eTopia (E-Journal)
Not a member yet
74 research outputs found
Sort by
THE MEANING OF “e-”: NEOLOGISMS AS MARKERS OF CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
Get PDFA community is known by the language it keeps, and its words chronicle the times. Every aspect of the life of a people is reflected in the words they use to talk about themselves and the world around them. As their world changes – through invention, discovery, revolution,evolution or personal transformation – so does their language. Like the growth rings of a tree, our vocabulary bears witness to our past.- John Algeo (Fifty Years Among the New Words)Algeo reveals two interesting concepts in this simple passage. First, he acknowledges the intricate relationship between language and culture. Although it is no secret that both language and culture change over time, he explains how language acts as a marker of history, reflecting back culture as it changes. Secondly, he points to vocabulary as the primary indicator for tracking this change and recognizes that new words or neologisms can be useful tools for understanding how culture is evolving. Algeo shows us that through monitoring vocabulary change, we can track cultural change. New words are constantly entering the lexicon to describe new concepts and technologies and what they mean to us. Conversely, older words continually fall out of use as they decrease in cultural significance. Considering the influence digital technology has had on society, it is not surprising then that lexicographers have found that science and technology are by far the most prolific sources of neologisms in recent times (Crystal 2002; Knowles & Elliot 1997;Van Dyke 1992; Gozzi 1990)
INFRARED IMAGINATIONS AND CLOUD-TRUTH: CLASSIFYING WEATHER IN THE SATELLITE AGE
Get PDFLike sex, weather is a social creation. Indeed, we talk about the weather more often than we talk about sex, and, as for most natural processes, society has created structures of meaning that define atmospheric change in human terms. These meanings evolve as technology and scientific thought progress, creating new ways of experiencing the weather and of literally seeing the sky. In modern, enlightened times, the weather has become subject to thorough classification, formulation and social regulation via new techniques of atmospheric observation and scientific processing. As the technocultural eye sees the atmosphere differently, ideas about what the weather means also change. Berland notes that the “most brazenly unruled of all the cyclical processes of ‘Nature’ turns out to be shaped differently by our different imaginations, and now haunts our material symbolic expressions through inversion, distortion, condensation,and absence” (1999). The endless sky becomes an endless seriesof digitized patterns and formulas, whose earthly results nonetheless connect to the most visceral and emotional centres of human consciousness
TELEVISION AND THE “OBJET A”: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE "BOOB TUBE"
Get PDFIt was Metz’ project, as Baudry before him, to position the filmic apparatus within its ideological framework in order to expose the medium that had been hidden beneath a discursive concentration on content. Metz and Baudry did not only interrogate the machinery of the cinema – the camera, the projector, the screen, the theatre – but also the position that its subject assumed to it: The cinema’s audience was not an external element, but its constitutive suture. And it was not just that the film industry created this position to empty the pockets of her patron’s; for Baudry, it represented the fulfillment of a centuries old desire to obtain a realer-than-real, as first manifested in Plato’s creation of the hypothetical cave-come-prison. So too for Metz the cinema was “a veritable psychical substitute, a prosthesis for our primally dislocated limbs” (15). My analysis here is similar to that of Baudry and Metz, though its object is different. Here television is unearthed from its content, described in its function as a member of our bodies, psyches, and social environment
CYBERMUSEOLOGY AND INTANGIBLE HERITAGE
Get PDFIn the globalization process many cultural traditions around the world tend to disappear under the pressure of standardisation of practice and content. Cultural diversity seems to recede more and more. In a proactive position, UNESCO made a universal declaration on cultural diversity in 2001 that it would aim at heritage preservation.In the same effort of protection and enhancement of cultural diversity, museums are developing Internet material to preserve and disseminate cultural knowledge and heritage and to create interactive experiences between users and content. This has given birth to what some refer to as cybermuseology. But one can ask, do virtual museums present more than images of objects? Can the knowledge of localised cultural heritage and practices be transferred without losing the context it stems from, or what de B’béri (Cinema andSocial Discourse 64) defines as “the condition under which a society produces specific meaning”? More specifically, can information and communication technologies (ICT) transfer tacit knowledge, human experience, and tangible cultural heritage, and if so, what can we learn through this new process of cultural codification?This paper shall focus on explaining cybermuseology and then explore the process of knowledge codification and the links we can draw with heritage codification. In the last section I will discuss virtual experiences and try to determine how museums are using the virtual to protect and promote cultural diversity