As an uncritical theoretical presupposition, the notion of literacy has led to formalistic, bookish philosophy. The constipated philosophical discourse adjudged worthwhile by literati and digirati falls historically into a line of dogmatic argument and counterargument within academic tradition submerged in subjective-idealist solipsism, petit-bourgeois political apologetics, and economic escapism. Careerist generalization of literacy from the ability to read print to include metaphoric uses of the term “literacy” to all media, while comfortably foggy to irrationalists, adds little to our understanding of print or other media except by increasing the gloom that prevails among privileged, neo-liberal pettifoggers.

This paper is a review of WikiLeaks—a prominent name in digital dissent. It was founded by Julian Assange in 2006. Since its inception, the organization has been exposing classified state and corporate documents on its website to common users of the Internet. Anonymous whistleblowers provide WikiLeaks with content. It creates a new methodology of uniting digital media and journalism. It uses information in an unprecedented way to reveal state and corporate transgressions. This paper analyses how WikiLeaks contributes to information-based capitalism. While the site is a commendable venture to reveal state and corporate secrets, WikiLeaks is not free from its flaws. This paper critiques the way Assange robs whistleblowers of their identities and voices and presents himself as a surrogate hero.

This article explores the ethical dimension of digital voice assistants from the angle of postphenomenology and the technological mediation approach, whereby technology plays a mediating role in the human-world relations. Digital voice assistants, such as Amazon Echo’s Alexa or Google’s Home, increasingly form an integral part of everyday life for many people. Powered by Artificial Intelligence and based on voice interaction, voice assistants promise constant accompaniment by answering any questions people might have and even managing the physical space of their homes. However, while accompanying daily lives of people, voice assistants also seamlessly redefine the way people talk, interact and perceive each other. In view of their intentionalities, such as interaction by voice, command-based model of communication and development of attachment, digital voice assistant mediate the norms of interaction beyond their immediate use, the way people perceive themselves, those around and form consequent normative expectations. The article argues that understanding how technologies, such as digital voice assistants, mediate our moral landscape forms an essential part of media literacy in the digital age.

Expecting that media and/or digital technologies “do” things (Verbeek), we are called upon to take a stance on them, theoretically as well as practically. Media literacy represents one such stance—we are prodded to be literate about media—but there are others. To this extent media literacy is a lens through which we look at issues and that shapes what we see. This becomes particularly clear when we consider another lens, namely, that of media health. While media literacy suggests a rather pragmatic way of doing, making do with what is on offer, the image of media health dramatically alters the starting point: media are seen here as affecting us, even to the extent that we become sick and need to be cured. This image or model of media as somehow related to disease and health is developed in varying degrees of explicitness in the work of Bernard Stiegler and Marshall McLuhan among others. In this paper, we investigate the differences between the media literacy and media health models from a meta vantage point and ask how the lens determines how we view and understand certain problems in relation to media/technologies. We do this by deploying a metaphor ourselves, namely that of mold. Our models are molds. They are understood as a “frame or model around or on which something is formed or shaped,” but the connotations of fungal growth helping organic decay and of soil and earth are also at stake. Depending on which meaning we prefer, it might turn out that we do not need to choose between our molds/models: they are interconnected, like mold. On a more theoretical level, we link up the media literacy and media health approaches to two major strands in philosophy of technology, namely to the pragmatist/postphenomenological and transcendentalist/critical streams respectively.

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.?

The article presents a phenomenological approach to the analysis of work experience from the notion of context of meaning and context of experience in finite areas of meaning in the work of Alfred Schütz. From this approach, a three-dimensional analysis of the world of work (Wirkwelt) is proposed, where work is simultaneously considered as a structure, as a social action and as an intersubjective environment. With this, it is sought to deepen a better understanding of the heterogeneous phenomena of the world of work.

Self-imaging has become a ubiquitous part of global networking and selfies have an impact on visual culture and portraiture, since they challenge the aesthetics of self-representation. The differences between a self-portrait and a selfie are not solely in the manner they are produced but also in the way they are structured, distributed and acknowledged by society. A self-portrait is not the same as a selfie; there is a difference in their origin. The definition of a selfie, given by the Oxford dictionary, is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. While the definition of self-portrait is “a portrait of an artist produced or created by that artist.” The aim of this paper is to describe the way self-representation has changed in relation to the media, its distribution and consumption. In this case, the speed of the information flow does not allow for a long contemplation, the seduction of the selfie lies in the attraction towards the ephemeral and overexposed, the hyper realistic version of a person. The mass reproduction of objects, images included, is the trace of modernity; it has become a global cognitive process. Nevertheless, the postmodern legacy is the rapid production and disposal of stories and meaning. The selfie has served as an attempt to answer some questions about the changes within an esthetic experience, where time is important in order to discriminate diverse layers of significance.

The dialogue in this paper is aimed at reflecting the form of representation of The Other within the cinematography from the philosophical point of view. For this, we support our study in Ethics as the first philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. The questions that trouble this study are: What is otherness? Who is the other? Why is it necessary to think about otherness in cinematography?Here we reflect on the recognition of the Other, of the different individual, of the foreign. Cinema allows to recognize the existence of other subjects, from a double look, as spectators, but also as creators. What motivates the reflection of otherness from the human relationships that are interwoven, as well as the cultural character of all perception, referring to the notion of the other as interior to the field of being.

Examples given in this paper deal with print media, but the argument applies to all media. These examples illustrate structural-linguistic principles, principles that may be extended to any medium. The approach is structuralist.The history of handwritten and printed texts in the West is an inseparable history of punctuation and lettering. Written and printed texts represent spoken language: letters are representations of segmental-phonemes (linguistically meaningful sounds); graphemic punctuation represents meaningful supra-segmental phonemes (intonation, pitch, pause, etc.).Alphabetical, graphemic representation in the West has through the ages developed many arbitrary systems of grammatic punctuation to show speech, but the semantics of speech representation remains under-developed. This is no less true of digital media as of print media. Digital print media are particularly vulnerable to ambiguity. Emoticons and emojis came about of necessity. Just as early-print punctuation was primarily invented by printers and printers’ devils, not scholars, so too emoticons are Silicon-Valley formalization of user-invented semantic punctuation. :-) becomes [smiley emoji] or [smiling alien emoji]. :-( becomes [frowning emoji] or [frowning alien emoji], and so on—and ambiguity is the hothouse of error and misreading that affects all media. We should not be surprised. It is said that a similar devil, Titivillus, caused medieval manuscript scribes to make errors in their copying.I am specifically interested in the ramifications of semantic punctuation on philosophical texts—above all, irony, though sarcasm, ridicule, double entendre, derision, mockery, satire, scorn, sneering, scoffing, gibing, taunting, acerbity, causticity, hate, trenchancy, etc., as well as positive expressions such as love, amusement, friendliness, approval, sincerity, etc. are also of semantic-punctuation representational importance. Does the failure of traditional written and printed tests to reflect, for the most part, semantic values handicap printed representational discourse? In fact, can the handicapped discussion of profound ideas be adequately represented graphemically and philosophical inquiry limited without representation of the full range of human linguistic communication?Representation of irony in print has long escaped writers and scholars. In the 17th century, John Wilkins in An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) proposed, among other semantic punctuations, an inverted exclamation mark (¡) to indicate irony: “That is terrific work¡” for a job poorly done. “What a lovely hat you have¡” said with sarcastic irony to someone sporting a ridiculous hat. (Later, an inverted question mark was suggested for ironic statement, ¿, but confusion with Spanish inverted question marks makes it a less attractive alternative).Wilkins’ term “philosophical language” refers to language as printed representation, not speech. His argument is an early reference to what I have elsewhere argued is the failure of “bookish philosophy” that has come to typify academic philosophy, for example, the gibberish of Heidegger, Derrida, post-structuralists, post-modernists, post-humanists, numerous analytic and “linguistic” philosophers, and many others.One possible way out of these difficulties is a process of mediation, unmediation, and immediation.

This article aims to analyze the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence through the movie “Marjorie Prime,” released in 2017 during Sundance Film Festival. Martin Heidegger's thoughts on Dasein and human nature and derived studies from Alan Turing's perspective on Artificial Intelligence and Humanity, as well as perspectives on posthumanism and transhumanism and their social implications, will be contrasted in order to discuss alterity and its presence in artificial intelligence. Hence, in this article we ask how it is possible to understand the alterity found between Marjorie, the protagonist of the film, and a holographic artificial intelligence created with the purpose of replacing her deceased husband, Walter. This study will begin with assumptions about the question of technology in the Heideggerian conception of Dasein and Being, as well as the view of technology as a current mode of being in postmodernity. Our methodology combines a bibliographical review and also an analysis of the audiovisual content previously quoted.

Post-market economies are driven by ownership or shareholding interests. We may consider ourselves to be living in societies driven by investment blocks - there is no doubt in our minds, given our awareness of the information blocks that compose media content, that the interests of these investment quarters in a globalized geo-economy is what determines how news is presented and consumed. What are the characteristics of investment-driven media scenarios? Our concept of media scenario differs from information dispersal models in brand capitalism and media franchise (Chomsky 2002; Golding et al 2012)? The disintegration of values of social responsibility in journalism is also apparent in the rise of investment driven journalism, with its absolute dependence on the mirror neuronal mechanics of social behavior, where the individual likes falling in with performance, and post-truth dialogue. But there are also options and limits of consensus within such discursive practice, and selective attention as the consumer betrays preference for information. We hypothesize that the new information media is a product of investment acts, and is fluid by nature, never innocent, and is always conditioned by local interest factors, and is as Barnett argues in a paper, a simulacrum of shareholder values (Barnett 2009).

The purpose of this research is to show part of the Mexican electronic art scenario, which in many cases is produce with limited resources, low-cost materials and free and open source data and software. What characterized the most this artistic works is the concept and the main idea, which is related to the Latin American context, because of that, these works of art are unique. The main statement of this research is to find evidence of the importance of the concept despite the materials, more than the spectacle that some works could offer to an audience with unlimited resources. Through this, an analysis of Electronic Art as an expression of social conditions take place.