Mobile, digital technologies are thought to augment and transcend the limits of our places, yet they raise the issue of what our places are. PlaceMark is a simple, distributed collaborative authoring environment constructed in conjunction with a site-specific writing activity. Here, we examine it as a cultural probe, investigating how new media students engage in collaborative writing and how t...

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes four different approaches to teaching it. Combining cultural studies with critical pedagogy, we argue that critical media literacy aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of media culture, information and communication technologies and new media, as well as deepen the potential o...

media suggests that they offer more fun and more pleasure than existing or traditional media. However, academic work within media and cultural studies has failed to interrogate these claims empirically. This article critically assesses the conceptualization of pleasure as it is deployed in media audience research and attempts to update these conceptualizations by drawing upon game design theory...

The relationship of the New Digital Media to the human mind has become a fraught question. In this paper we examine some of the frequently made contentions about the possible ‘impact’ of media technologies on our reading abilities and our wider cognitive processes more generally. We look at a particular case study of how HTML reading has come to be treated with suspicion and cast some doubt on ...

This article analyzes the evolution of the internet, with special emphasis on its impact on older media in their struggle to survive. The analysis is based on a 6-stage, natural life cycle model of new media evolution, comprising birth (technical invention), penetration, growth, maturity, self-defense, and adaptation, convergence or obsolescence. Our universal model melds several elements of pr...

Having evolved over approximately 20 years, Multimedia can now be considered a mature field. The term media traditionally refers to entities such as audio, video, text, images, graphics, sound, and animation. Today, while the range of these media and their applications are vast, all of them correspond in one way or another to only two main human perceptions: hearing and vision. As such, even th...

Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across...

Using the case study of the Tlowitsis, a dispersed indigenous community in British Columbia, Canada, this paper explores the role of ICTs, and in particular participatory video, in nation building. Also, the paper identifies factors that affect both the involvement and exclusion of the membership and addresses the challenges faced and lessons learned. ICTs, in particular new media technologies,...

Despite the fact that many Western nations face a critical shortage of skilled professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and despite abundant job opportunities in STEM disciplines, few women still prepare themselves for careers in these fields. Recently, there have been suggestions that new media programming, such as television dramas with women engineers, comput...

The world of social media influencers, bloggers and online “clothes horses” is a relatively new one. New-media personalities, a.k.a. “clothes horses”, are now endorsing brands, products and companies in a more subtle way than through traditional advertising. They carefully cultivate and position their personal brands with a view to persuading businesses to use them for relatively inexpensive, o...