Sexual Boundary Violations via Digital Media Among Students

As digital media becomes more central to the lives of adolescents, it also becomes increasingly relevant for their sexual communication. Sexting as an important image-based digital medium provides opportunities for self-determined digital communication, but also carries specific risks for boundary violations. Accordingly, sexting is understood either as an everyday, or as risky and deviant behavior among adolescents. In the affectedness of boundary violations gender plays an important role. However, it is still unclear to what extent digital sexual communication restores stereotypical gender roles and restrictive sexuality norms or, alternatively, enables new spaces of possibility. In this sense, current research points to a desideratum regarding adolescents’ orientations toward sexting as a practice between spaces of possibility and boundary violations. This paper discusses the possibilities, but also the risks, of intimate digital communication among adolescents. The main question is, how adolescents themselves perceive sexting practices and how they position themselves between both spaces for possibility and for the exchange of unwanted sexual content. For this purpose, orientations toward normalities and gender of students are reconstructed. To answer these questions, twelve single-sex, group discussions were carried out with students aged 16 and 17 at five different secondary schools in northern Germany. A total of 20 boys and 22 girls took part. The group discussions were structured by a narrative generating guideline. The analysis draws its methodology from the Documentary Method, regarding implicit and explicit forms of knowledge and discourse. It results in a typology of three types with different orientations. The study shows, that most of the students consider sexting to be a risky practice; only one type shows normality in the use of sexting. At the same time, some of the young people are interested in experimenting with image-based intimate digital communication. Further, gender differences in use and affectedness are also documented. In this way, orientations toward gender stereotypes “favor” both the attribution of responsibility to girls, and overlook the responsibility of students who perpetrated the boundary violation. The orientations of adolescents should be taken more into account in research as well as in educational programs for the prevention of sexual violence.

An Evolutionary Textual Environment

This article introduces the notion of evolutionary textual environment as the outcome of a digital experiment. The experiment consisted of transforming a digital archive of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet into a changing textual space sustained by role-playing interactions. As conceptual and technical artifact, this living archive expresses an innovative model not only for the literary acts of reading, editing and writing, but also for reimagining the book as a network of reconfigurable and dynamic texts, structures, and actions. The programmed features of the LdoD Archive can be used in multiple activities, including leisure reading, study, analysis, advanced research, and creative writing. Through the integration of computational tools in a simulation space, this collaborative archive provides an open exploration of the procedurality of the digital medium itself. The “unfinished machine” metaphor suggests the open-endedness both of the evolving textual environment and of the computational modeling of literary performativity that sustains the whole experiment.

Tales of Love and Pandemic

The main argument of the chapter is the analysis of the reading and writing behaviour on Wattpad during the phases of lockdown in Italy for the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic represents the first great event of ‘data society' reactions making several authors reflect on various aspects and thoughts about social impact of tech ecosystems. Nowadays, it becomes essential to understand the role that digital technologies and media have had to soothe feelings related to social isolation and physical distancing measures. Thus, as widely acknowledged, besides providing data for social research in many aspects of life, the digital context also suggests above all innovated methods enforced by the physical distancing. This research has explored about 600 stories edited on Wattpad that have been selected through the query “Covid.” The aim of the analysis is to map collective imaginary of users about the COVID-19 pandemic within a digital medium for fanfiction, combining three fundamental approaches of digital methods.

Young Citizen's Political Engagement in India

Social media has emerged as a dominant digital medium platform in contemporary society. The quick development of social media has instigated changes concerning the way publics to interact with a group of people with similar ideologies, the quality of information they share, or the opportunity to acquire and share ideas. Social media use has a major influence on public relations, marketing, and political communication. Therefore, politicians are formulating their strategies to reach increasingly networked individuals. The chapter defines political engagement concept, focuses on excessive use of social media to understand how the emergence of digital citizenship is changing political engagement. In addition to this, the chapter also examines whether the use of social media exercise any effect on 2014 and 2019. General elections outcome or not and discuss the proposed conceptual framework for future empirical testing. The chapter highlights the various concerns needed to be taken care of while using social media as a marketing tool for promoting political participation and engagement.

Playing out the unspeakable: the rhetorics of trauma in The Day the Laughter Stopped digital game

The article undertakes a detailed analysis of The Day the Laughter Stopped – a simple text-based browser game about rape, told from the perspective of a young teenage girl. While seemingly straightforward, the game uses choice poetics to build expectations of agency on the side of the player, only to subvert them at the most climactic moment, provoking emotional responses and serving as a commentary on the experience of loss of control and loss of words in the face of a traumatic event. Following existing approaches to rhetorical, emotion-evoking qualities and capabilities of digital games, the article explores the potential of the digital medium to communicate the unspeakable, overwhelming dimension of trauma, as illustrated by the game. The analysis not only explores the medium-specific means of expression which the game utilizes to encourage the audience to explore the perspective of a rape victim in an engaging way, but also leads to the conclusion that in doing so, the game aims to make persuasive statements about the social and cultural discourse around rape trauma and its representations, and therefore contributes to the larger socio-cultural discourse. As such, the article aspires to add to pre-existing studies on the specific rhetorical means of digital fiction, as well as on the approaches to cultural renditions of trauma.

A Study on the Contribution of a Digital Community towards the Parental Ecosystem Transformation

A research study was conducted to identify digital communities' role and sphere of influence in a parenting ecosystem. This report provides an overview of the target segment needs assessment and digitalization of their physical communities and support systems. Primary research was done via telephonic calls and zoom interviews of pregnant and new mothers and couples. Forty participants took part in the study to share their experiences and pain points. In addition to this, a WhatsApp group of 350 participants was created to observe the engagement on a digital medium. The study helped us validate the need for a social support system beyond the existing physical network of the participants to reach out to others with similar or better parenting approaches. 70% of the participants have expressed their willingness to join digital parental communities. The findings have been helpful to understand the role of a digital society, which can enhance the offerings of parenting facilitators and support parents in implementing better parenting practices. Of the last 10-12 years, there has been a steady increase in regional parenting networks. As a result, we picked the impact and influence of digital parental networks on these women's lifestyles and how they have aided in the growth of a conscious and good parenting style as our research topic. The conclusion outlines the impact of these communities and the significant concerns that have arisen due to their increased use.

Children’s Engagement with Urban Legends: Temporality and Collective Story-sharing Through Horror Narratives

<p>This thesis explores how children engage with horror narratives in the digital era and how this engagement has changed over the last decade. The term ‘Horror narratives’ encompasses a wide range of genre-based storytelling from urban legends, to creepypastas, to images, YouTube videos, and internet forums. It is a broad form of story-sharing that transcends physical and digital mediums. I examine the relationship between the horror narratives, the individual child, and wider group engagement in real-life and on a digital platforms, and how this has changed over the last fifteen years. Over the past twenty years children’s access to personal devices and digital media has expanded rapidly. I ask whether oral tradition has been overtaken by digital horror narratives. What does story-sharing look like in a digital medium? Part of this paper is looking at how children’s horror narrative repertoires develop and what stories are retained and disseminated among their peers. In my childhood era the predominant form of dissemination was oral story-sharing, but during my fieldwork with young scouts I learned that children engage in a variety of media for dissemination as they now have easier access to internet communities on their personal devices. I have compared popular oral urban legends from my childhood (Click Click Slide, Drip Drip, and “Johnny, I want my liver back”) to contemporary horror narratives children engage with both in real-life and in the digital medium. My thesis also explores the relationship between young adults in their early twenties and memories of these horror narratives from their childhood, and how these memories have been impacted by nostalgia and retroactive knowledge. The major question of this thesis is how has horror storytelling changed from my childhood fifteen years ago to present time, and what have new technologies contributed to this evolution in horror narration?</p>

Metatextual Print Fiction in the Age of Digital Fiction

<p>This thesis argues that the future envisaged for the novel by the early hypertext theorists, that the digital medium would displace print and open up a variety of new possibilities for novelistic fiction, can now be differently understood by exploring the materiality of the medium in works of print, hypertext and web-fiction composed in the past fifty years. Michael Kaufmann‘s analysis of modernist experimental print fiction in his book Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print and his use of the term 'metatextual' to locate the distinguishing feature of novels in this tradition will be extended to the works of hypertext and web-fiction in the new media, demonstrating that works of hypertext and web-fiction can be regarded as continuous with experimental print fiction. This analysis, which is also grounded on the concepts of the graphic surface and the materiality of the text, is further confirmed by considering the use of metatextual features of works composed in digital media in experimental novels published in the digital era which continue the tradition by publishing in print. There are four chapters in this thesis. In the first one, metatextuality of the print novels in the pre-digital era is explored through the theory and practice of William Gass who has insisted on the materiality of language and the medium in almost all of his theoretical works. Moreover, the first chapter establishes a point of reference for the discussion of the shift from print to digital media in novel writing by discussing an experimental print novel, William Gass's Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Each of the following chapters identify significant issues in the development of hypertext and print for the phase investigated in the chapter, and present two or more case studies of specific texts. The second chapter explores the development of the novel through the electronic textuality of the early computers. This chapter analyses the first hypertext novel, afternoon, written by Michael Joyce, and how and in what ways it took advantage of the capabilities of the computer and in what ways it tried to remediate print. In order to show how the print novel has been becoming more media-conscious, the second chapter ends with an analysis of a print novel, Fax Messages From a Near Future by Jorge Wilheim which highlights the role of medium in its narrative. The third chapter follows the line of argument of the previous chapters by exploring the relationship of the multimedia capabilities of the World Wide Web and analyzing the trends which appear through the way the Internet has been used to write novels. The case study section of this chapter includes two novels; 10.01 by Lance Olsen, and Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales by Edward Falco. The final chapter brings the whole line of inquiry back into print in order to examine what effects the arrival of digital media has had on experimental print fiction and how these novels push the boundaries of the print medium even further. There are three novels in the case study of this chapter, each of which provides a unique insight into the potentials of print and how they bring the materiality of the print to the foreground. The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock makes the book a multimodal work of art by incorporating the painting and the words. Mark Z. Danielewski‘s The Fifty Year Sword and House of Leaves make us see the book as a physical object which can be read in a variety of different ways.</p>