L Hjorth
Biographic Data
| ID | 19015 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Hjorth |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Hjorth |
| SIGNATURE | HJORTH L |
| AFFILIATIONS | RMIT University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4793-3233 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 95 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 402 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 95 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Assumptions and principles for responsible AI development and use in grief and bereavement care
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into grief and bereavement care represents a significant technological shift with therapeutic potential and ethical complexity. This paper establishes evidence-informed assumptions and principles to guide the responsible development and use of AI technologies in grief support, addressing the needs of bereaved individuals, families, communities, professionals, technology developers, and policym…
The Unsharable
Social media has transformed how grief is experienced and shared, turning platforms into unexpected spaces for mourning, remembrance, and community-building. Yet grief is not only about what is made visible—it is also about what remains unseen, unspoken, and deliberately withheld. This paper explores non-sharing as grief work, examining the ruptures that emerge when mourning does not align with platform logics of visibility, algorithmic curation,…
Towards a strengths-based Peer framework
As populations age and digital technologies become increasingly embedded in everyday life, fostering ICT competencies among older adults is essential for promoting independence, social inclusion, and well-being. While peer learning has shown promise in supporting digital engagement, existing research often adopts a deficit perspective that emphasises limitations and barriers. This study takes a strengths-based approach, focusing on older adults’ …
Older adults and mobile AI
Older adults – meaning people over the age of 65 – are the first generation to grow old in a digital data-saturated world and represent a diverse range of digital literacies. Some have a long history of mobile media adoption, interest, and play, while others are less digitally familiar or literate. When it comes to older adults and artificial intelligence (AI), research has explored how the health and wellbeing of older adults can be optimized an…
Unshareable
For death-online scholars, online rituals of loss and death help to challenge and reinforce social and moral order. The digital mediates, remediates and ‘mediatises’ both life and death. While grieving is an individual, internal process, mourning is an external practice that can help to connect us with others. Mourning is culturally specific. It is collective. Through posting eulogies online and sharing experiences of loss, we can enhance our gri…
Digital Gifts and Rituals
In Chapter 4 we revisit historical discussions around mobile media as gift and the important anthropological meanings of the gift as a practice into power relations and rituals, to think about how we might expand upon this practice in terms of location. Here location, co-location and co-presence are revisited
Ecological Grief, Hope, and Creative Forms of Resilience
With the effects of the climate emergency increasingly shaping our daily lives, feelings of ecological distress – particularly ecogrief and anxiety – have become palpable. In this article, we focus on these affective responses and examine how creative practice collaborations are curating possibilities for hope and resilience. We argue for the importance of such creative engagement, as ecological distress can lead to paralysis, nihilism, or despai…
Mapping Informal Digital Care Practice in Later Life
Increasingly, growing older is something we do alongside technologies. Often, through mobile media, our everyday practices of informal caring are being digitally mediated and mediatised. From apps such as Whatsapp to iOS Health, how digital technology is used to provide informal care in later life is poorly understood. Care operates intergenerationally and bilaterally—older adults often caring for young children as well as adult children caring f…
Creating speculative mobile media futures with older adults in Australia
People aged over 65 (“older adults”) are among the first to enter later life in a digital data-saturated world. Many older adults across the world are surrounded by mobile media and computational data in their everyday lives. Mobile media, including smartphones, tablets, and wearables, are near-ubiquitous in Australia. At the same time, older adults are among the most digitally excluded in the country and older adults have diverse feelings toward…
Older adults’ digital competency, digital risk perceptions and frequency of everyday digital engagement
Purpose This study explores digital risk perceptions – the perception of risk related to digital environments – among older adults. Specifically, it investigates how these risk perceptions influence older adults’ frequency of digital engagement in everyday activities. Design/methodology/approach The research methodology involved conducting 22 interviews and administering 708 surveys among older adults living at home. The researchers examined how …
Playing with persona
During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns (2020-2021), almost all facets of life were rendered digital – health, work, schooling, and logistics. In this phenomenon, not only did digital access become synonymous with social inclusion but inequalities were also amplified – particularly in the case of older adults (65 years and over). Contemporary older adults represent one of the most diverse spectrums of digital media users – spanning from technologi…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Cities have long been key sites for play. Play scholars, urban theorists, designers, and creative practitioners have explored and discussed the important role of city play and urban playgrounds. As organized locations of play, playgrounds stand as an important role in representing cultural and social mores, reflecting the relational, political, and psychological dimensions of the city. They expose how a city and its society views childhood, surve…
Factors Influencing Seniors' Anxiety in Using ICT
The ability of older adults to engage with information and communication technologies (ICT) is crucial in today's more digital and connected world. Anxiety about and failure to adopt and engage with ICT is increasingly likely to be a barrier in daily living for older adults, potentially reducing their freedom as consumers, quality of life, independence, and wellbeing. It may also be a significant factor in social and economic exclusion. Drawing o…
We Make Them Our Kin
Pets, companion animals, and 'more-than-human' kin play important roles in people's lives. Animals are familiar and familial-they are often integral family members and can help create communities beyond the family unit. People rely on their pets for emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. More recently, research into the role of animals in the lives of older adults has come into focus, especially through the visibilities and visualities of…
Creating 'Safe Places' in Social Media
This article explores the self-presentation strategies of young Japanese people (aged 19-21) on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on their creative resistance to social constraints. Drawing from ethnographic investigations conducted with Japanese college students, we delve into the creative practices undertaken by these individuals to carve out 'safe places' within the digital sphere amid the prevailing peer pressur…
QR codes during the pandemic
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 transport and mobile wallet applications, QR codes in the West were relatively overlooked. That was, …
Mobilizing care? WeChat for older adults’ digital kinship and informal care in Wuhan households
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 Wuhan and the role of the dominant social media app, WeChat, for intergenerational informal care through…
Sensing Playgrounding
Cities are complex spaces of contesting infrastructures, media, humans and more-than-human interactions. They are places that house multiple visible and invisible cartographies that draw on multisensorial ways of being in the world. In the city, our senses are amplified and intensified in ways that reorient our processes of worlding. Cities have, more recently, been defined and approached as spaces for play. In this article, we explore how unders…
Co-Creating ICT Risk Strategies with Older Australians
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. Complexities, including ICT environmental stressors and societal norms, may require concerted engagement with…
Playing with place
Careful Digital Kinship
During the pandemic many aspects of our life were recalibrated through the digital—highlighting the paradoxes of the digital for both empowerment and exploitation. In particular, the pandemic demonstrated the increasing role of the digital in shaping, and being shaped by, kinship. Kinship is a complex term that captures our relationality, intimacies and connections. Kinship is always in action, always becoming. Throughout the pandemic, some cohor…
Quality of life and loneliness post-bereavement
Older people experience bereavements more often than any other age group. National survey data collected across Australia from 633 bereaved adults aged 65+ years showed that 21% met the criteria for prolonged grief. Their quality of life was significantly lower and loneliness significantly higher compared to older people in the general population. Risk factors for the low quality of life and high loneliness post-bereavement included being female,…
Careful attunements
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 media practice. The study weaves together experiences around informal and formal crisis communicati…
The Art of Tacit Learning in Serious Location-Based Games
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 games in educational contexts. This paper presents three cases studies— TIMeR and Wayfinder Live and P…
Understanding Games and Game Cultures
No longer a marginal media form, the study of digital game industries and 'gameification' more popular than ever. Hjorth and Richardson bring you Understanding Games and Gaming Culture; the must-read guide to global games studies. Giving you the tools to conceptually navigate contemporary game studies, this book examines game development, audience and profit in the context of contemporary global debates and media, encapsulating: A broad scope tha…
Mobile intimacy in an age of affective mobile media
10.1080/14680777.2012.741860
New visualities and the digital wayfarer
In this article, we examine how second-generation locative media and emerging contemporary camera phone practices are becoming entangled to create new visualities and socialities of place and place making. With location-based services (LBS) smartphone apps like Instagram geotagging is increasingly the default, rather than choice. This has transformed both how we experience and conceptualize co-present relationships across micro and macro realms a…
Emplaced Cartographies
In the context of the increased use of high-quality camera phones, along with the growth in distribution services via social and locative media, we are witnessing new forms of visuality emerging. These new types of 'co-present' visuality overlay and interweave online and offline cartographies in different ways - maps that require a revision of ethnography. In this article, we frame this phenomenon as a shift from networked visuality to emplaced v…
Tactile digital ethnography
In this article we focus on the relationship between vision and the hand to develop an understanding of the experience of mobile media use which in turn informs a methodology for researching it; a tactile digital ethnography. Theories of knowing through the hand, and uses of the hand in documentary practice already highlight its significance. We bring these together with our video ethnographies of mobile media use, to show how a focus on the hand…
Pokémon GO
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 privacy (Coldewey, 2016; Cunningham, 2016), risk and surveillance (Machkovech, 2016; Mishra, 2016) …
Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific
Snapshots of Almost Contact
As a burgeoning component of visual media cultures, camera phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones
Digital work and play
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 concepts of atmosphere and ambient play. We argue that attention to how digital play is implicated in th…
Mobile media, domestic play and haptic ethnography
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 method can offer. Drawing from our current research into everyday media use conducted within Australia…
Relocating the mobile
While the 20th-century media practice was marked by the focus of visual and audio screen cultures, the 21st-century media can be characterized by three key features: locative, mobile and social. With the transformation of mobile media from a communication tool into a multimodal device accompanied by global positioning systems (GPS), the significance of location-based services (LBS) has taken centre stage. Google maps, Facebook places and Foursqua…
The place of the emplaced mobile
In this inaugural issue of the timely Mobile Media & Communication journal, questions have been posed about the state of play for mobile communication now and in the future. Given the growing convergence between mobile, social and locative media, this requires a reassessment of mobile media and its relationship with place and intimacy. How are these convergent media platforms, contexts and practices shaping, and being shaped by, intimate cartogra…
The place of emplaced visualities
As camera phones become more commonplace in the explosion of smartphones – along with new contexts for image distribution like microblogging and location-based services (LBS) – we are witnessing emergent types of visuality. In particular, through LBS such as Facebook Places we see ways in which users create new contexts for the overlay between place, ambient images, and geographic locations. While globally camera phone genres like self-portraitur…
Odours of Mobility
This paper is based on ongoing research into the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) character customisation of mobile phones in the Asia-Pacific region. Far from illustrating a form of homogeneous Japanisation in the region, consumers are using kawaii customisation in diverse ways to articulate practices of interiority and exteriority, cultural capital and habitus. The dominance of cute character culture (‘cuteness’ or kawairashisa) as the mode for cu…
Wising up
The evolution of mobile communication in the twenty-first century has been marked by its uneven transition into mobile media – often called ‘smartphones’. Once upon a time mobile phones were little
The Mourning After
In news media of late, much has been touted about the agency of social and mobile media in the events of political uprising or at times of natural disasters and crisis management. While these events did not become events because of social media, the media did affect how we experienced the situation. This leads us to ask, Just how helpful are social mobile media in maintaining relationships in times of crisis management, and how, if at all, do the…
Digitised caring intimacies
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 others. In this article, we draw on our ethnographic research with Japanese families engaging in digitise…
Rethinking Ethnography
This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to 'rethink' ethnography and ethnographic practice. Through the six contributions, the authors consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what we think of as 'media', the contexts through which media are produced, used and circulated, and the emergent practices afforded by digital media
Being Real in the Mobile Reel
Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. Whether we like it or not the mobile phone has become a vehicle for multimedia par excellence. Epitomising contemporary convergence by way of its smorgasbord of applications and multimedia possibilities, it seems almost impossible to get such a device just for voice calling without all the `extras'. But is mobile media a new emerging art form? Is it new media? Or is it a domestic technology?…
Storing and sharing
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 the strategies and rituals different people around the world employ to organize, curate, or delete …
Mobilizing care? WeChat for older adults’ digital kinship and informal care in Wuhan households
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 Wuhan and the role of the dominant social media app, WeChat, for intergenerational informal care through…
Careful Digital Kinship
During the pandemic many aspects of our life were recalibrated through the digital—highlighting the paradoxes of the digital for both empowerment and exploitation. In particular, the pandemic demonstrated the increasing role of the digital in shaping, and being shaped by, kinship. Kinship is a complex term that captures our relationality, intimacies and connections. Kinship is always in action, always becoming. Throughout the pandemic, some cohor…
A Snapshot of Social Media
This paper provides a short summary on some of the key debates emerging around visual social media. In particular we discuss the role of camera phones in issues of intimacy and co-presence
Situating ‘careful surveillance’
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 like the introduction of physical and social distancing, compulsory mask wearing, and contact tracin…
Introduction
Drawing on cultural studies’ strong history in challenging power relationships and highlighting the importance of the everyday for meaning and insights, this special issue calls for care to be taken seriously – particularly in shifting and diversifying cultural imaginaries of future work, ageing, life, and death. Published in the context of a global pandemic, in which contexts of care visibly collapsed or overlapped, it is a timely focus. As this…
Ambient and soft play
This is the editor’s introduction for the Special Issue on digital creativity, play and labour in everyday life (SIDigiplay)
Pop and ma
Odours of Mobility
This paper is based on ongoing research into the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) character customisation of mobile phones in the Asia-Pacific region. Far from illustrating a form of homogeneous Japanisation in the region, consumers are using kawaii customisation in diverse ways to articulate practices of interiority and exteriority, cultural capital and habitus. The dominance of cute character culture (‘cuteness’ or kawairashisa) as the mode for cu…
Home and Away
Snapshots of Almost Contact
As a burgeoning component of visual media cultures, camera phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones
Cybercute Politics
One of the central tenors of contemporary everyday life in Asia is the increasing role of global Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and negotiation between online and offl ine spaces. In the region, divergent uptake and characteristics can be noted, with each location demonstrating that the global media is far from homogenous. The cultural signifi cance of such mediated spaces as the Internet makes it an apt symbol for discussion o…
From the Guest Editors
Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific
Being Real in the Mobile Reel
Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. Whether we like it or not the mobile phone has become a vehicle for multimedia par excellence. Epitomising contemporary convergence by way of its smorgasbord of applications and multimedia possibilities, it seems almost impossible to get such a device just for voice calling without all the `extras'. But is mobile media a new emerging art form? Is it new media? Or is it a domestic technology?…
Guest Editor's Introduction
Locating the Game
The Asia-Pacifi c region is a geo-political and economic construct. Spanning East and South East Asia as well as countries in the southern Pacifi c Ocean and Pacifi c Rim, including Australia and New Zealand, the collectivizing of such disparate nations and cultures perhaps only largely makes sense as a post-World War II political and economic imaginary, as opposed to a purely geographic cartography. Yet, at the same time, the magnitudes of think…
Imaging Communities
In the rise of participatory, networked and social media epitomised by Web 2.0 and user created content (UCC), mobile media has been central in ushering in new types of consumer agency, creativity and collaboration. Through its rapid uptake across the world, the mobile phone has become a compelling symbol for contemporary post-industrial modes of labour and intimacy. In particular, the icon of the mobile phone is most palpable in the Asia-Pacific…
Gifts of Presence
In a period marked by the rise of online communities and when user-created content (UCC) is increasingly becoming a part of daily life, one is left to question what effect this is having on online and offl ine relations. What types of social gift-giving are being created via the Internet? Does Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of popular networking site MySpace represent a new frontier in global media, where viral marketing is vicariously seeded in so…
The Mourning After
In news media of late, much has been touted about the agency of social and mobile media in the events of political uprising or at times of natural disasters and crisis management. While these events did not become events because of social media, the media did affect how we experienced the situation. This leads us to ask, Just how helpful are social mobile media in maintaining relationships in times of crisis management, and how, if at all, do the…
Locating the Online
As one location boasting high broadband speeds, infrastructure, strong techno-nationalist policy and some of the early examples of so-called 'digital natives', South Korea has been seen as the model for the future of online culture. However, beyond these images of techno-fantasies is a technoculture that is marred by an increasing ambivalence towards online media. Specifically through user-created content (UCC), researchers can gain insight into …
The iPhone and Communication
Since its emergence in the late 1970s, the signifi cance of the mobile phone for communication has been widely debated. People have been fascinated about how the mobile phone has changed human communication, what kinds of new communication practices have emerged, and what exactly the cultural implications of this technology might be. Not only has the mobile phone become an extraordinarily ubiquitous and versatile communication device-an emblem of…
Wising up
The evolution of mobile communication in the twenty-first century has been marked by its uneven transition into mobile media – often called ‘smartphones’. Once upon a time mobile phones were little
Relocating the mobile
While the 20th-century media practice was marked by the focus of visual and audio screen cultures, the 21st-century media can be characterized by three key features: locative, mobile and social. With the transformation of mobile media from a communication tool into a multimodal device accompanied by global positioning systems (GPS), the significance of location-based services (LBS) has taken centre stage. Google maps, Facebook places and Foursqua…
Mobile intimacy in an age of affective mobile media
10.1080/14680777.2012.741860
The place of emplaced visualities
As camera phones become more commonplace in the explosion of smartphones – along with new contexts for image distribution like microblogging and location-based services (LBS) – we are witnessing emergent types of visuality. In particular, through LBS such as Facebook Places we see ways in which users create new contexts for the overlay between place, ambient images, and geographic locations. While globally camera phone genres like self-portraitur…
Rethinking Ethnography
This special issue of Media International Australia seeks to 'rethink' ethnography and ethnographic practice. Through the six contributions, the authors consider the variety of ways in which changes in our media environment broaden what we think of as 'media', the contexts through which media are produced, used and circulated, and the emergent practices afforded by digital media
Emplaced Cartographies
In the context of the increased use of high-quality camera phones, along with the growth in distribution services via social and locative media, we are witnessing new forms of visuality emerging. These new types of 'co-present' visuality overlay and interweave online and offline cartographies in different ways - maps that require a revision of ethnography. In this article, we frame this phenomenon as a shift from networked visuality to emplaced v…
Locating the Visual
Smartphones are increasingly becoming an all-pervasive and embedded part of everyday life. In this phenomenon, the rise of high-quality camera phones and growth in distribution services via social media has heralded new forms of visuality. With geotagging almost a default setting, these new visualities are marked by a different relationship between information, co-presence, and place. In particular, these new visualities are shaping, and shaped b…
New visualities and the digital wayfarer
In this article, we examine how second-generation locative media and emerging contemporary camera phone practices are becoming entangled to create new visualities and socialities of place and place making. With location-based services (LBS) smartphone apps like Instagram geotagging is increasingly the default, rather than choice. This has transformed both how we experience and conceptualize co-present relationships across micro and macro realms a…
The place of the emplaced mobile
In this inaugural issue of the timely Mobile Media & Communication journal, questions have been posed about the state of play for mobile communication now and in the future. Given the growing convergence between mobile, social and locative media, this requires a reassessment of mobile media and its relationship with place and intimacy. How are these convergent media platforms, contexts and practices shaping, and being shaped by, intimate cartogra…
Location-Based Status Updates and Camera Phone Apps in Social Networks
Sociology (65 works) · Computer Science (53 works) · Political science (45 works) · Media studies (37 works) · Art (32 works) · Aesthetics (25 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Social media (25 works) · World Wide Web (24 works) · Digital Games and Media (22 works)