The ability to bear witness to human trauma and devastation through technologies in the new media age endorses suffering as a form of mass spectacle which can negotiate distance between an exterior world as well as the unfamiliar and the unknown. Our engagements with these forms of mediated suffering in postmodernity can be public and complex and conditioned by both media power and our ability to domesticate suffering in the private confines of our homes. This article reviews the domestication of (...) suffering historically in mainstream media. It contends that mediated suffering has become an entrenched ritual in the media landscape and is a multi-faceted device which can be functionalist and therapeutic yet too pervasive to be rendered meaningful in people’s everyday lives. (shrink)

Mobile technologies such as tablets, iPads, laptops, netbooks as well as mobile phones with internet connectivity and recording features present new challenges to the academy. In the age of convergence and with the encoding of several features into mobile telephony, private spaces of the classroom can be reconfigured through the mediation of technologies. In most cases, existing rules and regulations of higher education institutions do not comprehensively address these challenges. The introduction of new technologies into the classroom has been often (...) framed historically as vital and relevant for a progressive academic society or as part of a national imperative to transform the ways in which the authors access and engage with knowledge. This paper surveys British universities to examine how they govern the phenomenon of recording content through mobile technologies. The results reveal a pervasive use of mobile devices in UK universities and clear divergences in approaches to enacting mobile device-specific policies to govern the usage of these technologies. (shrink)

The digital culture of the Internet and the emergence of social networking sites online have made identity construction a salient aspect of this economy. It also signifies a ‘narcissistic turn’ with increasing emphasis on self-construction and self-love from social profiles, self-representations, self-search to ‘selfies’. The construction of ‘self’ online is mediated through the gaze of the others, this being an important validation in the construction of self. By drawing on Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’ the article examines how this concept is relevant (...) in today’s digital culture and self narration online through everyday communication including imaging, uploading, tagging and ‘liking’ making others’ validation of us an important element of self-esteem. Rousseau’s notion of self-love has both constructive and destructive configurations and the article argues that these can take different manifestations online in today’s contemporary digital culture. (shrink)