Explorations in Media Ecology - Volume 19, Issue 3, 2020

Digital technologies and Musical Instrument Digital Interface-sampled instruments have emerged as one of the most significant technological shifts in musical consciousness in western society. Digital music has introduced new epistemologies of music as it raises questions of authorship and creativity, while also challenging the ontological presumptions about what it means to be a musician. Through interviewing the sample by applying various posthuman heuristics, I explore my own relationship to digital music samples and sampling technology as a composer and musician. I engage in a phenomenological inquiry that surveys the various ways the sample affects my ecological milieu of music-making, and more broadly, I explore how a musician is at all times enacting an intra/actional relationship as negotiated between themselves and their instrument.

Some teachers claim Twitter has become a useful source for their professional development and learning. As a social media platform, Twitter constitutes a heterogeneous ensemble of humans and things. However, research has yet to allow the nonhuman participants in Twitter to speak for themselves, reveal what they do and present the webs of relations that they enact. I offer here an approach to address that issue by drawing upon actor-network theory and interviewing objects, whilst evoking the spirit of the Parisian flâneur. I begin by untangling a tweet to identify each of the human and nonhuman actors, what they do and how they assist in performing teachers’ learning activities. I then ‘Gather Anecdotes’ describing how two other heuristics – ‘Following the Actors’ and ‘Studying Breakdowns’ – were appropriate for this study, how they were deployed, what fresh knowledge they produced and how a new research avenue was opened. I conclude by reflecting on some of the tensions which emerged when bringing a sociomaterial analysis to teachers’ practices.

Roomba, the autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner sold by iRobot since 2002, is now a taken-for-granted household helper in many homes. In this study that cross-cuts phenomenology, postphenomenology, actor–network theory and media ecology, I utilize four heuristics for interviewing digital objects. I interview Roomba and utilize qualitative research methods to theorize about the complexities of the entanglements and relationships between human beings and their robot vacuum cleaners. Conclusions connect to critical theory and feminism and also question justifications of anthropocentrism in a posthuman world.

The reproduction of the human form has been a universal practice amongst human ecologies for millennia. Over the past 200 years, popular culture has considered the imaginary consequences of the danger to humanity and human-ness of replicating the autonomous human form too faithfully. Today, the seductive allure of technologically advanced simulated human bodies and advances in robotics and artificial intelligence has brought us closer to facing this possibility. Alongside the simultaneous aversion and fascination of the possibility that autonomous simulated human forms may become indistinguishable from human beings is the deep-rooted uncanniness of the automaton in its strange familiarity – not only to ourselves but to our pleasant childhood imaginings of playing with dolls. As such, simulated human bodies are often enrolled in medical and nursing education models with the assumption that making the simulation teaching spaces seem as close to clinical spaces as possible will allow students to practise potentially harmful clinical skills without causing any harm to human patients. However similar the simulated human bodies may appear to a living, breathing human, a tension between the embodiment of particularly human attributes and their replication persists. How can computerized human patient simulators be enrolled to teach people to develop the necessary attributes of compassion and empathy when caring for human beings? This article explores the uncanny ecologies of simulated human patients in nursing education by presenting a posthuman analysis of the practices of nurse educators as they enrol these digital objects in their teaching. Guided by a selection of heuristics offered as a mode of interviewing digital objects, the analysis enrolled ‘Gathering Anecdotes’ and ‘Unravelling Translations’ to attune to the ways in which these uncanny posthuman assemblages become powerful modes of knowing to mobilize learning about human attributes within uncanny posthuman ecologies.

This article examines the use of high-fidelity mannequins in simulation scenarios as used in nursing undergraduate education. Notwithstanding a lack of robust support in the research literature regarding outcomes, these mannequins have been broadly taken up by educators. Employing a form of posthuman inquiry, I explore how the use of high-fidelity mannequins may affect the student nurses’ relation with real living bodies, and therefore the people they eventually look after. Ways to mitigate the potential side-effects of the medium are offered, including a reframing of the simulation scenario.

What constitutes ‘good’ posthuman research? This article offers three dynamics to help assess the value of posthuman-inspired inquiry. We propose that a good posthuman research account should show evidence that the researcher: (1) attended to their own more-than-humanness and made explicit how they interviewed and attuned to the nonhuman things of their inquiry; (2) reassembled resemblings of the posthuman world by inventively weaving and fusing human and nonhuman storylines; and (3) offered analytic insights into the liveliness of posthuman research work as the performativity of difference.

Video formats continue to increase as a popular form of delivering information. Instructional video provides a level of versatility in both delivery and design that make it an appealing and engaging teaching tool. According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, people retain more knowledge from words and pictures than words alone. Applying a basic instructional design model, such as the ADDIE model, to the video production process can increase the effectiveness of recorded content. The ADDIE model guides an instructor through a well-thought-out development plan that includes learning objectives and creation of content. For some, producing instructional video may seem like a daunting or cumbersome endeavour. However, with some structure and guidance, instructional video proves to be an effective teaching method. From a media ecology perspective, if more learning is to happen outside of the classroom, educators must learn to leverage these new mediated environments to increase student retention of course material. This article serves as an instructional guide for faculty who wish to begin recording or strengthening their current instructional videos.

Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, Leonard Shlain (2014)

Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-49300-335-8, h/bk, $25.95,

ISBN 978-1-49300-939-8, p/bk, $18.95,

ISBN 978-1-49152-985-0, CD audio, $14.95