This chapter provides examples of how attention plays an important role in our everyday lives. Real-world examples are used to explain the motivations behind cutting-edge attention research being done in neuroscience labs. These include distracted driving, airport security screening, and radar and sonar monitoring. Vigilance and the ability to sustain attention are introduced as critical mental processes for success at certain jobs. The influence of attention on reading and memory, and the choice of whether to study in silence or with music are discussed. Lapses of attention are described, including how these can have a range of consequences, from the brief embarrassment of not knowing what someone just said to us to the potentially fatal effect of not attending to our driving. Theories of joint attention and social-gaze orienting are introduced to explain how our attention is linked to those around us. The purposeful misdirection of a person’s attention, at multiple levels, by skilled magicians is linked to core processes of attention and perception. This chapter also introduces the idea of training attention, including the effects of playing video games, and explains how proper training protocols require detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of attention.

This chapter describes the processes of attentional control and contrasts the effects of attention on perceptual processing versus the control of attentional orienting. PET, fMRI, and single-unit recordings have identified a bilateral dorsal attention network (DAN) that controls the orienting of attention and a ventral attention network (VAN) that is critical for the reorienting of attention. The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and frontal eye fields (FEF) have been found to be core elements of the DAN, and the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and ventral frontal regions are consistently found to be part of the VAN. Internally generated attention, or willed attention, is contrasted to exogenous attention and externally triggered endogenous attention. New methods of analyzing patterns of brain connectivity that hold promise for helping understand individual and group differences in attentional control are described. Neurostimulation studies (e.g., tACS; cTBS; TMS) that are providing evidence for the causal involvement of DAN and VAN to attentional control are discussed, and ERP indices of attention control processes (such as the EDAN, ADAN, and LDAP components) and of executive monitoring (such as the ERN and FRN components) are described. Finally, this chapter discusses the plasticity of attention and brain training techniques such as meditation, neurofeedback, and video games.

This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s multifaceted depictions in modern popular culture as indicative of his ever-evolving reception in mainstream popular culture: he is simultaneously a rebel and an aesthete, a revolutionary and a fop, an ultra-canonical poet and a countercultural icon. Appearances of Shelley’s works – and depictions of the poet himself – in such popular media as television, film, comic books, graphic novels, contemporary fiction, pop music, and even international events like the Olympic closing ceremonies speak both to Shelley’s continued cultural relevance and to the variety of ways in which that relevance has evolved in the two centuries since his lifetime.

Chapter 4 describes the potential of mobile apps and video games in adolescent research. Adolescents have specific thoughts of what they need and want from these technologies, therefore researchers and designers should carefully consider these suggestions to ensure the effectiveness of these technologies. Design should have a sound theoretical foundation and be subject to evaluation to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the apps and games.

In the early 2000s, the idea of Japan as culturally “cool” captured imaginations. Propelled by a government interested in marketing and selling Japan, products from video games to anime and manga were repackaged as embodying cultural cool. And global audiences were reminded that what they enjoyed consuming, from sushi to Pokémon, were of Japanese origin. The capital of Tokyo, now virtually synonymous with the nation as a whole, was to epitomize this “cool Japan” with its technological sophistication, sleek aesthetics, and cultural creativity as host of the 2020 Olympic Games. Despite disruption by the COVID-19 pandemic, what the games reflected vividly was how the Tokyo metropolitan region, tracing a general trend that dated back centuries, had grown almost inexorably in size and in political, economic, and cultural gravity. Not just in historical patterns but in so many ways – from a city center that remains inviolate to the spiral that radiates outward, from the low-rise wooden buildings in the low city to the names of neighborhoods – the past remains deeply woven into the richly textured pastiche of contemporary Tokyo.

This chapter offers an assessment of the challenges that interactive forms of digital literature pose to print-based assumptions about narrative. The assertions of critics such as Espen Aarseth, Janet Murray, and Bolter and Landow – that the interactivity of digital texts invalidates such core assumptions as the distinction between fabula and syuzhet as well as author, reader, and character – have tended to lose their force as the genres they regarded as transformative – hypertext fiction and text-based interactive fiction (IF) – have receded from public view. Yet, as Emily Short argues here, these genres are far from “dead.” Speaking from her perspective as one of contemporary literature’s most highly regarded authors of interactive and choice-based literature, Short shows that interactive fiction has not disappeared, but rather become so thoroughly ingrained in contemporary artistic practice as to become nearly invisible – not only in hypertextual forms like the popular videogames authored in the Twine platform, but also in contemporary print-based literary fiction. In thus penetrating the mainstream of literary production, both digital and analog, interactive forms have subtly but powerfully revised our core assumptions about literary narrative.

1 Introduction

2 Video Games, Violence, and Aggression

3 Video Games, Politics, and Speech

4 Video Games and Gender

5 Video Games and Harassment

6 Video Games and Addiction

7 Loot Boxes, Gambling, and Exploitation

8 Video Games and Social Networks

9 Video Games and Cognitive, Emotional, and Health Effects

10 Conclusion

11 Future Directions

1 Introduction

  1.1 Overview of the Chapter

2 Cyber Behaviors Related to Entertainment and Learning

  2.1 Early Research on Cyber Behaviors Related to Entertainment and Learning

  2.2 Current Research on Cyber Behaviors Related to Entertainment and Learning

    2.2.1 Vocabulary Learning

    2.2.2 STEM Learning

    2.2.3 Transfer from Touchscreen to Non-Cyber Environments

3 Implications of Cyber Behaviors Centered on Communication

  3.1 Early Research on Cyber Behaviors Related to Communication

  3.2 Current Research on Cyber Behaviors Related to Communication

4 The Implications of Multitasking

 4.1 The Implications of Multitasking for Learning and Cognition

  4.2 Multitasking and Well-being

  4.3 Individual Differences Relating to Multitasking Behavior

5 Future Direction

Acknowledgment

This chapter seeks to understand how media and digital technologies influence art demand and supply. Particularly, we shed light on the impact of the mass media on cultural consumption and live attendance. We describe the emergence of virtual museums and, more broadly, digital cultural heritage. We also evaluate whether video games may influence art consumption and discuss the cultural importance of video games. Finally, we cover the consumption of music and how it relates to the rapidly changing and evolving music industry.

The story of how medieval polyphony and song have been approached in more recent times is the subject of our final chapter. We look at how the appearance of modern editions of medieval poetry allowed composers in the first half of the twentieth century, such as Carl Orff and Benjamin Britten, to set medieval song-texts to new music. It would take until after World War II, however, for the music of medieval polyphony and song to reach wide audiences, and we chart the history of the recordings, concerts, and festivals that have brought this music to listeners from 1950 onwards. We examine the approaches of the pioneering ensembles and directors who first performed and recorded this music in the 1950s and 1960s, looking at their influences and attitudes towards the many unknowns regarding its original performance practice. Situating the re-awakening of medieval music in the wider context of the early music revival and the ‘authentic’ (later, ‘historically-informed’) performance movements, we then move on to consider ‘medievalist’ music, especially in film, television, and video games with medieval settings.

This chapter describes a collaboration between its authors – a professor and an undergraduate (post-secondary) student – to develop an education programme for Play the Knave, a mixed-reality digital Shakespeare game. As part of an effort to bring the game to local elementary and secondary school English classrooms, the authors co-ran an internship programme at our university, where the game was created. Interns, most of whom were English majors interested in education, learned to create and then teach lesson plans for Play the Knave, subsequently researching the game’s impact on learning. Our chapter discusses the challenges of collaborating in a university environment, comparing these to the challenges players experience when interacting with avatars in Play the Knave. Like Knave’s players, participants in our programme faced difficulties connecting with other participants, including ourselves and local teachers. We maintain that flawed connection – which players of digital games describe as ‘glitchiness’ – need not undermine effective collaboration but can actually enhance it, as participants are pushed to adapt constantly to shifting circumstances. In contrast to theories of artistic collaboration that prioritize participants achieving a state of ‘flow’, we argue that, in fact, collaborations can be most successful when marked by fits and starts, lags and the imperfect connections endemic to living in a digital world.

This chapter explores the multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream and their founder, Edgar Froese, with an equal emphasis on the band’s practices during the 1970s and 1980s. We situate Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography within multiple styles such as kosmische Musik, ambient, techno/trance, and synthwave, while highlighting the band’s influences and legacies in live music and Hollywood film scores. First, Tangerine Dream’s evolution during the 1970s is traced, involving the group’s central role in the ‘Berlin School‘ of electronic music. Classic albums on Ohr, from Electronic Meditation to Atem, led to success particularly in Britain and France. With the signing of the band to Virgin Records, the subsequent sections explore landmark albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon, and the important roles of Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann in the group’s classic configuration. We then highlight Tangerine Dream’s iconic live tours, stretching from Australia to America, as well as influential concerts in Eastern Europe. The band’s extraordinary career in film music, especially in 1980s Hollywood, forms the focus of our conclusion, where the mark of Tangerine Dream’s major influence can be seen in media as diverse as the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto 5 and the Netlix hit series Stranger Things.

In “Digital Nature,” Lai-Tze Fan adapts Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecofiction in order to demarcate the emergent genre of “digital ecofiction,” which includes hypertext novels, video games, and other forms of multimedia art. Fan contends that the self-reflexive nature of digital texts like J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape and Eugenio Tisselli’s The Gate fosters in readers/users a critical awareness of their implication in environmental degradation through the use of digital technologies. Fan also suggests that digital ecofiction is well suited to address the challenges of the Anthropocene since it evokes alternative temporalities such as deep time and cyclical time.