Empathy and Togetherness Online Compared to IRL: A Phenomenological Account

In this paper I aim to show with the aid of philosophers Edith Stein and Peter Goldie, how empathy and other social feelings are instantiated and developed in real life versus on the Internet. The examples of on-line communication show both how important the embodied aspects of empathy are and how empathy may be possible also in the cases of encountering personal stories rather than personal bodies. Since video meetings, social media, online gaming and other forms of interaction via digital technologies are taking up an increasing part of our time, it is important to understand how such forms of social intercourse are different from in real life (IRL) meetings and why they can accordingly foster not only new communal bonds but also hatred and misunderstanding.

Friendship

This chapter considers “On the most intimate union of love and respect in friendship”—Kant’s conclusion to the preceding Elements of Ethics comprised of duties to oneself and to others. Kant first describes the elements of an ideal friendship which, as ideal, cannot be realized by human beings, yet it can serve as a standard for evaluating human friendships. He then proceeds to describe the elements of humanly possible “moral friendships” that strive toward a balance of love and respect, pointing out the difficulties in achieving them. This chapter elaborates on Kant’s behalf these types of friendship. It then proceeds to discuss Kant’s appendix on the virtues of social intercourse and their role in moral life.

The Motivations of Learning Foreign Languages: A Descriptive Case Study of Polyglots

Polyglots are extraordinary people in terms of language ability. Therefore, it is interesting to academically explore their motivations for learning several languages. This research is novel compared to previous studies because scant extant research exists of polyglots’ motivation for learning several languages. To this end, researchers collected data from semi structured interviews obtained from five informants. The method that we used was a descriptive case study. Findings showed that the polyglots’ motivation for learning multiple foreign languages were (a) pleasure, (b) social intercourse, (c) professional purposes, and (d) academic purposes. Mostly, the previous research revealed that motivation for people learning foreign languages were for social interaction, professional reasons, and academic purposes. Meanwhile, the motivation of polyglots for learning many languages besides those three motivations was for pleasure. This is the key point behind their commitment to sustainable multiple language learning.

Research and Practice of Agricultural Product Quality Traceability Social Intercourse Application

The social intercourse application of agricultural product quality traceability is facing historical opportunities such as the growth of member agriculture, consumption upgrading and grading, rapid development of social media and social services in the current internet era. This research divides the users of social intercourse application of agricultural product quality traceability into producers, consumers and distributors, and points out that the application should have the features of being open and easy to spread, free of charge and easy to access, interesting and attractive, real-time and interactive and for dissemination, it can be carried out through searching and subscribing the producers, recording and forwarding the content, as well as scanning agricultural product traceability QR code. Based on the above-mentioned methods and ideas, the “Nongdu Easy to Trace” Wechat program based on Wechat platform has been developed and has been widely promoted and used in many provinces in China.

MASCULINITY IN A POSTMODERN TEXT: CONCEPT, IDENTITY, CHARACTER

The paper considers masculinity representation in a postmodern text. The author reveals the theoretical background of the origin and development of masculinity studies as a branch of gender research. The key parameters of masculinity include sexual, social, cultural, national, and age components. Specific traits of masculine personages are explicated in postmodern texts of different styles. Masculinity is treated as an objectivated realization of androcentrism which loses its dominant positions in the bipolar world of gender dichotomy due to the postmodern transformations of the outlook. It acquires the features which form a new image of a man in consciousness, community, and a text. The paper proves that contemporary society does not possess gender polarity, it witnesses weakening of “hegemonic masculinity” and diffusion of boundaries between men and women as subjects of social intercourse. There appear new aspects of masculinity which destroy male stereotypes; masculinity splits into plurality of identities often being polarized inside this sex-gender group. The paper reveals the characters framed linguistically in a text. Resulting from restructured social relations and reestimation of values, they turn up not as a traditional character of a father in a literary text but a “divorced father” who performs his father’s duties remotely as a spouse, a “domestic partner”, “ex-husband”, and/or “lover (boyfriend)”. All the newly formed gender identities and the corresponding text constructs obtain relevant lingual nominations. Analysis of dictionary definitions enables to fix the correlation between the systemic meaning of masculine gender identities and their contextual semantics. The article concludes that postmodern masculinity is no longer interpreted as a biologically determined entity but rather as a performative option of a personal choice.

Chapter IV

What vain weather-cocks we are! I, who had determined to hold myself independent of all social intercourse, and thanked my stars that, at length, I had lighted on a spot where it was next to impracticable—I, weak wretch, after maintaining till dusk a struggle...

A Bichannel Transformer with Context Encoding for Document-Driven Conversation Generation in Social Media

Along with the development of social media on the internet, dialogue systems are becoming more and more intelligent to meet users’ needs for communication, emotion, and social intercourse. Previous studies usually use sequence-to-sequence learning with recurrent neural networks for response generation. However, recurrent-based learning models heavily suffer from the problem of long-distance dependencies in sequences. Moreover, some models neglect crucial information in the dialogue contexts, which leads to uninformative and inflexible responses. To address these issues, we present a bichannel transformer with context encoding (BCTCE) for document-driven conversation. This conversational generator consists of a context encoder, an utterance encoder, and a decoder with attention mechanism. The encoders aim to learn the distributed representation of input texts. The multihop attention mechanism is used in BCTCE to capture the interaction between documents and dialogues. We evaluate the proposed BCTCE by both automatic evaluation and human judgment. The experimental results on the dataset CMU_DoG indicate that the proposed model yields significant improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines on most of the evaluation metrics, and the generated responses of BCTCE are more informative and more relevant to dialogues than baselines.

Face Masks in the New COVID-19 Normal: Materials, Testing, and Perspectives

The increasing prevalence of infectious diseases in recent decades has posed a serious threat to public health. Routes of transmission differ, but the respiratory droplet or airborne route has the greatest potential to disrupt social intercourse, while being amenable to prevention by the humble face mask. Different types of masks give different levels of protection to the user. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has even resulted in a global shortage of face masks and the raw materials that go into them, driving individuals to self-produce masks from household items. At the same time, research has been accelerated towards improving the quality and performance of face masks, e.g., by introducing properties such as antimicrobial activity and superhydrophobicity. This review will cover mask-wearing from the public health perspective, the technical details of commercial and home-made masks, and recent advances in mask engineering, disinfection, and materials and discuss the sustainability of mask-wearing and mask production into the future.

Internet Technology Exposure, Social Intercourse Patterns, and Student Characters

This study aims to determine the effect of internet technology on student characters, as well as the influence of social intercourse patterns on their characters. The study used a survey method of 77 students at a religious school in Cilacap, Indonesia. Data were collected using questionnaires, interviews, and observation techniques. The results showed; First, exposure to internet technology has a negative effect on student character. The higher internet technology exposure, the worse students character. This is indicated by the correlation coefficient of -0.507 and is significant at the significance level of 0.05. Second, the social intercourse pattern affects the character of students. The tighter of social intercourse pattern, the better the character of students, conversely the more free the students' social intercourse, the worse their character. This conclusion is obtained from the correlation coefficient of 0.737 and is significant at the significance level of 0.05. Third, exposure to internet technology and social intercourse patterns simultaneously have a significant effect on student character. This conclusion is obtained from the multiple correlation coefficient of 0.752, which is significant at the 0.05 level.