scholarly journals «У РОБОТІВ – СВОЇ КАЗКИ» (РОБОТОТЕХНІЧНА ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА В СОЦІОКУЛЬТУРНОМУ ПРОСТОРІ ХХ – ПОЧАТКУ ХХІ СТ.)

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
М. Т. Братерська-Дронь

Robotic problems are one of the most relevant in contemporary socio-cultural space. Mechanical man appeared in the cultural traditions of our civilization repeatedly. Its invariance is found even in the Upanishads, Kabbalah, the myths of Ancient Greece.However, the theme of an artificial man in his modern work-engineering interpretation made the first step in the world from the easy hand of Karel Chapek, in his play «R.U.R.» (1920). It is the Czech writer introducing the term «robot» (in English translation). In essence, Karel Chapek in the early twentieth century. has defined the main philosophical aspects of modern robotics. In this aspect, one should also mention the film by F. Lang «Metropolis» (1926), which dumped the work of technical topics to the general public.The scientific and technological revolution that began after the Second World War expanded the imaginary possibilities of traditional science, determined the new technical perspectives of modern civilization, and at the same time meant the so-called related or negative trends of its development.In1941, A. Azimov in the story «The Liar!» postulates the main laws-tables of work equipment, starting a series of short stories called «I’m a robot». At the same time there is the term «work engineering».In the 1960s, collections of Stories by S. Lemah «Sum of Technologies», «Fairy Tales of Robots», «Kyberiada» were published. In these works the main character becomes a robot. Like an English writer, S. Lem is trying to reproduce, so to speak, a formula not only purely human, but also artificial intelligence.At the end of the 1950s, US engineers M. E. Klynse and N. S. Clin were working on the problem of human adaptation to the conditions of space and other planets. In the study, they concluded that the best way to solve this problem could be to combine man and work. Thus came the term «cyborg». From then on the robotic topic will be directly related to the space.On this wave appeared a feature film by S. Kubrick «2001: Space Odyssey» (1968), filmed in the scenario of the science fiction writer A. Clark, in which the confrontation between man and machine goes to survival.Even more gloomy coloring, the work-related problem is acquired in the film by R. Scott «Running on the razor blade» (1982). Apocalyptic motifs are more and more popular. Cyborgs become not just opponents of man, but fierce enemies of all mankind, threatening to destroy the civilization of their creators, about which, in particular, eloquently told the film D. Cameron «Terminator» (1984), etc.And finally, today, perhaps the most painful question was the probable cyberhization of the person himself, as evidenced by the onset of transhumanism. So where are the boundaries of the anthropic existence of man, which is merged with artificial technology, and therefore – what is the prospect of the development of modern civilization?Today it is impossible to deny that the working-engineering perspective acquires new aspects. The robot gradually creates more and more competition to a person. This is the economic sphere, the types of labor in which the robot is increasingly replacing a person. This is the intellectual and biological plane in which the robot can give the forefront a human species. From here, the sphere of social life, in which the robot should occupy its place, so to speak its «social cell», is actualized. And the main thing is the sphere of morality. And if robots are quite likely to lack understanding of human morality, then they will probably shape their ideas about the system of views and ideas, norms and evaluations that govern behavior. And what forms the co-evolution of man and machines can be guessed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zuzana Kvetanová ◽  
Jana Radošinská

The feature film Aquaman (2018, directed by James Wan) is the most commercially successful superhero movie belonging to the DC Extended Universe. Produced by DC Films and Warner Bros. Pictures, the motion picture portrays a rebellious superhero with an extraordinary physical presence. The paper aims to reflect on the movie Aquaman and its ability to function as a late modern fairy tale. Aquaman’s genre structure includes elements of fantasy, science-fiction and action film. However, the authors work with the assumption that the story is, in its nature, a fairy tale involving late modern means of expression. The first part of the text is largely theoretical, outlining the movie’s importance and defining the genre of a fairy tale in the context of late modern culture. Following the given line of thought, the second part of the paper presents a narrative analysis of the film in question, which is based on Propp’s morphology of fairy tales.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Fuhg

The emergence and formation of British working-class youth cultures in the 1960s were characterized by an ambivalent relationship between British identity, global culture and the formation of a multicultural society in the post-war decades. While national and local newspapers mostly reported on racial tensions and racially-motivated violence, culminating in the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the relationship between London's white working-class youth and teenagers with migration backgrounds was also shaped by a reciprocal, direct and indirect, personal and cultural exchange based on social interaction and local conditions. Starting from the Notting Hill Riots 1958, the article reconstructs places and cultural spheres of interaction between white working-class youth and teenagers from Caribbean communities in London in the 1960s. Following debates and discussions on race relations and the participation of black youth in the social life of London in the 1960s, the article shows that British working-class youth culture was affected in various ways by the processes of migration. By dealing with the multicultural dimension of the post-war metropolis, white working-class teenagers negotiated socio-economic as well as political changes, contributing in the process to an emergent, new image of post-imperial Britain.


Author(s):  
Banita Lal ◽  
Yogesh K. Dwivedi ◽  
Markus Haag

AbstractWith the overnight growth in Working from Home (WFH) owing to the pandemic, organisations and their employees have had to adapt work-related processes and practices quickly with a huge reliance upon technology. Everyday activities such as social interactions with colleagues must therefore be reconsidered. Existing literature emphasises that social interactions, typically conducted in the traditional workplace, are a fundamental feature of social life and shape employees’ experience of work. This experience is completely removed for many employees due to the pandemic and, presently, there is a lack of knowledge on how individuals maintain social interactions with colleagues via technology when working from home. Given that a lack of social interaction can lead to social isolation and other negative repercussions, this study aims to contribute to the existing body of literature on remote working by highlighting employees’ experiences and practices around social interaction with colleagues. This study takes an interpretivist and qualitative approach utilising the diary-keeping technique to collect data from twenty-nine individuals who had started to work from home on a full-time basis as a result of the pandemic. The study explores how participants conduct social interactions using different technology platforms and how such interactions are embedded in their working lives. The findings highlight the difficulty in maintaining social interactions via technology such as the absence of cues and emotional intelligence, as well as highlighting numerous other factors such as job uncertainty, increased workloads and heavy usage of technology that affect their work lives. The study also highlights that despite the negative experiences relating to working from home, some participants are apprehensive about returning to work in the traditional office place where social interactions may actually be perceived as a distraction. The main contribution of our study is to highlight that a variety of perceptions and feelings of how work has changed via an increased use of digital media while working from home exists and that organisations need to be aware of these differences so that they can be managed in a contextualised manner, thus increasing both the efficiency and effectiveness of working from home.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Kennett ◽  
Barbara Voorhies ◽  
Josue Gomez

We revisit the age and typological character of “Pox Pottery” that was reported in the 1960s by Charles Brush who considered it to be uniquely early (~2440 BC). Investigating the same two sites in coastal Guerrero where Brush excavated, we recovered Early Formative ceramics, some with the “pox” attribute. Here, we report potsherd frequencies for these deposits at both sites according to regional ceramic typologies, as well as AMS 14C dates used to establish a Bayesian stratigraphic chronology for each site to better constrain the age of these Early Formative period deposits. We argue that “Pox Pottery” is not a ceramic type per se and that the “pox” attribute occurs in multiple Early Formative period ceramic types. The earliest pottery is similar to other Red-on-Buff ceramic traditions from the Central Mexican Highlands and west of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Our chronological work demonstrates that these ceramics date between 1820 and 1400 cal BC, consistent with other recent studies indicating an early age of Red-on-Buff ceramics and suggesting shared cultural traditions distinct from the contemporary Locona interaction sphere that emerged in parallel.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Husam Alfahl

The use of mobile devices and smartphones is increasingly becoming a critical part of many people’s lifestyle. Such usage can vary from playing games to accomplishing work-related tasks. Being able to use organizations’ persuasive technologies via mobile business services or to achieve work-related tasks ubiquitously at any time means that such devices provide a valuable service, especially for employees who are working online. This paper explores the impact of mBusiness on the social life of employees. In the research, structural equation modeling was applied to validate the research model. Employees in Saudi organizations were surveyed to test the research hypotheses. The research results confirmed that there are some negative effects of using mBusiness technologies on the social life of employees. Based on the analysis, the findings revealed that addiction to mBusiness technologies significantly increases the perceived work overload, which also significantly increases work-family conflict. The paper concludes with some implications of this research.


Author(s):  
Надежда Степановна Коровина

Глубокая и прочная связь коми и русской сказочных традиций отмечалась неоднократно, вместе с тем конкретных разысканий по данной проблеме недостаточно. По этой причине в статье предпринята попытка исследовать особенности взаимодействия сказок соседних народов, принадлежащих к разным языковым семьям, но имеющих близкие культурные традиции. Материалом стал сказочный сюжет СУС 502 «Медный лоб». Проанализировав пять вариантов коми сказки, можно заметить, что в них реализованы все значимые эпизоды этого сюжетного типа. Однако наблюдения над коми региональным материалом меняют представление о стабильности законов народной сказки. При современном процессе затухания сказочной фольклорной традиции произошли изменения в наиболее устойчивой ее составляющей - сюжетно-композиционном строении. Широкое варьирование коми сказочниками сюжетов, образов, их трансформация привели к «новеллизации» некоторой части коми сказок, превращению их в авантюрно-фантастические устные повести. Традиционные сюжеты переосмыслялись прежде всего путем контаминации, а также путем сближения фольклорных сказок с русскими книжными произведениями. Приведенные примеры закономерных изменений отнюдь не говорят о полном разрушении его глубинной традиционной основы. Исследование показало, что коми сказочники имели представление о традиционной сказочной обрядности, широко ими пользовались, что во многом способствовало сохранению волшебной сказки как жанра. The strong connection between the Komi and Russian fairy tale traditions has been noted repeatedly, yet research on this issue is clearly insufficient. In this article the author attempts to define the interaction of fairy tales of these neighboring peoples which belong to different linguistic families but which have closely related cultural traditions. Its specific focus is fairy tale SUS number 502 “Copper Forehead.” It examines five Komi variants of the fairy tale that contain all of the significant elements of this plot type. Examination of the Komi material challenges the idea that the laws governing folktales are stable. With the fading of folkloric traditions, there have been changes in fairy tales’ most stable components, their plot and compositional structure. Komi storytellers have introduced changes that transform Komi fairy tales in the direction of “novelization,” turning them to some extent into oral tales of adventure and fantasy. Traditional stories are reinterpreted primarily due to contamination, including bringing folklore tales closer to those from Russian books. At the same time, these normal changes by no means indicate the complete destruction of Komi folklore’s deep traditional basis. The study also demonstrates that Komi storytellers have had a clear notion of traditional fairy-tale patterns and made wide use of them, which has largely contributed to the preservation of the fairy tale as a genre.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 529-548
Author(s):  
Anja Zlatović ◽  

The fear of death and the myth of immortality are themes long present in various narratives, whether literary or visual. Science fiction as a genre offers us many venues for new explorations of this idea. Mind uploading is one of them. This fictional technique, related to cloning, is performed when the mind and consciousness of a person are transferred to another biological body or machine with the help of technology. In this way, a person continues their social life through their brain functions. This paper looks at four separate recent screen narratives – the movies Self/less, Transcendence, and Replicas, and the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show Black Mirror. With the help of Tzvetan Todorov’s structural analysis, we find clauses that are present in all of the plots and see what ideas and topics they share. The paper also uses the idea of anthropological reading of science fiction and therefore uses scientific research to analyze these themes. By looking at anthropological findings of immortality, mortality, death in modern society, and digital techniques, we see how the analyzed narratives portray a unique mixture of fear of and longing for all the mentioned processes and ideas. Finally, this paper shows how science fiction could possibly reflect reality – both through presenting thoughts of society and inspiring future technological advances and ideas (in this case, the quest for immortality). While humans are still far from achieving eternal life, the mentioned screen narratives portray the growing stream of ideas that deal with mind uploading in the age of the internet and social media.


PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Radway

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.


Pravaha ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-123
Author(s):  
Lekha Nath Dhakal

This article attempts to explore the use of fantasy in literature and how it has attained the position of a literary category in the twentieth century. This work also concerns how as the form literature, it functions between wonderful and imitative to combine the elements of both. The article reveals that wonderful represents supernatural atmospheres and events. The story-telling is unrealistic which represents impossibility as it creates a wonderland. In the imitative or the realistic mode, the narrative imitates external reality. In it, the characters and situations are ordinary and real. Fantasy in literature does not escape the reality. It occurs in an interdependent relation to the real. In other words, the fantastic cannot exist independently of the real world that limits it. The use of fantastic mode in literature interrupts the conventional artistic representation and reproduction of perceivable reality. It embodies the reality and transgresses the standards of literary forming. It normally includes a variety of fictional works which use the supernatural and actually natural as well. The developers of fantasy fiction are fairy tales, science fiction about future wars and future world. A major instinct of fantastic fiction is the violence threatened by capitalist violation of personality that is spreading universally.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Bergrath ◽  
Tobias Strapatsas ◽  
Michael Tuemen ◽  
Thorsten Reith ◽  
Marc Deussen ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the severe respiratory distress syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) led to severe disruption in social life and economics. The present study should analyze the impact of the local COVID-19 epidemic on emergency resources for all hospitals in a major urban center (Moenchengladbach, Germany). Methods: An observational multicenter study was performed involving all four acute care hospitals. Systemic parameters department (ED) parameters from week 4 to 24 in 2020 were compared to the corresponding period in 2019 for each hospital and in a summative data analysis using a logistic regression model. Outcomes: ED visits, ED to hospital admission, ED to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission, medical specialties of admitted patients, work related accidents. Results: In week 9/2020 the first SARS-CoV-2 positive patients were detected in our region. All hospitals decided to minimize elective admissions to ensure operational capability for COVID-19 patients. The summative number of ED visits dropped from 34,659 to 28,008. Numbers decreased from week 8 on between 38% and 48% per week per hospital at the maximum and began to rise again from week 16 on. The pooled data analysis showed statistically significant decreases in outpatient ED visits (20,152 vs. 16,477, p=<0.001), hospital admissions of ED patients (14,507 vs. 11,531, p=<0.001), and work-related accidents (2,290 vs. 1,468, p=<0.001). The decrease in admissions from ED to ICU did not reach statistical significance (2,093 vs. 1,566, p=0.255). The decline in ED cases was mainly caused by a decrease in non-trauma and non-surgical patients. Conclusion: The regional COVID-19 outbreak led to significantly reduced ED contacts after the first COVID-19 cases appeared. Even the admissions to the hospitals and the number of ED to ICU-admissions decreased, which is potentially dangerous, because the ratio of emergency outpatients vs. inpatients remained stable. Therefore, one can assume that patients with severe medical problems did not seek ED care in many cases. The decline of patients was earlier than in other German hospitals and in contrast to the findings in the U.S. and Italy where ED visits and hospital admissions in medical disciplines increased.


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