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The article analyses critical blindspots in current European Artificial Intelligence (AI) policies and examines the potential impact of data and AI in the emerging socio-technical ecosystem of the contemporary Media and Communications (MC) sector from the perspective of critical media and communication studies. We first identify central blind spots in the dominant EU trustworthy and risk-based approach to governing AI. Next, we propose a novel multi-level framework to analyse key policy challenges for governing AI in the MC sector. The framework and discussion are based on desk research and multi-stakeholder expert discussions. The article concludes with reflections on AI governance in development, deployment and use in the MC sector. Jo Pierson received support from the DELICIOS project (Delegation of Decision-Making to Autonomous Agents in Socio-Technical System) funded by The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) (Grant G054919N) and Aphra Kerr would like to acknowledge support from the ADAPT Centre which is funded under the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106_P2).

This essay examines the formal and informal economies of video games and attends to the economies within video games. The first part introduces key approaches in the early 2000s when games were primarily sold as a product through retail shops. We then move to the post-2012 phase as games became a service that was downloaded or streamed across multiple platforms. This era ushered in a period of rapid innovation in production logics, business models, and company types. It brought with it a range of creative opportunities and challenges. New platform and performance logics emerged, while free-to-play became the dominant revenue model. Two key processes emerge as important – datafication and platformization. During this period, the industry struggled to retain workers as many companies failed to address project management and diversity issues. Independent, or indie, companies multiplied by choice and necessity. The essay concludes with some reflections on e-sports, gamblification and increasing regulatory pressures

Book review

This paper introduces the ‘Independence’ themed special issue which includes research presented at the 22nd annual Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference (2021). ‘Independence’ as a special issue theme could hardly be timelier, both in geopolitical and internet research terms. The call for the 2021 AoIR annual conference asked us to reflect on the ambivalence of the term, to look back on historical struggles for independence, the long waves of history, and prompted us to ask who benefits from independence (and who does not). Hosted online for a second year, this time by universities in Philadelphia (USA), the conference was bounded by the Black Lives Matter movement, the insurrectionist storming of Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill, and global struggles to control the COVID-19 pandemic. This special issue includes nine papers that showcase new research exploring the affordances offered by digital media platforms to people, users, and workers, while also identifying tendencies towards new forms of control and surveillance facilitated by platforms. Topics include geopolitical and biopolitical digital sovereignty, facial recognition technologies, data divides, new methods approaches and innovative data sourcing, mobile and social media, examinations of embodied local knowledge as well as patriarchal, racist, and gendered social structures, and a broad range of field sites from Asia, Africa, and South America.

Over the last two decades digital game companies have had to compete against internet companies, grapple with online distribution and rethink games as a free to play service. Change came incrementally. In this chapter I will first briefly outline the production logics approach and then introduce the key production logics in the digital games industry, including adaptations and new logics. The final section will focus on three moments of circulation in contemporary production logics, namely: the influence of implicit user data on professional content production, the role of community managers in supporting online communities, and finally the development of live performance forms of user generated content. The chapter is informed by two decades of projects examining the circuits of production in the digital games industry in Europe.

This report provides a summary of a one-year research project funded by the Gambling Awareness Trust in Ireland and conducted in late 2019 and 2020. The core focus of the project was on 1) trends in the gambling industry and gambling behaviour 2) conceptual and empirical evidence on harmful gambling, and 3) responses to gambling harms and emerging best practice. This report is based on a state-of-the-art literature review on gambling and the findings of 20 interviews with a range of gambling stakeholders in Ireland. This report contributes to expanding and updating our knowledge and understanding of the gambling ecosystem and the range of gambling harms in Ireland. It provides a social scientific perspective, which expands beyond medical and health-based responses to evaluate the wider trends, impacts and international best practice in responses to gambling harm. The authors update available research to capture the mediatisation of gambling across television and social media, trace the emergence of digital and online platforms associated with gambling and e-sports, identify the ongoing gamblification of sport, and the emergence of corporate social responsibility responses in parts of the industry. Finally, it examines the patchwork of public, private and charity services and initiatives which are responding to the individual and social harms caused by gambling in communities and society more generally. The report highlights five areas where urgent action is needed including: public health, education and awareness, legislation and regulation, advertising and marketing and the introduction of self-exclusion schemes.

While research on gamejams internationally has proposed that they can be a useful context for informal learning, networking between indie developers, and innovation, in this chapter we argue that they can also be perceived, and experienced, as exclusionary spaces by those who identify as women, and individuals who are outside of existing game making communities. Research on gamejams in two different cities in Ireland for the Refiguring Innovation in Games project found that these events overwhelmingly attracted a young male demographic with existing programming skills. Since 2016 the authors have designed and run six adult ‘female friendly’ diversity in games workshops in Ireland to encourage inclusive informal education and innovation. They took place at weekends in co-working innovation centres and formal educational settings provided by our partners. This chapter reflects on the recruitment, participation, and outcome of our workshops - but in particular reflects on the explicit and implicit spatial and technical barriers faced by participants and organisers. While contemporary discourses and industry data seem to support the democratisation of games production, contemporary software for game development and available learning spaces impose restrictions that continue to marginalise and impose a technicity that is gendered, classed and raced. This chapter argues that explicit inclusion strategies are needed to address persist structures of exclusion in informal and formal games education.

Contemporary Irish media are increasingly ubiquitous, mostly commercial, often internationally owned in part or whole, and largely ‘taken for granted’ (Share et al.:353). Locally produced media form only a small part of a much larger transnational information and entertainment market. This larger field includes computer companies offering new media forms such as social media and videogames. In this chapter we will focus on changes in the mass and hybrid media sectors following the financial crisis of 2008 in Ireland. It is common for textbooks to divide their analysis into three sections focusing on media production, content and audiences. In this chapter we take a broader approach and include examples of recent research on media production, representation, participation and policy. What is clear is that the economic crisis in 2008 precipitated significant changes in the media in Ireland and understanding these changes will enable us to better understand wider societal trends in politics, housing, social cohesion and identity construction.

In late 2019 an academic research team based at Maynooth University’s Department of Sociology and Maynooth Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI) including Prof. Aphra Kerr, Prof. John O’ Brennan and Dr Lucia Vazquez-Mendoza began work on a one-year project to examine the knowledge base and evidence on the nature and extent of gambling and gambling impacts in Ireland and how Ireland compares to international peer countries. The first stage of this project has involved desk research examining the international knowledge base on gambling and putting emerging trends in Ireland into an international perspective. This working paper provides an overview of the secondary academic research and publicly available data accessed to date in the project on gambling and its impacts on individuals and society.

As media are moving towards the ubiquitous capturing and processing of (personal) data, a key challenge is how to maintain trust and counteract manipulation (Susser, Roessler & Nissenbaum, 2019). Despite societal expectations in Europe that we can design ethical AI, and that developers and governments should share responsibility for the outcomes of AI use, it is unclear how we can effectively achieve these goals (Kerr, Barry & Kelleher, 2020). Much effort to date has been on technological solutions to fairness and explainability, and on the potential role of ethics and privacy by design. By contrast we focus on the challenge of responsibility as a potential source of European leadership and competitiveness. We are collaborating on an agenda which takes a multi-level distributed approach to the design and governance of AI. In this presentation we will outline our research agenda and give examples from ongoing and future projects.

In this chapter we examine how informal education events, like gamejams, contribute to the gendered structure of the knowledge economy in Ireland. We identify how communication, temporal and spatial structure, hierarchies of knowledge and unpaid labour contribute to gendered knowledge hierarchies, and to gendered pathways into ICT related occupations. Game making and game playing events may reinforce a relationship between codified and abstract forms of knowledge, certain forms of masculinity, and computers, ultimately undermining the assumption that digital games provide an equal pathway into STEM for all. Even if the focus of these events is on learning technical skills, we would suggest that a range of ‘informal’ and ‘incidental’ social learning is taking place that may serve to reinforce wider patterns of social inequality. In what follows, we first place our work in the context of historical and feminist research into the gender/technology/knowledge relationship in production and consumption cultures. We then present our findings from research at two day-long gamejam events in Ireland in 2016 to identify who attends these events and the ways in which these events are gendered. Finally, we discuss how academics and civic society organisations have collaborated to organise inclusive female-friendly informal learning events.

A report of findings and outputs from the Network in Play and ReFiG research projects

This report summarises the findings of a survey of workers and working issues in the games sector in Ireland. The survey was designed and administered by Game Workers Unite Ireland in 2019. GWUI is an affiliated branch of the Financial Services Union in Ireland and part of an international organisation with branches in a number of countries. The findings of this survey will inform the GWU charter in Ireland.

Corporate smart city initiatives are just one example of the contemporary culture of surveillance. They rely on extensive information gathering systems and Big Data analysis topredict citizen behaviour and optimise city services. In this paper we argue that many smart city and social media technologies result in a paradox whereby digital inclusion for the purposes of service provision also results in marginalisation and disempowerment of citizens. Drawing upon insights garnered from a digital inclusion workshop conducted in the Galapagos islands, we propose that critically and creatively unpacking the computational techniques embedded in data services is needed as a first step if we are to reimagine neganthropic, sustainable and empowering data services for inhabitants in diverse localities. We propose a therapeutic inspired by the concept of ‘common ground’ from communication theory. Common ground presupposes a symmetry of purpose, shared values and accessible participation processes. When common ground is deployed in the smart city context it prompts us to reimagine data services as an ongoing dialogue between peers, to rethink citizen participation in terms of capabilities and empowerment, and to focus on clear lines ofaccountability and equality of citizen outcomes.

This special issue of Internet Policy Review brings together a hand-picked selection of articles presented in the Communication Policy and Technology (CPT) section at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in Eugene, Oregon (USA), 2018. With different theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and geographical scope, the five papers in this issue address how ideal-type rights and values are translated into highly variable rules, regulations, policies and practices in different countries and regions around the world. Drawing from their respective case studies, the papers examine a number of consequences of this gap for internet users, as citizens and consumers. Building on these papers, the editorial discusses some recent evolutions of the internet policy field, and introduces the critical and ‘engaged scholarship’ approach that IAMCR and its CPT section have displayed over the years in their analyses of communication and internet policy.

When we agreed to edit the theme on online games for this Encyclopedia our first question was, “What is meant by online games?” Scholars of games distinguish between nondigital games (such as board games) and digital games, rather than between online and offline games. With networked consoles and smartphones it is becoming harder and harder to find players in the wealthy industrialized countries who play “offline” digital games. Most games developers now include some element of online activity in their game and the question is:What is the degree to which the gameplay experience occurs online? Is online gameplay more a multiplayer than an individual experience? If we move beyond the technological meaning of “being online” we should, as Newman (2002) argued, be concerned with varying degrees of participation during gameplay.

This article explores the relationship between teenagers, mobile media, and public spaces in the city. We use a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, sound walks, sound maps, and photography, to explore how teenagers use mobile media to respond to the visual and sonic landscape of a public space in Dublin, Ireland. This space was a “nonplace” for our contemporary participants from which they felt economically, socially, visually, and aurally excluded. They responded by using mobile media to create safe, centripetal, and meaningful spaces. Our findings underline the role that local soundscapes play in understanding the audio and mobile media practices of teenagers in public spaces.

This article explores the relationship between teenagers, mobile media, and public spaces in the city. We use a range of qualitative methods, including interviews, sound walks, sound maps, and photography, to explore how teenagers use mobile media to respond to the visual and sonic landscape of a public space in Dublin, Ireland. This space was a “nonplace” for our contemporary participants from which they felt economically, socially, visually, and aurally excluded. They responded by using mobile media to create safe, centripetal, and meaningful spaces. Our findings underline the role that local soundscapes play in understanding the audio and mobile media practices of teenagers in public spaces.