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Digital Media as Ambient Therapy explores the ways “mental illness” can emerge from our relationships (with ourselves, others, and the world), to address the concern around what kind of relationality is conducive for “mental health” and what role digital technologies can play in fostering such relationality.Exploring the rise of ambient—that is to say, ubiquitous, surrounding, and environmental—technologies and their impact on our understanding of “mental health,” sanity, and therapy, this book critically examines the work of influential contemporary social theorists such as Hartmut Rosa and investigates case studies that reveal new modes of digitally mediated intimacy and attention, such as ASMR and QAnon. It also poses the question of what “mental health” and “mental illness” mean for subjects increasingly faced with a maddening sense of interconnectedness.This book offers new perspectives for academics and postgraduates interested in critical discussions of alienation, digital technology, and contemporary social theory.

This book presents research conducted with children and young people about online harms, with a UK focus, while aiming to stimulate comparative analyses of other countries too. While the chapters vary in how data-driven they are, each will explore conceptualisations of online harm, children and young people's experiences of online harms, and their perspectives on interventions to educate about and address online harms. While the UK government claimed in 2019 to be introducing ‘tough new measures to make the UK the safest place to be online', it has been noted that there may be a limited capacity for formal legislation to address the complexities of contemporary digital life for children and young people; instead, tackling online harms has to be part of a broader agenda and must account for the diverse and socially contingent nature of children's and young people's experiences online, as evidenced by extensive research undertaken with children and young people. With the finalisation of legislation surrounding online harms in the UK imminent, the objective of this collection is to shape the implementation of policy in practice settings. To support practice development, the book offers vignette-style pieces that will describe examples of policy and practice models and how these models can support children's and young people's active participation in understanding online harms. As a result of this, the findings of this book will minimise the disparity between the practice, policy and research through speaking to the interface between these fields in the UK context.

This book addresses the growing use of computerized systems to influence people's decisions without their awareness, a significant but underappreciated sea-change in the way the world works. To assess these systems, this volume's contributors explore the philosophical and ethical dimensions of algorithms that guide people's behavior by nudging them toward choices preferred by systems architects. Particularly in an era of heightened awareness of bias and discrimination, these systems raise profound concerns about the morality of such activities. This volume brings together a diverse array of thinkers to critically examine these nudging systems. Not only are high-level perspectives presented, but so too are of those who use them on a day-to-day basis. While algorithmic nudging can produce benefits for users there are also many less-obvious costs to using such systems, costs that require examination and deliberation. This book is a major step towards delineating these concerns andsuggesting ways to provide a sounder basis for future policies for algorithms. It should be of interest to system designers, public policymakers, scholars, and those who wonder more deeply about the nudges they receive from various websites and on their phones.

In Digital Immigrants and Media Integration: The Smartphone Is the Synthesizer, Sally J. McMillan draws insights from the lived experience of digital immigrants who are Baby Boomers and who grew up without digital mobile technologies and have transitioned to become smartphone users. McMillan traces key points in media evolution that shaped the communication tools that digital immigrants use today, demonstrating that continued incremental change has led to a shift in focus from media types to media interfaces, with smartphones becoming ubiquitous and indispensable – the smartphone, she posits, is now firmly tied to identity. Although the telegraph was the first medium to allow the message to arrive before the messenger and initiated the transition from “cool” to “hot” media, it is the smartphone that has fully synthesized communication forms and functions into a single digital and mobile device. Through collecting and analyzing these personal and public histories, McMillan finds that digital immigrants continue to seek a balance between value and ease, and between breadth and depth of communication. Scholars of communication, media ecology, and technology will find this book of particular interest.

¿Las personas con autismo nos permiten vislumbrar nuestra futura condición humana? ¿Podríamos estar impulsando nuestra propia evolución con nuestra tecnología y, de hecho, estar asistiendo al inicio de la siguiente etapa de la evolución humana? La tesis central de este libro es que, desde que hemos delegado la capacidad de leer los contextos en tecnologías como las redes sociales, la localización y los sensores, nos hemos vuelto ciegos al contexto. Dado que la ceguera al contexto -o caetextia en latín- es uno de los síntomas más dominantes del comportamiento autista en los niveles más altos del espectro, es posible que las personas con esa condición nos den un vistazo a nuestra propia evolución en el corto plazo. Podríamos estar asistiendo al inicio de la siguiente etapa de la evolución humana: el Homo caetextus. Con inundaciones e incendios cada vez más frecuentes y veranos insoportablemente calurosos, la huella humana en nuestro planeta debería ser evidente para todos, pero no lo es porque estamos ciegos al contexto. Ahora podemos ver y sentir el calentamiento global. Estamos siendo testigos de la evolución en tiempo real y dando a luz a nuestras especies sucesoras. Nuestros bisnietos pueden resultar una especie muy distinta a la nuestra. Este libro es imprescindible para todos los cursos de comunicación y estudios de los medios de comunicación que se ocupan de tecnologías digitales, los medios de comunicación, la cultura y la sociedad. También resultará esclarecedor para un público lector general preocupado por la polarización de la esfera pública, las dificultades para sostener la gobernanza democrática, las conspiraciones desenfrenadas y fenómenos como la cultura de la cancelación y la necesidad de avisos de contenidos sensibles y espacios seguros.

Using a lens of mindfulness, this book explores how digital dependencies can displace attention and undermine attentional control, leading to experiences of stress and mindless involvement with digital technology. Using qualitative interviews with teachers and students of mindfulness programmes, the book explores the challenges and opportunities for reconciling digital interactions with mindful practice. A phenomenological analysis of participants'digital experiences shows three different imperatives (relating to digital capabilities, hyper-reality and algorithms), that can drive unconscious forms of interaction and encourage a delegation of attentional control that draws users away from the present moment. The book concludes by exploring the implications of these (extra-conscious) imperatives for understanding digital addiction. It also provides a set of guidelines for a digital approach to mindfulness practice that can encourage beneficial relationships with digital technology into the future.

This volume brings together an international team of authors to investigate a wide range of issues concerning the fundamental role of media technologies in shaping contemporary emotional life. Chapters explore key aspects of the mediatisation of emotional life, feelings and interpersonal relations: love, intimacy, loneliness, friendship, family relations, erotic, sexual and romantic experiences.The authors explain the key aspects of strong user–media relationships and human relationships based on media use and investigate problems such as the formation of identity based on social media, the role of communication applications and the effects of mobile and locative media on our relationships, as well as artificial intelligence, on our perception of our emotions. With a focus on new media, the book also draws on the scope of traditional media that express and shape emotions, taking into account the classic approaches to emotionality of messages from the perspective of film creators and recipients.This cutting-edge collection will be of interest to scholars and students of media and communication studies, especially digital media and new technologies, psychology, pedagogy, sociology of everyday life and cultural studies.Chapters 5 and 10 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Are people with autism giving us a glimpse into our future human condition? Could we be driving our own evolution with our technology and, in fact, be witnessing the beginning of the next stage of human evolution? The thesis at the center of this book is that since we have delegated the ability to read context to contextual technologies such as social media, location, and sensors, we have become context blind. Since context blindness—or caetextia in Latin—is one of the most dominant symptoms of autistic behavior at the highest levels of the spectrum, people with autism may indeed be giving us a peek into our human condition soon. We could be witnessing the beginning of the next stage of human evolution—Homo caetextus. With increasingly frequent floods and fires and unbearably hot summers, the human footprint on our planet should be evident to all, but it is not because we are context blind. We can now see and feel global warming. We are witnessing evolution in real-time and birthing our successor species. Our great-grandchildren may be a species very distinct from us. This book is a must for all communication and media studies courses dealing with digital technology, media, culture, and society. And a general reading public concerned with the polarized public sphere, difficulties in sustaining democratic governance, rampant conspiracies, and phenomena such as cancel culture and the need for trigger warnings and safe spaces, will find it enlightening.

The exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness experienced under digital capitalism, explored through works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers.Sometimes, interacting with digital platforms, we want to be passive—in those moments of dissociation when we scroll mindlessly rather than connecting with anyone, for example, or when our only response is a shrugging “lol.” Despite encouragement by these platforms to “be yourself,” we want to be anyone but ourselves. Tung-Hui Hu calls this state of exhaustion, disappointment, and listlessness digital lethargy. This condition permeates our lives under digital capitalism, whether we are “users,” who are what they click, or racialized workers in Asia and the Global South. Far from being a state of apathy, however, lethargy may hold the potential for social change. Hu explores digital lethargy through a series of works by contemporary artists, writers, and performers. These dispatches from the bleeding edge of digital culture include a fictional dystopia where low-wage Mexican workers laugh and emote for white audiences; a group that invites lazy viewers to strap their Fitbits to a swinging metronome, faking fitness and earning a discount on their health insurance premiums; and a memoir of burnout in an Amazon warehouse. These works dwell within the ordinariness and even banality of digital life, redirecting our attention toward moments of thwarted agency, waiting and passing time. Lethargy, writes Hu, is a drag: it weighs down our ability to rush to solutions, and forces us to talk about the unresolved present.

This is the first book to present an aesthetics of virtual reality media. It situates virtual reality media in terms of the philosophy of the arts, comparing them to more familiar media such as painting, film and photography.When philosophers have approached virtual reality, they have almost always done so through the lens of metaphysics, asking questions about the reality of virtual items and worlds, about the value of such things, and indeed, about how they may reshape our understanding of the'real'world. Grant Tavinor finds that approach to be fundamentally mistaken, and that to really account for virtual reality, we must focus on the medium and its uses, and not the hypothetical and speculative instances that are typically the focus of earlier works. He also argues that much of the cultural and metaphysical hype around virtual reality is undeserved. But this does not mean that virtual reality is illusory or uninteresting; on the contrary, it is significant for the altogether different reason that it overturns much of our understanding of how representational media can function and what we can use them to achieve.The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, philosophy of art, philosophy of technology, metaphysics, and game studies.