Introduction: Researching online worlds: challenging media and communication studies

Challenging education in virtual worlds

Introduction Digital Media, Communication & Power in Summary

The genre of the essay, as Hesse (1998) reminds us, may be traced back to the artistry of Montaigne. At that time, expository discourse was first a matter of composition by quill and ink, blotter, messy drafting and re-copying. A genre of an information communication technology (ICT), the essay was invaluable in the positing of argument and the demarcation of its disposition. It enabled ideas t...

A Design for Researching Virtual Worlds - Opportunities and Limitations

Second Life is a virtual world where users, known as residents, can interact socially and commercially. Its population is growing at 20% per month and each day sees around 500,000 real American dollars change hands between them. Worlds such as Second Life represent extreme versions of the sort of web-based knowledge sharing communities that have been studied in information management literature...

Debating, theorising and researching obesity in challenging times

The past decade has witnessed a cacophony of calls to combat ‘the obesity epidemic’ and the ‘impudent lifestyles’ claimed to cause it. Reportedly affecting most adults and a growing number of children (but considered especially problematic among the poor, notably working-class mothers), overweight/ obesity/fatness is presented by various ‘entrepreneurs’ (Monaghan et al, 2010) as a massive publi...

Chronic Media Worlds: Social Media and the Problem of Pain Communication on Tumblr

This article explores dynamics of pain communication in the social media platform Tumblr. As a device of health communication, the Tumblr platform brings together a network of behaviors, technologies, and media forms through which pain experience is reimaged through and against mainstream biomedical frameworks. The article develops an interpretative approach to analyze how, as social media plat...