of work brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation. A recent biography of Franz Kafka outlines the rigors imposed upon the writer while working as an insurance agent: his first contract stipulated that “no employee has the right to keep any objects other than those belonging to the office under lock in the desk and files assigned for its use” (Murray 66). Siegfried Kracauer’s collection of writings on salaried workers in Germany in the 1930s argues that mass entertainment offers distractions that inhibit social change. Such restrictions and inducements are exemplary of the attempts to make work succumb to managerial regimes which are intended to maximise productivity and minimise waste, and to establish a division between ‘company time’ and ‘free time’. One does not have to be an industrial sociologist to know the efforts of Frederick W. Taylor, and the disciplines of “scientific management” in the early twentieth century which were based on the idea of making work more efficient, or of the workplace sociology scholarship from the 1950s that drew attention to the ways that office work can be monotonous or de-personalising (Friedmann; Mills; Whyte). Historian JoAnne Yates has documented the ways those transformations, and what she calls an accompanying “philosophy of system and efficiency,” have been made possible through information and communication technologies, from the typewriter to carbon paper (107). Yates evokes the work of James Carey in identifying these developments, for example, the locating of workers in orderly locations such as offices, as spatial in nature. The changing meaning of work, particularly white-collar or bureaucratic labour in an age of precarious employment and neo-liberal economic regimes, and aggressive administrative “auditing technologies,” has subjected employees to more strenuous regimes of surveillance to ensure employee compliance and to protect against waste of company resources (Power). As Andrew Ross notes, after a deep period of self-criticism over the drudgery of work in North American settings in the 1960s, the subsequent years saw a re-thinking of the meaning of work, one that gradually traded greater work flexibility and self-management for more assertive forms of workplace control (9). As Ross notes, this too has changed, an after-effect of “the shareholder revolution,” which forced companies to deliver short-term profitability to its investors at any social cost. With so much at stake, Ross explains, the freedom of employees assumed a lower priority within corporate cultures, and “the introduction of information technologies in the workplace of the new capitalism resulted in the intensified surveillance of employees” (12). Others, like Dale Bradley, have drawn attention to the ways that the design of the office itself has always concerned itself with the bureaucratic and disciplinary control of bodies in space (77). The move away from physical workspaces such as ‘the pen’ to the cubicle and now from the cubicle to the virtual office is for Bradley a move from “construction” to “connection.” This spatial shift in the way in which control over employees is exercised is symbolic of the liquid forms in which bodies are now “integrated with flows of money, culture, knowledge, and power” in the post-industrial global economies of the twenty-first century. As Christena Nippert-Eng points out, receiving office space was seen as a marker of trust, since it provided employees with a sense of privacy to carry out affairs—both of a professional or of a personal matter—out of earshot of others. Privacy means a lot of things, she points out, including “a relative lack of accountability for our immediate whereabouts and actions” (163). Yet those same modalities of control which characterise communication technologies in workspaces may also serve as the platforms for people to waste time while working. In other words, wasteful practices utilize the same technology that is used to regulate and manage time spent in the workplace. The telephone has permitted efficient communication between units in an office building or between the office and outside, but ‘personal business’ can also be conducted on the same line. Radio stations offer ‘easy listening’ formats, providing unobtrusive music so as not to disturb work settings. However, they can easily be tuned to other stations for breaking news, live sports events, or other matters having to do with the outside world. Photocopiers and fax machines facilitate the reproduction and dissemination of communication regardless of whether it is it work or non-work related. The same, of course, is true for computerised applications. Companies may encourage their employees to use Facebook or Twitter to reach out to potential clients or customers, but those same applications may be used for personal social networking as well. Since the activities of work and play can now be found on the same platform, employers routinely remind their employees that their surfing activities, along with their e-mails and company documents, will be recorded on the company server, itself subject to auditing and review whenever the company sees fit. Employees must be careful to practice image management, in order to ensure that contradictory evidence does not appear online when they call in sick to the office. Over time the dynamics of e-mail and Internet etiquette have changed in response to such developments. Those most aware of the distractive and professionally destructive features of downloading a funny or comedic e-mail attachment have come to adopt the acronym “NSFW” (Not Safe for Work). Even those of us who don’t worry about those things are well aware that the cache and “history” function of web browsers threaten to reveal the extent to which our time online is spent in unproductive ways. Many companies and public institutions, for example libraries, have taken things one step further by filtering out access to websites that may be peripheral to the primary work at hand.At the same time contemporary workplace settings have sought to mix both work and play, or better yet to use play in the service of work, to make “work” more enjoyable for its workers. Professional development seminars, team-building exercises, company softball games, or group outings are examples intended to build morale and loyalty to the company among workers. Some companies offer their employees access to gyms, to game rooms, and to big screen TVs, in return for long and arduous—indeed, punishing—hours of time at the office (Dyer-Witheford and Sherman; Ross). In this manner, acts of not working are reconfigured as a form of work, or at least as a productive experience for the company at large. Such perks are offered with an assumption of personal self-discipline, a feature of what Nippert-Eng characterises as the “discretionary workplace” (154). Of course, this also comes with an expectation that workers will stay close to the office, and to their work. As Sarah Sharma recently argued in this journal, such thinking is part of the way that late capitalism constructs “innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space.” At the same time, however, there are plenty of moments of gentle resistance, in which the same machines of control and depersonalisation can be customised, and where individual expressions find their own platforms. A photo essay by Anna McCarthy in the Journal of Visual Culture records the inspirational messages and other personalised objects with which workers adorn their computers and work stations. McCarthy’s photographs represent the way people express themselves in relation to their work, making it a “place where workplace politics and power relations play out, often quite visibly” (McCarthy 214). Screen SecretsIf McCarthy’s photo essay illustrates the overt ways in which people bring personal expression or gentle resistance to anodyne workplaces, there are also a series of other ‘screen acts’ that create opportunities to waste time in ways that are disguised as work. During the Olympics and US college basketball playoffs, both American broadcast networks CBS and NBC offered a “boss button,” a graphic link that a user could immediately click “if the boss was coming by” that transformed the screen to something was associated with the culture of work, such as a spreadsheet. Other purveyors of networked time-wasting make use of the spreadsheet to mask distraction. The website cantyouseeimbored turns a spreadsheet into a game of “Breakout!” while other sites, like Spreadtweet, convert your Twitter updates into the form of a spreadsheet. Such boss buttons and screen interfaces that mimic work are the presentday avatars of the “panic button,” a graphic image found at the bottom of websites back in the days of Web 1.0. A click of the panic button transported users away from an offending website and towards something more legitimate, like Yahoo! Even if it is unlikely that boss keys actually convince one’s superiors that one is really working—clicking to a spreadsheet only makes sense for a worker who might be expected to be working on those kinds of documents—they are an index of how notions of personal space and privacy play out in the digitalised workplace. David Kiely, an employee at an Australian investment bank, experienced this first hand when he opened an e-mail attachment sent to him by his co-workers featuring a scantily-clad model (Cuneo and Barrett). Unfortunately for Kiely, at the time he opened the attachment his computer screen was visible in the background of a network television interview with another of the bank’s employees. Kiely’s inauspicious click (which made his the subject of an investigation by his employees) continues to circulate on the Internet, and it spawned a number of articles highlighting the precarious nature of work in a digitalised environment where what might seem to be private can suddenly become very public, and thus able to be disseminated without restraint. At the same time, the public appetite for Kiely’s story indicates that not working at work, and using the Internet to do it, represents a mode of media consumption that is familiar to many of us, even if it is only the servers on the company computer that can account for how much time we spend doing it. Community attitudes towards time spent unproductively online reminds us that waste carries with it a range of negative signifiers. We talk about wasting time in terms of theft, “stealing time,” or even more dramatically as “killing time.” The popular construction of television as the “boob tube” distinguishes it from more ‘productive’ activities, like spending time with family, or exercise, or involvement in one’s community. The message is simple: life is too short to be “wasted” on such ephemera. If this kind of language is less familiar in the digital age, the discourse of ‘distraction’ is more prevalent. Yet, instead of judging distraction a negative symptom of the digital age, perhaps we should reinterpret wasting time as the worker’s attempt to assert some agency in an increasingly controlled workplace. ReferencesBasso, Pietro. Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso, 2003. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.Bradley, Dale. “Dimensions Vary: Technology, Space, and Power in the 20th Century Office”. Topia 11 (2004): 67-82.Casciato, Paul. “Facebook and Other Social Media Cost UK Billions”. Washington Post, 5 Aug. 2010. 11 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/05/AR2010080503951.html›.Cuneo, Clementine, and David Barrett. “Was Banker Set Up Over Saucy Miranda”. The Daily Telegraph 4 Feb. 2010. 21 May 2010 ‹http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/was-banker-set-up-over-saucy-miranda/story-e6frewz0-1225826576571›.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of California P. 1988.Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Zena Sharman. "The Political Economy of Canada's Video and Computer Game Industry”. Canadian Journal of Communication 30.2 (2005). 1 May 2010 ‹http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1575/1728›.Friedmann, Georges. Industrial Society. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955.Kracauer, Siegfried. The Salaried Masses. London: Verso, 1998.McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. ———. “Geekospheres: Visual Culture and Material Culture at Work”. Journal of Visual Culture 3 (2004): 213-21.Mills, C. Wright. White Collar. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1951. Murray, Nicholas. Kafka: A Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Newman, Michael. “Ze Frank and the Poetics of Web Video”. First Monday 13.5 (2008). 1 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2102/1962›.Nippert-Eng, Christena. Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries through Everyday Life. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1996.Power, Michael. The Audit Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Ross, Andrew. No Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Sharma, Sarah. “The Great American Staycation and the Risk of Stillness”. M/C Journal 12.1 (2009). 11 May 2010 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/122›. Straw, Will. “Embedded Memories”. Residual Media Ed. Charles Acland. U. of Minnesota P., 2007. 3-15.Whyte, William. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Wagman, Ira. “Log On, Goof Off, Look Up: Facebook and the Rhythms of Canadian Internet Use”. How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts for Popular Culture. Eds. Bart Beaty, Derek, Gloria Filax Briton, and Rebecca Sullivan. Athabasca: Athabasca UP 2009. 55-77. ‹http://www2.carleton.ca/jc/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/02_Beaty_et_al-How_Canadians_Communicate.pdf›Yates, JoAnne. “Business Use of Information Technology during the Industrial Age”. A Nation Transformed by Information. Eds. Alfred D. Chandler & James W. Cortada. Oxford: Oxford UP., 2000. 107-36.

Background information Sandscript was programmed with the web application « Tchat-scene », created by Carol-Ann Braun and the computer services company Timsoft (). It organizes a data-base of raw material into compositions and sequences allowing to build larger episodes. Multimedia resources are thus attributed to frames surrounding the chat space or to the chat space itself, thus “augmented” to include pre-written texts and graphics. Sandscript works best on a PC, with Internet Explorer. On Mac, use 0S9 and Internet Explorer. You will have to download a chat application for the site to function. Coded conversation General opinion would have it that chat space is a conversational space, facilitating rather than complicating communication. Writing in a chat space is very much influenced by the current ideological stance which sees collaborative spaces as places to make friends, speak freely, flip from one “channel” to another, link with a simple click into related themes, etc. Moreover, chat users tend to think of the chat screen in terms of a white page, an essentially neutral environment. A quick analysis of chat practices reveals a different scenario: chat spaces are highly coded typographical writing spaces, quick to exclude those who don’t abide by the technical and procedural constraints associated with computer reading/writing tools (Despret-Lonné, Gentès). Chatters seek to belong to a “community;” conversely, every chat has “codes” which restrict its membership to the like-minded. The patterns of exchange characteristic of chats are phatic (Jakobson), and their primary purpose is to get and maintain a social link. It is no surprise then that chatters should emphasize two skills: one related to rhetorical ingenuity, the other to dexterity and speed of writing. To belong, one first has to grasp the banter, then manage very quickly the rules and rituals of the group, then answer by mastering the intricacies of the keyboard and its shortcuts. Speed is compulsory if your answers are to follow the communal chat; as a result, sentences tend to be very short, truncated bits, dispatched in a continuous flow. Sandscript attempts to play with the limits of this often hermetic writing process (and the underlying questions of affinity, participation and reciprocity). It opens up a social space to an artistic and fictional space, each with rules of its own. Hyper-linked dialogue Sandscript is not just about people chatting, it is also about influencing the course of these exchanges. The site weaves pre-scripted poetic content into the spontaneous, real-time dialogue of chatters. Smileys and the plethora of abbreviations, punctuations and icons characteristic of chat rooms are mixed in with typographical games that develop the idea of text as image and text as sound — using Morse Code to make text resonate, CB code to evoke its spoken use, and graphic elements within the chat space itself to oppose keyboard text and handwritten graffiti. The web site encourages chatters to broaden the scope of their “net-speak,” and take a playfully conscious stance towards their own familiar practices. Actually, most of the writing in this web-site is buried in the database. Two hundred or so “key words” — expressions typical of phatic exchanges, in addition to other words linked to the idea of sandstorms and archeology — lie dormant, inactive and unseen until a chatter inadvertently types one in. These keywords bridge the gap between spontaneous exchange and multimedia content: if someone types in “hi,” an image of a face, half buried in sand, pops up in a floating window and welcomes you, silently; if someone types in the word “wind,” a typewritten “wind” floats out into the graphic environment and oscillates between the left and right edges of the frames; typing the word “no” “magically” triggers the intervention of an anarchist who says something provocative*. *Sandscript works like a game of ping-pong among chatters who are intermittently surprised by a comment “out of nowhere.” The chat space, augmented by a database, forms an ever-evolving, fluid “back-bone” around which artistic content is articulated. Present in the form of programs who participate in their stead, artists share the spot light, adding another level of mediation to a collective writing process. Individual and collective identities Not only does Sandscript accentuate the multimedia aspects of typed chat dialogues, it also seeks to give a “ shape” to the community of assembled chatters. This shape is musical: along with typing in a nickname of her choice, each chatter is attributed a sound. Like crickets in a field, each sound adds to the next to create a collective presence, modified with every new arrival and departure. For example, if your nick is “yoyo-mama,” your presence will be associated with a low, electronic purr. When “pillX” shows up, his nick will be associated with a sharp violin chord. When “mojo” pitches in, she adds her sound profile to the lot, and the overall environment changes again. Chatters can’t hear the clatter of each other’s keyboards, but they hear the different rhythms of their musical identities. The repeated pings of people present in the same “scape” reinforce the idea of community in a world where everything typed is swept away by the next bit of text, soon to be pushed off-screen in turn. The nature of this orchestrated collective presence is determined by the artists and their programs, not by the chatters themselves, whose freedom is limited to switching from one nick to another to test the various sounds associated with each. Here, identity is both given and built, both individual and collective, both a matter of choice and pre-defined rules. (Goffman) Real or fictitious characters The authors introduce simulated bits of dialogue within the flow of written conversation. Some of these fake dialogues simply echo whatever keywords chatters might type. Others, however, point else where, suggesting a hyper-link to a more elaborate fictionalized drama among “characters.” Sandscript also hides a plot. Once chatters realize that there are strange goings on in their midst, they become caught in the shifting sands of this web site’s inherent duality. They can completely lose their footing: not only do they have to position themselves in relation to other, real people (however disguised…) but they also have to find their bearings in the midst of a database of fake interlocutors. Not only are they expected to “write” in order to belong, they are also expected to unearth content in order to be “in the know.” A hybridized writing is required to maintain this ambivalence in place. Sandscript’s fake dialogue straddles two worlds: it melds in with the real-time small talk of chatters all while pointing to elements in a fictional narrative. For example, “mojo” will say: “silting up here ”, and “zano” will answer “10-4, what now? ” These two characters could be banal chatters, inviting others to join in their sarcastic banter… But they are also specifically referring to incidents in their fictional world. The “chat code” not only addresses its audience, it implies that something else is going on that merits a “click” or a question. “Clicking” at this juncture means more than just quickly responding to what another chatter might have typed. It implies stopping the banter and delving into the details of a character developed at greater length elsewhere. Indeed, in Sandscript, each fictional dialogue is linked to a blog that reinforces each character’s personality traits and provides insights into the web-site’s wind-swept, self-erasing world. Interestingly enough, Sandscript then reverses this movement towards a closed fictional space by having each character not only write about himself, but relate her immediate preoccupations to the larger world. Each blog entry mentions a character’s favorite URL at that particular moment. One character might evoke a web site about romantic poetry, another one on anarchist political theory, a third a web-site on Morse code, etc… Chatters click on the URL and open up an entirely new web-site, directly related to the questions being discussed in Sandscript. Thus, each character represents himself as well as a point of view on the larger world of the web. Fiction opens onto a “real” slice of cyber-space and the work of other authors and programmers. Sandscript mixes up different types of on-line identities, emphasizing that representations of people on the web are neither “true” nor “false.” They are simply artificial and staged, simple facets of identities which shift in style and rhetoric depending on the platform available to them. Again, identity is both closed by our social integration and opened to singular “play.” Conclusion: looking at and looking through One could argue that since the futurists staged their “electrical theater” in the streets of Turin close to a hundred years ago, artists have worked on the blurry edge between recognizable formal structures and their dissolution into life itself. And after a century of avant-gardes, self-referential appropriations of mass media are also second nature. Juxtaposing one “use” along another reveals how different frames of reference include or exclude each other in unexpected ways. For the past twenty years much artwork has which fallen in between genres, and most recently in the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” Such work is designed not only to draw attention to itself but also to the spectator’s relation to it and the broader artistic context which infuses the work with additional meaning. By having dialogue serve as a hyper-link to multimedia content, Sandscript, however, does more. Even though some changes in the web site are pre-programmed to occur automatically, not much happens without the chatters, who occupy center-stage and trigger the appearance of a latent content. Chatters are the driving force, they are the ones who make text appear and flow off-screen, who explore links, who exchange information, and who decide what pops up and doesn’t. Here, the art “object” reveals its different facets around a multi-layered, on-going conversation, subjected to the “flux” of an un-formulated present. Secondly, Sandscript demands that we constantly vary our posture towards the work: getting involved in conversation to look through the device, all while taking some distance to consider the object and look at its content and artistic “mediations.” (Bolster and Grusin, Manovitch). This tension is at the heart of Sandscript, which insists on being both a communication device “transparent” to its user, and an artistic device that imposes an opaque and reflexive quality. The former is supposed to disappear behind its task; the latter attracts the viewer’s attention over and over again, ever open to new interpretations. This approach is not without pitfalls. One Sandscript chatter wondered if as the authors of the web-site were not disappointed when conversation took the upper hand, and chatters ignored the graphics. On the other hand, the web site’s explicit status as a chat space was quickly compromised when users stopped being interested in each other and turned to explore the different layers hidden within the interface. In the end, Sandscript chatters are not bound to any single one of these modes. They can experience one and then other, and —why not —both simultaneously. This hybrid posture brings to mind Herman’s metaphor of a door that cannot be closed entirely: “la porte joue” —the door “gives.” It is not perfectly fitted and closed — there is room for “play.” Such openness requires that the artistic device provide two seemingly contradictory ways of relating to it: a desire to communicate seamlessly all while being fascinated by every seam in the representational space projected on-screen. Sandscript is supposed to “run” and “not run” at the same time; it exemplifies the technico-semiotic logic of speed and resists it full stop. Here, openness is not ontological; it is experiential, shifting. About the Authors Carol-Ann Braun is multimedia artist, at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. EmaiL: carol-ann.braun@wanadoo.fr Annie Gentes is media theorist and professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecomunications, Paris, France. Email: Annie.Gentes@enst.fr Works Cited Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image, Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Augé, Marc. Non-lieux, Introduction à une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation, Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Bourriaud, Nicholas. Esthétique Relationnelle. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Despret-Lonnet, Marie and Annie Gentes, Lire, Ecrire, Réécrire. Paris: Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou, 2003. Goffman, Irving. Interaction Ritual. New York: Pantheon, 1967. Habermas, Jürgen. Théorie de l’Agir Communicationnel, Vol.1. Paris: Fayard, 1987. Herman, Jacques. “Jeux et Rationalité.” Encyclopedia Universalis, 1997. Jakobson, Roman.“Linguistics and Poetics: Closing statements,” in Thomas Sebeok. Style in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Latzko-Toth, Guillaume. “L’Internet Relay Chat, Un Cas Exemplaire de Dispositif Socio-technique,” in Composite. Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal, 2001. Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition Post-Moderne. Paris: les Editions de Minuit, 1979. Manovitch, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Michaud, Yves. L’Art à l’Etat Gazeux. Essai sur le Triomphe de l’Esthétique, Les essais. Paris: Stock, 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Braun, Carol-Ann & Gentes, Annie. "Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>. APA Style Braun, C. & Gentes, A. (2004, Jul1). Dialogue: a hyper-link to multimedia content.. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/05_Braun-Gentes.php>

My thesis is that new media, starting with analog broadcast and going through digital convergence, blur the line between work time and free time. The technology that we are adopting has transformed free time into potential and actual labour time. At the dawn of the modern age, work shifted from tasked time to measured time. Previously, tasked time intermingled work and leisure according to the vagaries of nature. All this was banished when industrial capitalism instituted the work clock (Mumford 12-8). But now, many have noticed how post-industrial capitalism features a new intermingling captured in such expressions as "24/7" and "multi-tasking." Yet, we are only beginning to understand that media are driving a return to the pre-modern where the hour and the space are both ambiguous, available for either work or leisure. This may be the unfortunate side effect of the much vaunted "interactivity." Do you remember the old American TV show Dobie Gillis (1959-63) which featured the character Maynard G. Krebs? He always shuddered at the mention of the four-letter word "work." Now, American television shows makes it a point that everyone works (even if just barely). Seinfeld was a bold exception in featuring the work-free Kramer; a deliberate homage to the 1940s team of Abbott and Costello. Today, as welfare is turned into workfare, The New York Times scolds even the idle rich to adopt the work ethic (Yazigi). The Forms of Broadcast and Digital Media Are Driving the Merger of Work and Leisure More than the Content It is not just the content of television and other media that is undermining the leisured life; it is the social structure within which we use the media. Broadcast advertisements were the first mode/media combinations that began to recolonise free time for the new consumer economy. There had been a previous buildup in the volume and the ubiquity of advertising particularly in billboards and print. However, the attention of the reader to the printed commercial message could not be controlled and measured. Radio was the first to appropriate and measure its audience's time for the purposes of advertising. Nineteenth century media had promoted a middle class lifestyle based on spending money on home to create a refuge from work. Twentieth century broadcasting was now planting commercial messages within that refuge in the sacred moments of repose. Subsequent to broadcast, home video and cable facilitated flexible work by offering entertainment on a 24 hour basis. Finally, the computer, which juxtaposes image/sound/text within a single machine, offers the user the same proto-interactive blend of entertainment and commercial messages that broadcasting pioneered. It also fulfills the earlier promise of interactive TV by allowing us to work and to shop, in all parts of the day and night. We need to theorise this movement. The theory of media as work needs an institutional perspective. Therefore, I begin with Dallas Smythe's blindspot argument, which gave scholarly gravitas to the structural relationship of work and media (263-299). Horkheimer and Adorno had already noticed that capitalism was extending work into free time (137). Dallas Smythe went on to dissect the precise means by which late capitalism was extending work. Smythe restates the Marxist definition of capitalist labour as that human activity which creates exchange value. Then he considered the advertising industry, which currently approaches200 billion in the USA and realised that a great deal of exchange value has been created. The audience is one element of the labour that creates this exchange value. The appropriation of people's time creates advertising value. The time we spend listening to commercials on radio or viewing them on TV can be measured and is the unit of production for the value of advertising. Our viewing time ipso facto has been changed into work time. We may not experience it subjectively as work time although pundits such as Marie Winn and Jerry Mander suggest that TV viewing contributes to the same physical stresses as actual work. Nonetheless, Smythe sees commercial broadcasting as expanding the realm of capitalism into time that was otherwise set aside for private uses. Smythe's essay created a certain degree of excitement among political economists of media. Sut Jhally used Smythe to explain aspects of US broadcast history such as the innovations of William Paley in creating the CBS network (Jhally 70-9). In 1927, as Paley contemplated winning market share from his rival NBC, he realised that selling audience time was far more profitable than selling programs. Therefore, he paid affiliated stations to air his network's programs while NBC was still charging them for the privilege. It was more lucrative to Paley to turn around and sell the stations' guaranteed time to advertisers, than to collect direct payments for supplying programs. NBC switched to his business model within a year. Smythe/Jhally's model explains the superiority of Paley's model and is a historical proof of Smythe's thesis. Nonetheless, many economists and media theorists have responded with a "so what?" to Smythe's thesis that watching TV as work. Everyone knows that the basis of network television is the sale of "eyeballs" to the advertisers. However, Smythe's thesis remains suggestive. Perhaps he arrived at it after working at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 1943 to 1948 (Smythe 2). He was part of a team that made one last futile attempt to force radio to embrace public interest programming. This effort failed because the tide of consumerism was too strong. Radio and television were the leading edge of recapturing the home for work, setting the stage for the Internet and a postmodern replication of the cottage industries of pre and proto-industrial worlds. The consequences have been immense. The Depression and the crisis of over-production Cultural studies recognises that social values have shifted from production to consumption (Lash and Urry). The shift has a crystallising moment in the Great Depression of 1929 through 1940. One proposal at the time was to reduce individual work hours in order to create more jobs (see Hunnicut). This proposal of "share the work" was not adopted. From the point of view of the producer, sharing the work would make little difference to productivity. However, from the retailer's perspective each individual worker would accumulate less money to buy products. Overall sales would stagnate or decline. Prominent American economists at the time argued that sharing the work would mean sharing the unemployment. They warned the US government this was a fundamental threat to an economy based on consumption. Only a fully employed laborer could have enough money to buy down the national inventory. In 1932, N. A. Weston told the American Economic Association that: " ...[the labourers'] function in society as a consumer is of equal importance as the part he plays as a producer." (Weston 11). If the defeat of the share the work movement is the negative manifestation of consumerism, then the invasion by broadcast of our leisure time is its positive materialisation. We can trace this understanding by looking at Herbert Hoover. When he was the Secretary of Commerce in 1924 he warned station executives that: "I have never believed that it was possible to advertise through broadcasting without ruining the [radio] industry" (Radio's Big Issue). He had not recognised that broadcast advertising would be qualitatively more powerful for the economy than print advertising. By 1929, Hoover, now President Hoover, approved an economics committee recommendation in the traumatic year of 1929 that leisure time be made "consumable " (Committee on Recent Economic Changes xvi). His administration supported the growth of commercial radio because broadcasting was a new efficient answer to the economists' question of how to motivate consumption. Not so coincidentally network radio became a profitable industry during the great Depression. The economic power that pre-war radio hinted at flourished in the proliferation of post-war television. Advertisers switched their dollars from magazines to TV, causing the demise of such general interest magazines as Life, The Saturday Evening Postet al. Western Europe quickly followed the American broadcasting model. Great Britain was the first, allowing television to advertise the consumer revolution in 1955. Japan and many others started to permit advertising on television. During the era of television, the nature of work changed from manufacturing to servicing (Preston 148-9). Two working parents also became the norm as a greater percentage of the population took salaried employment, mostly women (International Labour Office). Many of the service jobs are to monitor the new global division of labour that allows industrialised nations to consume while emerging nations produce. (Chapter seven of Preston is the most current discussion of the shift of jobs within information economies and between industrialised and emerging nations.) Flexible Time/ Flexible Media Film and television has responded by depicting these shifts. The Mary Tyler Moore Show debuted in September of 1970 (see http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm). In this show nurturing and emotional attachments were centered in the work place, not in an actual biological family. It started a trend that continues to this day. However, media representations of the changing nature of work are merely symptomatic of the relationship between media and work. Broadcast advertising has a more causal relationship. As people worked more to buy more, they found that they wanted time-saving media. It is in this time period that the Internet started (1968), that the video cassette recorder was introduced (1975) and that the cable industry grew. Each of these ultimately enhanced the flexibility of work time. The VCR allowed time shifting programs. This is the media answer to the work concept of flexible time. The tired worker can now see her/his favourite TV show according to his/her own flex schedule (Wasser 2001). Cable programming, with its repeats and staggered starting times, also accommodates the new 24/7 work day. These machines, offering greater choice of programming and scheduling, are the first prototypes of interactivity. The Internet goes further in expanding flexible time by adding actual shopping to the vicarious enjoyment of consumerist products on television. The Internet user continues to perform the labour of watching advertising and, in addition, now has the opportunity to do actual work tasks at any time of the day or night. The computer enters the home as an all-purpose machine. Its purchase is motivated by several simultaneous factors. The rhetoric often stresses the recreational and work aspects of the computer in the same breath (Reed 173, Friedrich 16-7). Games drove the early computer programmers to find more "user-friendly" interfaces in order to entice young consumers. Entertainment continues to be the main driving force behind visual and audio improvements. This has been true ever since the introduction of the Apple II, Radio Shack's TRS 80 and Atari 400 personal computers in the 1977-1978 time frame (see http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html). The current ubiquity of colour monitors, and the standard package of speakers with PC computers are strong indications that entertainment and leisure pursuits continue to drive the marketing of computers. However, once the computer is in place in the study or bedroom, its uses fully integrates the user with world of work in both the sense of consuming and creating value. This is a specific instance of what Philip Graham calls the analytical convergence of production, consumption and circulation in hypercapitalism. The streaming video and audio not only captures the action of the game, they lend sensual appeal to the banner advertising and the power point downloads from work. In one regard, the advent of Internet advertising is a regression to the pre-broadcast era. The passive web site ad runs the same risk of being ignored as does print advertising. The measure of a successful web ad is interactivity that most often necessitates a click through on the part of the viewer. Ads often show up on separate windows that necessitate a click from the viewer if only to close down the program. In the words of Bolter and Grusin, click-through advertising is a hypermediation of television. In other words, it makes apparent the transparent relationship television forged between work and leisure. We do not sit passively through Internet advertising, we click to either eliminate them or to go on and buy the advertised products. Just as broadcasting facilitated consumable leisure, new media combines consumable leisure with flexible portable work. The new media landscape has had consequences, although the price of consumable leisure took awhile to become visible. The average work week declined from 1945 to 1982. After that point in the US, it has been edging up, continuously (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics). There is some question whether the computer has improved productivity (Kim), there is little question that the computer is colonising leisure time for multi-tasking. In a population that goes online from home almost twice as much as those who go online from work, almost half use their online time for work based activities other than email. Undoubtedly, email activity would account for even more work time (Horrigan). On the other side of the blur between work and leisure, the Pew Institute estimates that fifty percent use work Internet time for personal pleasure ("Wired Workers"). Media theory has to reengage the problem that Horkheimer/Adorno/Smythe raised. The contemporary problem of leisure is not so much the lack of leisure, but its fractured, non-contemplative, unfulfilling nature. 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Links http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=20 http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=22 http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bits/400.html http://www.transparencynow.com/mary.htm http://www.digitaleconomy.gov/powerpoint/triplett/index.htm http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282%28193203%2922%3C8%3ASWTAU%3 E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Wasser, Frederick. "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml >. Chicago Style Wasser, Frederick, "Media Is Driving Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Wasser, Frederick. (2001) Media Is Driving Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Wasser.xml > ([your date of access]).

In the half-century since Shannon invented information theory… engineers have come up with brilliant ways of boiling redundancy out of information… This lets it be transmitted twice as fast (Bill Gates: 33). Shannon’s Code Puts an End to Noise The digital machine is often presented as the perfect medium for the efficient transmission of coded messages: an ever-improving machine, in which coded information travels near to the-speed-of-light. Integrated into a global network of communication, transmission is assumed to be friction-free – everything and everybody are just a click away. Indeed, the old problem of signal interference is subdued by the magnum opus of communication engineering – Shannon’s noiseless channel – a cure for the undesirable uncertainties of message sending (Shannon and Weaver 19). For that reason alone, the digitally enhanced fidelity of Shannon’s digital code, not only heralds a new age of communication, but also marks the end of the problem of noise. In effect, his mathematical theory of communication, establishes a highly effective coding mechanism that travels from sender to receiver, overcoming geographic constraint and the deafening raw of the analogue milieu. This makes the theory itself the substratum of the digital communication utopia, since Shannon’s conquest of noise has solved the reliability problem of code, allowing us to focus on the rapidity and fecundity of our messages. However, despite the ingenuity of the noiseless channel, its subsequent rapid expansion into a vast network of machines means that both senders and receivers pay a price for Shannon’s brilliance. The speed and boundless reproducibility of digital code outperforms our physical capacity to observe it. In this way, transmission works behind the scenes, becoming increasingly independent of the human gaze. Even so, we are assured that we will not be overwhelmed by code; a new digital order has purportedly emerged. As follows, network innovators provide us with robotic codes that work benevolently on our behalf, exploring a seemingly random universe of connection. These intelligent codes search the tangled webs that constitute digital communication networks, autonomously in step with our fleeting transactions and data desires. We can sleep safely at night… this is The Road Ahead. But of course, as we now know, the ideal system for perpetual communication has also turned out to be the perfect medium for the codes designed to destroy it (Gordon). Instead of efficiently taking care of our transmission needs, the flow of code has been interrupted by the relational interactions of a machinic assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari). This is a vast assemblage populated by both human and non-human actors. Its evolution has not followed a predictable path determined by the innovations of the science of code, but instead responds to the complex interactions and interconnectedness of the network environment. In this way, the binary switches of the robotic code have occasionally flipped over from true to false – from the munificent to the malevolent function. The interruption seems to be relatively new, but the human-computer assemblage has a long history of the production of what I term liar codes. They follow on from Gödel and Turing’s realisation of the incompleteness and undecidability of self-referential systems of logic in the 1930s. In the following decades, von Neumann’s ideas on self-reproducing code provided early programmers with the means to play coded games of life. Thirty years later and researchers discovered how unstable a network would become when a similarly coded evolutive got out of control (Shoch and Hupp, Cohen). By 1990, the digital worm had turned. Morris’s code famously ‘crashed’ the Internet. The liar code had escaped the research lab and entered the wild world of the network. Nevertheless, despite what appears to be the uncontrollable evolution of code, it is the assemblage itself that makes a difference. Many liar codes have since followed on from the games, experiments and accidents of the early human-computer assemblage. Some are simply mischievous pranks designed to take up space by making copies of themselves, while others conceal a deeper, sinister pre-programmed function of data piracy (Bey 401-434) and viral hijack. The former spread out across a network, spewing out fairly innocuous alerts, whereas the latter steel passwords, gaining access to safe places, capturing navigation tools, and redirecting our attention to the dark side of the global village. In addition to the deluge of spam, viruses and worms, liar code arrives hidden in Trojan programs. Like Russian dolls, code slips into email inboxes. Simple viral sentences repeatedly trick us into opening these programs and spreading the infection. By saying “I love you” code becomes a recursive deceiver, concealing the true intentions of the virus writer, while ensuring that the victim plays a crucial role in the propagation of the liar. Noise Is Dead – Long Live the New Noise! More recently Liar codes have been cunningly understood as contemporary instances of cultural noise – the other of order (Parikka). However, this does not mean that a solution can be found in the universality of Shannon’s linear diagram – this is an altogether different engineering problem. In principle, Shannon’s noise was more readily apprehended. It existed primarily at a technical level (signal noise), a problem solved by the incorporation of noise into a technical code (redundancy). Contrariwise, liar codes go beyond the signal/noise ratio of the content of a message. They are environmental absurdities and anomalies that resonate outside the technical layer into the cultural milieu of the human-computer assemblage. The new noise is produced by the hissing background distortion of the network, which relentlessly drives communication to a far-from-equilibrial state. Along these lines, the production of what appears to be a surplus of code is subject to the behaviour and functioning of a vast and vulnerable topology of human and non-human machinic interaction. Is the Solution to Be Found in a Clash of Codes? In an attempt to banish the network pirates and their growing phylum of liar codes there has been a mobilisation of antivirus technologies. Netizens have been drafted in to operate the malware blockers, set up firewalls or dig the electronic trenches. But these desperate tactics appeal only to those who believe that they can reverse the drift towards instability, and return a sense of order to the network. In reality, evidence of the effectiveness of these counter measures is negligible. Despite efforts to lower the frequency of attacks, the liar code keeps seeping in. Indeed, the disorder from which the new noise emerges is quite unlike the high entropic problem encountered by Shannon. Like this, digital anomalies are not simply undesirable, random distortions, repaired by coded negentropy. On the contrary, the liar is a calculated act of violence, but this is an action that emerges from a collective, war-like assemblage. Therefore, significantly, it is not the code, but the relational interactions that evolve. For this reason, it is not simply the liar codes that threaten the stability of transmission, but the opening-up of a networked medium that captures messages, turning them into an expression of the unknown of order. Code no longer conveys a message through a channel. Not at all, it is the assemblage itself that anarchically converts the message into an altogether different form of expression. The liar is a rhizome, not a root!! (See figure 1.) A Network Diagram of Senders, Receivers and Deceivers Rhizomatic liar code introduces an anarchic scrambling of the communication model. Ad nauseam, antivirus researchers bemoan the problem of the liar code, but their code-determined defence system has seemingly failed to tell apart the senders, receivers and deceivers. Their tactics cannot sidestep the Gödelian paradox. Interestingly, current research into complex network topologies, particularly the Internet and the Web (Barabási), appears to not only support this gloomy conclusion, but confirms that the problem extends beyond code to the dynamic formation of the network itself. In this way, complex network theory may help us to understand how the human-computer assemblage comes together in the production of viral anomalies. Indeed, the digital network is not, as we may think, a random universe of free arbitrary association. It does not conform to the principles leading to inevitable equilibrium (an averaging out of connectivity). It is instead, an increasingly auto-organised and undemocratic tangle of nodes and links in which a few highly connected aristocratic clusters form alongside many isolated regions. In this far-from-random milieu, the flow of code is not determined by the linear transmission of messages between senders and receivers, or for that matter is it guided by an algorithmic evolutive. On the contrary, while aristocratic networks provide a robust means of holding an assemblage together, their topological behaviour also makes them highly susceptible to viral epidemics. Liar codes easily spread through clusters formed out of preferential linkage, and a desire for exclusive, network alliances between humans and non-humans. From a remote location, a single viral code can promiscuously infect a highly connected population of nodes (Pastor-Satorras & Vespignani). This is the perfect environment for the actions of deceivers and their liar codes. On reflection, a revised diagram of transmission, which tackles head on the viral anomalies of the human-computer assemblage, would perhaps be unworkable. This is consistent with the problem of liar codes, and the resulting collapse of trustworthy transmission. The diagram would ideally need to factor in the anarchic, scrambled lines of communication (see figure 1), as well as the complex topological relations between node and link. Such a diagram would also need to trace significant topological behaviours and functions alongside the malfunctions of codes, coders and the sharing of codes over a network. It is this significant topological intensity of the human-computer assemblage that shifts the contemporary debate on noise away from Shannon’s model towards a complex, non-linear and relational interaction. In this sense, the diagram moves closer to the rhizomatic notion of a network (Deleuze and Guattari 9-10). Not so much a model of transmission, rather a model of viral transduction. References Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, Mass: Perseus, 2002. Bey, Hakim in Ludlow, Peter (ed). Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2001. Cohen, F. “Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments.” Computers & Security 6 (1987): 22-35. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. by Brian Massumi. London: The Athlone Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. London: The Athlone Press, 1984. Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. London: Penguin, 1995/1996. Gordon, Sarah. “Technologically Enabled Crime: Shifting Paradigms for the Year 2000.” Computers and Security 1995. (5 Dec. 2005) http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/Gordon/Crime.html>. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, 1988. Parikka, Jussi. “Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture.” M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). 5 Dec. 2005 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/05-parikka.php>. Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949/1998. Shoch, John F, and Jon A Hupp. “The ‘Worm’ Programs – Early Experience with a Distributed Computation.” Communications of the ACM 25.3 (March 1982): 172–180. 5 Dec. 2005. Pastor-Satorras, Romualdo, and Alessandro Vespignani. “Epidemic Spreading in Scale-Free Networks.” Physical Review Letters 86 (2001). Von Neumann, John, and Arthur Burks. Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. University of Illinois Press, 1966. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Sampson, Tony. "Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/03-sampson.php>. APA Style Sampson, T. (Mar. 2006) "Senders, Receivers and Deceivers: How Liar Codes Put Noise Back on the Diagram of Transmission," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/03-sampson.php>.

Introduction Many social media tools and services are free to use. This fact often leads users to the mistaken presumption that the associated data generated whilst utilising these tools and services is without value. Users often focus on the social and presumed ephemeral nature of communication – imagining something that happens but then has no further record or value, akin to a telephone call – while corporations behind these tools tend to focus on the media side, the lasting value of these traces which can be combined, mined and analysed for new insight and revenue generation. This paper seeks to explore this social media contradiction in two ways. Firstly, a cursory examination of Google and Facebook will demonstrate how data mining and analysis are core practices for these corporate giants, central to their functioning, development and expansion. Yet the public rhetoric of these companies is not about the exchange of personal information for services, but rather the more utopian notions of organising the world’s information, or bringing everyone together through sharing. The second section of this paper examines some of the core ramifications of death in terms of social media, asking what happens when a user suddenly exists only as recorded media fragments, at least in digital terms. Death, at first glance, renders users (or post-users) without agency or, implicitly, value to companies which data-mine ongoing social practices. Yet the emergence of digital legacy management highlights the value of the data generated using social media, a value which persists even after death. The question of a digital estate thus illustrates the cumulative value of social media as media, even on an individual level. The ways Facebook and Google approach digital death are examined, demonstrating policies which enshrine the agency and rights of living users, but become far less coherent posthumously. Finally, along with digital legacy management, I will examine the potential for posthumous digital legacies which may, in some macabre ways, actually reanimate some aspects of a deceased user’s presence, such as the Lives On service which touts the slogan “when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting”. Cumulatively, mapping digital legacy management by large online corporations, and the affordances of more focussed services dealing with digital death, illustrates the value of data generated by social media users, and the continued importance of the data even beyond the grave. Google While Google is universally synonymous with search, and is the world’s dominant search engine, it is less widely understood that one of the core elements keeping Google’s search results relevant is a complex operation mining user data. Different tools in Google’s array of services mine data in different ways (Zimmer, “Gaze”). Gmail, for example, uses algorithms to analyse an individual’s email in order to display the most relevant related advertising. This form of data mining is comparatively well known, with most Gmail users knowingly and willingly accepting more personalised advertising in order to use Google’s email service. However, the majority of people using Google’s search engine are unaware that search, too, is increasingly driven by the tracking, analysis and refining of results on the basis of user activity (Zimmer, “Externalities”). As Alexander Halavais (160–180) quite rightly argues, recent focus on the idea of social search – the deeper integration of social network information in gauging search results – is oxymoronic; all search, at least for Google, is driven by deep analysis of personal and aggregated social data. Indeed, the success of Google’s mining of user data has led to concerns that often invisible processes of customisation and personalisation will mean that the supposedly independent or objective algorithms producing Google’s search results will actually yield a different result for every person. As Siva Vaidhyanathan laments: “as users in a diverse array of countries train Google’s algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localised results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or ‘relevant’ in response to any query” (138). Personalisation and customisation are not inherently problematic, and frequently do enhance the relevance of search results, but the main objection raised by critics is not Google’s data mining, but the lack of transparency in the way data are recorded, stored and utilised. Eli Pariser, for example, laments the development of a ubiquitous “filter bubble” wherein all search results are personalised and subjective but are hidden behind the rhetoric of computer-driven algorithmic objectivity (Pariser). While data mining informs and drives many of Google’s tools and services, the cumulative value of these captured fragments of information is best demonstrated by the new service Google Now. Google Now is a mobile app which delivers an ongoing stream of search results but without the need for user input. Google Now extrapolates the rhythms of a person’s life, their interests and their routines in order to algorithmically determine what information will be needed next, and automatically displays it on a user’s mobile device. Clearly Google Now is an extremely valuable and clever tool, and the more information a user shares, the better the ongoing customised results will be, demonstrating the direct exchange value of personal data: total personalisation requires total transparency. Each individual user will need to judge whether they wish to share with Google the considerable amount of personal information needed to make Google Now work. The pressing ethical question that remains is whether Google will ensure that users are sufficiently aware of the amount of data and personal privacy they are exchanging in order to utilise such a service. Facebook Facebook began as a closed network, open only to students at American universities, but has transformed over time to a much wider and more open network, with over a billion registered users. Facebook has continually reinvented their interface, protocols and design, often altering both privacy policies and users’ experience of privacy, and often meeting significant and vocal resistance in the process (boyd). The data mining performed by social networking service Facebook is also extensive, although primarily aimed at refining the way that targeted advertising appears on the platform. In 2007 Facebook partnered with various retail loyalty services and combined these records with Facebook’s user data. This information was used to power Facebook’s Beacon service, which added details of users’ retail history to their Facebook news feed (for example, “Tama just purchased a HTC One”). The impact of all of these seemingly unrelated purchases turning up in many people’s feeds suddenly revealed the complex surveillance, data mining and sharing of these data that was taking place (Doyle and Fraser). However, as Beacon was turned on, without consultation, for all Facebook users, there was a sizable backlash that meant that Facebook had to initially switch the service to opt-in, and then discontinue it altogether. While Beacon has been long since erased, it is notable that in early 2013 Facebook announced that they have strengthened partnerships with data mining and profiling companies, including Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, which harness customer information from a range of loyalty cards, to further refine the targeting ability offered to advertisers using Facebook (Hof). Facebook’s data mining, surveillance and integration across companies is thus still going on, but no longer directly visible to Facebook users, except in terms of the targeted advertisements which appear on the service. Facebook is also a platform, providing a scaffolding and gateway to many other tools and services. In order to use social games such as Zynga’s Farmville, Facebook users agree to allow Zynga to access their profile information, and use Facebook to authenticate their identity. Zynga has been unashamedly at the forefront of user analytics and data mining, attempting to algorithmically determine the best way to make virtual goods within their games attractive enough for users to pay for them with real money. Indeed, during a conference presentation, Zynga Vice President Ken Rudin stated outright that Zynga is “an analytics company masquerading as a games company” (Rudin). I would contend that this masquerade succeeds, as few Farmville players are likely to consider how their every choice and activity is being algorithmically scrutinised in order to determine what virtual goods they might actually buy. As an instance of what is widely being called ‘big data’, the data miing operations of Facebook, Zynga and similar services lead to a range of ethical questions (boyd and Crawford). While users may have ostensibly agreed to this data mining after clicking on Facebook’s Terms of Use agreement, the fact that almost no one reads these agreements when signing up for a service is the Internet’s worst kept secret. Similarly, the extension of these terms when Facebook operates as a platform for other applications is a far from transparent process. While examining the recording of user data leads to questions of privacy and surveillance, it is important to note that many users are often aware of the exchange to which they have agreed. Anders Albrechtslund deploys the term ‘social surveillance’ to usefully emphasise the knowing, playful and at times subversive approach some users take to the surveillance and data mining practices of online service providers. Similarly, E.J. Westlake notes that performances of self online are often not only knowing but deliberately false or misleading with the aim of exploiting the ways online activities are tracked. However, even users well aware of Facebook’s data mining on the site itself may be less informed about the social networking company’s mining of offsite activity. The introduction of ‘like’ buttons on many other Websites extends Facebook’s reach considerably. The various social plugins and ‘like’ buttons expand both active recording of user activity (where the like button is actually clicked) and passive data mining (since a cookie is installed or updated regardless of whether a button is actually pressed) (Gerlitz and Helmond). Indeed, because cookies – tiny packets of data exchanged and updated invisibly in browsers – assign each user a unique identifier, Facebook can either combine these data with an existing user’s profile or create profiles about non-users. If that person even joins Facebook, their account is connected with the existing, data-mined record of their Web activities (Roosendaal). As with Google, the significant issue here is not users knowingly sharing their data with Facebook, but the often complete lack of transparency in terms of the ways Facebook extracts and mines user data, both on Facebook itself and increasingly across applications using Facebook as a platform and across the Web through social plugins. Google after Death While data mining is clearly a core element in the operation of Facebook and Google, the ability to scrutinise the activities of users depends on those users being active; when someone dies, the question of the value and ownership of their digital assets becomes complicated, as does the way companies manage posthumous user information. For Google, the Gmail account of a deceased person becomes inactive; the stored email still takes up space on Google’s servers, but with no one using the account, no advertising is displayed and thus Google can earn no revenue from the account. However, the process of accessing the Gmail account of a deceased relative is an incredibly laborious one. In order to even begin the process, Google asks that someone physically mails a series of documents including a photocopy of a government-issued ID, the death certificate of the deceased person, evidence of an email the requester received from the deceased, along with other personal information. After Google have received and verified this information, they state that they might proceed to a second stage where further documents are required. Moreover, if at any stage Google decide that they cannot proceed in releasing a deceased relative’s Gmail account, they will not reveal their rationale. As their support documentation states: “because of our concerns for user privacy, if we determine that we cannot provide the Gmail content, we will not be able to share further details about the account or discuss our decision” (Google, “Accessing”). Thus, Google appears to enshrine the rights and privacy of individual users, even posthumously; the ownership or transfer of individual digital assets after death is neither a given, nor enshrined in Google’s policies. Yet, ironically, the economic value of that email to Google is likely zero, but the value of the email history of a loved one or business partner may be of substantial financial and emotional value, probably more so than when that person was alive. For those left behind, the value of email accounts as media, as a lasting record of social communication, is heightened. The question of how Google manages posthumous user data has been further complicated by the company’s March 2012 rationalisation of over seventy separate privacy policies for various tools and services they operate under the umbrella of a single privacy policy accessed using a single unified Google account. While this move was ostensibly to make privacy more understandable and transparent at Google, it had other impacts. For example, one of the side effects of a singular privacy policy and single Google identity is that deleting one of a recently deceased person’s services may inadvertently delete them all. Given that Google’s services include Gmail, YouTube and Picasa, this means that deleting an email account inadvertently erases all of the Google-hosted videos and photographs that individual posted during their lifetime. As Google warns, for example: “if you delete the Google Account to which your YouTube account is linked, you will delete both the Google Account AND your YouTube account, including all videos and account data” (Google, “What Happens”). A relative having gained access to a deceased person’s Gmail might sensibly delete the email account once the desired information is exported. However, it seems less likely that this executor would realise that in doing so all of the private and public videos that person had posted on YouTube would also permanently disappear. While material possessions can be carefully dispersed to specific individuals following the instructions in someone’s will, such affordances are not yet available for Google users. While it is entirely understandable that the ramification of policy changes are aimed at living users, as more and more online users pass away, the question of their digital assets becomes increasingly important. Google, for example, might allow a deceased person’s executor to elect which of their Google services should be kept online (perhaps their YouTube videos), which traces can be exported (perhaps their email), and which services can be deleted. At present, the lack of fine-grained controls over a user’s digital estate at Google makes this almost impossible. While it violates Google’s policies to transfer ownership of an account to another person, if someone does leave their passwords behind, this provides their loved ones with the best options in managing their digital legacy with Google. When someone dies and their online legacy is a collection of media fragments, the value of those media is far more apparent to the loved ones left behind rather than the companies housing those media. Facebook Memorialisation In response to users complaining that Facebook was suggesting they reconnect with deceased friends who had left Facebook profiles behind, in 2009 the company instituted an official policy of turning the Facebook profiles of departed users into memorial pages (Kelly). Technically, loved ones can choose between memorialisation and erasing an account altogether, but memorialisation is the default. This entails setting the account so that no one can log into it, and that no new friends (connections) can be made. Existing friends can access the page in line with the user’s final privacy settings, meaning that most friends will be able to post on the memorialised profile to remember that person in various ways (Facebook). Memorialised profiles (now Timelines, after Facebook’s redesign) thus become potential mourning spaces for existing connections. Since memorialised pages cannot make new connections, public memorial pages are increasingly popular on Facebook, frequently set up after a high-profile death, often involving young people, accidents or murder. Recent studies suggest that both of these Facebook spaces are allowing new online forms of mourning to emerge (Marwick and Ellison; Carroll and Landry; Kern, Forman, and Gil-Egui), although public pages have the downside of potentially inappropriate commentary and outright trolling (Phillips). Given Facebook has over a billion registered users, estimates already suggest that the platform houses 30 million profiles of deceased people, and this number will, of course, continue to grow (Kaleem). For Facebook, while posthumous users do not generate data themselves, the fact that they were part of a network means that their connections may interact with a memorialised account, or memorial page, and this activity, like all Facebook activities, allows the platform to display advertising and further track user interactions. However, at present Facebook’s options – to memorialise or delete accounts of deceased people – are fairly blunt. Once Facebook is aware that a user has died, no one is allowed to edit that person’s Facebook account or Timeline, so Facebook literally offers an all (memorialisation) or nothing (deletion) option. Given that Facebook is essentially a platform for performing identities, it seems a little short-sighted that executors cannot clean up or otherwise edit the final, lasting profile of a deceased Facebook user. As social networking services and social media become more ingrained in contemporary mourning practices, it may be that Facebook will allow more fine-grained control, positioning a digital executor also as a posthumous curator, making the final decision about what does and does not get kept in the memorialisation process. Since Facebook is continually mining user activity, the popularity of mourning as an activity on Facebook will likely mean that more attention is paid to the question of digital legacies. While the user themselves can no longer be social, the social practices of mourning, and the recording of a user as a media entity highlights the fact that social media can be about interactions which in significant ways include deceased users. Digital Legacy Services While the largest online corporations have fairly blunt tools for addressing digital death, there are a number of new tools and niche services emerging in this area which are attempting to offer nuanced control over digital legacies. Legacy Locker, for example, offers to store the passwords to all of a user’s online services and accounts, from Facebook to Paypal, and to store important documents and other digital material. Users designate beneficiaries who will receive this information after the account holder passes away, and this is confirmed by preselected “verifiers” who can attest to the account holder’s death. Death Switch similarly provides the ability to store and send information to users after the account holder dies, but tests whether someone is alive by sending verification emails; fail to respond to several prompts and Death Switch will determine a user has died, or is incapacitated, and executes the user’s final instructions. Perpetu goes a step further and offers the same tools as Legacy Locker but also automates existing options from social media services, allowing users to specify, for example, that their Facebook, Twitter or Gmail data should be downloaded and this archive should be sent to a designated recipient when the Perpetu user dies. These tools attempt to provide a more complex array of choices in terms of managing a user’s digital legacy, providing similar choices to those currently available when addressing material possessions in a formal will. At a broader level, the growing demand for these services attests to the ongoing value of online accounts and social media traces after a user’s death. Bequeathing passwords may not strictly follow the Terms of Use of the online services in question, but it is extremely hard to track or intervene when a user has the legitimate password, even if used by someone else. More to the point, this finely-grained legacy management allows far more flexibility in the utilisation and curation of digital assets posthumously. In the process of signing up for one of these services, or digital legacy management more broadly, the ongoing value and longevity of social media traces becomes more obvious to both the user planning their estate and those who ultimately have to manage it. The Social Media Afterlife The value of social media beyond the grave is also evident in the range of services which allow users to communicate in some fashion after they have passed away. Dead Social, for example, allows users to schedule posthumous social media activity, including the posting of tweets, sending of email, Facebook messages, or the release of online photos and videos. The service relies on a trusted executor confirming someone’s death, and after that releases these final messages effectively from beyond the grave. If I Die is a similar service, which also has an integrated Facebook application which ensures a user’s final message is directly displayed on their Timeline. In a bizarre promotional campaign around a service called If I Die First, the company is promising that the first user of the service to pass away will have their posthumous message delivered to a huge online audience, via popular blogs and mainstream press coverage. While this is not likely to appeal to everyone, the notion of a popular posthumous performance of self further complicates that question of what social media can mean after death. Illustrating the value of social media legacies in a quite different but equally powerful way, the Lives On service purports to algorithmically learn how a person uses Twitter while they are live, and then continue to tweet in their name after death. Internet critic Evgeny Morozov argues that Lives On is part of a Silicon Valley ideology of ‘solutionism’ which casts every facet of society as a problem in need of a digital solution (Morozov). In this instance, Lives On provides some semblance of a solution to the problem of death. While far from defeating death, the very fact that it might be possible to produce any meaningful approximation of a living person’s social media after they die is powerful testimony to the value of data mining and the importance of recognising that value. While Lives On is an experimental service in its infancy, it is worth wondering what sort of posthumous approximation might be built using the robust data profiles held by Facebook or Google. If Google Now can extrapolate what a user wants to see without any additional input, how hard would it be to retool this service to post what a user would have wanted after their death? Could there, in effect, be a Google After(life)? Conclusion Users of social media services have differing levels of awareness regarding the exchange they are agreeing to when signing up for services provided by Google or Facebook, and often value the social affordances without necessarily considering the ongoing media they are creating. Online corporations, by contrast, recognise and harness the informatic traces users generate through complex data mining and analysis. However, the death of a social media user provides a moment of rupture which highlights the significant value of the media traces a user leaves behind. More to the point, the value of these media becomes most evident to those left behind precisely because that individual can no longer be social. While beginning to address the issue of posthumous user data, Google and Facebook both have very blunt tools; Google might offer executors access while Facebook provides the option of locking a deceased user’s account as a memorial or removing it altogether. Neither of these responses do justice to the value that these media traces hold for the living, but emerging digital legacy management tools are increasingly providing a richer set of options for digital executors. While the differences between material and digital assets provoke an array of legal, spiritual and moral issues, digital traces nevertheless clearly hold significant and demonstrable value. For social media users, the death of someone they know is often the moment where the media side of social media – their lasting, infinitely replicable nature – becomes more important, more visible, and casts the value of the social media accounts of the living in a new light. For the larger online corporations and service providers, the inevitable increase in deceased users will likely provoke more fine-grained controls and responses to the question of digital legacies and posthumous profiles. 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