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Digital media evoking interactive games in virtual space

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Abstract

Digital media are as much an inescapable part of everyday social life as the snail's shell is to its occupant. In particular, the lives of teenagers and young adults in Western industrial countries are intimately connected to these media; the young generation in other parts of the world would like to follow suit. Digital media are not voiceless; as discursive and presentational bearers of meaning, they evoke interaction games where online actors develop subjectivisation practices. Such practices have been identified in the ‘Communicative publics in cyberspace’ research project as transformation, self-staging, border management, border transgressions and networking. These practices are not developed independently of digital media's characteristics, such as interactivity, multimedia capability, network structure, hybridity and space-forming structure. In this contribution, digital media are conceptualised as material–immaterial objects. It is assumed that the relationship between these objects and bloggers and online actors is formed interactively.

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Notes

  1. Project team at the University of Klagenfurt: Christina Schachtner, Nicole Duller, Katja Osljak, Heidrun Stückler.

  2. German distinguishes between evocative (evokativ) and evocatory (evokatorisch). Evocative (evokativ) suggests ‘containing certain ideas or notions’, whereas evocatory (evokatorisch) means ‘summoning, prompting, awakening certain notions or ideas’.

  3. I carried out this interview as part of the ‘Computer-related thinking, acting, feeling’ study in 1992.

  4. Visualisation is a research method applied in the ‘Communicative audiences in cyberspace’ project as a method contrasting with focused network analysis and interviews.

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Schachtner, C. Digital media evoking interactive games in virtual space. Subjectivity 6, 33–54 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.27

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