Foucault famously claimed that in political theory the king’s head still needs to be cut off, proclaiming the imperative to move beyond a centralized and prohibitive conception of power and toward a more distributed, relational and productive understanding of power in political society. Ironically, Edmund Burke, famous for criticizing an actual revolutionary regicide in France, can be read as an ally in Foucault’s project of theoretical regicide and conceptual revolution. For although he staunchly defended existing monarchies in France and Britain, (...) Burke’s political theory in many ways encapsulates the kind of approach that Foucault sought to call forth. In this article, I argue for three particular resonances between Burke’s and Foucault’s views on power’s place and role in political society: one, power precedes subjects; two, power exceeds subjects; and three, subjects must negotiate with existing power relations (as opposed to ignoring or destroying them). Combined, these resonances remind us that political practice, reform and resistance are (almost) always situated in an unchosen context, thus happening in the middle of things rather than on a blank social canvas. Recognizing Burke’s interest in reform conditioned by the socio-cultural and historical circumstances and Foucault’s concern for resistance even though we can never be outside power allows us to appreciate the unchosen constraints that shape political practice of individual and collective subjects alike. (shrink)

The stories in this issue of Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics demonstrate two important things. First these stories explore the space between bodily impairment and the social structures that both enable and constrain the flourishing of those who are differently embodied. The authors of these narratives resist the dominant biomedical interpretation of their impairments, but also demonstrate their dependency upon others—social, medical, or familial others. Second, in writing these narratives, the authors are also engaged in an act of identity formation, which (...) sometimes challenge and sometimes embrace the label of disability. By telling their stories in the middle of the action of their lives— in media res, taking up or resisting the label of disability—they also demonstrate the way in which lives can be lived open to new possibilities and interpretations. (shrink)

This book makes his work accessible to a wider audience by putting it to work in orientation towards current issues.

It was not until the emergence, in the 19th century, of new technical devices – such as the telegraph and the phonograph – that the term medius came to serve as a collective noun (media) for advanced communication technologies. Although mediation is extensively theorized in philosophy and sociology, and is approached by medium theory and media studies, the concept remains undertheorized in the field of communication theory.By exploring the problem of mediation and by challenging its representationalist and transmissive accounts, this (...) paper posits mediation beyond the medium. It traces mediation as a relational principle which can be best understood as modulation involving inherent translation, inflection and movement. Mediation is not a simple transportation of meaning through a passive intermediary. It is not just something which stands or comes between things otherwise separated or opposed. Mediation is neither a middle-thing linking separate entities, nor do things get mediated: They are already forms of mediation. Mediation is, foremost, a connecting mean that generates modified experiences and relations, a modulating process that re-connects at the moment it separates. (shrink)

This essay argues that the digitization and proliferation of contemporary screens has moved us from a “screen-scape” to an encompassing “screen-sphere” – a new topologically-bounded and systemically-organized domain that has not only radically changed our lifeworld but also our ontological and epistemological comportment in it. With reference to recent cartoons and other popular discourses as well as to Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela’s description of, and distinction between, “autonomous” and “autopoietic systems,” the essay speculates on the organizational structure of this (...) new “screen-sphere” and, more significant, our positioning in relation to it. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with aesthetic experience as a central hermeneutic endeavour for theorising performing arts audiences in the Arab region. I argue that a critical engagement with Arab performing arts audiences’ aesthetic experiences necessitates both an archaeological manoeuver and a re-articulation of two keywords: ‘experience’ and ‘everyday’. The article advances, using evidence from research, that allowing the audiences of performing arts in the Arab region to speak may be a step towards democratising the triangular meaning making process among (...) the performer, the audience, and the art institution, and a means towards dislocating, if not liberating, the categories Arab culture, art, performance, and experience, from their teleological articulations. (shrink)

The question of how other consciousnesses appear via media has forced us to re-think the classical phenomenological accounts of sociality. However, as the phenomenological account of empathy is very much centred around the perception of the other’s living body, it has faced challenges in discussing the empathic experience in media-based contexts, where we cannot perceive the other’s body, but something else, such as a screen or a text. In this article, I provide the concept for describing the perceived object in (...) media-based empathy: a living textual body, based on Edith Stein’s concept of Wortleib (a living word body) referring to words as “living,” as bearers of meaning in her early work On the Problem of Empathy [Zum Problem der Einfühlung]. I divide the term Wortleib in two different cases—the empathic and non-empathic object—and thereby argue that, while the object of media-based empathic experience cannot be the other’s body, it is an empathic Wortleib, a communicative empathic object. While Stein herself discussed media-based empathy merely in paper media, I demonstrate the unique usefulness of these concepts in analysing any media-based communication and thus the timeliness of her work in this respect. (shrink)

The paper examines changing media representations of Jacinda Ardern, former Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister, from the global broadcaster, BBC News Online, across three key milestones in the politician’s career: her appointment, re-election and resignation. Our socio-semantic analysis of this representation demonstrates how the media intersect her professional identity with age, gender, social class, and later, her identity as a mother. Whilst earlier coverage of Ardern’s career praises her successfully reconciling these aspects of her personal, social and professional identities, later (...) coverage implies that ‘having it all’ was never really possible longer term. We argue that the visibility of this discourse, and the focus on intersectional aspects of Ardern’s personal and social identities, leads to her resignation being positively evaluated as her ‘finally’ succumbing and committing to the ‘natural’ inevitabilities of heterosexual family life. The article considers what such representation means for Ardern and women politicians and leaders more broadly, and contextualises these findings in relation to existing research on media representations of women in politics and leadership. Finally, we also consider the value of a more longitudinal approach to tracking the cumulative effects of the representation of social actors and groups. (shrink)

The volume provides an updated perspective on international aspects of various developments in media and culture. It includes discussions on how the digital environment contributes to the transformation and re-interpretation of existing phenomena, such as violence-on-demand in online movies, the internet appeal of virtual gangsta rappers, or the revived battle rap tradition, which operates outside the commercial limitations of the music industry and generates more views on social media than most recording artists. -/- The book offers a new consideration of (...) long-term trends and developments, and demonstrates in various examples how formerly marginal practices like gaming or the previously shunned Turkish movie industry have turned into influential tools of social change. In addition, the reciprocity of media content and political settings is underlined in a focus on the Arab world and the reconstruction of impulses from transnational media outlets to recent forms of citizen journalism, as well as in the case of governments’ approaches to media policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The book places the spotlight on pressing issues, such as the ongoing enforcement of information control in the name of public health or the local politics and practices that hinder the process of democratization in authoritarian systems. -/- . (shrink)

Although corruption has become a hot topic in organizational research, few studies have examined how it is socially constructed. To partially bridge this gap, the present paper takes a critical discursive perspective on the representation of corruption in the media. The empirical focus is on the media coverage of a corruption scandal that revolved around two instances of formal corruption charges and successive acquittals. Based on the analysis, the paper exemplifies how the media makes sense of and gives sense to (...) controversial activities in response to changing and at times contradictory information. In particular, the paper highlights interplay between four dominant discourses—transgression, political, public scapegoating, and individualistic—that that were mobilized throughout the media coverage. These discourses were intimately linked with wider dynamics between problematizing and restorative media framings and thus provided crucial means of reconstructing and reformulating the legitimacy of the reported activities throughout the scandal. While the findings are context specific, this study suggests that similar interplay and dynamics are important aspects of media sensemaking around controversial activities related to corruption. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEurope as an idea as well as a political and cultural project has been a vast subject in the British public debate, The relationship between Britain and Europe was mostly regarded as extremely cautious and parochially nationalist; however, whereas in the 1960s and 1970s opposition to the European Economic Community was predominantly led by intelligentsias and maverick politicians, the present-day debate seems less intellectually-driven and academic in his language. This article draws attention to the role of traditional and online media (...) in re-narrating the European question. Within this process, the re-semioticization of the role of Great Britain in the international scenario vis-à-vis the historical and cultural discourses of borders between the UK and the Continent play a pivotal function. Starting from here, the article considers, on the one hand, how the current re-narration of the European question is reproducing and reinterpreting historical arguments vis-à-vis old clichés. On the other, it deals primarily with the response to the profound transition taking place in the political landscape. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 58-64 [Access article in PDF] Media Literacy Education in Art:Motion Expression and the New Vision of Art EducationThe Bauhaus, which established the foundation of modern design, has greatly influenced Japanese design and art education. It is a historical fact that the movement views "synthetic art" as an integration of the various fields and the integration of the art and machine technology experimentally. (...) However, the Bauhaus is not just of historical importance but continues to have an influence even in the integration of the art and electronic technology in today's "multimedia." In addition, it can be said that it is very much alive as "the digital Bauhaus" or "the electronic Bauhaus." 1 As we know, today's multimedia and the Internet give us a new life-environment, and expandthe possibility of expression in art. Therefore, current art education must examine how these new medias will be incorporated into the curriculum.In the cases of the photograph, video, or computer, an expression by the image media is added to the art course for the junior high school course of study. 2 Also in school art classes, image media was introduced, expanding the possibilities of self-expression through art. This result can be matched to the needs of the industrial world in Japan as well. As an educational practice, the content of this course of study is promising, even though someproblems must be solved, acquiring new equipment, re-educating the artteacher, and securing additional art school hours. The new content in art education can be summarized as follows:1. The motion picture (animation) which includes time and movement. Motion picture is asequence of continuous images, obviously different from the still images of painting. There are, of course, artworks that express motion or induce the viewer'seye movement. There are also kinetic artworks that do move, such as mobiles. Works of motion picture have, however, a fixed time shaft, and they are formed by the afterimage phenomenon. Thinking about the progress of time shaft is an indispensable element for the production. [End Page 58]2. The synchronism of image and sound. Because time is a factor in the visual expression, the works are compatible with music — the art of time. There is a synchronized relation between the motion picture and music. Image expression with multimedia became synthetic art, just as the Bauhaus looked for "architecture." Currently, this kind of expression transitions from art to entertainment, and permeates daily life.3. The method with interactive art work. Not only artworks of installation, but also TV games and web design have interactive construction as an indispensable interface. The aesthetic value of these visual works will be appreciated when the user starts the action by hitting a touchpad, pushing buttons, or clicking a mouse. To make this kind of artwork, one needs to consider the latent relationships between humans and work, and establish the input-output order for the method of construction.4. The problem of virtual reality. The term "virtual reality" is used by some art teachers as criticism against digital works such as computer graphics. These teachers insist that there is no reality there. One can, however, get an aesthetic feeling through sensory information, imagination, and sensitivity, even though what one sees is an illusion. The feeling of reality a picture of an apple gives, for example, may be equal to a computer graphic apple.Human imagination also creates "virtual reality" beyond reality in the myth, the novel, and so on. It can be said that this is the basis for human creativity.Furthermore, expression by image media raises the problem of a "reality" in which material experience is important to encounterthe world directly. Such an argument discusses multimedia as a tool of expression and a teaching material while reconsidering human reality.More recently, "media literacy" (ability to read and understand media) became an important point of discussion for Japanese educators. Usually, in this discussion, the critical ability to talk back to the television program is emphasized. However, through art... (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope and significance (...) of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

When doubts were first raised about the veracity of the dramatic advances in stem cell research announced by Professor Hwang Woo-Suk, a significant minority response was to question the qualifications of journalists to investigate the matter. In this paper I examine the contemporary relationships between science, scientists, the public, and the media. In the modern context the progress of science often relies on the media to mobilise public support for research and also for the purpose of communication within the scientific (...) community. As a result, attempts to counterpose "science" and "the media" should be treated with some caution. I argue that because of the essential role played by ethics in good science, journalists may in fact sometimes be well placed to investigate scientists. At the conclusion of my paper I draw out some of the implications of my analysis for the ethics of investigative journalism directed towards scientific research. (shrink)

U vremenu novog definisanja srpskog nacionalnog identiteta od odlucujuceg je znacaja uspostavljanje kopce izmedju kriticki vrednovane tradicije s jedne i zahteva vremena globalizacije, s druge strane. Produktivnu vezu izmedju starog i novog mogu ce je ostvariti ukoliko Srbija izgradi demokratske i nekompromitovane i nekorumpirane drzavne institucije preko kojih bi se obrazovala racionalna svest o vlastitoj posebnosti, kao i vrednostima spoljnog sveta. Glavna odgovornost u tom osetljivom procesu samo definisanja je na politickim elitama i ideoloskim projektima koje oni otvoreno ili prikriveno (...) proteziraju, a koji se na najprozirniji nacin ogledaju u medijima (javnom mnjenju) i institucijama obrazovanja. (shrink)

Advances in medicine in the latter half of the twentieth century have dramatically altered human bodies, expanding choices around what we do with them and how they connect to other bodies. Nowhere is this more so than in the area of reproductive technologies. Reproductive medicine and the laws surrounding it in the UK have reconfigured traditional boundaries surrounding parenthood and the family. Yet culture and regulation surrounding RTs have combined to try to ensure that while traditional boundaries may be pushed, (...) they are reconstructed in similar ways. This paper looks at the most recent RT to be permitted in the UK, mitochondria replacement therapy. Despite controversial media headlines surrounding the technique, MRT is in fact an example of how science and regulation seek to expand models of traditional relatedness in a way that doesn’t challenge the existing order. Yet, like other RTs, while attempts are made to ensure it doesn’t push traditional boundaries too far, fissures and inconsistencies appear in law and culture, which give interesting insights into how genetics, parentage and identity are being mediated in new but familiar ways. (shrink)

This essay reviews the place and role of Public Service Media (PSM) in promoting social justice in the changing digital media landscape through the ethos of diversity. Media diversity – the value and practice of including varied viewpoints, social groups, voices, and channels or outlets in media – has long been a declared pillar of PSM organizations worldwide. However, current changes in the digital media landscape and the growing extension of PSM organizations to digital platforms require re-reading the premise of (...) promoting media diversity as a tool for social justice. This essay identifies a paradox. On one hand, online media appear to accommodate a greater range of diverse voices and players, particularly in the PSM ecosystem. At the same time, these very same online spaces jeopardize diversity, as the increasing practices of personalization, algorithmic curation, and platformization often reduce diversity of representations, voices, and exposure to content, thereby hindering opportunities for social justice and equality. This essay shines a spotlight on this nexus of conflicting mechanisms. The essay begins with in-depth definitions of the two somewhat convoluted terms diversity and social justice. This section includes a review of global perspectives on PSM organizations, and the long-standing value of diversity promoted through them for decades. We then review the impact and changes identified in PSM platforms worldwide in light of the digital turn in the media field. This is followed by an in-depth discussion of the inherent tension between mechanisms that promote and hinder diversity online. Throughout this discussion, we raise questions about the practical dimensions of using online media to promote social justice through diversity. It provides a useful starting point for considering the intersection of Public Service Media, online platforms, diversity, and social justice. Thus, the essay will serve academic scholars studying social justice on a conceptual level as well as practitioners and stakeholders in the media industry at large, and PSM in particular, seeking to practically promote social justice. (shrink)

In medias res: the life of Claude de Seyssel -- The scholar diplomat -- The translator of histories -- Seyssel in Italy : a scholar looks at war -- The scholar and the state -- Seyssel, the church, and the ideal prelate.

Our recent paper reported that 43% of reviewer comment sets shared with authors contained at least one unprofessional comment or an incomplete, inaccurate of unsubstantiated critique. Publication of this work sparked an online conversation surrounding professionalism in peer review. We collected and analyzed these social media comments as they offered real-time responses to our work and provided insight into the views held by commenters and potential peer-reviewers that would be difficult to quantify using existing empirical tools. Overall, 75% of comments (...) were positive, of which 59% were supportive and 16% shared similar personal experiences. However, a subset of negative comments emerged, that provided potential insight into the reasons underlying unprofessional comments were made during the peer-review process. These comments were classified into three main themes: forced niceness will adversely impact the peer-review process and allow for publication of poor-quality science ; dismissing comments as not offensive to another person because they were not deemed personally offensive to the reader ; and authors brought unprofessional comments upon themselves as they submitted substandard work. Here, we argue against these themes as justifications for directing unprofessional comments towards authors during the peer review process. We argue that it is possible to be both critical and professional, and that no author deserves to be the recipient of demeaning ad hominem attacks regardless of supposed provocation. Suggesting otherwise only serves to propagate a toxic culture within peer review. While we previously postulated that establishing a peer-reviewer code of conduct could help improve the peer-review system, we now posit that priority should be given to repairing the negative cultural zeitgeist that exists in peer-review. (shrink)

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

The concept of the national is often perceived, both in public and academic discourse as the central obstacle for the realization of cosmopolitan orientations. Consequently, debates about the nation tend to revolve around its persistence or its demise. We depart from this either-or perspective by investigating the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. Modern collectivities are increasingly preoccupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. However, unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring actions or (...) predictability models, global risks can no longer be calculated or forecast. Accordingly, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations. Cosmopolitanized risk collectivities are engendered through the anticipation of endangered futures which are, for the most part, communicated through an increasingly global media scape. While global media events produce shared exposure, risk conceptions retain distinctive political-cultural features as their respective meanings are prefigured by path-dependent pasts. Nevertheless, the promulgation of risk societies, we argue, results in a reimagination of nationhood which takes place in the context of: global norms (e.g. human rights); globalized markets; transnational migrations; global generations and their embeddedness in civil society movements; and the local interpenetration of world religions to name but a few of the global backdrops shaping new associational intersections. We develop our argument in four interrelated steps. Contrary to essentialized notions of nationalism or universal versions of cosmopolitanism, we address the cosmopolitan reconfiguration of nationhood by differentiating between presumptions of thick belonging and the actual proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. In a second step we overcome the territorial fixation of the social sciences by shifting our attention to temporal dimensions, with a particular focus on competing conceptions of the future. In a third step we demonstrate how these cosmopolitan transformations of nationhood are taking place in the context of a world risk society regime that marshals a set of cosmopolitan imperatives situating the global other in our midst. In a fourth step we illustrate these developments by exploring how the mediatization of risk, and concomitant notions of the future, contribute to the reimagination of cosmopolitan risk collectivities. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the changes that representative democracy is experiencing as a result of the transformation of communication channels. In particular, it focuses on non-electoral representation in the form of movements that emerged throughout the 2010s and that were defined by a strong social media presence (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Yellow Vests). Despite not attempting to gain political power via elections, these movements, through online and offline activities, nonetheless managed to shape the realm of (...) politics. The paper thus analyzes the movements’ inner representative dynamics and the ways they reshape representative democracy. It engages with a critical reading of Hanna Pitkin’s concept of symbolic representation and draws on Michael Saward’s framework of the representative claim to reevaluate Bernard Manin’s notion of “audience” democracy as today’s form of representative government. The argument is that, as digital development provides citizens with less demanding modes of political participation and platforms of representative claim-making, it enhances the sphere of opinion formation and the role of non-electoral representation. This sphere entails a tendency towards a re-depersonalization of politics, thus leading towards the transformation of “audience” democracy. (shrink)

Can we say we live in a post-digital condition? It depends. This paper sets out to distinguish between the current mass digital culture and an authentic post-digital culture. If we mean “post-digital” as the full internalization and awareness of the result of the so-called digital revolution, then it is necessary a philosophical work to discuss related problems, identify the causes and propose solutions. An authentic philosophy of digital will, however, have to start from a clarification of the terms and basic (...) objects of its investigation. Here media theory is inserted as an analytical tool: the purpose of this essay is to outline a road map for a good media theory that interfaces with questions of definition of digital, also in light of the notions of space, time, and matter. As will be seen, the description given here for a “good media theory” does, in fact, coincide with an already existing – and inserted in the contemporary debate – school. In conclusion we will try to delineate the field of philosophical inquiry opened by the clarification brought by the previous analysis, and to suggest a general framework within which philosophy will have to move in order to finally reach the authentic post-digital condition. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe pragmatist reform and opening-up in 1978 has revolutionised the way China communicates internally and engages with the outside world. Firmly embedded within this broader historical context, the interpreter-mediated and televised Premier-Meets-the-Press conferences are a high-profile institutional event in China. At this discursive event, the Chinese premier – ranked second in China’s political hierarchy – is put in the international media limelight, answering journalists’ questions on a range of topics. The section involving the interpreters’ rendering of journalists’ questions is triadic (...) and dynamic and represents a particularly interesting site of ideological contestation, which can be conceptualised profitably using Bakhtin’s concept dialogised heteroglossia. Drawing on a corpus containing 20 years’ press conference data between 1998 and 2017, this CDA study interrogates the interpreters’ agency, particularly in constructing the Chinese government’s image when rendering journalists’ questions. Despite the commonplace assumptions of interpreters being impartial with little agency, the government-affiliated interpreters are found to actively engage in facework and image construction. This leads to a discursive pattern described in Van Dijk’s ideological square, which involves further emphasising and foregrounding the positive elements yet de-emphasising and mitigating the negative elements about Beijing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 96-119 [Access article in PDF] Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception Steven Mailloux There is much talk nowadays about the double nature of rhetoric: rhetoric as a practical guide for composing and rhetoric as a theoretical stance for interpreting. The two uses can be viewed as complementary, as flip sides of the same holistic approach to rhetorical studies. But they can also (...) appear in conflict: production models of writing and speaking versus reception models of reading and listening; models for inventing rhetoric versus models for analyzing it. Indeed, though the two models can be mutually supportive, they have often developed in tension within the evolution of academic disciplines over the last 125 years. Different emphases on one or the other model have resulted in different departmentalized disciplines and varied divisions within those departments, as we are all so well aware. One might even claim that advocating one or the other model has contributed significantly to the fragmentation of rhetoric as an interdiscipline during the last century and to the distribution of its parts into various academic units. In many English departments, for example, the continuing divisions between literature and composition faculty arise from contrasting professional interests in reception models focused on interpreting literary works versus production models focused on composing student texts. A similar reception/production antagonism appears in the history of speech departments separating from English departments. In 1915, when seventeen teachers of public address broke off from the National Council of Teachers of English, the production (oratory or debate) model they favored was at odds with the reception (philological or hermeneutic) model of most literature faculty. 1I don't mean to suggest that different choices between models of production and reception fully account for the academic fragmentation of rhetorical study. Nevertheless, practical antitheses do constitute disciplinary [End Page 96] identities. Antitheses between production and reception—between writing/speaking, on the one hand, and reading/listening, on the other—have variously combined with other distinctions between written texts versus oral performances as objects of study and between scientific research versus humanistic scholarship as intellectual traditions, and these assorted configurations of interpretive practices and institutional formations did help shape disciplinary identities throughout the past century. We are now faced with a situation in which rhetoric is distributed across several departments and programs, not in an integrated interdiscipline but as disciplinary fragments, where rhetorical critics in literary and cultural studies, for example, don't read deeply either in the work of rhetoric/ composition faculty in their own departments or the rhetorical scholarship produced in other departments such as communications or classics.Historically, I believe, the separation of written rhetoric (literature and composition) from oral rhetoric (public address and debate) within the academic humanities, this separation of English and speech departments, has been just as debilitating for rhetorical study as the literature/composition split within English departments alone. One might speculate about how these divisions encouraged the eventual exclusion of oratory from British and U. S. literary canons. More important, these divisions have resulted in a fragmented disciplinary approach to everything having to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in culture, including most recently the study of local and global communication networks, old and new literacies, and past and present media revolutions.In the present essay I suggest an alternative to this disciplinary fragmentation of rhetoric. This alternative, call it rhetorical hermeneutics, learns from the more holistic approach to language arts found at the elementary and secondary levels of our U. S. educational system, where writing, speaking, reading, and listening (and sometimes viewing) are practices often taught in relation to one another. 2 Here production and reception models form parts of the same integrated framework for understanding and participating in the cultural conversations of diverse public spheres. In the following sections, I address these issues of model selection first by considering the objection that rhetorical hermeneutics is exclusively a method of reading and not a heuristic for writing. Then I move to an example of rhetorical hermeneutics in practice: a reception study of rhetorical productions... (shrink)

This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership. Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather (...) than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization of cultural techniques aims at presenting them as chains of operations that link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place. As Siegert points out, this shift recalls certain concurrent developments within the North American posthumanities; the paper therefore also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism. (shrink)

We explore in this paper the relation between activities, communication channels and media, and common ground building in global teams. We define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels and media. We identified the re - representation technique to build common ground that is used by team members during multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed settings. Our hypotheses are as follows: (1) Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for (...) actions are embedded within the fabric of communicative events in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. Capturing these information sources can facilitate common ground building and accelerate the execution of action requests. (2) Re-representations of concepts, i.e., sequences of representations using diverse media and communication channels, mediate and accelerate common ground building. (3) The use of intra- or interdisciplinary re-representations correlates with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. We used AEC Global Teamwork course offered in 2008–2009 as the testbed for our study to validate our hypothesis. (shrink)

Google Search is arguably one of the primary epistemic tools in use today, with the lion’s share of the search-engine market globally. Scholarship on countering the current scourge of misinformation often recommends “digital lit- eracy” where internet users, especially those who get their information from so- cial media, are encouraged to fact-check such information using reputable sources. Given our current internet-based epistemic landscape, and Google’s dominance of the internet, it is very likely that such acts of epistemic hygiene will take (...) place via Google Search. The question arises whether Google Search is fit for purpose, given the apparent misalignment the general epistemic goal of promoting true beliefs and the greater online commercial ecosystem in which it is embedded. I argue that Google Search is epistemically problematic as it stands, mainly due to the opacity related to the parameters it uses for personalising search results. I further argue that in as far as an ordinary internet user is legitimately ignorant of Google’s workings, uses it in an “ordinary manner”, and is generally unable to avoid using it in the current information environment, they are not ep- istemically blameworthy for any false beliefs that they acquire via it. I conclude that too much emphasis is currently placed on individual epistemic practices and not enough on our information environment and epistemic tools when it comes to countering misinformation. (shrink)

Populist representation is the process by which a body or set of bodies become the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression of the social order. We call this specific type of representative linkage ‘synecdochal representation’. In it, the leader’s body performs three key functions: it mirrors certain popular traits that are characterized as ‘low’, it displays marks of exceptionality, and it appropriates symbols of institutional power. These tasks are performed through particular ways of acting, dressing, talking, eating, and (...) the like, in public. Social media has become a key locus for bodily self-presentation because it is used to create the appearance of intimacy and spontaneity through the distribution of ‘candid’ pictures and videos. This paper will analyze how the self-presentation of populist and non-populist leaders are established through Twitter, what images they choose to disseminate, and how they are re-signified by the audience. To do so, we will focus on the two Latin American politicians: Cristina Fernández (with a populist style) and Mauricio Macri (with a technocratic one). (shrink)

Purpose: To show that the idea of non-dualistic thinking is of great value for some of the core problems of media philosophy (which often lacks the radical approach of Josef Mitterer's concept). Method: Non-dualistic philosophy, introduced by Mitterer, has a lot in common with other thinkers' discontent with the traditional way of describing the subject-object relation. Their differences and the impasses of phenomenological, structuralist and psychoanalytic media theory shall be examined to show whether and to what extent non-dualism could do (...) better. Findings: As sociologists and some media-philosophers are already adopting some principles of non-dualism without a real framework, non-dualistic thinking offers a new insight into the way that consent/dissent is manufactured in a world where most descriptions are given in a mediated (i.e., non-interpersonal) form. Implications: If we re-establish the personal freedom of gathering knowledge individually instead of "getting nearer to the truth," the way of looking at the escapist power of media also has to be reinterpreted. The early distinction between Lumiére-like "documentation" (= truth) and Méliès-like "fiction" (= perception open to alternatives) could be another dualism, which should be expurgated by the application of Mitterer's concepts. (shrink)

This study takes a systemic functional multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis and discussion of image and text relations in two sets of data. First, patterns of contextualisation of images and text in the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah produced by the Islamic extremist organisation which refers to itself as Islamic State are examined. The second data set consists of a sample of texts from Western online news and blog sites which include recontextualisations of images found in the first (...) data set. A sample of examples of the use and re-use of images is discussed in order to identify patterns of similarity and difference when images and text are recontextualised. It is argued that the ISIS material tends to foreground the interpersonal metafunction in combination with the textual metafunction, while the other data set tends to foreground the ideational metafunction. These inferences indicate that further exploration of a larger data set is worth pursuing. Such studies would provide deeper insights helping to distinguish between online material which supports terrorism and that which opposes it, as well as facilitating the further development of multimodal social semiotic approaches to image and text relations. (shrink)

The pbenomenon of European integration has received a great deal ofattention from political scientists in the wake of the mid-1980s 'relaunch' ofthe European Union. However, political science's theoretical consideration of West European integration has from the outset failed to include news media as a factor in EU politics. This oversight is linked to the general dismissal of the public and public debate as irrelevant to the integration project. Yet because media have several critical functions in politics - as an information-source, (...) agendasetter, and legitimator - political science treatment of the EU now needs to account for the role of news media. Turning to concepts in normative media theory, the article proposes a framework within which to consider media and suggests empirical analysis of media coverage of the European Union. Such analysis would complement political science study of the democratisation and legitimation of the EU, while acknowledging public discourse as an element crucial to the future course of European integration. (shrink)

In recent years, the translation of Debray’s writings and the study of his media thoughts have become increasingly popular in China, but the ‘medium’ in his media discourse has never been clarified. Debray pointed out that the focus of the media is ‘mediation’, which actually reveals a new way of thinking and reasoning. He then proposed four stages of mediological reasoning: Message, Medium, Milieu and Mediation. This article believes that based on this framework (i.e. 4M), Debray used McLuhan’s theory as (...) a hub for analysis and launched a set of research methods and tools aimed at exploring the multiple nature of medium and message on the sense of interaction between culture and technology, which also involved the utility of ‘mediasphere’ as an exploration principle to question the past and future of mankind and the media conditions. This approach provides an avenue for us to understand ourselves and transmissions in different space-time categories at both practical and theoretical levels. This article emphasizes that it is better not to interpret Debray’s thoughts as a theory parallel to the existing medium theories because its focus is on research approaches rather than arguments. Besides, although Debray’s medium theory is based on his experience and thinking in Europe and Latin America, there are reasons for the publicity of Debray’s ideology in China. From the perspective of history, culture and human geography, Chinese civilization can be said to contain rich ideological resources of mediation. This is of great significance to re-understand China’s history and reality in the new context of globalization, and to discover the global value of China’s experience. (shrink)

BackgroundThe global expansion of biobanks has led to a range of bioethical concerns related to consent, privacy, control, ownership, and disclosure. As an opportunity to engage broader audiences on these concerns, bioethicists have welcomed the commercial success of Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 bestselling book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. To assess the impact of the book on discussion within the media and popular culture more generally, we systematically analyzed the ethics-related themes emphasized in reviews and articles about the book, and (...) in interviews and profiles of Skloot.MethodsWe conducted a content analysis of a population of relevant English-language articles and transcripts (n = 125) produced by news organizations and publications in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain/Ireland, and Australia/New Zealand. We scored each article for the emphasis and appearance of 9 ethics-related themes. These were informed consent, welfare of the vulnerable, compensation, scientific progress, control/access, accountability/oversight, privacy, public education, and advocacy.ResultsThe informed consent theme dominated media discussion, with almost 39.2 percent of articles/transcripts featuring the theme as a major focus and 44.8 percent emphasizing the theme as a minor focus. Other prominent themes and frames of reference focused on the welfare of the vulnerable (18.4 percent major emphasis; 36.0 percent minor emphasis), and donor compensation (19.2 percent major; 52.8 percent minor). Ethical themes that comprised a second tier of prominence included those of scientific progress, control/access, and accountability/oversight. The least prominent themes were privacy, public education, and advocacy.ConclusionsThe book has been praised as an opportunity to elevate media discussion of bioethics, but such claims should be re-considered. The relatively narrow focus on informed consent in the media discussion generated by Skloot’s book may limit the ability of ethicists and advocates to elevate attention to donor control, compensation, patenting, privacy, and other ethical issues. Still, ethicists should view the book and a pending major TV film translation as opportunities to highlight through media outreach, consultation exercises and public forums a broader range of bioethical concerns that would otherwise be under-emphasized in news coverage. Such efforts, however, need to be carefully planned and evaluated. (shrink)

‘Six Degrees of Separation’ is analogous to what we have come to know as the origins of the ‘social network’ (social network service, social network software or SNS). In our time, the application of the ‘social network’ has become a common mode of living shared ubiquitously by different societies, cultures and communities. With the popularity of open source technology, the creation of social networks is no longer the exclusive domain of professional computer programmers. In China, social networking has also become (...) the new focus of new media artists, who are extremely sensitive to materials and creative media. The current article bases its analysis on the collaboration between American artist Max Kazemzadeh and the Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Beijing in the exhibition of Max’s interactive work ‘Wishing Well’ in China, trying to showcase the intriguing interaction between the social network service, human beings and Chinese society, and inviting the reader to re-examine the role and duties of an artist in our time. (shrink)

This study aims to describe the learning motivation of students using virtual media when they are learning mathematics in grade 5. The research design applied in this research is classroom action research. The research is conducted in two phases which involve planning, action and observation and reflection. The results of the study revealed that intrinsic motivation to learn is most prevalent in the form of fun to learn mathematics with virtual media. Other forms of intrinsic motivation include curiosity, need and (...) interests, and satisfaction. Extrinsic motivation in the form of awarded and clarity of learning objectives. The most enjoyable learning experience for students was when they feel like they're learning more than they actually are. This level of enthusiasm increases with the level of learning complexity. The students are more active and motivated to learn. This can be evidenced by the increase in motivation to learn after the first phase. Unfortunately, the lack of bandwidth and time allocated for conducting experiments are some of the obstacles in the way of learning through virtual media. This study revealed that the use of virtual media could improve student's motivation for learning. (shrink)

A change in the form of narrative presentation divides Heliodorus’ Aethiopica in two halves, the first embracing Books 1–5, the second Books 6–10. The shift has been described in different terms: Keyes notes that, whereas the first part uses an in medias res opening, the second follows by and large chronological order. Morgan ascribes to the first half a ‘hermeneutic impulse’ that gives way to an ‘end-directed’ drive in the second half. Using Sternberg's concept of narrative time, one could (...) say that by and large the first five books are dominated by curiosity, the second five books by suspense: after trying to fathom the prehistory, the reader then directs her attention to the further development of the plot. The shift, however, concerns not only the orchestration of time, but also the stance of the narrator: while Hefti juxtaposes the net of embedded narratives in the first five books with the predominance of the primary narrator in the last five books, Futre Pinheiro considers the shift in terms of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. The difference between the two halves of the Aethiopica thus hinges on the central narratological categories of time and voice. (shrink)

This article takes inspiration from Kittler’s claim that philosophy has neglected the means used for its production. Kittler’s argument for media ontology will be compared to the post-Kantian project of re-inventing philosophy through the medium of thought (in particular Deleuze’s Spiritual Automaton). The article discusses these views in the context of the automation of logical thinking where procedures, tasks, and functions are part of the instrumental processing of new ends evolving a new mode of reasoning. In particular, the article suggests (...) that in constructivist logic and information theory, the temporal gap between truth and proof, between input and output, can be taken to argue that the means of thought expose the indetermination or the incomputability of proof. The automation of reasoning in logical processing coincides not with mindless correlations of data, replacing axioms with data, truths with self-validating proofs. Instead, the problem of the indeterminacy of proof within automated logic re-habilitates techne or instrumentality, and the relation between means and ends away from classical idealism and analytic realism. By following John Dewey’s argument for instrumentality, it will be argued that the task of thinking today needs to re-invent a logic of techne away from the teleological view of ends or the crisis of finality. If the post-Kantian preoccupations about the task of thinking already announced that the medium of thought could offer possibilities for a non-human philosophy (or a philosophy beyond truth), this article envisions a machine philosophy originating from within computational media. (shrink)

Media art can be conceived as laboratory, at the edges of art. These technological experiments give priority to innovation and exploration by means of new media. In metaphorical terms, we could say that the emphasis is on creating new languages that allow us, in a later phase, to write prose or poetry with it.In my paper, I discuss why the common view on media art falls short. Media art is not just about mixing media but rather about mixing art. Several (...) different challenges are at stake that beget a hybrid post-medium condition. (1) The artistic practice of media art often concerns exercises in remediation (i.e. resonating visual narratives of old media in new media). Here, we encounter a repetition of historical themes and re-makes or re-enactments of classical art pieces. These experiments thus mix the history of art. (2) Media art is often also about immersion (i.e. interactively enclosing the spectactor in a audiovisual or virtual realm). In experiments with CAVE-installations or 3D-cinema using digital goggles, for instance, we notice a combination of an artistic interest with a phenomenologicaland a scientific one (cf. so-called postfenomenology, robotics, experimental psychology). Hence, these experiments mix art with science. (3) Media art is not just a friction between art an technoscience. It takes place at a junction between art, creative industry, design, sociology and politics. Concerning the latter, I willdiscuss the culture-critical potential of i.e. hacktivism, marx 2.0 and bio-performances like Stelarc and Orlan. (4) Media art is not simply a genre that aims for recognition as a part of or a completion of fine art. While democratizing new media technology, it actually blurs the idea of genre, altering and opening up the very canon of fine art, music art, live art, performance art, video art and cinema. (shrink)

Human–animal relations in post-industrial societies are characterized by a system of cultural categories that distinguishes between different types of animals based on their function in human society, such as “farm animals” or “pets.” The system of cultural categories, and the allocation of animal species within this cultural classification system can change. Options for change include re-categorizing a specific animal species within the categorical system. The paper argues that attempts by political actors to adapt the institutional system to cultural change that (...) calls for re-categorization of certain animal species can start a contradictory process that may lead to long-term survival of the respective institution despite the cultural change. It is common to explain the persistence of political institutions with institutional path dependency or policy preferences of the governing parties. This paper introduces a new institutional theoretical approach to the explanation, the approach of “rejecting changing a part for fear of undermining the whole.” This paper uses a case study of a series of failed political efforts to change the treatment of dogs in the framework of the agricultural human–animal policy in the Federal Republic of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, to evaluate its theoretical argument, using analyses of historical political documents, mass media, and communication documents between civil society actors and policymakers. This paper makes an innovative contribution to the theory and research on institutional change, the sociology of agriculture and food, and the sociology of human–animal relations. (shrink)

Drawing upon Bernard Stiegler’s and Jacques Rancière’s conceptions of medium as a milieu this article seeks to address the question of the political aspects of the aesthetic in relation to the notion of medium. Based on the analysis of this theoretical question the article interprets and discusses artistic endeavors to re-appropriate and reconfigure conservative symbolic orders and media milieus that have become dissociated in relation to works of art by Alfredo Jaar and Thomas Hirschhorn.