Energy and Economy: Recognizing High-Energy Modernity as a Historical Period

This introduction to Economic Anthropology’s special issue on “Energy and Economy” argues that we might find inspiration for a much more engaged and public anthropology in an unlikely place—19th century evolutionist thought. In addition to studying the particularities of energy transitions, which anthropology does so well, a more engaged anthropology might also broaden its temporal horizons to consider the nature of the future “stage” into which humanity is hurtling in an era of resource depletion and climate change. Net energy (EROEI), or the energy “surplus” on which we build and maintain our complex societal arrangements, is a key tool for anthropologists as we bring our trademark cross-cultural, ethnographically grounded knowledge and perspectives to bear in examining the complex interplay of material infrastructures, energy flows, social organization, and culture. We are now mindful of the always already cultural nature of such circuitry and interactions—in ways obviously unavailable to our nineteenth-century forebears. And yet even as our energy futures are neither predetermined nor inevitable, neither are they as unfettered by material constraints as many have come to think. A robust anthropology of energy informed by awareness of the energetic basis of the historically specific moment in which we find ourselves seems poised to help us get beyond the developmentalist ideas of Morgan and Tylor and to overcome a seeming inability to think comprehensively about the human predicament in simultaneously general and particular terms. We have a chance in the space now opening to get beyond the antinomies—materialist—mentalist, infrastructure—superstructure, agency—structure, objective—subjective, and so on—that dominated much of twentieth-century anthropology

Understanding the Use of Fauxtography on Social Media

Despite the influence that image-based communication has on online discourse, the role played by images in disinformation is still not well understood. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of fauxtography, analyzing the use of manipulated or misleading images in news discussion on online communities. First, we develop a computational pipeline geared to detect fauxtography, and identify over 61k instances of fauxtography discussed on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit. Then, we study how posting fauxtography affects engagement of posts on social media, finding that posts containing it receive more interactions in the form of re-shares, likes, and comments. Finally, we show that fauxtography images are often turned into memes by Web communities. Our findings show that effective mitigation against disinformation need to take images into account, and highlight a number of challenges in dealing with image-based disinformation

Post Memes

Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation -- memes are the inner currency of the internet’s circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike,  and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet’s most viral phenomenon

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity\u27s Monsters

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil can be read. Looking to popular culture, literature, and film, I discuss appearances of monstrous embodiments of oil and primarily analyze three varied depictions of petromonstrosity in China Miéville’s short story “Covehithe,” Gracie Gardner’s absurdist play Pussy Sludge, and the South Korean creature feature Sector 7 (2011) directed by Kim Ji-hoon

Out of a Clear Green Sky: Online dialogues surrounding commercial passenger air travel & sustainability, post-COVID.

Even as it deals with the fallout from COVID-19 travel restrictions, commercial passenger air travel finds itself approaching an even bigger challenge: that of its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions through its everyday operations, which also contribute to its increasing vulnerability. As a complex transportation infrastructure, air travel is key to many other systems around the world in economic, social, logistical, political, and cultural spaces, and its entrenchment in these systems is driven in part by our own expectations of air travel as being an available option. However, the COVID-19 travel bans have brought a huge shock to air travel, and also a rare opportunity in this very busy industry to pause and deeply reimagine what the future could be. Through an exploratory process of using strategic and ethnographic foresight, and analyzing the differences between how air travel is conceived both in formal and informal online discourses, key insights are generated as to the possible areas of leverage for getting the air travel industry to change faster, and also to help its passengers care more about sustainability

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2021

This open access book is the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 28th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER21@yourplace virtual conference January 19–22, 2021. This book advances the current knowledge base of information and communication technologies and tourism in the areas of social media and sharing economy, technology including AI-driven technologies, research related to destination management and innovations, COVID-19 repercussions, and others. Readers will find a wealth of state-of-the-art insights, ideas, and case studies on how information and communication technologies can be applied in travel and tourism as we encounter new opportunities and challenges in an unpredictable world

Measuring the semantic uncertainty of news events for evolution potential estimation

© 2016 ACM. The evolution potential estimation of news events can support the decision making of both corporations and governments. For example, a corporation could manage its public relations crisis in a timely manner if a negative news event about this corporation is known with large evolution potential in advance. However, existing state-of-the-art methods are mainly based on time series historical data, which are not suitable for the news events with limited historical data and bursty properties. In this article, we propose a purely content-based method to estimate the evolution potential of the news events. The proposed method considers a news event at a given time point as a system composed of different keywords, and the uncertainty of this system is defined and measured as the Semantic Uncertainty of this news event. At the same time, an uncertainty space is constructed with two extreme states: the most uncertain state and the most certain state. We believe that the Semantic Uncertainty has correlation with the content evolution of the news events, so it can be used to estimate the evolution potential of the news events. In order to verify the proposed method, we present detailed experimental setups and results measuring the correlation of the Semantic Uncertainty with the Content Change of news events using collected news events data. The results show that the correlation does exist and is stronger than the correlation of value from the time-series-based method with the Content Change. Therefore, we can use the Semantic Uncertainty to estimate the evolution potential of news events

Social Media and Social Order

This book addresses the relationship between social media and social order at multiple scales and sites, from city neighborhoods to national politics, to how the data harvested by transnational corporations influence lives worldwide. It provides insights into how diverse social worlds are being reshaped by social media, analysis of what this means, and reflection on how critical publics might constructively respond