Media Theory

Adopting the critical paradigm of solicitation, Armand demonstrates how structure is perceived through an incidence of crisis, and that crisis is pervasive in human experience. The topics addressed in these essays range from the cybernetic revolution and the situation of contemporary "culture," to the foundations of ethical philosophy. Commencing with an analysis of the rhetoric of “crisis,” Armand poses questions of central concern to the future of criticism and the institutions of knowledge. Focusing upon the role of technology in re-shaping the structures of human experience, language and cultural practice, this collection of essays offers a broad critique of the legacies of modernity and beyond.

Seit dem sogenannten Visual Turn wird auch dem Einsatz von Film in den Sozialwissenschaften mehr Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Dabei ist die Nutzung zweigeteilt: einerseits als Erhebungsund Auswertungsmethode, andererseits als wissenschaftlicher Output. In diesem Artikel werden die Herausforderungen und Potenziale der Produktion sozialwissenschaftlicher Filme diskutiert. Es wird sowohl auf methodologische und theoretische Fragen wie auf Fragen der konkreten Umsetzung eingegangen. Zentrale Schritte im Forschungsprozess werden in ihrer Bedeutung für die Filmarbeit diskutiert. Umgekehrt werden deren spezifische Stilmittel, etwa der Schnitt, in ihrer Bedeutung für die empirische Arbeit dargestellt. Schlussendlich werden die Folgen eines vermehrten Einsatzes von Film für das Wissenschaftssystem, etwa für die Publikationsmöglichkeiten, beleuchtet.

In today's China of big data and big pollution, air is computerized and darkened simultaneously. Amidst the rising socio-political anxiety regarding environment problems, numerous mobile applications have been developed in the recent decade to deal with environmental issues such as air pollution, carbon emission, and soil damage through technological means such as geo-mapping, crowd sourcing, and cloud computing. These environment-related mobile applications have gained growing popularity for Chinese cellphone users to collect data of pollutions, to monitor air and water quality, as well as to generate discussions and actions about environmental damages. At the center of this development is a group of mobile apps that are used to track the location-specific PM2.5 (particle matter of 2.5 micrometers) concentration as the air quality index, as the public attention about air pollution has been the driving force behind this environmental turn of Chinese mobile media. Examining the development and usage of such air-monitoring mobiles apps, this paper explores the dynamic intersection between mobile media and ecological environment. The history of portable, personal devices such as Sony Walkman has often centered on the techno-social development toward what Raymond Williams called "mobile privatization." But the case of the Chinese air-monitoring mobile apps rather points to the opposite direction. Instead of the micro-individual, these apps generate the macro-ecological where human, things, information, and environment converge in their different directions, scales, and speeds of movements. Such a tendency toward the mobile ecological highlights the notion of mobility as a central nexus connecting between technological media (cellphones and apps) and environmental ones (air and particle matter). The study of air-apps thus provides an opportunity to clash the techno-social history of mobile media with the theoretical debate of the so-called elemental media. If media define our relationship with the world, how does the technological mediation of mobile computing affect the ways in which we interact with the moving air particles in our own movement of everyday life? The air-apps, by bringing the movement of air as data into our daily encounters with mobile media, shatters the boundary between the ecosystem of media and the material ecology of environment, making us rethink the complex interplay between technology, bodies, and environment in their competing modes of mobility as the central problematics.

Recent approaches to media change have convincingly shown that distinctions between old and new media are inadequate to describe the complexity of present and past technological configurations. Yet, oldness and newness remain powerful ways to describe and understand media change and continue to direct present-day perceptions and interactions with a wide range of technologies – from vinyl records to artificial intelligence voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. How can one refuse rigid definitions of old and new, while at the same time retaining the usefulness and pertinence of these concepts for the study and analysis of media change? This introduction to the special issue entitled ‘Rethinking the Distinctions between Old and New Media’ aims to answer this question by taking up the notion of biography. We argue that the recurrence of oldness and newness as categories to describe media is strictly related to the fact that interactions with media are embedded within a biographical u...

Digitality is imposed upon us! To change this, we should not turn away from it, but look carefully into its transformative power and make operable alternatives such as counter-algorhythms and solidarity-oriented commoning. The aim is a world where profit and property no longer exist, but instead where a cooperative dance – between all the needs posed by our ecosystems, and all the needs of people – becomes practicable. This book is a critical media theory of future-building, modulated by a focus on the potentials of counter-dancing as providing ways to unfold fugitive practices.

This essay uses the notion of social context to examine both mediated and face-to-face interaction as part of one larger system of behavior and response. The concept of social context is extended beyond its typical definition of physical setting and location to include the types of "settings' that are fostered by the use of various  media. After developing common-denominator concepts that bridge place-contexts and media-contexts, the essay demonstrates how contextual principles offer insight into the impact of media on twp levels: (I) the micro, single-situation level, where choices among various communication options affect individual psychological experience, and (2) the macro, societal level, where shifts in the matrix of widely used media have an impact on social structure and on the situational geography of numerous social roles.

“Using Contextual Analysis to Bridge the Study of Mediated and Unmediated Behavior.” In Brent D. Ruben and Leah A. Lievrouw, (Eds.), Mediation, Information, and Communication: Information and Behavior, Volume 3, Transaction Press, 1990, 67-94.

This dissertation explores manifestations of musical subjectification in European musical thought in the decades leading up to and following 1800 by examining the shifts in the music-world relationship. Highlighting particular historical moments in the development of music and its Otherness, I study the process through which a modern autonomous identity of music, that is, a perceived separation between the musical and the extra-musical in the modern European concept of music, was constructed. I study this fissure between the musical ‘self’ and the surrounding non-musical world in the context of three important musico-conceptual developments: (1) the historical ‘movement’ of the music-painting dichotomy, (2) the clash of two musical outlooks embodied in the shift from the madrigal principle towards the sonata principle, and (3) the change in the meaning of the musical sublime. I argue that what is significant about and unifies these three manifestations of musical autonomy is the way in which they all reflect areas where music’s relationship to nature has been revolutionized; they all display some kind of otherization of nature, or the subjectification of music. More specifically, in Chapter 1, I survey how a new musical discourse was shaped partially through the otherization of music’s sister art, painting, leading to a conceptual independence of music from other arts; in Chapter 2, I explore a movement from a “realistic” approach to the music-world relationship historically exemplified in the madrigal towards a sonata-based principle that announced an increasing prominence of form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century music; and, in Chapter 3, I discuss a decisive shift in the history of the musical sublime around 1800 in order to shed light on an aesthetic change that reflects a new meaning for greatness in music, no longer sought in external nature but in the subjective notions of freedom and infinity. My conclusion is that what cements the three outlined manifestations of musical modernity is a modern—and also a romantic—treatment of music as a subject. That is to say, with modernity, the nature of music underwent a transformation that enabled it to be perceived as attaining some degree of autonomy and self-determination that was similar to the one attributed to the modern human subject. Through seemingly fragmented moments in some parallel histories in musical thought (the music-painting comparison, madrigal-sonata contrast, and subjective turn in the musical sublime), this research traces part of the history of that conceptual transformation, without any attempt to argue for or against its legitimacy.

“Dionysus in 1990” was Norman O. Brown’s last attempt at renewal, his last metamorphosis, last apocalypse, last attempt to enter a place of mystery in the life of the mind. The ostensible subject of the essay is Georges Bataille, the French novelist, philosopher, sociologist, and critic, whose work Brown discovered in the late 1980s. But the real subject of the essay might best be found in its title: Dionysus.

Cold exposure, more commonly known in Finland as winter/ice swimming, has become a seasonal social media phenomenon and internationally recognized therapeutic technique, which has created popular demand for research on the topic. In this article, we examine how representations of cold exposure are produced and articulated in our multimedia material.
Our analysis focuses on the Wim Hof Method, popular on social media platforms, in which cold exposure is marketed (alongside breathing and mindfulness exercises) as a scientifically proven wellness technique. We analyze how the method is represented in various audiovisual products and literature as an individualistic alternative treatment, a way to create an authentic nature connection, and how the technique makes use of spectacles of physical endurance and “biohacking”.
In line with our media-anthropological approach, our media materials are discussed in conjunction with empirical data collected from Finland, which highlights how media representations resonate with interviews with Wim Hof instructors and written responses from winter swimming enthusiasts. We contextualize our interpretations within broader body culture phenomena, such as the “new work body”, extreme sports, and so-called body nostalgia.

Being human in a hypermediated world is cause to much confusion and debate, on an ontological as well as on a practical front. This study draws on the works of Martin Heidegger, Charles Taylor, Terry Eagleton, and Michel Foucault to argue about how we orient ourselves in a hypermediated world. The research question of this thesis is: what opportunities and threats does the use of contemporary information technologies hold for identity and authenticity. The results of a systematic literature review is reflected against the philosophical background of Martin Heidegger, Charles Taylor, Terry Eagleton, and Michel Foucault for comprehensive arguments about contemporary identity-building and the nature of authenticity and contemporary information technologies. Conceptual papers, qualitative researches, and philosophical papers are searched and systematically narrowed down to form the data for this thesis. A modified form of the Fink model for systematic literature review is used to gather...

https://www.mediakrytyka.info/mediafilosofiya/internet-izolyuye-ne-obyednuye.html
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Наприкінці 80-х років на зорі розквіту всемережжя, Юрген Габермас мріяв, як інтернет стане інструментом звільнення людства від монополізованих масових медіа. Вже через 15 років філософ змінив свою думку і критикував інтернет за фрагментацію та розпорошення нашої уваги. То коли Габермас мав рацію: коли прогнозував об’єднання, чи коли в критикував ізоляцію?
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In the late 80s, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, Jürgen Habermas dreamed of how the Internet would become a tool for liberating humanity from monopolized mass media. Just 15 years later, the philosopher changed his mind and criticized the Internet for fragmenting and dispersing our attention. So when was Habermas right: when he predicted unification or criticized isolation?

Bergsonin elämänfilosofia liittyy laajaan suuntaukseen, joka syntyi biologian mullistuksien myötä 1800-luvun loppupuolella (Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Menyhert Palágyi, Ludwig Klages, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, William James...). Sikäli kuin naturalismi tulkitaan tämän päivän keskustelussa usein yksipuolisesti materialismiksi, elämänfilosofia voi antaa toisen kiinnostavan näkökulman ihmisen asemaan luonnossa. Suuntaus on tässä suhteessa vahvasti vaikuttanut fenomenologisiin teorioihin subjektin ruumiillisuudesta ja yleensäkin embodiment-käsitteeseen. Artikkelin tarkoitus on valaista filosofisen psykologian ja luonnonfilosofian suhdetta Bergsonin tuotannossa, temaattisesti syventää tätä suhdetta sekä historiallisesti ja ontologisesti taustoittaa Bergsonin filosofiaa, muun muassa suhteessa hänen edeltäjänsä Félix Ravaissonin aristotelismiin.

The objective of this article is to identify discursive marks and enunciated strategies of the news of political coverage by the printed newspapers O Regional and Folha de Sao Borja, in circulation in the municipality of Sao Borja, RS State in South Brazil. From a comparative study by Discourse Analysis (AD) methodology some identification was possible on the reduced mediation of the printed media in the social arena of community politics in those localities. We work with the hypothesis that the framing given by the newspapers to expressly political guidelines has been superficial and confer to the news field and to the readers much more a sense of normality than of mobilization and questioning as would be the function of the newspapers. The research question is precisely how newspapers do this framework in the sense of mediation of topics of interest to the community. This is an empirical survey with a theoretical-methodological basis in the French tradition of AD on a representati...

RESUMO Este artigo debate a relação entre jornalismo, populismo e mídias digitais. Deste modo, observamos de que maneira os textos jornalísticos, ao produzirem narrativas acerca das manifestações sociopolíticas conhecidas como “cacerolazo”, em 2012/2013 na Argentina, durante o governo de Cristina Kirchner, e “panelaço”, em 2015 no Brasil, durante o governo de Dilma Rousseff, reforçam o processo de propagação de elementos discursivos que se imiscuem à lógica do populismo e se imbricam às dicções populistas do contemporâneo, que vêm sendo denominadas como populismo algorítmico e/ou populismo digital. Ao promoverem a circulação de certos dizeres (e não outros), partindo do efeito discursivo de evidência, como se fossem apenas “relatos de fatos”, baseados na ilusão de neutralidade e imparcialidade, as construções jornalísticas produzem uma determinação dos sentidos, filiando-se a dadas práticas discursivas, sócio-historicamente marcadas. A atividade jornalística, ao se apropriar do disc...

Das Konzept des Körper-Archivs zielt darauf ab, die Kategorie des Körper-Gedächtnisses im Bereich der zeitgenössischen Künste mithilfe rekonstruktiver Praktiken und Archivtheorien zu systematisieren. Künstlerische Praktiken, die auf einer erneuten Verkörperung der Vergangenheit beruhen, problematisieren den Körper als ein Dokument und Zeugnis besonderer Art und ermöglichen so die Produktion und Konzeptualisierung performativen Wissens über die Vergangenheit. In dem Text werden diverse, auch technologisch bedingte Formen der körperlichen Rekonstruktion der Vergangenheit anhand theoretischer und praktischer Beispiele diskutiert, um die binäre Opposition zwischen Körper und Archiv, sowie zwischen Kunst- und Wissenspraktiken aufzuheben.

This article addresses three important moments for the consolidation of Animation Cinema at the School of Fine Arts, EBA at the Federal University of Minas Gerais: the creation of the qualification in Animation Cinema in 1985 (the first in Brazilian University); the implementation of the Regional Center of Animation Cinema of Minas Gerais in the EBA and the creation of the Animation and Digital Arts Film Course in 2009, through the Reuni – Restructuring and Expansion Plan of Federal Universities in Brazil.
Keywords:
Animation teaching; CAAD-UFMG; National Film Board of Canada.

Promises of incorporation, threats of punishment, and fragile, revocable entitlements mark the signature of a modality of governance dedicated to the production of subjects who are neither included nor excluded from political or economic orders, but who are provisionally appended to them as though hanging by a thread. A wide array of political regimes renders these subjects simultaneously indispensable and expendable. The authors examine promise, threat and revocability as modalities of governance appearing across liberal and illiberal registers as a means to displace the costs, risks and responsibilities of political and economic projects onto the indeterminate subjects they simultaneously produce. The authors ask what subjects do as they are held in suspense, by studying the collectivities, social orders, and forms of political organisation that emerge amongst subjects as they anticipate the authorisations and the censures, the arrival and the forfeiture of governance.

An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human.

In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements.

Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.

In this essay, I would like to explore an aspect of Flusser’s work, which despite its significance has received little attention so far: the relationship between music and mathematics and the complex mediatic dialectics of sound, number, image and word that goes with it. I would like to focus on two related texts, which although written 22 years apart show some remarkable parallels with regard to this issue: The History of the Devil (1963) and Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985). Other important aspects that would have to be taken into consideration, are the relationship between hearing and seeing, sound and image, which Flusser assigns in his lectures on communicology in the 1970s (Flusser 1996b) to the two fundamental forms of dialogue in the West: the Jewish and the Greek. A further thematic link could be drawn to the word-field Stimme, voice, Stimmung, atmosphere, and Stimmigkeit, coherence, consistency, es stimmt, it is right, with reference to Heidegger, and the assoc...

This article focuses on two indices from Geschlecht III session XIII: (1) an apparently insignificant reference to Stiegler and (2) the recourse to the concept of the engram as a trope of other grammatological figures that are more frequent in Derrida's work. By interweaving these indices together, the article suggests that Derrida's text can be read as a noteworthy stage in his ongoing dialogue with Bernard Stiegler surrounding the question posed by human evolution to any accounts of the history of life. Along this path, the article inscribes Derrida's (en-)grammatological history of life within the line of thought that goes from Richard Semon's engram theory to Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's contemporary re-elaboration of this theory. In doing so, it argues that, although for Stiegler Derrida's grammatology aligns with biological reductionism, the latter may provide the theoretical framework for current evolutionary accounts of life as plasticity.

Ziel dieser Text- und Theoriesammlung ist es, die Breite an medienkulturellen Themen und Problemstellungen abzubilden und unterschiedliche Sicht- und Herangehensweisen vorzuführen. Die systematische Anordnung erfolgt über Schlagworte, an denen die Eigenlogik und Eigenmacht der Medien und ihrer Effekte für Mensch, Kultur, Geschichte und Gesellschaft deutlich wird: von Anthropomedialität und Computing über Graphien, Infrastrukturen und Maschinenwelten bis hin zu Massenmedien und Vergesellschaftung. Diese Themenblöcke sind gleichermaßen historisch wie theoretisch angelegt und offerieren in Auszügen Originaltexte von Benjamin, Bergson, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Haraway, Heidegger, Innis, Latour, Luhmann, Ong, Simondon, Turing, Virilio und vielen anderen mehr.

Inspired by key concerns of this collective project, this afterword article highlights two main aspects in the discussion of governance through suspension. The first aspect is how geographically widespread the rhetoric of 'indeterminacy' (as the fuel of the temporal medium of suspension) has become, soliciting analyses of differentiation across cultures and time. The second aspect relates to the politics of punctuated time in light of changes happening in our current culture of temporality. These two aspects integrate my interest in rethinking the classic concept of the (sovereign) decision conceived as separation from towards that of incision as cut through, particularly in light of rising expressions of authoritarian populism, globally, across regimes.

In 1932, phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz provided a theory of mutual knowledge that explains how individuals come to understand one another in the increasingly differentiated lifeworld. Schutz’s main argument was that the contemporaneous lifeworld consists of two distinct realms and human mutual knowledge is constituted differently in each realm: in the realm of consociates, people get to know each other by way of growing older together in corporeal copresence; and in the realm of mere contemporaries, people come to know each other based on ideal types constructed through generalized typification. This article extends Schutz’s theory to an emergent realm of the lifeworld brought about by the advent of the Internet—the realm of consociated contemporaries. In this new realm, which is spatially divergent but temporally convergent, anonymous individuals become intimately familiar with one another through mutual biographical disclosure in telecopresence. This analytic extensio...

A review of the monograph titled “The Information Dimension of Hybrid Warfare,” edited by scientific editors Marek Wrzosk, Szymon Markiewicz, and Zbigniew Modrzejewski, presents the most important issues discussed in this book. Attention was paid to the extensive request of the authors - both in foreign and domestic literature. Although it did not result in a universal, generally accepted definition of "hybrid war", it outlined the context of hybrid conflicts with a particular emphasis on informational actions (including propaganda, disinformation) that are used during this type of conflict. The review also provides an interesting case study. This concerns the course of the hybrid war on the example of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which has been going on since 2014. Despite the difficulties associated with describing the existing conflict, the authors managed to identify several of the most important areas of action on both sides, and then outline three predictive scena...

Alle reden von Netzen und Netzwerken. Was bislang in der MedienÝ wissenschaft fehlt, ist eine empirisch belastbare und theoretisch hinÝ reichend komplexe Theorie der Fäden, Knoten, Netze und Netzwerke. Der Medienepistemologe Stefan Weber stellt sich mit diesem Buch dieser Aufgabe. Ist das Internet ein Medium oder bloß technische Infrastruktur? Ist das World-Wide-Web ein autopoietisches System? Sind Netzwerke Systeme? - Fragen dieser Art beherrschen die netzwissenschaftliche Debatte und zeugen von begrifflichen Konfusionen angesichts der neuen Medien. Webers Text ist der Versuch einer Flurbereinigung. Empirisch führt der Theorievorschlag zu einer strukturierten BeÝ obachtung von Mikro- bis Makro-Trends der Netzmedialisierung: ›ViÝ ralisierung‹, Selbstreferenzialisierung, Mensch/Maschine-EntdiffeÝ renzierung, Entdualisierung klassischer Kommunikationsverhältnisse und Redualisierung binärer Sozialstrukturen.