Aphra Kerr, PhD

Presentation

The Gamblification of Media, Sports and Play: Rethinking Risk and Responsibility.

Abstract

Gambling is a popular leisure activity in many countries, and it takes different forms in different social and cultural contexts. Commercial gambling has seen exponential growth since the 1980s in Europe – driven by the liberalisation of regulation, new technologies and changing attitudes to risk. This growth has led to the development of a highly profitable and lucrative revenue stream for companies and governments. Despite COVID restrictions over the past year, overall revenues of the largest gambling companies grew due to the availability of online gambling.

Online gambling is the fastest growing sub-sector in the gambling industry especially for highly networked European consumers. Most companies and lotteries now offer mobile apps and there is an increasing use by companies of machine learning technologies to target potential gamblers and model, predict and retain gamblers. Further, social media companies and game companies are increasingly offering gambling like mechanics in their applications. The transnational nature of the online world means that regulation and public policy in these spaces is often lagging behind what is required, or missing entirely. This is especially the case in Ireland which shares a media and sporting ecology with the United Kingdom but lacks the developed regulatory and public health responses to gambling of its near neighbours.

In this talk I will bring a political economy and policy lens to gambling. I will focus on four key trends including: 1) the Mediatisation of Gambling and its impact on Sport 2) Datafication, AI and the Gambling Industry 3) Gambling, Gaming and Games and finally, 4) Public Policy, Risk and Responsibility.  The talk is informed by a recently completed research project which explored gambling trends and harms internationally and in Ireland.

Kerr, Aphra, John O'Brennan, and Lucia Vazquez Mendoza. 2021. Gambling Trends, Harms and Responses. Ireland in an International Context. Maynooth University: Maynooth, Ireland. Available at http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/14258.

Biography

Dr. Aphra Kerr has a PhD in Communication Studies (2000) and is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University, Ireland where she teaches the sociology of media, technology and digital communication. She is a collaborator of the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology where she works on projects researching AI and data governance, ethics and policy, and is co-PI on a project on ‘Gambling in Ireland’. She has been researching digital games for almost 20 years and was co-principle investigator on the SSHRC funded ‘Refiguring Innovation in Digital Games’ project. In 2016 she received a Distinguished Scholar award from the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). She currently serves as an expert adviser to the Pan European Games Information system (PEGI) and is a member of the Media Literacy Ireland network. She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh (2019) and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (2011). Aphra’s books include Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Age, Routledge, 2017, and she co-edited the games entries in The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.