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The Social and Cognitive Lab is one of three FASS-centered research laboratories within the university-wide Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI).  It provides an interdisciplinary setting where social science and humanities-related research is brought to bear on interactive and digital media issues.  All members of the Lab are also members of the STS Research Cluster.

Scholars in this lab are deeply interested in the effects of new digital media technologies on social groups and practices, and the effects of social groups/practices on new technologies.  There are also areas in which technical innovation can be directly catalyzed by the lab’s research, such as the production of new templates for digitized educational media, as well as possible new GIS applications. Scholars in this lab engage in technology innovation through the production of literature, conferences and workshops, and other forms of oral and written engagement with engineers, scientists, and members of the educated public who affect - and are affected by - new media.

Lab members study interactive and digital media from numerous perspectives: cultural studies, cognitive, behavioral, social networks, ethical, and legal. Their methodologies include ethnographic research, surveys, participant observation, archival research, and experiments to explore IDM’s impact on individuals, social groups and norms. 

 

Examples of members’ existing and planned  research projects include the following:

Online Communities and Massive Multi-online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs)

This project aims to understand what makes MMORPGs attractive and engaging. The researchers plan to study how players of MMORPGs engage in the creation of communities and how this process is facilitated both by the games’ interfaces and the social expectations of players.

 

Ethical Implications of Serious Gaming among Youth in Singapore

Serious games are central to the exploitation of digital media technologies for education. There is an implied acceptance of the premise that this game genre provides students with a “neutral” playing environment. This study seeks to challenge this assumption and explore imbedded notions of masculinity, individuality and whiteness in serious games and assess the impact that those notions have on the shaping of Singapore’s youth.  

 

Mobile Devices, Format, Content and Media Engagement

Young people carry their mobile devices everywhere. These devices allow them to talk with friends, access their email, listen to music, search the Web and view their favorite TV programs. Researchers have found that the format or structural features of television messages have an impact on the viewer's experience and their ability to engage with the content. This study will explore how the format of television content helps young viewers engage with mobile TV content.

 

Cyber-Café Culture  in Asia’s Small and Medium Towns

This project seeks to explore how youth in developing countries use technologies that were originally designed for rich/developed ones. The project will concentrate on the use of interactive media in small and medium size cities in six countries (India, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam) with the aim of ascertaining the ways in which youth assimilate and re-purpose media to fit their social and economic reality.

 

Community Engagement in Public Participatory GIS

Public Participatory Geographical Information Systems (PPGIS) is the term given to initiatives to enhance community engagement and ownership in the management of spatial information.  This project will consider two forms of PPGIS broadly concerned with issues of environmental governance and of significant importance in the region.  The first theme deals with the application of PPGIS in disaster reconstruction effort, based on preliminary work in post-earthquake Nias, Indonesia and the second with promoting community engagement in water issues in Singapore.

 

The Gaming Industry in Singapore: Industry Dynamics and Social Network Analysis

This project proposes to study the structure of the online gaming industry in Singapore. The purpose is to examine the particular industry development model in the Asia-based new media economies. Literature in the area of creative industries emphasizes the importance of creative industry models in the US, UK and Australia, but there has been a lack of attention to successful new media production centers in the Asian context. 

 

Design and Analysis of Large-scale Collaborative Learning Environments, and an Assessment of Critical Internet Literacy in Primary School Children in Singapore

The goal of this project is to propose new interactive media systems and pedagogical tools in order to better support large-scale collaboration in a distributed learning community. Overall, this project focuses on how interactive media, individual/group cognition, and social interaction can be interwoven to better support collaborative learning. It suggests a shift away from the psychology of the individual (or the small group) to the community as the unit of analysis.