Processes of Proliferation

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

Digital Mediatization in Medicine: New Models of Clinic-to-Doctor-to-Patient Interaction

Mediatization is an interdisciplinary construct, which allows us to study how the transformation of social institutions is affected by media influence and social theories. Researchers are focusing on peoples digital representations and new interaction models. As digital networks grow and overlap with traditional interaction forms, new models of clinic-doctor-patient interaction emerge. Researching this reveals the efficiency of communicative constructivism. The purpose of the research is to study the transformative effect of mediatization on medicine. The research methodology is based on communicative constructivism and phenomenological approach, including analysis of 70 Instagram accounts of doctors and clinics and in-depth interviews of 10 St. Petersburg-based doctors. The research validates the transformation tendencies in medicine as a social institution.

Teaching and Learning Techniques for the Online Environment. How to Maintain Students’ Attention and Achieve Learning Outcomes in a Virtual Environment Using New Technology

Digital communication has become vital to all social and economic sectors. Today we are experiencing a transition from traditional learning to e-learning via digital means. Overnight, all of humanity is learning how to adapt to digital life and leaving traditional ways of doing things behind. Digitization has been around for several years, but has become a necessity due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have forced us to work remotely and to use digital networks to communicate, make payments, and learn – all sectors have had to abruptly adapt to the digital age. This paper shows how teaching and learning approaches need to adapt to new communication requirements and students' needs to achieve learning outcomes in a virtual environment. This paper uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze professors’ and students’ perspectives on the techniques of online teaching and learning, both during the isolation period and after, and what the best methods are for online learning, taking into consideration how to maintain students’ attention and how to get them actively involved in the learning process. The aim of this study is to develop a holistic image of online teaching-learning-assessment activities, to ensure the efficiency and quality of the educational process in the university environment.

Teaching techniques adapted for online delivery to achieve course learning outcomes in a virtual environment

Today we are moving from traditional learning to e-learning via digital means. The entire humanity learned how to adapt overnight to digital life and leave the traditional doing things behind. Digitization has been around for several years, but its use has become a necessity with the Covid-19 pandemic. The blockade forced us to work remotely overnight, to use digital networks to communicate, make payments, learn, all sectors of activity had to adapt to the digital age in one night. This paper shows how the teaching and learning approaches need to adapt to new communication requirements and students' needs to achieve course learning outcomes in a virtual environment. This paper uses both a quantitative and qualitative method to analyze the professors and students’ perspectives on the techniques of online teaching-learning, during the isolation period and after, and what are the best methods recommended to be used for online learning taking into consideration how students can maintain their class’s attention and how can get actively involved in a learning process. The value of this study is to develop a holistic image of online teaching-learning-assessment activities, to ensure the efficiency and quality of the educational process in the university environment.

Digitalization and Backward Design take the finance teaching techniques and study plan strategy one step further

Digitization has been around for several years, but its use has become a necessity with the Covid-19 pandemic. Lockdown forced us to work remotely overnight, to use digital networks to communicate, make payments, learn all sectors of activity were forced to adapt to the digital age in one night. This paper shows how teaching, research, and the study plan must adapt to the new communication requirements and students’ needs to achieve the course learning outcomes in a virtual environment. The paper proposes a realistic academic plan design - backward. Taking into account new environmental and digital challenges, the backward design facilitates the decision on the content of the study plan, the elimination of less important parts, and the application of new communication and assessment techniques.

Conclusion: A Turning Point for Liberal Democracy

Digital networks have unified contemporary geoculture around market expansion and the spectacle. The society of the selfie, as a sociotechnical complex that has emerged from the capitalist transformations since the 1980s, is the quintessence of a new structure for human relatedness. The introduction of new communication technologies always works in two directions at once—we become more connected in some ways, more alienated in others. The story of Web 2.0 and the discontents of the society of the selfie are, in this sense, a different genre of the same basic tendency. The society of the selfie is not the cause of this widespread immiseration, but it is historically inseparable from it, and in some significant ways contributes to the social changes and dislocations that authoritarian movements react against with their militant retrotopic visions. Yet the desire for progressive change to a more inclusive, egalitarian form of society is influenced by the same dislocations and crises that impact the authoritarians, in this case the cosmopolitans and anti-capitalists reacting not just against economic deprivation but also against a competitive, reified social world that has imposed rigid norms about work, strength, and individualism, while depriving them of belonging, cooperation, and ‘the good life’. If the society of the selfie favours threats that reify contemporary sociality and warp communication dynamics, it also feeds mechanisms of engagement and the production of new social ties, as well as new expectations for participation and empowerment in society.

Invisible Audience and Echo Chamber Effects

Developing a theory for the remote audiences of digital networks, we dialogue with social psychology and social theory to describe a novel form of communication that is delivered to everyone and no one at the same time. This is the invisible audience. At the same time as people express themselves to a generalized, invisible audience over social media, the ‘everyone’ of this invisible audience is often narrowed in a very specific way: echo chamber effects. The invisible audience and echo chamber effects both reinforce a solipsistic horizon for every person, and these individual horizons come partially together under echo chamber effects, constituting a multiplicity of separate ‘homophilic assemblages’ characterized by normative and political alignment, one-dimensional communication, and black-and-white thinking. We call this a ‘splitting public sphere’. On the whole, rational debate is curtailed, under the reign of soundbites, memes, and angry venting. The lack of exposure to reasoned disagreement makes people more susceptible to authoritarian rhetoric and propaganda.

Neoliberal Impression Management

This chapter discusses the nexus between digital networks and neoliberal transformations since the 1980s. We describe how on social media, people orient around a variety of metrics in order to build and display their ‘human capital’, projecting their preferred electronic doubles of themselves in order to gain desired recognition from others, and in many cases to network and showcase a ‘professional’ identity directly in the interests of career advancement. We discuss this in light of a theory of ‘neoliberal impression management’, which we introduce in reference to the ideas of Erich Fromm, Erving Goffman, and Michel Foucault. In our theory of neoliberal impression management, a person forges a spectacular self through which their actions and interactions are displayed in ‘public’ view. In doing this, they also amass publicly viewable metrics (likes, shares, followers, etc.) that suggest an ‘objective’ value. This cultural development moves toward self-centeredness, narcissism, and attention-seeking, and away from genuine concern for others and connection with them. This feeds the potential for numbness to – if not outright acceptance of – political cruelty and injustice.

LGBTQ+ Communities and Digital Media

Digital media offer spaces to many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people (LGBTQ+) for connection, support, and friendship and hosts vital resources for learning and practicing diverse genders and sexualities. In this chapter, the authors review key research on LGBTQ+ communities and identities in digital spaces over several decades, dividing the chapter into three main sections: (1) community and connection, (2) romance and dating, and (3) identity work. In the first section on community and connection, they examine research centered on how LGBTQ+ people use digital media to forge connections and build “communities.” While this term is contested in the literature, many LGBTQ+ people use it to describe their experiences of digital networks. Second, they outline the growing body of research on how LGBTQ+ people use digital media in their romantic and sexual lives, from dating/hook-up apps to social media. They consider the challenges, pleasures, and opportunities in how LGBTQ+ people use digital media for sex and dating practices and potential. Third, they reflect on how these connections have figured into ongoing research on LGBTQ+ identities, where digital media allow LGBTQ+ people to develop shared languages to describe their experiences, to reflect on their lives, and to rehearse modes of self-representation.

Hindrances in port digitalization? Identifying problems in adoption and implementation

Digitalization has an impact on all domains of maritime transport and logistics. Ports’ ability to act as a part of digital networks and information chains is vital for its competitiveness. This requires means and prerequisites to integrate with contemporary technology platforms and system architectures. Such readiness should exist in different parallel processes taking place in organizations of port communities. Successful digitalization requires focused technology management ensuring system and data transfer interoperability. The paper addresses problems, obstacles, and hindrances that ports are currently facing in their digitalization efforts. Interoperability and stakeholder interaction is significant, particularly between the port management, municipal ownership, and business operators and vendors. In the contemporary port development, environmental regulations have an effect on the level and effectiveness of digitalization. The future development of port digitalization will be dependent on the port capabilities to adopt and implement reliable and adoptable technologies with clear vision of the future.