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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

Offering an overall insight into the French tradition of philosophy of technology, this volume is meant to make French-speaking contributions more accessible to the international philosophical community. The first section, “Negotiating a Cultural Heritage,” presents a number of leading 20th century philosophical figures and intellectual movements that help shape philosophy of technology in the Francophone area, and feed into contemporary debates. The second section, “Coining and Reconfiguring Technoscience,” traces the genealogy of this controversial concept and discusses its meanings (...) and relevance. A third section, “Revisiting Anthropological Categories,” focuses on the relationships of technology with the natural and the human worlds from various perspectives that include anthropotechnology, Anthropocene, technological and vital norms and temporalities. The final section, “Innovating in Ethics, Design and Aesthetics,” brings together contributions that draw on various French traditions to afford fresh insights on ethics of technology, philosophy of design, techno-aesthetics and digital studies. The contributions in this volume are vivid and rich in original approaches that can spur exchanges and debates with other philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Arguably, every new technology creates hidden ejfects in its environment, rearranging the social order it penetrates. Many ofthese effects are inextricably linked to ethical issues. Some are eternal issues such as censorship andfree speech, but others have new names and dimensions, and may even be new issues. Forty of these issues pertaining to the new communication technologies of the 1990s and next millennium are catalogued here. The author argues that each new communication technology either retrieves, amplifies, transforms, obsolesces, (...) or mixes ethical issues from the past or creates new issues for the future. However, as in the Ross Hume Hall (1974) effect, it is also likely there are issues yet unknown due to untested eflects of combining new technologies. (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)

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)

What is the relationship between democracy and technology? And what should that relationship be? This book explores these questions, drawing upon a wide range of philosophical, historical and sociological points of view. In stark contrast to technology's promise as a wellspring of equality, freedom and self-government, its development now poses a host of problems for political society: an alarming concentration of power over global production, a widening gap between rich and poor, multiple environmental crises, trivialization of politics in (...) the mass media, decline of citizen competence in decision making, and the disproportionate influence of scientific and technical elites. As the writers discuss these issues, they investigate new avenues for democratic politics, possibilities that emerge as modernist ideas about progress, justice and the common good lose their ability to guide contemporary thought and action. This book will be of interest to philosophers, political scientists, those doing research on technology and society, engineers studying human factors, environmental scientists, sociologists. (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)

With the shift from a society dominated mass media toward a media landscape of targeted messages, mediated social relations are also transformed. This article addresses a civil society increasingly mediated by advanced marketing communication technologies, analyzing the democratic consequences of information flows constituting new forms of social interaction. It is suggestive to think of advanced marketing technologies not as discreet components and legal codes, but as representational technologies that allow the coordination of a variety of sophisticated knowledge (...) specialties, and as laboratories that structure the relationships, possibilities, and options for managers, technicians, viewers, and distributors. By conceptualizing issues of privacy with the focus on the creation and impact of social categories, we have a chance to make the marketing representations and laboratories constructed by concentrated powers less opaque and more open to joint creation. (shrink)

The object of the study is artificial intelligence technology in Chinese show business. The subject of the study is the following technologies of Chinese show business, at the basis of which we can find an artificial intelligence: virtual idols, digital avatars, virtual influencers. The following aspects of these technologies are considered in detail: making a profit, strengthening national identity. Special attention is focused on the fact that the development of artificial intelligence technology is part of the state policy (...) of the People's Republic of China, which is reflected in the country's regulatory legal acts. The theoretical basis of the study is the work of the following authors: A.M. Gridnev, G. A. Ioakimidi, M. D. Pysin, K. F. Lee, H. Khan and others. The following methods are used in the article: analysis of special literature, publications of mass media, normative legal acts, synthesis, deduction. The study showed that virtual idols and influencers such as "Xiangwan Big Devil", digital copies of celebrities (B. Sa, S. Zhu, B. Gao, Ya. Long) and presenter Xiao Xi bring additional profits and attract an audience, as well as strengthen the national image and unity of China. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the detailed systematization of information and cultural analysis of the phenomenon of "virtual influencer", which is gaining popularity in the modern digital world. The results of the study provide valuable data for the development and implementation of artificial intelligence strategies in China, especially in such areas as industry, defense, social sphere and show business. These findings contribute to the formation of standards and ethical principles for artificial intelligence, which is critically important for the successful digital transformation of the country. The study highlights China's strategic goals of using AI as a driver of modernization of the national economy by 2030. The document identifies key stages of development and goals, including the development of standards and the widespread introduction of AI in various sectors. China views AI as an important tool to strengthen its position on the world stage, striving to become a leader in high technology, which will undoubtedly have a significant impact on the global economy and the development of technological innovations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY: A REVIEW DISCUSSION [I]t seems to me that Schema 18 [preparatory draft for the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] needs to rest on a deeper realization of the urgent problems posed by technology.... (The Constitution on Mass Media seems to have been totally innocent of any such awareness.) For one thing, the whole massive complex (...) of technology, which reaches into every aspect of social life today, implies a huge organization of which no one is really in control, and which dictates its own solutions irrespective of human needs or even reason.... I am not of course saying that technology is "bad," and that progress is something to be feared. But I am saying that behind the cloak of specious myths about technology and progress, there seems to be at work a vast uncontrolled power which is leading man where he does not want to go... and in which the Church... ought to be somewhat more aware of the intervention of the "principalities and powers" of which St. Paul speaks. -Thomas Merton, Letter to Bernard Haring (December ~6, 1964) l WHEN A DRAFT of the United States Roman Catholic bishops' proposed pastoral letter on human values was circulated to philos·ophy teachers at Catholic colleges in 1975, one respondent took the occasion to suggest that what was needed was not another geneml restatement of " human values " or a piecemeal analysis of specific issues (unemployment, artificial contraception, abortion, nuclear weapons, etc.) but something intermediate-work toward the development of an ethics of technology.2 Unbeknown i The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, selected and edited by William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), pp. 383-384. 2 The pastoral subsequently appeared as To Live in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Reflection on the Moral Life (Washington, DC: U.S. Catholic Conference, November 1976). 146 TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY 147 to himself, he had voiced a concern similar to that expressed by Thomas Merton a decade earlier. With the publication another decade later of Technological Powers and the Person: Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technology,3 the proceedings of a workshop for Catholic bishops by the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center (then in St. Louis, now in Boston) there is evidence that this need is being increasingly recognized. Working from cmss-disciplinary analyses of two commonly un-associaited issues-nuclear energy and reproductive technologies (i.e., the ostensibly positive correlates 0£ nuclear weapons and artificial contraception)-Technological Powers and the Person seeks to formulaite general guidelines for the engagement with modern technology. Two specific technologies are rightly seen as related aspects of a global phenomenon, and philosophical anthropology is properly proposed as the foundation for ethical principles. Although aspects of this assessment may well be criticized, the general approach-a.s well as this particular workshop and the form of its final proceedingsdeserve commendation. 'Vhat follows, then, are some comments on format and substantive content aimed at furthering such a project. 1. The workshop itself (which was held in Dallas, Texas) was opened on the evening of January 31, 1983, with a keynote address by Christopher Derrick, a Catholic layman from England who has written on moral and religious issues of cuLture s Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P., Donald G. McCarthy, Edward J. Bayer, S.T.D., Michael P. McDonough, S.T.D., and Larry D. Lossing, eds., Technological Powers and the Person: Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technologies (St. Louis, MO: Pope John Center, 1983). Pp. xiii, 500. This is the third in a series. Previous proceedings are New Technologies of Birth and Death (196 pages, from a 1980 workshop) and Human Sexuality and Personhood (254 pages, from a 1981 workshop), both published by the Pope John Center; as the titles and pages alone indicate, neither has the scope of the present volume. 148 CARL MITCHAl\1 and eoology.4 Together with a general overview of the workshop by the senior editor, Derrick's address constitutes part ooo of the proceedings. His fundamental question concerns whether there might not be an "inordinate attachment to temporal good... (shrink)

I will argue in this paper that Andrew Feenberg has erred in his claim on technological adaptability. Adapting to modern technology may not always be liberating. Drawing from his reflections on Heidegger and Marcuse, I will explain why Feenberg thinks that adaptability has a redemptive role in the midst of technological domination. I will also show why technological domination still characterizes human relations in the modern age. Advanced technologies including social media, have continued to manipulate people and as (...) such, diminish rather than deepen the authenticity of human life. For instance, two people in a café sometimes spend more time on their smartphones rather than valuing their face-to-face encounter; here, one can point out the lack of authenticity in human relations. This clearly manifests how consumer culture has taken over human life. In addition, it can be said that the notion of adaptability also fails to account for the hegemonic social relations created by modern technological innovations, since these gadgets remain beyond the reach of the masses, thus broadening the divide between classes of people in society. In order to address this, I propose that people should use technology in a socially sensitive way in order to truly give meaning to their lives and to effectively resist the totalitarian tendency of the modern age. (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)

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 goal of the book is to present the latest research on the new challenges of data technologies. It will offer an overview of the social, ethical and legal problems posed by group profiling, big data and predictive analysis and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to address them. In doing so, it will help the reader to gain a better grasp of the ethical and legal conundrums posed by group profiling. The volume first maps the (...) current and emerging uses of new data technologies and clarifies the promises and dangers of group profiling in real life situations. It then balances this with an analysis of how far the current legal paradigm grants group rights to privacy and data protection, and discusses possible routes to addressing these problems. Finally, an afterword gathers the conclusions reached by the different authors and discuss future perspectives on regulating new data technologies. (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)

This book explores the transformational impact of new technological developments on legal practice. More specifically, it addresses knowledge management, communication, and e-discovery related technologies, and helps readers develop the project management and data analysis skills needed to effectively navigate the current, and future, landscapes. It studies the impact of current trends on business practices, as well as the ethical, procedural, and evidentiary concerns involved. Introducing novel interactive technologies as well as traditional content, the book reflects expertise from across the legal (...) industry, including practitioners, the bench, academia, and legal technology consultants. All of the contributing authors currently teach aspiring lawyers and/or paralegals and have identified a gap in the available instructional material. Rapid technology advances have radically changed the way we all live and work, and the legal profession is by no means exempt from the impact of these changes. In order to better assist their clients, and to better compete on the legal market, it is imperative for lawyers to understand the ethical, functional, and business consequences of new technologies on their respective practices. This book provides the necessary content by including legal technology texts, information about novel pedagogical technologies, helpful tools for managing legal technologies and IT staff, statistical methods, tips and checklists. (shrink)

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)

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)

The face is a component of an individual’s image, and as such it belongs to the attributes of a person’s identity. The spread of photography and other means of recording the image of a person’s face have been accompanied by an increase in the scale of threats of unauthorized intrusion into the sphere of individual privacy. The nature and frequency of the manifestations of interference with privacy are significantly influenced by the Internet and easy access to mass media, (...) including electronic media, in the information society. These phenomena are also becoming apparent in the field of employment. With the development of modern technologies used in workplaces to process personal data and control employees, the threat of unwarranted intrusion into the sphere of privacy of a person performing subordinate work is constantly increasing—not only by the employer, but also by third parties. Nowadays, one-, two- and three-dimensional images of the employee’s face are processed, including the use of biometric techniques. This paper attempts to show the limits of permissible interference in the sphere of employee privacy in connection with the recording, processing and sharing of images of the employee’s face using modern technologies. The subject of the analysis will be the solutions in EU and national law; in particular, those regulations concerning the protection of an employee’s personal data. The formal-dogmatic method is the basic research tool used to achieve the research objective. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have devoted more attention to the “prophetic” critique of mass media. Clifford Christians has served as both an originator and an ongoing contributor to these discussions. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on Jacques Ellul, a concern for the prophetic has been a consistent thread throughout his career. This paper begins by examining Ellul's influence on Christians's approach, with an emphasis on media ecology, ontology, and the concept of technique. I then summarize Christians's critique (...) of Ellul, and explain how his unique vision addresses Ellul's shortcomings. In outlining Christians's unique approach, I highlight the ways in which authenticity serves as an axial value permeating his work. In Christians's work, prophetic witness against technological fetishism is a means of protecting certain universal values such as “cultural continuity” and “authentic Being.” Through a brief examination of media coverage of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Jim Wallis, and the United Church of Christ, I show how Christians's discussion of authenticity and prophetic critique are not only applicable but uniquely relevant in the emerging new media environment. At this critical juncture in media, Christians's prophetic voice is among the most relevant and necessary that critical scholarship has to offer. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together a series of interdisciplinary contributions in the field of Information Technology Law. The topics addressed in this book cover a wide range of theoretical and practical legal issues that have been created by cutting-edge Internet technologies, primarily Big Data, the Internet of Things, and Cloud computing. Consideration is also given to more recent technological breakthroughs that are now used to assist, and - at times - substitute for, human work, such as automation, robots, sensors, (...) and algorithms. The chapters presented in this edition address these issues from the perspective of different legal backgrounds. The first part of the book discusses some of the shortcomings that have prompted legislators to carry out reforms with regard to privacy, data protection, and data security. Notably, some of the complexities and salient points with regard to the new European General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) and the new amendments to the Japan's Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) have been scrutinized. The second part looks at the vital role of Internet intermediaries (or brokers) for the proper functioning of the globalized electronic market and innovation technologies in general. The third part examines an electronic approach to evidence with an evaluation of how these technologies affect civil and criminal investigations. The authors also explore issues that have emerged in e-commerce, such as Bitcoin and its blockchain network effects. The book aims to explain, systemize and solve some of the lingering legal questions created by the disruptive technological change that characterizes the early twenty-first century. (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)

Why do we understand media the way we do? Sometimes we think about media simply as means of communication and instruments of human creativity. At other times we understand media as powerful technologies that influence human culture and that can even govern how we think and act. Dominic Boyer grapples with these complexities in Understanding Media, where he questions what our different strategies of engaging media actually tell us about media, their messages and powers." (...) "Understanding Media explores, in a serious yet entertaining way, our common habits of thinking about the presence and significance of media in our lives. Offering analysis of the philosophical and social foundations of contemporary media theory as well as everyday strategies of knowing media, it addresses the advantages and limitations of different ways of understanding media. Boyer also reflects on the practical issue of how we can know media better than we do."--Jacket. (shrink)

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular (regressive fascist) type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another (progressive communist) type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and (...) aesthetics also changes. Benjamin analyzes dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology. (shrink)

Until the end of the last century, media sociology was synonymous with the investigation of mass media as a social domain. Today, media sociology needs to address a much higher level of complexity, that is, a deeply mediatized world in which all human practices, social relations, and social order are entangled with digital media and their infrastructures. This article discusses this shift from a sociology of mass communication to the sociology of a deeply mediatized (...) world. The principal aim of the article is to outline a new media-sociological imagination: media sociology as a cross-sectional sociology, a sociology of entanglement, and a new critical sociology of technological deep structures. (shrink)

There has been a surge in mass media reports extolling the potential for using three-dimensional printing of biomaterials to treat a wide range of clinical conditions. Given that mass media is recognized as one of the most important sources of health and medical information for the general public, especially prospective patients, we report and discuss the ethical consequences of coverage of 3D bioprinting in the media. First, we illustrate how positive mass media narratives (...) of a similar biofabricated technology, namely the Macchiarini scaffold tracheas, which was involved in lethal experimental human trials, influenced potential patient perceptions. Second, we report and analyze the positively biased and enthusiastic portrayal of 3D bioprinting in mass media. Third, we examine the lack of regulation and absence of discussion about risks associated with bioprinting technology. Fourth, we explore how media misunderstanding is dangerously misleading the narrative about the technology. (shrink)