Keeping aside discussions about theories of depiction of photography and the epistemic value of photography from the viewer’s perspective, I reconsider this techne from the photographers’ entire act of photographing. It presents the quest of the possibility to regain the world by the art of photography, especially in a situation where human consciousness of the living environment is overwhelmed by the photographic effects. The nature of the current technological environment—while disguising the manifestation of pure humanity, in the sense that it is the externalization of technology due to human nature—is completely destructive. Today, trying to save or regenerate philosophy should be nothing more than seeking a way for human beings to refuse being incorporated as an automaton in an endless track of automated reproduction processes. As one of those who wish to find a way to reconstruct the relationship between humans and nature or to reveal that human existence can only be established in such correlation, I seek a way of breathing human freedom, momentarily disputing this automated living and social environment. In other words, to regain or to play the art of photography, to unsettle what usually works as concrete support for the cognitive transformation making us unconsciously think of the technological environment as something inevitable and natural. It would be presenting a temporary retreat and a more positive way forward.

This article critically reflects on Stiegler’s re-interpretation of Heidegger’s views on the relationships between existential temporality, the understanding of being and technology within the context of the latter’s notion of enframing, reconceptualized as an explicitly planetary phenomenon: the technosphere. Stiegler replaces Heidegger’s ontological conception with an organological one, arguing that the latter fails to understand these phenomena from the crucial perspective of thermodynamics, i.e., of the question of entropy and negentropy, which has never been addressed by Heidegger. What I particularly aim to show is that Stiegler’s organological re-intepretation of enframing as the technosphere and of existential temporality in terms of ‘quasi-causality’ (per Deleuze) may profit from being put in the broader, geothermodynamic context of Earth System Science, and considered from the perspective of Schneider & Sagan’s ‘gradient theory’, as being driven by what may be called the planetary ‘thermodynamic imperative’ with Jeffrey Wicken.

Disputes among conflicting “schools of thought,” located predominantly in philosophy departments in universities throughout the world, have degenerated into an academic, bookish philosophy that threatens to replace the discourse of wonder with the jargon of specialists. An elite process of inbred, intellectual decay renders all schools to a discourse that restricts philosophical discourse to print media, professional / professorial standards replace open-ended discussion, and “publish or perish” deflates the value of discourse. Literacy becomes the benchmark of understanding, and illiteracy is equated with lack of understanding. A tyranny of the articulate dismisses the wisdom of ordinary discourse, and the book itself becomes a coffin whose colophon page is a gravestone inscribed with the date of death of the corpse text within. Escape from this inevitable condition can be found in a return to the ordinary, common language and direct realism of the everyday human through a process of mediation, unmediation, and immediation.

In the world we live in, we encounter news everywhere. Authentic or not, fragmented or complete, audiences are being exposed to vast amounts of information, and it seems impossible to limit news intake, even when we want to. In a recent cross-country research based on data gathered from 35 countries (Toff, Kalogeropoulos et al. .2020), it was found that people avoid the news for factors varying between nations. This paper attempts to look into news consumption and avoidance patterns among Jordanians by posing several questions. Their entry points to news, preferred news mediums, the extent to which they are incidentally exposed to information, consciously or unconsciously, as well as if there were news avoidance patterns amongst them. These questions were explored through examination of a limited number of respondents from different generations, genders, and academic backgrounds and by deploying a Q methodology approach executed through card-sorting exercise with a think-aloud protocol and an in-depth one to one interview. The results indicated that Jordanians use multiple entry points to news, and the majority of them regard social media as a source of news. Neither gender, generation, nor the level of education seems to be a determining factor. The study revealed the existence of news avoidance trends. Education appeared to have no impact on the motives behind them.

In this article, the author seeks to understand how any information society generates clusters of information that act to secure and reinforce ecologies of consumption for media conglomerates and its circle of consumers. Empirical case studies would show that news information may not be based in the larger realities of all the players involved. Societies may be described in such situations as desiring their ends by means of segmented branching, but more empirically, by imperatives of survival and growth. Pseudology comprise the only sustaining principle of discourse for such a world immersed and fragmented by its local interests and their recognizable patterns of behavior as they are retrospectively conditioned by media.

Today, new insights into our interdependency with biotic masses, ecological ensembles, and technological and cultural practices in a growing world society all create the need to redefine human subjectivation. Since the so-called individual cannot be separated from these different involvements without endangering his/her existence, we should rethink our self-understanding in terms of the ‘undivided’ person and recognize that this concept expresses a misleading negation of our inevitable participations. It should therefore be replaced by the modified term ‘dividuation’, which endeavours to indicate our multidirectional and often ambivalent forms of entanglement and involuntary co-constitution by technological, cultural or even non-human ‘others’. The ever-specific dividuation has to be recognized and moderated in order to keep up our cohesion and psychophysical metastability.

Inaccurate interpretation of negotiated nonverbal communication during an intimate encounter has serious moral and legal repercussions. Reciprocity between bodies allows one to assess the intention of the other. However, when the intended message is miscommunicated through the sender’s embodied action or misperceived by the receiver, a sexual assault can ensue. Understanding, conveying, and responding to behavioral gestures indicative of agreement or refusal to consent, is an emotional quagmire that has received global attention through sociopolitical movements such as #MeToo. Despite the desired cogitation of a pre-reflexive intentioned message, reciprocal navigation of a shared intimate space shifts within the corporeal/intercorporeal relationship, such that a habituated behavioral response, autonomic bodily responding, and socialized dating norms all have the potential to sabotage the essence of the original message. Seeking legal retribution is compromised in its application of objectified parameters to an ambiguous, subjective human interaction. While programs promoting slogans such as “Just Say No” are well intentioned, the complexity of human behavior, unconscious processes, and subjective perception, all suggest that communicating a refusal to consent extends far beyond the verbal utterance of saying “No.”

This article discusses fundamental contradictions regarding the social role of the new media. Avantgarde identifies the emergence of the new media with the possibilities of liberating the man and achieving true individuality, while dystopia qualifies it as the suffocation of individuality, as ballast that levels out and averages a man, as a threat to human freedom. The media technology is for the avant-garde the embodiment of the enriched self and expanded capacities of selfhood, while for dystopia, the media technology is directed against selfhood, since its effects start and end with the creation of alienation, with the distortion of selfhood directed against the fundamental attributes of humanity. On the contrary, for the avant-garde, the breach of media background awareness of the artistic expression has marked the definite parting with the age of alienated artistic practice. According to their most profound beliefs, staggering in the chains of figurative and narrative expressions, art has always served a different purpose, religion, pedagogy, politics, and ideology. Hence, the turn towards the demands and logic of the self-serving media marked the rise from the state of alienation to the state of true achievement, to the emancipation of artists and the art.

This study offers a systematic, exhaustive and updated investigation of the declaration of the state of alarm and the processing of personal data relating to the health of citizens affected and/or potentially affected by the exceptional situation resulting from COVID-19. Specifically, it analyses the distinction between the state of alarm and the states of exception and siege and the possible effect on the fundamental right to the protection of personal data in exceptional health crisis situations and the effects that this declaration may have on the applicable regulations, issued, at a Community level. Next, and taking into consideration all the general and sectorial regulations applicable to data protection and health, we proceed to the analysis of the legitimate bases and the exceptions that, applicable to situations of health emergency such as the present one, enable the processing, taking into account the nature of the person who intervenes as the controller, making special emphasis on the public interest pursued by the Public Administrations and on the vital interest of the interested party.

This paper examines Friedrich Kittler’s infamous assertion that “media determine our situation” in conjunction with his less-discussed proclamation that the “day is not far off when … the history of communications technologies will literally come to an end” with the advent of artificial intelligence. It explores what Kittler might have meant by suggesting that there could be a situation without media to determine it. First, I survey Kittler’s statements about the end of media. Second, I consider existing interpretations of the end of media and judge them to be inadequate. Finally, I present a reading of the end of media as a horrific event in which the technologically-mediated conditions for subjectivity collapse. This, I suggest, provides support for the notion, advanced by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, that Kittler came ultimately to find his media theory abhorrent and thus devoted his last years to studying ancient Greece rather than artificial intelligence.

Although the writing of Estonian novelist Eduard Vilde has been described as feminist in asserting women’s right to individuality and equality, Mari, the protagonist in his 1916 novel Maekula Piimamees (Milkman of the Manor), does more than merely defend her standing alongside the male characters. An analysis based in Derridean differance reveals that she is instead a trickster character who delivers dramatic irony that subverts the norms of latefeudal Estonia, which would otherwise write her as dutiful wife and subservient maid. This becomes apparent through the novel’s ‘here-and-there’ narrative logic, which is apparent in a Bakhtinian threshold chronotope that underpins characterisations that reflect Merleau-Ponty’s constitutive liminality to form Mari as self-aware and self-confident in juxtaposition to the oblivious and anxious personalities of the male characters.

In the following article, the author examines the audiovisual design of Theo Angelopoulos’ filmmaking practice. The emphasis is on the close analysis of sequences and larger entities. The approach creates a heightened sensitivity to matters of analysis that cover similarities and differences, as well as causal and empirical reflections. The aim is to create a web of associations for these perspectives and perceive a wider approach for Angelopoulos’ films. The meaningful appropriation of various theoretical points of views requires sufficient correspondence and dialogical proneness to an understanding of the conceptual, formal and aesthetic legitimacy of his films. The approach consists of understanding Angelopoulos’ audiovisual design as a central force in the cinematic table of arrangements, and the aesthetics in the process of structuring expression.

Artists try to communicate precise ideas or concepts about certain social or political problems in order to change their context and surroundings. In this research the focus is on examples of Mexican Electronic artworks which specifically generate stages of communication. The methods applied to study these artifacts were observation, interview and analysis of certain art works and then selectively comparing different artists and their artistic works to understand, with the help of an adequate qualitative research approach, as to how the art communicated with human viewers. We concluded that communication of an abstract image could lead to different meanings. Interpretation depends on the cultural context of the viewer, age and nationality, among other important factors. Nonetheless all Mexican electronic artists studied in this research have a positive message for society, including justice and the preservation of environment and several related inspiring ideas.

This paper entails the issue around total visibility of media vs. paradoxically invisibility of “real world.” From Kant onwards it entails that it is impossible to know the world in its totality, it is a transcendental idea that cannot be cognized, “thing in itself” (noumeno); therefore, its representation is at the mercy of the illusion or fantasy. The immanence of the world and its representations have been transposed by the infinite range of possibilities -replicants and mutants- of the media (permanent presence, “without death”). To paraphrase of Borges's idea (Aleph), the media are the non-objective object that resides in the basement of the house of “Carlos Daneri,” “the place where they are, without being confused, all the places of the world,” “multum in parvo” (= much in a small place) according to Cusano cited there, the media are so powerful with their convictions to be able to cover everything that happens at the same time and in uninterrupted sequences, producing active realities even before they were possible, resulting an ontological naturalization similar to oblivion, alienation, etc. to cover the nothingness. Maybe it is that the media are nothing but fascinating and hallucinatory ways of producing “aesthetic truths,” are such fictions powerful that end up preventing us from discerning with clarity and distinction, things among themselves and between their representations, between the truthful (Sachverhalt=facts) and false representations, etc.?