While the use of memes as a persuasive strategy by the alt-right in the 2016 election gave rise to the notion that the left had been thoroughly outflanked in the meme wars, this project argues that the left can meme. Attending to the mimetic practices of anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist online publics reminds scholars and practitioners that reactionary forces do not monopolize memetic persuasion. We are interested in how left-wing publics constitute themselves and gain adherents through memetic labour or the work of inventing, sharing, remixing and commenting on images, objects and slogans. This exploratory essay charts a nascent rhetorical research agenda on leftist meme culture, tracking previous interventions such as the anti-fascist meme Gritty and speculating on generative terrain for scholars interested in examining the memetic labour of the left. This essay posits that if we are interested in actualizing more democratic and egalitarian futures, providing assessments of left-wing publics’ strategies might be one useful contribution to the struggle.
{"title":"The left can meme","authors":"Dustin A. Greenwalt, J. A. McVey","doi":"10.1386/eme_00163_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00163_7","url":null,"abstract":"While the use of memes as a persuasive strategy by the alt-right in the 2016 election gave rise to the notion that the left had been thoroughly outflanked in the meme wars, this project argues that the left can meme. Attending to the mimetic practices of anti-fascist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist online publics reminds scholars and practitioners that reactionary forces do not monopolize memetic persuasion. We are interested in how left-wing publics constitute themselves and gain adherents through memetic labour or the work of inventing, sharing, remixing and commenting on images, objects and slogans. This exploratory essay charts a nascent rhetorical research agenda on leftist meme culture, tracking previous interventions such as the anti-fascist meme Gritty and speculating on generative terrain for scholars interested in examining the memetic labour of the left. This essay posits that if we are interested in actualizing more democratic and egalitarian futures, providing assessments of left-wing publics’ strategies might be one useful contribution to the struggle.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45772246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the ancient Chinese sacred book from diverse perspectives. To maintain a fast tempo, and to stay within the bounds of what counts as a probe, the entries have been explained in a suggestive rather than exhaustive manner. Put otherwise, the piece seeks to say more with less, much like how the I Ching itself communicates. Although arranged alphabetically, the entries can be read in any order. As a matter of fact, the reader may experience the shock of recognition when leaping from entry to entry aleatorily. To pay homage to McLuhan, the piece ends with a tetrad on the I Ching. The reader is encouraged to read the piece in dialogue with ‘McLuhan and the I Ching: An interological inquiry’, ‘Flusser and the I Ching’ and ‘Focal knowledge, medium bias, and metamedium’.
{"title":"The I Ching as a medium: An adjectival glossary","authors":"Peter Zhang","doi":"10.1386/eme_00165_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00165_7","url":null,"abstract":"After presenting the I Ching as a medium, this piece goes on to reveal the characteristics of the ancient Chinese sacred book from diverse perspectives. To maintain a fast tempo, and to stay within the bounds of what counts as a probe, the entries have been explained in a suggestive rather than exhaustive manner. Put otherwise, the piece seeks to say more with less, much like how the I Ching itself communicates. Although arranged alphabetically, the entries can be read in any order. As a matter of fact, the reader may experience the shock of recognition when leaping from entry to entry aleatorily. To pay homage to McLuhan, the piece ends with a tetrad on the I Ching. The reader is encouraged to read the piece in dialogue with ‘McLuhan and the I Ching: An interological inquiry’, ‘Flusser and the I Ching’ and ‘Focal knowledge, medium bias, and metamedium’.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42707056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
If all the world is a stage, then the most recent stage direction might be: ‘enter Artificial Intelligence’. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made headlines ever since its release in late November 2022. ‘It’s like talking to God’, said a friend of mine, who first introduced me to the interface. The seeming omniscience of the thing is startling and overwhelming. Those who have played with it have found it addicting, astonishing and frustrating all at once. What follows is a conversation with ChatGPT performed in the style of a Platonic dialogue. ChatGPT is programmed as human conversation and that sparked this genre subversion, which is intended to resonate on multiple layers. Socrates was terrified by the advent of writing – the newest technology of his day. Plato’s Phaedrus is a foundational text for communication studies and has been called the first media critique. In short, this conversation with artificial intelligence (AI) honours the exigence of ChatGPT while also commemorating the tradition of communication scholarship back to Plato and Socrates. In the penultimate paragraph, I attempt to probe AI’s deepest weakness; supposedly, AI cannot create anything new – it can only remix the corpus of texts it has been trained on. That said, I believe ChatGPT’s (err, Phaedrus’s) concluding metaphor of media ecology as a labyrinth to be a provocative one. Recent technological advances seem to suggest that we are not so much on the ‘frontier’ of knowledge as in the depths of a maze. That connotes a different type of exploration, where not every advance is progress. Perhaps scholarship is nothing but a hand to the wall, thread unspooling, taking steps into the darkness as we ‘venture deeper into the labyrinth’. If so, we ought to think about which threads we are holding on to and where they might lead us.
{"title":"The labyrinth: A Platonic dialogue on what’s next, featuring ChatGPT as Phaedrus","authors":"Isaac James Richards","doi":"10.1386/eme_00164_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00164_7","url":null,"abstract":"If all the world is a stage, then the most recent stage direction might be: ‘enter Artificial Intelligence’. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made headlines ever since its release in late November 2022. ‘It’s like talking to God’, said a friend of mine, who first introduced me to the interface. The seeming omniscience of the thing is startling and overwhelming. Those who have played with it have found it addicting, astonishing and frustrating all at once. What follows is a conversation with ChatGPT performed in the style of a Platonic dialogue. ChatGPT is programmed as human conversation and that sparked this genre subversion, which is intended to resonate on multiple layers. Socrates was terrified by the advent of writing – the newest technology of his day. Plato’s Phaedrus is a foundational text for communication studies and has been called the first media critique. In short, this conversation with artificial intelligence (AI) honours the exigence of ChatGPT while also commemorating the tradition of communication scholarship back to Plato and Socrates. In the penultimate paragraph, I attempt to probe AI’s deepest weakness; supposedly, AI cannot create anything new – it can only remix the corpus of texts it has been trained on. That said, I believe ChatGPT’s (err, Phaedrus’s) concluding metaphor of media ecology as a labyrinth to be a provocative one. Recent technological advances seem to suggest that we are not so much on the ‘frontier’ of knowledge as in the depths of a maze. That connotes a different type of exploration, where not every advance is progress. Perhaps scholarship is nothing but a hand to the wall, thread unspooling, taking steps into the darkness as we ‘venture deeper into the labyrinth’. If so, we ought to think about which threads we are holding on to and where they might lead us.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43968519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The US White flight left historically and intentionally targeted marginalized groups in cityscapes in the impoverished dust of public transport. These racialized phenomena restructured urban environments and deadened surrounding landscapes, engendering deliberately barren space too far to traverse by no- and low-income feet. Now, in the present-COVID-19 envirusment, Midwest landscapes are an eyesore, which perpetually disable and dehumanize, further denying working folks from safe social distancing and PPE in areas already plagued with socio-historical and economic disenfranchisements. Meanwhile, redlined and/or gentrified affluent spaces remain composed of mostly Whites of a certain status. This project explored present-COVID-19 human implications of cars in a nation founded upon ecological devastations.
{"title":"Car as extension of whiteness: Not everyone’s skin is extended equal","authors":"Bernadette “bird” Bowen","doi":"10.1386/eme_00158_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00158_1","url":null,"abstract":"The US White flight left historically and intentionally targeted marginalized groups in cityscapes in the impoverished dust of public transport. These racialized phenomena restructured urban environments and deadened surrounding landscapes, engendering deliberately barren space too far to traverse by no- and low-income feet. Now, in the present-COVID-19 envirusment, Midwest landscapes are an eyesore, which perpetually disable and dehumanize, further denying working folks from safe social distancing and PPE in areas already plagued with socio-historical and economic disenfranchisements. Meanwhile, redlined and/or gentrified affluent spaces remain composed of mostly Whites of a certain status. This project explored present-COVID-19 human implications of cars in a nation founded upon ecological devastations.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45838929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: New Media and the Artaud Effect, Jay Murphy (2021) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 220 pp., ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6, h/bk, $109.99 ISBN 978-3-030-83490-6, p/bk, $79.99 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3, e-book, $59.99
《新媒体与阿尔托效应》，杰伊·墨菲(2021)Cham: Palgrave Macmillan出版社，220页，ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6, h/bk， $109.99 ISBN 978-3-030-83490-6, p/bk， $79.99 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3，电子书，$59.99
{"title":"New Media and the Artaud Effect, Jay Murphy (2021)","authors":"Konstantinos Kerasovitis","doi":"10.1386/eme_00167_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00167_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: New Media and the Artaud Effect, Jay Murphy (2021)\u0000 Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 220 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-3-030-83487-6, h/bk, $109.99\u0000 ISBN 978-3-030-83490-6, p/bk, $79.99\u0000 ISBN 978-3-030-83488-3, e-book, $59.99","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44221294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the field of media studies, Marshall McLuhan has often been celebrated as either a prognosticator of media development and social change or maligned as an interesting but otherwise inconsistent theoretician lacking rigour. However, wherever one falls within this spectrum McLuhan did have practical ideas that can provide insight into contemporary digital environments. This claim itself is unremarkable; however, perhaps more controversial a claim is that he also provides resources for a critical sensibility regarding racial discrimination and social justice. My goals for supporting this contention are threefold: first, I argue that McLuhan’s work might be constructively framed by what I call an ethic of understanding, which both responds to a common critique of McLuhan’s work as moral-neutral but also allows researchers to utilize his keen insights for revealing both overt and tacit modes of discrimination. Second, I unpack McLuhan’s use of the term media to demonstrate how common usage (largely limited to communication technologies) constrains our ability to identify vital connections among other forms of racial discrimination such as infrastructure and urban planning, which are also forms of media as conceptualized by McLuhan. Finally, I argue that to treat infrastructure media as distinct from and unrelated to contemporary digital platforms impedes our awareness of how current discriminatory behaviours are merely extensions of long-existing ideologies and institutional practices of coordinated (and often intentional) racial discrimination.
{"title":"Infrastructural media and discrimination: McLuhan’s method as an ethic of understanding","authors":"J. Dowd","doi":"10.1386/eme_00159_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00159_1","url":null,"abstract":"In the field of media studies, Marshall McLuhan has often been celebrated as either a prognosticator of media development and social change or maligned as an interesting but otherwise inconsistent theoretician lacking rigour. However, wherever one falls within this spectrum McLuhan did have practical ideas that can provide insight into contemporary digital environments. This claim itself is unremarkable; however, perhaps more controversial a claim is that he also provides resources for a critical sensibility regarding racial discrimination and social justice. My goals for supporting this contention are threefold: first, I argue that McLuhan’s work might be constructively framed by what I call an ethic of understanding, which both responds to a common critique of McLuhan’s work as moral-neutral but also allows researchers to utilize his keen insights for revealing both overt and tacit modes of discrimination. Second, I unpack McLuhan’s use of the term media to demonstrate how common usage (largely limited to communication technologies) constrains our ability to identify vital connections among other forms of racial discrimination such as infrastructure and urban planning, which are also forms of media as conceptualized by McLuhan. Finally, I argue that to treat infrastructure media as distinct from and unrelated to contemporary digital platforms impedes our awareness of how current discriminatory behaviours are merely extensions of long-existing ideologies and institutional practices of coordinated (and often intentional) racial discrimination.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47046571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From ‘Spec’ (for Martin MacInness)","authors":"Cal Wenby","doi":"10.1386/eme_00162_7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00162_7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47901881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Review of: The Media Environment of Political Thought: Rousseau, Marx, and the Politics of Selfies, Asaf Y. Shamis (2017) London: Lexington Books, 99 pp., ISBN 978-1-49853-293-8, h/bk, $72.11 ISBN 978-1-49853-295-2, p/bk, $40.78 ISBN 978-1-49853-293-8, e-book, $38.94
{"title":"The Media Environment of Political Thought: Rousseau, Marx, and the Politics of Selfies, Asaf Y. Shamis (2017)","authors":"P. Fallon","doi":"10.1386/eme_00166_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00166_5","url":null,"abstract":"Review of: The Media Environment of Political Thought: Rousseau, Marx, and the Politics of Selfies, Asaf Y. Shamis (2017)\u0000 London: Lexington Books, 99 pp.,\u0000 ISBN 978-1-49853-293-8, h/bk, $72.11\u0000 ISBN 978-1-49853-295-2, p/bk, $40.78\u0000 ISBN 978-1-49853-293-8, e-book, $38.94","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46904027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the transition from the oral mode of memorized song to the visualization of written musical notation. Modern music notation, unlike writing, emerged as a product of the medieval era. Musical forms burst information capacity boundaries sometime around fifteen centuries ago when unison cantillated plain-chant (one cantor) evolved into diversified organum (harmonious voices) in sacred ceremonies. New modalities of visually codifying song were required to keep pace with the growing possibilities of rhythm and harmony. Musical notation took recognizable shape roughly four hundred years prior to the printing press and some twelve hundred years after the onset of the phonetic alphabet. Moreover, musical notation, the ability to recreate from visual symbols polyphonic pitch and rhythmic complexity, was firmly in place centuries before the onset of the Renaissance. Although song and the spoken word coevolved naturally over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, the split from orality to literacy eventually required a visual technology to ‘hold’ song in stasis similar to the alphabet’s capturing of speech. This article focuses attention on the history of the neume, the musical staff and the mensural rhythm system as fundamental building blocks in the architecture of modern musical notation. This suggests that modes of visual specialist separation and tendencies towards individualist learning in the form of musical practice were embodied prior to and synergistically inspired the social transformations shaped by literacy.
{"title":"A media ecological approach to the history of music notation: The neume, staff and mensural rhythm","authors":"Barry Liss","doi":"10.1386/eme_00160_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00160_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the transition from the oral mode of memorized song to the visualization of written musical notation. Modern music notation, unlike writing, emerged as a product of the medieval era. Musical forms burst information capacity boundaries sometime around fifteen centuries ago when unison cantillated plain-chant (one cantor) evolved into diversified organum (harmonious voices) in sacred ceremonies. New modalities of visually codifying song were required to keep pace with the growing possibilities of rhythm and harmony. Musical notation took recognizable shape roughly four hundred years prior to the printing press and some twelve hundred years after the onset of the phonetic alphabet. Moreover, musical notation, the ability to recreate from visual symbols polyphonic pitch and rhythmic complexity, was firmly in place centuries before the onset of the Renaissance. Although song and the spoken word coevolved naturally over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, the split from orality to literacy eventually required a visual technology to ‘hold’ song in stasis similar to the alphabet’s capturing of speech. This article focuses attention on the history of the neume, the musical staff and the mensural rhythm system as fundamental building blocks in the architecture of modern musical notation. This suggests that modes of visual specialist separation and tendencies towards individualist learning in the form of musical practice were embodied prior to and synergistically inspired the social transformations shaped by literacy.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48169627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The purpose of this article is to analyse what is described as the non-aesthetic within the discourse and consumption of sports, which emphasizes the entrepreneurial logic of its management culture. In particular, I address the growing importance of analytics in sports as well as the growth of sports gambling and daily fantasy sports, which are simulated forms of the non-aesthetic, and how each of these embodies the philosophy of neo-liberalism and its entrepreneurial ethos. These are contrasted with the sports as an aesthetic activity relying upon the writings of ) to illustrate that, while analytics, sports gambling and daily fantasy sports can contribute towards the marketing potential of sports, particularly among younger demographics, these shifts come at the sacrifice of sports as a source of important cultural meaning.
{"title":"Sports have changed, you can bet on it: The rise of the non-aesthetic in sports","authors":"C. Hillman","doi":"10.1386/eme_00161_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00161_1","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this article is to analyse what is described as the non-aesthetic within the discourse and consumption of sports, which emphasizes the entrepreneurial logic of its management culture. In particular, I address the growing importance of analytics in sports as well as the growth of sports gambling and daily fantasy sports, which are simulated forms of the non-aesthetic, and how each of these embodies the philosophy of neo-liberalism and its entrepreneurial ethos. These are contrasted with the sports as an aesthetic activity relying upon the writings of ) to illustrate that, while analytics, sports gambling and daily fantasy sports can contribute towards the marketing potential of sports, particularly among younger demographics, these shifts come at the sacrifice of sports as a source of important cultural meaning.","PeriodicalId":36155,"journal":{"name":"Explorations in Media Ecology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47956569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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