Television as a Cultural and Communicative System: Evolution Directions and Modern Boundaries

Russian science has not yet developed a stable understanding of the essence and generic affiliation of television, which continues to have a powerful multidirectional impact on the cultural and social processes of our time. The proposed characteristic of television as an independent cultural and communicative system allows highlighting its functioning as a separate cultural phenomenon that cannot be reduced to other forms of communicative activity. At the same time, in line with the system-cultural approach, the article substantiates the interaction of the main system-forming factors within the television system: those are artistic-entertaining, economic, informational, political, and technological. Constant consideration of all these factors when examining any aspect of television communication should become the methodological basis for studying television as a system.A system-diachronic analysis of television, revealing the main directions of its nonlinear development through the mutual influence of the system-forming factors, allowed drawing the following conclusions.Modern television is increasingly acting not so much as a means, but as a method of communication. This leads to a reduction in the significance of the content of a television utterance and, conversely, to the absolutization of the format, which determines both the content itself and the ritualized processes of television communication.Significant changes in television communication occurred in the first decades of the 21st century under the influence of Internet technologies: the individualization of television viewing and the spread of “out-of-studio” forms of television production, the improvement of image quality and the democratization of video recording technologies leads to the fact that television ceases to perceive itself as a utilitarian means of broadcasting off-screen reality, and is increasingly positioned as an independent cultural source.Television in the 21st century has expanded its boundaries, having absorbed the vast sphere of Internet and video communications. The modern television system can be understood as a set of audiovisual messages intended for public display and perceived in non-specialized everyday living conditions.

Discussion on the Generation and Incorporation of Female Subjects in Mirror Double Heroine Films

In recent years, films with two female heroines appear frequently. The two female heroines mirror each other and construct the blooming subject in observation. Through the plot of rebellious girl’s death, the film makes the subject become a visible social subject in submission. This plot setting reflects the existence of discipline power in the film. Power marks a specific behavior as “deviant,” and relies on the public display of the punishment of deviant, as well as realizes the repeated indoctrination of discipline code in the audience through the reuse of the audience’s desire of “to be.” Audience identity ensures the smooth incorporation of power to the audience subject. The double female master setting seems to give freedom to the role and the audience, but the appearance of this freedom is the locus of power. The audience’s deviant viewing may break through in the ruins of the repeated process.

Social Norms Matter: University Students’ Misbehaviors in the Metro Carriage

Metro travelers’ travel experience is highly influenced by fellow passengers’ misbehaviors such as eating or littering in the carriage and sound blaster, which are common in the metro carriage. Although operators have implemented various regulations to reduce misbehavior, little theoretical research has investigated such behavior motivators to provide targeted guidelines for specific passenger segments. To this end, this study explores how demographic and perceived social norms of university students affect their misbehaviors, i.e., eating in the carriage, public display of affection, sound blaster, cross-legged sitting, leaning against the pole, and littering, in the metro carriage of Shanghai, China. With the structural equation model, it is revealed that both injunctive and descriptive norms impose significant impacts on passengers’ inappropriate behaviors, with the effect of the former generally to a greater degree. Gender heterogeneity in passenger misbehavior is also observed, where males significantly perform better in eating in the carriage and cross-legged sitting. These findings may decode the underlying motivation of passenger misbehaviors and provide guidelines for effective intervention with targeted policy design and implementation.

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and the early history of three-dimensional paleontological art

ABSTRACT Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–1894) was a British scientific illustrator and sculptor who illustrated many British exploration reports in the 1830s and 1840s. In the early 1850s, Hawkins was commissioned to create life-size, concrete sculptures of Iguanodon, ichthyosaurs, and other extinct animals for a permanent exhibition in south London. They were the first large sculptures of extinct vertebrates ever made, and they are still on view today. Inspired by his success in England, Hawkins launched a lecture tour and working trip to North America in 1868. Soon after his arrival, he was commissioned to “undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent” for public display in New York City. Had it been built, this would have been the first paleontological museum in the world. As part of this ambitious project, with the assistance of the American paleontologist Joseph Leidy, Hawkins cast the bones of a recently discovered Hadrosaurus specimen and used them to construct the first articulated dinosaur skeleton ever put on display in a museum. It was unveiled at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in November 1868. Hawkins worked tirelessly on New York’s proposed “Paleozoic Museum” for two years, until his funding was cut by William “Boss” Tweed, the corrupt leader of the Tammany Hall political machine, who grew hostile to the project and abolished the Central Park Commission that had made it possible. When Hawkins defiantly continued to work, without funding, Tweed dispatched a gang of thugs to break into his studio and smash all of the sculptures and molds. Although Hawkins would create several copies of his articulated Hadrosaurus skeleton for other institutions, the prospect of building a grand museum of paleontology in America was forever destroyed by Tweed’s actions.

Documentary Photography and Protest under Chile’s Dictatorship

An array of documentary photographic practices that emerged during the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) remain understudied, despite their political, aesthetical, and historical import. From the mid-1970s onward, these different practices served different purposes: some made visible the crime of disappearance and its disavowal by the repressive state; others stood as supplementary evidence that confirmed the legal existence of the detained-disappeared; some were a crucial force in denouncing state repression and demanding justice for victims; and some made it possible for independent media to simultaneously comply with and ridicule the censorship of images imposed by the dictatorship in 1984. These practices also helped to consolidate the expanding photographic field under dictatorship. They include the public display of ID photos and portraits torn from family albums; documentary images that relatives of the victims of repression pinned to their chests; the reproduction, compilation, and incorporation of these portraits into legal files and habeas corpus claims; the publication of countless photos of popular protests in independent media; and different photographic initiatives put forward by a group of photographers who established the Independent Photographers Association in 1981. Notably, the expanding photographic field under dictatorship engaged not only individuals and groups directly involved with photography but also ad-hoc human rights collectives and organizations (especially the Group of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared and the Vicariate of Solidarity), as well as lawyers, judges, journalists, and everyday users of photography. Given the different arenas in which documentary images circulated, the transformations they underwent to resist repression and censorship, and the array of individuals involved in their (re)production and dissemination, a study of documentary photography under dictatorship in Chile cannot content itself, as has been the case, with surveying the practices that emerged within the artistic field. A study of the visual culture under dictatorship instead reveals both the different uses of photography in the public space and the transformations of documentary images in their successive circulations and disseminations.

Cognitive and Medical Misanthropology: Corona Parties and Kolo Dancing by the Monument

This paper looks at so-called corona parties in Serbia, which can be seen as a specific paradigm of exhibiting irresponsible health behavior during an epidemic. The term refers to illegal gatherings of a large number of people in circumstances when all gatherings are restricted under anti-epidemic measures. A phenomenon similar to corona parties and co-ocurring with them in the Serbian socio-cultural and pandemic temporal context, is the dancing of the traditional kolo dance in public spaces. Both phenomena represent a conscious disregard for one's own health and of regulations introduced by the authorities, and at the same time an emphatic public display of indifference towards the epidemiological situation in the country, and rejection of the consequent legal restrictions on public life. The paper aims to establish the cultural background of such behavior, i.e. to ascertain its socio-cultural meaning. The indirect or direct endangerment of one’s own or other people’s health, particularly in a pandemic, can be seen as a misanthropic act. The cultural notions on which such irrational behavior is based are a consequence of a postmodernist relativization of previously existing socio-cultural discourse on science, and are counterintuitive. Behavior based on these notions is an irrational response to changes in socio-cultural reality due to COVID-19. The response is not only irrational but also ineffective, as it cannot eliminate the undesired consequences of the given situation, neither in terms of the illness itself, nor in terms of how it will be managed by those who have been put in charge by the government. Due to this, such behavior can also be seen simply as a deliberate defiance of rules. The misanthropic quality of the behavior of those who ignore anti-epidemic measures by dancing kolo in the streets or attending corona parties is evident in the conscious rejection of the principle of not harming others. Ignoring the possible health risks to themselves, they ignore the possible health risks to others, and thus become social factors of biological contagion. It is in this way that such behavior becomes the cause of the extension of the very state of socio-cultural reality against which it is supposed to be directed.

Situating embodied instruction – proxemics and body knowledge

In various ways the movement and experience of the body is instructed by others. This may be in the dance class or on the playing field. In these interactions, one person claims knowledge of the other’s body and rights to instruct how that body functions, moves, and feels. By undertaking a close analysis of embodied and spoken interaction within performance training sessions from a multimodal conversation analytic perspective, this paper will identify one kind of broad sequential trajectory – from intimate contact to public display - that shows how an instructor claims rights over the internal workings of another’s body by traversing different levels of proximity and sensorial modalities.

Machine Anthropology: A View of from International Relations

International relations are made up of thick layers of meaning and big streams of data. How can we capture the nuances and scales of increasingly digitalised world politics, taking advantage of the possibilities that come with ‘big data’ and ‘digital methods’ in our discipline of International Relations (IR)? What is needed, we argue, is a methodological twin-move of making big data thick and thick data big. Taking diplomacy, one of IR's core practices as our case, we illustrate how anthropological and computational approaches can be merged in IR research. We report from our experiences with the project DIPLOFACE: Diplomatic Face-Work between Confidential Negotiations and Public Display, investigating how digital communication technologies influence both the study and conduct of age-old and traditionally analogue practices of inter-state diplomacy.

Pembuatan File Input berbasis Chat untuk Screen-Smart Device Interaction (SSI)

Public display memiliki potensi untuk menjadi media diseminasi informasi kepada publik. Sayangnya, mayoritas public display memiliki kecenderungan untuk diabaikan oleh orang-orang yang melewatinya. Beberapa riset menunjukkan bahwa pengguna akan melihat sebuah public display jika dapat berinteraksi dengan display tersebut. Salah satu pendekatannya adalah Screen-Smart Device Interaction (SSI). Pada penelitian ini, dikembangkan sebuah interaksi untuk menampilkan sebuah file dari smart device ke sebuah display menggunakan antar muka berbasis Chat. Pengujian dilakukan dengan alat ukur SUS dan UEQ-S. Dari pengujian diperoleh kesimpulan bahwa hasil yang dikembangkan termasuk kategori acceptable dengan skor SUS 72.8. Akan tetapi dari UEQ-S diperoleh skor hedonic yang lebih rendah dari pragmatic, yang artinya perlu pengembangan lebih lanjut terkait tampilan dari prototype yang diujikan.