Rhetoric of self-expressions in online celebrity gossip

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Video Games, Influence, and Identification: The Perpetuation of Culture Through Digital Worlds

Video games, through their widespread popularity and appeal, transmit meaningful ideas, beliefs, and attitudes via the use of digital worlds, narratives, characters, and play. Play has always held a key role in human life, but the video game medium accentuates and accelerates the reach and impact of play on human users. Jacques Ellul’s philosophy of social propaganda and Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory each offer important implications to the persuasiveness of video games; however, when placed in conversation with one another, the union of Ellul and Burke leads to a more complete understanding of how video games have such an effect and what can be done when complications are found. That video games are influential is not troubling, but it is worth exploring the ways in which video games are changing players’ actions, attitudes, and ideals through covert persuasion. Video games have the capacity and potency to transmit and instill prejudicial attitudes in players through covert persuasion, and these attitudes can lead to destructive actions. Many groups suffer from stereotypical depictions in video games, but one particular group under threat from the video game industry in the current political climate of the United States are Hispanic and Latino populations and cultures. If video games have the power to spread prejudice, then they also have the power to correct those problematic attitudes

The Transparency Tax

Transparency is critical to good governance, but it also imposes significant governance costs. Beyond a certain point, excess transparency acts as a kind of tax on the legal system. Others have noted the burdens of maximalist transparency policies on both budgets and regulatory efficiency, but they have largely ignored the deeper cost that transparency imposes: it constrains one’s ability to support the law while telling a self-serving story about what that support means. Transparency’s true tax on the law is the loss of expressive ambiguity. In order to understand this tax, this Article develops a taxonomy of transparency types. Typically, transparency means something like openness. But openness about what—the law’s obligations? The reasons for the obligations? The actors behind the law? And open to whom? These are different aspects of what we typically lump together and call “transparency,” and they present different tradeoffs. With these tradeoffs in mind, we can begin to make more informed choices about how to draw the line between maximal and minimal transparency. Of particular note is the finding that we can demand maximal transparency about the law’s obligations without incurring much of the transparency tax. This runs contrary to the soft law literature, which suggests that vagueness about obligation is less costly than the alternative. The Article concludes with a guide for thinking through future transparency tradeoffs

More Than a Pretty Face: Using Embodied Lutheran Theology to Evaluate Community-Building in Online Social Networks

Oesch, Joel, C. More than a Pretty Face: Using Embodied Lutheran Theology to Evaluate Community-building in Online Social Networks. Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2015. 264pp. The human body holds a special place in Christian theology. Jesus gives of his body in the crucifixion and experiences bodily resurrection on Easter morning. The sacrament of Holy Communion is a common partaking in the actual body and blood of Christ. But what of the human body for the Christian, and of what import does this have for the broader community? The dissertation seeks to build on these facts and make a case for a Lutheran embodied theology and apply this theology to the online social network phenomenon. Such a theology is composed of three crucial pillars. First, humans exist as limited but redeemed creatures. Second, the sacramental life of the Christian is wholly embodied. Third, Christians look forward to bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time. Each of these pillars reinforce the uniquely physical nature of the human—whether as individual or in his/her relationship to the broader community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u27s theological anthropology argues for an individual who is simultaneously embodied and communal. One cannot be a Christian apart from the community, nor can they understand their status as creature without respecting their own somatic form. His theology of embodiment ultimately outlines three constitutive features of the Christian community: depth, local bondedness, and reciprocal trust. With these three features in mind, this dissertation offers criteria for evaluating other claims of community, particularly those found in online environments

Eurosodom : examining weaponized sexuality and gender-based narratives in Russian and pro-Russian disinformation

The Kremlin, under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, has sponsored a resurgence of political warfare against Western targets. This analysis will focus on a particular aspect of Kremlin-sponsored political warfare: sexuality and gender-based narratives in Russian and pro-Russian sponsored disinformation campaigns targeting EU and aspiring members from 2014-2020. The potency of these narratives arises from the emotional and cognitive load that they elicit. Their significance is often overlooked in security, intelligence, and communication studies. In order to alleviate this gap, this thesis consists of a mixed-methods analysis in order to analyze the role and function of these narratives within the larger body of Russian disinformation and the intended effects of targeted demographics’ consumption of these narratives. This research shows that sexuality and gender-based disinformation narratives are designed to target basic human emotions, such as fear, anger, hostility, confusion, and disgust by exploiting existing cognitive biases within the targeted population. These narratives are a useful and effective political and propaganda tool meant to elicit support for a specific brand of traditional values that furthers the Kremlin’s geopolitical aim of creating an alternative to Western liberal hegemony. These metanarratives designate the West as a bastion of moral and material decadence and deviance, and Russia as the savior of traditional Christendom because of its adherence to traditionality and rejection of liberal multiculturalismRussian, East European, and Eurasian StudiesGlobal Policy Studie

The New Aesthetic and Art: Constellations of the Postdigital

The case for the new aesthetic -- Manifestations of the new aesthetic -- Glitch ontology and the new aesthetic -- Setting the stage : the new precursorsand boundaries for a new aesthetic art -- Letting go : new aesthetic artists and the new aesthetic art that works -- Teleology and the new aesthetic -- Conclusion -- References -- Biographies. The new aesthetic and art: constellations of the postdigital is an interdisciplinary analysis focusing on new digital phenomena at the intersections of theory andcontemporary art. Asserting the unique character of New Aesthetic objects, Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha trace the origins of the New Aesthetic in visual arts, design, and software, find its presence resonating in various kinds of digital imagery, and track its agency in everyday effects of the intertwined physical world and the digital realm. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha bring to light an original perspective that identifies an autonomous quality in common digital objects and examples ofart that are increasingly an important influence for today\u27s culture and society.https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1118/thumbnail.jp

Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research