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Why online consumption communities brutalize
Get PDFConsumers who socialize in online consumption communities sometimes become alarmingly hostile, toxic, and otherwise verbally violent toward one another—a phenomenon known in sociology as brutalization. Research indicates that short-lived, situational outbursts of verbal violence—such as gross insults, harassment, or trolling—are common in online consumption contexts. However, it does not explain why such behaviors sometimes become endemic, turning entire communities into toxic social spaces. To address this question, the authors studied 18 years of interactions in an online electronic dance music community. Their interpretive analysis reveals three constellations of interacting, mutually reinforcing, forms of direct, structural, and cultural violence—sadistic entertainment, clan warfare, and popular justice—that fuel community brutalization in distinct ways. This article introduces these brutalization constellations, substantiates them with empirical data, and discusses their implications for theories of violence in consumption communities as well as the wider social media sphere
Transitions and continuities in petitioning in early modern England
Get PDFEarly modern England experienced a series of major political changes, including the English Civil Wars (1642-51) and the Glorious Revolution (1688), that had a far-reaching influence on how people engaged with official authority. This chapter examines how the practice of petitioning developed amid the upheavals of this era, attending to transitions but also to deeper long-term continuities. The focus here is primarily on what we might call ‘unrevolutionary’ petitioning, rather than the more well-known ‘radical’ petitioning campaigns that have received the most attention from historians, and which have often been associated with the emergence of the public sphere and modern political culture. The analysis shows that apparently ‘non-political’ petitioning on local or quotidian topics could have a mutually influential relationship with the more ‘radical’ varieties that are already well known. We find that the prevalence of petitioning at local and national level was rising from the late sixteenth century if not earlier, and some practical petitions by veterans and war widows adopted sharply partisan vocabulary from the 1640s onward. Yet, the aims of most petitioners as well as the form and tone of their requests remained remarkably stable across many decades. We should, therefore, seek to understand why petitioning became and remained so popular despite radical shifts in English government and political culture
The popular politics of local petitioning in early modern England
Get PDFThis article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history
Travelling in time: using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine temporal aspects of the personal experience of issues in health and well-being
Get PDFThis paper describes a model for thinking of how participants make sense of temporal aspects of their lived experience. The paper argues for the valuable input that interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) can make to exploring this experiential timeline. After a brief introduction to IPA as an experiential research methodology, I will describe growing interest in longitudinal research among qualitative researchers and outline recent thinking on this by leading researcher Bren Neale. I will then point to the distinctive contribution IPA can make to understanding personal experience of time and change. I will present a taxonomy of my IPA research engaging with it and illustrate each study type with research I have been involved in. During the paper we will see the way in which there are indeed two time-travelers involved in this process: researcher and the participant
An ‘“Electric Telegraph” of the Heart’: a community of feeling in the Victorian language of flowers
Get PDFThe publishing craze of the language of flowers anthologies spanned the length of the nineteenth century. As a cultural fad and popular form allied to the gift annual and the gift book, the language of flowers anthologies were well-known and prolific. The floriography of the flower 'vocabularies' became diffused and disseminated throughout the cultural imagination, yet, the anthologies were initially marketed at a female, middle-class, 'genteel' readership, with the broad aim of advancing the
romantic endeavours of the reader. In this article, I ask whether there was a community of meaning, authorship and readership of the language of flowers. Was a community of feeling established through the ‘gifting’ process inherent within this genre? Might the books have been meaningful to a wider range of relationships beyond the proposed remit of romantic entanglement? Looking to case studies of personalised inscriptions, together with the introductory and prefatory contents of the books, I will consider whether the language of flowers had a broader appeal than might be assumed, investigating just how far floral meanings became embedded in notions of feeling. Finally, I will speculate about how we might consider feeling through flowers now, in light of the many perceived foibles and failings of this nineteenth-century genre
Poetic traditions of revolt. On Rene Menil's Theory of the Public
Get PDFHow to reciprocate a precious gift? In this case the gift was given to us twice. First, in the shape of Paget Henry’s pioneering reinvention of René Ménil’s “Aesthetic Marxism”. Through it, second, we’re led to rediscover the fantastic world of Ménil’s hitherto ignored but crucial contribution to contemporary philosophy: his systematisation of the poetics of revolt. Our debt with Ménil and Henry is unpayable. Our humble response in this essay is to offer readers a map to the treasure that is Ménil’s thought. We aim to offer a path across and beyond the sedimentation and pacifying effects of given frames of judgment and the imagination in today’s post-classical public sphere. We call it “fantastic critique”, largely inspired by our wider reading of Ménil’s work and specifically his original concept of the “velocity of the spirit”. It renews the Hegelo-Marxian revolutionary formula. Here. Keep it with you. It’s a precious gift
How culture and legal environment affect classification shifting? Global evidence
Get PDFThis study examines the interplay between various cultural characteristics and the legal environment on classification shifting using a global sample that enables variability in underlying cultural characteristics across countries while controlling for heterogeneity. Given that both culture and the legal environment tend to exhibit low variability over time, our international cross-country analysis with diverse cultural dimensions and legal frameworks enhances the robustness of our empirical findings. Our identification strategy employs several models and shows the significant impact of culture on classification shifting and the interactions between national culture and the legal environment on classification shifting behaviour, though there is variability across countries. We also find that certain traits of culture induce classification shifting. We highlight that strengthening the legal environment becomes crucial in creating an institutional framework that effectively curbs unethical practices induced by certain national culture traits and enhances transparency and accountability in financial reporting
Pattern masking for dictionary matching: theory and practice
Get PDFData masking is a common technique for sanitizing sensitive data maintained in database systems which is becoming increasingly important in various application areas, such as in record linkage of personal data. This work formalizes the Pattern Masking for Dictionary Matching (PPSM) problem: given a dictionary D of d strings, each of length l, a query string q of length l, and a positive integer z, we are asked to compute a smallest set K⊆{1,...,l}, so that if q[i] is replaced by a wildcard for all i∈K, then q matches at least z strings from D. Solving PPSM allows providing data utility guarantees as opposed to existing approaches.
We first show, through a reduction from the well-known k-Clique problem, that a decision version of the PPSM problem is NP-complete, even for binary strings. We thus approach the problem from a more practical perspective. We show a combinatorial O((dl)^{|K|/3}+dl)-time and O(dl)-space algorithm for PPSM for |K|=O(1). In fact, we show that we cannot hope for a faster combinatorial algorithm, unless the combinatorial k-Clique hypothesis fails [Abboud et al., SIAM J. Comput. 2018; Lincoln et al., SODA 2018]. Our combinatorial algorithm, executed with small |K|, is the backbone of a greedy heuristic that we propose. Our experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that our heuristic finds nearly-optimal solutions in practice and is also very efficient. We also generalize this algorithm for the problem of masking multiple query strings simultaneously so that every string has at least z matches in D.
PPSM can be viewed as a generalization of the decision version of the dictionary matching with mismatches problem: by querying a PPSM data structure with string q and z=1, one obtains the minimal number of mismatches of q with any string from D. The query time or space of all known data structures for the more restricted problem of dictionary matching with at most k mismatches incurs some exponential factor with respect to k. A simple exact algorithm for PPSM runs in time O(2^l d). We present a data structure for PPSM that answers queries over D in time O(2^{l/2}(2^{l/2}+τ)l) and requires space O(2^{l}d^2/τ^2+2^{l/2}d), for any parameter τ∈[1,d].
We complement our results by showing a two-way polynomial-time reduction between PPSM and the Minimum Union problem [Chlamtac et al., SODA 2017]. This gives a polynomial-time O(d^{1/4+ε})-approximation algorithm for PPSM, which is tight under a plausible complexity conjecture.
This is an extended version of a paper that was presented at ISAAC 2021
Sands of Time
No full textThe challenges posed by the epic scale and byzantine plot twists of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels have seen filmmakers from Ridley Scott to Alejandro Jodorowsky left stranded in quicksand. As Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two reaches UK screens, Roger Luckhurst outlines the history of the books and their troubled screen adaptations and explains how the Canadian director has finally done justice to the writer’s grand vision
Performing grief in pandemic theatres
No full textThis Element explores how theatre responded to the death and loss produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, by innovating forms and spaces designed to support us in grief. It considers how theatre grieved for itself, for the dead, for lost ways of living, while also imagining and enacting new modes of being together. Even as it reckoned with its own demise, theatre endeavoured to collectivise grief by performing a range of functions more commonly associated with funerary, health and social care services, which buckled under restrictions and neglect. These pandemic theatres show how grief cannot only be let mourn over individual losses in private, but how it must also seep into the public sphere to fight to save critical services, institutions, communities and art forms, including theatre itself
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