The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Larissa Hjorth, whose focus is on how smartphones are shaping and shaped by women's roles and labour. They highlight the unbounded nature of the domestic, and the struggles of boundary making: smartphones are both empowering and exploiting gendered labour: they empower and constrain women's experiences.

Larissa interviewed some 40 smartphone users in their post-honeymoon phase (when the device was no longer new), finding that smartphones highlight how notions of home, domesticity, and everyday life are changing. Smartphones contain users as much as they are contained by them, they embody work as well as …

The first AoIR 2012 plenary begins with Mary L. Gray, whose interest is in moving past technology-centric work in Internet studies. Rather, life is entangled with Internet technologies: the study of media should be used to draw out larger questions, and Internet research needs to be an interdiscipline concerned with boundary work.

Early on, cultivation theory dominated media studies, but domestication theory finally provided a more sophisticated view of the adoption and adaptation of media technologies; but this also overlooked the reinscription of normative users to the exclusion of other user groups, who were considered to be outsiders and always …

And I've arrived at the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers conference – my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the family. We start with a quick burst of Ignite talks, which itself begins with John Carter McKnight. He notes the two fundamental axioms of video games studies: games teach, and games don't teach. The Red Cross has posed the question: Is there a way for first-person shooter games to include a more accuracy representation of international humanitarian law? Such laws are not especially firm, of course - much different from the rules in video games, which are more like gravity …