Medicine is often thought of as a science of the body, but it is also a science of data. In some contexts, it can even be asserted that data drive health. This article focuses on a key piece of data technology central to contemporary practices of medicine: the medical record. By situating the medical record in the perspective of its history, we inquire into how the kinds of data that are kept at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational (...) requirements that originate well outside of the clinic, in particular in health insurance records systems. Although this dependency of today's electronic medical records on billing requirements is widely lamented by clinical providers, its history remains little studied. Following the archaeology of medicine developed by Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic and expanding his methodology in light of more recent contributions to the field of media archaeology, this article excavates some of the underexplored technological conditions that help constitute today's electronic medical record. If in some contexts, it is true that data drive health, then an archaeology of medical records helps reveal how health insurance records often impact clinical care and, by extension, health and disease. (shrink)

This paper considers the significance of the informal publication and circulation in the work of one of the most important analytic philosophers of the late 20th Century, Saul Kripke. I argue that everyday copying technologies such as tape recording and photocopying enabled academic philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s to create and reproduce living documents whose private preservation and circulation offered a way to make and maintain a community of interest, carve out a space for oral discourse and, most significantly (...) for histories of alternative print technologies, that these technologies and techniques of reproduction were essential to the composition of Kripke’s ground-breaking and revolutionary published work. The recording, transcripts and photocopies archived Kripke’s ideas and offered access to them outside of institutional publishing channels. Kripke lectured a great deal, usually without notes, and was known to be reluctant to commit his ideas to print; this ‘szamizdat’ (as he refers to it) also preserved a space for the oral as the preferred mode of communication for philosophical discourse, connecting the modern tradition with the ancients, an oral tradition held together with magnetic tape, typescript, photocopies, and digital text files. This archival study draws attention to the intermediality of Kripke's work through close examination of his acknowledgments, prefaces, and footnotes to work up a history of the everyday media inscriptions (the recordings, typescript transcriptions, photocopies etc.) and practices (the lectures, seminars, and international social networks of distribution) that underpin the production of both his published and unpublished work. This essay brings a media archaeological approach into contact with scholarship on the history of the book and intellectual history. It foregrounds the role of the oral and aural in the history of print and contributes to our understanding of circulation and reproduction as a cultural practices. (shrink)

Social Media is a new media of information flow gateway that can be accessed by the public, easily and freely. Social Media is an interactive information technology which not only can netizens access information, but they can also make news (information, comments, etc.) and share it on the internet. Easy access to information has caused ideological effects on society. This research aims to examine the ideological effects of the myths about COVID-19 on social media. The data (...) collection was done through observation and distributing questionnaires online on social media. The data sources were from WhatsApp and Coronavirus cases reported online Indonesia. Researchers used Barthes' mythological theory to answer the research objectives. The results of this research indicated that the spread of myths related to COVID-19 by netizens on social media had caused ideological effects on society, for example, the public refused the coronavirus victims to be buried in public burial because of the corpse considered to infect the residents. This research contributes to the media effects theory development, which can be a policy for the government in fighting against Coronavirus, and netizens who use parrhesia on social media which can contain untrue myths. (shrink)

In 1713 the scientific instrument-maker Jakob Leupold published designs for three machines were the first attempt to design machinery with internal moving parts that replaced human agency in creating original images. This paper first analyzes his text and engravings in order to explain how he proposed to do this, given contemporary materials and command of physical forces. Next, it characterizes the devices as a transition from concepts of incision to concepts of mirroring, taken as models of the history of mechanical (...) reproduction. And finally, Leupold’s replacement of the sighting grid with differential gears points to a set of problems appearing in contemporary philosophy represented in Rococo artistic production of this period as well. Taking the proposed devices in context, they help to theorize the complex notions of creative activity in Rococo visual culture. Taken as an episode in the history of communications, they instance the development of conceptions of personhood and of physical forces at stake in the invention of automated media. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly historical cinema scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, and André Gaudreault have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. With increasing attention on the “database” as a symbolic metaphor for postmodernity and the decentered, networked tenants of the global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in intertextual space. Thus, the term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that (...) accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. As Giorgio Agamben wrote in 1992, “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema…human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere." Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, once staunchly film history scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser, Jane Gaines, Siegfried Zielinski, André Gaudreault and Benoît Turquety (to name just a few) have abandoned history for historiography and film studies for media archaeology. Considering the heightened attention given to kulturtechnik (Siegert), the database as a dominant symbolic metaphor,1 and the decentered networked tenants of the postmodern global present, cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in increasingly intertextual space. (...) Thus, the term “post-cinema” has been co-opted as a viable intermediary that accounts for new media conditions, as cinema is no longer emblematic of our cultural climate. It was once presaged in 1992 that “[t]he end of the cinema truly sounds the death knell of the ultimate metaphysical adventure of Dasein. In the twilight of post-cinema, of which we are seeing the beginning, human quasi-existence, now stripped of any metaphysical hypostasis and deprived of any theological model, will have to seek its proper generic consistency elsewhere.” Accordingly, we are no longer “moviegoing animals” who seek images of ourselves among a collective in the dark but, rather, users interfacing within a network of moving images. By locating post-cinema within the semblance of social media, we are allocated a newfound series of theoretical interventions, the most marked of which is that of media archeology vis-à-vis dialectical materialism. This is a lens through which Brian Winston has recently deftly decried Virtual Reality’s “empathy machine” utopic illusionism, bolstered by Chris Milk and a slew of neurohumanities researchers, steadily maintaining that the fundamental myth of “technologies of seeing” is in disguising “their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import.” However, this approach, which illuminates the bifurcation between Max Horkheimer/Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, neglects what Benjamin identified as occurring to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility—a shift from a technology’s “cult value,” associated with the unique work, to its “exhibition value,” associated with the social act of viewing as part of a mass. Speaking to this divarication, Benjamin Barber, in Strong Democracy, foresaw new media’s two-fold potential—as they are organized and networked, new media and communications technologies possess the possibility to both energize citizen information and political participation but, simultaneously, to supplement the deterioration of public debate. As evinced by Mark Adrejevic’s concept of Infoglut, this two-pronged possibility has only been exacerbated by the interlocking relationship between the advent of a “glut” of information, post-truth politics, the demise of symbolic efficiency, and a renewed focus on the role of affect and emotion as “alternative modalities for thinking about the role of communication in a post-referential era.” Manuel Castells qualifies Barber’s pessimism, noting that the Internet can “be an appropriate platform for informed, interactive politics, stimulating political participation.. […] beyond the closed doors of political institutions,” but that the Internet, like any technology, “is shaped by its uses and users.” Thus, if there exists a positive correlation between exposure to post-cinema media artifacts and political participation, then I seek to explore the revelatory political possibilities of “exhibition value” by way of a particular “post-cinema” case study: the Marxist-Leninist Turkish hacktivist group Redhack’s YouTube-circulated documentary RED! (2013), a project that demanded—by way of the moving-image—to galvanize cyberprotest and democratize a “hacktivist commons. (shrink)

An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature with culture is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal (...) relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art. (shrink)

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of (...) cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)

This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change within the domain of empirical experience, but in doing so, actually amplifies the anthropological vestiges that Foucault hoped to eradicate. (...) The result is an alluring but dogmatically positivist theory of mediatic causality that, in spite of its best efforts, can only reify, rather than dispel, the image of “so-called man.”. (shrink)

Book review of Colin Koopman's How We Became Our Data (2019).

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops, nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives. While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there (...) exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity. One only needs to consult the amnesiac protagonist M (Markku Peltola) in Aki Kaurismäki’s The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) or, as regards Lars von Trier’s cinema, Beth (Emily Watson) in Breaking the Waves (1996), Selma (Björk) in Dancer in the Dark (2000), “She” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Antichrist (2009) or Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Nymphomaniac (2013) to evince this overlap. However, this book is more concerned with performative self-contradictions, whereby cinema-as-enunciator is put under erasure, thus aggravating the inherent discrepancies troubling Europe today. Elsaesser, indeed, evaluates a growing general disaffection with politics, the rise of populist nationalism and far-right fringe parties, as well as an increasing population of economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. (shrink)

This book is an anthology about transformation processes. It brings together contributions that were made during the 16th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics 2021. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in attendance at the TU Chemnitz, in Germany, but took place online. 11 sections with different focuses from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment, and carto/atlas semiotics and (...) sign philosophy had each published their own call for papers. -/- The focus of the IMAGE & Cultural study sections' call, published with the volume, was to understand images as agents - according to art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also as active carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this. (shrink)

Researching into our past, scientists use different methods, from looking at the night sky to digging traces of our past and analyzing DNA. I propose here another method, that can have the potential of shedding more light into our history and the type of entities that we are. Working under philosophical idealism, I propose that evolution is in the first place the evolution of consciousness, and thus the traces of evolution are mostly not to be found in our physical bodies, (...) but in our consciousnesses. I argue that qualia are selected by evolution in order to solve evolutionary problems, and thus, looking into our qualia we can learn about our evolutionary history. (shrink)

A condensed summary of the adventures of ideas (1990-2020). Methodology of evolutionary-phenomenological constitution of Consciousness. Vector (BeVector) of Consciousness. Consciousness is a qualitative vector quantity. Vector of Consciousness as a synthesizing category, eidos-prototecton, intentional meta-observer. The development of the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Brentano, Husserl, Bergson, Florensky, Losev, Mamardashvili, Nalimov. Dialectic of Eidos and Logos. "Curve line" of the Consciousness Vector from space and time. The lower and upper sides of the "abyss of being". The existential tension of (...) being. Five reference “points” (existential-extremum) - world events in the evolution of Consciousness from “homo habilis” to “homo sapiens sapiens”. “Prometheus Effect". Inversion and reversion of Сonsciousness. "Open" and "closed" Сonsciousness. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness. Protogeometer: fall in the future, in the "EgoLand". The problem of justification/substantiation of mathematics (knowledge) is an ontological problem. The crisis of ontology and ontological limits of cognition. Ontological structure of space. The project of constructive dialectic ontology. The methodology of dialectical-ontological construction (modeling): conceptual-figure synthesis, total unification of matter, coincidence of ontological opposites, primordial Meta-Axioma and Superprinciple, vector (bivector) of the absolute state (states) of matter (absolute forms of existence). The ontological "celestial triangle" (Plato). Ontological invariants of the Universum and their ontological paths. Ontological and gnoseological dimensions of space. Triune (ontological) space of nine gnoseological dimensions: absolute rest (linear state, "Continuum")+ absolute motion (absolute vortex, "Discretuum") + absolute becoming (absolute wave, "Dis-Continuum"). Primordial generating structure: ontological framework, ontological carcass and ontological foundation. Ontological (structural, cosmic) memory - the semantic core of the conceptual construction of the Universum being as an eternal process of generation of new meanings and structures. Consciousness is an absolute (unconditional) attractor of meanings, a univalent phenomenon of ontological memory, which manifests itself at a certain level of the Universum being. Ontological space-MatterMemory-Ontological time (S-MM-T). Ontological Rhythm and Cycle. The nature and structure of ontological time. Natural (absolute) determinism. (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to clear the ground for the idea of aesthetic archaeology as an aesthetic analysis of remote artifacts divorced from aesthetic criticism. On the example of controversies surrounding the early Cycladic figures, it discusses an anxiety motivating the rejection of aesthetic inquiry in archaeology, namely, the anxiety about the heuristic reliability of one’s aesthetic instincts vis-à-vis remote artifacts. It introduces the claim that establishing an aesthetic mandate of a remote artifact should in the first place (...) be part of a quest after the norms of engagement an artifact’s kind signaled to the intended audience by its appearance. Rather than advocating for a new subdiscipline, the concept of aesthetic archaeology serves to bring into theoretical focus an aesthetic engagement with an artifact’s appearance under circumstances that rule out any acquired competence in distinguishing its aesthetic mandate perceptually—and thus rule out any aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

Material traces of the past are notoriously inscrutable; they rarely speak with one voice, and what they say is never unmediated. They stand as evidence only given a rich scaffolding of interpretation which is, itself, always open to challenge and revision. And yet archaeological evidence has dramatically expanded what we know of the cultural past, sometimes demonstrating a striking capacity to disrupt settled assumptions. The questions we address in Evidential Reasoning are: How are these successes realized? What gives us confidence (...) in the credibility and robustness, the trustworthiness, of the evidential claims based on archaeological data? And, what constitute best practices in building evidential claims, critically scrutinizing them and putting them to work in archaeological contexts? Rather than retreat to abstractions about how how science operates in the ideal, we approach this question by interrogating a number of close-to-the-ground case studies with the aim of teasing out the wisdom embodied in archaeological practice. The cases we consider – of fieldwork, strategies for working with old evidence, and the role of external resources – illuminate the role of various types of inferential scaffolding and bring into focus practice-grounded epistemic norms that we believe serve archaeologists better than the all-or-nothing ideals of truth and objectivity that dominate programmatic debate. (shrink)

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. Not only are they notoriously fragmentary but the conceptual and technical scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence can be as constraining as it is enabling. A recurrent theme in internal archaeological debate is that reliance on sedimented layers of interpretative scaffolding carries the risk that “preunderstandings” configure what archaeologists recognize and record as primary data, and how they interpret it as evidence. The selective and destructive nature (...) of data capture in archeology further suggests that there may be little scope for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet archaeologists have been strikingly successful in mining old datasets for new insights. I situate these concerns in the broader context of debate about the epistemic standing of the historical sciences, and then consider three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data. The first two – secondary retrieval and recontextualization – are a matter of reconfiguring the scaffolding that underpins evidential reasoning. The third turns on redeploying old data in the context of computational models that support the experimental simulation of the cultural systems and contexts under study. (shrink)

The point of departure of this paper is the striking similarities between the dispositions critical media literacy education aims to cultivate and the characteristics conspiracy theorists claim to embody. The golden question of critical literacy, “who benefits?” is in fact the central question of conspiracy theorists: “cui bono?” While critical media literacy educators teach learners to disrupt the common sense, to interrogate multiple viewpoints, to focus on sociopolitical issues, and to take actions and promote social justice, conspiracy theorists (...) claim that they do exactly those things. What I wish to illuminate through this juxtaposition, however, is not a way to clearly demarcate “critical” from “conspiratorial” theorizing, but is a question of educational desirability of skepticism. Skepticism in this paper is not understood as a classical epistemological question of the possibility of knowledge attainment, but as a form of vigilance toward epistemic authorities like the government, media, and academic institutions. Drawing on philosophy of conspiracy theories and political epistemology, I illuminate the problem of radical skepticism that characterizes some conspiracy theories and discuss the pivotal epistemic role of trust. Through this, I claim that critical media literacy education for democratic citizenship must strike a balance between cultivation of skepticism and building of trust toward epistemic authorities. (shrink)

In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...) species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient _H. sapiens_, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified. (shrink)

When radiocarbon dating techniques were applied to archaeological material in the 1950s they were hailed as a revolution. At last archaeologists could construct absolute chronologies anchored in temporal data backed by immutable laws of physics. This would make it possible to mobilize archaeological data across regions and time-periods on a global scale, rendering obsolete the local and relative chronologies on which archaeologists had long relied. As profound as the impact of 14C dating has been, it has had a long and (...) tortuous history now described as proceeding through three revolutions, each of which addresses distinct challenges of capturing, processing and packaging radiogenic data for use in resolving chronological puzzles with which archaeologists has long wrestled. In practice, mobilizing radiogenic data for archaeological use is a hard-won achievement; it involves multiple transformations that, at each step of the way, depend upon a diverse array of technical expertise and background knowledge. I focus on strategies of triangulation and traceability that establish the integrity of these data and their relevance as anchors for evidential reasoning in archaeology. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview with three members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sao Paolo (Brazil) Wylie explains how she came to work on philosophical issues raised in and by archaeology, describes the contextualist challenges to ‘received view’ models of confirmation and explanation in archaeology that inform her work on the status of evidence and contextual ideals of objectivity, and discusses the role of non-cognitive values in science. She also is pressed to explain what’s feminist (...) about feminist research and in that connection outlines her account of feminist standpoint theory and the relevance of feminist analysis to science. (shrink)

Social media sites offer a huge data about our everyday life, thoughts, feelings and reflecting what the users want and like. Since user behavior on OSNS is a mirror image of actions in the real world, scholars have to investigate the use SM to prediction, making forecasts about our daily life. This paper provide an overview of different commonly used social media and application of their data analysis.

How social media impacts the autonomy of its users is a topic of increasing focus. However, much of the literature that explores these impacts fails to engage in depth with the philosophical literature on autonomy. This has resulted in a failure to consider the full range of impacts that social media might have on autonomy. A deeper consideration of these impacts is thus needed, given the importance of both autonomy as a moral concept and social media as (...) a feature of contemporary life. By drawing on this philosophical literature, we argue that autonomy is broadly a matter of developing autonomy competencies, having authentic ends and control over key aspects of your own life, and not being manipulated, coerced, and controlled by others. We show how the autonomy of users of social media can be disrespected and harmed through the control that social media can have over its users’ data, attention, and behaviour. We conclude by discussing various recommendations to better regulate social media. (shrink)

I focus here on archaeologists who work with Indigenous descendant communities in North America and address two key questions raised by their practice about the advantages of situated inquiry. First, what exactly are the benefits of collaborative practice—what does it contribute, in this case to archaeology? And, second, what is the philosophical rationale for collaborative practice? Why is it that, counter-intuitively for many, collaborative practice has the capacity to improve archaeology in its own terms and to provoke critical (...) scrutiny of its goals and methodological norms? The broader import, I argue, is a rethinking of traditional views of objectivity that takes social, contextual values to be a resource for improving what we know, rather than inevitably a source of compromising error and distortion (as discussed in detail in Chapters 7 and 9). (shrink)

The issue of the definition and position of archaeology as a discipline is examined in relation to the dispute which took place from 1980 to 2009 between the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin and the sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron. This case study enables us to explore the actual conceptual relationships between archaeology and the other sciences (as opposed to those wished for or prescribed). The contrasts between the positions declared by the two researchers and the rooting of their arguments in their (...) disciplines are examined: where the sociologist makes use of his philosophical training, the archaeologist relies mainly on his work on semiology and informatics. Archaeology ultimately plays a minor role in the arguments proposed. This dispute therefore cannot be considered as evidence for the movement of concepts between archaeology and the social sciences. A blind spot in the debate, relating to the ontological specificities of archaeological objects, nevertheless presents itself as a possible way of implementing this movement. (shrink)

Social media is a mess. Philosophers have recently helped catalogue some of the various ills. In this chapter, I relay some of this conceptual work on virtue signalling, piling on, ramping up, echo-chambers, epistemic bubbles, polarization, moral outrage porn, and the gamification of communication. In drawing attention to these things, philosophers hope to steer us towards being better online. One form that this takes is a call for more civility (both online and off). There is a good case to (...) be made for this; social media is a mess, and we should be kinder and look to communicate better with each other. But there is also a good objection: Civility, and calls for civility and politeness, can placate serious resistance to power and wrongdoing. What we ought to be doing is resisting power, looking to protect democracy and mitigate the climate crisis. And given that, so the objection goes, focussing on civility is at best wrong-headed, and at worse counterproductive to real needed change. How then are we to negotiate the call for civility with the need for real change? The hope is that we can be better online and work towards serious change together. (shrink)

Given the diversity of explanatory practices that is typical of the sciences a healthy pluralism would seem to be desirable where theories of explanation are concerned. Nevertheless, I argue that explanations are only unifying in Kitcher's unificationist sense if they are backed by the kind of understanding of underlying mechanisms, dispositions, constitutions, and dependencies that is central to a causalist account of explanation. This case can be made through analysis of Kitcher's account of the conditions under which apparent improvements in (...) unifying power may be judged spurious. But to clarify what is at issue I consider an archaeological case in which debate about the merits of an ambitious explanatory account reproduces exactly the intuitions that divide Salmon and Kitcher. The case in question is the “demic-diffusion” account of contemporary linguistic diversity advanced by Renfrew in the late 1980s: the thesis that the diffusion of agricultural populations, itself attributed to demographic pressure, was responsible for the spread of the ancestral root languages (e.g., proto-Indo-Eurpoean) that account for the existence and distribution of linguistic macrofamilies. The credibility of this powerfully unifying argument pattern depends entirely on the plausibility of its claims about the conditions and mechanisms actually responsible for the explanandum, the spread of agriculture, and not on an elaboration of its unificationist virtues. (shrink)

Nowe media w partycypacji obywatelskiej osób starszych Andrzej Klimczuk Generacja 13:6--7 (2014) .

This paper explores how the social and affective lives of people with marginalized social identities are particularly affected by digital influences. Specifically, the paper examines whether and how social media enables LGBTQ+ people to experience feelings of belonging. It does so by drawing on literature from digital epistemology and phenomenology of the digital, and by presenting and analyzing the results of a qualitative study consisting of 25 interviews with LGBTQ+ people. The interviews were conducted to explore the social (...) class='Hi'>media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through an empirical framework informed by both phenomenology and social epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint theory. The paper emphasizes the importance of positionality and the epistemic value of research that centers marginalized perspectives and employs an anti-oppressive research approach, and focuses on understanding the digital experiences of LGBTQ+ people from within their marginalized perspective. (shrink)

Our lives are guided by habits. Most of the activities we engage in throughout the day are initiated and carried out not by rational thought and deliberation, but through an ingrained set of dispositions or patterns of action—what Aristotle calls a hexis. We develop these dispositions over time, by acting and gauging how the world responds. I tilt the steering wheel too far and the car’s lurch teaches me how much force is needed to steady it. I come too close (...) to a hot stove and the burn I get inclines me not to get too close again. This feedback and the habits it produces are bodily. They are possible because the medium through which these actions take place is a physical, sensible one. The world around us is, in the language of postphenomenology, an opaque one. We notice its texture and contours as we move through it, and crucially, we bump up against it from time to time. The digital world, by contrast, is largely transparent. Digital media are designed to recede from view. As a result, we experience little friction as we carry out activities online; the consequences of our actions are often not apparent to us. This distinction between the opacity of the natural world and the transparency of the digital one raises important questions. In this chapter, I ask: how does the transparency of digital media affect our ability to develop healthy habits online? If the digital world is constructed precisely not to push back against us, how are we supposed to gauge whether our actions are good or bad, for us and for others? The answer to this question has important ramifications for a number of ethical, political, and policy debates around issues in online life. For in order to advance cherished norms like privacy, civility, and fairness online, we need more than good laws and good policies—we need good habits, which dispose us to act in ways conducive to our and others’ flourishing. (shrink)

Self-control, the capacity to resist temptations and pursue longer-term goals over immediate gratifications, is crucial in determining the overall shape of our lives, and thereby in our ability to shape our identities. As it turns out, this capacity is intimately linked with our ability to control the direction of our attention. This raises the worry that perhaps social media are making us more easily distracted people, and therefore less able to exercise self-control. Is this so? And is it necessarily (...) a bad thing? This paper analyzes the nature of attention, its vices and virtues, and what currently available evidence has to say about the effects of social media on attention and self-control. The pattern that seems to be emerging is that, although there is an association between higher use of social media and lower attentional control, we do not yet know whether it is social media use that makes people more distracted, or whether those who use social media the most do so because they are more easily distracted. Either way, the rise of the ‘Web 2.0’ does raise questions about whether the virtues of attention will change in the future, and whether this will bring with it a transformation in the way we shape our selves. (shrink)

This short piece draws on political philosophy to show how social media interference operations can be used by hostile states to weaken the apparent legitimacy of democratic governments. Democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to this form of attack because democratic governments depend for their legitimacy on citizens' trust in one another. But when citizen see one another as complicit in the distribution of deceptive content, they lose confidence in the epistemic preconditions for democracy. The piece concludes with policy recommendations (...) for how democratic governments should protect themselves. (shrink)

The articles in this issue represent the pursuit of a new understanding of the human past, one that can replace the neo-saltationist view of a human revolution with models that can account for the complexities of the archaeological record and of human social lives. The articulation of archaeological, philosophical, and biological perspectives seems to offer a strong foundation for exploring available evidence, and this was the rationale for collecting these particular articles. Even at this preliminary stage there is a coherence (...) emerging in proposals: the origin and operation of symbolically rich, complexly signaling human social systems was the consequence of the long-term evolution of multiple components of perceiving and negotiating social interactions, a contingent outcome of myriad adaptive shifts rather than a single event. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral concerns (...) with these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

The visuospatial system integrates inner and outer functional processes, organizing spatial, temporal, and social interactions between the brain, body, and environment. These processes involve sensorimotor networks like the eye–hand circuit, which is especially important to primates, given their reliance on vision and touch as primary sensory modalities and the use of the hands in social and environmental interactions. At the same time, visuospatial cognition is intimately connected with memory, self-awareness, and simulation capacity. In the present article, we review issues associated (...) with investigating visuospatial integration in extinct human groups through the use of anatomical and behavioral data gleaned from the paleontological and archaeological records. In modern humans, paleoneurological analyses have demonstrated noticeable and unique morphological changes in the parietal cortex, a region crucial to visuospatial management. Archaeological data provides information on hand–tool interaction, the spatial behavior of past populations, and their interaction with the environment. Visuospatial integration may represent a critical bridge between extended cognition, self-awareness, and social perception. As such, visuospatial functions are relevant to the hypothesis that human evolution is characterized by changes in brain–body–environment interactions and relations, which enhance integration between internal and external cognitive components through neural plasticity and the development of a specialized embodiment capacity. We therefore advocate the investigation of visuospatial functions in past populations through the paleoneurological study of anatomical elements and archaeological analysis of visuospatial behaviors. (shrink)

Methodological innovations have a special status in disciplinary histories, because they can be widely adopted and anonymised. In the 1950s, this occurred to Georges Laplace’s innovative use of 3-dimensional metric Cartesian coordinate system to record the positions of archaeological objects. This paper proposes a conceptual and social history of this process, with a focus on its spatial context, the Pyrenean region (Spain, Basque Country, and France). Main results of this research based on archives, publications, and bibliometric data, include: 1) a (...) critical discussion of the notions concerning authorship of such methodological innovations; 2) a presentation of the lesser-known aspects of Laplace’s method, showing its contribution to the abstraction and formalisation of archaeological observations and data recording; and 3) the identification of an international Pyrenean intellectual lineage of innovation regarding stratigraphy and excavation methods, from the late 19th century to the early 21th century. (shrink)

Gender research archaeology has made significant contributions, but its dissociation from the resources of feminist scholarship and feminist activism is a significantly limiting factor in its development. The essays that make up this special issue illustrate what is to be gained by making systematic use of these resources. Their distinctively feminist contributions are characterized in terms of the recommendations for “doing science as a feminist” that have taken shape in the context of the long running “feminist method debate” in (...) the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper calls into question the growing tendency of quasi-absolutism within postmodern mainstream media discourse under the guise of objectivity. The tendency’s major aim is to ascribe more believability to its discourse by re-presenting that which it covers as the vehicle of objective truth to the mainstream audience. Two interweaving discourses have marked such objectivity: one in the form of indoctrinating and omnipresent narratives, which via effective propaganda become tantamount to ritualism, the other epitomised in the nostalgia for rationalisation, (...) already inherent in western positivist thought through the exponential increase of quasi-empiricism. Accordingly, what the media cover exists. What they do not remains in the order of myth. The article starts by rethinking objectivity within modern western academia, a discourse whose objectivity is already flawed from within. Then, with respect to human experience and media coverage, the paper concludes by raising the question of postmodern mainstream media’s substitution of religious quasi-absolutist narratives, be they secular or non-secular. Subjectivity thus emerges as the ultimate ground upon which our being may be legitimate. (shrink)

During the past decades, the culture industries have multiplied media spectacles in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life. An Internet-based economy has been developing hi-tech spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation and selling of commodities, using multimedia and increasingly sophisticated technology to dazzle consumers. M edia culture proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences and augment their power (...) and profit. The forms of entertainment permeate news and information, and a tablodized infotainment culture is more and more popular. New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio, film, TV news and entertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace, become spectacles of technoculture, generating expanding sites of information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle-form of media culture. Political and social life is also shaped more and more by media spectacle. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles like sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. M edia culture not only takes up expanding moments of contemporary experience, but also provides ever more material for fantasy, dreaming, modeling thought and behavior, and constructing identities. Of course, there have been spectacles since premodern times. Classical Greece had its Olympics, thespian and poetry festivals, its public rhetorical battles, and bloody and violent wars. Ancient Rome had its public offerings of bread and circuses, its orgies, its titanic political battles, and the spectacle of Empire with parades and monuments for triumphant Caesars and their armies, extravaganzas put on display in the 2000 film Gladiator.. (shrink)

Every year, the number of tourists in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is increasing. The most numerous visitors are journalists who come to perform theirofficial duties. At the same time, researchers have not yet shown interest in such an interesting and important tourist phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to de- scribe a new phenomenon of media tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and its features. The study was conducted with a help of a qualitative case study analysis method. (...) The websites of the state and private enterprises and mass media publications based on the results of trips to the territory for 2013-2017 were analyzed. As a result, the specific features of journalists who visit the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone were identified. Such journalists mainly have confidence in the absence of a threat to health (55%), developed empathy (45%) and imagination of thinking (45%). Consequently, the tragedy of history and the gloomy appearance of the territory, the suffering of local residents make it attractive to journalists. In addition, due to personal interest, the voluntary travel motive (61,5%) prevails over conditional forced travel (38,5%). At the same time, the attention of journalists to the territory is attracted due to the activities of tourists. The authors describe the so-called «compensation effect», when the reduction of tourists' attention to the territory is balanced by an increase in the attention of the mass media. The presence of risk explains the predominance of men among journalists in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (54%). For example, women can better assess the risk due to greater vulnerability. The peculiarity of journalists' work in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is the risk of radiation exposure and ethical controversy. The study shows that journalists' inherent positive world perception and profound sense of professional duty can successfully overcome these obstacles. The results of the study can be used by the following researchers to identify ways and strategies for promoting media tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The benefit of this study is to draw attention to a new unexplored tourist phenomenon. Mass media have a great influence on the formation of a positive attitude towards the territory and attracting the attention of tourists. Taking into account the specific features of media tourism will help to attract more tourists and improve the quality of rendering service to journalists. (shrink)

Focusing on the history of prehistoric archaeology in the 20th century, this papers shows (1) that statistical multidimensional analyses were carried out by a new kind of actors who challenged the previous common language shared by prehistorians. This fundamental change was important, considering that (2) language is a fundamental point for the epistemology of archaeology. However, a comparison of multidimensional analyses applications over time shall make clear that (3) the differences are mostly a generational matter: the transmission processes (...) between them will be addressed. (shrink)

Innovative modes of collaboration between archaeologists and Indigenous communities are taking shape in a great many contexts, in the process transforming conventional research practice. While critics object that these partnerships cannot but compromise the objectivity of archaeological science, many of the archaeologists involved argue that their research is substantially enriched by them. I counter objections raised by internal critics and crystalized in philosophical terms by Boghossian, disentangling several different kinds of pluralism evident in these projects and offering an analysis of (...) why they are epistemically productive when they succeed. My central thesis is that they illustrate the virtues of epistemic inclusion central to proceduralist accounts of objectivity, but I draw on the resources of feminist standpoint theory to motivate the extension of these social -cognitive norms beyond the confines of the scientific community. (shrink)

This article examines epistemic impacts of social media, merging Gibson’s affordance theory with the notion of selective permeability, which holds people encounter objective differences in a setting because of their distinct capacities, only here applying the idea to online spaces. I start by circumscribing my deployment of “affordances,” taking care not to totally divorce the term from Gibson’s intent, as often happens in information technologies research. I next detail ways that selective permeability characterizes online epistemic landscapes, focusing on how (...) factors (like culture) moderate normative standards for sharing information. This leads to a discussion about selective receptivity and blindness to information in the context of social media—a situation that amplifies political divides and renders antagonists mutually incomprehensible. This segues into my final topic: an exposition of how social media can make the offline world more selectively hostile to some. An additional proposition is that practical habits cultivated on networking apps can modulate what affordances are present in offline arenas, as opposed to just affecting which ones get noticed. Throughout, I suggest that selective permeability answers an increasingly recognized challenge: the difficulty of generalizing conclusions about one app to others and across cultures, ages, etc. Ultimately, my aim is not only to explicate how social media fragments common social knowledge but to defend selective permeability as an epistemic template for comprehending social media. (shrink)

Suicide is a complex act whose meanings, while sometimes tragic, vary widely. This chapter surveys the ethical landscape surrounding algorithmic methods of suicide prevention especially as it pertains to social media activity and to the moderation of online suicide communities. We begin with a typology of suicide, distinguishing between varied goals in which suicide may factor as a means. Suicides should be understood as an act with varied eliciting desires, meanings, consequences, and ethics. Further,while many suicides may be grounded (...) on irrational desire, we argue that a desire to suicide may nonetheless be rational in some cases. We then offer a survey of the attempts by social media corporations to create suicide prediction algorithms and launch interventions aimed at preventing suicide as well as an overview of the current ethical debate. We argue that the values embedded within algorithmic suicide prevention nudges are “thick” in a substantive sense and deserving of scrutiny. Given that debates about the rationality, meaning, and permissibility of suicide are common and subject to intracultural and cross-cultural differences, we maintain that the task of suicide prediction is ill-suited to algorithmic approaches. Despite an algorithm’s ability to quantify a complex phenomenon like suicide risk and its appearance of objectivity, any suicide prediction algorithm is thoroughly subjective and involves moral judgments all the way down. Any such algorithm would necessarily impose a normative stance on suicide onto its user base that is subject to reasonable intra and cross-cultural disagreement. (shrink)

To explore social media use in New Zealand, a sample of 1001 adults aged 18 and over were surveyed in November 2021. Participants were asked about the frequency of their use of different social media platforms (text message included). This report describes how often each of the nine social media sites and apps covered in the survey are used individually on a daily basis. Differences based on key demographics, i.e., age and gender, are tested for statistical significance, (...) and findings summarised. (shrink)

Deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media are widely regarded as serious threats to our knowledge of the world. Various technological responses to these threats have been proposed. The reactive approach proposes to use artificial intelligence to identify synthetic media. The proactive approach proposes to use blockchain and related technologies to create immutable records of verified media content. I argue that both approaches, but especially the reactive approach, are vulnerable to a problem analogous to the ancient problem (...) of the criterion—a line of argument with skeptical implications. I argue that, while the proactive approach is relatively resistant to this objection, it faces its own serious challenges. In short, the proactive approach would place a heavy burden on users to verify their own content, a burden that is exacerbated by and is likely to exacerbate existing inequalities. (shrink)

Corporative global media cannot be an instrument of the culture of peace, because they have made widespread individualistic values of the consummative society. Through their symbolic power, they successfully dominate over every sphere of existence of a society: politics, economic life, social ties, national culture, human communication and private life. Traditional media could not be a factor in the promotion and development of culture of peace, simply because they are proponents of corporative economic and political interests. It is (...) in the interest of citizens to counter the activities of “rapacious capitalism” (SCHMIDT 1998), of local comprador political and economic elites, and the practice of robbery of their work; to bridle the proliferation of weapons and acts of aggression. (shrink)

Vietnam, with a geographical proximity and a high volume of trade with China, was the first country to record an outbreak of the new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 or SARS-CoV-2. While the country was expected to have a high risk of transmission, as of April 4, 2020—in comparison to attempts to contain the disease around the world—responses from Vietnam are being seen as prompt and effective in protecting the interests of its citizens, (...) with 239 confirmed cases and no fatalities. This study analyzes the situation in terms of Vietnam’s policy response, social media and science journalism. A self-made web crawl engine was used to scan and collect official media news related to COVID-19 between the beginning of January and April 4, yielding a comprehensive dataset of 14,952 news items. The findings shed light on how Vietnam—despite being under-resourced—has demonstrated political readiness to combat the emerging pandemic since the earliest days. Timely communication on any developments of the outbreak from the government and the media, combined with up-to-date research on the new virus by the Vietnamese science community, have altogether provided reliable sources of information. By emphasizing the need for immediate and genuine cooperation between government, civil society and private individuals, the case study offers valuable lessons for other nations concerning not only the concurrent fight against the COVID-19 pandemic but also the overall responses to a public health crisis. (shrink)