Hee Jhee Jiow | Singapore Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Hee Jhee Jiow

The rapid evolution of our media landscape has placed tremendous strain on parents’ efforts and a... more The rapid evolution of our media landscape has placed tremendous strain on parents’ efforts and ability to mediate their children’s media use. This article argues that parental mediation theory, with its restrictive, co-use, and active mediation framework, is rooted in television studies and must be refined to accommodate the fast-changing media landscape that is populated by complex and intensively-used media forms such as video games, social media and mobile apps. Through a study of parental mediation of children’s video game play, we identify the limitations of parental mediation theory as applied to current trends in children’s media use and suggest how it can be enhanced. This study seeks to improve parental mediation theory’s descriptive and explanatory strength by identifying and outlining the specific activities that parents undertake as they impose their media strategies. We explain how restrictive, co-use, and active mediation are constituted by four types of mediation activities: gatekeeping, discursive, diversionary and investigative activities that are used in dynamic combination depending on the overarching mediation strategy parents exercise.

The rapid adoption of video gaming among children has placed tremendous strain on parents’ abilit... more The rapid adoption of video gaming among children has placed tremendous strain on parents’ ability to manage their children’s consumption. While parents refer online to video games ratings (VGR) information to support their mediation efforts, there are many difficulties associated with such practice. This paper explores the popular VGR sites, and highlights the inadequacies of VGRs to capture the parents’ concerns, such as time displacement, social interactions, financial spending and various video game effects, beyond the widespread panics over content issues, that is subjective, ever-changing and irrelevant. As such, this paper argues for a shift from content-centric to a parent-centric approach in VGRs, that captures the evolving nature of video gaming, and support parents, the main users of VGRs, in their management of their young video gaming children. This paper proposes a Video Games Repository for Parents to represent that shift.

With its high internet penetration rate, and the dense saturation of audio-visual-capturing mobil... more With its high internet penetration rate, and the dense saturation of audio-visual-capturing mobile smartphones among its citizens,
Singapore provides a ripe technological infrastructure for a surveillance society. Its citizens have been serendipitously capturing,
on photo or video, socially undesirable and controversial incidents of daily living. Widespread adoption and use of social media
have enhanced the viewership of these captured behaviours and provided a platform for responses of criticisms.
Panopticism, in the modern day context, is used as a metaphor to describe the effect of surveillance by authorities that shapes and
manipulates social behaviour. Lateral surveillance is the opposite of panopticism, which portrays the impact of surveillance of the
few by the unseen many. This study explored the perception and impact of these activities on citizens’ social behaviours.
Respondents were questioned on their awareness of surveillance in different milieu of their daily lives, such as commuting,
driving, interactions in public spaces, and checking into, or uploading of photos onto social media, and its impacts on their social
behaviours in those public spaces.
This study recruited a sample of 223 university students, aged between 18 and 26 years, comprising of both genders, to undergo
an online survey. These students were directed to an online survey, which did not capture identifiable information, by the authors
who have access to the students at their university.
Data collected provided descriptive statistics of the awareness and impact of panopticism, and lateral surveillance, by media-rich
and media-savvy young citizens. Comparisons were made between panopticism versus lateral surveillance’s effect on social
behaviour. This study found that lateral surveillance had a more powerful effect on social behaviours, contributed to significantly
by the presence and usage of publicity channels such as Facebook and other local popular news websites.

Singapore is ranked as one of the most wired and cyber-ready nations in the world; it is internat... more Singapore is ranked as one of the most wired and cyber-ready nations in the world; it is internationally ranked fourth highest in cybercrime victimization rate, and this is expected to increase. The establishment of INTERPOL’s Global Complex in Singapore signals the nation’s interest and readiness in playing a greater role in regulating Internet usage. As such, there is great significance in exploring Singapore’s glocalized approach towards regulation of Internet behaviors. To this end, this paper will begin with a survey of the global and local cybercrime scene, highlighting several pertinent characteristics of both victims and perpetrators. Adopting Lessig’s four modalities of constraint, this paper will examine Singapore’s approaches and efforts in its regulation of cybercrime, and will conclude by highlighting Singapore’s challenges in regulating users’ behaviors in cyberspace.

*** A revised version of this paper was submitted as a Working Paper (No. 179) to the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University (Perth) titled "Singapore’s Cybercrime Regulation based on Lessig’s Modalities of Constraint" ***

A key ingredient of successful parenting is parental knowledge of their children's whereabouts. T... more A key ingredient of successful parenting is parental knowledge of their children's whereabouts. The availability of, and easy access to, modern technology such as mobile phone location disclosure (MPLD) services has made it even easier for parents to locate their children by tracking their whereabouts. This study explored parental factors and children's receptiveness towards MPLD services and found that children's trust in their parents, optimal parental bonding, monitoring and solicitation, and children's general disclosure patterns are positively correlated to children's receptiveness towards MPLD, but parental invasiveness was found to be negatively correlated. The study found that in predicting children's MPLD attitudes: (1) general disclosure habit of children is the best predictor; and (2) children's perception of parental factors are better indicators than parents' perception.

Video games have grown in number, variety and consumer market penetration, encroaching more aggre... more Video games have grown in number, variety and consumer market penetration, encroaching
more aggressively into the domestic realm. Within the home therefore, parents whose children
play video games have to exercise mediation and supervision. As video games evolve, parental
mediation strategies have also had to keep pace, albeit not always successfully. By transposing
our appreciation of parental concerns over the historical development of video games, we
propose an analytical framework identifying key affordances of video games, elucidating how
their evolution has distinct implications for effective parental mediation. These affordances are
portability, accessibility, interactivity, identity multiplicity, sociability and perpetuity.

Book Chapters by Hee Jhee Jiow

As critical infrastructures, such as transportation, water, electricity, and gas distribution net... more As critical infrastructures, such as transportation, water, electricity, and gas distribution networks, mature into cyber-physical (CP) systems, they have become more vulnerable to cyber attacks. These attacks have become more sophisticated in nature, and as such, CP security has had to adopt a multi-pronged approach in dealing with it. While technological advancements have been hailed as the main source of safeguard for CP systems, little is mentioned about other contributing factors to CP security, especially if one considers the proliferation of CP systems into more publicly accessible applications such as banking and assisted living. This chapter will examine the efforts to get society involved in CP security specifically in two areas—educational efforts and initiatives to cultivate safe online practices. As Australia and Singapore are developed nations in the usage of CP systems, this chapter will discuss the initiatives undertaken in these two countries.

Mobile Location Based Services (MLBS) have been in operation since the 1970s. Conceived initially... more Mobile Location Based Services (MLBS) have been in operation since the 1970s. Conceived initially for military use, the Global Positioning System technology was later released to the world for other applications. As the usage of the technology increased, mobile network points, developed by mobile service operators, supplemented its usage in various applications of MLBS. This book chapter will first chart the trajectory of MLBS applications into the mass market, afforded by the evolution of technology, digital and mobility cultures. Assimilating various MLBS classifications, it will situate examples into 4 quadrants according to the measure of user-position or device-position focus, and alert-aware or active-aware applications. The social, political and economic implications of MLBS will be captured, and its future will be discussed.

Conferences by Hee Jhee Jiow

The pervasiveness of media in society has generated a significant amount of attention and researc... more The pervasiveness of media in society has generated a significant amount of attention and research on the topic of media addiction in the modern world. While excessive media usage has not been classified as an addiction by the DSM-V, diagnostic tools have been created to measure media addiction. This paper explores the scales used by researchers to measure media addiction, such as Young’s Internet Addiction Scale and Social Media Addiction, and highlights the shortcomings of such measures. With media use aggressively percolating throughout society, media addiction measures have not appropriately captured the shifting usage patterns, such as labelling the amount of time spent using media devices (which does not differentiate between type of activities) as contributing to addiction. Therefore, this paper examines the media addiction measures in light of today’s usage patterns, and proposes that such measures adopt a functional approach to appropriately appraise pathological/harmful use of media activities.

Due to the expansion of the entertainment industry, a plethora of innovative video games were dev... more Due to the expansion of the entertainment industry, a plethora of innovative video games were developed. Whilst some video games have been promoted for educational purposes, the bulk of it has been commercialised as leisure activities. Emergent video gaming technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) devices and Location-Based (LB) genre of video games are rapidly adopted for mass consumption. This paper examines the implications of these emergent interactivities on parental mediation of children’s video gaming habits. Firstly, adopting Jiow & Lim’s (2012) conceptualisation of the affordances (interactivity, portability, accessibility, identity multiplicity, sociability and perpetuity) of video gaming, this paper charts the developments of VR and LB technologies relevant for the video gaming landscape, and found that such emergent technologies have enhanced the affordances of video gaming. Secondly, this paper argues that VR and LB video game enhancements have placed increasing difficulties on parental mediation of video gaming. This paper claims that every aspect of the parental mediation framework, namely gatekeeping, investigative, discursive and diversionary processes, that parents embark on to manage their children’s video gaming habits, has been significantly impeded. With gamers required to leave their house to play LB video games, parents would have a hard time setting rules to restrict their children’s whereabouts and monitoring their location and game play sequences. Such monitoring difficulties would be prevalent in VR gaming as well, as parents would not have sight of their children’s in-game interactivities. Discursive mediation becomes challenging as parents are technologically incompetent compared to the younger digital natives, and diversionary mediation largely encumbered by the attractiveness of such gaming technologies. This paper expects the combination of both video gaming technologies, would greatly increase the challenges for parental mediation.

Video gaming is an increasingly popular activity among young people worldwide. The rapid evolutio... more Video gaming is an increasingly popular activity among young people
worldwide. The rapid evolution of video games has heightened concerns about their
negative effects on children, and placed tremendous strain on parents to manage their
children’s video game play. Whereas previous research has identified parental mediation
of video gaming as comprising active, restrictive and co-playing strategies, this paper
seeks to show that parental mediation is a fluid process, where parents employ mixed
methods depending on different conditions. As such, this study argues that assessing the
effectiveness of parental mediation’s necessitates an extension beyond the current
analytical approach of observing monolithic categories. This study proposes the use of
parenting style, among the most influential and well-studied theories in parenting
literature, as a heuristic device to assess parental mediation’s effectiveness. Parenting
style literature claims authoritative and neglectful parenting as the most and least optimal
parenting style respectively.
While prior studies adopted correlational analyses of parental mediation strategies with
their outcomes and/or antecedents, this study sought to use independent samples t test to
describe effective parental mediation by comparing the differences between two groups
of parent-child dyads. Through the use of two established instruments (Pathological
Video Game Use scale and Parenting Style scale) in the video game use and parenting
literature, we define two dyadic groups – authoritative parents and their non-pathological
gaming children (GofAN), with neglectful parents and their pathological gaming children
(GofNP). Through online surveys with 433 parent-child dyads, our study explored the
differences in antecedents and outcomes of parental mediation between the two dyadic
groups. Our study found that the parents in the GofAN group had more negative
perceptions of video games, higher achievement values for their children, and practiced
the full range of mediation strategies more. Moreover, the children in the GofAN group
were found to be more obedient towards parental requirements, to play less video games,
and, to have higher English academic scores.

The rapid evolution of video games has placed tremendous strain on parents’ efforts and ability t... more The rapid evolution of video games has placed tremendous strain on parents’ efforts and ability to mediate their children’s game play. This article argues that parental mediation theory, with its restrictive, co-use, and active mediation framework, is rooted in television studies and must be refined to accommodate the fast-changing video game landscape. It critically examines the limitations of parental mediation theory as applied to current trends in children’s video gaming and suggests how it can be enhanced. Through interviews with 41 parent-child dyads, this study seeks to improve parental mediation theory’s descriptive and explanatory strength by conceptualising parental mediation of video games as comprising gatekeeping, discursive, diversionary and investigative processes that better reflect the current media landscape.

Jiow, H. J. (2012, November). Singapore’s Regulation of Cybercrime. Conference for eDemocracy and... more Jiow, H. J. (2012, November). Singapore’s Regulation of Cybercrime. Conference for eDemocracy and Social Media CeDEM-Asia 2012, Singapore, 14-15 November.

Jiow, H. J. & Lin, J. (2012, July). The influence of parental factors’ on children’s receptivenes... more Jiow, H. J. & Lin, J. (2012, July). The influence of parental factors’ on children’s receptiveness towards mobile phone location disclosure services. 3rd International Conference on Geographies of Children, Young People and Families, Singapore, 11-13 July.

Since being launched on a mass scale in the 1970s, video games have grown in number, variety and ... more Since being launched on a mass scale in the 1970s, video games have grown in number, variety and consumer market penetration, encroaching more aggressively into the domestic realm. Within the home, parents whose children play video games have to exercise mediation and supervision. As video games evolve, parental mediation strategies have also had to keep pace, albeit not always successfully. This study reviews the history of video games and traces their evolution, finding enhanced affordances in portability, sociability, perpetuity, accessibility, interactivity and identity multiplicity. The study proposes an analytical framework comprising key affordances of video games, elucidating how their emergence and evolution pose growing challenges for parental mediation.

Jiow, H. J. (2008, November). Investigating Time Spent as an Indicator of Problematic Internet Ga... more Jiow, H. J. (2008, November). Investigating Time Spent as an Indicator of Problematic Internet Gaming. 9th Humanities Graduate Research Conference: Emerging place(s)/Engaging culture(s), Perth, 5-6 November.

Workshops by Hee Jhee Jiow

Jiow, H. J. & Morales, S. (2013, October). Perception and Effects of Surveillance in Singapore. G... more Jiow, H. J. & Morales, S. (2013, October). Perception and Effects of Surveillance in Singapore. Global Internet Governance Academic Network 8th Annual Symposium 2013, Bali, October 21.

Jiow, H. J. (2008, June). Investigating Problematic Internet Gaming in the Singaporean Context. W... more Jiow, H. J. (2008, June). Investigating Problematic Internet Gaming in the Singaporean Context. Workshop on Internet Addiction Research in Asia, Philippines, 16-17 June.

Thesis by Hee Jhee Jiow

This thesis examined parental mediation of video gaming in Singapore. Video gaming has become a p... more This thesis examined parental mediation of video gaming in
Singapore. Video gaming has become a popular online activity among the
young in Singapore. Moreover, its evolution has raised concerns about its
negative effects on children, and has also placed tremendous strain on
parents’ efforts to monitor and manage their children’s usage. However,
parental mediation theory, with its roots in television studies, has not
adequately accommodated the challenges of this new media platform; this
has resulted in descriptive and explanatory limitations of the theory. Its
contradictory claims of effectiveness have also questioned the theory’s
philosophical foundations. As such, this thesis seeks to address these
limitations.
Chapter 1 reviews how the video gaming industry has evolved in
its interactivity, identity multiplicity, accessibility, portability, sociability and
perpetuity; and claims that these increased affordances have added to
parental concerns surrounding children’s video gaming habits, and
increased challenges to parental mediation. It also explains why
Singapore is a suitable location for studying parental mediation of video
games, given the high video game consumption among its youths, the
prevalence of video gaming concerns, and its challenging parental worklife
environment.
Chapter 2 delves further into parental mediation theory’s
development, with regards to various new media platforms; namely,
Internet and video games. The chapter highlights certain conceptual
constraints and contradictory effectiveness claims as limitations to the
theory, and argues for an exploration into the following research questions
(RQs) “How is Parental Mediation Practised?” (RQ1), “How is
Parental Mediation Received?” (RQ2), and “What does effective
parental mediation look like?” (RQ3). Parents’ perceptions, their
practices and nuances of practices, as well as their children’s reactions to
those practices and perceptions, are areas of interest proposed to aid in
answering the research questions.
Chapter 3 justifies and documents the research methodology,
sampling framework, recruitment procedures, data collection, and data
processing techniques. This study is based on home interviews with a
sample of 41 children between the ages of 12 and 17, and their parents,
all of whom play First Person Shooter or Massively Multiplayer Online
Role Playing Games.
Chapters 4 and 5 analyse the interviews and provide descriptive
and explanatory clarity to parental mediation theory. These chapters posit
certain relationships between parent-child activities, and look at factors
that influence those activities, based on literature review and the
interviews conducted. These relationships were quantitatively tested later,
to see if generalisable claims could be made.
Chapter 6 outlines the research methodology underlying RQ3 and
the relationships in previous chapters, in which 433 parent-child pairs
underwent an online quantitative survey that was developed through a
concept sorting process.
Chapter 7 highlights findings from the quantitative phase and
discusses its implications on parental mediation and its effectiveness.
Chapter 8 concludes the study by accounting for its limitations and
sets out recommendations for future research.