Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online
At yesterday’s outstanding Controlling Data: Somebody Think of the Children symposium I presented the first version of my new paper “Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online.” Here’s the abstract:
Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. In order to more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people, and the way those decisions are being shaped, this paper focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies; and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celebrity and influencer parents. The paper begins by contextualizing these parental practices within the literature on surveillance, with particular attention to online surveillance and the increasing importance of affect. It then gives a brief overview of work on pregnancy mediation, monitoring on social media, and via pregnancy apps, which is the obvious precursor to examining parental sharing and monitoring practices regarding babies and infants. The examples of parental monitoring and parental mediation will then build on the idea of “intimate surveillance” which entails close and seemingly invasive monitoring by parents. Parental monitoring and mediation contribute to the normalization of intimate surveillance to the extent that surveillance is (re)situated as a necessary culture of care. The choice to not survey infants is thus positioned, worryingly, as a failure of parenting.
An mp3 recording of the audio is available, and the slides are below:
The full version of this paper is currently under review, but if you’re interested in reading the draft, just email me.
Replace every mention of internet of things with skynet (in chrome)
For Kath: How to replace every mention of “Internet of Things” with “Skynet” and vice versa in your Chrome browser.
- In Chrome, install the Word Replacer 2 plugin.
- Click the plugin settings, select settings.
- Click ‘new’ on the left and enter your item name (I’ve called mine “Internet of Things” in the left box, “Skynet” in the box next to it on the right.)
- At the top of the right pane, select ‘Swap’ (or just ‘Simple’ if you just want “internet of things” replaced, but IOT mentions of Skynet turing into Internet of Things).
- Type “internet of things => skynet” into the right pane’s text box, and hit return/enter.
- Click Export (ensuring the tickbox is still selected on the left next to your new item).
- The instruction will be made into code, and shown to you. Something like this …
- Click ‘Apply to selected’ after the code has appeared.
- Click the ‘x’ to close the settings window.
- Click on the Word Replace II icon and ensure it’s enabled (the term enabled will be green).
- Search for “Internet of Things” and see if it works. (If it doesn’t, I’d blame Skynet.) Also, checking the “Internet of Things” Wikipedia page becomes amusing.
- PS If it is working, this post clearly won’t make sense anymore!
CFP: “Infancy Online”–Special Issue of Social Media + Society
Here’s the Call for Papers (well, call for Abstracts, initially) for a special issue of Social Media + Society I’m editing with Bjorn Nansen:
Dear colleagues,
Special Issue of Social Media + Society
http://www.sagepub.com/journals/Journal202332Infancy Online
Eds Tama Leaver (Curtin University) and Bjorn Nansen (University of Melbourne)
From the sharing of ultrasound photos on social media onward, the capturing and communicating of babies’ lives online is an increasingly ordinary and common part of everyday digitally mediated life. Online affordances can facilitate the instantaneous sharing and joys of a first smile, first steps and first word spoken to globally distributed networks of family, friends and publics. Equally, from pregnancy tracking apps to baby cameras hidden inside cuddly toys, infants are also subject to an unprecedented intensification of surveillance practices. Reflecting both of these contexts, there is a growing set of questions about the presence, participation and politics of infants in online networks. This special issue seeks to explore these questions in terms of the online spaces in which infants are present; the forms of online participation enabled for and curated on behalf of infants, and the range of political implications raised by infants’ digital data and its traces, for both their present and future lives. Ideally papers will focus on the impact of digital technologies and networked culture on pre-birth, birth and the early years of life, along with related changes and challenges to parenthood and similar domains.Possible areas of focus include, but are by no means limited to:
• Social media and infant presence and profiles
• Cultural and national specificities of infant media use and presence
• Digital media in the everyday lives of young children
• The app economy, and capture of infant attention
• “Mommy blogs,” and online curation
• Identity and impression management
• Ethics, persistence and the right to be forgotten
• Geographies of infant media use
• Infant interfaces and hardware
• Cultural responses to parenting, “oversharing”, privacy and surveillance
• Erasure of maternal bodies in digitising infancy
• Apps and services targeting infants as a consumer marketAbstracts of 300 words should be submitted to both Tama Leaver t.leaver@curtin.edu.au and Bjorn Nansen nansenb@unimelb.edu.au by Friday, 1 April. Where appropriate, please nominate an author for correspondence.
On the basis of these short abstracts, invitations to submit full papers (of no more than 8000 words) will then be sent out by 15 April 2016. Full papers will be due by 1 July 2016, and will undergo the usual Social Media + Society review procedure. Please note that an invitation to submit a full paper for review does not guarantee paper acceptance.
Social, Casual and Mobile Games Book Published!
Michele Willson and I are delighted to announce that our collection Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape has been released by Bloomsbury Academic.
Here’s a quick blurb and the contents and contributors:
Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shifting the stereotype of gaming away from that of hardcore, dedicated play to that of activities that fit into everyday life.
Social, Casual and Mobile Games explores the rapidly changing gaming landscape and discusses the ludic, methodological, theoretical, economic, social and cultural challenges that these changes invoke. With chapters discussing locative games, the new freemium economic model, and gamer demographics, as well as close studies of specific games (including Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and Ingress), this collection offers an insight into the changing nature of games and the impact that mobile media is having upon individuals and societies around the world.
Contents
1. Social networks, casual games and mobile devices: the shifting contexts of gamers and gaming / Tama Leaver and Michele Willson
Part I: The (New?) Gaming Landscape
2. Who are the casual gamers? Gender tropes and tokenism in game culture / Lina Eklund
3. Between aliens, hackers and birds: non-casual mobile games and casual game design / Brendan Keogh
4. Casual gaming: the changing role of the designer / Laureline Chiapello
5. Discussions with developers: F2Play and the changing landscape of games business development / Tom Phillips
Part II: Reasons to Play
6. The sociality of asynchronous gameplay: social network games, dead-time and family bonding / Kelly Boudreau and Mia Consalvo
7. Digital affection games: cultural lens and critical reflection / Lindsay Grace
8. Mobile games and ambient play / Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson
9. Affect and social value in freemium games / Fanny Ramirez
Part III: Locative Play
10. Riding in cars with strangers: a cross-cultural comparison of privacy and safety in Ingress / Stacy Blasiola, Miao Feng and Adrienne Massanari
11. Playful places: uncovering hidden heritage with Ingress / Erin Stark
12. Rewriting neighbourhoods: Zombies, Run! and the runner as rhetor / Jamie Henthorn
13. The de-gamification of Foursquare? / Rowan Wilken
Part IV: New Markets
14. Social games and game-based revenue models / Mark Balnaves and Gary Madden
15. Angry Birds as a social network market / Tama Leaver
16. From premium to freemium: the political economy of the app / David Nieborg
Part V. Cheating, Gambling and Addiction
17. Social casino apps and digital media practices: New paradigms of consumption / Cesar Albarran-Torres
18. Cheating in Candy Crush Saga / Marcus Carter and Staffan Bjork
Afterword
19. Reflections on the casual games market in a post-Gamergate world / Adrienne Shaw and Shira Chess
Michele and I would like to publicly thank all of our wonderful contributors, the folks at Bloomsbury, and Troy Innocent for the rather nifty cover image. For the book’s launch Bloomsbury are offering 40% off the normal price, which makes the eBook version actually affordable for humans, not just libraries! Details here: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/social-casual-and-mobile-games-9781501310584/
The front material and first chapter can be read online here (PDF).
Finally, here are the very generous cover jacket reviews:
“This book is an exciting rogue’s gallery of authors, games and topics at the forefront of modern gaming. The inclusion of issues discussing not only recent developments in design, playfulness and the definition of who plays games, but also attending to the darker aspects of contemporary gaming cultures such as the transition to Freemiun, cheating and GamerGate is an important step in examining new pathways into games and gaming culture. Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscapedemonstrates through an impressive series of chapters how this genre of games needs to be taken seriously as a cultural marker of today’s players and the games they engage with.”
– Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, UK“Social, Casual and Mobile Games captures a wide array of scholarship from all corners of Game Studies. The authors explore, from a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, a rich tableau of games and players that often disappear from dominant narratives about what makes a game or a game player.”
– Casey O’Donnell, Associate Professor of Media and Information, Michigan State University, USA, and author of Developer’s Dilemma“This terrific and timely book is an invaluable guide to the profound ways in which gaming – in all its casual, mobile, and social glory – will never be the same again. Critical research for the rest of the (gaming) world has finally arrived.”
– Gerard Goggin, Professor of Media and Communications, The University of Sydney, Australia
Workshops past & coming soon…
So 2016 seems to be all about the workshops and Summer School so far!
Just finished:
- On 1 February, my first day back from leave, I presented “Developing a Scholarly Web Presence and Using Social Media for Research Networking” at the Perth Research Bazaar (ResBaz) held at Murdoch University (slides available here). The talk was vey well received, with some great questions. Also, kudos to the organizers for the ease of parking!
- Last week I had the great pleasure in facilitating several workshops with my collaborator Tim Highfield, updating our “Instagrammatics: Analysing Visual Social Media Workshop” (slides here) for the 2016 CCI Summer School on Digital Methods hosted by the fabulous folks at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. This was a fabulous event, with participants from across the world, all exploring the nuances of Digital Media methods and research. Tim and I learnt just as much from our participants as we brought to the table, which makes events like this so very rewarding. And there may have been one or two moments of levity, too!
Coming Up:
- On March 8th I’ll be giving a talk Introducing TrISMA – Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analytics with Alkim Ozaygen. This will be held in the new Internet of Everything Innovation Centre at Curtin and is hosted by the Curtin Institute for Computation (CIC).
- On March 30th, I’ll be facilitating a workshop at ECU Mouth Lawley (and livestreamed elsewhere, I believe) on “Promoting Your Research Online and Social Media Awareness”. This is tailored for ECU’s postgradaute students, but is open for anyone else to attend.
- Finally, for now, on May 2 I’ll be the first presenter at the Socialising Your Research – Postgrad and ECR Workshop @ UWA (flyer below). This event is open at anyone interested in WA, but RSVPs are needed (see the flyer for details).
Curtin TrISMA Seminar
On 8 March, I’ll be presenting an overview of TrISMA – Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis for interested researchers at Curtin. Details in the embedded flyer …
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