Dave Harley

Using texting to support students’ transition to university

This article argues that judicious use of mobile phone text messaging by university staff has the potential to enhance the support provided to students by an academic department during the transition to university. It reports on an evaluation of a desktop computer application, Student Messenger, which enables staff to send text messages from their computers to the mobile phones of groups of students. Analysis of qualitative interviews with 30 students reveals that text messaging is the dominant mode of electronic communication amongst students and plays a central role in maintaining their social networks. The text message dialogue amongst students provides emotional and social peer support and facilitates an informal system of interdependent learning in relation to navigating unfamiliar academic and administrative systems. Text messages from university staff, inserted into this dialogue, can enhance the existing peer support and aid students’ social integration into university life.

Design for Agency, Adaptivity and Reciprocity: Reimagining AAL and Telecare Agendas

It goes without saying that the developed world is facing significant challenges in dealing with the increasing demands of an ageing population, especially around health and care. It is also easy to understand why technology is seen as a key enabler for meeting this challenge. Application areas such as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and telecare are receiving increasing governmental, industry and research attention, taking advantage of maturing and increasingly ubiquitous wireless, mobile and sensor-based technologies. However, to date, many of these advances have been largely driven by technology-utopian visions without real understanding for how such technologies come to be situated in everyday life and healthcare practice and what their potential is for enhancing new ways of living into older age. Further, there is limited evidence of their effectiveness to date, and the problems with adoption from the patients’ perspectives suggest it is timely to reflect on these experiences and reimagine new ways of approaching AAL/telecare from a broader socio-technical perspective. To this end, we propose AAL/telecare as modular infrastructures for the home that can be adapted and repurposed, starting with personal ‘quality of life’ and social needs (supporting peer care) and progressing to monitoring, physical and medical needs (supporting formal care) as relevant for a person and as needs evolve. This extends the adoption path to supporting healthy ageing, taking notions of agency, adaptivity and social reciprocity as core principles. We illustrate this with some examples and identify some of the associated technical and methodological challenges.

Having a Social Life

With the rise of social networking sites, many people now spend time with their friends in online social spaces. These spaces are used to support and maintain existing friendships, as well as to form and develop new social connections. This chapter explores how people adapt to these online social interactions, how they bring social meaning to those conversations, and whether people can achieve ‘meaningful’ support in their relationships with others online. This chapter considers the role of interpersonal processes such as ‘self-disclosure’ in building intimacy with others online and what happens when we disclose too much. The chapter concludes by considering what drives people to socialise online and what makes us so committed to our online social interactions.

Understanding Digital Technology as Everyday Experience

This chapter starts by providing a brief overview of existing research in Cyberpsychology and then sets out a revised approach which is pursued throughout the book. Existing Cyberpsychology research has inherited a great deal from the ‘media effects’ tradition, and there are limitations to this positivist, objective stance when it comes to explaining the everyday use of digital technologies. In contrast, the approach to Cyberpsychology proposed here takes into account the effects of social context and subjective experience. In order to do this, the book examines different life stages and life orientations as significant in framing our digital interactions, giving them meaning and purpose.

Reflections on a Digital Life

This chapter revisits the previous chapters, showing how each life stage and life orientation reframes social context and subjectivity, revealing different meanings that are associated with the everyday use of digital technologies. Analysis of the literature shows how important digital spaces have become in providing opportunities for people to move beyond the social and psychological restrictions of their immediate lives. The key dilemmas for maintaining digital selves are considered in terms of: a) how much should we invest in our digital selves? and b) what counts as real life? Finally, suggestions are made for how a more complete version of Cyberpsychology might be developed that acknowledges the everyday significance of people’s digital selves.

Growing up Online

In the developed world, it is now common for children to experience a digitally immersed childhood. This chapter explores the implications of this for their psychosocial development and their experience of growing up. The benefits and risks involved in early encounters are considered in relation to video games, the internet and social media. Children’s own adaptations to this digital immersion are also considered in terms of their concerns over digital content and the ways that they manage their digital presence in order to stay popular while also avoiding unwanted attention. Finally, children’s experiences are placed within their sociocultural context, which shows how changes in parenting practices and the influence of consumer society encourage children’s digital immersion.