Larissa Hjorth

RMIT University | RMIT · School of Media and Communication

Purpose This study aims to address the existing gap in co-design frameworks by introducing the EMPOWER framework, a strength-based co-design methodological approach specifically designed to tackle the key empowerment challenges associated with co-designing alongside individuals experiencing vulnerability. The purpose of this study is to provide a s...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one technology for contact tracing has come to dominate – QR codes. As a technology pioneered in Japan two decades ago and mainstreamed in China, QR codes have quickly become part of quotidian placemaking. While locations such as China have fully incorporated QR code technology into everyday contexts including public t...

Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in !ields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, !lm, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane...

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the digital amplify all aspects of our lives—work, sociality, health, intimacy, care, and inequality. In a time of restrictions and physical distancing, the role of the digital for social inclusion—especially for older adults—was heightened with many having to care at a distance. Our study focuses on older adults from Wuha...

As digital inclusion becomes a growing indicator of wellbeing in later life, the ability to understand older adults’ preferences for information and communication technologies (ICTs) and develop strategies to support their digital literacy is critical. The barriers older adults face include their perceived ICT risks and capacity to learn. Complexit...

The pandemic restrictions and lockdowns have seen working from home (WFH) becoming a mundane practice. During the lockdowns, all movement were situated in the rhythms of the domestic and its infinite regresses of 'presence bleed' (Gregg [2011]. Work’s Intimacy. London: Polity.) – informal care of older parents and young children, the gendered natur...

This digital booklet aims to support older Australians with strategies to increase your digital confidence to connect, as well as assist organisations working with seniors and policy-makers to help reduce the digital divide. We want to help older adults to increase their digital confidence by addressing perceived risks experienced when engaging wit...

This paper takes a design anthropology approach to understanding the learnings, challenges and opportunities Victorians adopted to choreograph practices of care in and through media practice during and after the Australian 2019–2020 bushfire crisis. In doing so, we frame our inquiry from a perspective of how individuals and communities care through...

In this chapter, we seek to conceptualize the shifts in mobile gaming through two key rubrics – ambient play and digital wayfaring—to coalesce the multiple forms of domestic, casual and urban play that constitute mobile gaming. This chapter begins with a contextualization through a short history followed by a discussion of pervasive games as vehicl...

This study explores scenarios of use concerning the play practices of children on mobile devices, and the subsequent domestic tensions that arise out of such practices. In the domestic media landscape, mobile media has increasingly featured in the contested and contradictory practices of the home [Morley (Home territories: Media, mobility and ident...

The wellbeing of higher degree research (HDR) students, or postgraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of concern. In Australia, international students have queued for food parcels, while headlines report stark drops in international enrolments and the financial bottom line of universities. We undertook a pilot study using ethnograp...

The wellbeing of higher degree research (HDR) students, or postgraduate students during the COVID-19 pandemic has been of concern. In Australia, international students have queued for food parcels, while headlines report stark drops in international enrolments and the financial bottom line of universities. We undertook a pilot study using ethnograp...

Popular media and policy discussions of digital health for supporting older people in the ‘super-aged’ context of Japan often focus on novel technologies in development, such as service robots, AI devices or automated vehicles. Very little research exists on how Japanese people are engaging with these technologies for self-care or the care of other...

Over the past two decades, location-based games have moved from media art fringes to the mass cultural mainstream. Through their locative affordances, these game types enable practices of wayfaring and placemaking, with the capacity to deliver powerful tacit knowledge. These affordances suggest the potential for the development of location-based ga...

Increasingly, mobile media play a crucial role in how we make sense of life, death and afterlife. In times of disaster and trauma, mobile media are on hand as a vehicle for witnessing and companionship in which memories of dead and living are entangled. Mobile media help with continuity bonds – sometimes through perceived connections with the decea...

Workplace diversity and inclusion are recognised as integral to the internal and public-facing success of organizations. The games industry worldwide has been notably slow to embrace reforms to bring diverse work cultures into practice. Not only does the industry rank very low in the diversity of its corporate profile but a series of high-profile c...

Solid-state drives, Bluetooth capabilities, smartphones, “the cloud,” social media platforms, and other digital technologies have fundamentally altered how we share and store digital materials. This article sets an agenda for understanding how people manage the proliferation of digital material in their everyday lives through a close examination of...

In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures...

This rapid research brief synthesises the evidence on whether COVID-19 has had an impact on public sentiment in relation to privacy and the widespread use of data and technology by the government in responding to the public health crisis, be it through tracing, compliance, or enforcement.

In mid-2016, the streets of cities around the world were populated by digital wayfarers taking part in the augmented reality (AR) game, Pokémon GO. The game popularized the digital overlay technique of AR, in which real-time pedestrian movement is integrated with mobile location-based functionality and network information. In the years that followe...

Researching everyday media practices is a messy and tricky business fraught with uncertainty. In this panel the authors ask how stories of failure, especially during fieldwork, can be rethought as a meaningful emergent method and approach. How can we productively reframe failure as a core part of the research process that cannot be subsumed into th...

In this paper we explore how smartphone users in Victoria (Australia) used mobile and non-mobile media to find and manage information, emotions and networks during the 2019-2020 Australian summer bushfire crisis. Through arts-based methods that deployed drawing, critical reflection and group discussion, we sought to use techniques that elicit the e...

How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we interact across digital, material, and social landscapes. We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill—waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambie...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

How are intergenerational relationships playing out in and through the digital rhythms of the household? Through extensive fieldwork in Tokyo, Shanghai and Melbourne, this book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices. It investigates the rise of self-tracking, quantified self...

Imagine yourself wherever you were 20 years ago, and that an entrepreneurial, fresh-faced, and friendly young newsboy comes to your doorstep. He asks you to subscribe to the local paper. There is no cost to this subscription, he says, but, in exchange for community news, the boy must be allowed to come into your house and look at all of your photos...

“Minecraft is undoubtedly one of the most influential games of the past decade. Exploring Minecraft brilliantly situates this multiplatform and multisensory game within today’s pervasive play culture, focusing on its role in players’ everyday lives across domestic and educational spaces, and across cultural and generational contexts. In times of so...

In this chapter we explore the multiple and complex ways in which Minecraft occupies domestic spaces. Through ethnographic research conducted in Australian households we articulate how the game is played in the home as a vehicle for intergenerational literacy and intimacy. In this chapter we explore the multiple and complex ways in which Minecraft...

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s key themes—social play, informal creative literacies and quotidian platformativity. We reflect on what it means to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural phenomenon.

This chapter turns the focus to Understanding Play—that is, providing a more focused and detailed investigation of playful, creative, informal and incidental literacies—and identifies both the interdisciplinary and innovative methodological approaches that are used to analyse and interpret playful literacy practices. We suggest that Minecraft has b...

In this chapter, we explore the creative metagaming and paratextual play practices that surround Minecraft, apprehending the many ways that the game encourages and enables sociality and informal literacies beyond the core gameplay. The terms metagaming and paratextuality describe the way players engage outside the boundaries of the primary game, un...

We then conclude with this chapter which serves as an overview of key themes and insights to be gained from the book, and investigates some of the broader issues for the future of social play, informal creative literacies and quotidian platformativity. We reflect on the recalibration of the digital in light of COVID-19 and social distancing. As we...

This chapter begins with a critical discussion of nascent playful and creative practices within contemporary media culture and reviews the scholarly literature across relevant disciplines (including game studies, media studies, education, visual culture and digital/haptic ethnography). The chapter then identifies diverse modalities of play, includi...

This chapter focuses on Minecraft’s core gameplay and provides a critical exploration of the game’s diverse affordances. Framed around insights gained from our ethnographic research, we examine how the design of the game offers a range of different ways to play. These include: the expressive and inventive power of creative mode, the interactive cha...

In Chap. 7, we turn from the home to consider how the use of Minecraft is being deployed in institutional contexts, including school classrooms, extra-curricular workshops, libraries and museums. In this chapter we draw from workshops and interviews conducted in Victoria (Australia). This context is important as it is the largest educational jurisd...

Digital location—or geolocation—is a fixture of digital platforms and economies, figuring as an organizational logic for content and user experience (e.g., map-based interfaces), native technical affordance (e.g., locational functionalities of GPS-enabled smartphones), and core enabling agent behind the rise of ‘disruptive’ platform enterprises (e....

This article examines the use of Let’s Play (LP) in Manila, Philippines. LP is an emerging genre in which players record, narrate, and broadcast video game play online. While in Western contexts LP is predominantly viewed in domestic settings, our focus is on the distinct manner in which LP is viewed in the Philippines, resulting in unique social a...

Mobile and social media have progressively become vessels for manifesting death and dying in our everyday lives. This article investigates the visual nature of social mobile media as “affective witnessing” by analyzing mobile media use during the 12th June 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida (USA). How mobile media serve as wit...

In the sinking of the South Korean MV Sewol boat on 16 April 2014 (known as “Sewol”), mobile phones functioned across multiple forms of haunting—individual, collective, social, and cultural. These hauntings were intimate as they were public. They became repositories for damning camera phone footage taken by the now deceased of procedures gone wrong...

From disasters to celebrations, camera phone practices play a key role in the abundance of shared images globally (Frosh 2015; Hjorth and Hendry 2015; Hjorth and Burgess 2014; Van House et al. 2005). Photography has always had a complicated relationship with death. This paper focuses on how mobile devices, through the broadcasting of troubling mate...

This chapter examines how digital media practices, relating to care and intimacy (the ‘intimate surveillance’), are being played out in the daily lives of intergenerational and cross-cultural families in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Melbourne with thirteen households in 2015–2016, it considers how ‘doing famil...

Introduction Jessica Chan is 19 years old and lives in the outer suburbs of Melbourne with her mother and father. She is first generation Australian, her Singaporean Chinese mother and her Malaysian Chinese father immigrated to Australia in 1989. She is baking vegetarian curry puffs, while her mother Nancy is stir-frying some chicken for their rela...

Are information and communication technologies (ICTs) connecting families? And what does this mean in terms of family routines, relationships, norms, work, intimacy and privacy? This book takes a life course and generational perspective covering theory, including posthumanism and strong structuration theory, and methodology, including digital and c...

Mobile media has become a crucial part of everyday storytelling. As we move through our daily rhythms and rituals, mobile media weave multiple cartographies—visual, social, spatial and temporal. Far from placeless, the history of mobile media has been one in which the important stories of place and locality are reinforced. By contextualising story-...

In the emerging scholarship on live-streaming sites, the role of gender has been relatively overlooked. This article aims to address this oversight by capturing the controversial rise of nüzhubo (Chinese for ‘female casters’) in the Chinese live-streaming platform, Douyu. Through ethnographic research on Douyu over 2 years, we have witnessed female...

In this article, we explore the material, sensory and corporeal aspects of digital ethnography, primarily in the context of mobile media use in the domestic environment. We align our methodological approach to the ‘sensory turn’ in theory, situated loosely under the rubric of new materialism, and outline the insights that a post-phenomenological me...

When we first entered homes to study mobile games and home automation, we envisaged our projects would focus on humans and various modes of interaction and co-presence. Yet as our research progressed, it became clear that in many homes, humans and their pets are intimately entangled in various forms of digitally mediated kinship. In this chapter we...

From natural disasters to private funerals, digital media are playing a central role in the documentation and commemoration of shared significant events and individual loss experiences. Yet few studies have fully engaged with the increasing role mobile media play in making meanings related to traumatic events across different individual and collect...

In this article, we advance current discussions by bringing together debates about digital play and digital labour. We consider everyday life entanglements of mobile media and digital work and play at home. To develop this argument, we analyse the embodied and affective dimensions of mundane everyday life at home with digital media through the conc...

This is the editor’s introduction for the Special Issue on digital creativity, play and labour in everyday life (SIDigiplay).

Self-monitoring offers benefits in facilitating awareness about physical exercise, but such data-centric activity may not always lead to an enjoyable experience. We introduce EdiPulse a novel system that creates activity treats to offer playful reflections on everyday physical activity through the appealing medium of chocolate. EdiPulse translates...

This article explores the emergence of the dominant mobile social media platform in Japan, LINE. In particular, the article focuses upon its usage to maintain familial ties, especially between matriarchal connections. Drawing upon ethnographic work with 12 families over 3 years, this article seeks to provide a detailed and nuanced sense of how soci...

At the crossroads between the aesthetic and the social, camera phone practices can provide insight into contemporary digital media. This phenomenon is magnified in the context of selfies as a barometer for changing relationships between media, memory and death. This relationship between emotion, grief and affect is most apparent in the South Korean...

This chapter explores the conflation of portable, handheld, and mobile gaming devices, and the particular relationship between mobile phone games and handheld consoles in Japanese media history. Through a case study of mobile game development in Japan (DeNA, GREE, Nintendo, and Sony), Hjorth and Richardson seek to rethink this conflation within the...

This special commentary for Mobile Media & Communication seeks to put these divisive debates in context. Through the lens of Pokémon GO, we can understand and critically interpret a variety of issues involved in the politics and practice of playful mobile media. These issues move across debates around location-aware technologies in constructions of...

Hjorth examines the shift from first- to second-generation locative media practices and how its relationship to shifting camera-phone practices is creating new ways for representing place, place-making, and play. Specifically, the chapter reflects how camera-phone practices, as part of broader everyday media routines and ritual, create playfully so...

This article explores the unofficial role of camera phone practices in visualizing everyday forms of play as part of emergent urban cartographies. I argue that camera phone practices—especially in an age of timestamping—are creating their own cartographies of place that overlay the visual with the ambient, social with the geographic, emotional with...

In Chapter 4 we consider how mobile media require us to rethink the types of media and capital flows that take place in the Asia-Pacific region and what these movements say about cultural geographies. As noted earlier, the rise of mobile media has become synonymous with screen culture in the region. Mobile media have also played a key role in ampli...

In Chapter 9, which concludes the book, we summarize how the intersection between art, media, and the environment in the region allows for new ways for re-imagining the Asia-Pacific through changing depictions of the environment. To end we reflect on the relationship between arts practice and critical enquiry through a series of proposals concernin...

Chapter 6 examines how contemporary cultural and local debates have engaged in effective environmental critique. It focuses in the strengths and limitations of art and social media as an effective method for rethinking climate change. In particular, this chapter considers how regional art responds to the theme of water, such as in the Australian-ba...

Each chapter in this book takes a different angle on the intersections between art, media, and environment. Chapter 1 functions as an introduction to the key debates informing art, media, and environment intersections. In this chapter we locate our motivations for this book and how overlays of art, media, and environment allow us to reimagine the r...

In Chapter 2 we set out an approach for examining the relationships between art, media, and climate change, drawing on anthropology, media studies, and cultural studies.

In Chapter 7 we outline new models for collaborative cross-cultural art projects in the Asia-Pacific region with a particular emphasis on how networked and social media can be used to re-imagine artistic subjectivity and engagement and provide new paradigms for understanding collaboration in a global context. The use of multiple platforms for engag...

In Chapter 3 we connect artistic explorations and representations of the environmental with stories of media innovation and climate change in the region. In order to do so, the chapter contextualizes global media debates in relation to some of the emergent environmentalism issues the region. Then we turn to examples of artists working through these...

Chapter 5 shifts the discussion to art and its relationship to the emergence of the “platform” as a concept and place through which artists engage across the region. Focusing particularly on the role of public engagement, this chapter looks at the rise of transregional spaces in contemporary art (such as biennials) and how they participate in the m...