The Stacks (Library of Anglo-American Culture & History - FID AAC, Göttingen State and University Library)
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Media Distortions: Understanding the Power behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media
No full textMedia Distortions is about the power behind the production of deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, science and technology studies (STS), feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Distortions argues that using sound as a conceptual framework is more useful due to its ability to cross boundaries and strategically move between multiple spaces—which is essential for multi-layered mediated spaces.
Drawing on repositories of legal, technical and archival sources, the book amplifies three stories about the construction and negotiation of the ‘deviant’ in media. The book starts in the early 20th century with Bell Telephone’s production of noise, tuning into the training of their telephone operators and their involvement with the Noise Abatement Commission in New York City. The next story jumps several decades to the early 2000s focusing on web metric standardization in the European Union and shows how the digital advertising industry constructed web-cookies as legitimate communication while making spam illegal. The final story focuses on the recent decade and the way Facebook filters out antisocial behaviors to engineer a sociality that produces more value. These stories show how deviant categories re-draw boundaries between human and non-human, public and private spaces, and importantly, social and antisocial.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/7016
Überwachung ist Macht. Zur Mythifizierung von Überwachung in der Gegenwartskunst
No full textThe article uses contemporary artworks by Florian Mehnert (Waldprotokolle [2013]), Paolo Cirio (Street Ghosts [2012–2017]) and the artists’ collective ‘Center for Political Beauty’ (Holocaust Memorial Bornhagen [2017]) to show how ‘narratives of surveillance’ change in art. Surveillance can be semantically functionalized as ‘power’, as the art action Holocaust Memorial Bornhagen by the Center for Political Beauty shows. This functionalization of surveillance as power stems from culturally established phobic narratives. In this context, the symbolic representation of surveillance is repeatedly charged with meaning, which can be assigned to the semantic field of power. This results in a ‘mythification’ of surveillance in the sense of Roland Barthes, in which original semantics such as state surveillance, security or
freedom are eliminated.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6988
Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen zum Lebenswissen der Literatur und zu Axel Hackes ‚Wozu wir da sind‘ als literarisches Gedankenexperiment für ein gelungenes Leben
No full textA series of theoretical reorientations has not only reshaped the study of culture and the humanities, these ‘cultural turns’ (Doris Bachmann-Medick) have also had an impact on the trajectory of literary studies. Taking its cue from one of the most recent turns that have been proposed, viz. the so-called ‘eudaimonic turn’ (James O. Pawelski and D.J. Moores), this essay argues that literary studies have good reasons to involve themselves more strongly than hitherto in the interdisciplinary discussion on what constitutes a good life, and that literature itself creates important life-knowledge and cultural models of what a good life could look like. Literary works delineate aesthetically created thought experiments that test different models of viable or good forms of life (section 2). The knowledge of literature, however, does not entail explicit or normative recommendations on how to lead one’s life, but is based more on the aesthetic forms and literary techniques used for representing forms of life. These hypotheses are explored in section 3 by means of an exemplary analysis of Axel Hacke’s latest book ‚Wozu wir da sind. Walter Wemuts Handreichungen für ein gelungenes Leben‘ (2019). The essay attempts to show that a reorientation towards the poetics and thematic of a good life or eudaimonia opens up not only new research questions and trajectories for literary studies but also affords an opportunity to increase the social and practical relevance of a form of literary studies that gravitate towards life sciences (section 4). A short epilogue in a more personal and subjective vein concludes this essay with reflections on the question of what professors and universities are there for
Surveillance | Society | Culture
No full textWhat only a few decades ago would have been considered a totalitarian nightmare seems to have become reality: Surveillance practices and technologies have infiltrated all aspects of our lives, forcing us to reconsider established notions of privacy, subjectivity, and the status of the individual in society. The United States is central to contemporary concerns about surveillance. American companies are at the forefront of developing surveillance technologies; and government agencies, in the name of security and law and order, are monitoring our words and actions more than ever before. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the implications of what many consider to be a far-reaching social, political, and cultural transformation.Florian Zappe and Andrew S. Gross: "Introduction" 9 // Bernhard H. F. Taureck: "Surveillance – A Complex Relationship" 27 // Florian Zappe: "Gazing Back at the Monster – A Critical Posthumanist
Intervention on Surveillance Culture, Sousveillance and the Lifelogged Self" 39 // Bärbel Harju: "Too Much Information: Self-Monitoring and Confessional Culture" 57 // Felix Haase: "Death by Data: Identification and Dataveillance in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story" 85 // Birgit Däwes: "Flickers of Vision: Surveillance and the Uncertainty Paradigm in Dave Eggers’s The Circle" 103 // Andrew S. Gross: "The Black Box of Humanism: Surveillance, the Spy Narrative, and Literary Form" 119 // Silke Järvenpää: Rap vs. Big Brother: The Conscious and the Comical" 137 // Hugh Davies: "The Art of Surveillance: Surveying the Lives and Works of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei" 153 // Marek Paryż: "Paranoia and Surveillance in Andrew Dominik’s Film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" 175 // Caren Myers Morrison: "Mythologies of Violence in American Police Videos" 191 // Garrett Stewart: "Afterword" 213 //https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6489
Give Them Something to Watch. Videoüberwachung als Motiv in Werbung
No full textIf 'video' is Latin for 'I see,' then 'video surveillance' literally means: I see surveillance. Thus, video surveillance is a technique that functions not only by making someone or some event visible to others. But also by making itself visible: by turning itself into a specific image and by disseminating these images of itself. Surveillance studies scholars examine not only the empirical reality of surveillance, but regularly find their objects in the field of pop and popular culture: in news broadcasts, feature films, computer games or pop music. In this paper, I will study how selected advertising clips represent video surveillance on a visual and narrative level, how they frame the discourse on surveillance in a specific way, how they seemingly show options of resistance and how they link the possibility of resistance to the consumption or use of a particular advertised commodity. From this, arguments are developed for a critique of some of the dominant topoi of the surveillance discourse.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6988
Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives
No full textThe essay explores the often-ignored histories of the indigenous people who resided on the confluence of the Merrimack and the Concord rivers up to the 1650s. This place is characterized by a significant bend in the Merrimack River as it changes its southerly flow into an easterly direction. Today, the area includes the modern city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and its surroundings. While the 1650s saw the creation of a Native American “praying town” and the incorporation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s towns of Chelmsford and Billerica, it is the diverse and complex indigenous past before this decade which North American and global historians tend to neglect. The pre-colonial and early colonial eras, and how observers have described these periods, have shaped the way we understand history today. This essay problematizes terminology, looks at how amateur historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries have shaped popular perceptions of Native Americans, and explores how researchers have told the history before the 1650s. The materials available to reconstruct the history of the region’s Native Americans are often hard to find, a common issue for researchers who attempt to study the history of indigenous peoples before 1500. Thus, the essay pays special attention to how incomplete primary sources as well as archeological and ethnohistorical evidence have shaped interpretations of this history and how these intellectual processes have aided in the construction of this past.http://www.asjournal.org/69-2020/uncovering-indigenous-worlds-and-histories-on-a-bend-of-a-new-england-river-before-the-1650s-problematizing-nomenclature-and-settler-colonial-deep-history-and-early-colonization-narratives
The Crime Fiction Series
No full textThe serial logic manifests itself on several levels: the microlevel of the individual narrative, the intermediate level of the story or book series, and the macro level of the genre. In the course of the genre’s maturation and professionalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crime fiction came to be inscribed with seriality. The traditions of the French feuilleton and the American dime novel proved especially instrumental for the evolution of modern crime narration. It has been argued that the formation of industrialised nation-states across the globe was contingent on the invention of “print capitalism” that gained traction in the nineteenth century and relied heavily on the formats of the periodical publishing market with its synchronised production and reception practices. For most of the twentieth century, serial storytelling in general and crime fiction particularly retained the reputation of being cheap and fast, and increasingly, literary and cinematic formats intersected
The Gamer’s Panopticon – Überwachung und Kontrolle als Motiv und Prinzip des Computerspiels
No full textThis paper deals with the question of how computer games usually represent surveillance and control. It examines the games Papers, please, Beholder and Orwell. In the second part, connections between the process of the game and the principles of surveillance and control are sought using The Stanley Parable as an example.https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/6988