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Regulating communicative risk: online harms and subjective rights
Get PDFStates are in the process of creating controversial legislation aimed at subjecting ‘harmful’ online communication on social media and search engines to new regulatory regimes. Critics argue that these measures are serious threats to the right to freedom of expression. This article first draws on elements of systems theory to reframe the right to freedom of expression in democracy as a paradoxical critical engine which protects the value of second-order observation. Taking the UK’s Online Safety bill as the paradigm example of the new laws, the article analyses the concept of harmful communication at three levels: society, organisation, and subject. It identifies a shift in the law’s epistemic approach to communication, by which individuals are reconfigured from agential subjects into contingent users, whose capacities are determined by the structure of online communication platforms. Arguing that it is insufficient to merely reaffirm subjective rights in this environment, the article suggests systems theoretical analysis as a means of identifying further lines of critique
Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
No full textJ. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels—from the notorious Crash (1973) to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing journalism, memoir, and cultural criticism in a variety of forms. This volume collects the most significant short nonfiction of Ballard's fifty-year career, extending the range of the only previous collection of his nonfiction, A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996), which selected essays and reviews published between 1962 and 1995.
A decade on from Ballard's death in 2009, a new generation of readers needs a new collection. In the period following A User's Guide, Ballard's writing addressed 9/11, British politics from New Labour onward, and what he termed “the rise of soft fascism”—a diagnosis that maintains its relevance amid a shift toward right populism in European and US politics. Beautifully edited by Ballard scholar and novelist Mark Blacklock, this volume includes Ballard's editorials and manifestos; commentaries on his own work; commentaries on the work of others; reviews; and more. Above all, it makes the case for the currency of Ballard's work at a contemporary juncture at which so many of his diagnoses concerning the media and politics have become apparent
Science communication as a collective intelligence endeavor: a manifesto and examples for implementation
Get PDFEffective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be informed by (a) a wider base of aggregated knowledge, (b) contributions from a diverse scientific community, (c) participatory input from stakeholders, and (d) better responsiveness to ongoing changes in the state of knowledge
‘All this way, all this money, for a five-minute procedure’: barriers, mobilities, and representation on the US abortion road trip
Get PDFThe abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Unpregnant and Girls on the Verge) and two films (Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Grandma) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual
Convergence of sparse grid Gaussian convolution approximation for multidimensional periodic functions
Get PDFWe consider the problem of approximating -periodic functions by convolution with a scaled Gaussian kernel. We start by establishing convergence rates to functions from periodic Sobolev spaces and we show that the saturation rate is where is the scale of the Gaussian kernel. Taken from a discrete point of view, this result can be interpreted as the accuracy that can be achieved on the uniform grid with spacing In the discrete setting, the curse of dimensionality would place severe restrictions on the computation of the approximation. For instance, a spacing of would provide an approximation converging at a rate of but would require grid points. To overcome this we introduce a sparse grid version of Gaussian convolution approximation, where substantially fewer grid points are required (from on the full grid to just on the sparse grid) and
show that the sparse grid version delivers a saturation rate of This rate is in line with what one would expect in the sparse grid setting (where the full grid error only deteriorates by a factor of order ) however the analysis that leads to the result is novel in that it draws on results from the theory of special functions and key observations regarding the form of certain weighted geometric sums
Queers in quarantine: young LGBTQ+ people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic led to major restrictions of everyday life activities. This worsened the social situation of many people, and marginalised groups have been especially affected. This article explores how LGBTQ+ young adults in Sweden have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recommendations and restrictions. Fifteen participants between 20-29 years, who self-identified as LGBTQ+, were interviewed about their experiences. A thematic analysis of the data showed that the participants perceived their psychological wellbeing to have been greatly affected by the pandemic. Several reported symptoms of clinical depression, as well as anxiety, worry, rumination, and a heightened sensitivity to stress. Stressors included fear of the disease itself, and fear of spreading the virus, as well as the negative consequences of adhering to the recommendations of social distancing, which constantly interplayed with the marginalised position of being a young LGBTQ+ person. Most participants experienced a decrease in minority stress in face-to-face interaction with social distancing measures in place, but an increase in minority stress online. Those who faced minority stress at home experienced the isolation as particularly stressful. Limited access to the LGBTQ+ community was a common stressor. For transgender participants, the effects on transgender healthcare, such as prolonged waiting times for gender dysphoria assessment and hormone treatment, were a major challenge. Our results have added valuable knowledge to research indicating how vulnerable young adults were highly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions
Why record improvisation?
Get PDFThis paper addresses the notion of the archive, specifically in the context of recording improvised music, and counter-poses this to the Schmittian/Pauline idea of the katechon. It argues that, whilst the difference between archive and katechon is slight, nevertheless this crucial difference allows for the possibility of decisiveness without exceptionalism
Differences in foreign language anxiety in regular and online EFL classes during the pandemic: a mixed-methods study
Get PDFThis paper explores differences in 437 learners’ foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) in in-person and online English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes before the outbreak of the pandemic and during the first lockdown in spring 2020. Statistical analyses of data gathered with a web survey revealed a slight, yet significant drop in learners’ overall FLCA in emergency remote teaching. In order to obtain a more granular view, item-level analyses revealed that learners in online classes were significantly less worried about being outperformed by peers, suffered less from physical symptoms of anxiety when called on in class and were less anxious when they were in fact well-prepared. Feeling embarrassed to volunteer answers was significantly higher in online classes. Interviews with 21 participants revealed that the interviewees mentioned anxiety-provoking aspects of the class considerably more frequently in online than in in-person classes. However, the sources of anxiety in online classes differed from the ones in classes taught on site. Thus, it seems that the newness of the setting foregrounded anxiety-provoking aspects specific to emergency remote teaching, making others fade in the background at the beginning of the pandemic
Infants’ representation of asymmetric social influence
Get PDFIn social groups, some individuals have more influence than others, for example, because they are learned from or because they coordinate collective actions. Identifying these influential individuals is crucial to learn about one’s social environment. Here, we tested whether infants represent asymmetric social influence among individuals from observing the imitation of movements in the absence of any observable coercion or order. We defined social influence in terms of Granger causality; that is, if A influences B, then past behaviors of A contain information that predicts the behaviors and mental states of B above and beyond the information contained in the past behaviors and mental states of B alone. Infants (12-, 15-, and 18-month-olds) were familiarized with agents (imitators) influenced by the actions of another one (target). During the test, the infants observed either an imitator who was no longer influenced by the target (incongruent test) or the target who was not influenced by an imitator (neutral test). The participants looked significantly longer at the incongruent test than at the neutral test. This result shows that infants represent and generalize individuals’ potential to influence others’ actions and that they are sensitive to the asymmetric nature of social influence; upon learning that A influences B, they expect that the influence of A over B will remain stronger than the influence of B over A in a novel context. Because of the pervasiveness of social influence in many social interactions and relationships, its representation during infancy is fundamental to understand and predict others’ behaviors
The economic constitution & the political constitution: seeking the common good in the post-national setting
Get PDFIn the post-national setting, the concept of the economic constitution has been seen as design template and saviour: whether based in transactional certitude, or founded in ordo-liberal precepts, the economic constitution is assumed to legitimate economic integration across national borders in the absence of comprehensive political settlement. Nevertheless, recent tensions, not just in the EU but more strikingly so, within the WTO context indicate the limits to economic constitutionalism. This contribution seeks the roots of recent disfunction within the history and theory of economic constitutionalism. The contribution traces an adjudicational economic constitutionalism and its place within the European legal order, including the new EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and contrasts this vision with the more comprehensive and/or socialised models of economic constitution found, not only within Weimar, but also within the post-revolutionary/post-conflict constitutional context. The contribution also places a major emphasis upon theorising around the apex of economic-constitutional thought, ordo-liberalism, but concludes that no concept of the economic constitution can be seen in isolation from its social-political context, or from notions of the common good. To this exact degree, failures in modern economic constitutionalism may derive from a misplaced universalism, a technocratic absolutism that abdicates political responsibility for the common good, locating it instead in an ‘idolatry of the factual’ or a new naturalism of market inevitability
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