Analyzes twentieth-century media and cultural theories as they relate to changes in political economy, communication technology, popular culture and collective consciousness in the United States. It argues that much of contemporary media environment is operating as Western capitalist media have for more than a century, making these theories more relevant than ever.

There have been different approaches to the study of the relations between mass media on the one hand and science and technological activities on the other. In this article, I summarize consumption approaches, point out some of their limitations, and then show how these limitations can be addressed by drawing on an ethnographic study I conducted of an academic engineering research laboratory. I analyze the discursive practices lab members use to interpret mass media. One practice treats (...) media as reference points that mark a lab member’s growing alignment with the profession of electrical and computer engineering, and this constructs an engineering self by providing an opportunity for lab members to display knowledge of the prevalence and shapes of robots and align themselves with the firsthand knowledge prized in engineering culture. Another practice uses the discourse-in-practice of religion to construct an engineering self by aligning the speaker with things that are valued in engineering culture such as objectivity, science, evolution, and literature reviews. The final practice I analyze involves repurposing media technologies in ways that are helpful for both current and future lab research projects, which constructs selves by giving lab members an opportunity to show they know which features of media are relevant for engineering and how these features can be used to address engineering problems. I conclude with a discussion of how this contributes to studies of engineering identity and the relations between science, technology, and media. (shrink)

Since seminal essays like Adorno’s ‘The Culture Industry’ and Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the mass media has been of central concern for Critical Theory. Yet Critical Theorists have produced relatively little in the way of systematic analysis of the concrete institutions of mass communication. Early on, Habermas seemed to be headed in this direction, especially with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. However, in Habermas’s later years, (...) this concern is eclipsed, on the one hand by an ideal theory of communication which says relatively little about non-ideal institutions that “systematically distort” communication, and on the other hand by an increasing focus on properly “political” institutions and the formal structure of law, exemplified by his later work Between Facts and Norms. In this essay, I will show how the colonization of public space by private interests, via technological media, remains sorely under-theorized in Habermas’s work, and that this is not just a peripheral oversight but a central problem that Habermas fails to resolve. I will then give some preliminary suggestions as to how one might expand and develop the critique of systematically distorted communication in more fruitful directions by developing the idea of a politics of meaning. My argument is located within the extensive discussion generated by the relatively recent translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English, which has produced many useful and important criticisms. (shrink)

The new mass media technologies now make information processing and distribution more accessible to people globally. Marshall Mcluhan’s “global village” has given birth to a “global palour”. However, perpetrators of crimes now bask on the philosophy of communication media practitioners that people have the right to know what is happening within and outside their environment. This stance is rapidly dismantling, in an amazing fashion, the hitherto accorded respect for media ethics. Neil Postman, a New York (...) class='Hi'>media analyst, describes the creator of technology as the list judge of its consequences, especially with regards to the technology of the media. True, every communication medium is potent with the possibility of occasioning other consequences not directly intended by it. This paper, therefore, attempts to bring to the fore the way communication media are inadvertently promoting crimes and terrorist activities globally. It is the stand of this paper that a global overhaul of mass communication media is needed for balance reportage that would bring about global and meaningful developments of human and material resources under an atmosphere of peace and mutual tolerance. (shrink)

Analysis of the material properties of the Internet reveals its true weight: the mass of component routers, switches, cables, satellites, cellnet masts, and of course computers, and the vast network of resource extraction, manufacturing, energy generation, and waste in which its functioning is embedded. Equally important is understanding the massless but highly regulated system of software and legislation affecting the ostensibly free and open evolution of network media. The chapter traces some exemplary standards bodies responsible for the design (...) of key features such as protocols and codecs, and discusses the vexed dialectic of intellectual property rights and the notion of an information commons, arguing that the Internet bears the hallmarks of three major types of institutional construction, those proper to the nation-state, to commerce, and to network systems themselves. It concludes with a critical challenge to future archaeology: the ephemerality of digital files. (shrink)

When environmental science acts by enlightenment rather than instrumental use, that is, by changing the aims and values of politics rather than its means, adequate communi cation to the general public is crucially important. Based on the study of two issues, forest death from acid rain and the size of whale stocks, this article shows how the "constraints" of commercial mass media can be contrary to the task of enlightenment. It is also argued that skeptical and relativist views (...) of science contribute indirectly to bias by undermining criticism. (shrink)

Many people are concerned about the legitimacy of digital technology companies like Meta. In this paper we show that two existing models for characterizing power – sovereign power and structural power – are inadequate when it comes to digital technology companies. This is because they fail to accommodate something crucial: the uniquely empowering nature of digital power. Companies like Meta empower users to interact by providing them with versatile systems defined by minimalist permission structures. Drawing on Searle’s theory (...) of institutions and Hart’s theory of law, we show how these permission structures facilitate the creation of new powers, as well as new institutions, through the emergence and recognition of new social norms. This means we must ask how entities that provide us with such versatile – and thus unsteerable – means of empowerment can come to be legitimate. We argue that a custodial framework for digital legitimacy can assign responsibility for the patterns of empowerment that are sustained by companies like Meta. (shrink)

In this volume a group of distinguished legal and political theorists and experts on journalism discuss how to reconcile our values concerning freedom of the press with the enormous power of the media - especially television - to shape opinions and values. The policy issues treated concern primarily the extent of justifiable government regulation of the media and the justification for regulating television differently from newspapers. The volume contains some highly original and groundbreaking analyses of philosophical issues surrounding (...) the First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights. This is a book for anyone seriously interested in the rights to free speech and expression in technologically advanced societies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Edward Bellamy's influential utopian novel Looking Backward dramatizes the epistemological impact of an increasingly media-saturated urban environment on turn-of-the-century American culture and identity. Bellamy's fanciful adaptation of the telephone receives particularly careful analysis in this essay. Deprived of its transmitting function, this denatured instrument both disrupts Bellamy's utopian project and, more subtly, registers the effect of mass media technologies on the construction and coherence of subjectivity. Lowenstein ultimately argues that Bellamy's novel rehearses the displacement of an (...) epistemology rooted in the search for ontological certainty by what Anthony Giddens calls an epistemology of social reflexivity. (shrink)

The article discusses the forms and ways of the impact of modern digital media on people, groups, and society as a whole. The unilateral communication effect on a person is emphasized. The accent is made on the transmission model of information dissemination, taking into account the formation of its ritualized form. The author pays his particular attention to the status and role of an individual in interaction with mass media; provides arguments about the exclusion of a person (...) from the communication dimension. The activity of modern digital media structures is substantiated as social constructors of reality. The researcher shows the technological and visual possibilities of mass media in the creation of artificial, illusory simulated models of the world perceived by a person as objective, authentic, and real. Mass media are presented as an integral social institution of modern society, operating autonomously, based on its own rules and norms, technological and content principles, conditions of network communication, digitalization, and mediatization of society. The article presents the concepts of theoretical comprehension of mass media as a self-sufficient autopoietic system of N. Luhmann, and consideration of media communication implementation as a non-communication of J. Baudrillard. The author stresses the role of spectacle and visuality in the process of TV influence on the subjects, in the construction of images and models of the world, comparable with the already available information consumers pictures of the world. The contradictory and ambiguous conceptual assessments of the activity and influence of mass media on the modern man are emphasized. (shrink)

In recent years, the growing academic field called “Data Science” has made many promises. On closer inspection, relatively few of these promises have come to fruition. A critique of Data Science from the phenomenological tradition can take many forms. This paper addresses the promise of “participation” in Data Science, taking inspiration from Paul Majkut’s 2000 work in Glimpse, “Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity,” and some insights from Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology." The description of Data Science provided in the (...) scholarly literature includes “the study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge from data” (Dhar 2013, 64), “data stewardship and data sharing…access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research” (Hartter et al., 2013, 1), and “personal information, health status, daily activities and shopping preferences that are recorded and used to give us instant feedback and recommendations based on previous online behavior.” (Shin 2013) United States universities have begun to offer graduate programs in “data science”, anticipating the growth of this field for marketing, national security, and health industries. These universities include New York University, Columbia University, Stanford, Northwestern, and Syracuse. (shrink)

Reviewed work: Geoffrey Cantor; Sally Shuttleworth . Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth‐Century Periodicals. 351 pp., illus., index. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. $40 .; Louise Henson; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham . Culture and Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Media. xxv + 296 pp., illus., index. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. $84.95 .; Geoffrey Cantor; Gowan Dawson; Graeme Gooday; Richard Noakes; Sally Shuttleworth; Jonathan R. Topham. Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Periodical: Reading (...) the Magazine of Nature. xi + 329 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75. (shrink)

In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science?exemplified by early?modern ?invisible colleges? of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small?scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence?to 20th?century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass?produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the growing use of (...) more participatory, interactive ?Web 2.0? technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific ?information explosion? since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large?scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document?producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so?called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer?reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the issue of influential modifications of the genre system of modern mass media. It has been established that the mass media are one of the main means of communication for the wide audience. The meaning of the words "modification", "mass media", "mobile journalism", "new media" has been studied. The article notes that "new media" appeared in the 60s of the XX century. The main characteristics (...) of the media are presented. It is noted that the most common examples of mass media are television, radio, newspapers, magazines, social media, digital media, the Internet. The textbooks and publications of domestic and foreign scientists, which raise the issue of influential modifications of the genre system of modern mass media are highlighted. It was found that the first media were newspaper, telegraph, radio, television. The study of the main types of media is emphasized: traditional media, print media, electronic broadcasting media, external media, transit media and new media. It is noted that new media is a reconceptualization of traditional media. The aspect of media in the role of a social institution has been studied. It was noted about the significant impact of digitalization on the global media system. The significant influence of the use of the Internet in the political life of the United States is given as an illustrative example. The use of the "video story" technology as one of the strategies for holding the attention of the reader or listener is considered. The focus is on the interactive storytelling made possible by digital media and provides advantages for interactive television and cinema, as well as helping to create virtual and mixed reality in games, contributing to the emergence of new forms of voice games. (shrink)

Ethical objections to the use of mass media and the internet help explain why the Plain People of North America avoid new communication technologies. Each subgroup of plain folk-including Amish, Mennonites, and Brethren adopt differing amounts of new technology, and the use variesfrom region to region or even,from community to community. Old media such as the radio and telephone and newer media such as television and the internet introduce diferent and unwelcome moral values into plain (...) communities, although the telephone is often a borderline case. The ethical systems of the Old Order groups provide a unique and pragmatic critique of the widespread acceptance of mass media and the internet in the larger social world. (shrink)

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and (...) some come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way. (shrink)

The last technological developments have introduced a huge amount of hardware, communication systems, and information systems into life of human beings. But also has brought a multiplicity of images, objects and sensitive experiences having a direct effect in social life. It can be said that this amount of current elements deserve to be analyzed in order to try to clarify the nature of information technology and its political impact. That means that far over history of scientific developments, it is (...) precise to take into account a critical task of the role of the information techniques in different levels of society (moral, social and economic levels), but after all the role playing in the way we perceive the world. For that, we treat some of the technological developments related to virtual reality; then, we handle the concept of simulation, and finally we establish the distinction between reality and virtuality. (shrink)

Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture. By Seth Jacobowitz. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 387. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 299. $39.95.

This paper considers the ethics of educational technology in terms of whether or not selected media and methods are beneficial to the teacher and student, or whether other motives and criteria determine the selection. Communications media have proven themselves to be powerful and efficient tools, used like ?dynamite? for getting the most out of a ?quarry?, but the vast scope of their applicability and flexibility may notoriously neglect the unprecedented risks to the user of current online methods (...) ? as one of the areas in which ethical issues arise. Having mentioned en passant any potential benefits of all communications media, their harmful potential is also noted, and, based on this introductory notification, ethical responsibilities of all parties involved in educational media have been examined. The authors? main objective is to centralise the concept of the ?uncritical mass? representing the educationally uninformed general public whose selections of communication technologies can lead to their adoption as educational tools regardless of their educational value. (shrink)

Against Transmission introduces the technical history and phenomenology of media, a field of study that explains the characteristics of contemporary life by looking to the technical properties of machines. By studying the engineering of signal processing, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine exposes us to a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history? This book (...) offers both a detailed and radical investigation of the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, combined with innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture. (shrink)

In this essay the visual arts of the machine age morph into literature and theory and then back again to images, gestures, and thought.

What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today’s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling — they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone’s (...) concern. Some of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it — inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device. (shrink)

The cliché understanding of mass media is that they are tools and means to transmit news and expand communications whose function is to be informative, provide entertainment and promote ethical codes among people. This paper, mainly relying on the views and approaches of 'Heidegger' and 'Marx' about technology, aims to analyse the media and its relation with advertisement. This analysis has put under question the current common belief and shows that the advertisement industry implies a biased (...) viewpoint toward the world, which will bring about certain philosophical requirements and consequences. This analysis also shows that the media in the new world are structurally manufactured to operate under the influence of social relations and acts. (shrink)

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) as a form of intelligence has recently made a prominent public appearance in the theater of war. During the early months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities relied on FRT as part of the country's defensive activities, harnessing the technology for a variety of purposes, such as unveiling covert Russian agents operating amid the Ukrainian population; revealing the identity of Russian soldiers who committed war crimes; and even identifying dead Russian (...) soldiers. This constellation of uses of FRT—in a war increasingly waged on the digital and information front—warrants ethical examination. The essay discusses some of the most serious concerns with FRT in the context of war, including the infringement of informational privacy; the indiscriminate and disproportionate harms it may inflict, particularly when the technology is coupled with social media intelligence; and the potential abuse of the technology once the fog of war dissipates. Some of these concerns parallel those to be found in nations that are not engulfed in war, but others are unique to war-torn settings. (shrink)

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it can - although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the "human" in the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-LucNancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the "techtonic" movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire - love, in other words (...) - always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a selfamong others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply andmesh together.Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage - "the stirrings of the soul" - have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues,is not eternal, but external. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to analyze how English-language versions of e-newspapers in the first two countries affected, China and Japan, which are non-English-speaking countries and have different socio-economic and political settings, have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic news and informed the global community. Design/methodology/approach A text-mining approach was used to explore experts’ thoughts as published by the two leading English-language newspapers in China and Japan from January to March 2020. This study analyzes the Opinion section, which mainly comprises editorial and (...) the op-ed section. The current study groups all editorial discussions and highlights into ten major aspects, which cover health, economy, politics, culture and others. Findings Within the first three months, the media in both China and Japan shifted their focus from health and preparedness to the economy, politics and social welfare. Governance and social welfare were key concerns in China’s news media, while, in contrast, global politics received the highest level of attention from experts in Japan’s news media. Environment and technologies aspects did not receive much attention by the expert’s columns. Originality/value At the initial stage of a world crisis, how leading nations and initially affected nations deal with the problem, how media play their role and guide mass population with experts’ thoughts are highlighted here. The understanding developed in this study can provide guidance to news media in other countries in playing effective roles in the management of this health crisis and catastrophes. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions and (...) the two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

When an employee’s off-duty conduct generates mass social media outrage, managers commonly respond by firing the employee. This, I argue, can be a mistake. The thesis I defend is the following: the fact that a firing would occur in a mass social media outrage context brought about by the employee’s off-duty conduct generates a strong ethical reason weighing against the act. In particular, it contributes to the firing constituting an inappropriate act of blame. Scholars who caution (...) against firing an employee for off-duty conduct have thus far focused primarily on due process related issues or legal concerns pertaining to free speech, lifestyle discrimination, and employment at-will. However, these concerns amount to only a partial, and contingent, diagnosis of what is at issue. I argue that even when due process considerations are met, firings in these contexts can be unjustified. Moreover, even if a business is not concerned with the unethical conduct per se, but is rather strictly concerned with PR, the argument I advance nevertheless provides one important ethical reason that counts against firings in mass social media outrage contexts. Given that managers are often under significant pressure to respond swiftly in cases where an employee is at the center of mass social media outrage, it is especially important that scholars begin to clarify the normative issues. This article builds on the burgeoning philosophical literature on the ethics of blame and provides a novel account of a distinctive ethical concern that arises with firings in mass social media outrage contexts. (shrink)

_Imagologies: Media Philosophy_ is no ordinary book. Provocative, irritating and stimulating, this is a work to be engaged, questioned and pondered. As the web of telecommunications technology spreads across the globe, the site of economic development, social change, and political struggle shifts to the realm of media and communications. In this remarkable book, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen challenge readers to rethink politics, economics, education, religion, architecture, and even thinking itself. When the world is wired, nothing remains (...) the same. To explore the new electronic frontier with Taylor and Saarinen is to see the world anew. A revolutionary period needs a revolutionary book. Get a head start of the 21st Century: Read _Imagologies: Media Philosophy_. (shrink)

The majority of adults in Britain cite the mass media as their main source of information about developments in science and technology. This alone makes it worth studying how the press covered the story of Dolly the cloned sheep. However, the media's reporting of Dolly revealed serious difficulties in the relationship of science to society. Although there were failures of journalistic accuracy and balance, these should not be allowed to obscure the deeper issues.

Mass testing is one COVID-19 pandemic response strategy. The effect of population-wide testing programs is influenced by public attitudes toward COVID-19 viral tests. However, the public’s attitudes toward mass testing and related factors in mainland China are not adequately understood. This study focuses on pandemic responses during the first wave of the Delta variant outbreak in southern China and explores how residents responded to population-wide mass COVID-19 testing programs. The research relies on data collected from short videos (...) recording residents’ experiences of being in lockdown, media reports, and semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data, and four themes emerged: public attitudes toward mass testing, the technology of viral tests, policy and governance, and cultural practices. The study finds that residents actively participated in mass testing campaigns as mass viral tests are associated with hope and trust. The Reverse Transcription–Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), negative test results, lockdown policies, waiting times, medical staff, and media representations are all actors that assemble and mobilize hope and trust. The research reveals some critical factors influencing people’s attitudes toward mass testing policies in response to COVID-19 and provides practical suggestions for public health professionals in rolling out effective population-wide mass COVID-19 testing. (shrink)

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. The political public of representative democratic régimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularization of culture and the democratization of politics. A governmentalist approach understands political (...) media technologies not as aberrations in the light of democratic theory but as the practices of “actually existing” representative democracy. Genuine popular democracy does not exist, fully formed, in the publics constituted by the media technologies but is most likely to flourish in popular culture and through media technologies. (shrink)

Introduction. The development of legal culture and a culture of human rights in the modern world through media technologies, is acquiring special significance in connection with the processes of globalization and the spread of media in recent decades. The purpose of the article is to study the prospects for the use of media education in the formation of the legal social culture and a culture of human rights. Materials and methods. Based on a study of domestic and (...) foreign sources, issues of media education, media literacy, spiritual and moral education, the legal culture of society, the phenomenon of post-truth and ways of forming critical, creative thinking are considered. The use of general scientific, philosophical, and socio-pedagogical methods has made it possible to study media education as a dialogue of learning, stimulating the development of rational, critical thinking, focused on the search for the value foundations of intellectual and social activity. Results. The development of the field of information and communication technologies determines the principles for the formation of the content and orientation of modern education. Media education is interlinked with the development of democracy and human rights. It influences the formation of a culture of citizen participation, their active social position, civic and political culture. Media education plays a significant role in shaping the legal culture of society since critical media research and information research focuses on the analysis of power structures and structures of dominance in the media. A study of the interpretations of the concepts of "media education" and "media literacy" made it possible to show that media education focuses a person on a critical approach to media content. One of the main issues of media education is teaching a person the skills to critically study media and media technologies, which involves addressing the technological, cultural and historical specifics of specific media used at a specific time and place. Information and communication technologies have changed the way of life, work, communication, and ways of selfpresentation, the formation of values, participation in socially significant events. Therefore, a critical approach to mass media should be based on knowledge of socio-philosophical theories, ethics and research in the field of mass media. Discussion. Mass media are constructing a history of human rights, which updates the topic of the media policy of human rights, combining socio-legal, cultural and media theories. Education in the field of acquiring information perception skills, the ability to correctly understand the importance of audiovisual images, to competently handle and navigate information flows are necessary for the life of a modern person in society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force of the better (...) argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

This paper, first presented at the spring 1990 conference on Mass Media Ethics in the Information Age, compares and contrasts approaches of five scholars - Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul - whose works are chief contributions to an influential communications theory that posits that the history of media technologies is central to the history of civilization, that media transformations result in social change, and that changes in the form of (...) class='Hi'>media technology alter the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

The alleged emergence of a ‘post-truth’ regime links the rise of new forms of social media and the reemergence of political populism. Post-truth has theoretical roots in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies, with sociologists of science arguing that both true and false claims should be explained by the same kinds of social causes. Most STS theorists have sought to deflect blame for post-truth, while at the same time enacting a normative turn, looking to deconstruct truth (...) claims and subject expertise to criticism. Steve Fuller has developed a positive case for post-truth in science, arguing that post-truth democratizes science. I criticize this argument and suggest an alternative approach that draws on the prehistory of the field in the 1930s and 1940s, when philosophers and sociologists sought to define the social conditions necessary for reliable knowledge production that might stem mass media irrationalism. (shrink)

Félix Guattari's theoretical and practical interests in cinema culminated in the film project A Love of UIQ. While critics have concentrated on the sci-fi screenplay's elements of minor cinema, its themes of mass media, emerging computer technologies and informatic-communication networks particularly express Guattari's concept of post-media. The screenplay is an aesthetic meditation on the potentialities of post-media, a concept that anticipates the practical and theoretical issues surrounding the age of the Internet. A Love of UIQ voices (...) Guattari's ambivalence towards the liberatory possibilities of network technologies that are at constant risk of capitalist recapture. (shrink)

Jacques Ellul’s work on propaganda provides the basis for this analysis of life in technology. Advertising and the mass media rely on temptation and seduction and create a constant flow of propaganda, all of which serve the technological system. Propaganda aims to condition and regulate us so that we participate in and adapt ourselves to a desired pattern, specifically an existence adjusted to and in accord with the technological milieu. Technology tempts and seduces us with its (...) promise and provision of comfort, convenience, and efficiency. Above all, technology tempts and seduces us with power: power over nature and over human beings. Naively and paradoxically, we believe we have power over technology, even though it actually has power over us. Our immersion in a sea of temptation and seduction, of constant and total propaganda, may seem inescapable; however, to criticize and challenge the primacy of technology is to reassert our freedom. (shrink)

The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations. Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since the United States `discovered' international terrorism on 11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political decision-makers quickly adjusted (...) propaganda passages, prepared as part of the Project for the New American Century, to emphasize domestic support for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals, including expanding domestic social control. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the potential influence of mass-media on public’s opinions and attitudes towards economic liberalism. It shows that, without relying to the assumption that journalists pursue such a purpose, the nature of the media system leads them to give a rather negative image of how the market economy works and doesn’t give the same place to liberal thesis with respect to others. Our argument is founded on a critique of the economic (...) model of spatial competition currently used in this field, on the crucial role that norms inherent to the profession of journalist play and the characteristics of the demand which media face. L’objet de cet article est d’examiner la question de l’influence éventuelle des médias de masse sur les opinions et attitudes du public à l’égard du libéralisme économique. On y montre que, sans recourir à l’hypothèse que les journalistes poursuivent consciemment un tel objectif, la nature du système médiatique les conduit à donner une image plutôt négative du fonctionnement de l’économie de marché et à ne pas donner une place équilibrée à l’exposé des thèses libérales par rapport aux autres. L’argumentation suivie repose sur la critique du modèle économique de la concurrence spatiale habituellement utilisé à ce sujet, sur le rôle déterminant que jouent les normes propres à la profession de journaliste et les caractéristiques de la demande s’adressant aux médias. (shrink)

Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication - in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. The book's four parts each deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic (...) moments in Adorno's reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno's Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields. (shrink)

Philosophy’s engagement with mass media has often been ambiguous: many critical theorists, from Benjamin to Bourdieu, recognised the emancipatory potential of modern communication technologies, but they also denounced the economic, political and ideological forces at work in the creation and dissemination of public opinion. Looking at different media, these authors emphasised the dialectical tension between the plurality of the public sphere and different forms of control and manipulation. In the present paper, I argue that this line of (...) criticism, albeit important, is no longer sufficient. I claim that contemporary forms of communication, defined by a unique emphasis on interactivity, cannot be analysed simply in terms of the opposition between dominant and marginalised agents or discourses. In its most extreme form, interactivity leads to an implosion of the distinction between the sources and the targets of the information flow, which calls into question the very possibility of a meaningful communicative exchange. To clarify the nature of this phenomenon, I retrace the evolution of modern political communication, from live speeches to digital platforms and social networks, and discuss its implications for recent debates on political authority, participation and representation. (shrink)

The crisis of contemporary art is a paradigmatic example of the crisis of spiritual values in today's world. The main cause of this crisis, it is argued, lies in the spirit of modern sciences. These do not find their object as a ready given, but rather determine it themselves, from their own standpoint, and thus basically produce it. Due to enormous technological development, modern civilization has turned the whole world into the Eleatic One. In materializing the uniform spirit of (...) class='Hi'>technology in our world the role of the new audio-visual media: cinema, radio, television, video and the internet, has been crucial. Technology has become a powerful instrument of modern power: it has enabled a concentration of power in the hands of technical, cultural and political administration, as well as automatically expanding mass production and consumption, and finally subordination of people to methodic education, control and manipulation. These are main features of the spirit of the contemporary technical civilization where technology is not understood as something technical but rather as a mode of existence, connected with science and industry. By changing the way in which human life is lived, and the way in which human community is ordered, the purpose and perception of the work of art has also changed. Beauty is not taken to be a result of subjective experience and something belonging to the object as such. The sphere of the aesthetic has become the ground for manifesting relativism and subjectivism in various forms. With the development of knowledge and human power, the contemporary world has begun to sink into nihilism, losing a sense for anything bearing the stamp of individuality. In such a world, everything, including the sphere of spiritual values, is reduced merely to what is useful and efficient.. Kriza savremene umetnosti predstavlja paradigmatican primer krize duhovnih vrednosti u savremenom svetu. Glavni uzrok te krize autor vidi u duhu modernih nauka za koje je karakteristicno da svoj predmet ne nalaze kao gotovu datost, vec ga same odredjuju sa svog stanovista i tako ga iz osnova proizvode. Zahvaljujuci ogromnom razvitku tehnike moderna civilizacija je ceo svet pretvorila u elejsko jedno. Kljucnu ulogu u realizaciji uniformnog duha tehnike u nasoj savremenosti imali su novi audio vizuelni mediji: film, radio, televizija, video i Internet. Tehnika je postala mocan instrument moderne vlasti: ona je omogucila koncentraciju moci u rukama tehnicke, kulturne i politicke uprave, masovnu proizvodnju i potrosnju koje se automatski sire, podcinjavanje ljudi metodskom skolovanju, kontroli i manipulaciji. To su najvaznija obelezja duha savremene tehnicke civilizacije u kojoj se tehnika ne shvata kao nesto tehnicko vec kao jedan nacin egzistencije povezan s naukom i industrijom. Promenom nacina vodjenja ljudskog zivota, nacina uredjenja ljudske zajednice, promenjena je svrha i percepcija umetnickog dela. Lepota se shvata kao plod subjektivnog dozivljaja i ne pripada predmetu kao takvom. Sfera estetskog postala je najsire podrucje za razlicite vrste ispoljavanja relativizma i subjektivizma. Razvojem saznanja i ljudske moci, savremeni svet poceo je da tone u no? nihilizma i da gubi smisao za sve sto ima pecat individualnosti. U takvom svetu sve se, pa i sfera duhovnih vrednosti, svodi samo na ono sto je korisno i delotvorno. (shrink)