Information technology (IT) is an important enabler of innovative learning scenarios. Today, numerous IT-enabled learning scenarios – often referred to as technology-mediated learning (TML) – such as massive open online courses, are applied worldwide across different cultures. However, little insights are available regarding the appropriation of TML and how culture influences the appropriation ...

Cultural appropriation is often mentioned but undertheorized in critical rhetorical and media studies. Defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into 4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Although each of these types can be understood as relevant to p...

In an advancement of Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST), Wheeler and Valacich (1996) offer Process Restricted Adaptive Structuration Theory (PRAST) as a means by which GSS appropriation may be assessed. Using an external assessment involving microcoding, they demonstrated in their study that so-called appropriation mediators may enhance the faithful appropriation of GSS structures. We offer fu...

Abstract In this article, I explore how the sensory perception of urban environments translates into an activist practice care. Based on a case study from my digital ethnography, argue that artist and architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer’s performative “City Walks” are aimed at experimenting with, questioning reframing perceptions marginalised places in Durban. Re-interpreting re-experiencing public...

In this article, I compare William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Sadeq Chubak’s The Patient ‎Stone ‎with respect to the theme of death and from the perspective of Existentialism. I argue that ‎despite ‎Faulkner’s influence on Chubak and similarities in their writings, the Iranian modernist novel ‎presents ‎intellectual and aesthetic nuances catering to the domestic material circumstances of ‎it...

In this article Adorno’s approach to Mahler is subjected to linguistic-conceptual critique, in order to highlight its ambiguous philosophical and methodological syncretizing of discourses of epistemological commensurability and hermeneutic incommensurability. As a response to this and to Adorno’s privileging of authorial production as determinant of meaning, this study invokes Richard Rorty’s p...

People have always used tools and technologies creatively. Technology appropriation concerns on how users adopt technologies for personal purposes. In this paper, we review the appropriation literature and explicate four varieties of this concept. Then we explore these varieties in the empirical setting of a citywide network of multipurpose interactive public displays. This network was designed...

In this paper we discuss technology appropriation in the context of close personal relationships. We review literature that reveals how collaborative appropriation is a natural and necessary feature of technology adoption by relational partners. We then advance a position whereby appropriations in close relationships can be characterised as a form of discretionary effort investment. We end by r...