scholarly journals Digital Culture: Control and Domination of Technical Images in the Era of Psychocapitalism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Augusto Melo Ward de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Text Messaging ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Economic

This Chapter aims to conduct a theoretical study in order to understand the transmutation of modern culture into digital culture, which is intrinsically linked to technological, political, economic, artistic and cultural advances. Our goal is to unite components of the visual culture and the culture of convergence to explain how new realities and new forms of control and domination are created through images and used on a large scale by the neoliberalist system in the network society, inaugurating the new phase of capitalism, i.e., psychocapitalism. Until recently, mobile phone devices were used solely for calls (oral language), being then followed by the era of text messaging (written language). Today, everyone has cameras (image language) and Internet connectivity. The Internet is part of people’s daily lives, and the trend is for us to increasingly connect to devices connected thereto and to connect electronic devices of daily use to the Internet. This ensures connectivity as a common space in the social construction and identity of the social being in such a way that there is no longer a distinction between “online,” “offline,” “real,” and “virtual.” The disciplines of arts, sociology, philosophy, anthropology and social communication are used as a basis.

scholarly journals Coptic Language Learning and Social Media

Languages ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 73 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Nicole Deschene
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Maintenance ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Learning Material ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Endangered Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Media Platforms

This study explored the potential of using the Internet, including existing social media platforms, for Coptic language learning. Through global exposure, endangered language maintenance and revitalization efforts may benefit from having a presence on social media. The researcher created Coptic language learning material, social media accounts on multiple platforms, and a website. Data were collected through a survey with questions focused on social media users’ background and experience with the Coptic language learning material. In addition to the survey, analytics from the social media and website platforms were documented. The results indicated that social media provided a global audience and the Coptic language learning material blended into survey respondents’ daily lives with positive acceptance.

Ethical Dilemma of the Digital Divide in the Threshold of Social Inequalities in Africa

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Essien Essien
Keyword(s):  
Digital Divide ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
New Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ict Tools ◽  
The Web

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the internet in our daily lives today, the digital divide discourse in Africa highlights the inequitable social distribution of ICT access. The failure to have equitable social access to ICT tools, or a lack of skills to operate them, clearly depicts a technological predicament and a metaphor that questions the social gaps between humans that can access and use the web, and those that cannot. Relying on content analysis of extensive literature on the digital divide, this paper explores the notion of digital divide social inequalities in Africa, especially as it concerns how it should be understood, valued and managed. Findings, reveals that though the new information technologies are rapidly changing lives of a small but growing number of people across Africa, decisions on content, knowledge and participation excludes Africans. The digital divide therefore, has the potential to create, perpetuate and exacerbate morally objectionable conditions that can replicate poverty, construct exclusion and foregrounds social inequality in many African societies.

How “New Media” Change Our Emotions? Three Strategies of Research

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Anna Grishina
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
New Media ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
Cognitive Research ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Media Change ◽  
Important Means

The article is a review of current studies of emotion transformations under the influence of the Internet and “new media”. The main approaches to this problem, including cognitive research, are considered. It is proved that a significant limitation of the most popular approach in cultural studies, which recognizes considerable differences between the “old” and “new” media, but does not absolutize this opposition, is the tendency to large-scale generalizations — a direct combination of empirical observations and broad theoretical conclusions about the nature of neoliberal society and contemporary digital culture. An important means of overcoming these superficial generalizations is turning to cognitive research, for which it is fundamentally important to verify data and clarify the framework of their correctness, depending on different types of social interaction.

Living Underground: Bomb Shelters and Daily Lives in Wartime Chongqing (1937–1945)

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-399
Author(s):  
Tan Gang
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Public ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
New Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Micro Level

Because of Japan’s large-scale aerial bombing of Chongqing and the surrounding mountainous natural environment during the Anti-Japanese War, shelters became important places where the residents of wartime Chongqing evaded attacks by Japanese planes. In addition, the differences between the public and private bomb shelter facilities reflected the high and low, noble and humble people in the shelters, indicating the social class differences in wartime Chongqing. Shelters, especially public shelters, also provided places for socializing, recreation, and they had political and economic functions. Thus, bomb shelters became new public living spaces. Living in bomb shelters also became an important component of the daily lives of the residents in wartime Chongqing. Discussing their daily lives in the shelter allows us to not only understand and know the diversity and complexity of the daily lives of Chongqing’s wartime citizens but also reveals the significant impact of the all-encompassing invasion waged by Japan at the micro level.

scholarly journals Social Media, Mediation and the Arab Revolutions

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 518-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriyam Aouragh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Class ◽  
Marxist Concept ◽  
Political Economic

Abstract: This article discusses the socio-political implications of user-generated applications and platforms through the prism of the Arab revolutions. Popular postmodern conceptualisations such as (post-nation state) network societies, (post-class) immaterial economies and (horizontal) political resistance through multitudes requires rigorous reassessment in the aftermath of the events in the MENA. Although the revolutions have led to a resurgence of debates about the power of new media, such arguments (or rather assertions) are echoes of earlier suggestions related to peculiar fetishisations of ICT in general and social media in particular. The point of my critique is not to deny the social and political usefulness of new media but to examine the pros and cons of the internet. I tackle the juxtaposition of the internet and political activism through the Marxist concept Mediation and investigate how the social, political and cultural realms of capitalism (superstructure) are both conditioned by and react upon the political-economic base. This helps us to understand structural factors such as ICT ownership (political-economic decision making of social media); while deconstructing the effect of cultural hegemony disseminated through mass media. It also overcomes an unfortunate weakness of some “academic Marxism” (an overwhelming focus on theory) by anchoring the theoretical arguments in an anthropological approach

scholarly journals Understanding Patient Anxieties in the Social Media Era: Qualitative Analysis and Natural Language Processing of an Online Male Infertility Community

10.2196/16728 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. e16728 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vadim Osadchiy ◽  
Jesse Nelson Mills ◽  
Sriram Venkata Eleswarapu
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Male Infertility ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Discussion Board ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Published Data ◽  
The Social

Background Couples struggling with infertility are increasingly turning to the internet for infertility-related content and to connect with others. Most of the published data on infertility and the internet only address the experiences of women, with limited studies focusing exclusively on internet discussions on male factor infertility. Objective The aim of this study was to understand the concerns and experiences of discussants on an online male infertility community and to provide insight into their perceptions of interactions with health care professionals. Methods Using the large-scale data analytics tool BigQuery, we extracted all posts in the r/MaleInfertility community (877 members) of the social media website and discussion board Reddit from November 2017 to October 2018. We performed a qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative semantic analysis using Language Inquiry and Word Count 2015 of the extracted posts to identify dominant themes and subthemes of discussions. Descriptive statistics and semantic analytic Z-scores were computed. Results From the analysis of 97 posts, notable themes and subthemes emerged: 70 (72%) posts shared personal experiences, including feeling emasculated or isolated or describing a negative (28/97, 29%), positive (13/97, 13%), or neutral (56/97, 58%) experience with a health care professional; 19% (18/97) of the posts posed questions about personal semen analysis results. On the basis of semantic analysis, posts by men had higher authenticity scores (Z=3.44; P<.001), suggesting more honest or personal texts, but lower clout scores (Z=4.57; P<.001), suggesting a more tentative or anxious style of writing, compared with posts by women. Conclusions To our knowledge, this study represents the first evaluation of a social media community focused exclusively on male infertility using mixed methodology. These results suggest a role for physicians on social media to engage with patients and connect them to accurate resources, in addition to opportunities to improve in-office patient education.

scholarly journals The Subject Supposed to LOL: Slavoj Žižek and the Event of the Internet

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Clint Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Assembly Line ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Mirror Stage ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The University ◽  
Two Bodies

Is the Internet an Event? Does it constitute, as Žižek argues an Event should, a reframing of our experience, a retroactive re-ordering of everything we thought we knew about the social but were afraid to ask Facebook?In this contribution, Clint Burnham engages with Žižek’s recent work (Less than Nothing, Event, Absolute Recoil) as a way to argue, first, that in order to understand the Internet, we need Žižek’s “immaterial materialism,” and, in turn, to understand Žižek’s thought and how it circulates today, we need to think through digital culture and social media. 

As regards the Internet, then, no cynical disavowal, no Facebook cleanses, no shutting off the wifi: les non-dupes errent, or those who distance themselves from social media and the like are the most deceived. Next: the Internet’s two bodies: digital culture is both the material world of servers, clouds, stacks and devices and the virtual or affective world of liking, networking, and the mirror stage of the selfie. And here we must confront the “obscene underside” of digital culture: not only the trolls, 4chan porn, and gamergate bro’s, but also the old fashioned exploitation of labour, be it iPhone assembly-line workers at Foxconn, super-exploited “blood coltan” miners in the Congo, “like farmers” in India, or social media scrubbers in the Phillipines, who ensure your feeds are “clean” of porn, beheadings, and other #NSFW matter. These last concerns, then, mean we also have to think about what Žižek calls the “undoing of the Event” of the Internet, the betrayal of the Internet, its diseventalization.This podcast is a recording of a CAMRI research seminar that took place at the University of Westminster on January 28, 2015.

Rethinking the Chinese Internet: Social History, Cultural Forms, and Industrial Formation

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 393-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luzhou Nina Li
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Primary Concern ◽  
The Social ◽  
Development Trajectory ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Political Economic

Current accounts of the development of the Chinese Internet have provided important analyses of the political economy of telecommunications and the Internet. This study builds on these research to examine how vernacular online practices played a role in enabling political economic dimensions of the Chinese Internet to act as significant shaping forces. With this objective in mind, this article considers vernacular online practices that preceded the rise of commercial online video portals. My specific examples are ‘video spoofing’ and ‘fansubbing’, practices popular in the early to mid-2000s. Led by amateur enthusiasts, these practices were intimately associated with the legacy of cultural piracy in China in the pre-Internet era. My primary concern here is with identifiying and explicating the social energies that encouraged the formation of these online practices, their development trajectory, and finally, how these practices eventually became assimilated within a nascent video industry. In that respect, my argument is that the vernacular cultural forms and practices associated with these phenomena were central, and indeed essential, to the formation of an online video industry in China.

Masters of Imagination

2021 ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
Jaap van Till
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Super Resolution ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Social ◽  
Network Surveillance ◽  
Micro Grids ◽  
Interesting Direction

This chapter is about some observations of the social and economic impact of ICT and ICT digital infrastructures and more specifically what users do with processing and telecommunication power tools. Network architects should be aware of those. Computer systems are no longer neutral tools, but they influence companies, public policies for control and institutions, and civil society cooperatives. Even the internet architecture board (IAB) has issued a directive about these effects. Electronic and network surveillance of users and what they do is growing with effects on elections. ICT is at the core of several large-scale transitions identified in this chapter. Groups of people who are immune to social media propaganda and alternative truth are discovered. And the chapter is rounded off with a hopeful vision about constructive value creation in cooperatives and science teams, making use of liberty of though and diversity of backgrounds. Making swarms and micro grids makes society alive again. Social super resolution is an interesting direction to pursue together.

Evolution and Mutation in Push Technologies

2011 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Julie E Kendall ◽  
Kenneth E. Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Software Agent ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Genetic Determination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rss Feeds

PointCast was a magic carpet of content providers. Imagine that of all the information that users needed to complete their work would suddenly appear on their desktops. Although PointCast and other technologies did not survive the hype that surrounded their introduction, push technologies are now back in vogue. RSS feeds and podcasts are now part of many people’s daily lives. Software robots, called autonomous agents, are helping users download what they want from the Internet. The next helpful software agent will be more akin to a butler who anticipates all of the user’s needs today, tomorrow, and in the future. This agent will change as the user changes and is therefore referred to as an evolutionary agent. Evolutionary agents will also change because memes (or messages) one agent broadcasts to another will cause the evolutionary agent to mutate. In this chapter, we explore the social implications of meritorious and malevolent memes exchanged by evolutionary agents. We also discover that interactions occur among humans, evolutionary agents, and memes. Finally, we raise a series of questions for future research regarding genetic determination of evolutionary agents; if it is possible to predict whether a meme will be meritorious or malevolent; and whether it is desirable to legislate the evolution of agents that are evolved from malevolent memes. This chapter contributes to the awareness of the movement toward push technologies deploying evolutionary agents and the social implications their use entails.

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