Las leyes de los medios

This text ennontiates and explains the four laws of the media which analyze the evolution and the genealogy of every form of human communication.Ce texte analyse les quatre lois des média que analysent l’évolution et la généalogie de toutes les formes de la communication humaine.Enuncia y explica las cuatro leyes de los medios que analizan la evolución y genealogía de las formas de comunicación humana de todo tipo

Marshall McLuhan’s Theory of Communication: The Yegg

In this paper the methodological implications arising from Marshall McLuhan’s classic refrains—“I don’t have A Theory of Communication” and “I don’t use theories in my work”—are discussed. Absent a theory, the other way to work is by observation and investigative technique: first the evidence; then later, much later, the theory—if indeed one is necessary by then. Without a theory as a guide McLuhan was influenced by artists and poets in developing the analytical and conceptual tools he relied upon to examine media and communication. He referred to his procedure as starting with a problem and digging into the toolkit for something to open the matter up for elucidation. Chief among his tools of analysis was Practical Criticism, which he viewed as a kind of critic’s Swiss-Army Knife that worked equally incisively across all of the arts and through all areas of culture, from high-brow to low. The argument that emerges from this analysis of McLuhan’s investigative techniques is that many of the conundrums of modern media and culture are understood most effectively through research that transcends the constraints imposed by seeking to make the case for or against the truth of a particular theory. Begin with theory, you begin with the answer; begin with observation, you begin with questions

Las leyes de los medios

This text ennontiates and explains the four laws of the media which analyze the evolution and the genealogy of every form of human communication.Ce texte analyse les quatre lois des média que analysent l’évolution et la généalogie de toutes les formes de la communication humaine

Complex Networks and Symmetry II: Reciprocity and Evolution of World Trade

We exploit the symmetry concepts developed in the companion review of this article to introduce a stochastic version of link reversal symmetry, which leads to an improved understanding of the reciprocity of directed networks. We apply our formalism to the international trade network and show that a strong embedding in economic space determines particular symmetries of the network, while the observed evolution of reciprocity is consistent with a symmetry breaking taking place in production space. Our results show that networks can be strongly affected by symmetry-breaking phenomena occurring in embedding spaces, and that stochastic network symmetries can successfully suggest, or rule out, possible underlying mechanisms.Comment: Final accepted versio

Language, Media and Community in the Information Age

This article argues that the electronically mediated communication contributes to the construction of new, mediated forms of communities which are based on the synthesis of virtual and physical communities. The appearance of these new forms of communities leads to a new conceptualization of the relation between self and community. The aim of this article, on the one hand, is to show that with the mediatization of communities, our concept of community becomes more complex. On the other hand, in this essay I consider the assump - tion that the medium of the mediatization and new conceptualization of community is a specific, pictorial language of electronically mediated communication

The media, animal conservation and environmental education

Editoria

Feigning Incompetence in the Field

A basic feature of professions is specialized competence. Indeed, expertise grants professions and their members privileged, prestigious, and protected statuses. Members of professions thus face interactional pressure to appear competent in encounters with colleagues, clients, and lay publics, demonstrating that they, indeed, have the particular competencies expected of and associated with their position. For example, in a classic study of professionalization, Jack Haas and William Shaffir examine how medical students adopt a cloak of competence—presenting more-than-fully-able selves—in their training and work to convince gatekeepers, each other, and patients that they have the ability to do medicine. Similar competence-enhancing presentations are evident in other professions. However, a related dramaturgical phenomenon remains neglected: adopting a cloak of incompetence—presenting less-than-fully-able selves—in performing the professional role. Using the ethnographer’s work as an illustrative case, the following paper examines this other side of managing professional competence

Dealing Drugs: Careers of Involvement, Subcultural Life-worlds, and Marketplace Exchanges

This thesis is an ethnography of drug dealers. Working from a Chicago School Symbolic Interactionist approach (Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969), nineteen interviews were conducted with current and former drug dealers. I inquired into their careers (initial involvements, continuities, disinvolvements, reinvolvements) of participation in selling drugs. The data analysis is primarily located in three chapters – Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Chapter Five considers people’s involvements in selling drugs as well as dealers’ interpersonal exchanges with their customers. In particular three processes are considered in Chapter Five: initial involvements in drug sales,expanding the customer base, and making sales. Chapter Six discusses dealers’ relationships with suppliers as well as dealers who become involved in supplying activities. This chapter discusses the matters of: making contacts with suppliers, working with suppliers, and becoming suppliers. Chapter Seven examines some of the identity allures and problematics of being a drug dealer as well as instances of disinvolvement and reinvolvement in drug dealing. This includes considerations of: striving for respectability, encountering regulatory agencies, and the problematics of disentanglement