The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organizations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a far-reaching impact on social life. Scholarship on digital ethnography has fallen along a continuum between theory and methodology. By shifting the focus of the digital from a subject to a method of research, this article contends for a methodologically centred framework of digital ethnography that can transcend the digital/physical binary that is more fraught in discourse than it is in the human experience of contemporary culture. Within this framework, ethnographers can leverage the digital affordances of scalability and inter modality to uncover new perspectives on field observations and document social and cultural processes with empirical specificity and precision. Ethnographers can use data and new informational discoveries to extend of their field-based knowledge, achieving what the author refers to as “augmented empiricism.” In this article, he examines how working with a variety of digital tools, including web scraping, mapping, and sound visualization, could widen the scope of ethnographic work and deepen our practice. Part two focuses on the process of interpreting field data and the value of geospatial visualizations. The last part explores digital methods that magnify the perception of physical senses like sound, sight, and space.
The study deals with the issue of the influence of mass media on the behaviour of youth. Specifically, it is about the extent of leisure time spent using electronic media in relation to drug behaviour (alcohol consumption, cigarettes, marijuana, illicit drug use). It is an exploratory, correlational, non-experimental research. The sample consisted of 2,133 elementary and secondary school pupils (39.6% of them were boys and 60.4% girls). The data was obtained through the SAHA questionnaire (i.e. The International Social and Health Assessment, originally proposed by Weissberg et al. in 1991). Relations were examined in two age groups – “14” (≤ 15 years, n = 743) and “16” (≥ 16 years, n = 1,390). The results show a weak, but statistically significant correlation between time spent with electronic media, especially on the Internet and all forms of drug behaviour except illegal drug use, to a larger extent in the older age group.
Today, we witness two generative forces of digital media culture meeting flexible, open, easy-to-use digital technology and large-scale social communication, sharing of in- formation, knowledge and media representations. These two forces are equally important in media convergence and divergence, but also tightly coupled. This paper traces the root of 'metamedium' concept, developed in late 70s by Alan Kay, to show that at the beginning two crucial aspects of digital revolution were intentionally connected within the project of creating 'personal dynamic media'. Thinking of digital technology as a 'material without qualities' - as a open to any transformation, mutation and extension metamedium - has significant impact on new media discourse. Not only because it reveals essential difference between 'old' and 'new media', but also because it exposes solid ground for practices od media hybridization, innovation or - using Lev Manovich notion - process of 'deep remixability'.
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Michel Foucault characterized heterotopias as specific spaces which disrupt and overturn our existing systems, the hitherto valid order of things and also our ways of thinking. They are significantly important particularly from the point of view of culture, since they affect cultural dynamic transformations. The author in her contribution points out that we presently discover such specific spaces mainly by means of modern technologies. Regarding digital media, the database – a collection of digital data – has a heterotopic character; it neutralizes the present forms of orders and preferences. Images, sounds and words are loosened from their indexicality and are converted into numerical code, which enables the modification and combination of the obtained data. The database thus represents a new type of space which subverts the standard organization of signs. Modern technologies also unveil other unconventional spaces of our micro and macro worlds. The newest medical technologies such as ultrasound, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging penetrate through the surface of the human body into the depths of biological structures in order to obtain their image, and they indeed make the molecular system of the human organism visible. This molecular system can be characterized by high complexity, multifunctionality and highly variable interactions, and the medical technologies in a certain way contribute to the fact that our forms of knowledge are constantly enhanced, extended and sometimes even refuted. This current expansion of heterotopia corresponds with Foucault’s opinion that every epoch creates its own spaces which strive to gain their legitimacy. It is interesting that in both cases of the above-mentioned examples of heterotopia the data transformation can be seen as a significant form of their element arrangement, and thus the borders not only between semiotic systems but also between scientific and artistic discourses are gradually wiped out.
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