164
Leisure and/in the Cyberspace

Tuesday, 12 July 2016: 16:00-17:30
Location: Dachgeschoss (Juridicum)
RC13 Sociology of Leisure (host committee)

Language: English

This session focuses on the intersection between leisure and the cyberspace defined as a leisure location which is absorbing an increasing amount of time from people’s daily life.
In attempting to avoid the traps of binary thinking (new media vs. old media, digital native vs. digital immigrant, etc.) and all rhetoric about the “revolutionary” impact of technological innovation, we invite reflection on the many continuities that can be established with the past, given the assumption that change proceeds according to complex and multidimensional trajectories, intertwined with other forms of historically specific social and cultural change as well as with resilient structural conditions, such as those defined by age, gender, and socioeconomic status. In order to understand this complex and ever-changing panorama, new theories and methodologies are needed. 
For this reason, the session focuses on innovative theoretical and/or methodological approaches. Some of the questions that can be asked are: 

  • How is cyberspace being taken up in leisure practices?
  • How the re-allocation of time to cyberspace leisure can generate different kinds of impact on traditional leisure activities, in some cases reducing or replacing the time previously spent in physical places or in other “mediated” locations?
  • How notions such as “space”, “mobility”, “friendship”, “civil/political participation” and “public vs. private” are reconfigured in/by social media?  
Session Organizers:
Gianna CAPPELLO, University of Palermo, Italy and Fabio Massimo LO VERDE, University of Palermo, Italy
Posters:
Online Leisure Communities: The Case of Tennis Spectators
Nadina AYER, University of Waterloo, Canada; Ron MCCARVILLE, University of Waterloo, Canada
The Augmented Experience of Television “Watching” in the Web 2.0. a Marxist Critique
Gianna CAPPELLO, Department of Cultures and Society - University of Palermo, Italy
Leisure Time on Virtual World; A Battlefield to Create Virtual Capital
Abbas FAGHIH KHORASANI, University of Tehran, Iran
Problematizing Electronic Gambling
Tommaso BARBETTA, The University of Tokyo, Italy