A Provisional Phenomenology of the Audiobook

In this preliminary phenomenology of the experience of an audiobook, I compare the engagement with language with that of reading and listening to a present speaker, as well as approaching the particularities of embodied audiobook listening on its own terms. The process of constructing meaning at the level of individual sentences is treated exhaustively, while the remainder is approached only in its general contours. We see that the audiobook contains its own temporal structure and forms a context in which physical and social experiences become background

Against Strong Copyright in E-Business

As digital media give increasing power to users—power to reproduce, share, remix, and otherwise make use of content—businesses based on content provision are forced to either turn to technological and legal means of disempowering users, or to change their business models. By looking at Lockean and Kantian theories as applied to intellectual property rights, we see that business is not justified in disempowering users in this way, and that these theories obligate e-business to find new business models. Utilitarian considerations support disempowering users in this way in some circumstances and for the time being, but also show that there is a general obligation to move to new business models. On these moral bases, as well as on practical bases, e-business ought to refrain from using the legally permitted strong copyright protections, and should instead find ways of doing business which support, value, and respect the technical capabilities that users have gained

Revolutionary Industry and Digital Colonialism

Copyright-based industries have become revolutionary. That is, the machinery of production of digital wares has itself taken on the role of the revolutionary class within the political economy of digital production. The progress of capitalist production in this industry has undermined the conditions of its own possibility, not because it has driven the proletariat to rise against an oppressive system, but because the means of production, through digital media, have simultaneously made communist production possible, and the continued separation of the means of production from the laborer impracticable

Method Against Method: Swarm and Interdisciplinary Research Methodology

Part of a special issue on “swarm methodology,” this paper, written by a swarm participant, reflects upon the purpose and value of this kind of interdisciplinary research methodology. First, by way of a recognition of the interdisciplinary status of this paper itself, the question of what we hope to accomplish when we engage in conversations across disciplinary boundaries is broached. Second, a discussion of the practice of peer-review provides an approximate view of one paradigmatic understanding of how we produce a “conversation” within a given established research methodology. We are then, third, able to consider a number of possible related ways in which we might understand the value of a conversation between research methodologies. Finally, the common intuition that there is a concrete value specifically within a “holistic” or “synergistic approach” is addressed, and the swarm methodology put forth as a very likely place for such a value to emerge, if it is to emerge anywhere

On The Origins of the Cute as a Dominant Aesthetic Category in Digital Culture

In discussions of online culture, nobody has yet given sufficient consideration to the importance of cute animal pictures. While there are perhaps obvious reasons for this aspect of online culture being and remaining understudied, from an objective stance we should consider it both surprising and noteworthy that, once given the means of mass communications and internationally accessible publication, a primary activity that people are interested in and committed to is the sharing of cute and funny pictures, especially of cats. This presumably unforeseeable outcome is made stranger yet by the relative lack of commercial motivation for a communications category that approaches the ubiquity of spam and pornography. This chapter investigates three possible explanations of aspects of these phenomena

Social Media and the Organization Man

On new dynamics in organizational psychology, self- and group-identity, character, and integrity in an age of social media, Organizations may then have a similar relation to our integrity as does our character. Our character is formed by a history of actions and interactions, but we may not identify with the actions that it brings us to habitually perform. When we recognize our vices—e.g., intemperance—and seek to act in accordance with our values and beliefs, we act against our character and contribute thereby to reforming our habits and character to better align with the version of ourselves with which we identify. Organizations may similarly bring us, through their own form of inertia and habituation, to act in ways contrary to our values and beliefs. A confrontation with this contradiction through context collapse may help us to better recognize the organization’s vices and to act according to the version of ourselves, in that organizational context, with which we identify—and contribute thereby to reforming our organization to better align with our values, and with its values as well

Friend is a Verb

An argument against the Aristotelian emphasis on formal and final causes in understanding friendship, and in favor of efficient and material causes. Attempts to establish that social media communications constitute a secondary literacy in the context of a shared asynchronous experience at a distance, and addresses the sandwich problem: how we can charitably account for the practice of photographing and sharing one\u27s lunch

The Vital Non-Action of Occupation, Offline and Online

Using an Arendtian framework, I argue that we can understand distinctive and effective elements of the #OWS movements as forms of non-action related to prior strategies of non-violence, the propaganda of the deed, and coalitions of affinity rather than identity. This understanding allows us to see that, while the use of social media in the movement does not provide the same affordances for building and maintaining power as physical occupation, and while online community clearly cannot substitute for physical community in many relevant and consequential ways, Facebook does nonetheless provide a platform well suited to maintaining power through these distinctive forms of non-action