Media & Communication

The digital navigator programme in the time of COVID-19: A case study on Philadelphia’s programme
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic posed dire challenges for digital inclusion and digital literacy among marginalized communities. This article adopts a case study approach to analyse how the digital navigator programme (DNP) in Philadelphia addresses these challenges. The DNP in this city implements a policy design and governance strategy which presents a novel approach to bolstering universal access to information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure digital inclusion and digital literacy in order to combat the pandemic’s pernicious impact in worsening the digital divide in the city. This policy approach entails collaborative governance and cross-sector partnerships to address digital equity issues exacerbated by the pandemic. This study offers empirical evidence on the demands that the city’s residents placed on the DNP to address their digital inclusion and digital literacy issues. It also provides an understanding of the measures that the DNP’s partners adopted to respond to the citizens’ needs for digital equity.

Reframing Materiality in the Caribbean Diaspora Podcast
This chapter explores the Conversations with the Caribbean Diaspora podcast as a new type of content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global crisis is posed multiple challenges for world leaders in terms offinances society culture and economy. As digital platforms become more popular migrants abroad rely heavily on virtual spaces to communicate. The Caribbean Diaspora community's online platforms were flooded with panic during the pandemic. In this context the Conversations podcast provided an alternative voice for this community.
With the podcast as an emerging digital space this chapter explores its relationship to notions of materiality. Sondergaard (2011) and Hegel (1998) define materiality differently. Sondergaard emphasises physical matter while Hegel highlights content and creativity. Other theories highlight the abstractness in the term (McLuhan 1964) or define digital materiality asimmaterial (Morizio 2014; Latour 2005). However Lacey (2018) calls for a holistic approach accounting for tangible and intangible layers. These fragmented theories provide a starting point to frame this podcast's materiality. The chapter explores the connectionbetween materiality and podcasts in the Caribbean Diaspora community.

Patch Lead Possibilities
An ordinary patch lead is commonplace in many musical settings particularly with guitarists and electronic musicians. It is something that many take for granted a necessity of their work hardly worth a second thought. For this teenage aspiring musician it came to represent a lifetime of music-making a gateway to an as yet unknown and seemingly unattainable world and the possibility to expand creative horizons. This value of this cheap mass-produced object is in what it represented and continues to represent; an opportunity to connect and make music with seemingly endless possibilities.

‘Press the Start Button’
This short take is a reflective piece that describes the author's personal relationship with a handheld games console in which through thinking of their connection to this material object the author experienced sensations of nostalgia memory and familial ties.

On, Off, and in the Map: Materializing Game Experiences Through Player Cartography
This chapter focuses on maps produced and used by players seeking to understand them as recording devices that capture and preserve narratives and experiences. It takes the position that the materiality of maps emerges both in their very existence and relation to place and in the way they chronicle experience and record a past. For fictional gameworlds this distinction is arguably emphasized because the relation to ‘real’ place is weakened or non-existent.
Cartographic practices in games are however also enmeshed in discussions about colonialism. In many games exploration is connected with conflict and mapping often represents the objectification of space in the service of player narratives. Such objectification surely limits the forms of narrative that can emerge so what narratives – and what pasts – can and do such maps record? How do they offer an account of experience? And what is it that is made material in their materiality?

Conclusion: Shifting Horizons of Possibility
This concluding chapter addresses the materiality of media – devices storage formats platforms – as tied up with feeling; the sense of things. If media technology presents a material ever-shifting horizon of possibility for what can or cannot be done at any given point in time it also gives rise to modes of sensation as sounds and images materialise in different ways and as they become differently experienced.

Materialities and Craft Value
In my research on supporting diversity and expertise development in craft I've been trying to think through craft value and how it is racialized gendered and classed. Why the types of craft promoted by my project partner CraftsCouncil has so much value placed on it and why craft work and objects created as part of craft participation programmes and within communities are considered less valuable and not recognised as aesthetically important.
While value judgements do depend on skill and aesthetic expertise I argue these value judgements are also classed and racialised. There is work on materialities which helps me to think through how value judgements can be reframed for a more equitable and inclusive craft ecology.

Essentially (Not) the Game: Reading the Materiality of Video Game Paratexts
Video games utilise many different forms of materiality to establish game-worlds players are interested in entering and exploring. While games as texts represent these worlds paratexts create various ways into these games. This chapter addresses three kinds of materiality associated with texts and/or paratexts: (1) the physical and digital materiality of games and their paratexts (2) essential and non-essential paratexts and (3) gameplay technological and marketing paratexts. At the end of this chapter the reader will have gained a better understanding of the complex relationships between video game texts and paratexts as well as the particular idea of materiality associated with elements generating unique game-worlds for their players.

Materialities of Television History
This short take reflects on the process and experience of accessing fanzines about television. These fanzines published in the 1970s and 1980s account for the materiality of historical relationships with television in at least three directions: 1) Reflecting on working with paper documents and their digital copies; 2) Noting where collections overlap but the handwritten annotations on archived pieces differ; and 3) Material conditions of watching television are part of fans’ accounts of being an audience.