Remediation of practices: How new media change the ways we see and do things in practical domains

First Monday ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovan Francesco Lanzara
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Video Recording ◽  
Apparent Distance ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Judicial Practice ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Media Change ◽  
The Relationship

Based on two ethnographic studies of technology-driven innovation in music education and judicial practice, in this paper I investigate the nature and meaning of mediation as a primary aspect of our way of experiencing and understanding reality. I explore what happens in an established domain of practice when the introduction of new technologies, such as the computer and video recording, requires practitioners to work with a new medium for carrying out their practices. In spite of the apparent distance of the two practical domains, music and the judicial, the two cases point to surprisingly similar phenomena affecting the nature of objects, the relationship between objects and their representations, and the perceptual and practical skills of the practitioners. The paper shows to what extent a practice is embedded in the medium and discusses the coping strategies that musicians and judges enact in order to make sense of and master the new media, and to reweave the ripped fabric of their practice.

Social Media and Elections in Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iginio Gagliardone
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global North ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

The analysis of the diffusion of social media in Africa and its relevance for politics has been caught in a paradox. On the one hand, social media have been saluted for their newness and for their ability, especially in connection with increasingly accessible portable tools such as mobile phones, to offer a level playing field for individuals to participate in politics and speak to power. On the other hand, this very enthusiasm has evoked relatively tired tropes used to frame the advent of other “new” technologies in the past, stressing what they could do to Africa, rather than exploring what they are doing in Africa. Early research on the relationship between social media and elections in Africa has tended to adopt normative frameworks adapted from the analysis of electoral contests in the Global North, presupposing unfettered citizens using social media to root for their leaders or demand accountability. A more recent wave of empirically grounded studies has embraced a greater conceptual and methodological pluralism, offering more space to analyze the contradictions in how social media are used and abused: how humor can be turned into a powerful tool to contest a type of power that appears overwhelming; or how armies of professional users have exploited people’s credulity of new media as “freer” from power to actually support partisan agenda. Interestingly, this latter approach has brought to light phenomena that have only recently caught global attention, such as the role of “fake news” and misinformation in electoral contests, but have played a determinant role in African politics for at least a decade.

scholarly journals Available in Selected Metros Only: Rural Melancholy and the Promise of Online Connectivity

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Gregg
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
New Media ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
Social And Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Civic Institutions

This article considers the benefits a cultural studies perspective can offer debates around rural and regional telecommunications provision. It begins with a critique of the metrocentrism dominant in recent scholarship of new media, arguing that academic, business and government discourses share progressivist assumptions in equating online connectivity with freedom. It highlights how the gap between the promotion of connectivity and actually existing infrastructure leads to an ontological resilience among rural residents who 'make do' with deferred promises of community and participation. The relationship this bears to the political subjectivities described in recent queer theory is briefly explored. The article develops to suggest that a parachute model of policy consultation privileges those in rural communities with the social and cultural capital to advance established interests – leaving the everyday lives of the majority of residents unrecognised. In encouraging ethnographic studies of technology use that spend time in rural locations, the paper concludes that the different priorities that drive country life – the prominence of environmental concerns, the importance of civic institutions, and above all, distance from the temporalities that dictate the terms for assessing political participation – offer important correctives to the ideologies of individualism and innovation that drive new media consumption.

Mega-events and mediatisation: between old and new media

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Roche
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
New Media ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
Mega Events ◽  
Media Change ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship

Sport mega-events are often referred to as being media-events. This chapter is concerned with the relationship particularly between Olympic mega-events and the media in a period of massive media change involving the digital revolution and the rise of the internet. The chapter’s discussion of these issues in the mediatisation of mega-events is in two parts. The first part is concerned with the changing nature of the media and wider social contexts in which the relationship between the Olympics and media has developed. On this basis it then looks at the symbiotic relationship which developed and continues to endure between the Olympics and the old media, particularly television. The second part introduces the changing social context involved in the growth of new media, together with the potential for the growth of positive relations, a new symbiosis, between the Olympics and the new media.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

AI Narratives

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imaginative Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real artificial intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. These chapters explore the revealing prehistory of key concerns of contemporary AI discourse, from the nature of mind and creativity to issues of power and rights, from the tension between fascination and ambivalence to investigations into artificial voices and technophobia. Part II focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerged alongside rapid developments in AI technology. These chapters reveal not only how AI narratives have consistently been entangled with the emergence of real robotics and AI, but also how they offer a rich source of insight into how we might live with these revolutionary machines. Through their close textual engagements, these chapters explore the relationship between imaginative narratives and contemporary debates about AI’s social, ethical, and philosophical consequences, including questions of dehumanization, automation, anthropomorphization, cybernetics, cyberpunk, immortality, slavery, and governance. The contributions, from leading humanities and social science scholars, show that narratives about AI offer a crucial epistemic site for exploring contemporary debates about these powerful new technologies.

Mediatizing Sex

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Thurlow
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Digital Discourse ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on sex/uality in the context of so-called new media and, specifically, digital discourse: technologically mediated linguistic or communicative practices, and mediatized representations of these practices. To help think through the relationship among sex, discourse, and (new) media, the discussion focuses on sexting and two instances of sexting “scandals” in the news. Against this backdrop, the chapter sets out four persistent binaries that typically shape public and academic writing about sex/uality and especially digital sex/uality: new-old, mediation-mediatization, private/real-public/fake, and personal-political. These either-or approaches are problematic, because they no longer account for the practical realities and lived experiences of both sex and media. Scholars interested in digital sex/uality are advised to adopt a “both-and” approach in which media (i.e., digital technologies and The Media) both create pleasurable, potentially liberating opportunities to use our bodies (sexually or otherwise) and simultaneously thwart us, shame us, or shut us down. In this sense, there is nothing that is really “new” after all.

scholarly journals Geocomputing, New Technologies and Historical Analysis: Tools for a Changing Planet

Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Sebastiano Trevisani
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Relationship

Modern Earth Scientists need also to interact with other disciplines, apparently far from the Earth Sciences and Engineering. Disciplines related to history and philosophy of science are emblematic from this perspective. From one side, the quantitative analysis of information extracted from historical records (documents, maps, paintings, etc.) represents an exciting research topic, requiring a truly holistic approach. On the other side, epistemological and philosophy of science considerations on the relationship between geoscience and society in history are of fundamental importance for understanding past, present and future geosphere-anthroposphere interlinked dynamics.

Living with Barren Truths: A Tale of Triumphalism and Tribulations of a Technology

2021 ◽  
pp. 097168582110159
Author(s):  
Sital Mohanty ◽  
Subhasis Sahoo ◽  
Pranay Kumar Swain
Keyword(s):  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Fact ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

Science, technology and human values have been the subject of enquiry in the last few years for social scientists and eventually the relationship between science and gender is the subject of an ongoing debate. This is due to the event of globalization which led to the exponential growth of new technologies like assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART, one of the most iconic technological innovations of the twentieth century, has become increasingly a normal social fact of life. Since ART invades multiple human discourses—thereby transforming culture, society and politics—it is important what is sociological about ART as well as what is biological. This article argues in commendation of sociology of technology, which is alert to its democratic potential but does not concurrently conceal the historical and continuing role of technology in legitimizing gender discrimination. The article draws the empirical insights from local articulations (i.e., Odisha state in eastern India) for the understandings of motherhood, freedom and choice, reproductive right and rights over the body to which ART has contributed. Sociologically, the article has been supplemented within the broader perspectives of determinism, compatibilism alongside feminism.

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