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The digital turn in leisure has opened up a vast array of new opportunities to play, learn, participate and be entertained – opportunities that have transformed what we recognise as leisure. This edited collection provides a significant contribution to our changing understanding of digital leisure cultures, reflecting on the socio-historical context within which the digital age emerged, while engaging with new debates about the evolving and controversial role of digital platforms in contemporary leisure cultures. This book also demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying digital leisure cultures. To make sense of how individuals and institutions use digital spaces it is necessary to draw on history, science and technology, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and geography, as well as sport and leisure studies. This important and timely study discusses both the promise of the digital sphere as a realm of liberation, and the darker side of the internet associated with control, surveillance, exclusion and dehumanisation. Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical perspectives is fascinating reading for any student or scholar of sociology, sport and leisure studies, geography or media studies.
Spracklen explores the impact of the internet on leisure and leisure studies, examining the ways in which digital leisure spaces and activities have become part of everyday leisure. Covering a range of issues from social media and file-sharing to romance on the Internet, this book presents new theoretical directions for digital leisure.
This book provides a critical introduction to the ways in which digital technologies have enabled new types of interactions, experiences and collaborations across a range of platforms and media, profoundly shaping our socio-cultural landscapes. These discussions are grounded in classical sociological concepts; community, the self, gender, consumption, power and exclusion and inequality, to demonstrate the continuities that exist between sociological studies of ‘real’ world phenomena and their digital counterparts. Examining the various debates around methods in digital sociology in recent years, this book provides an accessible and engaging guide to using methodologies to study digital technology. From the moment we wake up until we go to bed, many of us constantly use digital technologies. Our mobile phones have become our maps, banks, newspapers and entertainment consoles. What′s more, they allow us to be constantly connected with the people in our lives. This book will equip you to analyse digital media in your own work. The book offers a broad guide to the various areas of our lives that are impacted by digital technology, from the virtual communities that we form on social media to the impact that digital technology has on our identity through a ′sociology of selfies′. With chapters on leisure, work, privacy and methods, this is an essential introduction for students in the areas of sociology, digital media, and cultural studies. Learning features include: - Annotated further reading in every chapter - Case studies that illustrate theory - Learning objectives and questions throughout - Historical and theoretical context in every chapter
As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication present new challenges and opportunities for the football industry. This is the first book to bring together key contemporary debates at the intersection of football studies, leisure studies, and digital cultural studies. It presents cutting edge theoretical and empirical work based around four key themes: theorizing digital football cultures; digital football fandom; football and social media; and football (sub)cybercultures. Covering topics such as transnational digital fandom, online abuse, and gender, Digital Football Cultures argues that we are witnessing the hyperdigitalization of the world’s most popular sport. This book is a valuable resource for students and researchers working in leisure studies, sports studies, football studies, and critical media studies, as well as geography, anthropology, criminology, and sociology. It is also fascinating reading for anybody working in sport, media, and culture.
Digital worlds and cultures—social media, web 2.0, youtube, wearable technologies, health and fitness apps—dominate, if not order, our everyday lives. We are no longer ‘just’ consumers or readers of digital culture but active producers through facebook, twitter, Instagram, youtube and other emerging technologies. This book is predicated on the assumption that out understanding of our everyday lives should be informed by what is taking place in and through emerging technologies given these (virtual) environments provide a crucial context where traditional, categorical assumptions about the body, identity and leisure may be contested. Far from being ‘virtual’, the body is constituted within and through emerging technologies in material ways. Recent ‘moral panics’ over the role of digital cultures in teen suicide, digital drinking games, an endless array of homoerotic images of young bodies being linked with steroid use, disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, facebook games/fundraising campaigns (e.g. for breast cancer), movements devoted to exposing ‘everyday sexism’ / metoo, twitter abuse (of feminists, of athletes, of racist nature to name but a few), speak to the need for critical engagement with digital cultures. While some of the earlier techno-utopian visions offered the promise of digitality to give rise to participatory, user generator collaborations, within this book we provide critical engagement with digital technologies and what this means for our understandings of leisure cultures. The chapters originally published in a special issue in Leisure Studies.
One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Joseph Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago. Pieper shows that Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure. Leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our cultureCand ourselves. These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Joseph Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of Awork as he predicts its destructive consequences.
In this book, Marcella Szablewicz traces what she calls the topography of digital game culture in urban China, drawing our attention to discourse and affect as they shape the popular imaginary surrounding digital games. Szablewicz argues that games are not mere sites of escape from Real Life, but rather locations around which dominant notions about failure, success, and socioeconomic mobility are actively processed and challenged. Covering a range of issues including nostalgia for Internet cafés as sites of youth sociality, the media-driven Internet addiction moral panic, the professionalization of e-sports, and the rise of the self-proclaimed loser (diaosi), Mapping Digital Game Culture in China uses games as a lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2015 and first-hand observations spanning over two decades, the book is also a social history of urban China’s shifting technological landscape.
This volume critically analyzes the multiple lives of the "gamer" in India. It explores the "everyday" of the gaming life from the player’s perspective, not just to understand how the games are consumed but also to analyze how the gamer influences the products’ many (virtual) lives. Using an intensive ethnographic approach and in-depth interviews, this volume situates the practice of gaming under a broader umbrella of digital leisure activities and foregrounds the proliferation of gaming as a new media form and cultural artifact; critically questions the term gamer and the many debates surrounding the gamer tag to expand on how the gaming identity is constructed and expressed; details participants’ gaming habits, practices and contexts from a cultural perspective and analyzes the participants’ responses to emerging industry trends, reflections on playing practices and their relationships to friends, communities and networks in gaming spaces; and examines the offline and online spaces of gaming as sites of contestation between developers of games and the players. A holistic study covering one of the largest video game bases in the world, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, media and communication studies and science and technology studies, as well as be of great appeal to the general reader.
Transforming Sport and Physical Cultures through Feminist Knowledges contributes new perspectives on the entanglement of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post and decolonial ways of knowing, and how onto-epistemologies of sport come to matter. These perspectives are explored through a diverse array of topics, including, the embodiment of netball through Feminist Physical Cultural Studies; pregnant embodiment and implications of the postgenomic turn; posthumanist perspectives on women’s negotiation of affective body work and an autoethnographic account of how masculinity materialises through football; the mediation of gendered subjectivity through the digital-physical cultures of cycling; as well as how decolonial and postcolonial approaches identify the gendered and racialised relations of power in sport for development and football campaigns aimed at women’s empowerment. The thread that connects these chapters is the ‘doing’ of feminism as a generative knowledge practice that can transform ways of imagining, knowing, and affecting more equitable futures. This feminist collection contributes to the movement of ideas and transformation of knowledge within and across sport and physical cultures. Authors explore the power relations implicated in the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being, and various embodied practices) from a range of disciplinary perspectives and theory-method approaches. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Leisure Sciences.
This book explores the interrelations between food, technology and knowledge-sharing practices in producing digital food cultures. Digital Food Cultures adopts an innovative approach to examine representations and practices related to food across a variety of digital media: blogs and vlogs (video blogs), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, technology developers’ promotional media, online discussion forums and self-tracking apps and devices. The book emphasises the diversity of food cultures available on the internet and other digital media, from those celebrating unrestrained indulgence in food to those advocating very specialised diets requiring intense commitment and focus. While most of the digital media and devices discussed in the book are available and used by people across the world, the authors offer valuable insights into how these global technologies are incorporated into everyday lives in very specific geographical contexts. This book offers a novel contribution to the rapidly emerging area of digital food studies and provides a framework for understanding contemporary practices related to food production and consumption internationally.