Jane Vincent

“Girls are addicted to likes so they post semi-naked selfies”: Peer mediation, normativity and the construction of identity online.

This paper examines how children aged 11-16 in three European countries (Italy, UK and Spain) develop and present their online identities, and their interactions with peers. It focuses on young people’s engagement with the construction of an online identity on social media through pictures, and explores how peer-mediated conventions of self-presentation are appropriated, legitimated, or resisted in pre-teens’ and teenagers’ discourses. In doing so, we draw on Goffman’s (1959) work on the presentation of self and “impression management” to frame our analysis. Mobile communication and social network sites serve an important role in the process of self-presentation and emancipation, providing “full-time” access to peers and peer culture. Our findings suggest that there are gender differences and the presence of sexual double standards in peer normative discourses. Girls are positioned as being more subjected to peer mediation and pressure. Boys blame girls for posing sexy in photos, and negatively sanction this behaviour as being aimed at increasing one’s popularity online or as an indicator of “a certain type of girl.” However, girls who post provocative photos chose to conform to a sexualised stereotype as a means of being socially accepted by peers. Moreover, they identify with the pressure to always look “perfect” in their online pictures. While cross-national variations do exist, this sexual double standard is observed in all three countries. These insights into current behaviours could be further developed to determine policy guidance for supporting young people as they learn to manage image laden social media.

Social Robots from a Human Perspective

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the human dimension of social robots by discussing both transnational features and national peculiarities. Addressing several issues that explore the human side of social robots, this book investigateswhat a social robot is and how we might come to think about social robots in the different areas of everyday life. Organized around three sections that deal with Perceptions and Attitudes to Social Robots, Human Interaction with Social Robots, and Social Robots in Everyday Life, it explores the idea that even if the challenges of robot technologies can be overcome from a technological perspective, the question remains as to what kind of machine we want to have and use in our daily lives. Lessons learned from previous widely adopted technologies, such as smartphones, indicate that robot technologies could potentially be absorbed into the everyday lives of humans in such a way that it is the human that determines the human-machine interaction. In a similar way to how todays information and communication technologies were initially designed for professional/industrial use, but were soon commercialized for the mass market and then personalized by humans in the course of daily practice, the use of social robots is now facing the same revolution of domestication. In the context of this transformation, which involves the profound embedding of robots in everyday life, the human aspect of social robots will play a major part. This book sheds new light on this highly topical issue, one of the central subjects that will be taught and studied at universities worldwide and that will be discussed widely, publicly and repeatedly in the near future.

Affiliations, Emotion and the Mobile Phone

Over half of the worlds population is expected to be using mobile phones by 2009 and many have become attached to and even dependent on this small electronic communications device. Drawing on seven years of research into the affective aspects of mobile phone usage this chapter will examine ways that people in the UK have incorporated mobile phones into their lives. It will explore what they use it for, their affiliations and their emotional attachment to the mobile phone and how it appears to have gained such an extraordinary role in maintaining close relationships with family and friends.

Introduction: Situating the Human in Social Robots

Traditionally the social has been considered as a characteristic of human beings, not of inanimate machines. At the same time, each technological device can be considered social born out of a complex process of invention, implementation, distribution and domestication by users (Hirsch and Silverstone 2004; Lasen 2013). Since recent technical developments have made possible rather detailed technical mimicking of human beings and their social features, and incorporating them in silicon chips, there is a pronounced need to understand to what extent the humanness can be implanted in social robots. This is also an occasion to think over and discuss what the human is when considered in this context of social robots. With this book we tackle what can be considered as a social robot, which in fact is a paradoxical term, from a social, cultural and humanistic perspective.

The Mobile Phone: An Emotionalised Social Robot

This chapter builds on the notion that humans, who have appropriated mobile phones and incorporated them into their everyday lives since the 1980s have, in so doing, created their own personal social robot. It asserts that the constant always on connectivity afforded by this device is enabling a communicable stream of consciousness and emotions that are intertwined between the mobile phone and their emotional self. This, in turn has created a dependence and attachment to the device, to the relationships it mediates and more, such that it is so fully integrated into people’s day-to-day living they cannot imagine how to conduct everyday life without it. The outcome of this human and machine interaction, and the electronic emotions it imbues, is a device that has become an emotionalised social robot that is exclusive to its user.

The New Television Ecosystem

Contents Alberto Abruzzese Introduction 9 Part I: The Role of Emotion in the New Television Ecosystem Leopoldina Fortunati & Sakari Taipale Adoption of New Forms of Television and Emotion in Five European Countries 21 Nello Barile The Age of Personal Web TVs. A Cultural Analysis of the Convergence between Web 2.0, Branding and Everyday Life 41 Emiliano Trere & Manuela Farinosi (H)earthquake TV: ‘People Rebuilding Life after the Emergency’ 61 Part II: Digital Television Audiences and their Practices of Use Leif Kramp Access to Cornucopia? The Rise of a New Television Archive Culture on the Web 83 Fausto Colombo & Andrea Cuman The (Old) New Value of Digital TV as a Cultural Product 105 Eleonora Benecchi & Giuseppe Richeri TV to Talk about. Engaging with American TV Series through the Internet 121 Part III: The Transformation of Television: Contemporary Perspectives Juan Miguel Aguado, Claudio Feijoo, Inmaculada J. Martinez & Marta Roel Mobile Television, a Paradigmatic Case on the Uncertainties and Opportuni- ties of the New Media Ecosystem 141 Andrea Miconi A Glocal Way to Broadcasting: Neighbourhood TV and Web TV in Con-temporary Italy 159 Part IV: Understanding New Behaviours and Attitudes towards Digital Television Jakob Bjur Social Television Ecology – The Misfits and New Viewing Practices 175 Bartolomeo Sapio, Tomaz Turk, Stefano Livi, Michele Cornacchi, Enrico Nicolo & Filomena Papa User Experience of Payment Services through Digital Television 193 About the Authors 216

Cross-Fertilization between Studies on ICT Practices of Use and Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication

The following are comments and considerations on how the Information Communication Technology (ICT) will exploits research on cross modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication.