Media Theory Matters
Sousveillance: Filling the Legal Gap View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelly Wheeler
In the digital world, surveillance has become easier because of computer capabilities that can sort large amounts of public open data quickly. I am particularly interested in how issues of liberty bristle up against issues of safety and create friction as we look at the implications of projects designed to track, or map, behaviors. Specifically, I am interested in projects that track behavior deemed hateful or intimidating to minority groups. Because hateful acts often go unpunished unless they violate a law, i.e. vandalism, physical violence, property damage, or trespassing onto private property, to name a few, some groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), ThinkProgress, CITYLAB and ProPublica have taken it upon themselves to document these acts over varying amounts of time. The documentation of past events acts as a form of “tactical cartography” that seeks to cause introspection, conversation, and to alter future social behavior. Their mapping takes several forms, which will be explored briefly before examining how another project called The Swastika Monitor looks at the circulation of the swastika as an iconic symbol of hate. Through looking at The Swastika Monitor, I propose that these forms of mapping as a form of sousveillance fill a gap in the legal system, which neglects to address public spaces as spaces that could be conceived of as being hostile and therefore unsafe for minority groups.
Featured Media Ecology Theorists: A Comparison of the Ideas of Ong and Postman View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Akosua Frempong
When we think about media ecology, a number of names arise. Walter Ong and Neil Postman are two of those. Their most popular works, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business have made immense contributions to the discipline of media ecology. This paper examines the similarities and differences between both media ecologists, mainly based on both books. It assesses their ideas on epistemology, psychodynamics, and theology and media communication. It also compares both authors to their contemporaries, Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan. The paper evaluates how Ong and Postman, in particular, merged their faith with their scholarship. Both theorists privileged oral and written communication over visual or electronic means of communication, although their approaches to media ecology were different.
Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Language in Journalistic Communication? : An Analysis of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Journalistic Social Media Management View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Luca Serafini
Gamification, understood as the use of ludic mechanisms in non-ludic contexts, is seen today as a practice ingrained in new medias. The shift of journalism onto social networks has laid the foundations for a ludic communicative paradigm that revolves specifically around gaming mechanisms. Nevertheless, recent developments in artificial intelligence call for a partial redefinition of the term “gamification,” so as to situate it in its relations with machines and algorithms. For some time now, what are known as empathic media have signaled a turning point in the development of an emotional artificial intelligence, capable of eliciting and responding to the emotional states of consumers for commercial purposes. In recent years, this use of artificial emotional intelligence has also made its way into journalism on social networks. This communications channel builds on tools such as sensationalism, irony, and the creation of an empathetic connection with readers—centered on sharing a ludic, humorous paradigm of communication. In this instance, gamification is transformed into AI-gamification. Echobox, a social media platform based on artificial intelligence, used by media to communicate more efficiently with readers on social platforms, provides a case study by which to analyze this effort. I show the benefits and drawbacks of this shift from gamification to AI-gamification, examining in particular the capacities and limits of the algorithms in developing a ludic human language whose goal is to increase both users’ emotional involvement and the readership of the articles (and, consequently, the revenue) of the media outlets.
Measure in the Global Village: McLuhan as a Lens for Understanding Mathematics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Hessel Mial
Marshall McLuhan’s work has been well-extended to the study of writing, fitting McLuhan’s literary background and debt to early grammatological research. Less explored is the applicability of McLuhan’s core concepts to mathematics, despite the mediated nature of most acts of counting, measuring, reckoning, and patterning. This paper applies the foundational concepts of Understanding Media to measurement, drawing on two case studies in the history and anthropology of mathematics. The first case study, from the history of mathematics, explores historian Sebatai Unguru’s polemical call to engage ancient treatises in their original notation, a call that recognizes mathematical reasoning as inherently mediated. The second case study, from the anthropology of mathematics, turns to Marcia Ascher’s work cataloging graphs from non-Western mathematical traditions, as well as Ascher’s observation that such graphs frequently blend mathematics and poetic narrative. Examining such studies through McLuhan’s work, a properly mediated understanding of mathematics will suggest a much closer relationship between the verbal and the metrical, with important consequences for media theory, embodied poetics, and scientific epistemology. This study, written by a media scholar with a similar audience in mind, does not assume math literacy above algebra. Some clarifying terms from the philosophy of mathematics are defined early in the paper.
The Hypodermic Theory and the Operability of Lasswell’s Communication Model in a Time of Social Media: The Case of Charlottesville, USA, 2017 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paulo Bruno Alves
The communication model presented by Harold Lasswell in 1948, is one of the most important of the twentieth century. Concepts of the psychological theories were applied to him and it was organized around two basic themes of his investigation: analysis of the contents and analysis of the effects. His study opened space for several research sectors to appear, such as content analysis, effects analysis, audience analysis and control analysis. The overcoming of the hypodermic theory occurred when one began to analyze the individual as being more important than the group. After more than seven decades, we find out that Lasswell’s model is still remembered in certain moments nowadays. First of all, as the basis of journalistic writing. Today, at a time when social media demonstrates that information is more quickly transmitted, Lawssell’s model is still applied. See the case of Charlottesville, in August 2017 (more circumscribed to US national context, and long before the George Floyd’s worldwide case, in April 2021), as the tweets published by opinion leaders, such as Obama or Trump, demonstrated how their messages stuck with the effects produced by those who read them. In fact, the interventions of Donald Trump (2017-21), at the time of the facts President of the United States of America, as well as attention brought to the case by Barack Obama, former US Head of State (2009-17) and senators and politicians, showed how the American racial problem is still an open wound, as visible in the effect produced by their messages.
A Study about Memory and Perception from the Philosophy of Henri Bergson and the Context of the Digital View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Douglas Rossi Ramos
According to McLuhan, the Gutenberg galaxy is marked by the emergence of electronic media. The emergence of electronic media conditions this galaxy, where there is a conjuncture of a new tribalism marked by hybridism (man-machine) in which conditions of possibilities of partial identities are presented. Such hybridity brings the need to constitute categories of analysis to understand these new ways of being in the digital, since what we call "body", in its modern, unified, closed form, independent of the outside, would be unable to articulate or explain the experiences in digital networks. From this, categories recurrently approached by areas of knowledge such as psychology such as, for example, memory and perception, are also revisited and invoked by scholars of the media and the digital context. This paper discusses these categories, memory and perception, in the digital context, taking as reference the complex ontology of Philosopher Henri Bergson. Therefore, a reading of recent bibliographic material (28 articles, 5 dissertations and 2 theses) was carried out, which addresses the theme of the digital from discussions referenced by Henri Bergson. Among the results, it was possible to observe the transposition of the concept of matter in Bergson as an ecosystem constituted by a set of bodies or images and their spatial relationships, in their successive changes; in addition to the idea of a database as a chaotic center and a procedural mass updated from the present.
Shentu War: A Gaze at Chinese Netizen's Debate Regarding Northern Europe View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beibei Wu, Rong Wan
Northern Europe has been situated in a complicated context in the public sphere of China. The debate over symbolic Northern Europe originated in a once-thrived topic of interest forum (TIF)- Tieba. Though the world has witnessed the rise of China as a powerful country position in recent years, the debate did not die down. This paper is based on a case study, collecting data from multiple platforms, mainly Bilibili, a Chinese video-sharing website popular with youngsters. By applying content analysis (CA) and thematic analysis (TA), triangulated with critical discourse analysis, we attempt to reveal the controversy and coherence of Shen and Tu-two seemly dualistic groups, discursively and ideologically.
No Normal: Communication and Consequential Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Martin Laba
In visions of education and communication in a post-pandemic world, techno-utopian ideologies and discourse have been fuelled by the affordances and especially the economics of remote delivery. Indeed, such visions regard recovery as dependent on a comprehensive technological integration of all dimensions of civic life. In this aspirational mix, education is foundational, and as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt urges, we should "accelerate the trend toward remote learning" where proximity is neither required nor necessary. This is an unambiguous articulation of a "no touch future" to borrow Naomi Klein's phrase, a decisive prevalence of capitalized technology, and a contactless education driven by a faith in the ameliorative capacities of technology. While technology has understandably dominated responses to the vicissitudes for the pandemic, we have rather neglected critical issues of educational philosophy and practice that must inform and direct our future-facing educational priorities. The trepidatious return to pre-pandemic educational conventions should in fact be a critical moment for bold educational revision driven by the urgencies and pedagogies of "consequential" education. How do we activate students to be protagonists in their own education, and more broadly, their own civic lives? How do we develop and sustain learning motivated and animated by social change? As technology continues to be privileged as an educational "solution', the principles of embodied and democratic education become ever more urgent. This paper explores these questions and posits that communication studies are. key in the achievement of consequential education.
