Ito, M. (ed.) (2009). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com Do teenagers waste their time by using social media? No, according to a recent three-year study conducted by the MacArthur Foundation and led by Mary Ito.  Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out is a report by Prof. Ito and her 23 colleagues on the study and its key findings. This book fills a gap in research on teenage online behaviour. Rather than taking a negative technological deterministic view, the authors seek to understand how these tools improve the teenagers’ … Continue reading Annotated Bibliography

RE:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World is a useful text for social change activists. The authors, Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, advocate the “story-based” approach they developed through working on social change campaigns at “The Center for Story Based Strategy” (formerly “SmartMeme”), which they co-founded. “Story-based strategy” is about using our oldest and most powerful communication tool – stories –  as catalysts for change. The authors contend that the stories we tell each other can challenge the power structures that seek to oppress, subvert old assumptions by connecting issues to people’s values, and ultimately create the … Continue reading Can Stories Change the World?

Reinsborough, Patrick, and Doyle Canning. RE:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010. Print. This text describes a blueprint for social change activists. The authors, Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, are both activists themselves and co-founders of “The Center for Story-Based Strategy” in Oakland, California (formerly “SmartMeme”). They describe “story-based strategy” as a “framework that links movement building with an analysis of narrative power, and places storytelling at the centre of social change strategy” (12). Their main idea is that we understand our world based on the stories we tell each other. The problem, according … Continue reading RE:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy

  The hybridity of ludo-literary works are examined in Astrid Ensslin’s monograph Literary Gaming (2014). Ensslin’s text participates along a continuum of works which argue for the coalescence of literature and ludology in scholarship. Namely, she argues that a framework is needed to discuss the broad spectrum of works which blur the boundary between literature and gaming and she proposes to offer such a framework with her “functional ludostylistics,” which will be discussed in further detail later in this essay. The main research questions addressed in her work are: How can stories be approached in a way that reflects gaming structures? Conversely, how do games deploy … Continue reading Functional Ludostylistics: Establishing an Interdisciplinary Language in Astrid Ensslin’s Literary Gaming

Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago:   University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Johanna Drucker’s SpecLab is a methodological investigation into the philosophy and application of speculative computing, galvanized within research efforts conducted at the University of Virginia with her colleague, Jerome McGann. Drucker describes speculative computing as an intervention into the relationship between aesthetic representation and subjective knowledge development. It aims to delineate the intellectual “superstructure” or dichotomy between formal, objective logic—or mathesis—often favoured within the practices of digital humanities— and aesthesis—individual thought that challenges authoritarian structures of intelligence (23). As static mechanisms within the organization and dissemination of data, Drucker asserts that digital information systems employed by the humanities—focused upon “functionality” rather than interactivity—problematically indoctrinate the parameters of user engagement through the projection of a cognitive monoculture; a concept which upon greater reflection prompts significant concerns within both scholastic and sociocultural spheres (17). By contrast, the scholar’s vision of speculative computing, and endeavors at SpecLab, boast a phenomenological impulse focused upon the connection between “aesthetic provocation” and human “inflection” (19). In short, Drucker advocates for the necessity of subjectivity within visually oriented learning projects.

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