New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication
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The New Exploration’s Editor’s Welcoming Remarks
No full textThe welcoming remarks of Robert K. Logan, Editor of the New Explorations Journa
Scientific and Technological Revolution, Digital Humanism and Prospects for Sustainable Development of Science and Education
No full textScientific and Technological Revolution, Digital Humanism and
Prospects for Sustainable Development of Science and Educatio
Intergenerational Media of Understanding? The Belt and Road Initiative and the Project of a Social European Union
No full textDigital technologies enhance chances for and limits of human autonomies. Accelerating "technical generations" and cultural standardizations of dis-/information and ex-/communication, of coordinating experiences and activities enhance context shifts. Digital humanism requires foci on those potentially democratizing and inclusive long-term developmental patterns for which traditionally only rudimentary and often hegemonic culture- and generation-specific data exist. China\u27s Belt and Road Initiative and the Project of a more social European Union offer two highly eminent and distinctive cases. They refer back to the historic silk road and Chinese global greatness or European enlightenment and universalizing human rights. Their disparate and conflictual concepts of main and legitimate decisive actors, political, economic, and social goals emerge in quite different modes. Such inconsistencies of partially contradictory and fundamentally competing domain assumptions and basic categories are veiled by seemingly neutral classifications in digital archives and retrieval systems. They are also darkened via politically and economically driven interests, which become prioritized in digital ranking orders. Such fights for setting and breaking any rules or conventions require more attention by digital humanism and digital humanities. In contrast, media of mutual understanding across cultures for long-term networks of successive generations call for interpreting upheavals of contextual experiential settings
The Bible Project and the Sensorium: Opening Spaces for New Media Ecologies
No full textThe Bible Project is a nonprofit animation studio that uses explainer videos—a relatively new genre of digital media—to tell the biblical story. In this paper, I first trace media ecology theory in relation to church history and doctrine, giving special attention to how the advent of the printing press resulted in a divorce between different Christian traditions’ theology of media. I then contextualize explainer videos as a media genre using Gregory Ulmer’s theory of electracy, and posit that their deployment by The Bible Project as digital exegesis is the natural result of Protestant theology. To illuminate different Christian traditions’ historical, contemporary, and future media ecologies and theologies, I point to Dennis Cali’s call to reconceive the inner or “interior” sensorium; suggest that we do so in light of imago Dei; and cite ways that theoretical and empirical research might contribute to questions at the intersections of media ecology, digital religion, and theological anthropology
Education and Digitalisation in the Global South: A Reflection from the Colombian Case
No full textThis paper begins by sketching the discussion about the modern educational project. In order to do so, some critiques of the project of modernity are first presented, along with decolonial theories in Latin America. Afterwards two alternative experiences are presented, one from an indigenous community in the south of the country The Nasa Acin and the proposal of the University of the Earth and Memory in Bogotá. On the basis of these experiences will be discussed their novelty and potentiality as educational proposals that seek intercultural recognition and attempt to break with the dominance of the digitalisation market in education. Some ambiguous and contradictory dimensions stand out: uneven levels of technological appropriation, old and new power structures in market-driven societies are mixed in complex ways with novel social, cultural and educational proposals. Finally, it presents some conclusions
A World Worth Living—Can Artificial Intelligence Help to Reach the Goal?
No full textArtificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of Computer Science that has reached quite some attention in the public media, politics and economy. There is a worldwide expectation that AI will be the key technology for the future. In this paper, I sketch and discuss whether the prospects and hopes are realistic from a technical point of view and under which conditions AI will contribute to the human beings’ welfare
From Objective Reality to Fake News Galaxy: Narcissus Narcosis, Images and Imagination in Contemporary Global Expanded Reality Village
No full textWe explore Marshall McLuhan’s notion of Narcissus’ Narcosis, the way by which a new technology, as an extension of ourselves, mesmerizes us—as was the case of Narcissus, who fell in love with an image of himself in a pool of water. The article explores how the Narcissus\u27 Narcosis effect with radio and cinema led to devastating effects on public opinion, and the dissemination of false information by WhatsApp and other social media networks affected recent political events, such as the Brexit referendum (2016), the victory of Donald Trump in the USA (2016) and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018). Our aim is to understand how, in an increasingly complex and difficult world, the narcissistic and narcotic pleasures involved in recognizing oneself reflected in one’s favorite digital devices left ordinary people extremely vulnerable to any news that confirms their biases, their worldview, no matter if true or false. This effect is even more intense when one considers the relationships between digital images and imagination. The antidote to this recurrent state of media trance seems to be in the artistic intervention in the cultural arena
Info-Autopoesis and Digitalisation
No full textDigital information and communication technologies remain a powerful force for change since the middle of the 20th century. Their Promethean reach demands laying bare their hidden tentacles to maximize benefit and minimize harm to living-beings-in-their-environment. One obvious hindrance to achieve this objective is that it lacks the firm foundation of an unambiguous and practical definition of information, perhaps due to the at times ethereal, at times pervasive nature of information. This may be partly due to the wide- ranging applicability of information in many and disparate fields of knowledge, e.g., business, finance, media communications, physics, biology, computer science, engineering, library science, to name a few. To find a common framework, we seek to show that the interactions of living beings with their environment are constitutive of information generation, information exchange, information relations and life. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to discover the connection between info-autopoiesis and digitalization. Info-autopoiesis is based on Bateson’s notion of difference which makes a difference, the self-referential, recursive process of self-production of information, which all living beings are engaged in in their efforts to satisfy their physiological and social needs. On the other hand, digitalization is viewed both as the ability to encode information in multifarious but equivalent forms to allow for embodied syntactic occurrence, and as the means to artificially generate information that is beyond the reach of its originators
The Mind Map of Media Ecology: A Review of Lance Strate’s Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition
No full textA Review of Lance Strate’s Media Ecolog
Beatrice Bruteau (1979) on Marshall McLuhan (1964), and Walter J. Ong’s Thought
No full textIn my 10,100-word commentary “Beatrice Bruteau (1979) on Marshall McLuhan (1964), and Walter J. Ong’s Thought,” I highlight the life and work of (1) the American mystic philosopher and Catholic convert Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014; Ph.D. in philosophy, Fordham University, 1954) up to 1979; (2) the Canadian Renaissance specialist and media theorist and Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) up to 1964; and (3) the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and media theorist and orthodox Catholic priest Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Specifically, I focus most notably on Dr. Bruteau’s perceptive and lucid discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill) in her 1979 philosophical book The Psychic Grid: How We Create the World We Know (Quest Books/ Theosophical Publishing House). My style in the present essay tends to be associative, which, at times, may even seem digressive. Yes, though the substance of what I say here is scholarly, not personal, my associative style here bears a family resemblance to Molly Bloom’s associative style in her soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s famous experimental novel Ulysses (1922). Yes, my associative style here tends to be “Additive [and paratactic] rather than subordinative” to use one of Ong’s (1982, p. 37) characterizations of orally based thought and expression