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.

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.

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?