Phatic Workshop

care of /r/rickandmorty

I just remembered the title of this book by danah boyd and co-authors.  Here's some summary information.  Possibly good source of data. Social network sites, online games, video-sharing sites, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. They have so permeated young lives that it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago these technologies barely existed. Today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity as did their predecessors, but they are doing so amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression. - abstract of report Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital medi...

Photo of a Romanesco from the journal where the paper is published I've been looking around at some of the secondary sources on Simondon.  This paper, by Andrew Iliadis, seems like a reasonable short summary of things that could be relevant for our work here.  The main idea is a contrast between Simondon's notion of information as that which gives rise to form -- information "as" reality in other words -- and the simplified perspective from e.g. Shannon where the problem is how to move a "message" from one point to another, leaving aside how that message will be interpreted once it arrives.  Shannon said: Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.  These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. In contrast to this, Simondon deals with issues of morpho-genesis.  It seems to me that in this way of looking a...

The only thing I really got done this week was a throwaway project of translating the abstracts of newest psychology articles into Estonian. I'm not exactly sure why I undertook doing it, perhaps to improve my academic Estonian, perhaps to find out what contemporary social psychology is dealing with. In any case I found one article whose example I consider worth emulating: Carter, Dorothy R.; Leslie A. DeChurch; Michael T. Braun and Noshir S. Contractor 2015. Social Network Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Conceptual Review. Journal of Applied Psychology 100(3): 597-622. Contemporary definitions of leadership advance a view of the phenomenon as relational, situated in specific social contexts, involving patterned emergent processes, and encompassing both formal and informal influence. Paralleling these views is a growing interest in leveraging social network approaches to study leadership. Social network approaches provide a set of theories and methods with which to art...

Historically aesthetics has focussed on the philosophy of art, on the nature of beauty, and on the character of the experience of both. This tended to represent the aesthetic as somewhat rare and elevated above ordinary experience and practice. In recent decades the subject has broadened with attention being given to a wider diversity of art forms including conceptual art and land art, computer art, the cinema, and video arts. In addition there has been a growth of interest in environmental aesthetics. A more limited development has been the recognition of the ubiquity of the aesthetic within the fabric of everyday life as for example in work on the aesthetics of the built environment, of personal spaces, and on the aesthetic aspects of social life. Papers are invited that explore either the general idea of an aesthetics of everyday life, or particular topics within this general area. Of particular interest are papers relating the aesthetics of everyday life to issues in...