Insightful Views
Transcultural Images?: Questioning the Global Image View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Holger Briel
For many years, the view existed that images can be understood globally, irrespective of the place of origin and/or place of consumption. Especially after WWII, social sciences and semiotics held on to that belief. Furthermore, it would seem that with the arrival of social media, this belief has been strengthened even more. Over the last 20 years or so, a budding counter-movement can be observed which is challenging this belief. Much of this is based on more recent studies, e.g. naming practices of object by Trobriand islanders (Russell, 2003), internet research on dress colours (Bleasdale, 2015); or the exchange and circulation of memes (Briel 2023). While it is true that science accepts a basic universal understanding of lines and shapes (Dolev, 2001), when visual cognition goes beyond these, cultural determinants take over. In my paper, I demonstrate how these culture-dependent visions are providing much needed insight into how cultural transmissions are working (or not), and why understanding this phenomenon is becoming ever more important in a world bracketed by and based on visual internet exchanges. I also introduce the concept of the VisionByte and enlarge upon is usability in vision studies.
The Digital Polis: Civic Participation in the 21st Century
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matias Sur, Joseph Rodriguez
In this paper, we describe how social media platforms have become the new centers of civic participation, leading to political polarization that poses serious risks to our democratic communities. Given these circumstances, social media has created a new digital locus for the daily transmitting, diffusing, and contesting of ideas. Before the digital age, citizens met in public spaces to exchange news and opinions in a shared hub of daily civic activity. However, now these public spaces of daily interaction among citizens have now shifted to the comment sections of photo and video posts on social media platforms. We call this the new “digital public forum", a new kind of virtual agora, a space for the constitution of a public forum. When examined closely, these platforms create the conditions and environment conducive to deliberative activity. But they also challenge analytically rigorous definitions of deliberation, and instead introduce us to new ways of thinking about deliberation online. We argue that, although social media sites help users unite through their status as “followers,” these “followers” do not comport by the same decorums they otherwise would in the non-digital public forum. Our argument is situated at the nexus between democratic theory and new media studies. If civic participation is relegated to the online sphere, divorced from everyday life, the notion of a citizen is transformed into a consumer. We no longer view each other as citizens. Consequently, democratic life is transformed into a dangerous game, a hallowing out of civic participation.
Travelling Concepts in Emotion Studies: The Case of Culture-specific Emotions in Finnish Literatures
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elise Nykanen
In her seminal study Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), Mieke Bal takes a convincing case for more nuanced and exciting interdisciplinary cultural analysis and use of concepts, which travel across disciplines and cultures. My paper focuses on the challenges and possibilities of interdisciplinary emotion studies. More precisely, the goal of my paper is to show how a cultural-sensitive approach to emotions in literature can work as a methodological tool for analyzing embodied, spatially situated affects and moods both in characterization and readerly experience. Humanities scholars, in general, have emphasized the cultural dimension of emotions, which are expressed and verbalized in certain ways in certain cultures and regions (e.g. Wierzbicka 1999). In my paper, I approach the affective aspects of the imagined North (Chartier 2007) through a case study of Finnish literature written in Finnish, Swedish, and Sami languages. I argue that culture-specific emotions ask for translation of the whole emotional culture and cultural scripts rather than just emotion words or imageries. Cultural specificity and variability in emotional experience and meaning also influence the affective styles of literary texts and genres, which are approached in my study not only as globally traveling models, but also fundamentally local and environmental.
