Curious Conversations: Henry Mayhew and the Street-Sellers in the Media Ecology of London Labour and the London Poor

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna M Herdman
Keyword(s):  
Media Ecology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Henry Mayhew

Abstract Henry Mayhew is renowned as the chronicler and historian of London street-sellers and poor labourers. However, Mayhew’s relationships with his subjects, and their influence on the development of London Labour and the London Poor, is less often discussed. This article examines Mayhew’s productive and disruptive friendships, collaborations, and disagreements with the London poor, and situates these exchanges within the layered print and oral texts that comprise the extensive media ecology of London Labour. I argue that through their disruptive collaborations with Mayhew, some street-sellers, including Charles Alloway, memorialized as ‘The Crippled Street-Seller of Nut-Meg Graters’, strategically harnessed the media forms of London Labour for profitable self-representation. In contrast, a group of street-sellers known as the Street Traders’ Protection Association mobilized against Mayhew and critiqued his representations of their class. These disruptive collaborations reveal underlying kinships and conflicts between Mayhew and the street-folk, thus destabilizing his reputation as a neutral and authoritative observer in the history of poverty.

McLuhan | Havelock | metaphysics

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Chrystall
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Tribal Culture ◽  
Anniversary Issue ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
20Th Anniversary

The McLuhan ⇔ Havelock correspondence turns on a question about the meaning(s) of events that transpired in Greece during the Archaic and High-Classical period – perhaps the only time and circumstance in which the metaphysical and independent human being had been able to manifest themself amidst the vast amorphous resonance of tribal culture. Here, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary issue of Explorations in Media Ecology, this article uses the correspondence between two leading figures in the Media Ecology (anti-)canon as a leaping off point to talk about metaphysics and media. The focus is McLuhan. This article offers a portrait that shows the significance, if not centrality, of (Christian) metaphysics to McLuhan’s project, and how his metaphysical commitments inform and shape his ethics, politics and pedagogy. This article also makes the claims that: (1) McLuhan, in his theory and practice, asserted the primacy of mediation with respect to thinking about being and knowing, and (2) McLuhan’s insertion of media into metaphysics stands as an invitation to revisit and revise the history of metaphysics, especially when, under digital conditions, the merging of all pasts and presents is well advanced.

Modernism and the Media History of Obscenity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Media History ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Lady Chatterley's Lover ◽  
The Way

This chapter surveys the history of obscenity in English jurisprudence, from the invention of obscene libel as a crime in the eighteenth century through the 1857 Obscene Publications Act and its 1959 reform. It draws on Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler to argue that the invention of obscenity, and its subsequent definitions and redefinitions, reflect changes in media ecology and technology. It begins by examining the 1960 trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, before surveying the history of obscenity, and concluding with readings of the way the technologically mediated character of obscenity is reflected in both James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.

Selfi es

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Role Expectations ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Front Stage

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

Methods of Communicative Intention Explication of the Phraseological Unit with Biblical Expression «Forbidden Fruit» (Diachronic Section)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-76
Author(s):  
Olga Lomakina ◽  
Oksana Shkuran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Communicative Intention ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Media Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Semantic Value ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Good And Evil

The article analyzes methods of explication of the traditional and widely used stable biblical expression «forbidden fruit». The study is based on a diachronic section – from the interpretation of the biblical text to the communicative intention of dialogue participants in the media space illustrating nuclear and peripheral meanings. The analysis includes biblical texts that realize the archetypal meaning of the biblical expression «forbidden fruit» in which it is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The secularized interest in the kind of tree, on which forbidden fruits grew, is motivated by a realistic presentation of a sad history of the first people’s fall in the Book of Genesis. Scientific hypotheses have their origins since the Middle Ages, when artists recreated the author’s story of eating the forbidden fruit. For religion, the variety of the fruit is not of fundamental importance, however, visualization in the works of art has become an incentive for the further use of the biblical expression with a new semantic segment. Modern media texts actively represent the transformation of the biblical expression«forbidden fruit» for different purposes: in advertising texts for pragmatic one, in informative, educational, ideological texts for cognitive one, in entertaining textsfor communicative one, lowering the spiritual and semantic value register of the modern language. Therefore, the process of desemantization and profanization of the biblical expression results in the destruction of national stereotypes in Russian people’s worldview.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

How Scientists Communicate

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Scientific Communication ◽  
Scientific Publication ◽  
Good Communication ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conference Presentations ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Broad Overview

What is scientific research? It is the process by which we learn about the world. For this research to have an impact, and positively contribute to society, it needs to be communicated to those who need to understand its outcomes and significance for them. Any piece of research is not complete until it has been recorded and passed on to those who need to know about it. So, good communication skills are a key attribute for researchers, and scientists today need to be able to communicate through a wide range of media, from formal scientific papers to presentations and social media, and to a range of audiences, from expert peers to stakeholders to the general public. In this book, the goals and nature of scientific communication are explored, from the history of scientific publication; through the stages of how papers are written, evaluated, and published; to what happens after publication, using examples from landmark historical papers. In addition, ethical issues relating to publication, and the damage caused by cases of fabrication and falsification, are explored. Other forms of scientific communication such as conference presentations are also considered, with a particular focus on presenting and writing for nonspecialist audiences, the media, and other stakeholders. Overall, this book provides a broad overview of the whole range of scientific communication and should be of interest to researchers and also those more broadly interested in the process how what scientists do every day translates into outcomes that contribute to society.

Readers' Liberation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Freedom Of Information ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Investigative Journalism ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right ◽  
Promotion Campaigns

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. For the Internet and digitial generation, the most basic human right is the freedom to read. The Web has indeed brought about a rapid and far-reaching revolution in reading, making a limitless global pool of literature and information available to anyone with a computer. At the same time, however, the threats of censorship, surveillance, and mass manipulation through the media have grown apace. Some of the most important political battles of the twenty-first century have been fought--and will be fought--over the right to read. Will it be adequately protected by constitutional guarantees and freedom of information laws? Or will it be restricted by very wealthy individuals and very powerful institutions? And given increasingly sophisticated methods of publicity and propaganda, how much of what we read can we believe? This book surveys the history of independent sceptical reading, from antiquity to the present. It tells the stories of heroic efforts at self-education by disadvantaged people in all parts of the world. It analyzes successful reading promotion campaigns throughout history (concluding with Oprah Winfrey) and explains why they succeeded. It also explores some disturbing current trends, such as the reported decay of attentive reading, the disappearance of investigative journalism, 'fake news', the growth of censorship, and the pervasive influence of advertisers and publicists on the media--even on scientific publishing. For anyone who uses libraries and Internet to find out what the hell is going on, this book is a guide, an inspiration, and a warning.

Political and Economic History of Land-Grabs in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peer Ghulam Nabi Suhail
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
The State ◽  
Developmental Approach ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

This chapter begins with tracing the roots of colonialism in India, followed by understanding its various structures and processes of resource-grabbing. It argues, that India has largely followed the colonial approach towards land appropriation. After independence, although the Indian state followed a nationalistic path of development, the developmental approach of the state was far from being pro-peasant and/or pro-ecology. In a similar fashion, hydroelectricity projects in Kashmir, developed by NHPC from 1970s, have been displacing thousands of peasants from their lands and houses. Despite this, they are yet to become a major debate in the media, in the policy circles, or in academia in India.

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