In this paper, I take up the conciliatory-steadfast debate occurring within social epistemology in regards to the phenomenon of peer disagreement. I will argue, because the conciliatory perspective al-lows us to understand argumentation pragmatically—as a method of problem-solving within a community rather than as a method for obtaining the truth—that in most cases, we should not simply agree to disagree.

Self-recognition is an intimate act performed by people. Inspired by Paul Ricoeur, we reflect upon the action of self-recognition, especially when data visualization represents the observer itself. Along the article, the reader is invited to think about this specific relationship through concepts like the personal identity stored in information systems, the truthfulness at the core of self-recognition, and the mutual-recognition among community members. In the context of highly interdisciplinary research, we unveil two protagonists in data visualization: the designer and the (...) observer - the designer as the creator and the observer as the viewer of a visualization. This article deals with some theoretical aspects behind data visualization, a discipline more complex than normally expected. We believe that data visualization deserves a conceptual framework, and this investigation pursues this intention. For this reason, we look at the designer as not just a technician in the visualization production, but as a contemporary ethnologist - the designer as a professional working in a social environment to comprehend the context and formulate a specific inquiry with the help of appropriate visual languages. (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)

This paper presents a study of the generation, manipulation and use of visual representations in different episodes of scientific discovery. The study identifies a common set of transformations of visual representations underlying the distinctive methods and imagery of different scientific fields. The existence of common features behind the diversity of visual representations suggests a common dynamical structure for visual thinking, showing how visual representations facilitate cognitive processes such as pattern-matching and visual inference through the (...) use of tools, technologies and other cultural resources. This dynamical model suggests a way of theorizing the interaction of cognitive, socio-cultural and technological aspects of science without losing sight of the essential contribution each makes to the processes of discovery. Whereas scientific work is often construed epistemically, as having the aim of improving the fit between theories and phenomena or culturally given notions of what counts as reality, this study shows that scientists use transformations to modify visual representations in ways that achieve other kinds of match: between a representation and the cognitive demands of a task or between an emerging representation and the social need to communicate and negotiate new meanings in a context of culturally embedded conventions. By showing how images connect each of the overlapping contexts of scientific work the proposed model negotiates the sometimes contested boundary between cognitive and social aspects of science. (shrink)

The article reviews the developing studies of visuality with respect to their own focus on cultural and political fields in which visual communication unfolds. I found that that some of the academic interests related to visuality can be located within the broader or intersecting field of cultural and political studies and provide successful tools of analysing and describing the communicational interactions within local communities situated in broader contexts of mobility. Some light is shed on the visualisations of the (...) current condition of the nation-state with respect to globalizing or Europeanising tendencies. Also, I discuss a more general impact of mobility and novel visualisations of the public and cultural sphere. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual and strategic relationships between corporate identity, organizational identity and ethics, utilizing the Benetton Corporation as an illustrative case study. Although much attention has been given to visual aspects of Benetton's renowned ethical brand building efforts, few studies have looked at how Benetton's employees, retail environments, and trade events express ethical aspects of their well-known corporate identity. Operational identity emerged as a useful complement to models of corporate identity. A multi-method case study, including interviews at retail (...) outlets and trade events, sheds light on several important yet under-studied components of corporate identity, including stakeholders such as retail managers and contract employees. Analysis of Benetton's operations revealed disconnection and inconsistency, as well as a failure to communicate ethical values and socially responsible attributes throughout organizational identity. We demonstrate the way in which organizations may fail to capitalize on positive aspects of their organizational identity by neglecting their operational identity. (shrink)

A brain-computer interface technology that can decode the neural signals associated with attempted but unarticulated speech could offer a future efficient means of communication for people with severe motor impairments. Recent demonstrations have validated this approach. Here we assume that it will be possible in future to decode imagined (i.e., attempted but unarticulated) speech in people with severe motor impairments, and we consider the characteristics that could maximize the social utility of a BCI for communication. As a (...) social interaction, communication involves the needs and goals of both speaker and listener, particularly in contexts that have significant potential consequences. We explore three high-consequence legal situations in which neurally-decoded speech could have implications:Testimony, where decoded speech is used as evidence;Consent and Capacity, where it may be used as a means of agency and participation such as consent to medical treatment; andHarm, where such communications may be networked or may cause harm to others. We then illustrate how design choices might impact the social and legal acceptability of these technologies. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual and strategic relationships between corporate identity, organizational identity and ethics, utilizing the Benetton Corporation as an illustrative case study. Although much attention has been given to visual aspects of Benetton's renowned ethical brand building efforts, few studies have looked at how Benetton's employees, retail environments and trade events express ethical aspects of their well-known corporate identity. A multi-method case study, including interviews at retail outlets and trade events, sheds light on several important yet under-studied components (...) of corporate identity, including stakeholders such as retail managers and contract employees. Analysis of Benetton's operations revealed disconnection and inconsistency, as well as a failure to communicate ethical values and socially responsible attributes throughout organizational identity. Operational identity emerged as a useful complement to models of corporate identity. We demonstrate the way in which organizations may fail to capitalize on positive aspects of their organizational identity by neglecting their operational identity. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual and strategic relationships between corporate identity, organizational identity and ethics, utilizing the Benetton Corporation as an illustrative case study. Although much attention has been given to visual aspects of Benetton's renowned ethical brand building efforts, few studies have looked at how Benetton's employees, retail environments and trade events express ethical aspects of their well‐known corporate identity. A multi‐method case study, including interviews at retail outlets and trade events, sheds light on several important yet under‐studied components (...) of corporate identity, including stakeholders such as retail managers and contract employees. Analysis of Benetton's operations revealed disconnection and inconsistency, as well as a failure to communicate ethical values and socially responsible attributes throughout organizational identity. Operational identity emerged as a useful complement to models of corporate identity. We demonstrate the way in which organizations may fail to capitalize on positive aspects of their organizational identity by neglecting their operational identity. (shrink)

From its inception in 1987 social epistemology has been divided into analytic and critical approaches, represented by Alvin I. Goldman and Steve Fuller, respectively. In this paper, the agendas and some basic ideas of ASE and CSE are compared and assessed by bringing into the discussion also other participants of the debates on the social aspects of scientific knowledge—among them Raimo Tuomela, Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino. The six topics to be analyzed include individual and collective epistemic agents; (...) the notion of scientific community; realism and constructivism; truth-seeking communities; epistemic and social values; science, experts, and democracy. (shrink)

In light of growing concerns about obesity, Winson (2004, Agriculture and Human Values 21(4): 299–312) calls for more research into the supermarket foodscape as a point of connection between consumers and food choice. In this study, we systematically examine the marketing of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals to children in Toronto, Ontario supermarkets. The supermarket cereal aisle is a relatively unstudied visual collage of competing brands, colors, spokes-characters, and incentives aimed at influencing consumer choice. We found that breakfast cereal products with (...) higher-than-average levels of sugar, refined grains, and trans-fats are more likely to feature child-oriented marketing in the form of spokes-characters, themed cereal shapes/colors, and child incentives on cereal boxes. These forms of visual communication are consistent with a “health exploitive” pattern of targeted marketing to children in the supermarket setting. Only one aspect of visual communication is consistent with a “health protective” pattern of marketing to children—cereals shelved within reach of children aged 4–8 had less sugar per serving and were less likely to contain trans-fats than less reachable products. We discuss the implications of our findings for the measurement and regulation of marketing to children in North American supermarkets. (shrink)

Widely recognized as America's premiere photography critic, Coleman took an interest in emerging digital technologies long before his colleagues. In fact, the earliest text in this new book of essays concerning the advent of electronic media is from 1967. The intervening thirty years have found Coleman returning to topics such as digitized images, the shifting concept of intellectual property, the impact of computers on photography as a whole, and the social implications of the Internet and World Wide Web. A (...) wide-ranging selection of essays, lectures, and writings, The Digital Evolution makes for stimulating reading, and should be well received by those familiar with Coleman's previous collection of essays, Critical Focus. (shrink)

This Handbook of Visual Communication explores the key theoretical areas and research methods of visual communication. With chapters contributed by many of the best-known and respected scholars in visual communication, this volume brings together significant and influential work in the discipline. The second edition of this already-classic text has been completely revised to reflect the metamorphosis of communication in the last 15 years and the ubiquity of visual communication in our modern (...) mediated lifestyle. Thriteen major theories of communication are defined by the top experts in their fields: perception, cognition, aesthetics, visual rhetoric, semiotics, cultural studies, ethnography, narrative, media aesthetics, digital media, intertextuality, ethics, and visual literacy. Each of these theory chapters is followed by an exemplar study or two in the area, demonstrating the various methods used in visual communication research as well as the research approaches applicable for specific media types. The Handbook of Visual Communication is a theoretical and methodological handbook for visual communication researchers and a compilation for much of the theoretical background necessary to understand visual communication. It is required reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in visual communication, and it will be influential in other disciplines such as advertising, persuasion, and media studies. The volume will also be essential to media practitioners seeking to understand the visual aspects of how audiences use media to contribute to more effective use of each specific medium. (shrink)

By contrast to the competitive and participatory models of sport, the immersive model shows greater potentiality as a healthful practice more distant from transcendent, technocratic aspects of other models, instead accepting the body's immanence as part of evolutionary history and the natural world. Because of the largely unconscious, evolutionarily based responses to one's environment, the environment in which a sporting activity takes place has a tangible impact on performance. As our most evolutionarily recent sense system, visuality is linked to the (...) Social Engagement System. The mediated experience of sport through visual culture might catalyse the Social Engagement System and the perception that the sporting activity is communal and welcoming. Particularly the subculture surrounding the sport of CrossFit, which spread almost entirely through website presence and the posting of videos of workouts on the mainsite, might be said to exemplify how growth in new sports is augmented by visuality and the formation of virtual communities that then become embodied. (shrink)

Some contemporary philosophers of action have contended that the intentions, decisions, and actions of collective social agency are reducible to those of the individuals involved. This contention is based on two assumptions: (1) that collective agency would require super-minds, and (2) that actions presuppose causes that move our bodies. The problem of how to account for collective action had not been regarded as a problem in the history of philosophy earlier.The explanation of why ancient Greek philosophers did not see (...) joint agency as a problem is not, as sometimes assumed, that they had no, or only a weak, sense of individuality. Nor is it because they simply overlooked the difference between individual and collective agency. It is, rather, as Aristotle’s conception of humans as ‘social’ or ‘political’ animals indicates, that the aims and ends of actions, and the means to bring them about by acting together, is the result of practice from early on. Without the acquisition of language and moral habituation humans would not become humans. There is, then, a shared understanding about common agency from infancy on. Individuals may disagree about some particular aim and action, and act only because it is a decision of the majority. But no super-minds are required to explain the communality of wishes. That Aristotle ignored the fact that all motion starts in individual bodies is explained by the difference between motions and actions: moves that are not determined by their ends are mere motions, not actions. So what moves an individual body can be the wish to bring about a joint action with another person or with a collective of persons. (shrink)

This study addresses the social aspect of the duty of pilgrimage through the documentation method based on sociological perspective. The aim of this paper is to determine the social gains of people through the pilgrimage. Religion is an phenomenon that people need in every aspect of their daily life. Because religion is one of the phenomenon that deeply affect the individual and society. The pilgrimage, which is one of the sociological expressions of religion, and maintains its existence in (...) the form of creed, worship and religious community, is instrumental in strengthening and consolidating the faith and feeling the feelings of brotherhood. For instance; spiritual fundamentals of integration are based on Quran by means of worships such as salaat, fasting and alms with the pilgrimage as well as the messages serving as guidance for socio-cultural integration. In accordance with this, worships, with its psychological effects, lead people to attain social aspects such as brotherhood, solidarity, protecting each other, enduring and overcoming distresses together, accomplishing societal sharing by meeting on the common ground of benefaction in the establishment and subsistence of the Islamic community. The pilgrimage, on that sense, is required to have its principal qualification once more in where the historical, social, political and economic issues of the Islamic world are discussed and solutions addressing such issues are delivered accordingly. Therefore, the pilgrimage is not expected to only affects the individuals, families, groups but also regulates the national and transnational lives of societies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Achieving Social and Cultural Educational Objectives through Art Historical Inquiry PracticesJacqueline Chanda (bio)Some overburdened art or generalist teachers may ask: "With all the things we have to know and do these days, why should we be interested in art history inquiry processes? What educational value is there in promoting the use of art history inquiry processes in teaching and learning?" The answer to the first question lies in (...) art history's relationship to the humanities and the visual arts. The humanities is the branch of learning concerned with human thought and relations. We turn to the humanities when we wish to understand the human condition, social and cultural values, and ourselves. But some might say that historical inquiry methods do the same thing. What distinguishes art historical inquiry from general historical inquiry is the focus on the visual arts. Visual arts are in the branch of learning that deal with the production and study of visual imagery and material objects. In the context of art history inquiry, visual imagery and material objects are the primary data used for the study of changes in ourselves; religious, social, and cultural values; and human conditions. Visual imagery is one of the universal ways that the human condition and social and cultural values of the past and present are expressed. It is one of the fundamental means by which humans communicate feelings, emotions, ideas, ideologies, etc.Art educators have acknowledged for a long time the importance of the study of images and visual elements in the lives of children and the field of art education. This is even more evident today as the discipline moves to embrace notions of "visual culture," which emphasize exploring and studying all the things that visibly shape our lives. The acknowledgment of art history as an inquiry process rather than simply the study of facts about past artworks developed in the discipline-based arts education (DBAE) [End Page 24] movement of the 1980s and 1990s.1 In spite of the recommendations that art history be explored as a discipline of inquiry, much of the art history investigations that take place in the classroom today focus on understanding the artist through his/her biography and understanding the work of art through analysis of style and formal description.2 While the artist biography brings to light the artist's intention and a formal description examines what one can see in the work and makes reference to aspects of style and formal elements, the two approaches do not provide enough information to generate meaning and speculate about what social and cultural elements may have caused the work of art to look the way it does or the effects it may have had at the time of its creation. Unfortunately, many educators are not aware of how to extend their investigations to uncover these levels of analysis.Erickson provides one definition of inquiry as describing, attributing (determining who created the work), reconstructing (determining what the object originally looked like), and interpreting the artwork.3 While these aspects are all a part of an art historical investigation, they do not go far enough into the practices utilized by art historians when exploring a work of art. Therefore, in the context of this article the phrase "art historical inquiry processes" refers to the use of authentic activities (asking questions, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting, speculating about cause or effect, and disseminating knowledge) and approaches that art historians use when studying works of art; this approach goes beyond what is clearly seen in visual imagery in order to reveal not only the denotative but also the connotative meanings that are relevant to the historical and cultural context of the artwork. These authentic activities incorporate approaches related to structural analysis (that is, contemporary analysis—iconography, iconology semiotics, feminism, etc.—that draws from literary reading skills to generate meaning) and explore, examine, and facilitate the drawing of conclusions about the significance and place of visual imagery and material objects in the societies from which they come.4 The purpose of this article is to discuss the value of studying visual images and material objects using authentic art history inquiry processes to uncover meanings, and by extension... (shrink)

The concept of cuteness, which can evoke positive emotions in people, is an essential aspect to consider in artificial intelligence design. This study aimed to investigate whether the use of baby schema designed avatars in computer-mediated communication elicits higher positive attitudes than neutral avatars and whether the ethnicity of the cute avatars influences individuals' perceived level of cuteness. 485 participants from Israel and Japan viewed six avatar images, including three baby schema avatars of different visual characteristics and ethnicities (...) (Caucasian, Asian, and Black) and three neutral avatars. Participants rated their attitudes on each avatar, and the results revealed that the baby schema designed avatars were rated cuter, more likable, approachable, and pleasant than the neutral mature avatars. Cultural differences were also evident, as the Caucasian baby schema avatar was rated cuter among Japanese participants, while the Asian and Black baby schema avatars were rated cuter among Israeli respondents. The study findings suggest that cute avatar design can serve as a powerful tool for promoting positive interactions in computer-mediated communication, especially in cultures that highly value cuteness, such as Japan. However, the subjective nature of cuteness is evident as attitudes toward cuteness varied significantly across cultures and individuals. This research highlights the significance of cultural diversity and emphasizes the importance of considering cuteness as a crucial aspect of artificial intelligence design, particularly when creating avatars intended to elicit positive emotions from users. Therefore, designers should be mindful of potential cultural and individual differences in the perception of cuteness while developing avatars for various applications. (shrink)

Using agent‐based modelling, Harrington, Kleber, Reubold, Schiel & Stevens (2018) develop a unified model of sound change based on cognitive processing of human speech and theories of how social factors constrain the spread of change throughout a community. They conclude that many types of change result from how biases in the phonetic distribution of phonological categories are transmitted via accommodation processes between individuals in interaction.

It has become essential to create and apply new media in visual communication design due to social media existence. This study aims to investigate the role of innovative applications of new media in visual communication design in educational institutions. Traditional media design in visual communication lacks to disseminate information more effectively, which requires innovative change. Therefore, this study attempts to highlight the role of innovative application of new media in visual communication (...) by considering visual expression design with information technology, flexible layout, diversified modes of transmission, and interactivity of integration. For this purpose, this study adopted a quantitative research approach in which a cross-sectional research design is followed. A questionnaire survey is carried out to collect data from educational institutions in China. Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling is used for data analysis. Results of the study indicated that innovative applications of new media have central importance in visual communication. However, resistance to innovative change has a negative role in the relationship between innovative applications of new media and visual communication design. Results of the study highlighted that visual expression design with IT, flexible layout, diversified modes of transmission, and interactivity of integration have a positive effect on visual communication design. Therefore, among the educational intuitions of China, implementing innovative applications related to the new media can lead to visual communication design. The results of this study provided several insights for the practitioners to promote communication methods among educational institutions. (shrink)

Engineering sketches and drawings are the building blocks of technological design and production. These visual representations act as the means for organizing the design to production process, hence serving as a "social glue" both between individuals and between groups. The author discusses two main capacities such visual representations serve in facilitating distributed cognition in team design work As conscription devices, they enlist and organize group participation. As boundary objects, they facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by various (...) groups involved in the design process. The introduction of computer-aided design into this visual culture of engineering restructures relationships between workers in ways that can hamper the flexibility necessary for these crucial capacities to take place. The data are drawn from a study of the daily practices of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The method is participant observation. (shrink)

The article presents an account of the visual relations created by garments through their plastic formants, examining the role played by form, material, and composition in creating body hierarchies that produce prescribed behaviors between different subjects. The work dissects the concept of thematic role from Greimasian theory, investigating the manners in which an eighteenth-century wedding dress presents the chaining of programs governing materials, garments, and the body in the production of narrative interactions between subjects. The work utilizes a combination (...) of Greimas’ method with the Visual Semiotics continued by Floch and Oliveira, as well as Hammad’s Semiotics of Space which permit the exam of optical relations created in the body through its clothing – relations that can be read as manifesting values that are both historically and socially determined, or in the act of apprehension of an object. The eighteenth century provides a type of “original” case, whose results are pertinent to a broader study of the relations between body and dress: the work concludes with the understanding that Fashion changes through the transit of values and roles invested in the body and dress – a set of changes closely linked to the construction of social roles. (shrink)

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory-affective reasons. From news coverage of terror attacks to viral videos of police brutality, and from graphic horror films to incendiary artworks that provoke mass boycotts, many of the images in our media culture strike as beyond the pale of consumption. Yet what does it mean to proclaim a media object "unwatchable": disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? Appealing to a broad academic and general readership, Unwatchable (...) offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in our global visual culture, from cinema, television, and video games through museums and classrooms to laptops, smart phones, and social media platforms. This anthology assembles 60 original essays by scholars, theorists, critics, archivists, curators, artists, and filmmakers who offer their own responses to the broadly suggestive question: What do you find unwatchable? The diverse answers include iconoclastic artworks that have been hidden from view, dystopian images from the political sphere, horror movies, TV advertisements, classic films, and recent award-winners. (shrink)

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope (...) that requires two identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

From fields as art history, semiotics and communication theories, a dozen researchers attempt to provide new and compelling approaches about the genesis of the images, their functions in relation to our existence and how we establish and construct our social and power relations, through the book.

Catholic University Of America, Philosophical Studies, No. 145, Abstract No. 2.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Deafness May Emerge as a Disability as Social Interactions UnfoldGabrielle HodgeMy hearing loss ranges from moderate to profound in both ears. I use spoken English, written English and Auslan (Australian sign language) to communicate, and rely heavily on two hearing aids, speach reading skills and my vision to interact with other people. Here I demonstrate how my deafness tends to emerge as a disability through interactions with (...) other people within the health and wellbeing context of group yoga practice. I compare two experiences from practicing yoga in group classes (which involves physical interaction and requires attendance to non–spoken tasks), and use these experiences to explore what the label ‘disability’ does not capture, how this term reflects my lived experience of deafness, and what this might mean for health and wellbeing [End Page 193] professionals engaging with clients who experience types of deafness.All human interactions are uniquely and intersubjectively shaped by the actors, how they communicate, and what they are doing while interacting. In my case, if someone is simultaneously attending to some task while talking with me, this may mean that I cannot see their face and therefore cannot access their spoken utterances. During group conversations, others may overlap their spoken turns at a pace faster than I can visually track and therefore I cannot access the dynamic content of the group conversation. In these situations, my deafness may manifest as disability. This contrasts with interactions where I engage with other signers using Auslan, where my deafness does not manifest as disability at all. For me, deafness as disability tends to be an emergent characteristic of my interactions with other people, rather than a constant feature of all interactions, or all moments of a single interaction. It emerges most prominently through interactions with strangers, and less during interactions with social intimates. This characterisation contradicts the concept of disability as a fixed feature of an individual that impacts uniformly on all aspects of their experience.I regularly practice yoga and have done so for many years. I enjoy participating in classes with other students, as we jointly learn and develop practices that challenge and illuminate different aspects of our lives. “At the heart of all yogas lies the manipulation of visible, accessible means to reach invisible, intangible ends” (Givón 2005, p. 23). How one manipulates their visible, accessible means depends on one’s personal physiology, psychology and sociality. Over the years I have developed various strategies that enable me to participate in group practice and engage with other students and teachers without over–reliance on teachers or mediation from Auslan interpreters. I have mostly come to depend on observing how the teacher and other participants move (or even how shadows on the wall infer that they move) and interpreting their movements in context of the group practice.For example, by placing myself at the front or the middle of the class, I can observe the movements of others from several viewpoints in order to synchronise my own with theirs as the practice unfolds. Through experience, I can distinguish when these movements are intentional and when they may be accidental. By combining these strategies with one–on–one discussions with teachers before or after class, as well as doing my own research, I can subsequently learn about teachings that may be verbally expressed during classes and later match these with various teachers and practices over time. These strategies enable me to adapt to a situation where it is impossible to experience consistent face–to–face interaction and where it is difficult to access spoken instruction.Group yoga classes usually begin with the teacher sharing some comments or a story to prompt the theme of the class. This helps us to integrate our exploration of action with the exploration of “invisible and intangible” goals. As a class, we observe our teacher’s intentional movements and mirror these both mentally and physically. As the class progresses, the teacher migrates around the class observing and attending to individual students with adjustments and other assistance. Throughout the class, the teacher alternates between observing, demonstrating and assisting, while simultaneously instructing the class verbally.Most of the students in these group classes... (shrink)

The bifocal stance theory (BST) focuses on cultural evolution without alluding to associated processes in linguistic evolution and language use. The authors briefly comment on language acquisition but leave underexplored the applicability of BST to linguistic evolution, to changes of language representations, and to possible consequences for constructing social identity, based on, for example, collective resilience processes within language communities.

La scalabilità è una proprietà desiderabile di sistemi informatici associata a metriche di performance. Più precisamente, un sistema è definito scalabile quando riesce a gestire, senza calo di prestazioni, un numero crescente di elementi, processi, quantità di lavoro e/o quando può essere espanso a piacimento. Progettare un sistema scalabile garantisce un’ottimizzazione dei costi e delle prestazioni, e della produttività di un’azienda. Questi scopi sono stati perseguiti, dagli anni Ottanta, attraverso numerosi studi sulla scalabilità, che sono stati sviluppati in un ambito (...) esclusivamente tecnologico. Tuttavia, negli ultimi anni è sorto il bisogno di estendere la tradizionale prospettiva tecnologica della scalabilità perché troppo limitata considerata al di fuori delle organizzazioni e applicata alle situazioni di uso quotidiano delle nuove tecnologie. Per esempio, le rubriche dei telefonini sono tecnicamente scalabili: grazie alla funzione di ricerca, essi offrono un accesso immediato alle informazioni indipendentemente dal numero dei contatti memorizzati. Inoltre, il supporto di memorie digitali esterne molto capienti permette di inserire un numero pressoché illimitato di contatti. Le versioni più avanzate delle rubriche degli smartphones sono integrate anche con i social network come Facebook. Dal punto di vista cognitivo, negli utenti si crea un’illusione di essere in grado di gestire efficacemente reti sociali sempre più estese e ricche di contenuti. In realtà, vari studi hanno dimostrato che esistono dei limiti alla gestione di relazioni sociali rilevanti, quali il famoso numero di Dunbar. Pertanto, la prospettiva tecnologica sulla scalabilità è limitata nel senso che essa riesce a descrivere solo la performance di un sistema informatico, ma non ne spiega l’impatto su performance cognitiva e sociale. Un approccio alternativo potrebbe essere basato sul presupposto che la scalabilità è una proprietà importante non solo per computer e reti informatiche, ma anche per esseri umani e reti sociali. La comprensione della correlazione fra scalabilità tecnologica e umana, renderebbe possibile migliorare il design delle tecnologie per uso quotidiano. Per esempio, le rubriche dei telefonini, come anche i siti di social network, potrebbero ottimizzare l’accesso ai contenuti in base al significato delle relazioni sociali e della situazione nella quale sono considerate. Si può ipotizzare che la comprensione della scalabilità, sia umana sia tecnologica, possa permettere di migliorare la performance dell’azione individuale e/o collettiva. Socionics, un programma interdisciplinare di ricerca che integra sociologica e informatica, offre la possibilità di estendere la definizione di scalabilità anche ai sistemi sociali. Al contrario della prospettiva tradizionale della scalabilità, che è incentrata sull’aspetto quantitativo, Socionics pone al centro dell’analisi il problema da risolvere, che è analizzato sia dal punto di vista quantitativo sia da quello qualitativo . Grazie a Socionics, nell’articolo sono introdotti i concetti di scalabilità cognitiva e scalabilità sociale, che descrivono la capacità di gestire elegantemente a livello individuale o collettivo quantità crescenti di lavoro, e/o adattarsi alla loro complessità crescente. Il processo di valutazione della scalabilità cognitiva e sociale di un problema si compone di tre fasi: la prima riguarda la definizione del contesto dell’attività a cui il problema è associato. Questo richiede di specificare gli attori coinvolti, le risorse disponibili e i compiti che essi stanno svolgendo, individualmente o in gruppo. La seconda fase si propone di identificare i bisogni legati al contesto, che servono a capire in che misura il sistema è riuscito a soddisfare il bisogno, ovvero a misurare la performance. Nella terza e ultima fase si considera la funzione delle ICT nella risoluzione del problema, al fine di capire se le ICT abbiano alleviato, accentuato o rimosso eventuali limitazioni cognitive e/o sociali. Lo stesso problema è scalabile da un punto di vista cognitivo e/o sociale se esso è risolto in modo efficace al variare dei suoi elementi quantitativi e qualitativi. Per una prima valutazione dell’approccio, è discusso il problema della coordinazione sociale tramite telefonini, che non è ridotto semplicemente al numero di persone che i telefonini riescono a mobilizzare, ma anche alla qualità e impatto della loro performance. In conclusione, i concetti di scalabilità cognitiva e sociale offrono l’opportunità di informare la progettazione e favorire l’adozione di ICT grazie alla comprensione di come gli aspetti di scalabilità tecnologica influiscano sulla performance individuale e collettiva, e viceversa.Scalability has been for long time presented as a desirable property of a networked computer system associated to measure of its performance. As information and communication technologies become ubiquitous, a need of describing scalability also from a human perspective has emerged. Indeed, technical scalability only describes the performance of a computer system, but it does not explain anything about its impact on cognitive and social performance. Without acknowledging that technical scalability does not imply human scalability, there is the risk of not realizing the full potential of ICT in the everyday life. By adopting the Socionics approach, we extend the technical view of scalability with two additional concepts, namely cognitive and social scalability. These concepts describe the capacity to process individually or collectively growing volumes of work gracefully, and/or to adjust to their increasing complexity. The notion of social scalability is then evaluated in the activity-context of social coordination through mobile devices. We conclude that by improving our understanding of scalability issues, we may positively inform the design and use of ICT not only from the viewpoint of technical performance, but also for that of individual and collective performance. (shrink)

There is mounting evidence that language comprehension involves the activation of mental imagery of the content of utterances (Barsalou, 1999;Bergen, Chang, & Narayan, 2004;Bergen, Narayan, & Feldman, 2003;Narayan, Bergen, & Weinberg, 2004;Richardson, Spivey, McRae, & Barsalou, 2003;Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002). This imagery can have motor or perceptual content. Three main questions about the process remain under‐explored, however. First, are lexical associations with perception or motion sufficient to yield mental simulation, or is the integration of lexical semantics (...) into larger structures, like sentences, necessary? Second, what linguistic elements (e.g., verbs, nouns, etc.) trigger mental simulations? Third, how detailed are the visual simulations that are performed? A series of behavioral experiments address these questions, using a visual object categorization task to investigate whether up‐ or down‐related language selectively interferes with visual processing in the same part of the visual field (followingRichardson et al., 2003). The results demonstrate that either subject nouns or main verbs can trigger visual imagery, but only when used in literal sentences about real space—metaphorical language does not yield significant effects—which implies that it is the comprehension of the sentence as a whole and not simply lexical associations that yields imagery effects. These studies also show that the evoked imagery contains detail as to the part of the visual field where the described scene would take place. (shrink)

In online communication, writers incorporate into fictional representation imaginaries that arise from the interaction between various artistic manifestations. This paper explores the work of two spanish authors, Patricia Esteban Erlés and Albert Soloviev in order to study the social impact and ethical aspects of hypermedial short stories in the virtual space, since their works function as vehicles for social criticism. At the same time, the paper addresses fundamental questions associated with the understanding and interpretation of hybrid narrative (...) microtexts. (shrink)

In light of the many corporate scandals, social and ethical commitment of society has increased considerably, which puts pressure on companies to communicate information related to corporate social responsibility (CSR). The reasons underlying the decision by management teams to engage in ethical communication are scarcely focussed on. Thus, grounded on legitimacy and stakeholder theory, this study analyses the views management teams in large listed companies have on communication of CSR. The focus is on aspects on interest, (...) motives/reasons, users and problems related to corporate communication of CSR information. A questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews confirm that there is a distinct trend shift: towards more focus on CSR in corporate communication. Whilst this trend shift started as a reactive approach initiated by the many corporate scandals, the trend shift is now argued to be of a proactive nature focussed at preventing legitimacy concerns to arise. These findings are significant and interesting, implying that we are witnessing a transit period between two legitimacy strategies. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the way respondents argue when it comes to CSR activities coincides with consequentialism or utilitarianism, i. e. companies engage in CSR activities to avoid negative impacts instead of being driven by a will to make a social betterment or acting in accordance with what is fundamentally believed to be right to do. This provides new input to the ongoing debate about business ethics. The findings should alert national and international policy makers to the need both to increase the vigilance and capacity of the regulatory and judicial systems in the CSR context and to increase institutional pressure to enhance CSR adoption and CSR communication. Furthermore, stakeholders need to be careful in assuming that CSR communication is an evidence of a CSR commitment influencing corporate behaviour and increasing business ethics. (shrink)

The oral eye is a metaphor for the dominance of global designer capitalism. It refers to the consumerism of a designer aesthetic by the 'I' of the neoliberalist subject, as well as the aural soundscapes that accompany the hegemony of the capturing attention through screen cultures. An attempt is made to articulate the historical emergence of such a synoptic machinic regime drawing on Badiou, Bellmer, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Rancir̈e, Virilio, Ziarek, and Zizek to explore contemporary art (post-Situationism) and visual (...) cultural education. Jagodzinski develops the concept of an 'avant-garde without authority,' 'self-refleXion' and 'in(design)' to further the questions surrounding the posthuman as advanced by theorists such as Hansen, Stiegler and Ziarek's 'force' of art. (shrink)

In this article we argue for the importance of building critical communities as an integral, yet neglected, aspect of education for social justice. We begin by defining critical communities and by describing goals and vision for social justice education. We then explore how community is discussed in the education literature, limitations and challenges of calling for community, and images of critical communities in social justice work. We end by exploring the role that individuals can play in nurturing (...) and enabling social justice efforts, offering some strategies to promote community building within and beyond higher education. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to review and critically assess the role that data visualizations played as communication media tools to help society during a worldwide crisis. This paper re-creates and analyzes several visualizations, critically and ethically assesses their strengths and limitations and provides a set of best practices that are informative, accurate, ethical and engaging at each stage in a reader’s interest. Design/methodology/approach The paper bases its methodology on the construct of “The Network Society” (Van Dijk, 2006; Castells, 2000, (...) 2006) by creating a series of social networked visualizations, identifying the challenges and pitfalls associated with this communication approach and suggesting best practices in information communication technology. The case study is COVID-19. Findings The research in this study found that visual data dashboards and interactive Web-based charts did play a significant role in helping society understand COVID-19’s impact to make better informed decisions about society’s health and safety. Research limitations/implications Visual expositions of data do have strengths and weaknesses depending on how they are designed, how they communicate the story and how they are ethically deployed. Best practices are provided to help mitigate these limitations. Practical implications Visualizations are certainly not new, but the technology for rapidly developing and sharing them is new. Visual expositions provide an effective media for communicating complex information to a networked society. Social implications Visual expositions provide an effective media for communicating complex information to a networked society. Originality/value This paper highlights the significance of the need to understand complex data in a crisis in a visual format and to communicate the information quickly, persuasively, effectively and ethically to a networked audience. (shrink)

Although euthanasia is seen as the problem of the individual will and as one’s right to privacy, to a better quality of life or to a dignified death, it has major institutional implications. They are closely related to the juridical system, to the way of understanding state involvement in protecting the individuals and respecting their freedoms, to the institutional system of health care, to the government rules that establish social, political or professional practices. The public debate around the topics (...) related to the human condition, like euthanasia, grants a special force to public communication, to organizational communication, to communication in professional environments, to physician-patient communication and, more generally, to interpersonal communication. In this text we emphasize the importance of public debate on euthanasia from the perspective of organizational ethics, of medical deontology, of patients’ rights, but especially of elaborating public policies and national programs, and we underline the importance of the need to establish protocols for health care, as well as to build a framework of democratic communication. (shrink)

On May 14, 1940, Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister fled from the harbour of Scheveningen in The Hague to England. It was the last boat that could escape from Holland before the German occupiers took the city. Years earlier, in 1934, they had fled the same danger from Vienna to Holland. Otto Neurath can be seen as the godfather of today's infographics. In the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social & Economic Museum) that he founded in Vienna, developments in various areas (...) of society were shown by means of pictorial statistics to a broad audience - rich and poor, literate and illiterate. At the Museum, Otto Neurath acted as the scientific director and inspirer, Marie Reidemeister as the 'Transformer' of data into sketches, and Gerd Arntz as the head of the graphics department which designed pictograms and layouts. These three continued that work in Holland under the acronym Isotype (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education). After internment as 'enemy aliens' on the Isle of Man, Neurath & Reidemeister were able to continue their work in the UK. Through Wolfgang Foges and his book packaging firm Adprint, they were commissioned to design Isotype charts for books supported by the Ministry of Information during the war - what might be called 'soft propaganda'. From 1942, Isotypes were supplied for information about the embryonic welfare state (Beveridge Plan), for illustrated books about Britain's allies (USA and USSR), and on what British democracy should look like after the war. This book illustrates around 250 Isotypes from these publications and provides information about the producers, authors, editors, and designers, and not least about the working relationship between the Isotype Institute and Adprint. The examples presented show the remarkable quality of the graphics, produced under less than ideal circumstances during wartime. (shrink)

An anthology of the writings of the Buddha on the subject of harmony selected and translated from the original Pali.

In thePhilosophy of RightHegel argues that modern life has produced an individualized freedom that conflicts with the communal forms of life constitutive of Greek ethical life. This individualized freedom is fundamentally unsatisfactory, but it is in modernity seemingly resolved into a more adequate form of social freedom in the family, aspects of civil society, and ultimately the state. This article examines whether Hegel’s state can function as a community and by so doing satisfy the need for a substantial ethical (...) life that runs through Hegel’s social thought. The article also examines why Hegel does not provide a detailed analysis of community, as a distinct sphere between the private and the public political sphere in thePhilosophy of Right, and why it is not a key platform of his social freedom. (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated aspects of Mexican regional music response to the coronavirus crisis in the música huasteca community: the growth of interactive huapango livestreams as a preexisting but newly significant space for informal community gathering and cultural participation at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and the composition of original verses by son huasteco performers addressing the pandemic. Both the livestreams and the newly created coronavirus disease verses reflect critical improvisatory approaches to the pandemic in música huasteca. The (...) interactive livestreams signaled an ad hoc community infrastructure facilitated by social media and an emerging community space fostered by Do-It-Yourself activists. Improvised COVID-related verses presented resonant local and regional themes as a community response to a global crisis. Digital ethnography conducted since March 2020 revealed a regional burst of musical creativity coupled with DIY intentionality, a leveling of access to virtual community spaces, and enhanced digital intimacies established across a wide cultural diaspora in Mexico and the USA. These responses were musically, poetically, and organizationally improvisational, as was the overall outpouring of the son huasteco music inspired by the coronavirus outbreak. Son huasteco is a folk music tradition from the Huasteca, a geo-cultural region spanning the intersection of six states in central Mexico. This study examines a selection of musical responses by discussing improvisational examples in both Spanish and the indigenous language Nahuatl, and in the virtual musical communities of the Huasteca migrant diaspora in digital events such as “Encuentro Virtual de Tríos Huastecos,” the “Huapangos Sin Fronteras” festival and competition, and in the nightly gatherings on social media platforms developed during the pandemic to sustain the Huastecan cultural expression. These phenomena have served as vibrant points of transnational connection and identity in a time where physical gatherings were untenable. (shrink)

Aspects of phronetic social science and phronetic organization research have been much debated over the recent years. So far, the visual aspects of communicating phronesis have gained little attention. Still organizations try to convey a desirable image of respectability and success, both internally and externally to the public. A channel for such information is corporate reporting, and particularly CSR reporting embrace values like fairness, goodness, and sustainability. This study explores how visual portrayals of supposedly wise and discerning (...) values (phronesis) are used to reinforce the verbal features of CSR reporting. The two propositions underlying this study is (1) that visual images form some of the major parts of the structures of contemporary corporate reporting (particularly CSR reporting) and (2) that phronetic action in organizations is subjected not only to textual documentation, but also to visual expressions. This study also discusses how the Aristotelian concept of phronesis can be linked to contemporary concerns about responsibility, and how this is visually represented in CSR reporting. Finally, this study addresses the symbolic and contextual signification of images in corporate accounts of wisdom and responsibility. (shrink)

Just as burnout is manifested through changes in behavioural and communication patterns, it is important to examine whether certain aspects of communication can affect student burnout development. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between communication and academic burnout. To achieve this, the study proposes an integrated model examining the effects of three communication dimensions – support from academic staff, support from colleagues, and participation in decision-making – on four different dimensions of academic burnout, as (...) well as students’ overall burnout. The model is tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis. High coefficients of determination regarding particular burnout dimensions validate the strength of the proposed model. The results show that support from academic staff and support from fellow students significantly and negatively influence academic burnout, and might be instrumental in its reduction. Unexpectedly, participation in decision-making is shown to be positively related to academic burnout. (shrink)

Social scientists have a long history of concern with the effects of industrialized farming on communities. Recently, the topic has taken on new importance as corporate farming laws in a number of states are challenged by agribusiness interests. Defense of these laws often requires evidence from social science research that industrialized farming poses risks to communities. A problem is that no recent journal articles or books systematically assess the extent to which research to date provides evidence of these (...) risks. This article addresses the gap in the literature. We evaluate studies investigating the effects of industrialized farming on community well-being from the 1930s to the present. Using a pool of 51 studies, we document the research designs employed, evaluate results as to whether adverse consequences were found, and delineate the aspects of community life that may be affected by industrialized farming. Of these studies, 57% found largely detrimental impacts, 25% were mixed, finding some detrimental impacts, and 18% found no detrimental impacts. Adverse impacts were found across an array of indicators measuring socioeconomic conditions, community social fabric, and environmental conditions. Few positive effects of industrialized farming were found across studies. The results demonstrate that public concern about industrialized farms is warranted. Scholars often debate whether research should be oriented around disciplines’ accumulated body of knowledge or, conversely, provide critical knowledge in the public interest. Social scientists’ long-term engagement in building the body of research on industrialized farming allows for accomplishment of both objectives. (shrink)