Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2023

EN:

This article explores the relationship between digital environments and adverse mental health effects. I begin by operationalizing key terms including social media and loneliness, before moving to relevant literature on social media use and mental health. Next, I unpack R.D. Laing’s notion of confirmation and disconfirmation, which serves as a backdrop for thinking through online social interaction. Finally, putting Burke in conversation with Laing, I discuss the role that embodiment plays in social presence and argue that experiences of loneliness may be, contrary to claims by social media firms and techno-enthusiasts, heavily influenced by the inevitable disconfirmation that occurs in digitally mediated communication environments.

EN:

We will explore the thesis that social media are used to achieve many of the same objectives of traditional wall-based graffiti and as such are forms of electronic graffiti that can reach a much larger audience than traditional graffiti scratched or painted on walls, buildings, monuments and other public surfaces. The parallel of graffiti and e-graffiti is that both provide a medium of communication and expression to those without access to the traditional mass me- dia channels of society controlled by the owners (private or governmental) of commercial me- dia outlets. We will focus in this study on the uses of social media that parallel wall-based graf- fiti such as personal aggrandizement, boasting of achievements, protesting, expressing woke culture, political propaganda and protest, hatred, love, and rebellion. We also identify similari- ties and differences between wall-based traditional graffiti and e-graffiti.

EN:

We describe the importance of exploration and formulating questions to be explored ratherthan studying the answers of the past as a way to reform education based on ideas first formulated byMarshall McLuhan.

EN:

The aim of this paper is to review The MediuM, a board game developed by professor Paolo Granata with his students in the Book & Media Studies Program at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. It is based on Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media and one of its goals is to stimulate creative and fast thinking skills. After playing the game, we inferred that it encourages players to think about how technology, as McLuhan argued, determines society and, at the same time, how people cannot be functionally separated from them.

EN:

Byung-Chul Han’s pivotal works display a provocative examination of digital technologies, capitalism and its commodification of life, achievement society and its pathologies. This article examines these issues in relation to the end of the disciplinary and immunological paradigm and the shift toward a neuronal model at the base of the present-day human subject and its social and political consequences. The relationship between new technologies and self-exploitation, pornographication of the ego and the disappearance of the Other is explored in conjunction with the overload of information and entropy, and an agonizing democracy.

EN:

The pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) is a tough act to follow. Question: Are there perhaps ways in which media ecology theorists today can follow his example by further developing themes in hismature work from the early 1950s onward? I have selected five themes from Ong’s 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in Methuen’s New Accents book series for attention in my bibliographic review. I have appropriated the word relationist for use here from Ong’s 1977 statement of what he himself styles as his relationist thesis about the historyof the word in Western cultural history. In brief, I suggest through my categorized and briefly annotated bibliography how media ecology theorists today can develop certain themes in Ong’s work by following what I am here styling as the relationist spirit that he himself followed in his mature work from the early 1950s onward.

EN:

Two interrelated thesis are explored in this probe, namely that;

i. AI by itself could never take over and control us humans;

ii. the written word is in a certain sense a form of artificial intelligence whereas the spoken word is a form of natural intelligence.

EN:

Semiotics and media ecology are compared and an attempt is made to reconcile semiotics and media ecology and translate the terminology of semiotics into that of media ecology and vice versa that of media ecology into semiotics. An attempt is also made to create a bridge between these two closely related studies of communication to create a hybrid study of the media ecology of semiotics and the semiotics of media ecology.