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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.

What are you willing to lose for a connected life? Digital detox expert Tanya Goodin explores the cost that our digital life inflicts on our offline existence, and offers a toolkit to anyone who has lost their way. Whether you are dealing with a partner who is mindlessly scrolling rather than listening to you (phubbing), flooding social media with your child's image (sharenting), or panicking whenever you misplace your phone (nomophobia), learn how to recognise and label harmful habits– both of yourself and others – and find actionable answers in this book. The collision of our online and offline worlds has left us more dependent on technology than ever before, and even more desperate to log off. My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open is your key to finding digital balance and addressing strange new social norms. Complete with diagnostic guides to tell-tale signs and a manifesto for improved digital citizenship, this habit-improving bible offers the conversation-starting vocabulary we so desperately need to understand and untangle our relationship with technology for a more humane world. Among the scenarios included are: Doomscrolling – endlessly consuming doom-and-gloom news, a habit perpetuated by attention-seeking algorithms that triggers anxiety and depression; Comparison Culture – 52% of teens feel less confident because of feeling inadequate when comparing their social media profiles with other people's; Vampire Shoppers – dead-of-night, sleepless shoppers who spend a third more than daytime shoppers, and range from nocturnal gamers to exhausted parents; Digital Legacies – before the end of the century there could be 4.9 billion deceased internet users, yet only 7% of us want our online profiles maintained after death; Cyberchondria – Dr Google is causing a wave of misdiagnoses from anxious searchers, with 35% of all US adults among this number; Clicktivism – also known as slacktivism, is virtue signalling through performative alignment with online causes, but can it ever amount to meaningful change? Both a wake-up call and a user's guide, My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open is your key to finding digital balance.

Can moderated screen time actually have a positive impact on young people's mental health? With over 30 expert contributors spanning a range of disciplines including psychology, education and communications, as well as young people′s own perspectives, this book dispels some of the myths that surround young people's use of digital media and covers important topics ranging from safeguarding, to digital citizenship and the fear of missing out. Using reflective activities, practical tips and evidence-based research, this book will help you find out informed ways social and digital media can be used beneficially, providing vital understanding to anyone studying child and adolescent mental health.

Why technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers.In Urban Play, Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play--in the sense of acting for one's own enjoyment rather than to achieve a goal--that we explore new territories, create new devices and languages, and transform ourselves. Only then can innovative spatial design create resonant spaces that go beyond functionalism to evoke an emotional response in those who use them. The authors show how creativity emerges in moments of instability, when a new technology overthrows an established one, or when internal factors change a technology until it becomes a different technology. Exploring the role of fantasy in design, they examine Disney World and its outsize influence on design and on forms of social interaction beyond the entertainment world. They also consider Las Vegas and Dubai, desert cities that combine technology with fantasies of pleasure and wealth. Video games and interactive media, they show, infuse the design process with interactivity and participatory dynamics, leaving spaces open to variations depending on the users'behavior. Throughout, they pinpoint the critical moments when technology plays a key role in reshaping how we design and experience spaces.

People have always depended on the mass media for information and entertainment. With mobile devices and easy access to the internet, people are now in constant connection with an ever growing source of information and entertainment and they contribute their own content to those sources through social media. As their media usage shifts towards digital media with their immediacy, interactivity, and intrusiveness, the way media affects people has fundamentally changed. Digital Media Effects focuses on those changes in media effects. While the author acknowledges the findings from the very large literature of effects from exposure to traditional media. Expanding from traditional media effects studies, this book focuses attention on the kinds of effects that have arisen in the new digital age.

How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices.In Tactics of Interfacing, Ksenia Fedorova explores how digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world. With the advent of ubiquitous computing, the self becomes an object of technological application, increasingly defined by data received from tracking technologies. Subtly, these technologies encourage versions of ourselves that are easier to interpret computationally. Fedorova views these shifts in self-perception through the lens of contemporary media art practices, examining a range of artistic tactics that enable embodied and intimate experiences of machinic operations on our lives.

Negli ultimi anni si è discusso molto degli effetti che le nuove tecnologie hanno prodotto e stanno producendo sulle nostre facoltà mentali. Tale cambiamento è stato spesso interpretato nei termini di un progressivo deterioramento dell'attenzione: sovraccarico cognitivo, incapacità di concentrarsi, disturbo da deficit dell'attenzione sarebbero tutti fenomeni causati dalla diffusione massiccia dei dispositivi digitali. La tesi di questo libro è che l'interpretazione di tali processi nei termini di una «degradazione» o «crisi» dell'attenzione non basti a spiegare il fenomeno ed è pertanto necessario proporre una visione alternativa. La grande maggioranza degli studi sull'attenzione assume, infatti, un'impostazione individualistica e universalistica: tratta l'oggetto di ricerca come un fenomeno esclusivamente individuale e limita il proprio interesse alle funzioni mentali condivise da tutti gli esseri umani. Molte delle ricerche dedicate agli effetti della tecnologia digitale sulla configurazione biologica dei processi mentali corrono quindi il rischio di riprodurre una visione onnipotente della tecnologia, capace, da sé, di plasmare il contesto sociale in cui ciascuno vive. L'obiettivo qui è, invece, di porre al centro la variabilità culturale e sociale dei processi cognitivi e, allo stesso tempo, di analizzare la molteplicità di forze e di ambienti tecnici e sociali che incoraggiano, stimolano e inibiscono alcuni meccanismi cognitivi piuttosto che altri, anche in chiave diacronica. Il libro mette dunque in primo piano proprio le convenzioni culturali, le norme sociali e gli ambienti ecologici che strutturano l'attenzione individuale e collettiva, senza ridurla alla sola focalizzazione; emerge così la pluralità delle forze in gioco, che non sono limitate solo all'ambito della tecnologia e della biologia.

Modern populations are superficially aware of media potentials and paraphernalia, but recent events have emphasized the general ignorance of the sentient media. Advertising has long been suspected of cognitive manipulation, but emergent issues of political hacking, false news, disinformation campaigns, lies, neuromarketing, misuse of social media, pervasive surveillance, and cyber warfare are presently challenging the world as we know it. Media Models to Foster Collective Human Coherence in the PSYCHecology is an assemblage of pioneering research on the methods and applications of video games designed as a new genre of dream analogs. Highlighting topics including virtual reality, personality profiling, and dream structure, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, academicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, media specialists, game designers, and students hoping for the creation of sustainable social patterns in the emergent reality of energy and information.

Opting out of Digital Media showcases the role of human agency and cultural identity in the development and use of digital technologies. Based on academic research, news and trade reports, popular culture and 105 in-depth interviews, this book explores the contemporary'opting out'trend. It focuses directly on people's intentions and the many reasons why they engage with or reject digital technologies. Author Bonnie Brennen illustrates the nuanced thinking and numerous reasons why people choose to use some new technologies and reject others. Some interviewees opt out of digital technologies because of their ethical, political, environmental, religious or cultural beliefs. Other people consider new media superficial diversions that do not meet their expectations, needs or interests while some citizens worry about issues of privacy and security and reject digital technologies because of their fears. Still other people construct their cultural identities through the choices they make about their use of new media. In many cases the use or nonuse of digital technologies offers specific representations of how people assert their independence, authority and agency over new media, while in some cases the choices that people make about new technologies also illustrate their class position or socioeconomic status.Opting Out of Digital Media responds to the growing opting out trend, addressing the developments in the unplugging phenomenon. It serves as the ideal text for any reader interested in the role of digital technologies in our lives and how it has become a part of a mainstream movement.

Digital technologies are deeply embedded in everyday life with opportunities for information access and perpetual social contact now mediating most of our activities and relationships. This book expands the lens of Cyberpsychology to consider how digital experiences play out across the various stages of people's lives. Most psychological research has focused on whether human-technology interactions are a ‘good'or a ‘bad'thing for humanity. This book offers a distinctive approach to the emergent area of Cyberpsychology, moving beyond these binary dilemmas and considering how popular technologies have come to frame human experience and relationships. In particular the authors explore the role of significant life stages in defining the evolving purpose of digital technologies. They discuss how people's symbiotic relationship with digital technologies has started to redefine our childhoods, how we experience ourselves, how we make friends, our experience of being alone, how we have sex and form romantic relationships, our capacity for being antisocial as well as the experience of growing older and dying. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners across psychology, digital technology and media studies as well as anyone interested in how technology influences our behaviour.

How do people avoid the stresses of the digital age? Urban dwellers must now turn to nature to recover, restore and rebalance after the stresses brought on by relentless digital connectivity. It is easy to task nature as the cure, with technology as the ailment. In Network Nature, Richard Coyne challenges the definitions of both the natural and the artificial that support this time-worn narrative of nature's benefits. In the process, he attacks the counter-claim that nature must succumb to the sovereignty of digital data. Covering a spectrum of issues and concepts, from big data and biohacking to animality, numinous spaces and the post-digital, he draws on the rich field of semiotics as applied to natural systems and human communication, to enhance our understanding of place, landscape and architecture in a digital world.

This book takes the interface – or rather to interface, a process rather than a discrete object or location – as a concept emblematic of our contemporary embodied relationship with technological artefacts. The fundamental question addressed by this book is: How can we understand what it means to perceive or act upon the world as a body–artefact assemblage? Black works to clarify the role of artefacts of all kinds in human perception and action, then considers the ways in which new digital technologies can expand and transform this capacity to change our mode of engagement with our environment. Throughout, the discussion is grounded in specific technologies – some already familiar and some still in development (e.g. new virtual reality and brain–machine interface technologies, natural user interfaces, etc.). In order to develop a detailed, generalizable theory of how we interface with technology, Black assembles an analytical toolkit from a number of different disciplines, including media theory, ethology, clinical psychology, cultural theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, cultural history, aesthetics and neuroscience.

“Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers David and Goliath and Outliers“One of the most mesmerizing and important books I've read in quite some time. Alter brilliantly illuminates the new obsessions that are controlling our lives and offers the tools we need to rescue our businesses, our families, and our sanity.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and TakeWelcome to the age of behavioral addiction—an age in which half of the American population is addicted to at least one behavior. We obsess over our emails, Instagram likes, and Facebook feeds; we binge on TV episodes and YouTube videos; we work longer hours each year; and we spend an average of three hours each day using our smartphones. Half of us would rather suffer a broken bone than a broken phone, and Millennial kids spend so much time in front of screens that they struggle to interact with real, live humans. In this revolutionary book, Adam Alter, a professor of psychology and marketing at NYU, tracks the rise of behavioral addiction, and explains why so many of today's products are irresistible. Though these miraculous products melt the miles that separate people across the globe, their extraordinary and sometimes damaging magnetism is no accident. The companies that design these products tweak them over time until they become almost impossible to resist. By reverse engineering behavioral addiction, Alter explains how we can harness addictive products for the good—to improve how we communicate with each other, spend and save our money, and set boundaries between work and play—and how we can mitigate their most damaging effects on our well-being, and the health and happiness of our children.Adam Alter's previous book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave is available in paperback from Penguin.

This book provides an overview of the state-of-the art of psychological research on learning and knowledge exchange with digital media, based on a comprehensive research program that was realized at the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien(IWM) during the last decade. The dramatic rise of new tools and technologies, including both hardware devices like smartphones, tablets, multitouch-tables, or stereoscopic screens as well as software environments like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter or MOOCs – has fundamentally reshaped teaching, learning, and knowledge exchange. The authors describe an area of digital learning in light of these recent technological developments, specify the relevant theoretical approaches, summarize the main research results from the lab, and discuss their theoretical and practical implications.

The second edition of this successful book provides further and in-depth insight into theoretical models dealing with Internet addiction, as well as includes new therapeutical approaches. The editors also broach the emerging topic of smartphone addiction. This book combines a scholarly introduction with state-of-the-art research in the characterization of Internet addiction. It is intended for a broad audience including scientists, students and practitioners. The first part of the book contains an introduction to Internet addiction and their pathogenesis. The second part of the book is dedicated to an in-depth review of neuroscientific findings which cover studies using a variety of biological techniques including brain imaging and molecular genetics. The third part of the book focuses on therapeutic interventions for Internet addiction. The fourth part of the present book is an extension to the first edition and deals with a new emerging potential disorderrelated to Internet addiction – smartphone addiction. Moreover, in this second edition of the book new content has been added. Among others, the reader will find an overview of theoretical models dealing with Internet addiction, results from twin studies in the context of Internet addiction and additional insights into therapeutic approaches to Internet addiction.

Raus aus dem digitalen Hamsterrad! Das Leben entschleunigen, Stress reduzieren, Handyhörigkeit ablegen, ständige Erreichbarkeit unterbinden und endlich wieder die Kussbilanz verbessern – dieses Buch zeigt, wie's geht! Es eröffnet Ihnen einfache Wege aus der digitalen Leibeigenschaft und hält über 100 Digital-Detox-Tipps für einen Alltag ohne E-Mail-Flut und Digitalisierungswahnsinn bereit. Schonungslos ehrlich, gnadenlos charmant, ausnahmslos effektiv: eine Anstiftung zur digitalen Selbstverteidigung, ein Plädoyer für einen smarten Mix aus on- und offline, das Buch für mehr Lebenszeit und Lebensglück, für mehr Erfolg und Arbeitsspaß! »Es ist ein Buch für mehr Liebe, menschliche Nähe, den Genuss des Lebens und das Hier und Jetzt. Ein starkes Plädoyer gegen die digitale Abgebrühtheit und für mehr Ruhe, Entschleunigung und Zeit mit seinen Liebsten. Muss man lesen!« People

Ce livre se penche sur les usages qu'ont les enfants et les adolescents des mondes numériques et sur les conséquences psychoaffectives, éducatives et sociales qui en découlent. Si le focus est mis sur les pratiques « jeunes », l'ouvrage aborde aussi la petite enfance et ne fait pas l'économie d'une réflexion globale sur la place des écrans aujourd'hui. Les auteurs, issus de différentes disciplines, proposent quelques balises et des outils pour comprendre et accompagner les enfants sur le Net.

Sie berühren morgens als Erstes Ihr Smartphone? Ihre E-Mails überrollen Sie wie Wellen? Facebook ist Ihr gefühltes Zuhause? Ihr Status ist online? Ihr Stresslevel hoch? Darüber jammern kann jeder. Lernen wir endlich, damit umzugehen.In diesem Sachbuch verrät die junge Autorin mit Humor und wissenschaftlichem Tiefgang die psychologischen Hintergründe für unsere Medienabhängigkeit sowie den Ursprung unserer Vernetzungssehnsucht und zeigt Wege auf, die zu einer selbstbestimmten Mediennutzung verhelfen. Begleitet durch praktische Übungen und Beispiele aus dem digitalen Alltag in Beruf, Freizeit, Freundschaft und Partnerschaft plädiert sie für eine neue, entspannte Life-Media-Balance.Erhalten Sie Antworten auf die große Frage, wie Sie im digitalen Zeitalter die Lust am Leben und Ruhe im Kopf bewahren und wie Sie die Autonomie über ihre mediale Kommunikation zurückgewinnen. Dieses Buch lädt Ihren persönlichen Akku auf.

Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The'gameworlds'title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players'bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world.

“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. Hayles examines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or “hyper reading,” and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions—Steve Tomasula's electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

Arguing that today's viewers move through a character's brain instead of looking through his or her eyes or mental landscape, this book approaches twenty-first-century globalized cinema through the concept of the'neuro-image.'Pisters explains why this concept has emerged now, and she elaborates its threefold nature through research from three domains—Deleuzian (schizoanalytic) philosophy, digital networked screen culture, and neuroscientific research. These domains return in the book's tripartite structure. Part One, on the brain as'neuroscreen,'suggests rich connections between film theory, mental illness, and cognitive neuroscience. Part Two explores neuro-images from a philosophical perspective, paying close attention to their ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions. Political and ethical aspects of the neuro-image are discussed in Part Three. Topics covered along the way include the omnipresence of surveillance, the blurring of the false and the real and the affective powers of the neo-baroque, and the use of neuro-images in politics, historical memory, and war.

The Breakup 2.0 is intriguing and illuminating. By exploring how college students use Facebook, cell phones, and IM, Gershon deepens our understanding of these media, of young people's lives, and of our evolving definitions of public and private. It's an original and enlightening book.— Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University, author of You Just Don't Understand and You Were Always Mom's Favorite!A few generations ago, college students showed their romantic commitments by exchanging special objects: rings, pins, varsity letter jackets. Pins and rings were handy, telling everyone in local communities that you were spoken for, and when you broke up, the absence of a ring let everyone know you were available again. Is being Facebook official really more complicated, or are status updates just a new version of these old tokens?Many people are now fascinated by how new media has affected the intricacies of relationships and their dissolution. People often talk about Facebook and Twitter as platforms that have led to a seismic shift in transparency and (over)sharing. What are the new rules for breaking up? These rules are argued over and mocked in venues from the New York Times to lamebook.com, but well-thought-out and informed considerations of the topic are rare.Ilana Gershon was intrigued by the degree to which her students used new media to communicate important romantic information—such as'it's over.'She decided to get to the bottom of the matter by interviewing seventy-two people about how they use Skype, texting, voice mail, instant messaging, Facebook, and cream stationery to end relationships. She opens up the world of romance as it is conducted in a digital milieu, offering insights into the ways in which different media influence behavior, beliefs, and social mores. Above all, this full-fledged ethnography of Facebook and other new tools is about technology and communication, but it also tells the reader a great deal about what college students expect from each other when breaking up—and from their friends who are the spectators or witnesses to the ebb and flow of their relationships.The Breakup 2.0 is accessible and riveting.

Neuroscientist and expert on brain function and behavior Dr. Gary Small explores how technology's march forward has altered the way young minds develop, function, and interpret information. iBrain reveals a new evolution catalyzed by technological advancement and its future implications: Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price? While high-tech immersion can accelerate learning and boost creativity, it also has its glitches, among them the meteoric rise in ADD diagnoses, increased social isolation, and Internet addiction. To compete and thrive in the age of brain evolution, and to avoid these potential drawbacks, we must adapt, and iBrain--with its Technology Toolkit--equips us with tools and strategies needed to close the brain gap.--From publisher description.