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Provocative takes on cyberbullshit, smartphone zombies, instant gratification, the traffic school of the information highway, and other philosophical concerns of the Internet age. In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas, Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the “death algorithm ” is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow into a group of pedestrians, a mother and child, or a brick wall. Can such life-and-death decisions no longer be left to the individual human? In these incisive essays, Simanowski asks us to consider what it means to be living in a time when the president of the United States declares the mainstream media to be an enemy of the people—while Facebook transforms the people into the enemy of mainstream media. Simanowski describes smartphone zombies (or “smombies”) who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks; calls on Adorno to help parse Trump's tweeting; considers transmedia cannibalism, as written text is transformed into a postliterate object; compares the economic and social effects of the sharing economy to a sixteen-wheeler running over a plastic bottle on the road; and explains why philosophy mat become the most important element in the automotive and technology industries.
Provocative takes on cyberbullshit, smartphone zombies, instant gratification, the traffic school of the information highway, and other philosophical concerns of the Internet age. In The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas, Roberto Simanowski wonders if we are on the brink of a society that views social, political, and ethical challenges as technological problems that can be fixed with the right algorithm, the best data, or the fastest computer. For example, the “death algorithm ” is programmed into a driverless car to decide, in an emergency, whether to plow into a group of pedestrians, a mother and child, or a brick wall. Can such life-and-death decisions no longer be left to the individual human? In these incisive essays, Simanowski asks us to consider what it means to be living in a time when the president of the United States declares the mainstream media to be an enemy of the people—while Facebook transforms the people into the enemy of mainstream media. Simanowski describes smartphone zombies (or “smombies”) who remove themselves from the physical world to the parallel universe of social media networks; calls on Adorno to help parse Trump's tweeting; considers transmedia cannibalism, as written text is transformed into a postliterate object; compares the economic and social effects of the sharing economy to a sixteen-wheeler running over a plastic bottle on the road; and explains why philosophy mat become the most important element in the automotive and technology industries.
On Facebook and fake news, selfies and self-consciousness, selling our souls to the Internet, and other aspects of the digital revolution. With these engaging and provocative essays, Roberto Simanowski considers what new media has done to us. Why is digital privacy being eroded and why does society seem not to care? Why do we escape from living and loving the present into capturing, sharing and liking it? And how did we arrive at a selfie society without self-consciousness? Simanowski, who has been studying the Internet and social media since the 1990s, goes deeper than the conventional wisdom. For example, on the question of Facebook's responsibility for the election of Donald Trump, he argues that the problem is not the “fake news” but the creation of conditions that make people susceptible to fake news. The hallmark of the Internet is its instantaneousness, but, Simanowski cautions, speed is the enemy of depth. On social media, he says, “complex arguments are jettisoned in favor of simple slogans, text in favor of images, laborious explorations at understanding the world and the self in favor of amusing banalities, deep engagement in favor of the click.” Simanowski wonders if we have sold our soul to Silicon Valley, as Faust sold his to the Devil; credits Edward Snowden for making privacy a news story; looks back at 1984, 1984, and Apple's famous sledgehammer commercial; and considers the shitstorm, mapping waves of Internet indignation—including one shitstorm that somehow held Adidas responsible for the killing of dogs in Ukraine. “Whatever gets you through the night,” sang John Lennon in 1974. Now, Simanowski says, it's Facebook that gets us through the night; and we have yet to grasp the implications of this.
How computational methods can expand how we see, read, and listen to Holocaust testimony The Holocaust is one of the most documented—and now digitized—events in human history. Institutions and archives hold hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video testimony, composed of more than a billion words in dozens of languages, with millions of pieces of descriptive metadata. It would take several lifetimes to engage with these testimonies one at a time. Computational methods could be used to analyze an entire archive—but what are the ethical implications of “listening” to Holocaust testimonies by means of an algorithm? In this book, Todd Presner explores how the digital humanities can provide both new insights and humanizing perspectives for Holocaust memory and history. Presner suggests that it is possible to develop an “ethics of the algorithm” that mediates between the ethical demands of listening to individual testimonies and the interpretative possibilities of computational methods. He delves into thousands of testimonies and witness accounts, focusing on the analysis of trauma, language, voice, genre, and the archive itself. Tracing the affordances of digital tools that range from early, proto-computational approaches to more recent uses of automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, Presner introduces readers to what may be the ultimate expression of these methods: AI-driven testimonies that use machine learning to process responses to questions, offering a user experience that seems to replicate an actual conversation with a Holocaust survivor. With Ethics of the Algorithm, Presner presents a digital humanities argument for how big data models and computational methods can be used to preserve and perpetuate cultural memory.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Almost 68.5 million refugees in the world today live in a protection gap, the chasm between protections stipulated in the Geneva Convention and the abrogation of those responsibilities by states and aid agencies. With dwindling humanitarian aid, how do refugee communities solve collective dilemmas, like raising funds for funeral services, or securing other critical goods and services? In Networked Refugees, Nadya Hajj finds that Palestinian refugees utilize Information Communication Technology platforms to motivate reciprocity—a cooperative action marked by the mutual exchange of favors and services—and informally seek aid and connection with their transnational diaspora community. Using surveys conducted with Palestinians throughout the diaspora, interviews with those inside the Nahr al Bared Refugee camp in Lebanon, and data pulled from online community spaces, these findings push back against the cynical idea that online organizing is fruitless, emphasizing instead the productivity of these digital networks.
A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action. The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. —from In the Swarm Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.” Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.
This book is a scientific basis for understanding the urgent need for a Great Transformation to a third step in social evolution. Already being a community of common destiny, humanity can form an actual unity through diversity to avoid extinction. Social actors can recognise informational imperatives for cognition, communication and co-operation to achieve such a unity. By doing so, they apply a logic that underlies the structuration of any agency, which is a real logic of self-organising systems from the physical to the social. This logic is the Logic of the Third — the Third is a meta-structure that emerges in a leap. The agents interact and when they co-act they are likely to form a real meta-structure of organisational relations. Informational agents anticipate this by generating requisite information in their attempt to cope with complex challenges. Such an information is a meta-structure too. The Third helps achieve synergy effects.This book discusses considerations from philosophy, systems theory, the study of information, social systems, social information, ecology and technology. It addresses ethical issues connected with the long-forgotten arms race in an atomic age, the global warming not yet under control, the pandemic misunderstood, the social question still unanswered.
What is the relevance of Dada and its artistic strategies in our current moment, one marked by post-truth politics, information floods and big data? How can contemporary art highlight the neglected nuances of cultural representation in the present day? While it may feel like we are living in a period of anomaly with the rise of the alt-right, this book shows how the Dada movement's artistic response to the aggressive nationalism and fascism of its time offers a fruitful analogy to our contemporary era. Dada's counter-cultural strategies, such as the distortion of reality and attacks on elites and rationality, have long been endorsed by artistic avantgardes and subcultures. Dada Data details how modern-day movements have appropriated such tactics in their ways of addressing the public both on- and offline. Bringing together contributions from interdisciplinary scholars, curators and artists working in global contexts that explore an array of artistic modes of persuasion and resistance, the book demonstrates how contemporary art can bring out neglected nuances of our post-truth moment. In linking the Dada movement's counter-cultural activities to modern phenomena such as post-internet art, information floods and big data mining, the book collates original propaganda with diverse artwork from such figures as Hannah Höch, Paula Rego, Tschabalala Self, Sheida Soleimani and South African artists donna Kukama and Kemang Wa Lehulere. In doing so, Dada Data brings together a rich scrapbook of Dada resources and perspectives that are highly relevant to present-day political concerns. With artistic contributions by IOCOSE, donna Kukama, Kemang Wa Lehulere and Montage Mädels.
This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective. The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis. This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.
A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders. In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder. Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.