This paper advances the research on personalization of political communication by investigating whether this process of focusing on politicians instead of political issues plays a role on Twitter. Results of a content analysis of 5,530 tweets posted in the run-up to the German federal election provide evidence that Twitter communication refers more often to politicians than to issues. However, tweets containing personal characteristics about political leaders play only a marginal role. When distinguishing among different groups of (...) actors on Twitter (journalists, politicians, citizens), we find that citizens focus more on candidates than do journalists or politicians. Investigating the impact of a televised debate on Twitter communication, we observe that this person-centered event puts the focus on individual politicians instead of issues. (shrink)

The current issue of the Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung presents a discussion of social media's future. Geert Lovink and Stefan Heidenreich debate the sense and non-sense of network-critique in light of the internet's modified usage and perception, which is commonly labeled Web 2.0. Lovink is critical about the increasing tendency towards monopolization in Web 2.0. Users, he contends, become thrilled by walled gardens , which are presented to them by big companies. Independent of the question whether the need for (...) practical information and the prevalence of economical interests is understandable or not, Lovink is most of all concerned with artistic alternatives and an activist usage of the nets. According to him, it is time for developers, programmers, freaks and nerds of all nations to become conscious of and active against the dark sides of economical and political control over the internet. Heidenreich, on the other hand, is skeptical. In contrast to the project of network-critique, he pursues a rigorously medial approach, which presents itself as unimpressed by ethical or engaged observations of social media. In his view, the heroization of hackers and nerds is informed by Science Fiction and nostalgia, both of which miss Reality 2.0. Heidenreich asserts that the internet's new generation, which has grown up with the new media, is not particularly interested in network-critique, but uses the given internetservices in various ways. German In der aktuellen Ausgabe der Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung wird über die Zukunft der Social Media gestritten. Geert Lovink und Stefan Heidenreich debattieren über den Sinn und Unsinn von Netzkritik angesichts einer veränderten Nutzung und Wahrnehmung des Internets, die sich hinter dem Schlagwort Web 2.0 verbirgt. Lovink sieht die zunehmende Tendenz zur Monopolisierung im Web 2.0 kritisch. Die Nutzer lassen sich von walled gardens begeistern, die Großunternehmen ihnen vorsetzen. Netzkritik solle sich daher nicht in der Frage erschöpfen, wie man Facebook und Twitter am besten nutzen kann, sondern sich mit echten Alternativen im Netz auseinandersetzen. Unabhängig davon, wie nachvollziehbar der Bedarf an praktischen Informationen und die Dominanz ökonomischer Interessen ist, geht es Lovink vor allem um künstlerische Alternativen und eine aktivistische Nutzung der Netze. Es sei an der Zeit, dass Entwickler, Programmierer, Freaks und Nerds aller Nationen sich die dunklen Seiten der ökonomisch-staatlichen Kontrolle des Internets bewusst machen und dagegen aktiv werden. Heidenreich ist dagegen skeptisch. Im Gegensatz zum Projekt der Netzkritik verfolgt er einen strikt medialen Ansatz, der sich gegenüber einer ethischen oder engagierten Beobachtung sozialer Medien kühl gibt. Die Heroisierung von Hackern und Nerds ist aus seiner Sicht von Science Fiction und Nostalgie geprägt, die an der Realität 2.0 vorbeigeht. Die neue Internetgeneration, die mit dem Medium aufgewachsen ist, habe gar kein ausgeprägtes Interesse an Netzkritik, sondern nutze die gegebenen Netzwerkfunktionen auf unterschiedliche Weise. (shrink)

Obóz Kultury 2.0 Mirosław Filiciak, Alek Tarkowski, Agata Jałosińska, Andrzej Klimczuk, Maciej Rynarzewski, Jacek Seweryn, Stunża M., D. Grzegorz, Marcin Wilkowski & Anna Orlik .

Digital media transform social options of access with regard to producers, recipients, and literary works of art themselves. New labels for new roles such as »prosumers « and »wreaders« attest to this. The »blogger« provides another interesting new social figure of literary authorship. Here, some old desiderata of Dadaism appear to find a belated realization. On the one hand, many web 2.0 formats of authorship amplify and widen the freedom of literary productivity while at the same time subjecting such production (...) to a periodic schedule. In comparison to the received practices of authors and recipients many digital-cultural forms of narrating engender innovative metalepses (and also their sublation). Writing in the net for internet-publics enables the deliberate dissolution of the received autobiographical pact with the reader according to which the author’s genuine name authenticates the author’s writing. On the other hand, the digital-cultural potential of dissolving the autobiographical pact stimulates scandals of debunking and unmasking and makes questions of author-identity an issue of permanent contestation. Digital-cultural conditions of communication amplify both: the hideand- seek of authorship as well as the thwarting of this game by recipients who delight in playing detective. In effect, pace Foucault’s and Barthes’ postulates of the death of the author, the personality and biography of the author once again tend to become objects of high intrinsic value. (shrink)

The current issue of the presents a discussion of social media's future. and debate the sense and non-sense of network-critique in light of the internet's modified usage and perception, which is commonly labeled Web 2.0. Lovink is critical about the increasing tendency towards monopolization in Web 2.0. Users, he contends, become thrilled by, which are presented to them by big companies. Independent of the question whether the need for practical information and the prevalence of economical interests is understandable or not, (...) Lovink is most of all concerned with artistic alternatives and an activist usage of the nets. According to him, it is time for developers, programmers, freaks and nerds of all nations to become conscious of and active against the dark sides of economical and political control over the internet. Heidenreich, on the other hand, is skeptical. In contrast to the project of network-critique, he pursues a rigorously medial approach, which presents itself as unimpressed by ethical or engaged observations of social media. In his view, the heroization of hackers and nerds is informed by Science Fiction and nostalgia, both of which miss Reality 2.0. Heidenreich asserts that the internet's new generation, which has grown up with the new media, is not particularly interested in network-critique, but uses the given internetservices in various ways. (shrink)

The book Hidden Harmony—The Connected Worlds of Physics and Art by J.R. Leibowitz is critically reviewed. The book is intended for a general audience and does not assume prior knowledge of physics or the arts.

It is possible to survey humankind and be proud, even to smile, for we accomplish great things. Art and science are two notable worthy human accomplishments. Consonant with art and science are some of the ways we treat each other. Sacrifice and heroism are two admirable human qualities that pervade human interaction. But, as everyone knows, all this goodness is more than balanced by human depravity. Moral corruption infests our being. Why?

Cybernetic Bacteria is an ongoing transdisciplinary investigation that brings together art, philosophy, microbiology and digital technology to examine the relationship of the emerging science of bacterial communication to our own digital communications networks, looking in particular at ‘packet data’ and bacterial quorum sensing. The project seeks to compare philosophical notions of the sublime with a kind of bacterial sublime, demonstrating the greater complexity of the interactions taking place at a microscopic level, when compared to human communication technologies such as the (...) World Wide Web (with particular focus on scale-free networks). The first artwork in the series employed a clear plastic tube of liquid agar jelly planted into earth to allow the soil bacteria beneath to grow upwards and become visible. A total of 100 µL of Homoserine Lactone, a hormone used by bacteria for quorum sensing (a form of bacterial communication), was then added by the artist as part of a performance lecture, with her in effect saying: ‘I’m here’ to the bacteria below. The microbes that have been communicated to then pass the signal on to their neighbours and so on. In theory this enables the signal to travel around the planet. However, the main issue with this work is one of Hermeneutics; the bacteria, which receive the communication, will not identify the artist as human – simply as another (albeit very large) bacterium. The project has subsequently evolved into a multiple screen digital artwork showing network traffic taking place in real time (web traffic, RFID and Bluetooth), a film of bacterial communication in progress (using two strains of genetically modified bacteria) and an interactive conceptualisation of the data from both sources generated using artificial life. The project continues. (shrink)

The invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago has been called the worst mistake in human history. Alongside the social, political, and technological innovations that stemmed from it, there came a litany of drawbacks ranging from social inequality, a decline in human health, to the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Millennia after the invention of agriculture, another revolution—the digital revolution—is having a similar impact on humanity, albeit at a scale and speed measured in decades. Despite the tremendous (...) advances brought about by this revolution, there is today a rapidly expanding gulf within and between societies along technological lines; alarming effects on sociality and cognition due to a persistent online presence; and a concentration of power in the form of wealth and data within a handful of tech companies, the likes of which has never been seen before. While the effects of agriculture can now be discerned with thousands of years of hindsight, those of the digital revolution can be witnessed in real time. Is the digital revolution paving the way for a more equitable and stable world, or is it leading humanity down a road that will prove to be more detrimental the more ensconced in technology we become? (shrink)

The proliferation of social media and web 2.0 applications (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the previous 5 years has created a new social research opportunity, with over an estimated 552 million active daily users on Facebook (Facebook Press 2012). As with all research, boundaries must be set out to create valid and accurate data, keeping ethical practices at the forefront of the data gathering process. The lack of standardized practices requires an in-depth look into the use of such (...) methods, with focus on four major areas: 1) security for the individual, 2) anonymity, 3) safety and 4) use of mined data and information gathered by either passive or active means. (shrink)

This article examines ethical implications from workplace romances that may subsequently turn into sexual harassment through the use of social media technologies, such as YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, text messaging, IMing, and other forms of digital communication between office colleagues. We examine common ethical models such as Jones (Acad Manag Rev 16:366–395, 1991) issue-contingent decision-making model, Rest’s (Moral development: Advances in research and theory, 1986) Stages of Ethical Decision-Making model, and Pierce and Aguinis’s (J Org Behav 26(6):727–732,2005) review of (...) workplace romance versus sexual harassment issues. The article makes a contribution by developing a new communication ethics model that includes response positive and response negative contingencies to guide decision-making about inappropriate social media contacts that spillover into the workplace. In addition, we recommend that human resource personnel take a more active role in communicating appropriate ethical rules of conduct concerning the use of social media technologies inside and outside the office. (shrink)

The author assures readers that Chris Matthew Sciabarra has met all Aristotelian requirements in full, providing not one but two definitions of “dialectics,” which, as the art of context-keeping, is indeed an essential part of Ayn Rand's philosophical method. He shows how Sciabarra's definitional process compares quite favorably in terms of timeliness, transparency, and benevolence to that of Rand and other Objectivists, and notes that Sciabarra's overriding concern, notwithstanding his obvious great respect for Rand's substantive philosophical achievements, has been to (...) identify and clarify the methods she and other thinkers have used to profound benefit. (shrink)

"C.E. Emmer’s article addresses the ongoing debates over how to classify and understand kitsch, from the inception of postmodern culture onwards. It is suggested that the lack of clear distinction between fine art and popular culture generates 'approaches to kitsch – what we might call 'deflationary' approaches – that conspire to create the impression that, ultimately, either 'kitsch' should be abandoned as a concept altogether, or we should simply abandon ourselves to enjoying kitschy objects as kitsch.' (...) The author offers critical insight into 'kitschy' items made in response to 9/11 and tries to examine the reception of these products through scrutinizing a selection of remarks posted by the Internet commentators." Editor Justyna Stępień's summary from her introduction to Redefining Kitsch and Camp in Literature and Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 2. The final pages of the chapter analyze the seemingly sweet landscape paintings of Thomas Kinkade to show the spirit of revenge their Christian coding can conceal. (shrink)

Sciabarra responds to critics of the second edition of his book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical: Wendy McElroy, who reviewed the book for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and Shoshana Milgram and Gregory Salmieri, whose most recent criticisms appear in A Companion to Ayn Rand. Sciabarra defends both his historical and methodological theses, situating the book within a trilogy of works that define and defend “dialectical libertarianism,” which eschews utopian thinking and embraces a fully radical mode of inquiry. Sciabarra (...) argues that dialectics—the art of context-keeping—figures prominently throughout Rand's literary and philosophical corpus. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis is the field of natural language processing to analyze opinionated data, for the purpose of decision making. An opinion is a statement about a subject which expresses the sentiments as well as the emotions of the opinion makers on the topic. In this paper, we develop a sentiment analysis tool namely SENTI-METER. This tool estimates the success rate of social campaigns based on the algorithms we developed that analyze the sentiment of word as well as blog. Social campaigns (...) have a huge impact on the mindset of people. One such campaign was launched in India on October 2, 2014, named Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Our tool computes an elaborated analysis of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which examines the success rate of this social campaign. Here, we performed the location-wise analysis of the campaign and predict the degree of polarity of tweets along with the monthly and weekly analysis of the tweets. The experiments were conducted in five phases namely extraction and preprocessing of tweets, tokenization, sentiment evaluation of a line, sentiment evaluation of a blog and analysis. Our tool is also capable of handling transliterated words. Unbiased tweets were extracted from Twitter related to this specific campaign, and on comparing with manual tagging we were able to achieve 84.47 % accuracy using unigram machine learning approach. This approach helps the government to implement the social campaigns effectively for the betterment of the society. (shrink)

La révolution peut-elle être gazouillée ? Peut-on parler d’une révolution 2.0 dans le cas de l’utilisation de Twitter et des réseaux sociaux numériques pendant la révolte des populations arabes dans la première moitié de 2011 ? Faut-il plutôt analyser le rôle et l’importance des outils de communication dans le processus de réveil des populations longtemps maintenues au silence par des régimes autoritaires?Does the use of Twitter and social networks sites during the Arab revolts in early 2011 amount to (...) a revolution 2.0? Or would it be more relevant to analyse the role and importance of communication tools generally in the awakening of populations silenced for so many years by authoritarian regimes? (shrink)

During 2018, as part of a research project funded by the Deviant Practice Grant, artist Bruno Moreschi and digital media researcher Gabriel Pereira worked with the Van Abbemuseum collection (Eindhoven, NL), reading their artworks through commercial image-recognition (computer vision) artificial intelligences from leading tech companies. The main takeaways were: somewhat as expected, AI is constructed through a capitalist and product-focused reading of the world (values that are embedded in this sociotechnical system); and that this process of using AI is an (...) innovative way for doing institutional critique, as AI offers an untrained eye that reveals the inner workings of the art system through its glitches. This paper aims to regard these glitches as potentially revealing of the art system, and even poetic at times. We also look at them as a way of revealing the inherent fallibility of the commercial use of AI and machine learning to catalogue the world: it cannot comprehend other ways of knowing about the world, outside the logic of the algorithm. But, at the same time, due to their “glitchy” capacity to level and reimagine, these faulty readings can also serve as a new way of reading art; a new way for thinking critically about the art image in a moment when visual culture has changed form to hybrids of human–machine cognition and “machine-to-machine seeing”. (shrink)

This article explores the interesting connection between social movements and new social media also referred to as web 2.0. It is argued that the public as well as parts of the scientific debate about the impact of new media on social change is to a large degree dominated by two rigid camps, namely Internet-utopians on the one side and Internet-sceptics on the other side. Both positions tend to degenerate into technological determinism. Furthermore, they ignore the long tradition for the critical (...) study of alternative media and their role as critical and oppositional communication tools for social movements. In order to analyse how social movements challenge dominant and hegemonic worldviews, the article calls for a socially oriented media theory with a sensibility for analytical concepts and frameworks. Such a theoretical and contextual framework can be used in order to produce empirically based insights into the relation between protest movements, social media use and actual political change. (shrink)

Political representatives with excessive authority and a lack of deliberation and co-legislation with their electors, provoke protests that desire to have influence over the State. Traditional mass media (television, radio, newspapers and cinema) and the Web 1.0 (lists of e-mails and non-interactive websites) created distance among them because they reduced the electorate to fewer recipients. But the new media from the Web 2.0 (Blogs, Facebook, Wikis, and in particular the Micro-Bloggins and Twitter) pretend to improve old limitations. Likewise, the (...) first supposed we had a democracy and so we searched for information online, on the other hand, the new gives information and demands democracy. The idea exposed on this article is how the new Web 2.0 seeks to exceed the limits of traditional participation and to dissolve, more than surpassing, citizen’s frontiers of political activity on the Web. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Art_ is a textbook for undergraduate students interested in the topic of philosophical aesthetics. It introduces the techniques of analytic philosophy as well as key topics such as the representational theory of art, formalism, neo-formalism, aesthetic theories of art, neo-Wittgensteinism, the Institutional Theory of Art. as well as historical approaches to the nature of art. Throughout, abstract philosophical theories are illustrated by examples of both traditional and contemporary art including frequent reference to the avant-garde in this way enriching (...) the readers understanding of art theory as well as the appreciation of art. Unique features of the textbook are: * chapter summaries * summaries of major theories of art and suggested analyses of the important categories used when talking and thinking of art * annotated suggested readings at the ends of chapters. Also available in this series: _Epistemology_ Pb: 0-415-13043-3: £12.99 _Ethics_ Pb: 0-415-15625-4: £11.99 _Metaphysics_ Pb: 0-415-14034-X: £12.99 _Philosophy of Mind_ Pb: 0-415-13060-3: £11.99 _Philosophy of Religion_ Pb: 0-415-13214-2: £12.99. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 93-113, April 2022. Twitter is an increasingly common source of rich, personalized qualitative data, as millions of people daily share their thoughts on myriad topics. However, questions remain unclear concerning if and how to quote publicly available social media data ethically. In this study, focusing on 136 education manuscripts quoting 2667 Tweets, we look to investigate the ways in which Tweets are quoted, the ethical discussions forwarded and actions taken, and (...) the extent to which quoted Tweets are “discoverable.” A concerning result is that in almost all manuscripts, and for around half of all quoted Tweets, the original author could be identified. Drawing on our findings we share some ethical dilemmas, including those that arise from an apparent lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the platform, and offer suggestions for promoting ethically-informed practice. (shrink)

Aesthetic experience is original, dynamic and ever-changing. This article covers three research questions (RQs) concerning how immersive installation artworks can elicit emotions that may contribute to their popularity. Based on Yayoi Kusama’s and Peter Kogler’s kaleidoscopic rooms, this study aims to predict the emotions of visitors of immersive installation art based on their Twitter activity. As indicators, we employed the total number of likes, comments, retweets, followers, followings, the average of tweets per user, and emotional response. According to (...) our evaluation of emotions, panic obtained the highest scores. Furthermore, compared to traditional machine learning algorithms, Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool (TPOT) Automated Machine Learning used in this research yielded slightly lower performance. We forecast that our findings will stimulate future research in the fields of data analysis, cultural heritage management and marketing, aesthetics and cultural analytics. (shrink)

Ch. 1. Divine plants and magical animals -- Ch. 2. Aesthetic effects of domestication -- Ch. 3. The rainforests of domestication -- Ch. 4. The rise of ornamental plants -- Ch. 5. Darwin's sublime -- Ch. 6. Playing God -- Ch. 7. Standards of excellence -- Ch. 8. Doubles -- Ch. 9. Kitsch plants -- Ch. 10. Bastard flowers -- Ch. 11. Biotechnology in the garden -- Ch. 12. Recent art involving DNA -- Ch. 13. Naming life -- Ch. (...) 14. Anthropocentrism and genetic art -- Ch.15. The angel of extinction -- Ch. 16. Seven breeding complexes -- Ch. 17. The slowest art -- Ch. 18. Breeding for wildness. (shrink)

This article derives from data collected over a six-month period between February and August 2022. Its sampling pertains to members of two general Twitter Lists of philosophy professionals: “Philosophers on Twitter”, limited to a maximum of 4500 active accounts, and “Philosophers”, restricted to accounts surpassing 1000 followers and currently including over 1,100 individuals. The totality of members of these two Lists is referenced in this article as “Philosophy Twitter”. -/- Data was collected in five principal ways from (...) members of these two Lists: 1) Monitoring the List streams, 2) addressing members, including following, retweeting, liking, endorsing, asking, commenting, and replying, 3) probing members’ Twitter activities in their Profiles (“Tweets & replies”), 4) reviewing members’ Twitter Bios, CVs, professional profiles, and websites, and 5) network analysis of members’ quantitative and qualitative association and interaction profiles. -/- The study of this material aimed at revealing interpersonal social structures and processes of philosophy professionals by their Twitter conduct. Its personal purview focused on creators, teachers, researchers, and students and thus excepted schools, colleges, universities, formal associations, and publishers. Particular attention was given to gaining insights on substantive orientation, cooperation, and constructive dialogue versus hierarchic and tribal characteristics. (shrink)

The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists’ claims in a more sinister light. The ability to bring about social change depends on the (...) balance of these two forces, and in particular which side can capture and maintain sustained attention. The present study examines 2 years worth of tweets about BLM (about 118 million in total). Timeseries analysis reveals that activists are better at mobilizing rapid attention, whereas right-wing accounts show a pattern of moderate but more sustained activity driven by reaction to political opponents. Topic modeling reveals differences in how different political groups talk about BLM. Most notably, the murder of George Floyd appears to have solidified a right-wing counter-framing of protests as arising from dangerous “terrorist” actors. The study thus sheds light on the complex network and rhetorical effects that drive the struggle for online attention to the BLM movement. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to (...) 2020. For each day, we break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)