The New Instantaneity: How Social Media are Helping us Privilege the (Politically) Correct over the True

The recent sacking of the eminent scientist Tim Hunt from one of the UK’s leading research institutions is only the latest in a series of cases where public individuals have been derided for comments made in jest on social media, with serious consequences for their professional and personal lives. This article discusses the case of Tim Hunt as an example of the extent to which the privileging of the correct over the true which has long pervaded media discourse is taken to the extreme by the instant-response culture of social media. It points to the emergence of a new form of instantaneity enabled by these networked forms of communication that serves to reinforce systemic inaction rather than the change widely associated with these technologies. It draws on philosophy and Critical Theory as useful conceptual frameworks for highlighting the ways in which Twitter & co. increasingly call us to action but crowd out thought, thereby passing over opportunities for real social change

"Engaging with birth stories in pregnancy: a hermeneutic phenomenological study of women's experiences across two generations"

BACKGROUND: The birth story has been widely understood as a crucial source of knowledge about childbirth. What has not been reported is the effect that birth stories may have on primigravid women's understandings of birth. Findings are presented from a qualitative study exploring how two generations of women came to understand birth in the milieu of other's stories. The prior assumption was that birth stories must surely have a positive or negative influence on listeners, steering them towards either medical or midwifery-led models of care. METHODS: A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used. Twenty UK participants were purposively selected and interviewed. Findings from the initial sample of 10 women who were pregnant in 2012 indicated that virtual media was a primary source of birth stories. This led to recruitment of a second sample of 10 women who gave birth in the 1970s-1980s, to determine whether they were more able to translate information into knowledge via stories told through personal contact and not through virtual technologies RESULTS: Findings revealed the experience of 'being-in-the-world' of birth and of stories in that world. From a Heideggerian perspective, the birth story was constructed through 'idle talk' (the taken for granted assumptions of things, which come into being through language). Both oral stories and those told through technology were described as the 'modern birth story'. The first theme 'Stories are difficult like that', examines the birth story as problematic and considers how stories shape meaning. The second 'It's a generational thing', considers how women from two generations came to understand what their experience might be. The third 'Birth in the twilight of certainty,' examines women's experience of Being in a system of birth as constructed, portrayed and sustained in the stories being shared. CONCLUSIONS: The women pregnant in 2012 framed their expectations in the language of choice, whilst the women who birthed in the 1970s-1980s framed their experience in the language of safety. For both, however, the world of birth was the same; saturated with, and only legitimised by the birth of a healthy baby. Rather than creating meaningful understanding, the 'idle talk' of birth made both cohorts fearful of leaving the relative comfort of the 'system', and of claiming an alternative birth

Making Well-being an Experiential Possibility: The Role of Sport

Whilst the relationship between active participation in sport and well-being has been widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to actually understand this relationship from the perspective of the individual. Our paper draws upon phenomenological philosophy and the existential life-world view of well-being, in order to explore how the experience of sport can help facilitate possibilities for multiple kinds and levels of well-being. In doing so, our paper highlights the multiplicity of the dimensions of well-being, and offers examples of the different paths to well-being provided by sport, thus providing ways of describing well-being experiences within a sports context that are more complex than those offered by more traditional approaches to study in this area. Within this conceptual analysis we adopt a humanistic approach that considers the multiple ways well-being can be experienced through sport as a sense of dwelling, mobility or dwelling-mobility within the life-world dimensions of temporarily, spatiality, mood, embodiment, inter-subjectivity and identity

Visualism and technification—the patient behind the screen

At stake in this study is the patient's credibility. The Cartesian philosophical standpoint, which holds sway in western thinking, questions with scepticism whether the reported symptoms are “real.” Do they reside in the body, or are they mentally concocted. However, from the caring perspective any symptom must be both listened and attended to in its own right, not just scrutinized as evidence for an accurate diagnosis

The ontological consequences of Copernicus: global being in the planetary world

This article argues that contemporary space exploration, in producing visual representations of the planetary Earth for terrestrial consumption, has engendered a shift in the way the Earth - as terra firma - is both experienced and conceived. The article goes on to suggest that this shift is a key, but still largely tacit presupposition, underlying contemporary discourses on globalization and cultural cosmopolitanization. However, a close reading of some of the texts that make up the canon of 20th-century European philosophy shows that this idea of a ‘deterritorialized’ planetary Earth challenges some basic presuppositions of that canon: especially its use of the pre-reflective experience of terra firma as a tropic site of intological and normative grounds. This article examines the way in which contemporary Western European philosophy - and intellectual culture generally - has responded to this challenge: and offers Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the Earth as a ‘surface without territory’ as the most intellectually and ethically viable conception of the Earth in the age of ‘planetary deterritorialization’

Some comments on "The Mathematical Universe"

I discuss some problems related to extreme mathematical realism, focusing on a recently proposed "shut-up-and-calculate" approach to physics (arXiv:0704.0646, arXiv:0709.4024). I offer arguments for a moderate alternative, the essence of which lies in the acceptance that mathematics is (at least in part) a human construction, and discuss concrete consequences of this--at first sight purely philosophical--difference in point of view.Comment: 11 page

Music in advertising and consumer identity: The search for Heideggerian authenticity

This study discusses netnographic findings involving 472 YouTube postings categorized to identify themes regarding consumers’ experience of music in advertisements. Key themes relate to musical taste, musical indexicality, musical repetition and musical authenticity. Postings reveal how music conveys individual taste and is linked to personal memories and Heidegger’s coincidental time where moments of authenticity may be triggered in a melee of emotions, memories and projections. Identity protection is enabled as consumers frequently resist advertisers’ attempts to use musical repetition to impose normative identity. Critiques of repetition in the music produce Heideggerian anxiety leading to critically reflective resistance. Similarly, where advertising devalues the authenticity of iconic pieces of music, consumers often resist such authenticity transgressions as a threat to their own identity. The Heideggerian search for meaning in life emphasizes the significance of philosophically driven ideological authenticity in consumers’ responses to music in advertisements

How to return to subjectivity? Natorp, Husserl, and Lacan on the limits of reflection

This article discusses the recent call within contemporary phenomenology to return to subjectivity in response to certain limitations of naturalistic explanations of the mind. The meaning and feasibility of this call is elaborated by connecting it to a classical issue within the phenomenological tradition concerning the possibility of investigating the first-person perspective through reflection. We will discuss how this methodological question is respectively treated and reconfigured in the works of Natorp, Husserl, and Lacan. Finally, we will lay out some possible consequences of such a cross-reading for the conception of subjectivity and the concomitant effort to account for this dimension of first-person experience in response and in addition to its omission within the standard third-person perspective of psychological research