Playing with Technology: Young Children Making Sense of Technology as Part of Their Everyday Social Worlds

Games and activities, often involving aspects of pretence and fantasy play, are an essential aspect of everyday preschool life for many young children. Young children’s spontaneous play activities can be understood as social life in action. Increasingly, young children’s games and activities involve their engagement in pretence using play props to represent computers, laptops and other pieces of technology equipment. In this way, pretend play becomes a context for engaging with matters from the real world. There are a number of studies investigating school-aged children engaging in gaming and other online activities, but less is known about what young children are doing with online technologies. Drawing on Australian Research Council funded research of children engaging with technologies at home and school, this chapter investigates how young children use technologies in everyday life by showing how they draw on props, both real or imaginary, to support their play activities. An ethnomethodological approach using conversation analysis is used to explore how children’s gestures, gaze and talk work to introduce ideas and activities. This chapter contributes to understandings of how children’s play intersects with technologies and pretend play.

Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Era

As patterns of media use become more integrated with mobile technologies and multiple screens, a new mode of viewer engagement has emerged in the form of connected viewing, which allows for an array of new relationships between audiences and media texts in the digital space. This exciting new collection brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media. The result is a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.

Distribution Revolution: Conversations about the Digital Future of Film and Television

Distribution Revolution is a collection of interviews with leading film and TV professionals concerning the many ways that digital delivery systems are transforming the entertainment business. These interviews provide lively insider accounts from studio executives, distribution professionals, and creative talent of the tumultuous transformation of film and TV in the digital era. The first section features interviews with top executives at major Hollywood studios, providing a window into the big-picture concerns of media conglomerates with respect to changing business models, revenue streams, and audience behaviors. The second focuses on innovative enterprises that are providing path-breaking models for new modes of content creation, curation, and distribution—creatively meshing the strategies and practices of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And the final section offers insights from creative talent whose professional practices, compensation, and everyday working conditions have been transformed over the past ten years. Taken together, these interviews demonstrate that virtually every aspect of the film and television businesses is being affected by the digital distribution revolution, a revolution that has likely just begun. Interviewees include: • Gary Newman, Chairman, 20th Century Fox Television • Kelly Summers, Former Vice President, Global Business Development and New Media Strategy, Walt Disney Studios • Thomas Gewecke, Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, Warner Bros. Entertainment • Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer, Netflix • Felicia D. Henderson, Writer-Producer, Soul Food, Gossip Girl • Dick Wolf, Executive Producer and Creator, Law & Order

Digital copyright and the consumer revolution: Hands off my iPod

This book documents and evaluates the growing consumer revolution against digital copyright law, and makes a unique theoretical contribution to the debate surrounding this issue. With a focus on recent US copyright law, the book charts the consumer rebellion against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act 1998 (US) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 (US). The author explores the significance of key judicial rulings and considers legal controversies over new technologies, such as the iPod, TiVo, Sony Playstation II, Google Book Search, and peer-to-peer networks. The book also highlights cultural developments, such as the emergence of digital sampling and mash-ups, the construction of the BBC Creative Archive, and the evolution of the Creative Commons. Digital Copyright and the Consumer Revolution will be of prime interest to academics, law students and lawyers interested in the ramifications of copyright law, as well as policymakers given its focus upon recent legislative developments and reform proposals. The book will also appeal to librarians, information managers, creative artists, consumers, technology developers, and other users of copyright material.

Post-quantum key exchange for the TLS protocol from the ring learning with errors problem

Lattice-based cryptographic primitives are believed to offer resilience against attacks by quantum computers. We demonstrate the practicality of post-quantum key exchange by constructing cipher suites for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol that provide key exchange based on the ring learning with errors (R-LWE) problem, we accompany these cipher suites with a rigorous proof of security. Our approach ties lattice-based key exchange together with traditional authentication using RSA or elliptic curve digital signatures: the post-quantum key exchange provides forward secrecy against future quantum attackers, while authentication can be provided using RSA keys that are issued by today's commercial certificate authorities, smoothing the path to adoption. Our cryptographically secure implementation, aimed at the 128-bit security level, reveals that the performance price when switching from non-quantum-safe key exchange is not too high. With our R-LWE cipher suites integrated into the Open SSL library and using the Apache web server on a 2-core desktop computer, we could serve 506 RLWE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 HTTPS connections per second for a 10 KiB payload. Compared to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, this means an 8 KiB increased handshake size and a reduction in throughput of only 21%. This demonstrates that provably secure post-quantum key-exchange can already be considered practical.

Development of a switch mode assisted linear amplifier for use as a high fidelity voltage source

Frequency Domain Spectroscopy (FDS) is one of the major techniques used for determining the condition of the cellulose based paper and pressboard components in large oil/paper insulated power transformers. This technique typically makes use of a sinusoidal voltage source swept from 0.1 mHz to 1 kHz. The excitation test voltage source used must meet certain characteristics, such as high output voltage, high fidelity, low noise and low harmonic content. The amplifier used; in the test voltage source; must be able to drive highly capacitive loads. This paper proposes that a switch-mode assisted linear amplifier (SMALA) can be used in the test voltage source to meet these criteria. A three level SMALA prototype amplifier was built to experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposal. The developed SMALA prototype shows no discernable harmonic distortion in the output voltage waveform, or the need for output filters, and is therefore seen as a preferable option to pulse width modulated digital amplifiers. The lack of harmonic distortion and high frequency switching noise in the output voltage of this SMALA prototype demonstrates its feasibility for applications in FDS, particularly on highly capacitive test objects such as transformer insulation systems.

Re-theorizing the “digital divide”: Identifying dimensions of social exclusion in contemporary media technologies

The digital divide is the disparancy in access to information, in the ability to communicate, and in the capacity to make information and communication serve full participation in the information society. Indeed, the conversation about the digital divide has developed over the last decade from a focus on connectivity and access to information and communication technologies, to a conversation that encompasses the ability to use them and to the utility that usage provides (Wei et al., 2011). However, this conversation, while transitioning from technology to the skills of the people that use them and to the fruits of their use is limited in its ability to take into account the social role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). One successful attempt in conceptualizing the social impact of the differences in access to and utilization of digital communication technologies, was developed by van Dijk (2005) whose sequential model for analyzing the divide states that: 1. Categorical inequalities in society produce an unequal distribution of resources; 2. An unequal distribution of resources causes unequal access to digital technologies; 3. Unequal access to digital technologies also depends on the characteristics of these technologies; 4. Unequal access to digital technologies brings about unequal participation in society; 5. Unequal participation in society reinforces categorical inequalities and unequal distributions of resources.” (p. 15) As van Dijk’s model demonstrates, the divide’s impact is the exclusion of individuals from participation. Still left to be defined are the “categorical inequalities,” the “resources,” the “characteristics of digital technologies,” and the different levels of “access” that result in differentiated levels of participation, as these change over time due to the evolving nature of technology and the dynamics of society. And most importantly, the meaning of “participation” in contemporary society needs to be determined as it is differentiated levels of participation that are the result of the divide and the engine of the ever-growing disparities. Our argument is structured in the following manner: We first claim that contemporary digital media differ from the previous generation of ICTs along four dimensions: They offer an abundance of information resources and communication channels when compared to the relative paucity of both in the past; they offer mobility as opposed to the stationary nature of their predecessors; they are interactive in that they provide users with the capability to design their own media environments in contrast to the dictated environs of previous architectures; and, they allow users to communicate utilizing multi forms of mediation, unlike the uniformity of sound or word that limited users in the past. We then submit that involvement in the information society calls for egalitarian access to all four dimensions of the user experience that make contemporary media different from their predecessors and that the ability to experience all four affects the levels in which humans partake in the shaping of society. The model being cyclical, we then discuss how lower levels of participation contribute to the enhancement of social inequalities. Finally, we discuss why participation is needed in order to achieve full membership in the information society and what political philosophy should govern policy solutions targeting the re-inclusion of those digitally excluded.

Napster: Infinite digital jukebox or pirate bazaar?

This paper considers the copyright litigation over the file-sharing program, Napster. The first section examines the culture of collecting at work in Napster. The next part examines the litigation by the major record companies and Metallica against Napster. The final section considers the future of file-sharing, looking at alternatives to Napster, such as Filetopia, Freenet, Gnutella, MP3board.com and streaming media.