Online audiovisual interaction (AVOI), though minimal, constitutes a form of embodiment. This implies that empathy can be fostered even in non-co-located individuals through online platforms. To address both the limitations and potential of online embodied interaction the article develops a framework for comprehending and cultivating empathy in the virtual realm. It argues that empathy is a skill that is fundamentally tied to our physical and sensory experiences, and therefore, dismisses the Theory of Mind (ToM) model for reducing empathy to (...) mere mental constructs with inherent limitations. Instead, it draws upon Embodied Cognitive Science (ECS) to show that the feeling of disembodiment experienced in AVOI can be conceptualised as a “shrinking of” the social space. With the aim of both widening and deepening this space, the article introduces concrete guidelines that can help enrich the embodied and interactive experience in AVOI. Thereby, highlighting ways of integrating spatiality and physical engagement in the audiovisual online sphere, in addition to nurturing awareness and digital tact. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In (...) particular, we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

PurposeDigital and social inclusion are becoming more talked about as approaches to what has been discussed as the digital divide. But what is digital or social inclusion? The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of social exclusion as a variety of, sometimes conflicting, social programmes which embody ideas of what society should be. Becoming more aware of this variety of approach can give insights into programmes addressing the digital divide and the political, cultural and (...) social aspects of policies of social inclusion.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyses the notion of social inclusion as a variety of social policies to address social exclusion and develop the nation state. It uses an example of a telecentre in Jordan's knowledge station programme to illustrate and extend this analysis.FindingsThe analysis and discussion of the KS initiative shows how different notions of social and digital inclusion are important features of strengthening the Jordanian state and are useful in analysing the relative success of this programme.Originality/valueThe paper argues that analyses of digital divides and digital exclusion could be strengthened by a closer understanding of policies of social inclusion. In this way it is possible to move from technological connection as a measure of a digital divide to a more thorough understanding using social inclusion policy which illuminates social, political and cultural aspects of technological change. (shrink)

Value-sensitive design theorists propose that a range of values that should inform how future social robots are engineered. This article explores a new value: digital well-being, and proposes that the next generation of social robots should be designed to facilitate this value in those who use or come into contact with these machines. To do this, I explore how the morphology of social robots is closely connected to digital well-being. I argue that a key decision is whether social (...) robots are designed as embodied or disembodied. After exploring the merits of both approaches, I conclude that, on balance, there are persuasive reasons why disembodied social robots may well fare better with respect to the value of digital well-being. (shrink)

Gender, sexuality and embodiment in digital spheres have been increasingly studied from various critical perspectives: From research highlighting the articulation of intimacies, desires, and sexualities in and through digital spaces to theoretical explorations of materiality in the digital realm. With such a high level of (inter)disciplinarity, theories, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in relation to digital spheres have become highly diversified. Aiming to reflect this diversity, this special issue brings together innovative and newly (...) developed theoretical, empirical, analytical, and critical approaches in the study of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. By connecting intersectionality and digitality to one another, it adopts an integrated approach that reflects the intricacy and interconnectedness of social categories and markers of difference, privilege, performance, and discrimination. The contributions explore a range of differently situated digital cultural practices, including intimate and sexual experiences with(in) digital media, online self-presentation, expressions of digital resistance, and forms of backlash and online attacks. What connects all these articles, is their critical approach to intersectional inequalities and privileges in relation to digitality, plus their nuanced perspective on gender, sexuality, and embodiment interferentially. The final article is based on a roundtable discussion and aims to encourage interdisciplinary connections and suggests ways of doing research that builds bridges between academia and activism. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze feminist strategies against digital violence and their relation to performative forms of social justice. Based on new feminist materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010; Souza, 2019), the article shows how female bodies are at the crossroads in our digital society. On the one hand, they are a target of digital violence because of their political activities, while on the other hand feminist protesters are opening new political possibilities for mobilization. By conducting a (...) class='Hi'>digital ethnography with two social collectives located in Mexico City – Luchadoras and Laboratorio de Interconectividades – I argue that embodying and politicizing technologies are strategies to mobilize the body as a political, critical and material category, which reveals a renewed feminist agency in hacking the hegemonic meanings of digital technology and resignifying its materiality in order to politicize it. Furthermore, I argue that based on the body as material category, innovative forms of social justice for feminist collectives emerge. These strategies are related to the critical questioning of technologies to repoliticize digital violence, to render visible the memories and affectations in women’s bodies, as well as to mobilize a new feminist positioning called hackfeminist self-defense. All in all, this article seeks to contribute to understanding the broader issue of feminist politics performing social justice in the digital era. (shrink)

The AI and Society discourse has previously drawn attention to the ways that digital systems embody the values of the technology development community from which they emerge through the development and deployment process. Research shows how this effect leads to a particular treatment of gender in computer systems development, a treatment which lags far behind the rich understanding of gender that social studies scholarship reveals and people across society experience. Many people do not relate to the narrow binary gender (...) options of male or female, and many people express their gender identity in much richer ways than the sex/gender binary female/woman and male/man Boolean terms will allow. We ask: are “born-digital” gendered datasets in digital systems experienced as marginalising by those who express their identity beyond the male/female binary? Case Study: Ireland. To answer this universal question, this paper presents the findings of an empirical case study of people in Ireland with diverse gender identities and expressions, and their experiences with public data systems and new technologies. In spite of great social changes in Ireland which have led to constitutional change in favour of LGBTQI + people, born-digital systems were experienced by respondents as embodying socio-cultural values which were no longer accepted in society at large. For many of the respondents, digital technologies routinely marginalise them in all kinds of ways. These systems keep alive violence and oppression long after civil rights have been enshrined in constitutional law. This study is just one example of the way assumptions about digital are disengaged from society-at-large. It is a call to arms to all who are passionate about socially-responsible technology. (shrink)

Empathy is an integral aspect of human existence. Without at least a basic ability to access others’ affective life, social interactions would be well-nigh impossible. Yet, recent studies seem to show that the means we have acquired to access others’ emotional life no longer function well in what has become our everyday business – technologically mediated interactions in digital spaces. If this is correct, there are two important questions: (1) What makes empathy for frequent internet users so difficult? and (...) (2) What can we do to alleviate the negative consequences? Correspondingly, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, we identify structural differences between offline and technologically mediated interactions that can explain why digital empathy is harder to achieve. Second, drawing on the literature on ‘situated affectivity,’ we consider the idea of modifying digital spaces in ways specifically designed to ‘scaffold’ empathy where our evolved mechanisms fail. Section 2 argues that empathy is requires interpreting the behavior of embodied subjects. Section 3 identifies three factors that are crucial for this interpretative endeavor: the empathizer’s affective repertoire, their perceptual input, and their background knowledge. Section 4 argues that technologically mediated interactions differ from face-to-face interactions with regard to these factors in ways which render our evolved empathy mechanisms less effective in the digital world. Section 5 introduces the idea that situational factors can serve as ‘empathic scaffolds,’ i.e., as ‘tools’ that can ‘shape’ people’s empathic reactions. Section 6 wraps up the main line of reasoning, responds to objections and invites further scholarship. (shrink)

Taking its cue from Michel Foucault’s analyses of the pastoral ‘conduct of conduct’, this paper considers social media as a specific dispositif that derives its mode of operation from the religious techniques of individualization. It argues that today’s preoccupation with digital performances, far from exorcizing the pastoral logic, in fact manifests its secular intensification. By examining social media practices through the lens of the sacramental paradigm of confession, the article shows how the digitalization of the pastoral directive culminates in (...) the production of spectral subjects. These spectral subjects, it contends, function as the conduits of the dominant power, guaranteeing the persistence of capitalism by embodying the imperative to complete economization. (shrink)

The term Methodological Cognitivism was introduced in the late 90s when cognitivism was dominated by the information-processing psychology approach. The model of the mind was of the Cartesian type, and the analogy was that of the digital Turing machine. The MC program was, however, open to incorporate within it the developments of neurocognitive sciences and embodied cognition. A dimension of wide embodied cognition of action incorporates both the causal role of the body and the causal variables of (...) the extended, embedded, and enactive dimension of individual action. Ultimately, it is an Embodied Individualism that structurally includes the environmental and social dimensions in individual action. The concept of social affordances and the individual enaction towards them demonstrates how there is a horizontal relationship and recursive interaction between individual action and the social environment. The embedded dimension of the action in the sense of the situational context that shapes it is another concept that expresses the founding social dimension of the action. Finally, the extended dimension of cognition, which is not limited only to what is contained in the individual’s skull, but is present in all mnemonic supports and external computing devices of an artificial but also social human type. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article asks how social media changes and challenges critical agency through spatial, networked and embodied discourses? It argues that CDS has the potential to explore relations and contexts that go beyond the deliberative participatory, affective and exploitative conditions of social media. Employing a critical discursive reading of street artist Banksy’s mural of a Les Misérables-poster on the public wall across from the French embassy in London in 2016, we argue that social media is neither purely deliberative, affective, (...) nor exploitative. The illustrative case allows us to trace the intricate digital intertextual and interdiscursive relations between social media, public spaces and embodied politics offered in counter-discourse. Further, the case brings new light to the ability of CDS in combination with political discourse theory to underscore the political agency in social contexts. While critiques of the affective and exploitative conditions of social media have merit as critiques of hegemonic discourses, an affirmative response that emphasises the political agency in counter-discourses highlights the nuances of social media. This article argues that intersecting CDS with social media presents an opportunity to gain a complex understanding of how the political is played out in changing publics consisting of different mediated spaces, digital as well as non-digital. (shrink)

Today, the earth is an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions-a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny. The new media are powerful tools for education, cultural enrichment, commercial activity, political participation, intercultural dialogue and understanding. They also can serve the cause of religion. Yet the new information technology needs to be informed and guided (...) by solidarity in the service of the common good bridging the digital divide within and among nations. The value-laden message of Western secular culture to people and traditional societies in many cases ill-prepared to evaluate it leads to widespread crisis, for example, in regard to marriage and family life. This technology can be a means for solving human problems, promoting the integral development of persons, creating a world governed by justice, peace, and love. It also can help men and women in their age-old search for self-understanding. Like today's world itself, the world of media, including the Internet, has been brought by Christ, inchoately yet truly, within the boundaries of the kingdom of God and placed in service to the word of salvation. (shrink)

During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and (...) Digitality,” this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists. (shrink)

In a context of pervasive digitalization of the social world, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the field of education has undergone major changes with the development of digital practices and settings. However, the physical presence of the subjects and the body remain something primordial and irreplaceable in traditional educational processes. Thus, it is often assumed that virtuality is opposed to the corporeal reality of the subjects involved in teaching, learning and studying. In this paper we aim to (...) critically challenge this assumption by addressing the phenomenon of virtuality in a more original sense: as a fundamental dimension of corporeality itself. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological insights, we argue that the experience of the virtual is inherently embodied and fully real. We understand corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena. At the same time, this leads us to rethink the digital as only one possible medium in which virtuality can appear as inherent to embodied experience. We develop our phenomenological approach in three instances. First, we question and bracket two common assumptions about corporeality. From our critical perspective, assumptions about a disembodied digitality and a devirtualized corporeality represent extremes within which educational discourses currently move. Second, we address the inherent virtuality of embodied experience. We outline the heuristic concept of the virtual body to describe corporeality and virtuality as entangled and multidimensional phenomena that encompass extension, intercorporeality and intermediality. Finally, we make some remarks on the relationships of corporeality and virtuality considering the challenges of digital education. (shrink)

Digital technology is rapidly transforming human life. But our cognition is honed for an analog world. I call this the problem of digital whiplash: that the digital transformation of society, like a vehicle whose sudden acceleration injures its occupants, is too fast to be safe. I focus on the unprecedented phenomenon of digital surveillance, which I argue poses a long-term threat to human autonomy that our cognition is ill-suited to recognize or respond to. Human cognition is (...) embodied and context-sensitive, and thus faces four problems of digital whiplash vis-à-vis digital surveillance. First is the problem of signal sparsity, that there are few if any perceptible indications of digital surveillance. Second is the problem of signal elusiveness, that the few indications there are prohibitively difficult to discover. Third is the distraction problem, that using digital technologies corrodes the cognitive abilities we need to recognize and respond to digital surveillance. Fourth is the hooking problem, that digital technologies are engineered to cultivate dependency. I address, among other objections, the idea that we choose to exchange our privacy for the use of digital technologies, so their use is in fact an expression of autonomy. The response to digital whiplash, I argue, is not to slow down the digitalization of society in its current form so that we can adapt our cognitive capacities. It is to allow ourselves the time to reflect on and debate whether digitalization, in its current form, is delivering a socially and ethically desirable future. (shrink)

Throughout Iran and various countries, the recent calls of the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (in Persian), “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (in Kurdish), or “Woman, Life, Freedom” (in English) movement call for change to acknowledge the importance of women. While these feminist protests and demonstrations have been met with brutality, systematic oppression, and internet blackouts within Iran, they have captured significant social media attention and coverage outside the country, especially among the Iranian diaspora and various international organizations. This article, grounded in feminist urban (...) theories of the Global South, analyzes the digital feminist placemaking movement in Iran. As the first counter‐revolution led by women, the movement utilizes digital art, graffiti, and protest movements to embody women’s solidarity groups and sympathy rallies. Our analysis employs various digital research methods, including social media scrutiny and the study of protest illustrations. Analyzing the digital feminist placemaking in Iran will enable us to compare the commonalities, differences, challenges, and opportunities between the minorities and majorities in the world’s countries. The outcomes of this research can help international organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Agency for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women), as well as policymakers, institutions, academics, and NGOs, to highlight the various ways in which broader public participation could be encouraged in the process of digital feminist insurgent placemaking. (shrink)

Is the first generation of Critical Theory still relevant to an analysis of the technocentric nature of contemporary society – particularly its digitally based mediums of interaction and communication? This paper will argue that it is. This will be achieved by examining the interdisciplinary methodological framework that guides Critical Theory. This approach offers the researcher fruitful insight. It allows for a broad, yet heuristically rich understanding of society which can extend to the technological and digital domains of the 21st (...) century. Critical Theory’s powerful (albeit damning and admittedly over-extensive) critique of first- generation instrumental rationality (as embodied in modern technology) assists the contemporary researcher in their evaluation of the forms of communicative technology that have emerged in the 21st century. This is because such a critique permits one to attain a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of such technologies and the variegated forms they have assumed. It also cautions against technological determinism and cyber-utopianism which has managed to entrench itself in a great deal of modern literature pertaining to this topic. (shrink)

Cutting-edge scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, psychology, philosophy and sport science is brought together to ask: What do individuals bring to and do in collaborative embodied performance? How do group members with distinct capacities complement each other in skilled action? Innovative methodological approaches are applied to detailed case studies from martial arts, tango, social interaction, English Restoration Theatre, Body Weather, traditional and digitally-informed experiences of music composition, and failing at handstands. Each investigation exposes performance and theory (...) as mutually revealing, informative and captivating. Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring embodied coordination, cognition, and collaboration, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each brings to light different facets of the performance ecology present in the collaborative moment, equipping performance makers, students and researchers with theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking. (shrink)

Since technology has been entering into human beings’ everyday life, individuals established a deep relationship with digital technology, thus an embodied link between people and digital instruments has been born. This is particularly evidenced by recent literature about screen time (duration of time spent by the individual in using electronic/digital media like television, smartphone, tablet or computer), it significantly influences different human beings’ dimensions: physical, psychological and neurological functions. Impact of digital technology on human beings (...) can be considered as a result of syntonic functioning in order to improve different people’s life areas (e.g., work, social or intimate relationship, learning), while the dystonic relationship is evidenced as a result of human addiction to digital technology. The present study aims to provide a cognitive and social psychology perspective on how screen time is changing our existences, defining digital technology as a gift which people should be aware of in terms of positive but even negative consequences in everyday life. (shrink)

This paper considers an emerging practice whereby citizen’s use of ubiquitous and domesticated technologies enable a parallel form of criminal justice. Here, weaponised visibility supersedes police intervention as an appropriate response. Digital vigilantism is a user-led violation of privacy that not only transcends online/offline distinctions but also complicates relations of visibility and control between police and the public. This paper develops a theoretically nuanced and empirically grounded understanding of digital vigilantism in order to advance a research agenda in (...) this area of study. In addition to literature on vigilantism and citizen-led violence, this paper draws from key works in surveillance as well as visibility studies, 914–934, 2010) in order to situate how digital media affordances and cultures inform both the moral and organisational dimensions of digital vigilantism. Digital vigilantism is a process where citizens are collectively offended by other citizen activity, and coordinate retaliation on mobile devices and social platforms. The offending acts range from mild breaches of social protocol to terrorist acts and participation in riots. The vigilantism includes, but is not limited to a ‘naming and shaming’ type of visibility, where the target’s home address, work details and other highly sensitive details are published on a public site, followed by online as well as embodied harassment. The visibility produced through digital vigilantism is unwanted, intense and enduring. Such campaigns also further a merging of digital and physical spaces through the reproduction of localised and nationalist identities on global digital platforms as an impetus for privacy violations and breaches of fundamental rights. (shrink)

The contemporary world is characterised by the pervasive presence of digital technologies that play a part in almost every aspect of our life. An urgent and much-debated issue consists in evaluating the repercussions of these technologies on our human condition. In this paper, I tackle this issue from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. I argue that phenomenology offers a contribution to our understanding of the implications of digital technologies, in the light of its analysis of the essential structures (...) of human experience, and especially of its corporeal grounding. In the light of this analysis, it is possible to investigate the ways in which these essential structures are affected by digital technologies. In particular, it is possible to highlight the ways in which some digital technologies involve a process of disembodiment or simply a superficial embodiment of experience. (shrink)

Digital technology is transforming life and is beginning to have a profound effect on individual psychic life and the wider social milieu. This article seeks to understand the nature of the new technology and its implications for personal life, culture, and education. The scene is set by comparing the introduction of printing to the revolution inaugurated by digital technology. This new age is often called “postmodern,” and some of the characteristics of the age suggested by Lyotard, Baudrillard, McLuhan, (...) and others are identified. The cultural impact of technology, according to Heidegger, is outlined, together with the interpretation in terms of digital technology proposed by Dreyfus and Spinosa. This is illustrated with examples and compared with the position of other thinkers. Finally, the consequences for education, including universities, are presented, and some proposals for approaches to education in terms of meaning, embodiment, and teacher-student relationship are considered. (shrink)

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical (...) and theoretical foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some (...) theoretical developments to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

Digital technologies are frequently considered as lacking material aspects. Today, it is evident that behind digital technologies lies a huge and complex material infrastructure in the form of fiber optic cables, servers, satellites, and screens. Postphenomenology has theorized the relations to material things as embodiment relations. Taking into account that technologies can also have hermeneutic aspects, this theory defines hermeneutic relations as those in which we read the world through technologies. The article opens with a review of some (...) theoretical developments to hermeneutic relations with a special focus on digital technologies. The article suggests that in the digital world, material hermeneutics needs to be updated as it shifts from a scientific to an everyday technological context. Now, technologies not only “give voice” to things, they also produce new meanings to informational structures and direct users to certain meanings. When it comes to digital technologies, especially those involving artificial intelligence (AI), the technology actively mediates the world. In postphenomenological terms, it possesses a technological intentionality. The postphenomenological formula should be updated to reflect this type of technological intentionality, by reversing the arrow of intentionality so that it points to the user, rather than from the user. (shrink)

This article employs Foucauldian and feminist analytics to advance a critical approach to wearable digital health- and activity-tracking devices. Following Foucault’s insight that the growth of individual capabilities coincides with the intensification of power relations, I argue that digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) expand individuals’ capacity for self-knowledge and self-care at the same time that they facilitate unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance, extend the regulatory mechanisms of both public health and fashion/beauty authorities, and enable increasingly rigorous body projects devoted (...) to the attainment of normative femininity. These technologies of surveillance, normalization, and discipline thus function to augment, and facilitate the cooperation of, neoliberal-era biopower and post-feminist patriarchal power. My analysis of digital self-tracking devices’ instrumentality to biopower and patriarchy contributes to the emergent field of critical digital health studies and builds new connections between political, social, and feminist theories of embodiment; biopower studies; fat studies; and trans-disciplinary body studies. (shrink)

Anhand der Mechanismen „Filterblase“ und „ Echokammer“ in digitalen Medien beleuchtet der Artikel, inwiefern Deweys funktionaler Öffentlichkeitsbegriff für die aktuelle Demokratiekrise mögliche Lösungsperspektiven erschließen lässt. Eine Rekonstruktion von Deweys Begriffen der Öffentlichkeit und der geteilten Erfahrung legt offen, dass der Aspekt der situativ-leiblich eingebundenen Erfahrung in der Forschungsdebatte zu digitalen Öffentlichkeiten nicht adäquat berücksichtigt wird. Darauf aufbauend lässt sich im Widerspruch zu einigen Debatten-Beiträgen zeigen, dass eine stärkere Rückbindung an lokale Lebenskontexte eine Voraussetzung dafür ist, diesen problematischen Mechanismen digitalisierter Medien (...) zu begegnen. (shrink)

Theories of face-to-face interaction employ a concept of spatial presence and view communication via digital technologies as an inferior version of interaction, often with pathological implications. Current studies of mediatized communication challenge this notion with empirical evidence of “telepresence”, suggesting that users of such technologies experience their interactions as immediate. We argue that the phenomenological concepts of the lived body and mediated immediacy (Helmuth Plessner) combined with the concept of embodied space (Hermann Schmitz) can help overcome the pathologizing (...) of digital communication in social theory and enable descriptions which are truer to the experience of using said technology. From this perspective it appears as an ethnocentric premise to restrict interaction to human actors being present in local space. This restricted understanding of interaction does not allow for an appropriate empirical analysis of the emerging structures of digital communication. (shrink)

This paper examines the figure of the hate-fighting digital vigilante as embodied through Aryan Queen, an online persona developed and depicted by self-proclaimed antifa member Talia Lavin in her book Culture Warlords. One chapter in the 2020 memoir relays Lavin’s pursuits to elicit and make known identifying information of Der Stürmer, an anonymous white supremacist online hater. I first locate Lavin’s undertaking in the porous policy landscape regulating online hate transnationally to make a case for its value as (...) an entry into the navigation of hate on Telegram, a platform that has become a popular enclave for hate, and one that remains otherwise impenetrable to state efforts at formal governance. I then introduce the digital vigilante as a cultural figure that has become increasingly distinguished from, but developed in relation to, the classical or analogue vigilante in academic literature, albeit with only limited attention paid to the seemingly boundless temporality that constitutes the virtual sphere. Attending to processes of temporalization, I argue, can well serve an analysis of the moral universe within which the digital vigilante operates, thereby enabling a critical engagement with the motivations, methods, and intentions of her justice pursuits online. With the support of anthropological theories of temporalization – namely, past presencing, un/doing futures, and affective justice – I show that justice pursuits by way of digital vigilantism for Lavin are entangled with an affective longing for revenge, and manifest a complex intermingling of open wounds from injustices that emerge from and produce entanglements of the past, present, and future. (shrink)

This article develops a framework for analysing how digital software and models become mediums for creative imagination in architectural design. To understand the hermeneutics of these relationships, we develop key concepts from Material Engagement Theory (MET) and Postphenomenology (PP). To push these frameworks into the realm of digital design, we develop the concept of Digital Materiality. Digital Materiality describes the way successive layers of mathematics, code, and software come to mediate enactive perception, and the possibilities of (...) creative material engagement actualised in work with software. Just as molecular materials come to transform action with material objects, so digital materiality comes to enable and transform creative practices with computers. Digital architectural design form a new space for ongoing enactive discovery and creativity through manipulation of digital models and their underlying software environments. By shifting relationships within their digital models, architects can direct their attention, intention, and imagination towards widely different aspects of the model. Here, creative imagination becomes a fundamentally situated activity where mind emerges through dynamic interaction between a variety of embodied, material, and cultural domains. (shrink)

Postphenomenology is not a critique of phenomenology, but a practical interpretive epistemology where technological artifacts and practices are studied. These new researchers can be called ‘R&D postphenomenologists’. Over the past 25 years, the expanding hermeneutics of postphenomenology has been undertaken by classical phenomenologists, cultural anthropologists, media/communications writers and performance artists. But these face Scharff’s challenge of ‘insufficient critical consideration’ and an entire world of artifice experienced through embodied mobile devices. In response there is a ‘weaving metaphor’ and performance art (...) with the intentional use of artifice/illusion to allow for multistability and ‘implicit idealism’ in a complex and unpredictable sensory world of ontological experiments and case studies. Allowing for multistable interpretations, variational theory, and the study of illusions, technoscience researchers and users of emerging technologies can develop heuristics for interpreting the world through devices, if programmers of these technologies make the hermeneutics accessible and visually interpretable. Both groups must expand the purview of the ‘readable technologies’ of Patrick Heelan, allowing for an expanding material hermeneutics of postphenomenology that is poised to become a praxis of perception for users of ubiquitous digital technologies and devices. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate embodied social cognition, embodied cognition’s account of how we understand others. I identify and evaluate three claims that motivate embodied social cognition. These claims are not specific to social cognition; they are general hypotheses about cognition. As such, they may be used in more general arguments for embodied cognition. I argue that we have good reasons to reject these claims. Thus, the case for embodied social cognition fails. Moreover, to the (...) extent that general arguments for embodied cognition rest on these premises, they are correspondingly uncompelling. (shrink)

The virtual has become the latest rostrum for ideological heteronormativity; it increasingly plays host to an insidious rhetoric of unjustifiably fixed and oppositional gender binaries that exhort heterosexuality as a norm. Conservative political and religious groups, as well as consumerist advertising, utilise digital technology to reinforce cast-in-stone and adversarial social perspectives for manipulative and exploitative ends. Contrastingly, the virtual may be mobilised to support and facilitate queering in contemporary societies and may positively counter such fixed ideological heteronormative categories of (...) social life. Crucial in this transformative account of the virtual is the body, which is for Merleau-Ponty the horizon of engagement with the world as a condition for perception and performativity. Queer perspectives may, in turn, overcome the oversight of Merleau-Ponty (as critically suggested by Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young) regarding the specific gendered characteristics of the body itself, and allows for an expanded embodied and queer conceptualisation of the virtual. A transformative vision of the virtual entails therefore a rethinking of our understanding of digital technology through (a) the phenomenology of the body-subject and (b) queer theory. I argue that the idea of the body as entirely discursive or performative (per queer theory) needs to be adjusted by explicating the foundational ontological characteristics of the body-subject’s encounter of the virtual. (shrink)

The article explores digital literacy practices in children’s everyday lives at Norwegian preschools and some of the ways in which young children appropriate basic digital literacy skills through guided participation in situated activities. Building on an ethnomethodological perspective, the analyses are based on 70 hours of video recordings documenting the activities in which 45 children, aged 5-6, and eight preschool teachers participated. Through the detailed analysis of two categorization activities – identifying geometrical shapes and identifying feelings/thoughts –the use (...) of digital tools in the social organization of the activities are examined. The article finds that children’s digital literacy activities encompass visual, verbal, audio and embodied competencies that are made relevant, and thus accessible for learning, in interaction between the children and between the adults and children in the form of norms and guidelines for what constitutes correct categorizations (geometrical shapes and green and red feelings) in the situated activities, and that are appropriated and actualized by the children in interaction with their peers. The findings also show how the categorization practices in preschools deal with symbols and labels in ways that create and sustain socially organized ways of knowing, seeing and acting upon the world. Digital media are embedded in routines, procedures and socialites that are part of these categorization practices; they are part of how children are instructed to experience, interpret, understand and act in the world. Moreover, the different technologies created different conditions for the children’s participation. It was found that peer interaction was part of the digital literacy activities that involved such mobile technologies as smartphones and tablets, while when using non-mobile technologies, e.g. smartboards, the activities were structured more as ‘classic’ classroom activities, primarily guided by the teacher and the didactic material presented through the smartboard. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to examine how metadata taxonomies in embodied computing databases indicate context and describe ways to track the evolution of the embodied computing industry over time through digital media archiving. Design/methodology/approach The authors compare the metadata taxonomies of two embodied computing databases by providing a narrative of their top-level categories. After identifying these categories, they describe how they structure the databases around specific themes. Findings The growing wearables market often hides complex sociotechnical tradeoffs. (...) Marketing products like Vandrico Inc.’s Wearables Database frame wearables as business solutions without conveying information about the various concessions users make. Potential solutions to this problem include enhancing embodied computing literacy through the construction of databases that track media about embodied computing technologies using customized metadata categories. Databases such as FABRIC contain multimedia related to the emerging embodied computing market – including patents, interviews, promotional videos and news articles – and can be archived through user-curated collections and tagged according to specific themes. One of the benefits of this approach is that users can use the rich metadata fields to search for terms and create curated collections that focus on tradeoffs related to embodied computing technologies. Originality/value This paper describes the importance of metadata for framing the orientation of embodied computing databases and describes one of the first attempts to comprehensively track the evolution of embodied computing technologies, their developers and their diverse applications in various social contexts through media archiving. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the qualities of living and learning in digital cultures, the design of digital technologies and the philosophical history that has informed that design. It takes as its critical perspective the field of embodied cognition as it has developed over the last three decades, in concert with emerging neurophysiology and neurocognitive research. From this perspective the paper considers cognitive, neurological and physiological effects that are increasingly becoming noticed in user populations, especially young populations. I (...) call this class of conditions ‘sensorimotor debility’, to distinguish it from other psychological, social, cultural and political symptoms associated with computer, internet and social media use. (shrink)

Sensemaking has recently been identified as a driver of society developments, in particular in the context of designing a reasonable, valuable, and fair life. Since the construction of meaning is a crucial momentum in sensemaking processes, the authors investigate how meaning can be constructed in a sustaining form by utilizing digital means of expression, articulation, sharing of information, and creation of artscience artefacts. The authors report on results of exploring cyber-physical-systems with performative methodologies in the context of sensemaking to (...) identify sensemaking processes of entering digital environments and share meaning-making activities through interaction. The collected data from two artscience studies reveal that activities beyond cognition facilitate sensemaking. Aesthetics and embodiment in performing actions are understood to play a role in sensemaking and subsequently effect on the construction of meaning. To investigate the role of the body and aesthetics in sensemaking in digital environments, we were particularly interested in sensemaking through embodied agency and aesthetic awareness, drawing from kinesthetic awareness of performance artists. In the performative activities digital behavior recognition and human task behavior were coupled, on the one hand by performers exploring digital environments actively reflecting on their performative process, on the other hand by a performance artist and choreographer creating performative experiences for audiences. It has been demonstrated in cyber-physical settings and can be utilized in upcoming developments further integrating virtual and physical worlds. (shrink)

This article investigates the possibility to question the difference between artificial and human intelligence by assuming that the latter can incorporate artificial, external components just as artificial intelligence can simulate human responses, and by exploring human embodiment in its technically and digitally augmented dimension. The idea that digital processes do not merely imply a detachment from the body, a dematerialization or disembodiment, is supported by many researchers, starting already from those who—back in the 1980s—reacted to cyberpunk narratives and their (...) tendency to posit a new mind–body dualism. Yet, here I would like to frame this thesis not within the post-human context but in a phenomenological perspective, and in doing so I will employ specific conceptual tools. I will particularly (1) rely on Katherine Hayles’ distinction between incorporating and inscribing practices; (2) refer to Maturana and Varela’s notion of structural coupling; (3) analyze algorithmic thinking and its temporal structure. (shrink)

This paper argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political (...) speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies’ algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens’ choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens’ choice menu. (shrink)

Social media plays an important role in forming, maintaining, and reproducing norms and practices (Flanagan et. al 2008). Content shared on social media has the power to reaffirm certain norms and practices merely by being shared (Caldeira et al., 2018; Burns, 2015; Krijnen & Van Bauwel, 2015). When it comes to questions of identity and questions surrounding representation of certain identity groups in the media, social media content is often taken to play a significant role in the constitution of certain (...) identities (Haimson, 2018, 2021; Frissen et al., 2015; Eickers & Rath, 2021). This chapter specifically explores the role social media plays in trans peoples’ transitioning processes. Transitioning, as understood here, can be social – e.g., performing gender differently via clothing or behavior, using a different name or pronouns – and legal – e.g., changing one’s gender category on formal identification documents, official name changes, and medical – e.g., undergoing hormone replacement therapy or other gender-affirming medical care like gender-reassignment surgeries. Transitioning can encompass all or any combination of these aspects (Bettcher, 2009, 2017). The chapter homes in on the impact that the representation of trans people on social media has on the transitioning processes. Here, questions around bodies and their representation through and with technologies and increasing digitization emerge. One might ask, for example, whether representation on social media platforms facilitates someone’s discovery of their gender identity and/or supports their coming to terms with it. This kind of representation may also provide people before or in transitioning processes with different ways to conceive of their future self. There are numerous social media accounts of trans people documenting their transitioning processes (Horak, 2014; Gauthier & Chaudoir, 2004). Displaying one’s own gender transition online may not only be important to some trans people because they feel like it makes a difference for the community, it may also become a vital part of the transitioning process itself, influencing and shaping the way the transition is taking place (Rawson, 2014; McInroy & Craig, 2015). Indeed, the representation of trans people on social media matters to trans communities and trans individuals because, by seeing images and perceiving narratives of trans people, one might, first, conceive of the possibility of one’s existence as a trans person, including the possibility of embodying another gender, and, second, think of the possibility of representing oneself (as a trans person) too (Cavalcante, 2016; Cannon et al., 2017). Accordingly, this chapter argues that social media can be viewed as a form of corporeal technology that is involved in transitioning processes. Social media can help the individual to reconceive their identity by means of representing themselves to themselves and others online. (shrink)

The book takes a critical look at the phenomenon of disinformation by identifying the historical, technological and human elements that contribute to the current success of disinformation strategies. The author examines the origin of the word "Dezinformatsiya", used by Russian planners in the 1950s, to understand how military strategy has transformed into militarization of information. The book pays particular attention to the power of algorithmic platforms on the selection and dissemination of digital content and their role in the spread (...) of misinformation. This influences traditional editorial practices, disintermediating the production and distribution of news and amplifying a particular human cognitive mechanism: confirmation bias. The author investigates the Italian case to identify general archetypes, and typical and salient elements of disinformation strategies. The results offer a further interpretative aspect to studying disinformation, which represents a fracture in the digital public sphere, a kind of irrational object circulating in a space believed to be governed by rational engagement norms. The book conclusively shows how polarizing narratives used in disinformation strategies are the expression of complex ideological undergrowth embodied in extremes of the political spectrum. This highly topical book is for students and researchers from across the social sciences and media interested in the disinformation phenomenon. (shrink)

Social media (SM) influence young adults’ communication practices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used for making recommendations on SM. Yet, its effects on different generations of SM users are unknown. SM can use AI recommendations to sort texts and prioritize them, shaping users’ online and offline experiences. Current literature primarily addresses technological or human-user perspectives, overlooking cognitive perspectives. This research aims to propose methods for mapping users’ interactions with AI recommendations (AiRS) and analyzes how embodied interactions mediated by a (...) digital agent can lead to changes in social and cultural practices. For this, this work proposes a comparative analysis of central practices evoked by AI recommendations-mediated communication on SM among users in Italy, Estonia, and the Netherlands in the age category 18–26 years old. The data used in the comparative analysis was collected via semi-structured interviews and elaborated based on cognitive psychology and semiotics. This research highlights the contextual significance of AI recommendations as a mediator in creating new communication practices. Findings confirm that young adults often choose practices that would enhance their digital representations according to AiRS’ dominant patterns and categories. AiRS impacts individual interpretations and practices and can further affect social and cultural levels. (shrink)

Digital texts have for decades been a challenge for reading research, creating a range of questions about reading and a need for new theories and concepts. In this paper, we focus on materialities of texts and suggest an embodied, enacted, and extended approach to the research on digital reading. We refer to findings showing that cognitive activities in reading are grounded in bodily and social experiences, and we explore the cognitive role of the body in reading, claiming (...) that–influenced by tacit knowledge and the task at hand–textual meaning is enacted through a mental and physical engagement with text. Further, applying the concept of affordances, we examine how digital technologies have induced new ways of physically handling and mentally interpreting text, indicating that brain, body, text, and technologies are integrated parts of an extended process of reading. The aim of the paper is to encourage empirical research on the interplay between body, text, and text materialities, a focus we argue will deepen our understand of the current transformation of reading. (shrink)

Nowadays, there is an evolving process of digital transformation and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into a wide range of social systems. Usually, insufficient attention is paid to assessing the social consequences of such innovations. The underlying causes of that are related to the dominance of the technogenic model of civilization, the embodiment of which is the technocratic approach, and the use of this approach in the interests of the globalist project. In the development and implementation of (...) class='Hi'>digital technologies and AI, an ontological paradox arises, for overcoming which it is required to develop adequate philosophical and methodological foundations for assessing social innovations based on digital technologies. The article discusses the expediency of using three types of scientific rationality (classics, non-classics, post-non-classics) to overcome the limitations of the Western model of technogenic civilization and the use of a subjective approach corresponding to this rationality. It is fundamentally important that the three types of scientific rationality correspond to the key stages in the evolution of cybernetics and AI. The evolution of AI is analyzed from these positions and an approach is proposed to overcome the ontological paradox in digital transformations and the implementation of AI. In the context of the development of ideas on scientific rationality, the author considers the specifics of innovative models based on digital technologies and AI. The article examines the problem of the formation of an integrative field of knowledge as the ergonomics of digital transformations and AI, which will allow to take into account the rich ergonomic experience of a multi-criteria socio-humanitarian assessment of the use of computer technology and software: productivity, safety, satisfaction, and development. In the conclusion, the article considers the basic positions of the configurator, that is, of the devise for assessing innovations based on digital technologies and AI, including assessing of scientific, methodological and organizational issues and persons concerned. (shrink)

Human presencing explores how people’s past encounters with others shape their present actions. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective on human embodiment in which the re-evoking of the absent can be traced to the intricate interplay of bodily dynamics. By situating the phenomenon within distributed, embodied, and dialogic approaches to language and cognition, I am overcoming the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in perceiving and acting upon what is not perceptually present. In a case study, I present (...) strong and weak dimensions of human presencing. In the former, a person uses their body in distinct ways and shapes their immediate ecology to make others present to them. In contrast, in the latter, a person’s past encounter with others powerfully shapes the projections they make onto written digital inscriptions. These findings have implications for how people act in online learning environments and how human activity shapes the machines we use every day. In this way, the paper highlights the complexity of a person as a social being and allows for different approaches to human embodiment in technology. (shrink)

This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about ‘confessional culture,’ it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution – understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposure. It argues that, with digital enclosures, the renunciative self-mortification that lies at the heart of classic Christian confession (...) is reprogrammed into what Byung-Chul Han calls a ‘pornographic self-presentation.’ The self-death dealt by the confessional thus becomes an apparently voluntary self-exploitation for the social media subject. In both cases, however, absolution governs via rituals of cathartic transparency, submitting interiority to processes of legible exteriorization and articulating the subject via an exhibitive logic that blurs the boundaries between communicative freedom and compulsory self-exposure. (shrink)

The disruptions of coronavirus disease 2019 in the year 2020 reshaped all aspects of life, including religious practices and rituals. As more religious activities shifted to digital space during the lockdown periods, there was a growing need to examine the link between religion and digital media. Using the model of the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa, this article draws on the notion of transversal rationality and concepts of rationality, cognitive, evaluative and pragmatic to posit that COVID-19 has (...) configured traditional missional and liturgical spaces in ways that locate the agency of the marginalised at the centre. The article highlights how COVID-19 configured Christian mission as it disrupted power dynamics through religious digital spaces, which emerged as a new way of reimaging a missional church. These new digital spaces mediate between interaction and ‘telepresence’, embodied in the representations of the sacred available through online religious systems in practices where users are no longer ordinary believers – but religious participants who have power and freedom to choose. Although this is not a new phenomenon, the article concludes that such spaces created by COVID-19 shifts in power dynamics present opportunities for ordinary members to reinvent new meanings on what it means to be present or absent, to name, narrate and reinterpret the divine and forge new meanings towards participating in the mission of God.Contribution: Although this is not a new phenomenon, this article represents a systematic and practical reflection within a paradigm in which the intersection of philosophy, religious studies, social sciences, humanities and natural sciences generate an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

This study discusses the paradigm shift that has occurred in public speaking practice in the first two decades of the 21st century, conceptualised under the term ‘the New Oratory’. The New Oratory is a product of the digital revolution in that it brings together formats that are typically relayed via videos uploaded to the Internet, and serves as a vector of the new, digital economy. Drawing on previous critical work linking language and discourse to what is referred to (...) as the new economy, late or new capitalism or neoliberalism, the study focuses on two aspects of discourse practice that can be explained due to developments within the current economic climate: the entrepreneurial speaker ethos that is embodied by the start-up generation of entrepreneurs, finds a resonance in Anglo communication culture and is closely linked to the neoliberal emphasis on branding; the model of horizontal knowledge or information-sharing, whereby a move from specialist to non-specialist target audiences is shifting the frontiers of discourse communities and leading to their reorganisation. These two phenomena are illustrated via examples taken from two formats: the investor pitch and the three-minute-thesis presentation. The first belongs to the corporate sector, the second to academia. The study highlights the neoliberal forces at work outside the corporate sector per se which have come to influence most spheres of professional, social and personal lives, as well as the way these forces are ultimately being promoted by the emergence of a new, fairly homogeneous discursive setup. (shrink)

Social media has transformed how individuals handle their illnesses. While many patients increasingly use these online platforms to understand embodied information surrounding their conditions, healthcare professionals often frame these practices as negative and do not consider the expertise that patients generate through social media. Through a combination of insights from social epistemology and ignorance studies, this paper problematizes the distinctive understandings of social media between patients and healthcare professionals from a different perspective. A total of four ideas are introduced: (...) (1) healthcare professionals see embodied knowledge that arises from patients’ social media practices as uncomfortable knowledge; (2) healthcare professionals engage in several behaviours to preserve their authority and power in front of embodied knowledge created through these online platforms; (3) failing to consider embodied knowledge can have consequences not only in terms of trust between patients and healthcare professionals but also in connection with epistemological populism and the transition towards patient-centred care; and (4) media and digital health literacy could help healthcare professionals enhance the uses of social media in healthcare. Adopting this framework allows not only to offer valuable insights into how healthcare professionals manage patients’ social media practices, but also opens new avenues to improve healthcare digitisation. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 22-25. The Author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento do Ensino Superior), Brazil. From the multifarious subdivisions of semiotics, be they naturalistic or culturalistic, the realm of semiotics of value is a ?eld that is getting more and more attention these days. Our entire political and economic systems are based upon structures of symbolic representation that many times seem not only to embody monetary value but also to determine it. The connection between monetary (...) and linguistic exchanges is self-evident: the former requires the latter and develops in direct relation to it. Creative experimentation and design of digital systems of value exchange are blossoming on the web. Dr. Gilson Schwartz, an economist turned media theorist and professor at the University of São Paulo, adopted the concept of Iconomics, originally created by Michael Kaplan, an author concerned with the linguistics of economic value. Empowering local communities and unlocking new levels of value creation and representation via digital technologies are the main goals of Dr. Schwartz’s projects, aiming at the re-designing of our relationship to the economic value of imagination and the social control of property. Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, a former Chief Economist at BankBoston, Brazil and Advisor to the President of the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). FURTHER READING: Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture . 15.3 (2003): 477-493. Renata Lemos-Morais: You have recently produced and directed a short documentary about Creative Currencies in Latin America. Could you tell us a bit about its process and its findings? Gilson Schwartz: The “Creative Currencies” project is a work-in-progress platform which unfolds as an action research agenda connected both to the production of audiovisual content and the development of social currency software. The initiative dates back to 2003 when I led an experimental project supported by the Presidency of Brazil. At that time, we issued paper currency in a small, touristic village in the Northeast Region which stimulated local cultural projects. But it was only in 2009 that the Central Bank of Brazil acknowledged “social currencies” as a legitimate economic agenda, calling for more debate at the I Financial Inclusion Forum. This year, the monetary authorities organized a second forum that also opened the room to discussions on mobile payment systems and new perspectives on poverty alleviation via State subsidies. The Ministry of Culture funded the “Creative Currencies” project in 2009-2010 and our next stage in this discovery process is to be supported by the National Social and Economic Development Bank (BNDES). In short, there is genuine interest among public officials in different areas and public funding for social currencies is on the rise in Brazil. However, after all these years we are still at a very early stage of research and practice. Some of the most successful initiatives (such as Banco Palmas) actually evolved out of local monetary creation to become correspondent banking operations for commercial banks and other financial groups. After eight years of price stability and social inclusion, Brazil stands out as a major opportunity for social experimentation, even the Grameen Bank is now entering the Brazilian market and many NGOs are geared towards different forms of entrepreneurialism in the base of the pyramid, riding solidarity economic models, microfinance and microcredit for local development. It is yet to be seen, however, whether these developments are just one more stage of “bankarization”, that is to say, an extension of regular banking services or actually a new form of social and symbolic self-determination at the local level. So far, the Central Bank of Brazil is open to new forms of credit and local finance as long as they are strictly territorial and very close to barter among the poor. In other words, whether the process of monetary creation could be made to fit an open source paradigm is yet to be seen. Community banking and social currencies might as well end up as just another channel for access to and use of banking services. The “Creative Currencies” project aims at promoting the discussion of more fundamental issues, such as the limits of central banking, the prospects for local financial development and the possibility of creating and managing financial icons as cultural assets. The purpose of this project is to produce short documentaries that will bear testimony to this evolving regulatory framework while inducing more discussion about the fundamental iconomic issues concealed in the process of money and wealth creation. RLM: What new potential is there in applying digital technologies to currency creation? GS: Globalization is a result of the virtualization of money, that is, the overcoming of illusions such as the “gold standard”. Money is an icon created by institutions, not on supposedly natural or material foundations but out of political and financial interests. The “dollar standard” is an outstanding evidence of this phenomenon and Kaplan´s paper, the first to use the expression “iconomics”, insists on the rhetoric and semiotic effects associated to a supposedly scientific model of money creation and management. This is a fundamental change that was perceived and discussed much before the digitalization of the world by unorthodox economists such as John Maynard Keynes since the early 20th century. The digitalization of global financial flows accelerated this immateriality and the creation of the Euro was yet another evidence of the political foundations of currencies. The banking establishment, however, is keen on the idea that scientific formulae hold the key to sound money creation. Keynesianism has been repeatedly associated to “inflationism” while the supposedly sound monetary policies of the Orthodoxy serve well the political and financial interests of a technocratic elite. Corporate media also serve this fictitious depiction of the monetary process despite the cyclical bust of monetary rules and financial regulations. The internet, however, has created numerous opportunities for the disintermediation in industries such as film, music and commodities. There is no reason to doubt that the financial industry can also be transformed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) infrastructures. Money is media as well. Credit is but confidence. Once people realize that the distributed computing power of networks can also be the platform to weave new monetary and credit operations, there is room for grassroots emancipation out of the established owners of monetary institutions. So far, however, there has been a privatization of monetary management and there is not a clear path or model for the emergent (P2P) property democratization that is inherent to the internet. Digital assets, however, clearly have an inherent potential to escape central control and proprietary regulatory frameworks. RLM: How are social networks transforming the ways in which we exchange value? Do you believe that online influence and reputation might be translated into a new kind of currency? GS: The foundation for social currencies as envisaged by solidarity economics is the territory. Authorities are willing to concede local monetary creation as long as it is restricted to poor neighborhoods, as a proxy to barter. In this relevant but limited context, reputation, personal knowledge and informal ties form the matrix of local or “proximity” finance which are expected to keep credit and leverage to a sustainable level. Anything beyond that should and would lead to an integration of local finance into the established banking system. However, inasmuch as the internet promotes virtual territories and reputation is now subject to all sorts of digital manipulation and stardom becomes an everyday cultural process among teenagers and elders alike, the territorial “foundation” is substituted for more complex patterns of solidarity, cooperation and exchange that reach beyond the physical territory and even the “human.” Digital assets embody knowledge, technology, cultural and educational values that are exchanged at a global scale beyond the control of democratic States (Chinese-like intervention is the exception, not the rule). Hacktivism is unstoppable and so is monetary hacktivism. Especially in the Third World, mobile communications fast became conveyors of money transfers and other appropriation strategies. Banking and telecom sectors already battle for the control of these emerging markets and, as a matter of fact, have so far contributed to the containment of these processes. Governments serve these moguls and have usually adopted a wait-and-see attitude. If open source hardware and grassroots social movements combine to challenge these proprietary battles, then social networks may evolve into new forms of social capital and thus form the ground on which to design and implement social currencies. The global financial crisis, as well as the dollar demise, are an event of such a proportion that social networks may open the path for emancipator subjects to seize the opportunity. RLM: What are some of the social experiments that you think are revolutionizing the way in which value is exchanged? GS: There is a broad evolution of economic systems towards the valuation of intangible assets such as knowledge, reputation and sustainability. There are many examples of local as well as global events that call the traditional systems of exchange into question, from carbon credits to educational bonuses, digital barter frameworks and locally based solidarity and fair trade networks. These emerging examples, no matter how different in nature or scale, represent a challenge to the traditional value creation schemes and theories which are based on use and exchange value, supply and demand. This is not to say that utility and labour or scarcity are to be totally dismissed, but there is now an emerging perception that value is also a function of behavioral codes, symbolic patterns and the energy of institutional frameworks. The plasticity of digital platforms is relevant insofar as intellectual property becomes the central source of value creation. But when you discuss the property rights of public goods such as the environment or basic social rights (of minorities or localities), then a new paradigm seems to emerge. RLM: Are gaming and online storytelling digital practices that might have an impact on the way new currencies are created and developed? GS: “Play money” has been one of the early and most intriguing phenomena associated to the diffusion of virtual worlds. These virtual currencies have also been prone to “boom and bust” dynamics, speculation and pure theft (Second Life scams were common and led to “intervention” by the owners of the game). Storytelling is a major source of value, that is, the value of attention and the markets for audience. There are plenty of private monies created and managed by corporate entertainment groups, telecom operators (via mobile virtual network operators) and marketing frameworks. The casino economy, as already depicted by Keynes and other unorthodox economists, is always storytelling about future states of the world, confidence building and leverage of animal spirits. The novelty of current events is not the fictitious nature of any form of capital, but the potential for digital democratization of controls over the imaginary nature of value creation. But this is just a potential, a possibility, a figment that more often than not is appropriated by centralized and opaque private powers. The game industry is a testbed for new connections between storytelling and money creation. RLM: Monetary value was originally connected to the scarcity of precious metals, such as gold. Our entire monetary system seems therefore to function according to a logic of scarcity. Do you believe it is possible to reverse this logic into a logic of abundance? GS: The gold standard was a fiction itself, the “scarcity” is always produced by institutions that regulate confidence and access to credit. The key issue is not to fabricate abundance, but to question the institutions which produce scarcity out of any standard, gold or whatever. Central banks are at the service of private banks in the creation and management of scarcity. RLM: The promise that nanotechnology holds for our future is one of radical abundance (or so say transhumanists). The possibility of creating any kind of material substance through nanoengineering seems each day more feasible. What would this possibility entail in terms of systems of value exchange? GS: Nanotechnology, environmental concerns and grassroots appropriation of distributed knowledge are the frontiers of a new horizon of energy creation and management. Social groups in charge of managing scarcity for the sake of wealth and power concentration must be held accountable for the destruction of our future. Once this key political conundrum is accounted for, new systems of value exchange and even a non-mercantile society will come into existence. Revolutionary theorists such as Marx envisaged transformation via the extreme clash of contradictions between capital and labour. This approach has never led to a change in the systemic logic of scarcity for the sake of social control. We are once again facing the threshold of large scale societal change, but the outcome of the current crisis should come from our imagination, not from yet another paradox of abundance and scarcity. As long as we remain attached to the materiality of value, the illusion of freedom will but reinforce the massive manipulation of necessity. RLM: What do you think is the role of crowdfunding in this context? GS: Crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding are examples of the peer to peer opportunities that come along with distributed computer power. However, the power structure behind wealth and scarcity creation may or may not be changed by crowd management. But it should not be taken at face value, so to speak. The stock market of course is an early form of crowdfunding without calling into question the proprietary framework of the companies offering their investment projects to the market. Any market is a form of crowdsourcing, that is to say, of distributed forms of supply and demand matchmaking. The wealth of networks, however, depends on the contractual ecosystem, the institutional framework, the channeling of social imagination, not on the purely quantitative distribution of bids and offers. I see economics as supply, demand and code. Once you have access to the code, once openness becomes part of the game, then there is a chance of crowd behavior becoming collective intelligence and sustainable imagination. RLM: Is the development of digital currencies headed towards a pluralistic ecology in which many micro currency systems co-exist, or is it penetrating the mainstream monetary system? If it is affecting the mainstream financial system, what would be its effect in the long-term? GS: The same issue is at stake both at local and global levels. The global system is, as a matter of fact, an unstable ecosystem of “micro currencies” whereas the dollar has so far exerted an overwhelming influence. Local currencies and private monies coexist with national currencies only to the extent that the Central Bank admits, for instance, that grassroots monetary emissions remain territorial and strictly connected to poverty. However, the question of how new developments in digital technologies and nanotechnologies might alter not only our current monetary systems but also our understanding of value in itself, is still an open question. (shrink)