Category Archives: Public Sphere

American Bodies – A Soma-Semiotics of the USA

A preliminary report of ethnological research on “soma-semiotics,” that is body semiotics in the USA is both interesting and provocative. “Body semiotics” refers to the way in which a society inscribes its values on the bodies of its members, quite apart from the usual group identifiers such as age, gender, education, income, profession, or subcultural affinity. In a society as diverse and heterogeneous as the USA, community and collective identity across ethnic, political, gender, subcultural, etc. boundaries is a major issue.  In addition to this, the postmodern celebration of diversity has created an enormous deficit of unity that society must in some way compensate. Although the fieldwork is not completed, and the theoretical assumptions untested, some of the findings are highly suggestive. The author identifies four types of bodies, that is, four typical ways in which society becomes inscribed in bodies. These are termed “grotes,” “scribbs,” “caps,” and “styles” and there is a separate category for the uninscribed body that is termed “normalo.“

The first type is called, somewhat provocatively, “grotes.” “Grote” is short for “grotesque.” The term should be understood in the sense in which Bakhtin uses the word when describing the grotesque body in his work on Rabelais. The grotesque should not be understood as pejorative. Instead, the term describes how the abstract and symbolic dimension expresses itself in the material and the bodily. Human anatomy becomes a mirror of abstract values and conflicts. What is suppressed on the symbolic level appears in a distorted way on the physical and anatomical level. In this way, the body illustrates those cultural and social meanings that do not appear within the officially sanctioned and supported symbolic realm. Against the background of postmodern rejection of universal values, the body comes to be the place, where unifying cultural identity can be publically displayed.

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The AIME of Media – Latour and New Media

Nowhere are media to be found among the list of beings that Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence has so far discovered. Even the concept of “communication” does not belong to the metalanguage of Latour’s pluralistic ontology. It would seem that these basic concepts of modern social theory are subsumed under the ideas of “association” and “mediation” and thus not a suitable matter for differentiation into networks of their own. However, the list is not complete. The door is open. But the threshold is high. The master himself does not make it easy to get through the door. In order to be acknowledged as a mode of existence, a network must have its own kind of crisis, hiatus, rupture, or breach, that is, there must be some reason, why actors make efforts to associate in a particular way. Furthermore, a network must have its own trajectory or direction of establishing continuity and jumping over the gaps. Legal associations are different from scientific associations, and these again are different from religious associations. Third, a network must also meet certain conditions of felicity or infelicity regarding what counts as “truth” for it. Quite obviously, legal truth conditions are different from religious, political, scientific, or artistic truth conditions. Fourth, networks “institute” beings of a certain mode and they do this for a certain purpose, function, or what Latour calls “alteration.” If a mode of existence, or a being, cannot be identified by these criteria, then it has no place in the list of modes of existence that the AIME project is assembling. Despite these hurdles, we ask if media and communication do not demand to be considered as modes of existence in their own right. Can a future media studies be based upon communication and media as a specific mode of existence?

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Searching for Google or What is a Filter?

Ever since Clay Shirky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI) proclaimed that there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, the role of filters in the network knowledge economy has taken center stage. With over 3 billion searches per day, Google’s search engine is probably the most used filter in the world. Google’s PageRank algorithm – and 250 other criteria that are much less publicized – seem to work so well for filtering that knowledge out of the ocean of information in the web that is relevant and reliable for our questions and concerns that we have come to believe that Google is presenting us a complete and unbiased view of the world. We tend to forget that there is indeed a problem of filter failure and that perhaps no filter, not even the algorithm searching for Google, can be a mirror of the world.

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If Facebook were a Nation

With 1.35 billion active users (3rd qt. 2014), Facebook is now as big as China. If we include other social media, such as Twitter, Goggle+, YouTube, Instagram, etc., we seem to be witnessing an unprecedented migration into a networked social sphere that demands rethinking of topics such as globalization, transnational publics, global governance, and international relations. It will be objected that these topics have to do with real politics, with economics, war, terrorism, ecological threats, and issues of justice. However, it would perhaps be too hasty – considering the role that social media have played in political initiatives throughout the world – to assume that global communities of social media users are not also concerned with these issues and do not make a difference in the world of real politics. Traditional political theory is going through a crisis. Politics has always been the prerogative of sovereign nation states. Only citizens of a constitutional state were thought to be capable of political action, that is, participation in processes of deliberation and decision making with regard to the common good. Politics belongs in the domain of what Habermas called the “public sphere.” The public sphere is that social domain in which private individuals come together to freely and equally deliberate matters of common concern. In democratic societies the better argument and not violence or coercion legitimates governance. If legitimate and effective governance is only possible within the boundaries of a constitutional state, where rule of law and democratic procedures are established, what happens to the public sphere in a global network society? Globalization means that almost all important problems go beyond national borders. It means that the “emergence” of supra-national moral obligations such as Human Rights and global governance institutions such as the UN place the traditional idea of state-based politics in question. Globalization leaves the public sphere, it would seem, without a home.

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The Ontological Interpretation of Privacy

Luciano Floridi is one of the few philosophers of the digital age who radically reinterprets issues such as informational privacy on basis of an informational ontology (see The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy, in: Ethics and Informational Technology, 2006). Being is information. The world consists of information and not things or people. People do not possess their personal information, they are their personal information. Privacy therefore should not be understood as an issue of possession and control of data, but as a matter of personal integrity. Stealing and misusing personal data should not be compared to stealing and misusing someone’s possessions, for example, their automobile, but instead to kidnapping. My data is not the same as my auto, but rather much more like my body.

If information is a state of being and not a state of having, then what constitutes privacy? Floridi defines privacy in terms of the “ontological friction” regulating the flow of information in the “infoshpere.” The more friction blocking, disturbing, slowing down, and attenuating the flow of information, and the more effort it takes to bridge the gaps between information, the more privacy can be ascribed to information. Correspondingly, the less the flow of information is regulated, slowed down, hindered, the less this information can be considered private. Private and public are not different spaces, for example, the privacy of my home as opposed to public spaces like the shopping center or the train station. Digital media do not knock at the door and ask permission before entering. They are ubiquitous. Privacy is neither a space, nor a thing, but a state of being.

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