Tama Leaver
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 245100 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Tama Leaver |
| PRENOMES | Tama |
| SOBRENOME | Leaver |
| ASSINATURA | LEAVER T |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Curtin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4065-4725 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 90 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
Care, competence, or control? The evolution of parental supervision tools on social media platforms
Interaction with social media constitutes a significant part of children’s online experiences, with the potential for both positive and negative experiences. Social media platforms provide parental “supervision tools” as a mechanism for balancing children’s autonomy with safeguards, promoting this function to parents to ensure safer digital practices for their children. This research adopts a constructivist framework to investigate the evolution …
Rupturing Digital Childhoods and Parenting in Australia? Social Media Bans, Privacy, Screen Time, and Generative Ai
In the current state of global political, environmental and social challenges, it is perhaps unsurprising that digital childhoods and parenting are in continuous flux as well, with families of all configurations experiencing digital and cultural ruptures. In Australia this discontent with the digital world has led to unprecedented legislation banning all children under the age of 16 from having accounts on social media platforms from December 202…
The Digital Childhood Industry
Many children lead lives that are heavily influenced by the digital world, whether that’s through digital products, services, and practices made for them, or made about them. For children and their families, their digital childhood is mediated across many dimensions, including play, learning, communication and the everyday routines of family life. In this panel, we examine some of the ways digital childhood is mediated through Industry. In partic…
The Place of a Child on Platforms
This panel delves into the complex entanglement of children within our 'platform society,' spotlighting their roles amidst the dynamics of platformisation, datafication, and monetisation. It scrutinises the emergence of child influencers, mapping their integration and active participation within the influencer economy. This exploration underscores the critical intersection between childhood and platformization, highlighting the commodification an…
Generative AI and children’s digital futures
From WALL·E (Stanton, 2008) to The Wild Robot (Sanders, 2024), children’s popular culture is filled with sympathetic, lovable, heroic artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic characters who make pa
TikTok and children
TikTok's global popularity among children has sparked intense debate worldwide. Some argue that the platform's algorithmic design leads children down a rabbit hole of compulsive content consumption and encourages the imitation of socially harmful behaviours. Others highlight its positive role as a space for children to express their voices on social issues and engage in socialization. This Special Issue on TikTok and Children arises within this c…
Generative AI Glitches
Introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed in popular culture far longer than any particular technological tools that carry that name today (Leaver), and in part, for that reason, fantasies of AI being or becoming sentient subjects in their own right form current imaginaries of what AI is today, or is about to become. Yet ‘the artificial’ does not just mark something as not human, or not natural, but rather provokes an exploration of t…
Perceptions of social media harms and potential management strategies
There was consensus among participants that e-cigarette related social media content can be harmful and government action is urgently needed. There was an identified need for the development of government led national-level regulatory frameworks, with government led appropriate legislation; identification of an organisation or organisations with suitable levels of regulatory power and resources to monitor, enforce and penalise noncompliant social…
Child idols in South Korea and beyond
This article explores how the influencer and traditional entertainment industries are converging in the “child idol” phenomenon—a celebrity genre and system that had existed prior to the emergence of the influencer industry but has now been remixed with the influencer industry’s convention and refashioned as the stepping stone to lubricate children’s journeys toward professional idol careers in the wake of K-pop culture. We examine the “child ido…
Social media
Almost every Australian over the age of 13 is a social media user. Social and digital media has become part of the everyday landscape of social lives, politics, education and entertainment. Yet Australia’s relationship with the big platforms has become strained in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which Facebook showed a lack of care for users’ personal data or the Australian News Media Bargaining Code debates which saw Facebook bloc…
Adam Mosseri
Using a detailed content analysis of his public commentary, public social media posts, and captured ephemeral social media, this paper argues that Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has strategically constructed a public persona as an active, engaged and concerned parent. While this parenting persona emerges from a relatively typical combination of professional and personal/parenting content, I argue this persona has been strategically developed to b…
Toward a Revolution in Australian Children’s Data and Privacy
This panel combines four papers which focus in different ways on the question of children’s data and privacy in the Australian context. All four are framed with children’s right to privacy as a core concern, consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as updated via the General Comment 25 on Child Rights in the Digital Environment. We examine four arenas where children’s data is either extracted or occluded in ways that make it m…
ChatGPT Isn't Magic
Introduction Author Arthur C. Clarke famously argued that in science fiction literature “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke). On 30 November 2022, technology company OpenAI publicly released their Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbot ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), and instantly it was hailed as world-changing. Initial media stories about ChatGPT highlighted the speed with which it…
It’s All about the Toys
Toys: quintessentially the objects of childhood, their role in culture is anything but child’s play. Toys offer a site for young children to learn anything and everything from the commodification of time, through gendered and racial positioning of subjectivities (or the subversion of these positionings), through to social expectations around reading, sharing, and relative wealth and access. The importance of toys to children is vast, gauged by th…
Blocks
Children's engagement with blocks is a vital and joyful aspect of childhood shared across the world. While the physical manipulation of blocks is a core part of children's development (i.e., LEGO), there are also online platforms and apps available that provide virtual play experiences with blocks (i.e., digital building apps, virtual worlds). The open-ended nature of block play allows children to explore their creativity, experiment with differe…
Promotion of E-Cigarettes on TikTok and Regulatory Considerations
E-cigarettes are promoted extensively on TikTok and other social media platforms. Platform policies to restrict e-cigarette promotion seem insufficient and are poorly enforced. This paper aims to understand how e-cigarettes are being promoted on TikTok and provide insights into the effectiveness of current TikTok policies. Seven popular hashtag-based keywords were used to identify TikTok accounts and associated videos related to e-cigarettes. Pos…
Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation
Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian ‘news ban’ exposed the limits of a…
Transmedia storytelling during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the importance of streaming within the context of commercial transmedia strategies. While cinemas have remained closed, studios have used streaming to extend audience engagement, and experiment with transmedia strategies attached to large intellectual properties. This paper seeks to determine how the pandemic affected transmedia and a shift to streaming. Drawing from key scholarly transmedia theory, and industry …
Platform Specificities
Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analy…
Australia’s Big Gamble
Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Austr…
Going Dark
The first two months of 2021 saw Google and Facebook ‘go dark’ in terms of news content on the Australia versions of their platforms. In January, Google ran a so-called “experiment” which removed or demoted current news in the search results available to a segment of Australian users. While Google was only darkened for some, in February news on Facebook went completely dark, with the company banning all news content and news sharing for users wit…
Is it banned? Is it illegal?”
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has recently (21 December 2020) confirmed that from 1 October 2021 smokers who have tried quitting with other approved cessation pharmacotherapies will be required to obtain a prescription for nicotine-containing vaporiser products from a registered medical practitioner. The results of this study suggest further consideration of regulatory measures are however required to support the different chara…
Playing YouTube
This article analyzes Nancy YouTuber, a popular doll and companion app that is part of a growing trend of children's toys modeled on YouTube influencers. Nancy YouTuber's app is one of the first to provide a fictitious YouTube channel, introducing children to YouTube's affordances. We investigate how the doll and app socialize YouTuber practices, and to what extent the combination of both deepens the commodification of childhood. We use the walkt…
A Topography of Virtual Influencers
Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discours…
The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children
In a deeply mediatised age that embeds media within everyday life, it is particularly important to examine how digital and online media contribute to teenagers’ sociability. There is a lack of detail around how media impact upon the ways teens communicate and create relationships with others. Based on studies of sociability, teenagers and media, and on the media practices of a sample of Portuguese teenagers, research demonstrates that teenagers’ …
Instagram
Intimate Surveillance
Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. To more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people and the way those decisions are being shaped, this article focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celeb…
Child idols in South Korea and beyond
This article explores how the influencer and traditional entertainment industries are converging in the “child idol” phenomenon—a celebrity genre and system that had existed prior to the emergence of the influencer industry but has now been remixed with the influencer industry’s convention and refashioned as the stepping stone to lubricate children’s journeys toward professional idol careers in the wake of K-pop culture. We examine the “child ido…
Playing YouTube
This article analyzes Nancy YouTuber, a popular doll and companion app that is part of a growing trend of children's toys modeled on YouTube influencers. Nancy YouTuber's app is one of the first to provide a fictitious YouTube channel, introducing children to YouTube's affordances. We investigate how the doll and app socialize YouTuber practices, and to what extent the combination of both deepens the commodification of childhood. We use the walkt…
Researching the Ends of Identity
This paper argues that expanding the scope of social media studies to examine birth and early life at one end, and death and memorialisation at the other, demonstrates that social media is never just about an individual, but also the way individuals are always already joined together as families, groups, communities and more. Mapping these ends of identity also reveals more of the nuances of everyday social media use and its impact
A Topography of Virtual Influencers
Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discours…
Infancy Online
This article introduces a Special Issue on the topic of infancy online, addressing a range of issues, including representation, privacy, datafication, and children's rights. The 7 articles included map important arenas of emerging research which highlight a range of increasingly urgent questions around the way infants are situated online, the longer term ramifications of infant online presences, and the ways in which infants and young children pa…
Joss Whedon, Dr. Horrible , and the Future of Web Media
In the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, one of the areas in dispute was the question of residual payments for online material. On the picket line, Buffy creator Joss Whedon discussed new ways online media production could be financed. After the strike, Whedon self-funded a web media production, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Whedon and his collaborators positioned Dr. Horrible as an experiment, investigating whether original online media co…
Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance
In an era where communication technologies can move digital media at close to the speed of light, this paper explores the rupture between this technical potential and the actual model by which international television screening dates are determined in Australia. As the delays between overseas and Australian airdates can be as long two years, and average over six months, the rapid rise in both official and fan-produced online material and interact…
Watching Battlestar Galactica in Australia and the Tyranny of Digital Distance
In an era where communication technologies can move digital media at close to the speed of light, this paper explores the rupture between this technical potential and the actual model by which international television screening dates are determined in Australia. As the delays between overseas and Australian airdates can be as long two years, and average over six months, the rapid rise in both official and fan-produced online material and interact…
Joss Whedon, Dr. Horrible , and the Future of Web Media
In the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, one of the areas in dispute was the question of residual payments for online material. On the picket line, Buffy creator Joss Whedon discussed new ways online media production could be financed. After the strike, Whedon self-funded a web media production, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Whedon and his collaborators positioned Dr. Horrible as an experiment, investigating whether original online media co…
A methodology for mapping Instagram hashtags
While social media research has provided detailed cumulative analyses of selected social media platforms and content, especially Twitter, newer platforms, apps, and visual content have been less extensively studied so far. This paper proposes a methodology for studying Instagram activity, building on established methods for Twitter research by initially examining hashtags, as common structural features to both platforms. In doing so, we outline m…
Researching the Ends of Identity
This paper argues that expanding the scope of social media studies to examine birth and early life at one end, and death and memorialisation at the other, demonstrates that social media is never just about an individual, but also the way individuals are always already joined together as families, groups, communities and more. Mapping these ends of identity also reveals more of the nuances of everyday social media use and its impact
Instagrammatics and digital methods
Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos,…
Social, Casual and Mobile Games The Changing Gaming Landscape
Social, casual and mobile games, played on devices such as smartphones, tablets, or PCs and accessed through online social networks, have become extremely popular, and are changing the ways in which games are designed, understood, and played. These games have sparked a revolution as more people from a broader demographic than ever play games, shifting the stereotype of gaming away from that of hardcore, dedicated play to that of activities that f…
Infancy Online
This article introduces a Special Issue on the topic of infancy online, addressing a range of issues, including representation, privacy, datafication, and children's rights. The 7 articles included map important arenas of emerging research which highlight a range of increasingly urgent questions around the way infants are situated online, the longer term ramifications of infant online presences, and the ways in which infants and young children pa…
Intimate Surveillance
Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. To more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people and the way those decisions are being shaped, this article focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celeb…
The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children
In a deeply mediatised age that embeds media within everyday life, it is particularly important to examine how digital and online media contribute to teenagers’ sociability. There is a lack of detail around how media impact upon the ways teens communicate and create relationships with others. Based on studies of sociability, teenagers and media, and on the media practices of a sample of Portuguese teenagers, research demonstrates that teenagers’ …
Instagram
From Youtube to Tv, and Back Again
While talk shows and reality TV are often considered launching pads for ordinary people seeking to become celebrities, we argue that when children are concerned, especially when those children have had viral success on YouTube or other platforms, their subsequent appearance(s) on television highlight far more complex media flows. At the very least, these flows are increasingly symbiotic, where television networks harness preexisting viral interes…
‘Please Read the Comments’
An old adage about the internet goes “Don’t Read The Comments”. It is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (Phillips 2015). “Don’t Read The Comments” has become an internet meme. Alongside parody websites (i.e. @AvoidComments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in se…
Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children
Motivations for use, identity and the vaper subculture
Understanding the complexities of vaping, and the nuanced differences of 'cloud chasers' and 'substitute' vapers may have important implications for health communication, research and policy. E-cigarette users within this sample were not a homogeneous group and differed in their motivations for use, association with the vaper subculture and relationship with the vape community. These findings provide new insights into the socialisation process an…
Platform Specificities
Social media platforms shape our lives on micro, meso and macro levels. They have transformed our everyday practices as individuals, or social practices as small and large groups, and have multiple, entangled impacts on rituals of democracy and cultural (re)production, organization of labor and industry. This panel brings together five papers, each by authors of recently published or forthcoming platform books. Together, the papers offer an analy…
Australia’s Big Gamble
Responding rapidly to extraordinary developments in early 2021, this panel examines the background, development, implementation, and consequences of the latest Australian regulatory intervention in the engagement between content platforms and domestic media organisations: the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The Australian federal government envisioned the NMBC as “a mandatory code of conduct to address bargaining power imbalances between Austr…
Going Dark
The first two months of 2021 saw Google and Facebook ‘go dark’ in terms of news content on the Australia versions of their platforms. In January, Google ran a so-called “experiment” which removed or demoted current news in the search results available to a segment of Australian users. While Google was only darkened for some, in February news on Facebook went completely dark, with the company banning all news content and news sharing for users wit…
Is it banned? Is it illegal?”
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has recently (21 December 2020) confirmed that from 1 October 2021 smokers who have tried quitting with other approved cessation pharmacotherapies will be required to obtain a prescription for nicotine-containing vaporiser products from a registered medical practitioner. The results of this study suggest further consideration of regulatory measures are however required to support the different chara…
Playing YouTube
This article analyzes Nancy YouTuber, a popular doll and companion app that is part of a growing trend of children's toys modeled on YouTube influencers. Nancy YouTuber's app is one of the first to provide a fictitious YouTube channel, introducing children to YouTube's affordances. We investigate how the doll and app socialize YouTuber practices, and to what extent the combination of both deepens the commodification of childhood. We use the walkt…
A Topography of Virtual Influencers
Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discours…
Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation
Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian ‘news ban’ exposed the limits of a…
Transmedia storytelling during the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the importance of streaming within the context of commercial transmedia strategies. While cinemas have remained closed, studios have used streaming to extend audience engagement, and experiment with transmedia strategies attached to large intellectual properties. This paper seeks to determine how the pandemic affected transmedia and a shift to streaming. Drawing from key scholarly transmedia theory, and industry …
Social media
Almost every Australian over the age of 13 is a social media user. Social and digital media has become part of the everyday landscape of social lives, politics, education and entertainment. Yet Australia’s relationship with the big platforms has become strained in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which Facebook showed a lack of care for users’ personal data or the Australian News Media Bargaining Code debates which saw Facebook bloc…
Adam Mosseri
Using a detailed content analysis of his public commentary, public social media posts, and captured ephemeral social media, this paper argues that Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has strategically constructed a public persona as an active, engaged and concerned parent. While this parenting persona emerges from a relatively typical combination of professional and personal/parenting content, I argue this persona has been strategically developed to b…
Toward a Revolution in Australian Children’s Data and Privacy
This panel combines four papers which focus in different ways on the question of children’s data and privacy in the Australian context. All four are framed with children’s right to privacy as a core concern, consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as updated via the General Comment 25 on Child Rights in the Digital Environment. We examine four arenas where children’s data is either extracted or occluded in ways that make it m…
Computer Science (26 obras) · Business (18 obras) · Political science (18 obras) · Sociology (17 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Social media (15 obras) · Advertising (13 obras) · Child Development and Digital Technology (13 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Media studies (10 obras)