Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Nov 07, 2009, 10:00 PM

I've been representing HASTAC and the Digital Media and Learning Competition this week at the wonderful workshop, "Etiology and Impact of 'Digital Natives' on Culture, Commerce, and Societies," that took place at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea, and then at Bar Camp Seoul.   Among the excellent papers and conversations of the week were a number with Doug Gentile of Iowa State University.  I find his work, and the complexity of his thinking, to be some of the most exciting out there on games.  Plus, Doug was very willing to play along with me as I took paradigm after paradigm and turned it on the head, reasking each of his precisely articulated and elegant questions from the opposite point of view.   For many researchers as careful as Doug, my habit of inverting the assumptions is very annoying.  He was not only a good sport but he really engaged and engaged me.

Here are some of the highlights of those interactions.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 17, 2008, 03:30 AM
Along with the monumental studies recently published by the Pew Foundation and Mimi Ito's Digital Youth Project (both funded as part of the MacArthur Foundation's field-changing Digital Media and Youth Initiative), here is a crucial new study in Cyberpsychology and Behavior that systematically debunks the myth of "internet addiction." It's about time! Here's the url: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9021320/Internet-Addiction-Metasynthesis-of-19...

This paper is called "Internet Addiction: Metasynthesis of 1996-2006 Quantitative Research" and it looks scrupulously at the methodologies of several important alarmist studies of this "addiction" to show the shoddy methods being used, the false conclusions, and the specious lines of argument throughout.