Gregory N. Hearn

The mobile phone as media

This article focuses on the mobile phone’s permeation into ‘everyday life’ through products, knowledge and cultural processes. The convergence and blurring of industry boundaries increasingly see entertainment, information and communication technologies (ICTs) and lifestyle products and services combine. The possibilities that digital economies (via products and services) provide in shaping our experiences - and how others experience us - lend support to Featherstone’s comment that the ‘aestheticisation of everyday life’ has arrived. The resulting consumption is an experience economy, where a broad range of mobile phone users, with or without technical savvy, expendable income and aesthetic ambitions, can harvest from the ever-increasing palette of the digital domain. Throughout the 20th century, visions of utopia and dystopia have often run alongside such major developments in technology, especially those that have the capacity or likelihood to transform and disturb conceptions of the everyday. Outlining a number of current states of play and future scenarios for the mobile phone in the everyday, we suggest that mobile phone analytics will shift from the utopian and dystopian towards analyses by more conventional theoretical and methodological tools and approaches found in media, cultural and policy studies, as well as in the social sciences and other disciplines.

The Second Life of urban planning? Using NeoGeography tools for community engagement

The majority of the worlds citizens now live in cities. Although urban planning can thus be thought of as a field with significant ramifications on the human condition, many practitioners feel that it has reached the crossroads in thought leadership between traditional practice and a new, more participatory and open approach. Conventional ways to engage people in participatory planning exercises are limited in reach and scope. At the same time, socio-cultural trends and technology innovation offer opportunities to re-think the status quo in urban planning. NeoGeography introduces tools and services that allow non-geographers to use advanced geographical information systems. Similarly, is there a potential for the emergence of a neo-planning paradigm in which urban planning is carried out through active civic engagement aided by Web 2.0 and new media technologies thus redefining the role of practicing planners? This paper traces a number of evolving links between urban planning, NeoGeography and information and communication technology. Two significant trends – participation and visualisation – with direct implications for urban planning are discussed. Combining advanced participation and visualisation features, the popular virtual reality environment Second Life is then introduced as a test bed to explore a planning workshop and an integrated software event framework to assist narrative generation. We discuss an approach to harness and analyse narratives using virtual reality logging to make transparent how users understand and interpret proposed urban designs.

Handbook on the Knowledge Economy : Volume Two

This thoroughly revised second edition of the Handbook on the Knowledge Economy expands the range of issues presented in the first edition and reflects important new progress in research about knowledge economies. Readers with interests in managing knowledge- and innovation-intensive businesses and those who are seeking new insights about how knowledge economies work will find this book an invaluable reference tool. Chapters deal with issues such as open innovation, wellbeing, and digital work that managers and policymakers are increasingly asked to respond to. [Book summary from WorldCat]

Cultivating innovation through social relationships: A qualitative study of outstanding Australian innovators in science & technology and the creative industries

In this chapter, we describe and explore social relationship patterns associated with outstanding innovation. In doing so, we draw upon the findings of 16 in-depth interviews with award-winning Australian innovators from science & technology and the creative industries. The interviews covered topics relating to various influences on individual innovation capacity and career development. We found that for all of the participants, innovation was a highly social process. Although each had been recognised individually for their innovative success, none worked in isolation. The ability to generate innovative outcomes was grounded in certain types of interaction and collaboration. We outline the distinctive features of the social relationships which seem to be important to innovation, and ask which ‘social network capabilities’ might underlie the ability to create an optimal pattern of interpersonal relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for universities, which we argue play a key role in the development of nascent innovators.It is widely accepted that organizations and individuals must be innovative and continually create new knowledge and ideas to deal with rapid change. Innovation plays an important role in not only the development of new business, process and products, but also in competitiveness and success of any organization.Technology for Creativity and Innovation: Tools, Techniques and Applications provides empirical research findings and best practices on creativity and innovation in business, organizational, and social environments. It is written for educators, academics and professionals who want to improve their understanding of creativity and innovation as well as the role technology has in shaping this discipline.

ENTERTAINMENT MANNA: DOES TELEVISION VIEWING LEAD TO APPETITIVE HELPLESSNESS?'"

A link between passivity and television viewing has long been part of the public discourse about television. Despite this, both cognitive and psychophysiological studies of viewing have tended to dismiss such a link. The possibility that the basis of the persistent public perceptions lies in motivational rather than attentional or psychophysiological mechanisms is explored. Starting with the observation that, regardless of the content, television viewing involves noncontingent reinforcement, reviewed research links television viewing and a range of helplessness outcomes. Three specific hypotheses which derive from helplessness theory are developed to stimulate further consideration of the issue.

Patient Perceptions of Health Professional Interpersonal Skills

Clinician interpersonal skills in interaction with patients are broadly conceptualised as having task (instrumental) and socioemotional (affective) dimensions. There has been, however, inconsistency in the assignation of specific skills to these dimensions, and lack of information on how patients perceive these dimensions. Ninety-eight patients, who were being given instruction in the use of contact lenses, filled in a 27-item questionnaire on clinician skills and patient perception of clinician qualities such as empathy. Factor analysis indicated three dimensions of patient response. The first was a socioemotional factor, reflecting skills such as questioning which encourages patient participation. The other two factors were a task factor (directive information-giving) and a factor indicating clinician ease in the interaction.

Creative Work Beyond the Creative Industries: An Introduction

Creative occupations exist across the entire economy. The creative worker’s habitus cannot be discovered by looking only in film studios, games companies or artist’s garrets. Work practices, evolved through the traditions of the creative and performing arts, are now deployed to create new services and products across all sectors, to develop process innovations, and to change the distribution thereof. Yet the bulk of academic study of creative work (both functionalist and critical), as well as the content of higher/further professional education programs and everyday understanding of creative workers, focuses on one subset of the Creative Industries: those involved in the production of cultural goods or services (film, television, music etc.) for consumption by the general public. And further, the bulk of existing academic work focuses on those creative workers employed in cultural production industries. However, as recent work has shown, this focus misses both the large (and increasing) number of creative workers embedded in industries beyond the core Creative Industries (for example, manufacturing, banking, mining) and those creative workers and firms that supply services to business as well as to the general public, such as architects, technical writers, and graphic designers (see Cunningham 2013; Potts and Cunningham 2008; Potts, Cunningham, Hartley and Omerod 2008). This book focuses on this subset of very important, and yet under-recognized creative workers: embedded creative workers and providers of creative services into other sectors of the economy, as indicated in the following taxonomy (Figure 1.1), which juxtaposes occupation and industry sector...

A Deweyan Experience Economy for Higher Education: The Case of the Australian Indie 100 Music Event

In this essay we argue that a Deweyan experience economy will best support the higher education (HE) sector in the future, and we draw a contrast between that economy and the sector’s current focus on informational concerns, as expressed by the recent rush to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other mass online informational offerings. We base our argument on current developments in music education and music technology that we see as being preemptive of wider trends. We use examples from a three-year study of online and offline music pedagogies and outline a four-year experiment in developing a pedagogical experience economy to illustrate a theoretical position informed by John Dewey’s theory of experience,Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and capital, and recent work in economic geography on epistemic communities. We argue further that the future of the HE sector is local rather than global, experiential rather than informational, and that therefore a continued informational approach to the future of HE risks undermining the sector.; ;

Encounters and Content Sharing in an Urban Village: Reading Texts Through an Archaeological Lens

Archaeology provides a framework of analysis and interpretation that is useful for disentangling the textual layers of a contemporary lived-in urban space. The producers and readers of texts may include those who planned and developed the site and those who now live, visit, and work there. Some of the social encounters and content sharing between these people may be artificially produced or manufactured in the hope that certain social situations will occur. Others may be serendipitous. With archaeology’s original focus on places that are no longer inhabited, it is often only the remaining artifacts and features of the built environment that form the basis for interpreting the social relationships of past people. Our analysis, however, is framed within a contemporary notion of archaeological artifacts in an urban setting. Unlike an excavation, where the past is revealed through digging into the landscape, the application of landscape archaeology within a present day urban context is necessarily more experiential, visual, and based on recording and analyzing the physical traces of social encounters and relationships between residents and visitors. These physical traces are present within the creative content, and the built and natural elements of the environment. This chapter explores notions of social encounters and content sharing in an urban village by analyzing three different types of texts: the design of the built environment; content produced by residents through a geospatial web application; and, print and online media produced in digital storytelling workshops.