Search Results

Are Supervaluational and Revision Theories Self‐Undermining?

Hartry Field

in Saving Truth From Paradox

This chapter is concerned with the extent to which supervaluation and revision theories can declare that their rules all preserve truth. The extent varies from one such theory to another, but none ... More

This chapter is concerned with the extent to which supervaluation and revision theories can declare that their rules all preserve truth. The extent varies from one such theory to another, but none can do so entirely, and many actually declare some of their rules not to be truth-preserving. The question is raised whether this makes the theories ‘self-undermining’, and a reason is given why it doesn't. Connections to Gödel's second incompleteness theorem are drawn.Less

Media Histories, Media Theories, and Modernity

Nicholas Garnham

in Emancipation, the Media, and Modernity: Arguments about the Media and Social Theory

This chapter examines the debate about history and its relation to the past that springs out of the confrontation between modernity and Enlightenment thought. It also argues that all debates about ... More

This chapter examines the debate about history and its relation to the past that springs out of the confrontation between modernity and Enlightenment thought. It also argues that all debates about the media necessarily mobilize historical arguments. In addition, it explores the interrelationship between different perspectives on media history, and the evaluative stances they carry with them, on the one hand and more general histories of modernity on the other. The post-modern attack on history is given. In general, it is argued that all theories of the media rest upon historical theories as to the process of the historical development of media institutions and practices and their relationship to the development of modernity and its characteristic social structures and practices.Less

Media naturalness theory: human evolution and behaviour towards electronic communication technologies

Ned Kock

in Applied Evolutionary Psychology

This chapter provides a discussion of what has become known as media naturalness theory, a theory of communication media with a special focus on electronic communication, and developed based on human ... More

This chapter provides a discussion of what has become known as media naturalness theory, a theory of communication media with a special focus on electronic communication, and developed based on human evolutionary principles. The theory is centered on the media naturalness hypothesis, which argues that, other things being equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads to the following effects in connection with a communication interaction: (a) increased cognitive effort, (b) increased communication ambiguity, and (c) decreased physiological arousal. It is argued here that the media naturalness hypothesis has important implications for the selection, use and deployment of e-communication tools in organizations. Unlike some previously proposed technology-centric theories, the media naturalness theory is compatible with social theories of behaviour toward electronic communication tools. Among other things, this chapter shows that the media naturalness theory is compatible with the notion that, regardless of the obstacles posed by low naturalness media, individuals using those media to perform collabourative tasks may achieve the same or better task-related outcomes than individuals using media with higher degrees of naturalness.Less

Toward a General Theory of Media

Matthias Vogel

in Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality

This chapter attempts to develop a general vocabulary for media theory, in order to show that media can be understood as sets of behavioral possibilities that do not necessarily depend on the ... More

This chapter attempts to develop a general vocabulary for media theory, in order to show that media can be understood as sets of behavioral possibilities that do not necessarily depend on the individuating power of language. A difficulty in developing media theory as an independent theory arises from an interpretationist standpoint, in which case an attempt to construct a viable theory must assume a form in which it is possible to show the plausibility of increasingly decoupling understanding from language. The short version of the resulting formulation, which shall be further explicated in this chapter, is “(M1) Every medium presents a specific number of possibilities for action that arise for the actors.”Less

What are Media?

Matthias Vogel

in Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality

This chapter attempts to define the concept of media through sociological, technological, and action-theoretic frameworks, in crafting a general theory of media. In social theory contexts, the ... More

This chapter attempts to define the concept of media through sociological, technological, and action-theoretic frameworks, in crafting a general theory of media. In social theory contexts, the explications characterizing media yield an astoundingly heterogeneous composite, encompassing such things as language, love, health, the formation of empirical order, and so on. From this standpoint, media theory expands to include the consequences of media, particularly in the context of societal structures, which have changed and developed in response to the use of media. The final concept of media discussed in this chapter is grounded on John Dewey's action theory. Dewey's concept plays a decisive role in differentiating art from merely purposive action, especially in the reconstruction of art as a dimension of intersubjective communication.Less

Imagining the New Media Encounter

Alan Liu

in Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

This chapter studies "narratives of new media encounter" (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to ... More

This chapter studies "narratives of new media encounter" (accounts of how individuals and societies react to the introduction of writing, radio, television, the internet, Web 2.0, and so on) to suggest that major historical changes in the sociocultural order are mirrored in narratives of media history. Often, as in the case of Marshall McLuhan's writings, such narratives follow a plot of progressivist media determinism—of necessary change from old media to new media—even as they also reveal the more ambivalent experience of a "contact zone" between civilizations. At once descriptive and interpretive, tales of new media encounter are a foundational form of media theory—a kind of media archaeology of media theory. They show how societies experience history as communication and information media, and communication and information media as history. They register the experience of history as media history. Finishing on the promising example of a recent collection of essays on the digital humanities, the chapter concludes by asking the critical question: what is an imaginatively enriching, rather than deterministic constraining, narrative of new media encounter?Less

Dynamical Mean-field Theories of Correlation and Disorder

E. Miranda and V. Dobrosavljević

in Conductor-Insulator Quantum Phase Transitions

This chapter provides a review of recently-developed Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) approaches to the general problem of strongly correlated electronic systems with disorder. The chapter first ... More

This chapter provides a review of recently-developed Dynamical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT) approaches to the general problem of strongly correlated electronic systems with disorder. The chapter first describes the standard DMFT approach, which is exact in the limit of large coordination, and explain why in its simplest form it cannot capture either Anderson localization or the glassy behavior of electrons. Various extensions of DMFT are then described, including statistical DMFT, typical medium theory, and extended DMFT, methods specifically designed to overcome the limitations of the original formulation. The chapter provides an overview of the results obtained using these approaches, including the formation of electronic Griffiths phases, the self-organized criticality of the Coulomb glass, and the two-fluid behavior near Mott-Anderson transitions. Finally, the chapter outlines research directions that may provide a route to bridge the gap between the DMFT-based theories and the complementary diffusion-mode approaches to the metal-insulatorLess

Among the Everywheres: Global Crowds and the Networked Planet

Ursula K. Heise

in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Building on Ch. 1, this chapter analyzes scientific texts, novels, films and poems between the 1960s and the 1990s that explore the relationship between local, national, and global forms of identity ... More

Building on Ch. 1, this chapter analyzes scientific texts, novels, films and poems between the 1960s and the 1990s that explore the relationship between local, national, and global forms of identity and community through portrayals of population growth and urban spaces. Works from the 1960s and 1970s represent “overpopulation” in the form of urban crowding that forces individuals to remain confined to the local. Works from the 1990s, by contrast, such as David Brin’s science fiction novel Earth or John Cage’s poem “Overpopulation and Art,” imagine in sometimes utopian fashion how digital technologies open up virtual spaces that span the globe and enable new kinds of identity and community. The more recent texts highlight how the experience of virtual spaces has come to form part of living in local places, and thereby highlight the necessity of integrating such mediated experiences into environmentalist theories of inhabitation. They also provide innovative narrative and lyrical solutions to the formal problem of how to represent global connectedness in literary texts.Less

Introduction

Bernhard Fulda

in Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic

This introductory chapter underlines the importance and originality of the book as a contribution to our understanding of the fate of Weimar democracy. It reflects on the connection between media ... More

This introductory chapter underlines the importance and originality of the book as a contribution to our understanding of the fate of Weimar democracy. It reflects on the connection between media consumption and electoral behaviour, and challenges previously held assumptions about the role of the press in the political process. It provides a discussion of the difficulties of using newspapers as a historical source, and of the methodological problem of assessing something as complex as media effects. It summarizes key historical debates on the rise of Nazism, and places them in the context of media theory.Less

Introduction: Cultural Techniques, or, the End of the Intellectual Postwar in German Media Theory

Bernhard Siegert

in Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real

The chapter relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. ... More

The chapter relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization of cultural techniques aims at presenting them as chains of operations that link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place. The chapter also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism.Less

Shelley Amid the Age of Separations; or, A Poetry of Ambiversion for Networked Life

Yohei Igarashi

in The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication

This chapter approaches the Romantic period as an instructive earlier moment for today’s digitally networked life, and views Shelley’s poetics as offering a compelling way of being a networked being. ... More

This chapter approaches the Romantic period as an instructive earlier moment for today’s digitally networked life, and views Shelley’s poetics as offering a compelling way of being a networked being. Shelley sat at the nexus of two contemporaneous discourses: proto-sociological discourse found in Scottish conjectural histories and Romantic-era reflections on poetic communication. From this position, Shelley engages in sociological and medial thinking. He offers the obscure medium of abstract poetry as a model for a specific form of social interaction suited to modernity: an interaction that would forge a middle way between an empty commercial kind of dependence and the total intersubjectivity that he calls “love.” Reading Epipsychidion (1821) in light of these concerns, and positing a “poetry of ambiversion” that allows for both connection and disconnection, this chapter suggests that Shelley arrives at a modern ethos of communication that is neither purely business-oriented nor amatory.Less

Archival Media Theory: An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology

Wolfgang Ernst

in Digital Memory and the Archive

An introduction to WE’s media theory in relation to German media theory, Kittler and the wider Digital Humanities debates

Form

John Corner

in Theorising Media: Power, Form and Subjectivity

This chapter considers formal issues that are pivotal for research on media forms. It argues in support of the view that a continuing address to concepts and methods for analysing the forms of media ... More

This chapter considers formal issues that are pivotal for research on media forms. It argues in support of the view that a continuing address to concepts and methods for analysing the forms of media is of the utmost importance for progress in understanding how the media work. The chapter looks at how form figures in the broader context of media theory and research, particularly in regard to ideas of medium and of content. It considers the higher-level descriptive/analytic categories of narrative and genre, in which different formal elements are active, including varieties of those modes of representation designated as realist. The chapter also discusses the varieties of realism and the comparative formal relations among sound, image and writing.Less

Hybrid Schemes

Mike Finnis

in Interatomic Forces in Condensed Matter

This chapter discusses two types of interatomic potentials for metallic systems that take neither the approach of perturbing a free electron gas nor of superimposing atomic charge densities and doing ... More

This chapter discusses two types of interatomic potentials for metallic systems that take neither the approach of perturbing a free electron gas nor of superimposing atomic charge densities and doing tight binding. Rather they combine aspects of both. The first is generalized pseudopotential theory, which subsumes and generalizes the pair-potential approach, while systematically adding three-body and four-body contributions to the total energy. It has proved very useful for the simulation of transition metals. The second is effective medium theory, which after much simplification becomes identical to the embedded atom method. The relative merits of different approaches are discussed.Less

Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An Unfinished Project

Leah A. Lievrouw

in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society

A newly materialist approach to the study of media technologies is emerging in several fields, including cultural studies, digital humanities, and science and technology studies (STS). Yet most ... More

A newly materialist approach to the study of media technologies is emerging in several fields, including cultural studies, digital humanities, and science and technology studies (STS). Yet most technology scholarship in the communication field, informed by classical media research, still follows a broadly constructivist line focused on the meanings, appropriations, representations and semiology of communication technology and its uses. This chapter explores the conceptualization of communication and media technologies at the intersection of STS and communication studies, surveying and comparing key concepts or schools of thought in each field. A framework for mediation is proposed as a way to theorize material artifacts, communication practices, and social arrangements or structures as mutually-constitutive elements of communication and media technology.Less

The Medium Becomes the Message

Boris Groys

in Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media

This chapter examines how the medium becomes the message. It begins by revisiting Marshall McLuhan's statement that the medium “is” the message and its implications for media theory. According to ... More

This chapter examines how the medium becomes the message. It begins by revisiting Marshall McLuhan's statement that the medium “is” the message and its implications for media theory. According to this sentence, the medium that the subject of speech uses to issue a particular statement also issues at the same time and parallel to that statement a statement of its own—the point being that the speaking subject can rarely reflect and can never consciously control this statement of the medium. This chapter also discusses the tendency of media discourse to rehumanize the media; the presumed existence of the subject of signification, notification, and communication within submedial space; McLuhan's baffling trust in medial sincerity; and how media theory continues to thrive based on the belief about the sincerity of medial signs as originally formulated by the avant-garde.Less

Introduction: The Discontinuities

Daniel Reynolds

in Media in Mind

The introduction argues that conceptual discontinuity, or dualism, has had a significant influence on the development of media theory. Many theories have held media and the mind apart from one ... More

The introduction argues that conceptual discontinuity, or dualism, has had a significant influence on the development of media theory. Many theories have held media and the mind apart from one another and from the world at large. The introduction argues that this is often a result of media theorists importing dualist conceptions of the mind into their approaches to media. It outlines an alternative history of antidualist thought in media studies, from surrealism in the 1920s through contemporary philosophy of new media, but it argues that an antidualist orientation does not always result in nondualism. The introduction suggests that an embodied, extended understanding of the mind will be key for a truly nondualist theory of media. It provides an overview of the remainder of the book, showing how the chapters work together in articulating a new theory of media and mind.Less

The Consequences for a Concept of Rationality

Matthias Vogel

in Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality

This chapter addresses the question of the degree to which our view of rationality can be refined by the proposed media-theoretic means, as well as the consequences that this might have for the ... More

This chapter addresses the question of the degree to which our view of rationality can be refined by the proposed media-theoretic means, as well as the consequences that this might have for the further development of the project of the Enlightenment. Two possible benefits of the media-theoretic amelioration of the concept of understanding thus arise: the study of the explicative benefits, in which the common critique of rationality becomes attractive because it is based on a view of rationality that centered on philosophical explications of rationality that only take account of linguistic competencies. A normative benefit, however, examines whether we ought to understand reason as a bundle of linguistic competencies with which we can best achieve our respective contingent preferences, or whether general norms can be obtained from the analysis of understanding whose normative power is not dependent on the norms of the Enlightenment process.Less