This open access book synthesizes the swiftly growing critical scholarship on mistakes, glitches, and other aesthetics and logics of imperfection into the first transdisciplinary, transnational ...framework of imperfection studies. In recent years, the trend to present the notion of imperfection as a plus rather than a problem has resonated across a range of social and creative disciplines and a wealth of world localities. As digital tools allow media users to share ever more suave selfies and success stories, psychologists promote 'the gifts of imperfections' and point to perfectionism as a catalyst for rising depression and burnout complaints and suicide rates among millennials. As sound technologies increasingly permit musicians to 'smoothen' their work, composers increasingly praise glitches, noise, and cracks. As genetic engineering upgrades with swift speed, philosophers, marketeers, and physicians plea 'against perfection' and supermarkets successfully advertise 'perfectly imperfect' vegetables. Meanwhile, cultural analysts point at skewed perspectives, blurry images, and other 'deliberate imperfections' in new and historical cinema, painting, photography, music, and literature. While these and other experts applaud imperfection, scholars in fields ranging from disability studies to tourism critically interrogate a trend to fetishize imperfection and poverty. They rightfully warn against projecting privileged (and, often, emphatically western-biased) feel-good stories onto the less privileged, the distorted, and the frail. The editors unite the different strands in imperfection thinking across various disciplines tools. In fourteen chapters by experts from different world localities, they offer scholars and students more historically grounded and more critically informed conceptualizations of the imperfect. This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
The electromagnetic scatterings of a layered sphere is a canonical problem. Mie theory is suitable for plane wave incidence case, whereas spherically layered media theory can deal with arbitrary ...incident waves. Both Mie theory and spherically layered media theory suffer from numerical instabilities due to the involved spherical Bessel functions when the order is large, the argument is small or the medium is lossy. Logarithmic derivative method had been proposed to solve this numerical issue with Mie theory successfully, while the numerical issue with spherically layered media theory has not been solved fully so far. Computations of reflection and transmission coefficients are the key part of spherically layered media theory. In this paper, we first define the renormalized reflection and transmission coefficients, which enjoys the feature of having an ordinary level of magnitude. Then, borrowing the idea of logarithmic derivative method, the expressions for the renormalized canonical reflection and transmission coefficients as well as other terms in the theory are rearranged. Recursive formulas for the product or division of Bessel functions with some common combinations of order and argument are derived. Numerical tests show that the proposed approach, validated by full wave numerical method, is more stable than the conventional formulation.
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The article proposes a theoretical model of the development of parasocial relationships (PSRs) building on Knapp’s model of relationship development. Through synthesis of research across ...disciplines, the model conceptualizes the relational goals and parasocial interactions (PSIs) specific to the PSR. The model identifies variables that predict engagement at that level, describes the stage’s outcomes/effects, and considers the utility of existing measures to assess these stages. The conceptualization of PSRs as a dynamic process rather than intensity of a monolithic experience offers new directions worthy of empirical examination.
Reading the ars dictaminis as a medieval media theory that carefully accounts for the relationships the epistle generates between the text object and its users, this article examines the human body ...of the epistolary messenger as a locus of anxiety in both medieval rhetoricians’ theorizations of epistolarity and literary depictions of epistolarity. Letter-writing manuals—such as Guido Faba’s Summa dictaminis (ca. 1228–29), Thomas of Capua’s Ars dictandi (1216–20), and Conrad von Mure’s Summa de arte prosandi (1275–76)—emphasize the status of the letter as a material object, operating among and across human and nonhuman bodies in what is termed here the epistolary circuit. The messenger’s human body is a site of vulnerability to violence, particularly in romances, which often depict the subsumption of individual bodies into the machineries of statecraft. The titular hero of Richard Coer de Lyon (early fourteenth century) kills hostages and turns their bodies into pseudoepistles, parodying the complementary relationship between textual “body” and human body inherent in the epistolary circuit, as established in the reading offered here of the dictaminal treatises.
The academic discourse on the West and the East is not new, and it has been commonly believed that non-Western countries must learn from the West in order to develop their own societies. Here, ...comprehending the notion of the West is considered significant, as it offers a model of comparison. While it is not necessary for the perspectives and process to be radical, it should be convincing to grasp Asia as a formation of a changeable force to the West. Of course, media scholars have to avoid limited perspectives emphasizing only intra-Asian dialogues; instead they must analyze Asian perspectives in the globalization context. What non-Western scholars must contemplate are not only paradigms that are unique to Asian society but also general trends and norms that apply to the globe so that they can identify new trends and directions, which provide fundamentals to advance new theories and norms in global media studies. This certainly contributes to a broadening of media theory and comprehension in a way that takes account of the practices of non-Western countries outside the Anglo-American sphere.
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A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical ...architecture.
What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image?
In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us.
In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention.
The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds.
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Technics gathers leading international media scholars to rethink technology for the contemporary digital era. The volume’s 28 contributors provide cutting-edge theoretical, historiographical, and ...methodological reflections on media and technology. Chapters explore the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Ursula Le Guin, Bernhard Siegert, Gilbert Simondon, and Sylvia Wynter in conjunction with urgent issues such as ableism, algorithms, digital infrastructures, generative AI, and geoengineering. An expansive collection of writings on media technologies in the digital age, Technics is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media studies, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and the philosophy of technology.
Spectacle and Time in Contemporary Philosophy Through historical and phenomenological analyses, the present paper attempts to centralize the research of the phenomenon of spectacle as a viable ...subject of contemporary philosophy. We study the notion of the spectacle upon the basis of the historical development of the modern comprehension of time not only as one of the central issues of contemporary philosophy, but also as a central concept for the understanding of contemporary science, culture, and society as a whole. Within contemporary continental philosophical tradition, the concept of time is closely connected with the notions of presence, perception, and mediation. The philosophical debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein brought the ideas of spectacle and time into immediate connection as a part of the new conceptual framework of contemporary philosophy. It demonstrated, for the first time, that science holds an essential value for the construction of modern life. We follow further developments by outlining the philosophical and cybernetic framework for the establishment of a philosophical attitude towards spectacle as one of the fundamental phenomena of contemporaneity. The elaboration of the theme seeks to respect methodological determinations demonstrated in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The groundbreaking critique of cybernetics in Gilbert Simondon allows us, finally, to draft a specific prefiguration of a certain theory of spectacle.
We investigate elevators as media. Our central argument is that elevators manipulate information in time. Time manipulation of elevators (movement data + genetic algorithms) produces temporal order. ...Elevators have become media objects because they produce data that are digitally manipulated to optimize movement. We conducted an empirical study in a multinational corporation that manufactures elevators, including 4 months of field research at multiple locations and interviewed 64 people. We show how time manipulation changes with the information architecture: first, time manipulation took place inside and during the movement of elevators by pushing the buttons. Second, time manipulation took place in the cloud by statistical mathematics. The latest development is toward decentralized social application where elevators as independent media objects manipulate time using genetic algorithms and communicate with each other. We reveal how largely hidden media affects our temporality and argue that media theory should study its implications in contemporary society.
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