In their attempts to offer visitors meaningful experiences in historical churches, museums are increasingly experimenting with augmented reality. Arguing that an augmented reality experience should be counted as a material event in its own right, I focus on the aesthetic strategies employed in two augmented reality experiences. The first is an augmented virtuality installation that was presented in the Old Church in Amsterdam (Netherlands). The second concerns a HoloLens experience hosted by St. Peter’s Church in Leuven (Belgium). Drawing on the work of Gernot Böhme (2017) and undertaking a sensory auto-ethnography, I demonstrate how bodily sensations in these augmented reality experiences altered my affective involvement with the church spaces. I found that strategies of defamiliarisation and fragmentation affected my disposition, effectively personalising the perceptional relationship between the church as an authoritative institution and myself in the role as the visitor. Building on recent discussions on museums’ function in society, I also discuss the potential of augmented reality experiences to play on a multitude of meanings, and particularly, in staging dispositions that move away from universal truths.
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Live blogs are a popular format for covering crises, breaking news, politics, or sports events. Despite their popularity among journalists and the public, the format has also been subject to scholarly debate regarding the conflict between immediacy versus credibility, resulting in a high degree of uncertainty for producers and consumers. Journalists cope with this paradox by performing discourse: imposing valid and persuasive representations of the social world. One way to do so is by the use and representation of sources. In this paper, we uncover the performative discourse of live blogs through possible patterns of sourcing and discursive strategies among a range of live blogs and the way journalists cope with the mix of speed and uncertainty. Based on a quantitative content analysis of nine Dutch live blogs, we conclude that journalists follow the same conventions and routines as regular (online) articles. Despite the possibilities for polyvocality (more and different voices in live blogs) due to the accessibility by social media, journalists choose predominantly formal sources and report their speech predominantly in a direct way.
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Liveblogs are very popular with the public and journalists alike. The problem, though, is their credibility, given the uncertainty of the covered events and the immediacy of their production. Little is known about how journalists routinize the unexpected—to paraphrase Tuchman—when journalists report about an event that is still unfolding. This paper is about makers of liveblogs, livebloggers, so to speak, and the routines and conventions they follow. To better understand the relationship between those who do the “liveblogging” and how the “liveblogging” is done, we interviewed a selection of nine experienced livebloggers who cover breaking news, sports, and politics for the three most-visited news platforms in the Netherlands. Based on our results, we concluded that journalists working at different platforms follow similar routines and conventions for claiming, acquiring, and justifying knowledge. Journalists covering news in liveblogs must have expert knowledge, as well as technical and organizational skills. Liveblogging—in contrast to regular, online reporting—is best summarized as a social process instead of an autonomous production. These findings are important for three reasons: first, to understand how journalists cope with uncertainty covering events under immediate circumstances using liveblogs; second, to understand the workings of this popular format; and third, to contribute to literature about journalistic genres, discourse communities and, more specifically, generic requirements of liveblogs for effects of credibility to take place.
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Considering recent calls for change towards a more liveable tourism academia, critical participatory action research is combined with duoethnography to develop The Academic Line—a humorous comic project about academic life. Traditional theories of humour are used to leverage the effectiveness of comics as communicative devices and explored how and to what extent the project promoted solidarity, reflexivity, well-being, and change. This study reveals the concrete commitment to fostering change within and potentially improving academia, and to experiment with a form of communication, which is still underexplored in the scholarly sphere but fruitfully applied in other contexts to raise awareness of and prompt discussion about crucially important issues.
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Part 3 Programming and Activating Cyberparks deals with the variety of ways in which urban public spaces can be reinvigorated through the use of digital media technologies. As is outlined in the introduction to this volume, digital media technologies profoundly shape the use and perception of urban public spaces. Critical observers have noted that digital media may threaten the public nature of our cities and civic spaces. For instance, elsewhere we have described these threats in terms of three Cs: commercialisation, control, and capsularisation (de Lange and de Waal 2013). First, the combination of digital media technologies and consumer culture overlays everyday urban life with a market logic of pervasive customer tracing, quantification, and a vying for attention. Datafication and personalized recommendation services capitalise on our habitual everyday movements in the city, turning them into an ever-expanding string of (potential) customer ‘touchpoints’. This affects the spatial, social and cultural dimensions of almost every realm of urban life, from work to meeting to leisure to travel to home. Visible illustrations include the rapidly changing appearance of high streets in most cities, or the nature and quality of inner-city neighbourhoods coinciding with the popularity of platforms like Airbnb (for more on platforms, see van Dijck et al. 2018). As a result, our polyvocal and frictional public open spaces are being transformed into silent and seamless marketplaces, where public interactions are reduced to commercial transactions.
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This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges". Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraway's narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway's project constitutes an interesting effort to fuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments.
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