Reversal, Disconnect, and Proposition

Author(s):  
Kevin Day

This paper examines the potential countertactics of contemporary interactive media art to interrogate the data-mining practices that encode the everyday and exploit user data in the big data economy. It argues that noise is the "other" of information, a way to counter the operation of turning the world into data commodities. Through a Brechtian methodology informed by philosophy and critical theories of media and technology, the paper suggests that amplifying the "noise" of the digital media assemblages deviates from their everyday normative functions and estranges our relationship to them, inviting critical ways of understanding, relating to, and engaging these ubiquitous systems. All three noted artworks destabilize the protocols of data-mining to examine data politics. Specifically, the paper looks at three different tactics that amplify the "noise" of digital culture in different ways: reversing roles, disconnecting, and proposing viable alternatives.

2012 ◽  
Vol 145 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Horst ◽  
Daniel Miller

As with all material culture, the digital is a constitutive part of what makes us human. Social order is itself premised on a material order, making it impossible to become human other than through socialising within a material world of cultural artefacts, and includes the order, agency and relationships between things, and not just their relationship to persons. This article considers the consequences of the digital culture for our understanding of what it is to be human. Drawing upon recent debates concerning materiality in the sub-field of digital anthropology, we focus upon four forms of materiality – the materiality of digital infrastructure and technology; the materiality of mediation; the materiality of digital content; and the materiality of digital contexts – to make the case that digital media and technology are far more than mere expressions of human intention. Rather than rendering us less human, less authentic or more mediated, we argue that attention should turn to the human capacity to create or impose normativity in the face of constant change. We believe these debates around materiality and normativity, while rooted in the discipline of anthropology, have broader implications for understanding everyday practices in the digital age.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1S) ◽  
pp. 100S-115S
Author(s):  
Arianna Mainardi ◽  

This article engages with the current debate on feminisms and digital media by looking at the tension between individualism and collective action. Drawing on an empirical research project involving girls, carried out in Italy and focusing on female processes of subjectivation in a postfeminist new media context, it will discuss constraints and opportunities shaped by the everyday use of social media. The article places itself in the latest trend of cyberfeminist studies, by analysing friendship relationships developed among girls in and through digital media. It also looks at how the mediated nature of social network sites offers room for the building of alliances among girls, and how this challenges online and offline gender norms. In doing so, the article reflects on the way female relationships change and are reworked in digital culture, thus giving a new meaning to the feminist concept of sisterhood.


GeroPsych ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 205-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Ossenfort ◽  
Derek M. Isaacowitz

Abstract. Research on age differences in media usage has shown that older adults are more likely than younger adults to select positive emotional content. Research on emotional aging has examined whether older adults also seek out positivity in the everyday situations they choose, resulting so far in mixed results. We investigated the emotional choices of different age groups using video games as a more interactive type of affect-laden stimuli. Participants made multiple selections from a group of positive and negative games. Results showed that older adults selected the more positive games, but also reported feeling worse after playing them. Results supplement the literature on positivity in situation selection as well as on older adults’ interactive media preferences.


MedienJournal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Gudrun Marci-Boehncke ◽  
Matthias Rath

This article presents the paradigm shift, especially in school education, under the conditions of current mediatization, whereby we understand education initially as a communicative system that is dedicated to the acquisition of new and future relevant knowledge in lifelong processes of appropriation. To this end, educational institutions demand an educational language that screens out those who cannot serve that linguistic register. Arguing with regard to Rawls and Nussbaum, we present this selection mechanism under the conditions of current mediatization as both ideologically outdated and practically reducible and refer to current models of professionalization of teachers and international competency frameworks for digital media education.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
Rosemary Lucy Hill ◽  
Kim Allen

This article discusses the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture and reflects on the everyday online meanings of the term in distinction to academic theorisations. In the 1960s–1980s, feminists theorised patriarchy as the systematic oppression of women, with differing approaches to how it worked. Criticisms that the concept was unable to account for intersectional experiences of oppression, alongside the ‘turn to culture’, resulted in a fall from academic grace. However, ‘patriarchy’ has found new life through Internet memes (humorous, mutational images that circulate widely on social media). This article aims to investigate the resurgence of the term ‘patriarchy’ in digital culture. Based on an analysis of memes with the phrase ‘patriarchy’ and ‘smash the patriarchy’, we identify how patriarchy memes are used by two different online communities (feminists and anti-feminists) and consider what this means for the ongoing usefulness of the concept of patriarchy. We argue that, whilst performing important community-forming work, using the term is a risky strategy for feminists for two reasons: first, because memes are by their nature brief, there is little opportunity to address intersections of oppression; secondly, the underlying logic of feminism is omitted in favour of brevity, leaving it exposed to being undermined by the more mainstream logic of masculinism.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 169-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukasz Szulc

AbstractThe practice of profile making has become ubiquitous in digital culture. Internet users are regularly invited, and usually required, to create a profile for a plethora of digital media, including mega social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Understanding profiles as a set of identity performances, I argue that the platforms employ profiles to enable and incentivize particular ways and foreclose other ways of self-performance. Drawing on research into digital media and identities, combined with mediatization theories, I show how the platforms: (a) embrace datafication logic (gathering as much data as possible and pinpointing the data to a particular unit); (b) translate the logic into design and governance of profiles (update stream and profile core); and (c) coax—at times coerce—their users into making of abundant but anchored selves, that is, performing identities which are capacious, complex, and volatile but singular and coherent at the same time.


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