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Digital Culture & Society (DCS)
Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of capitalist exploitation for some time. From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic - the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In this issue, the contributors show how participation and commodification are closely linked to the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.
Lived-Body Experiences in Virtual Reality
What is it like to perceive a virtual object through the sensed presence of a virtual body? How do subject-object relations occur and can be actualized in virtual environments? Zeynep Akbal explores the impact of virtual reality (VR) technology on the subjective experience of the body and situates the results in context with existing theories in media sciences and the phenomenology of bodily perception. This study presents VR technology as a tool that can be used to more closely examine and study the fundamental intersections of the humanities and the natural sciences that explore the nature of perception.
Digital Culture & Society (DCS)
Modern mundane life is brimming with a variety of data-driven technologies that are supposed to augment the practices they are involved in. As humans bring these technologies into their lives in a process of domestication, they tame them and are simultaneously influenced by their presence. In combining domestication research and an empirical analysis of current, digital, and interconnected media, this issue examines the process of taming with an emphasis on practices. The contributions in this issue explore the use of digitally connected media such as vacuum robots, smart speakers, drones, and kitchen appliances with reference to the domestication paradigm from interdisciplinary perspectives including media studies, sociology, anthropology, and human-computer interaction.
Dreaming Big in Post-War Greece
In post-war Greece, Western Allies, the country's conservative political elite and parts of the middle class share a dream of consolidating and maintaining the country's Western, bourgeois-liberal orientation. In 1947, with the civil war still raging in the country, the Greek government chooses the path of the capitalist countries and joins the American program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Miltiadis Zermpoulis focuses on the impact and significance of the social and political changes brought about by the civil war, the dominance of conservatives in the political arena and the promotion of political surveillance and compliance technologies in the daily life of Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki.
Narrating Experiences of Alzheimer's Through the Arts
While Alzheimer's might be associated with a difficulty to express oneself, Ana Paula Barbosa-Fohrmann addresses this topic by examining experiences with Alzheimer's based on narratives. In this original contribution, she studies the nexus of life stories, subjectivity, fragmentation, and fiction. The philosophical basis of this research is phenomenology from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, specifically that of Husserl and above all that of Merleau-Ponty. This work also draws on Proust's and Camus' literature as well as Beckett's dramaturgy.
To the Last Drop - Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality
The romance of extraction underlies and partly defines Western modernity and our cultural imaginaries. Combining affect studies and environmental humanities, this volume analyzes societies' devotion to extraction and fossil resources. This devotion is shaped by a nostalgic view on settler colonialism as well as by contemporary »affective economies« (Sara Ahmed). The contributors examine the links between forms of extractivism and gendered discourses of sentimentality and the ways in which cultural narratives and practices deploy the sentimental mode (in plots of attachment, sacrifice, and suffering) to promote or challenge extractivism.
Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction
We live in a critical moment in history, often called the »Anthropocene«, that is defined by unprecedented scales of uncertainty. Natalie Dederichs draws on insights from the new materialisms about the entangled nature of planetary existence and combines them with approaches to aesthetics from fields as diverse as reader-response criticism, phenomenology, Gothic and media studies. She introduces a poetics of atmospheric re(lation)ality as a necessary component of any ecological engagement with fiction that fully embraces literary encounters with the inaccessible and elusive as expressed in uncanny atmospheric reading experiences.
Guides of the Atlas
How do digital media technologies shape or restructure social practice? And which transitions and demarcations of different forms of publicness arise in this context? Simon Holdermann examines this question in his ethnography of everyday life in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In order to approach the ongoing, historically situated social transformations of the region, he analyses a variety of media practices concerning the organizational work and transnational cooperation that take place there - in particular at the intersection of mountain tourism, NGO work, and local self-government.
More-Than-Human Choreography
In the global context of the Great Acceleration, things and people have been on the move more than ever before. Moritz Frischkorn takes a fresh look at recent performing arts practices that deal with everyday objects on and beyond the stage. Contrasting these practices with the business field of logistics, he examines the aesthetic and ethical concerns of moving things. Drawing on concepts from performance as well as Black studies and philosophy, and based on an artistic-research methodology, the book formulates a notion of more-than-human choreography as an ecologically informed, infinitely indebted practice of living within the material world.
Death is Served
The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media.
