In Supernatural Entertainments , Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media ...entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Artificial Sociality Natale, Simone; Depounti, Iliana
Human machine communication journal (Print),
2024, Letnik:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article proposes the notion of Artificial Sociality to describe communicative AI technologies that create the impression of social behavior. Existing tools that activate Artificial Sociality ...include, among others, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, voice assistants, virtual influencers, socialbots and companion chatbots such as Replika. The article highlights three key issues that are likely to shape present and future debates about these technologies, as well as design practices and regulation efforts: the modelling of human sociality that foregrounds it, the problem of deception and the issue of control from the part of the users. Ethical, social and cultural implications are discussed that are likely to shape future applications and regulation efforts for these technologies.
Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material world. Yet to understand its social and cultural impact, one needs to examine also the different ...narratives that circulate about it. Software’s opacity, in fact, makes it prone to being translated into a plurality of narratives that help people make sense of its functioning and presence. Drawing from the case of Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, widely considered the first chatbot ever created, this article proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of ‘biographies of media’ to illuminate the dynamics and implications of software’s discursive life. The case of ELIZA is particularly relevant in this regard because it became the centre of competing narratives, whose trajectories transcended the actual functioning of this programme and shaped key controversies about the implications of computing and artificial intelligence.
In Supernatural Entertainments , Simone Natale vividly
depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon
and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media
entertainment ...industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the
spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that
changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first
spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of
spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its
foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He
demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of
the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were
being developed for the broader entertainment industry.
Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional
performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the
press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism's explosion and
nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of
how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and
popular culture of today.
In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography’s vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century.
In the first half of the ...nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography developed as a medium that changed how images were produced and circulated. Yet, for the most part, photography of the era is studied outside the field of media history. The contributors to this volume challenge those established disciplinary boundaries as they programmatically explore the intersections of photography and “new media” during a period of fast-paced change. Their essays look at the emergence and early history of photography in the context of broader changes in the history of communications; the role of the nascent photographic press in photography’s infancy; and the development of photographic techniques as part of a broader media culture that included the mass-consumed novel, sound recording, and cinema.
Featuring essays by noteworthy historians in photography and media history, this discipline-shifting examination of the communication revolution of the nineteenth century is an essential addition to the field of media studies.
In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Geoffrey Batchen, Geoffrey Belknap, Lynn Berger, Jan von Brevern, Anthony Enns, André Gaudreault, Lisa Gitelman, David Henkin, Erkki Huhtamo, Philippe Marion, Peppino Ortoleva, Steffen Siegel, Richard Taws, and Kim Timby.
Abstract
This review article examines two recent publications that explore the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and communication. Discussing Human–Machine Communication (HMC) as an ...emerging area of inquiry within communication and media studies, two important implications of this body of work are highlighted. First, the "human" component still plays a key role in HMC, since what we call “AI” derives from the technical and material functioning of computing technologies as much as from the contribution of the humans who enter in communication with AI technologies. Second, HMC challenges the very concept of medium, because the machine is at the same time the channel as well as the producer of communication messages. A potential way to solve this challenge is to mobilize existing approaches in media history and theory that expand the concept of medium beyond its conceptualization as mere channel.
This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by ...the construction of a powerful cultural myth: The creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on AI published in two magazines, the Scientific American and the New Scientist, which were aimed at a broad readership of scientists, engineers and technologists, three dominant patterns in the construction of the AI myth are identified: (1) the recurrence of analogies and discursive shifts, by which ideas and concepts from other fields were employed to describe the functioning of AI technologies; (2) a rhetorical use of the future, imagining that present shortcomings and limitations will shortly be overcome and (3) the relevance of controversies around the claims of AI, which we argue should be considered as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the AI myth.
There Are No Old Media Natale, Simone
Journal of communication,
08/2016, Letnik:
66, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Despite its ubiquity in scholarly and popular publications, relatively few attempts have been made to interrogate the meanings and implications of the notion of “old media.” This article discusses ...this notion in the context of theoretical debates within media and communication studies. Defining old media as artifacts, technologies, or in terms of their social use is problematic, because media constantly change, resisting clear‐cut definitions related to age. The article therefore proposes to treat new media as a relational concept: not an attribute characterizing media as such, but an element of how people perceive and imagine them. Rhetoric, everyday experience, and emotions are key contexts where new ground can be found to redefine the concept of “old media.”
This article proposes the notion of the ‘Lovelace Effect’ as an analytical tool to identify situations in which the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users as original and creative. It ...contrasts the Lovelace Effect with the more commonly known ‘Lovelace objection’, which claims that computers cannot originate or create anything, but only do what their programmers instruct them to do. By analysing the case study of AICAN – an AI art-generating system – we argue for the need for approaches in computational creativity to shift focus from what computers are able to do in ontological terms to the perceptions of human users who enter into interactions with them. The case study illuminates how the Lovelace effect can be facilitated through technical but also through representational means, such as the situations and cultural contexts in which users are invited to interact with the AI.
Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have recently been the subject of lively debates in regard to issues such as artificial intelligence, surveillance, gender stereotypes, and ...privacy. Less attention, however, has been given to the fact that voice assistants are also web interfaces that might impact on how the web is accessed, understood and employed by users. This article aims to advance work in this context by identifying a range of issues that should spark additional reflections and discussions within communication and media studies and related fields. In particular, the article focuses on three key issues that have to do with long-standing discussions about the social and political impact of the internet: the role of web platforms in shaping information access, the relationship between production and consumption online, and the role of affect in informing engagement with web resources. Considering these issues in regard to voice assistants not only helps contextualize these technologies within existing debates in communication and media studies, but also highlights that voice assistants pose novel questions to internet research, challenging assumptions of what the web looks like as speech becomes one of the key ways to access resources and information online.
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