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The purpose of this paper is to detail the perceived influence of early gaming habits toward media production from seven students enrolled at a university in the Southeastern US. Participants identified as heavily involved in creating media such as anime, videos, fanfiction, webcomics, games, and digital music.

This exploratory study used qualitative research, thus data collection and analysis included questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts identifying and categorizing six main themes: game play preferences, persistence, early connections between game play and media, support and feedback, creations inspired by games, and significance of games in current lives.

The study found that most participants believed game play in childhood influenced increasingly complex media production habits. Six of the seven believed game play influenced their career path. The paper concludes with implications for education including games as conduits to personalized learning and career paths.

Results from this study extend prior research on the value of games to promote media production and meet personal and professional goals. This is significant as prior research linking early game play to media production influencing career goals is sparse.

This study/paper aims to explore civic participation within multimodal expression. With the rise of content produced and circulated within participatory cultures online, there has been much attention raised regarding questions of audience and attention to this content. For example, does production of media content constitute having a voice if no one is paying attention?

Using multimodal analysis and mediated discourse analysis, this study examines adolescents’ school-based media production and use of multimodal ensembles to recruit and maintain audience attention to specific content in their radio and video documentaries.

Research findings reveal deliberate attempts to connect with audience needs when creating media as well as exploration of emerging civic identities.

Questions for how researchers in literacy and learning can further investigate and articulate civic engagement and advocacy are suggested.

Implications for how teachers can use multimodality to create spaces for civic engagement are provided.

This study is original in that few studies have applied the concepts of participatory politics to media products and process conducted in school settings. This study begins to test the utility of these constructs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what types of task information media scholars need while gathering research data to create new knowledge.

The research design is qualitative and user-oriented. A total of 25 media scholars were interviewed about their research processes and interactions with their research data. The interviews were semi-structured, complemented by critical incident interviews. The analysis focused on the activity of gathering research data. A typology of information (task, domain and task-solving information) guided the analysis of information types related to data gathering, with further analysis focusing only on task information types.

Media scholars needed the following task information types while gathering research data to create new knowledge: (1) information about research data (aboutness of data, characteristics of data, metadata and secondary information about data), (2) information about sources of research data (characteristics of sources, local media landscapes) and (3) information about cases and their contexts (case information, contextual information). All the task information types should be considered when building data services and tools to support media scholars' work.

The paper increases understanding of the concept of task information in the context of gathering research data to create new knowledge and thereby informs the providers of research data services about the task information types that researchers need.

This chapter focuses on clarifying the cooperation and convergence between tourism and audiovisual (AV) sectors in Hamburg and Riga. In light of increasingly easier and more accessible travel, the tourism sector is a growing trend in most countries and regions. To what extent does this affect cooperation with the AV sector? The chapter gives an overview of different types of cooperation in these regions and brings out the main obstacles for innovation. When describing the innovation systems, focus is put on institutional frameworks in these two regions. We end by arguing that raising the demand for innovation in the tourism sector is a real challenge and demonstrating that the public sector plays an important role in driving the cross-innovation processes between the observed sectors.

Traditionally, most readers' news access and consumption were based on direct intentional news seeking behavior. However, in recent years the emergence and popularization of social media platforms have enabled new opportunities for citizens to be incidentally informed about public affairs and politics as by-product of using these platforms. This article seeks to shed light on how socio-political conversation attributes may explain incidental exposure to information.

Drawing on US and UK survey data, the authors explore the role of political discussion and discussion network heterogeneity in predicting individuals' levels of incidental exposure to news. Furthermore, the authors also test the role of social media news use as a moderator. A hierarchical OLS regression analysis with incidental news exposure as dependent variable was conducted as well as analyses of moderation effects (heterogeneity*social media and political discussion*social media) using the PROCESS macro in SPSS.

Findings reveal that heterogeneous networks are positively related to incidental news exposure in the UK, while sheer level of political discussion is a positive influence over incidental news exposure in the US. Social media news use moderates the relationship between political discussion and incidental news exposure in the UK. That is, those who are highly exposed to news on social media and discuss less often about politics and public affairs, they tend to be incidentally exposed to news online the most. Meanwhile, the interaction of social media news and discussion heterogeneity showed significant results in the US with those exhibiting high levels of both also receiving the biggest share of INE.

This study contributes to closing research gaps regarding how and when people are inadvertently exposed to news in two Western societies. By highlighting that beyond the fate of algorithmic information treatment by social media platforms, discussion antecedents as well as social media news use play an integral part in predicting incidental news exposure, the study unravels fundamental conditions underlying the incidental news exposure phenomenon.

The purpose of this study is to identify the structural processes that lead citizens to escape their common social circles when talking about politics and public affairs (e.g. “filter bubbles”). To do so, this study tests to what extent political attitudes, political behavior, news media consumption and discussion frequency affect discussion network heterogeneity among US citizens.

Supported by the polling group Nielsen, this study uses a two-wave panel online survey to study the antecedents and mechanisms of discussion network heterogeneity among US citizens. To test the hypotheses and answer the research questions, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions (cross-sectional, lagged and autoregressive) and mediation analyses were conducted.

The findings imply that political discussion frequency functions as the key element in explaining the mechanism that leads politically interested and participatory citizens (online) as well as news consumers of traditional and online media to seek a more heterogeneous discussion network, disrupting the so-called “filter bubbles.” However, mediation analyses also showed that discussion frequency can lead to more homogenous discussion networks if people score high on political knowledge, possibly reflecting the formation of a close network of political-savvy individuals.

The survey data give important insights into the 2016 pre-election situation, trying to explain why US citizens were more likely to remain in homogenous discussion networks when talking about politics and public affairs. By using two-wave panel data, the analyses allow to draw tentative conclusions about the influential and inhibiting factors and mechanisms that lead individuals to seek/avoid a more heterogeneous discussion network.

This paper aims to explore the process that undergraduates go through in selecting universities and courses in the context of an increasingly marketisated higher education (HE) where students may see themselves as consumers.

The process students go through is examined with reference to the services marketing literature and using a qualitative, phenomenological approach with students encouraged to focus on their lived experiences.

Notable was the reported inexperience of students who suggest an apparent focus on peripheral rather than core aspects of the HE service offering and therefore aim to quickly make “safe” choices. Also there is evidence of “satisficing” and of avoiding risks and choosing options which “feel right” rather than following a more systematic decision‐making process which might be expected for such an important decision. Also noted was a tendency to defer the decision to others, including the institutions themselves, and their increasingly seductive marketing approaches.

The study is based on a vocational university with a focus on subjects for the new professions (marketing, journalism and media production). Further studies might consider how far the findings hold true for other types of subjects and institutions.

The paper considers the implications of these findings for universities and their marketing activities, and invites them to both re‐evaluate assumptions that an informed and considered process has taken place, and to further consider the ethics of current practices.

The paper's focus on the stories provided by students provides new insights into the complexities and contradictions of decision making for HE and for services in general.

This paper aims to examine how metadata taxonomies in embodied computing databases indicate context (e.g. a marketing context or an ethical context) and describe ways to track the evolution of the embodied computing industry over time through digital media archiving.

The authors compare the metadata taxonomies of two embodied computing databases by providing a narrative of their top-level categories. After identifying these categories, they describe how they structure the databases around specific themes.

The growing wearables market often hides complex sociotechnical tradeoffs. Marketing products like Vandrico Inc.’s Wearables Database frame wearables as business solutions without conveying information about the various concessions users make (about giving up their data, for example). Potential solutions to this problem include enhancing embodied computing literacy through the construction of databases that track media about embodied computing technologies using customized metadata categories. Databases such as FABRIC contain multimedia related to the emerging embodied computing market – including patents, interviews, promotional videos and news articles – and can be archived through user-curated collections and tagged according to specific themes (privacy, policing, labor, etc.). One of the benefits of this approach is that users can use the rich metadata fields to search for terms and create curated collections that focus on tradeoffs related to embodied computing technologies.

This paper describes the importance of metadata for framing the orientation of embodied computing databases and describes one of the first attempts to comprehensively track the evolution of embodied computing technologies, their developers and their diverse applications in various social contexts through media archiving.