Technologically Mediated Identity

This essay locates Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson within the late 19th-century media ecology that gave rise to emergent concepts of cognition, automation, and posthuman embodiment. Framing Twain’s infamous claim that the novel “wrote itself” in relation to his financial and psychological investment in the Paige typesetting machine, the essay explores how Twain’s text and its compositional apparatus reflect broader epistemic and ontological shifts in the human-technology relation. Drawing on Katherine Hayles’ formulation of the recursive feedback loops between media, embodiment, and subjectivity, the essay argues that Twain’s narrative enacts and anticipates a theory of automated authorship, in which the human is constituted through, and not merely opposed to, its machinic extensions. Through close readings of the novel and Twain’s engagement with inscription technologies, the essay reveals how the doubled bodies and unstable voices of Pudd’nhead Wilson dramatize a crisis of singularity, foregrounding a cognitive model in which textuality, embodiment, and technical mediation converge to produce the posthuman subject.

This chapter maps a number of significant shifts and trends in recent scholarship about young people and digital media cultures. We foreground new and emerging research on young people's image production, with a particular focus on young femininities. The chapter is divided in to three parts. In the first part we offer a brief review of the research about sexualization, femininities, normative beauty standards and the media. Next, we chart the turn to an interest in self-images as communication, highlighting the ephemeral and affectively charged nature of body imaging, and the shift towards curating and editing the self, and tensions between the dual demands for 'authenticity' and 'perfection'. The chapter then presents a case-study of the Kardashians to highlight debates about gendered and racialized ideals and authenticity.

Tanulmányomban a magyarországi Nyírvasváriban élő oláh cigány Rostás családnak az elmúlt nagyjából hatvan évből származó, műfaji szempontból heterogén mozgóképes ábrázolásait elemzem. A korai néprajzi jellegű mozgóképektől a kései dokumentumfilmekig ívelő spektrum egyben a család kultúrában betöltött pozíciójának, illetve társadalmi helyzetének a megváltozását is mutatja. A filmeken a kultúra örökítésével együtt a roma és nem roma kulturális identitások is megjelennek és konstruálódnak, ahogy a különböző identitások közti viszonyok is performálódnak és dramatizálódnak. Öt példát és ezáltal öt különböző korszakot választottam a Rostás család filmes ábrázolásának történetéből, ezeken jól érzékeltethető a lokális zenei világ adaptációs képessége az eltérő mediális műfajokhoz oly módon, hogy a nagycsaládi zenei kultúra egyszerre változik és mutat bizonyos állandóságot. Bár kronológiai sorrendben tárgyalom a mozgóképeket, de el szerettem volna kerülni annak a látszatát, hogy ez a történeti vonal egyben hiánytalan fejlődést jelent pozitív irányban a romák médiaábrázolásában. Bár van egy igen erős ilyen irányú tendencia (a roma folklór megjelenése, a roma kultúra ábrázolása az érintett közösség részvételével és közreműködésével, és legfőképpen, a roma személyiségek portrészerű ábrázolása, amelyekben hangsúlyozódik az individuális képesség és ambíció), de mindig a változó társadalmi és kulturális kontextusukban kell értelmeznünk és értékelnünk ezeket a médiatartalmakat, az aktuális lehetőségekhez viszonyítva őket.

A vast fraction of the population of India considers agriculture as its primary occupation. The production of crops plays an important role in our country. Bad quality crop production is often due to either excessive use of fertilizer or using not enough fertilizer. The proposed system of IoT and ML is enabled for soil testing using the sensors, is based on measuring and observing soil parameters. This system lowers the probability of soil degradation and helps maintain crop health. Different sensors such as soil temperature, soil moisture, pH, NPK, are used in this system for monitoring temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and soil pH along with NPK nutrients of the soil respectively. The data sensed by these sensors is stored on the microcontroller and analyzed using machine learning algorithms like random forest based on which suggestions for the growth of the suitable crop are made. This project also has a methodology that focuses on using a convolutional neural network as a pr...

A vast fraction of the population of India considers agriculture as its primary occupation. The production of crops plays an important role in our country. Bad quality crop production is often due to either excessive use of fertilizer or using not enough fertilizer. The proposed system of IoT and ML is enabled for soil testing using the sensors, is based on measuring and observing soil parameters. This system lowers the probability of soil degradation and helps maintain crop health. Different sensors such as soil temperature, soil moisture, pH, NPK, are used in this system for monitoring temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and soil pH along with NPK nutrients of the soil respectively. The data sensed by these sensors is stored on the microcontroller and analyzed using machine learning algorithms like random forest based on which suggestions for the growth of the suitable crop are made. This project also has a methodology that focuses on using a convolutional neural network as a pr...

A vast fraction of the population of India considers agriculture as its primary occupation. The production of crops plays an important role in our country. Bad quality crop production is often due to either excessive use of fertilizer or using not enough fertilizer. The proposed system of IoT and ML is enabled for soil testing using the sensors, is based on measuring and observing soil parameters. This system lowers the probability of soil degradation and helps maintain crop health. Different sensors such as soil temperature, soil moisture, pH, NPK, are used in this system for monitoring temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and soil pH along with NPK nutrients of the soil respectively. The data sensed by these sensors is stored on the microcontroller and analyzed using machine learning algorithms like random forest based on which suggestions for the growth of the suitable crop are made. This project also has a methodology that focuses on using a convolutional neural network as a pr...

In this point of departure, I discuss using an intersectional feminist lens to explore Twitter traffic around Donald Trump's 2016 US election win in an MA module Sociology of Education. Next I reflect upon my experience of having the feminist content of my public Twitter account trolled during the election period. I argue Twitter provides a new mediated space for teaching and learning but feminist academics also face risks in the form of misogyny both online and off.

Technologically, the world is moving rapidly into the digital realm. Artificial Intelligence has penetrated into all aspects of life. It is possible to predict solutions to complex Engineering problems with the help of advanced software tools, but still these products are costly and available to only the elite or at the most to upper middle class.

Musical Group Interaction (MGI) has been found to promote prosocial tendencies, including empathy, across various populations. However, experimental study is lacking in respect of effects of everyday forms of musical engagement on prosocial tendencies, as well as whether key aspects—such as physical co-presence of MGI participants—are necessary to enhance prosocial tendencies. We developed an experimental procedure in order to study online engagement with collaborative playlists and to investigate socio-cognitive components of prosocial tendencies expected to increase as a consequence of engagement. We aimed to determine whether mereperceivedpresence of a partner during playlist-making could elicit observable correlates of social processing implicated in both MGI and prosocial behaviors more generally and identify the potential roles of demographic, musical, and inter-individual differences. Preliminary results suggest that for younger individuals, some of the social processes invol...

This article argues that gender-equality policy may function to cultivate women’s ‘psychological capital’, that is, psychological traits that assist women in becoming better workers and therefore further the interests of capital. It assesses documents produced by the UK government’s Body Confidence Campaign. First, the article finds that the campaign promoted narrow and corporate ideas about gender equality, only treating women’s aspiration as valuable if it led them to pursue profitable and traditionally ‘male’ professions. Second, it finds that despite campaign leaders’ criticisms of initiatives that blame women for their own low self-esteem, in practice, the campaign ended up doing exactly this by portraying low confidence as a drain on society and instructing women and girls to ‘build resilience’. Finally, the article finds that the campaign allowed companies to receive credit for limited and temporary efforts to appear ‘woman-friendly’ without overhauling their harmful marketin...

A vast fraction of the population of India considers agriculture as its primary occupation. The production of crops plays an important role in our country. Bad quality crop production is often due to either excessive use of fertilizer or using not enough fertilizer. The proposed system of IoT and ML is enabled for soil testing using the sensors, is based on measuring and observing soil parameters. This system lowers the probability of soil degradation and helps maintain crop health. Different sensors such as soil temperature, soil moisture, pH, NPK, are used in this system for monitoring temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and soil pH along with NPK nutrients of the soil respectively. The data sensed by these sensors is stored on the microcontroller and analyzed using machine learning algorithms like random forest based on which suggestions for the growth of the suitable crop are made. This project also has a methodology that focuses on using a convolutional neural network as a pr...

A vast fraction of the population of India considers agriculture as its primary occupation. The production of crops plays an important role in our country. Bad quality crop production is often due to either excessive use of fertilizer or using not enough fertilizer. The proposed system of IoT and ML is enabled for soil testing using the sensors, is based on measuring and observing soil parameters. This system lowers the probability of soil degradation and helps maintain crop health. Different sensors such as soil temperature, soil moisture, pH, NPK, are used in this system for monitoring temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and soil pH along with NPK nutrients of the soil respectively. The data sensed by these sensors is stored on the microcontroller and analyzed using machine learning algorithms like random forest based on which suggestions for the growth of the suitable crop are made. This project also has a methodology that focuses on using a convolutional neural network as a pr...

Two hundred years have passed since the question of subjectivity (re-interpreted through Kierkegaard’s existentialism) became central in modern philosophy. Over these two centuries, multiple theories addressed and questioned the borders between authentic subjectivity and an internalized panopticon of the hegemonic views that dominate the subject. Nevertheless, they still have to be definitively defined. As we may try to point Fake News (FN) is an opponent to subjectivity, and yet it comes from the subject. FN is the intentional spreading through new technologies of false information on a global level by subjects that use social media, a process influencing not only the sense of socio-political reality but also the concept of identity. Identities (personal or collective) are in general the combination of the socially determined understanding of ‘who I am’ and the socially and psychologically influenced ‘mental model’ of ‘what the world - and the self within it - should be’, all expre...

Agroecology is one of the oldest and noblest professions in India. Farmers face a lot of hardships while using traditional methods of farming in today's technologically centric world. Precision farming is a modern approach in comparison to traditional cultivation techniques.

This article is an outline of the current issue of Filosofija.Sociologija, thematically divided into five sections. Starting from the most abstract thematically one and going down to reflections on actualities. Here I try to give it a meaningful structure and a flavour of a general Zeitgeist residing now in our contemporary academia.

This article describes the ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) video-a visual form of technologically-mediated, intimacy-inducing sound performanceand its accompanying embodied, psychosensory effects as a mode of literacy production and reception that blurs the boundaries between what something might mean semantically and symbolically and what it could mean as a texture of sound whose pleasures are independent of rational thought. What, this article asks, do the affective, sonic entanglements of ASMR imply for literacy teaching, research and learning? Turning to a conceptual assemblage of non-representational theories, this article also draws on the creative possibilities of psychoanalysis. Referring to a number of ASMR videos on YouTube, this discussion considers three major challenges that this sensorially affective practice brings to literacy: radical forms of intimacy, oscillatory readings, and invitations to unintelligibility. This article then concludes by considering ASMR as a posthuman structure of feeling.

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actually support the process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents diffe...

As part of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, we held a oneday symposium, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, to discuss priorities for research on relationships and sex education (RSE) in a world where young people increasingly live, experience, and augment their relationships (whether sexual or not) within digital spaces. The introduction of statutory RSE in schools in England highlights the need to focus on improving understandings of young people and digital intimacies for its own sake, and to inform the development of learning resources. We call for more research that puts young people at its centre; foregrounds inclusivity; and allows a nuanced discussion of pleasures, harms, risks, and rewards, which can be used by those working with young people and those developing policy. Generating such research is likely to be facilitated by participation, collaboration, and communication with beneficiaries, between disciplines and across sectors. Taking ...

The theory of technological mediation aims to take technological artifacts seriously, recognizing the constitutive role they play in how we experience the world, act in it, and how we are constituted as (moral) subjects. Its quest for a compatible ethics has led it to Foucault’s “care of the self,” i.e., a transformation of the self by oneself through self-discipline. In this regard, technologies have been interpreted as power structures to which one can relate through Foucaultian “technologies of the self” or ascetic practices. However, this leaves unexplored how concrete technologies can actually support the process of self-care. This paper explores this possibility by examining one such technology: a gamified To-Do list app. Doing so, it first shows that despite the apparent straightforwardness of gamification, confrontation and shame play an important role in how the app motivates me to do better. Second, inspired by Ihde’s schema of human-technology relations, it presents diffe...

As part of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, we held a oneday
symposium, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and
policymakers, to discuss priorities for research on relationships and
sex education (RSE) in a world where young people increasingly
live, experience, and augment their relationships (whether sexual or
not) within digital spaces. The introduction of statutory RSE in
schools in England highlights the need to focus on improving
understandings of young people and digital intimacies for its own
sake, and to inform the development of learning resources. We call
for more research that puts young people at its centre; foregrounds
inclusivity; and allows a nuanced discussion of pleasures, harms,
risks, and rewards, which can be used by those working with young
people and those developing policy. Generating such research is
likely to be facilitated by participation, collaboration, and communication
with beneficiaries, between disciplines and across sectors.
Taking such an approach, academic researchers, practitioners, and
policymakers agree that we need a better understanding of RSE’s
place in lifelong learning, which seeks to understand the needs of
particular groups, is concerned with non-sexual relationships, and
does not see digital intimacies as disconnected from offline everyday
‘reality’.

Lee, N., Hewett, A., Rübner Jørgensen, C.H., Turner, J., Wade, A. and Weckesser, A., 2018. Children and sexting: The case for intergenerational co-learning. Childhood, p.0907568218777305.

Children’s sexting is presented as an emergent outcome of technology-based innovation in children’s peer-to-peer relations. We argue that it calls for creative responses that draw on adults’ and children’s understandings and views and on exchanges of these. We describe, and make the case for, intergenerational co-learning as a practice that could foster such creativity, as a pathway for children’s participation in the debate, and as a means by which media regulators, children’s service providers, and social media companies can consider and address their capabilities and responsibilities.

Executive Summary This submission outlines key findings around sexualisation, gender, sexuality and body image drawn from international research and over a decade of international research and from the investigators own projects. The methodologies informing these projects are sociological including qualitative focus groups, interviews and online observations, which places young people's voices and communications at the centre of the research. These methods offer often neglected in-depth, first hand and contextually rich experiences of how young people understand and navigate appearance norms and body image issues both online and in and around schools.