The COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic both highlighted and exacerbated deep societal inequalities. Vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, especially women, faced even more unequal treatment. During the lockdown, women at home performed more childcare, and shouldered more cooking and cleaning duties, while husbands spent most of their time in virtual meetings. The media played a crucial role during this situation through its representation of women. An analysis of the reportage of two bestseller print mainstream media, Sabah and Hürriyet, compared to two alternative media channels on the internet, GazeteDuvar and T24, highlighted a serious difference in perspective in news stories about women. Bestseller mainstream Turkish media ignored the difficulties faced by women and followed dominant hegemonic discourse emphasizing women as wives and mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children and families. They ignored the plight of women victims subjected to violence during the lockdown and reproduced the idea of traditional gender roles through their news items. However, alternative newspapers provided a voice to the women, as well as to the voiceless, disadvantageous groups. They were critical of the government, local authorities, related powers, and their health politics. They did not prefer to ignore women and their voices but instead announced them in detail.

Dividual Subjectivation in World Society

Today, new insights into our interdependency with biotic masses, ecological ensembles, and technological and cultural practices in a growing world society all create the need to redefine human subjectivation. Since the so-called individual cannot be separated from these different involvements without endangering his/her existence, we should rethink our self-understanding in terms of the ‘undivided’ person and recognize that this concept expresses a misleading negation of our inevitable participations. It should therefore be replaced by the modified term ‘dividuation’, which endeavours to indicate our multidirectional and often ambivalent forms of entanglement and involuntary co-constitution by technological, cultural or even non-human ‘others’. The ever-specific dividuation has to be recognized and moderated in order to keep up our cohesion and psychophysical metastability.

The Perverse, Embodied Trickster in Eduard Vilde's Milkman of the Manor

Although the writing of Estonian novelist Eduard Vilde has been described as feminist in asserting women’s right to individuality and equality, Mari, the protagonist in his 1916 novel Maekula Piimamees (Milkman of the Manor), does more than merely defend her standing alongside the male characters. An analysis based in Derridean differance reveals that she is instead a trickster character who delivers dramatic irony that subverts the norms of latefeudal Estonia, which would otherwise write her as dutiful wife and subservient maid. This becomes apparent through the novel’s ‘here-and-there’ narrative logic, which is apparent in a Bakhtinian threshold chronotope that underpins characterisations that reflect Merleau-Ponty’s constitutive liminality to form Mari as self-aware and self-confident in juxtaposition to the oblivious and anxious personalities of the male characters.

Identifying News Consumption, News Avoidance Patterns, and Incidental News Exposure among Jordanians: A Qualitative Study

In the world we live in, we encounter news everywhere. Authentic or not, fragmented or complete, audiences are being exposed to vast amounts of information, and it seems impossible to limit news intake, even when we want to. In a recent cross-country research based on data gathered from 35 countries (Toff, Kalogeropoulos et al. .2020), it was found that people avoid the news for factors varying between nations. This paper attempts to look into news consumption and avoidance patterns among Jordanians by posing several questions. Their entry points to news, preferred news mediums, the extent to which they are incidentally exposed to information, consciously or unconsciously, as well as if there were news avoidance patterns amongst them. These questions were explored through examination of a limited number of respondents from different generations, genders, and academic backgrounds and by deploying a Q methodology approach executed through card-sorting exercise with a think-aloud protocol and an in-depth one to one interview. The results indicated that Jordanians use multiple entry points to news, and the majority of them regard social media as a source of news. Neither gender, generation, nor the level of education seems to be a determining factor. The study revealed the existence of news avoidance trends. Education appeared to have no impact on the motives behind them.

Media Pseudologies

In this article, the author seeks to understand how any information society generates clusters of information that act to secure and reinforce ecologies of consumption for media conglomerates and its circle of consumers. Empirical case studies would show that news information may not be based in the larger realities of all the players involved. Societies may be described in such situations as desiring their ends by means of segmented branching, but more empirically, by imperatives of survival and growth. Pseudology comprise the only sustaining principle of discourse for such a world immersed and fragmented by its local interests and their recognizable patterns of behavior as they are retrospectively conditioned by media.

The Question of Disclosure in Photography

Keeping aside discussions about theories of depiction of photography and the epistemic value of photography from the viewer’s perspective, I reconsider this techne from the photographers’ entire act of photographing. It presents the quest of the possibility to regain the world by the art of photography, especially in a situation where human consciousness of the living environment is overwhelmed by the photographic effects. The nature of the current technological environment—while disguising the manifestation of pure humanity, in the sense that it is the externalization of technology due to human nature—is completely destructive. Today, trying to save or regenerate philosophy should be nothing more than seeking a way for human beings to refuse being incorporated as an automaton in an endless track of automated reproduction processes. As one of those who wish to find a way to reconstruct the relationship between humans and nature or to reveal that human existence can only be established in such correlation, I seek a way of breathing human freedom, momentarily disputing this automated living and social environment. In other words, to regain or to play the art of photography, to unsettle what usually works as concrete support for the cognitive transformation making us unconsciously think of the technological environment as something inevitable and natural. It would be presenting a temporary retreat and a more positive way forward.

Problematizing Motherhood

In this paper, I focus on the representation of motherhood from a two-fold perspective by choosing the bestselling Turkish baby diapers advertisements as a case study of broadcasting in Turkish media. The first perspective analyzes the representation of motherhood by applying the concept of “Male Gaze” by Laura Mulvey, according to whom a woman is objectified by the male gaze and becomes a bearer of meaning rather than a maker of meaning. Further, the themes emerging from a careful reading of representations of women in advertisements of baby diapers are discussed. The second perspective consists of looking at discursive strategies of the term “motherhood” by problematizing the fact that baby diapers are always identified with women, thereby also reducing them to commodities in the market. The second perspective applies Julia Kristeva’s “The Semiotic Chora” to reveal the myths about motherhood created by the ruling ideology of the males, and to seek possible alternatives through that perspective.

COVID-19 Infodemic

Journalism like many other professions is facing a crucial phase with the emergence of Coronavirus pandemic. The impact of Coronavirus phenomenon is enormous on social and cultural relationships of many communities who depend on the media for information to connect with each other and participate in governance freely. Journalists globally are facing enormous crisis of managing the infodemic of the pandemic streaming particularly from social media; as well as controversies of the media perpetuating disinfodemic or disinformation and distrust in the society. Besides arrests and restrictions of movement, journalists are also under intense threats of losing their jobs, and exacerbated psychological and physical pressures owing to the devastating effects of COVID-19. Using the Social Responsibility theory, that emphasises improved standards of journalism, safeguarding the interests of journalism and journalists among others, and the Agenda setting theory, that controls access to news, information, and entertainment; this research interrogates how journalists from selected states in Northern Nigeria are responding to the challenges of reportage of COVID-19. This research sampled the views of journalists using structured questionnaire administered online and interviewed seven senior journalists holding managerial positions. Findings revealed that journalists are embracing fact checking of the avalanche of information even within familiar sources to verify reports on COVID-19. Similarly, they are deploying digital and multimedia strategies to provide a continuum of media services and sensitive reporting to engage this new infodemic of COVID-19, now globally considered the “new normal”. This research recommends that, since COVID-19 is a novel disease, professionals across countries need to talk with each other, and journalists particularly from Africa and indeed Nigeria; need to put some structure and some science in place, especially in the performance of their jobs, so that professionalism can be sustained without compromising the future of the journalism.

Thermodynamics of the Technosphere. Rethinking Temporality and Technicity in the Age of Planetary Emergency with Heidegger and Stiegler

This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.

From the Self-Image to the Image Itself

In this article, I examine the idea of the portrait from two viewpoints: the ‘classical’ portrait as it appears in Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-phenomenological philosophy, and the recent self-portrait photographs or ‘selfies’ on social media. First, I consider the portrait’s value in Nancy’s theories of art: for him, portraits hold an important position among the genres of visual art, since they present themselves as distinctive images by extracting the innermost force of the portrayed person. Secondly, I take up the philosophical and political implications of Nancy’s notion of the portrait vis-a-vis the contemporary selfie culture. I suggest that, instead of emphasizing the model’s singularity as traditional artistic portraits do, the flow of selfies tends to create similarity. I begin by clarifying Nancy’s paradoxical claim that the human portrait may resemble a person only on the condition of not representing him or her. After this, I inquire about the philosophical position of selfies as constructed portraits that make visible the absence of the self. However, as I argue, they do this in a sense that differs from Nancy’s account of the portrait. As a result, I propose that the repetition and circulation of selfies has remarkably changed our view on the significance and, finally, the ontology of the portrait.