This article is devoted to the analysis of the characteristic features of the process of displaying virtual network platforms and cybernetic technologies in the early 1970s — early 2020s in the fantastic universe (literary and cinematic) created by S. King, one of the leading American science fiction writers of our time. In this study, the authors provide a justification for the relevance and scientific novelty of the problem under study. This paper analyzes the specific features of the impact of electronic (...) communication communities and computer technologies on modern society. This article provides an argument for the need to comprehend the coverage of this social problem in fantastic art — specifically in literature and cinematography — as one of the additional aspects of the progress of the predictive function of science. This study provides a reasoned explanation of the definition of the fantastic literary and cinematic universe of S. King as an object of research, taking into account its priority position in the fantasy genre as a whole. This problem was chosen by the authors for analysis in order to reasonably refute stereotypes, according to which the works of S. King and the film adaptations created on their basis are a complex of mass culture materials of an entertainment nature that do not have any semantic significance. At the same time, the authors explore the cardinal differences in the coverage of the studied problem in the original literary works of S. King and their film adaptations. This approach, among other things, allowed the authors to identify the reasons for the negative attitude of the writer to the embodiment of his books on the cinema screen. In this work, the specifics of the process of transformation of the display of social networks and high technologies in the fantastic universe of S. King during the 1970s and early 2020s are comprehended in the context of the author’s reaction to objective changes in scientific and technological progress and ideas about it in public opinion, as well as the growth of their importance in socio-economic, spiritual and the political spheres of life of the human community. In this study, using the example of the fantastic universe of S. King, the characteristic features of the evolution of the position of experts in the field of computer technology over the past five decades in the context of their perception in literature and cinema are also analyzed. The work also examines the moral criteria for the use of social networks and cybernetic technologies in public life and their impact on the development of modern family relations in the perception of S. King, one of the subjects of the formation of public relations in Western society. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the study of the specific features of the display of social networks and computer technologies in the late 70s of the XX – early 20s of the XXI century in the fantastic Star Wars universe created by American filmmaker D. Lucas. In this scientific work, the authors argue for the relevance and scientific novelty of the problem under consideration. The study examines the peculiarities of the influence of social networks and computer (...) technologies in modern conditions. The article provides a justification for the need to analyze the reflection of this issue in fantasy art as an auxiliary factor in the development of the prognostic function of science. This paper provides a reasoned explanation of the choice of the Star Wars universe as an object of research, taking into account its importance in the fantasy genre, as well as in order to refute stereotypes according to which Star Wars is a collection of entertainment materials in which there is completely no semantic load. The authors analyze the fundamental differences in the coverage of the studied problem in such genres of art as literature and cinema in the context of Star Wars. The article examines the features of the evolution of the display of cybernetic technologies and communication network platforms in the Star Wars universe in the mid‑1970s – early 2020s, as a reflection of the real development of scientific and technological progress, as well as an example of the impact of political, socio‑economic and moral factors on the use of online platforms and computer technology during the period under study. In this article, using the example of the Star Wars universe, the features of the transformation of the role of specialists in the field of high technology through the prism of the attitude of artists to them – more specifically, writers and cinematographers – are also considered. The article also examines the moral and ethical aspect of the use of computer technology and social networks, considered by artists who have made a significant contribution to the development of the fantastic epic of Star Wars. (shrink)

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the reflection of computer technologies and network resources in the Terminator cinematic and literary universe created by the American director J. Cameron in the mid 1980s and early 2020s. In this study the authors substantiate the relevance and scientific component of the problem under study. The paper considers the degree of importance of high technologies and social networks in modern public life. The article provides a justification (...) for the fallacy of the judgment, according to which works of fiction of a fantastic orientation perform purely entertaining function and do not carry a significant semantic load. This article also provides an argument for choosing the Terminator fantastic universe as an example for research, wit an analysis of the reasons for its great popularity and high degree of significance for contemporary art. The authors of the work subject the key components of the topic under consideration to reflection, taking into account the changes that have taken place in the public consciousness over three and a half decades, takin inti account the differences in historical and political realities – from the last quarter of the 20-th century to the present, until the beginning of the third decade of the XXI century. This article provides a comparative analysis of the reasons for significant differences in the display of high technology and online resources in cinema and fiction. The work draws parallels and analogies with historical events, analyzes the use of the religious meanings used in the Terminator universe. The authors of the article analyze the moral issues that are raised by the creators of the fantastic universe of Terminator in the context of the positive and negative consequences of the intense growth of the role of high technologies and communicative Internet sites in the life of human society. (shrink)

In the age of ubiquitous computing and artificially intelligent applications, social machines serves as a powerful framework for understanding and interpreting interactions in socio-algorithmic ecosystems. Although researchers have largely used it to analyze the interactions of individuals and algorithms, limited attempts have been made to investigate the politics in social machines. In this study, I claim that social machines are per se political machines, and introduce a five-point framework for classifying influence processes in socio-algorithmic ecosystems. By (...) drawing from scholars from political theory, I use a notion of influence that functions as a meta-concept for connecting and comparing different conceptions of politics. In this way, I can associate multiple political aspects of social machines from a cybernetic perspective. I show that the framework efficiently categorizes dimensions of influence that shape interactions between individuals and algorithms. These categories are symbolic influence, political conduct, algorithmic influence, design, and regulatory influence. Using case studies, I describe how they interact with each other on online social networks and in algorithmic decision-making systems and illustrate how the framework is able to guide scientists in further research. (shrink)

The human history has evidenced a great number of systems of hierarchy and power, various manifestations of power and hierarchy relations in different spheres of social life from politics to information networks, from culture to sexual life. A careful study of each particular case of such relations is very im-portant, especially within the context of contemporary multipolar and multicultural world. In the meantime it is very important to see both the general features, typical for all or most of (...) the hierarchy and power forms, and their variation. This set of issues has been treated by a series of international conferences titled ‘Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations’ held in 2000–2006. Most articles of this volume were originally presented at the 4th conference of this series (Moscow, 2006). Needless to mention that all those presentations have been substantially re-worked for the publication in this volume. Notwithstanding the fact that the relations of hierarchy and power are rele-vant for all the spheres as they penetrate the whole of social life, establishing a sort of framework for the human agency, they are naturally most visible in the political sphere. They existed long before the formation of the earliest states – ethologists maintain that complex systems of hierarchy and power can be found among many highly organized animals. Yet, this was with the formation of the state and civilization when the power and hierarchy relations acquired their mature forms. Although ancient and medieval systems of government and domination always attract special attention, contemporary systems are much closer for every scholar. At the same time relations of power and hierarchy in the modern political world system demonstrate a great number of variants, levels and dimensions. In the present edited volume we only focus on three aspects of this important subject. These are revolutionary transformations (in the broad sense of this notion), violence, and globalization. Each volume section is devoted to one of those themes. (shrink)

The concept of a relational self has been prominent in feminism, communitarianism, narrative self theories, and social network theories, and has been important to theorizing about practical dimensions of selfhood. However, it has been largely ignored in traditional philosophical theories of personal identity, which have been dominated by psychological and animal theories of the self. This book offers a systematic treatment of the notion of the self as constituted by social, cultural, political, and biological relations. The author's (...) account incorporates practical concerns and addresses how a relational self has agency, autonomy, responsibility, and continuity through time in the face of change and impairments. This cumulative network model of the self incorporates concepts from work in the American pragmatist and naturalist tradition. The ultimate aim of the book is to bridge traditions that are often disconnected from one another--feminism, personal identity theory, and pragmatism--to develop a unified theory of the self. (shrink)

How can we confront the problems of diminished democracy, pervasive economic inequality, and persistent global poverty? Is it possible to fulfill the dual aims of deepening democratic participation and achieving economic justice, not only locally but also globally? Carol C. Gould proposes an integrative and interactive approach to the core values of democracy, justice, and human rights, looking beyond traditional politics to the social conditions that would enable us to realize these aims. Her innovative philosophical framework sheds new light (...) on social movements across borders, the prospects for empathy and solidarity with distant others, and the problem of gender inequalities in diverse cultures, and also considers new ways in which democratic deliberation can be enhanced by online networking and extended to the institutions of global governance. Her book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of political philosophy, global justice, social and political science, and gender studies. (shrink)

Decency remains one of the most prevalent yet least understood terms in today's political discourse. In evoking respect, kindness, courage, integrity, reason, and tolerance, it has long expressed an unquestioned duty and belief in promoting and protecting the dignity of all persons. Today this unquestioned belief is in crisis. Tribalism and identity politics have both hindered and threatened its moral stability and efficacy. Still, many continue to undertheorize its political character by isolating it from the effects of identity (...) politics. Decency and Difference argues that decency is a primary source of the political tension that has long shaped the struggles for power, identity, and justice in the global arena. It distinguishes among basic, conservative, and liberal strands of decency to critically examine the many conflicting and competing applications of decency in global politics. Together these different stands reflect a long and uneven evolution from the British and American Empire to a global network of justice. By engaging the contradictions of the progressive and retrogressive qualities of decency and the role played by emotion and affect in driving these contradictions, the book exposes the propriety gaps of decency and the disparate ways that it is practiced in global politics. The book thus addresses the global challenge of reconciling different political proprieties and configuring a diverse political ethic of decency. (shrink)

The objective of the study is to re-examine the Verba, Nie, and Kim 's path-breaking analysis of political participation and political equality, under the inclusion of a social network model in Japan. In particular, the present research investigates how and why we find the extremely low correlations between one's socio-economic resource level and political participation in Japan, the evidence unsatisfactorily explained by the VNK analysis. Building on the social network model and employing the first wave (...) of the Asian Barometer survey conducted in 2003, this research presents a more comprehensive model of political participation. The study finds three major kinds of causes for the weak associations between SERLpsychological involvement linkage. From the viewpoint of the social network model, it is clear that the weak SERL–participation linkage is derived from the equalizing impact of group-based processes, yet uniquely Japanese style of network involvement. (shrink)

From the viewpoint of information transaction models in linguistic pragmatics, expressions of linguistic politeness (LP) induce costs upon speakers. That speakers regularly “pay" such cost is what formal models of LP typically explain either by individual-level _strategic_ considerations (e.g., the speaker’s aim of avoiding a face-threat to the hearer) or community-level _conventional_ considerations (e.g., the use of LP as a relation-acknowledging device). Because these explanations are compatible, as each relates to the speaker and hearer’s social relation, we combine them (...) into a single game-theoretical model enriched by three types of social network structures (ring-shaped, star-shaped, and complete). Using simulation studies of (single and repeated) speech acts of requesting, we let the degree of LP be determined by (i) the degree of social imposition associated with a request, (ii) the number of interlocutors’ past interactions, and (iii) the relative importance of strategic and conventional considerations. The greatest average optimal degree of LP is obtained in the star-shaped network, which intuitively corresponds to a power-centered, hierarchical society. (shrink)

Could global government be the answer to global poverty and starvation? Cosmopolitan thinkers challenge the widely held belief that we owe more to our co-citizens than to those in other countries. This book offers a moral argument for world government, claiming that not only do we have strong obligations to people elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation-states will help ensure that all persons can lead a decent life. Cabrera considers both the views of those political philosophers who say (...) we have much stronger obligations to help our co-citizens than foreigners and those cosmopolitans who say our duties are equally strong to each but resist restructuring. He then outlines his own position, using the European Union as a partial model for the integrated alternative and advocating instituting EU-style supranational government, development aid, and free movement of persons in the Americas and other regions. Over time, Cabrera argues that the transformation of the global system into a cohesive network of democratic institutions would help ensure that anyone born anywhere could lead a decent life. This book will appeal to all those interested in political philosophy and the processes and potential of globalization. (shrink)

This book explores aesthetic forms of the left to negotiate the political frontiers of post-colonial, post-partition South Asia. Spanning India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the contributors study art, film and literature to illuminate interconnections across regions and countries, and discuss the shifting political contours of the region during the latter half of the 20th century. With a clear focus and conceptualization this volume raises two key questions; how left-wing art generated cultural and social formations, and how (...) aesthetic forms held political value across the region. Reframing political aesthetics within a postcolonial and decolonised framework, it traces the trajectories and nuances the left-wing cultural movement took during decolonization, and focuses on connections and continuities across post-1947 India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Following the evolution of progressive culture in the 1950s and 60s, networks of leftist filmmakers and theatre activists in postcolonial Pakistan, and the changing fate of left cultural politics in Sri Lanka and India during the 1970s, this book looks to reinvigorate the entangled histories of the left cultural movement in post-partition South Asia. (shrink)

Five concepts are presented which together form elements of a theoretical framework for American history: 1) persistent inequality from one stage of history to another under the impact of massive transforming social and political influences; 2) systematization, referring to the way in which people sought to organize institutions in both private and public affairs so as to integrate people and resources into ever larger systems of human action; 3) differentiation, which is the realm of human identity and meaning, (...) of understanding personal possibilities and limitations, and of choosing whether one seeks to be similar to or different from others; 4) interactions among levels of scale, of which the aspects of perception, personal networks, and institutions are especially important; and 5) innovation and response, or change and response to change. Each concept is well rooted in recently accumulated evidence. Together they constitute useful building blocks of theory which enable one to integrate the vast and often diffuse outpouring of literature in both social and political history. (shrink)

The book highlights the ethical aspects and issues that are inherent to economics in the context of today's prominent social institutions. It reviews a range of problems concerning dominant social institutions, namely markets, government agencies, corporate entities, financial networks, and religious systems. Further, in each case, the book takes a detailed look at the economic problems as they arise within a broader sociological and political environment, taking into account the respective ethical/philosophical paradigms. It analyzes from an (...) ethical point of view topics like the evolution of economic thought, happiness and spirituality, and human values in relation to ethics. (shrink)

A generation ago, the field of business ethics largely abandoned analyzing the broader issue of social justice to focus upon more micro concerns. Donaldson applied the social contract tradition of Locke and Rawls to the ethics of management decision-making, and with Dunfee, has advanced this project ever since. Current events suggest that if the field is to remain relevant it needs to return to examining social and economic fairness, and Rawl's approach to social contracting suggests a (...) way to start. First, however, the field needs to discard the weaker and counterproductive aspects of its Lockean legacy: Locke's hostility to government activism and his indifference with regard to outcomes for the bulk of society. Donaldson's and Dunfee's social contracting approach is not suited to, nor was it designed to, analyze or resolve broad issues of social and economic justice. Their postulated network of communities upon which they rely is problematic in a number of ways, and while they take the legal and political status quo into account, their method does not deal with the historical reality that, as the economic and social environment changes, promoting greater justice requires new and sometimes coercive government interventions. Rawls's work, however, does acknowledge the historically demonstrable necessity of using the power of government to help to achieve desirable social outcomes. While he rejected Mill's methodology, Rawls was inspired by the earlier philosopher's concerns for social justice at a time of major economic change. The field would do well to follow the example of both men in this respect. (shrink)

The outcomes of a bibliographic review on political communication, in particular electoral communication in social networks, are presented here. The electoral campaigning are a crucial test to verify the transformations of the media system and of the forms and uses of the linguistic acts by dominant actors in public sphere – candidates, parties, journalists and Gatekeepers. The aim is to reconstruct the first elements of an analytical model on the transformations of the political public sphere, with (...) which to systematize the results of the main empirical research carried out in recent years, in particular those conducted with a promising methodology: Digital Trace Data Analysis. (shrink)

Ultimately, this affects the natural interplay between privacy, personal identity and identification. This book investigates that interplay from a systemic, socio-technical perspective by combining research from the social and computer sciences. It sheds light on the basic functions of privacy, their relation to identity, and how they alter with digital identification practices. The analysis reveals a general privacy control dilemma of (digital) identification shaped by several interrelated socio-political, economic and technical factors. Uncontrolled increases in the identification modalities inherent (...) to digital technology reinforce this dilemma and benefit surveillance practices, thereby complicating the detection of privacy risks and the creation of appropriate safeguards. Easing this problem requires a novel approach to privacy impact assessment (PIA), and this book proposes an alternative PIA framework which, at its core, comprises a basic typology of (personally and technically) identifiable information. This approach contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of privacy impacts and thus, to the development of more effective protection standards. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical security studies, surveillance studies, computer and information science, science and technology studies, and politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future Is Political and TransdisciplinaryAwais Aftab (bio)Philosophy, psychiatry, & psychology (PPP) is a transdisciplinary oasis, one of the few journals in mental health care that facilitate a meaningful dialogue between philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and scholars from related disciplines. The fact that PPP successfully provides such a space is of no small importance, especially from my perspective as a psychiatrist. The multidisciplinary nature of the undertaking has been (...) a central aspect of the identity of the journal from the very beginning. PPP has maintained this transdisciplinary inclusive spirit over the years, and its editorial and advisory boards remain richly representative, but the challenge of ensuring continued participation of clinicians is not insubstantial. After all, the point is not token participation, but a robust and transformative interdisciplinary engagement. Clinicians have much to contribute to philosophical debates, however, such capacity for dialogue requires sustained cultivation (Aftab & Waterman, 2021), and forces in medical education have led to a situation where comparatively fewer psychiatrists have the interest or the ability to engage in such rigorous dialogue with philosophers. Philosophy of mental health has grown and specialized exponentially since the mid-90s. Keeping up with this literature is difficult even for philosophers, it is no small feat for full-time clinicians.This means that PPP and its affiliate organizations have a responsibility to take a more active role in supporting educational initiatives to ensure that future generations of psychiatric clinicians are able to contribute to philosophical debates, and that philosophy of psychiatry does not become divorced from clinical and practical concerns. My advice to clinicians based on my experience would be two-fold: first, it is essential to acquire a basic familiarity with the philosophy of psychiatry literature. Aftab and Waterman (2021) offer a sample list of reading recommendations. At the time of this writing, the International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry is also undertaking efforts to develop curricula aimed at clinicians. Second, it is important to find ways to interact with others in the philosophy of psychiatry community. Formal avenues to do so include the annual meetings of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, among others. There are also various online communities active on social media that many find helpful.In recent years, we have seen an unprecedented enthusiasm and support for inclusion of lived experience in mental health care. This is a welcome and much needed development, but we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of [End Page 5] how to philosophically navigate this inclusion. Frameworks such as standpoint epistemology and epistemic justice offer us starting points (Knox, 2022), but much remains to be worked out (Aftab, 2022). There are notable philosophical challenges, such as ascertaining the limits of lived experience, and the biases and errors to which it is vulnerable; the application of scientific method and philosophical criticism to lived experience; methods to resolve disagreements when different forms of lived experience contradict each other; handling discrepancies between knowledge from lived experience and knowledge from other sources be handled; and analyzing the intersection of politics of lived experience with other differentials of power. I anticipate that these topics will be of central importance to the field and to the journal in the coming years.It is also vital that philosophy of psychiatry engage with the sociopolitical dimensions of madness (Kalathil & Jones, 2016). The failure of philosophy to do so in a meaningful way has already been articulated powerfully by commentators such as Nev Jones (2022). An important aspect of acknowledging philosophy's failures in this regard comes from the notion of "elite capture," recently popularized by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022). It refers to how progressive philosophical ideas such as standpoint epistemology are co-opted by the "elite" to serve their own ends. Discussions on social media have already begun to point out that concepts in philosophy of psychiatry such as "epistemic injustice" show signs of elite capture by the psychiatric establishment, resulting in token participation but no systemic changes. Philosophy of psychiatry needs to tackle its own vulnerability to co-option. This will require creative forms of philosophizing and engagement with... (shrink)

This book, the first of two volumes dedicated to ethics in social networking and business, presents the notions, theories and practical aspects related to ethics, morale and deontology in our society. Through a series of discussions and examples on topics ranging from complexity to evolution theories, the author provides an insight into why business ethics is essential for managing risks and uncertainties. The Ethics in Social Networking and Business series is the result of a cross-integration of real experiences (...) (from IBM, society and the Rotary Club), transdisciplinary works in decision making, and advances at the boundaries of several scientific fields. (shrink)

One of the least understood aspects of the world-wide “greening of markets” is the emergence of local “ethical marketplaces” and the subset of alternative business models described as “ethical businesses.” But previous research has demonstrated the ability of local politicians to encourage their regions toward more ethical marketplaces. This paper explores the impact radical centrist third party representation has on the emergence of ethical businesses across Great Britain. To understand this relationship, we utilize a novel data set of organizations with (...) membership in Ethical Junction, the United Kingdom's largest network for ethical businesses. We use a zero-inflated Poisson regression to model the connection, and find a meaningful relationship, between third-party political representation on British local councils and the presence of ethical businesses within local authorities. This presents an example of the way in which radical political change may be part of a wider social movement toward greening markets. (shrink)

Consistent findings about the inverse association of social network level with coronary heart disease mortality and morbidity suggest the importance of investigating biological pathways of association. Differences in plasma fibrinogen level were investigated among middle-aged men with weak and strong structural and functional social network ties. Men with low scores in the adequacy of social participation variable (structural) had higher mean values of plasma fibrinogen than those with high scores. The difference remained after adjustment for age, smoking (...) and cardiovascular health status and after possible modifying factors were taken into account, but did not remain significant after allowing for physical fitness. Men with high scores in overall support (functional) had higher plasma fibrinogen levels compared to the men with low scores. This difference persisted after age and cardiovascular health status were taken into account but was explained by smoking. The data suggest that smoking and cardiorespiratory fitness are important mediating or modifying factors between structural and functional aspects of social network ties and plasma fibrinogen. (shrink)

This paper is one of the few attempts made by social scientists to measure social capital via psychometric approach, and is the only one of such kind to base its evidence on the AsiaBarometer survey data. After first reviewing the history of social capital, including its conceptual emergence and recent literatures, we expose the issue of difficulty in the measurement of social capital despite its topical popularity. We tackle this measurement issue by applying psychometric procedures to (...) the AsiaBarometer survey data of 2004, 2005, and 2006, focusing on questions pertaining to social capital of ordinary individuals residing in the 29 survey societies. This paper is significant in two aspects. First, using simple statistical procedures, it extracts various dimensions of social capital without first knowing what dimensions to extract. In short, it does not try to measure social capital using some kind of pre-defined concepts such as those outlined in the historical review of our predecessors. Rather, it succeeds in manifesting key factors of social capital by mechanically processing collective responses by individual respondents towards survey questions oriented with social capital. Though the paper does not aim to establish its methodology as a widely held consensus on how to measure social capital, it does give credence and recognition to psychometric approaches as effectives means to measure social capital, which, by its very definition, calls for approaches using collective data to measure notions of individual actions within networks. Second, this paper is the first systematic empirical analysis of social capital in all the subregions of Asia, i.e. East, Southeast, South, and Central. It builds on our earlier works, including the 2006 paper on social capital in Central and South Asia, and gives empirical credence to important concepts on Asian political culture. (shrink)

Human relations are driven by social events—people interact, exchange information, share knowledge and emotions, and gather news from mass media. These events leave traces in human memory, the strength of which depends on cognitive factors such as emotions or attention span. Each trace continuously weakens over time unless another related event activity strengthens it. Here, we introduce a novel cognition-driven social network model that accounts for cognitive aspects of social perception. The model explicitly represents each social (...) interaction as a trace in human memory with its corresponding dynamics. The strength of the trace is the only measure of the influence that the interactions had on a person. For validation, we apply our model to NetSense data on social interactions among university students. The results show that CogSNet significantly improves the quality of modeling of human interactions in social networks. (shrink)

The word blat refers to the system of informal contacts and personal networks which was used to obtain goods and services under the rationing which characterised Soviet Russia. Alena Ledeneva's book is the first to analyse blat in all its historical, socio-economic and cultural aspects, and to explore its implications for post-Soviet society. In a socialist distribution system which resulted in constant shortages, blat developed into an 'economy of favours' which shadowed an overcontrolling centre and represented the reaction of (...) ordinary people to the social constraints they faced. In social and economic terms, blat exchanges became vital to the population, and to the functioning of the Soviet system. The book shows that the nature of the economic and political changes in contemporary Russia cannot be properly understood without attention to the powerful legacy of the blat economy. (shrink)

Propagation of novel linguistic terms is an important aspect of language use and language change. Here, we test how social network size influences people's likelihood of adopting novel labels by examining hashtag use on Twitter. Specifically, we test whether following fewer Twitter users leads to more varied and malleable hashtag use on Twitter, because each followed user is ascribed greater weight and thus exerts greater influence on the following user. Focusing on Dutch users tweeting about the terrorist attack in (...) Brussels in 2016, we show that people who follow fewer other users use a larger number of unique hashtags to refer to the event, reflecting greater malleability and variability in use. These results have implications for theories of language learning, language use, and language change. (shrink)

To date, the role of user behavior in the formation of politically homogeneous online environments (oftentimes called echo chambers) is not fully understood. Building on selective exposure research, we introduce the notion of selective political friending, that is, the preference for political like-mindedness in social affiliations on social networking sites. In a pre-registered laboratory experiment with users of social networking sites in Germany (N = 199), we find that users preferably build connections with those who (...) share their opinions toward controversial political issues. Political like-mindedness outperforms other friending criteria such as popularity or career-related fit with another user. Political friending is pronounced when individuals’ pre-existing opinions are strong. The present study points to the necessity to take the motivational complexity into account when studying phenomena linked to political homogeneity on SNS. (shrink)

The article is based on reports and discussions held during three online events organized by the Russian Research Center for the Internet of Things together with the Department of Philosophy and Sociology of South-West State University during 2021: an open discussion with the famous transhumanist philosopher David Pearce dedicated to the birthday of Jeremiah Bentham on February 15, a round table dedicated to the World Internet of Things Day on April 9, and a session within the first IoT Hot Spots (...) conference on June 16. The main topics for discussion this year were the consideration of the following philosophical and socio-cultural problems and concepts in the light of the development of cyberphysical systems: anthropological differences between the «posthuman» and «metahuman» projects, epistemological aspects of bio- and cybersemiotics in modern hybrid techno-social networks, the cultural dimension of remote proximity in the digital age, the ontology of the quantum complexity of the digital multiverse, the ethical dimensions of the digital economy in the post-covid period, the aesthetics of metamodernism in the smart city, the anthropocene effects of silicon addiction and the race of computing, socio-philosophical problems of management in situations of high uncertainty, political strategies for sustainable development. (shrink)

The aim is to examine the multiple meanings of creativity in creative economy. The meanings which reinforce the individual aspect stress that personal characteristics may unlock the wealth that lies within people. The definitions that reinforce the organizational and social aspects understand creativity as a process, which requires knowledge, networks, and technologies that interconnect novel ideas and contexts. The perspectives which reinforce the political aspect see that creativity took the status of a doctrine to secure collaboration between (...) government and industry. However, these notions of creativity stress its instrumental utility and undermine fantasy, play, or uselessness. (shrink)

The research focus is set in the investigation of positive and negative aspects of use of social networks using a ‘bifocal approach’ to social networks analysis. Our bifocal approach uses qualitative approach reviewing published literature primarely blogs, forums, web sites, etc and interchangeably compares and conveys the results with focus groups. The objective of the research study is to show that social networks can runs both ways, it can be helpful while at the same (...) time can be very dangerous and impact in asocialization and other harmfull ways. Social networks have become an inseparable part of not only students but also the lives of people in general. Students spend a lot of time utilizing social networks and are considered to be the largest social network users. Students communicating with social networks, especially virtual communities, enabled real-time access, communication synchronization, posting and sharing photos, videos, original and creative work are the main activities and interests of students. As a result of the fast acquisition of social networks, people today live in the world of technology and can quickly gain competences in their daily lives, these changes in technology also affect the lives of students. The Internet has also changed day-to-day and student activities both in University life and in social life. The research study tries to investigate and present a realistic picture of the current situation on the impact of social networks on students. The research methodology is qualitative and reviewed is the published research in the field as well as blogs, forums and other web sites where real life experiences and opinions are expressed from real users. Also 2 student focus groups have been used, novice and expert group. The research study tries to contribute with the recommendations how students can use these networking technologies positively in their daily lives and where educational opportunities are still unknown, we can help schools to be more important, connected, and fully understandable to students, and at the same time to alert to the dangers of social networks. Therefore, the main purpose of this research study is to investigate the effects of using social networks and their social or antisocial impact to society. Based on the study, the conclusion is that in order to protect the student we should increase the awareness for the risk that are coming from inappropriate use of social networks. Insights and recommendations are provided. (shrink)

The dynamics of knowledge transmission and acquisition, or how different aspects of culture are passed from one individual to another and how they are acquired and embodied by individuals, are central to understanding cultural evolution. In small-scale societies, cultural knowledge is largely acquired early in life through observation, imitation, and other forms of social learning embedded in daily experiences. However, little is known about the pathways through which such knowledge is transmitted, especially during middle childhood and adolescence. This study (...) presents new empirical data on cultural knowledge transmission during childhood. Data were collected among the Baka, a forager-farmer society in southeastern Cameroon. We conducted structured interviews with children between 5 and 16 years of age about group composition during subsistence activities. Children’s groups were generally diverse, although children tended to perform subsistence activities primarily without adults and with same-sex companions. Group composition varied from one subsistence activity to another, which suggests that the flow of knowledge might also vary according to the activity performed. Analysis of the social composition of children’s subsistence groups shows that vertical and oblique transmission of subsistence-related knowledge might not be predominant during middle childhood and adolescence. Rather, horizontal transmission appears to be the most common knowledge transmission strategy used by Baka children during middle childhood and adolescence, highlighting the importance of other children in the transmission of knowledge. (shrink)

The outputs of economic forecasting—predictions for national economic indicators such as GDP, unemployment rates and inflation—are all highly visible. The production of these forecasts is a much more private affair, however, typically being thought of as the work of individual forecasters or forecast teams using their economic model to produce a forecast that is then made public. This conception over-emphasises the individual and the technical whilst silencing the broader social context through which economic forecasters develop the expertise that is (...) essential for the credibility of their predictions. In particular, economic forecasts are given meaning and fine-tuned through the social and institutional networks that give forecasters access to the expertise of a heterogeneous mix of academics, policy-makers and business people. Within these broader groups, individual forecasters often create private forecast ‘clubs’, where subscribers have privileged access to the expertise of the economist, but where the forecasters also have privileged access to their clients’ own expert knowledge. In examining these aspects of the forecasters’ work I show that the visible and audible activities of modelling and forecasting are made possible and plausible by virtue of the modeller’s invisible interaction with a wider network.Keywords: Expertise; Economic forecasting; Periodic table of expertise; Judgement. (shrink)

In the tumultuous period spanning the French Revolution to the Restoration, individuals coped with the challenge of navigating successive political transitions, showcasing exceptional adaptability. Pierre-Vincent Benoist (1758–1834) epitomised this versatility, assuming diverse roles as a lawyer, translator from English, secret agent, Napoleonic official, and ultra-royalist deputy. His biography not only sheds light on the experiences of translators disseminating radical content, despite conflicting beliefs, but also illuminates their ‘hybrid status’ as traducteurs-commis, straddling the literary and administrative realms. Benoist’s multifaceted profile (...) facilitated his integration into various networks of artists, hommes de lettres, bureaucrats, and politicians. By examining both aspects of his life that resonated with those of his contemporaries and aspects that made him unique, this contribution aims to use his case as a prism for understanding political, social, and cultural change at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

It can sometimes be difficult to think about “everyday” objects, those things we are so familiar with that they become taken-for-granted aspects of the backdrop of our world. But what if those objects, despite their everydayness, are politically fraught and call for closer examination? I suggest that insights from two contemporary perspectives, postphenomenology and actor-network theory, are useful for drawing out the experiential, social, and political dynamics of everyday things. In this paper, I review and resituate several key (...) concepts from these two theoretical frameworks and outline a method for using them together for the evaluation of technology. As a guiding example, I explore a paradigmatic everyday device: fire hydrants. Despite their everyday character, hydrants fulfill multiple social roles, some of them loaded with difficult and important political implications. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope (...) that requires two identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

Online social networks can bridge the gap between distant individuals by simulating online experiences that closely resemble physical interactions. While people have positive experiences, such as joy, in a physical relationship and would like to enjoy those experiences online, they also have negative experiences, such as being subject to a lie. An online social network may allow users to lie to simulate a real-world social group better. However, lying must be prevented on social networks (...) as unethical behavior. Thus, this study aims to investigate an ethical dilemma raised due to the two abovementioned perspectives.,This paper examines different aspects of lying in social networks, using a comprehensive descriptive literature review approach and a classification scheme.,Contrary to their initial intent, social networks are disrupting the traditional notion of human interaction, either by disregarding the presence of dishonesty or by attempting to regulate relationships. In this research, the authors examine the challenges of these two perspectives by identifying enablers, consequences and control measures of lying on social networks at the individual, social and technological levels. The authors also develop a framework to facilitate investigating this dilemma.,This paper examines a controversial topic. Although lying is unethical, allowing users to lie may be considered an appealing feature of social network platforms. This paper offers a framework to propose several research directions for future studies. This study’s examination focuses on the challenges associated with deception on social networks, prompting the formulation of three crucial questions regarding the potential impact of technology on such behavior. (shrink)

The AMA Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs (CEJA) has written a position paper on how social medical use challenges medical professionalism. The report offers persuasive ethical and practical guidelines for nonclinical internet use, specifically for social networking.This commentary provides a framework from which to apply these guidelines, but adds that there may be important situations in which physicians are not able to act in accordance. The guidelines call for professional reporting of questionable online portrayals or behaviors, but (...) this commentary argues that this may be not only cumbersome to implement, but may violate aspects of constitutional rights. While online social networking may in many ways be a new application of old challenges, there may be other aspects that require novel approaches to medical professionalism. (shrink)

Mathews, Race This essay - appearing in two parts - examines aspects of the early and middle phases of the episcopate of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, in the context of a wider study of responses to Catholic social teachings in Victoria between 1891 and 1966. Part I dealt mainly with Mannix's significance and early life, and the focus in Part II is on the episcopate up to and including the onset of the Great Depression.

Purpose This paper aims to study the developed countries’ experience on the cyberbullying legal regulation among adolescents, to identify existing shortcomings in the developing countries’ laws and to develop recommendations for regulatory framework improvement. Design/methodology/approach The authors have studied the state regulatory practice of the UK, the USA, Canada, Malaysia, South Africa, Turkey, UAE and analyzed the statistics of 2018 on the cyberbullying manifestation among adolescents in these countries. Findings The study results can encourage countries to create separate cyberbullying legislation (...) and periodically review and modify already existing legislation. Originality/value The study provides a list of the recommendations to regulate cybercrime in developing countries and prevent it as well. The results may contribute to creating laws related to the regulation of cyberbullying in countries where such legislation does not exist yet or existing regulatory legal acts do not bring the expected results, namely, in Post-Soviet countries and other developing countries of the world. (shrink)

This article considers how to go beyond the polarities of individualism and communitarianism in the analysis of contemporary political cultures in a global era. It is argued that there is a need to ground analysis in a presumption of social networks and coalitions, rather than in the concept of recognition. Political cultures are always already riddled with complexity and cross-cutting relations with other political cultures, coalitions and alliances. Within the politics of recognition, the conventional operationalization (...) of the concept of the ‘social’ via the concept of ‘community’ misleadingly narrows the analysis of key aspects of social relations. Rather, we should invoke a wider range of sociological concepts to capture the nature of the social including, among many others, coalition, network and reference groups. In particular, the selection of the ‘other’ against whom aspirational comparisons are made is a complex social process, much previously analysed by reference group theory. The contemporary framing of some political claims in reference to a socially constructed conception of the universal is an increasingly common strategy. The politics of recognition is shown to be subordinate to the politics of equality, when sociological analysis of contemporary political cultures, of how people actually do make ethical and political claims, is prioritized. (shrink)

It is widely believed that bringing parties with differing opinions together to discuss their differences will help both in securing consensus and also in ensuring that this consensus closely approximates the truth. This paper investigates this presumption using two mathematical and computer simulation models. Ultimately, these models show that increased contact can be useful in securing both consensus and truth, but it is not always beneficial in this way. This suggests one should not, without qualification, support policies which increase interpersonal (...) contact if one seeks to improve the epistemic performance of groups. (shrink)

This pioneering study of Bertrand Russell's social and political thought deals with the years 1896 to 1938, and is the first book to embark on a thorough investigation of the intellectual and cultural context out of which Russell's ideas emerged. Maintaining a sympathetic but critical stance towards Russell's almost innumerable political postures, and focusing in particular on his concern with the intellectual elite, the author renders that thought both plausible and coherent by placing its development against a (...) significant historical background. As well as giving attention to the aspects of Russell's private life which helped determine the direction of his thought, Dr Ironside undertakes an enlightening exploration of the individuals, groups and beliefs by which he was successively influenced. The result is a wide-ranging and highly original view of an important and enduring figure. (shrink)

The article demonstrates the role of traditional and new media, as well as other forms of Internet communications as means of influencing the course of the election process in Ukraine and the formation of public opinion. We focused attention on the fact that in the conditions of transformational processes and political shifts, the level of trust in the latest online means of information dissemination, as well as the intensity of their influence on public opinion, are steadily growing. In this (...) context, the main means and varieties of online communication are characterized, the reasons for their social attractiveness for the politically active part of society are highlighted. The study considered both: positive and negative consequences of the influence of mass media on political processes. The study proved that the positive aspect correlates with the role of communication media, especially online media, as an effective platform for political discussions, active discussion of issues relevant to society, and prompt dissemination of information. The negative aspect is related to the fact that a high level of trust in social networks and messengers can intensify the mechanisms of manipulation and the spread of disinformation.Using the example of the presidential and parliamentary elections in the USA and in Ukraine, we found that the influence of manipulative tools in the media on the course of the election process and the opinion of the electorate has recently been decisive. The study established that further in-depth research on this topic will have significant scientific and practical value, as it will contribute to the effective regulation of mass media activities during elections, as well as make it possible to minimize the risks of media manipulation and engaged coverage of political processes in mass media.Normative and legal regulation of media (in particular, new media and social networks) during elections will create favorable conditions for the development of effective strategies of state-public communication and improvement of interaction between authorities and institutions of civil society. (shrink)

Sustaining the military targeting of the everyday sites and spaces of urban life in the contemporary period is a new constellation of military doctrine and theory. In this the spectre of state-vs-state military conflict is seen to be in radical retreat. Instead, the new doctrine is centred around the idea that a wide spectrum of global insurgencies and ambient threats now operates across the social, technical, political, cultural and financial networks which straddle transnational scales while simultaneously penetrating (...) the everyday spaces, sites and circulations of global cities. Such lurking threats are deemed by the latest theorist of ‘asymmetric’ or ‘irregular’ warfare to camouflage themselves within the ‘clutter’ of cities at home and abroad for concealment against traditional forms of military targeting. Addressing the Mumbai attacks through the lens of this emerging constellation of military and security doctrine, this article highlights three important implications of viewing the everyday sites, spaces and circulations of cities as the key strategic ‘battlespaces’ of our era. These involve, first, the way contemporary doctrine views urban terrorist attacks as part of a broad terrain of trans- national organized ‘information operations’. Second, such paradigms prefigure a radical blurring between local and global scales, the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of nation-states, and between policing, military power and state intelligence. And, finally, emerging urban security propagates hyper-militarized perspectives in which every aspect of urban life is transposed as an act of limitless and boundless warfare. (shrink)