Download or read book Carnal Resonance written by Susanna Paasonen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the modalities, affective intensities, and disturbing qualities of online pornography. Digital production tools and online networks have dramatically increased the general visibility, accessibility, and diversity of pornography. Porn can be accessed for free, anonymously, and in a seemingly endless range of niches, styles, and formats. In Carnal Resonance, Susanna Paasonen moves beyond the usual debates over the legal, political, and moral aspects of pornography to address online porn in a media historical framework, investigating its modalities, its affect, and its visceral and disturbing qualities. Countering theorizations of pornography as emotionless, affectless, detached, and cold, Paasonen addresses experiences of porn largely through the notion of affect as gut reactions, intensities of experience, bodily sensations, resonances, and ambiguous feelings. She links these investigations to considerations of methodology (ways of theorizing and analyzing online porn and affect), questions of materiality (bodies, technologies, and inscriptions), and the evolution of online pornography. Paasonen dicusses the development of online porn, focusing on the figure of the porn consumer, and considers user-generated content and amateur porn. She maps out the modality of online porn as hyperbolic, excessive, stylized, and repetitive, arguing that literal readings of the genre misunderstand its dynamics and appeal. And she analyzes viral videos and extreme and shock pornogaphy, arguing for the centrality of disgust and shame in the affective dynamics of porn. Paasonen's analysis makes clear the crucial role of media technologies—digital production tools and networked communications in particular—in the forms that porn takes, the resonances it stirs, and the experiences it makes possible.
Download or read book Bio A I From Embodied Cognition to Enactive Robotics written by Adam Safron and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even before the deep learning revolution, the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) was already changing drastically in the 90s. Embodied intelligence, it was proposed, must play a crucial role in the design of intelligent machines. This new wave was inspired by what is today known as Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science or E-Cognition, which considers that cognitive activity does not reduce to the intellectual capacities of agents being able to represent their environments. E-cognition set AI and robotics in a new direction, in which intelligent machines are required to interact with the environment, and where this interaction does not reduce to explicit representations or prespecified algorithms. These ideas revolutionized the way we think about intelligent machines and cognition, but these theoretical advances are only partially reflected in modern approaches to AI and machine learning (ML). Despite deeply impressive achievements, AI/ML still struggles to recapitulate the kinds of intelligence we find in natural systems, whether we are considering individual insects (e.g. simultaneous localization and mapping), or swarm behaviour (e.g. forum sensing and ensemble inferences), and especially the kinds of flexibility and high-level reasoning characteristic of human cognition.
Download or read book Postmodern Environmental Ethics written by Max Oelschlaeger and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-08-17 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the role of language in causing and in resolving the ecocrisis, showing that ecologically adaptive behavior can be facilitated through language. The authors explore the discourses of deep ecology, ecofeminism, Judeo-Christianity, quantum theory, and Native American world views, all to the end of empowering ecosocial change.
Download or read book Instructing Beginners in Faith written by Augustine of Hippo and published by New City Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As with very many of Augustine’s works, Instructing Beginners in Faith is a response to a request, an answer to questions put to him by others. In this case we know from the first words of the work itself that the one making the request is named Deogratias (Augustine calls him “brother”), and a couple of lines later we learn that he is a deacon in Carthage, the principal city of Proconsular Africa, where he enjoys popularity as a teacher of the faith. In the most general terms, he wanted Augustine to send him “something in writing which might be of use to him on the question of instructing beginners in faith (de catechizandis rudibus)”. The term rudes in this expression referred specifically to people who were approaching the Church for the first time with the wish to become Christians. Instructing Beginners in Faith has been frequently and creatively adapted to serve the needs of education in faith in many different contexts, including the education of clergy and religious education more generally. The two model catecheses that Augustine sketches not only continue to have relevance today but also provide an important insight into his understanding of the use of scripture and tradition. Augustine's awareness of the problems that religious educators face demonstrates his profound grasp of the human condition. Written as a reflection on the most suitable way of communicating the heart of Christian faith to those applying for membership of the Church.
Download or read book Boundary Images written by Giselle Beiguelman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are images made, and how should we understand their limits, capacities, and forces in digital media? While functioning as representations or mediations of the political, images also act through the technologies and social processes that they claim only to represent. In both capacities, images can be innovative, but they can also reproduce harmful phenomena such as racism, misogyny, and conspiracy. Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.
Download or read book Everyday Feminist Research Praxis written by Koen Leurs and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday feminist research practices. As a whole, the interventions – ranging from fashion modelling, child-birthing discourses and digital documentaries – show how feminist research praxis remains crucial in critically disentangling naturalized routines of daily life, which in turn enables the scrutiny of, for example, the arbitrariness of entrenched power relations and contradictory, personal and collective, everyday trajectories. Everyday Feminist Research Praxis, thus, energises possibilities for new forms of recognition, representation and redistribution of power.
Download or read book Snuff written by Neil Jackson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of so-called 'snuff movies' (films that allegedly document real acts of murder, specifically designed to 'entertain' and sexually arouse the spectator) represents a fascinating socio-cultural paradox. At once unproven, yet accepted by many, as emblematic of the very worst extremes of pornography and horror, moral detractors have argued that the mere idea of snuff constitutes the logical (and terminal) extension of generic forms that are dependent primarily upon the excitement, stimulation and, ultimately, corruption of the senses. Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media brings together scholars from film and media studies to assess the longevity of one of screen media's most enduring cultural myths. Thorough, provocative, and well argued, the contributions to this volume address areas ranging from exploitation movies, the video industry, trends in contemporary horror cinema, pornography and Web 2.0.
Download or read book Tumblr written by Katrin Tiidenberg and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-08-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Launched in 2007, tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counseling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for nonusers. Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to tumblr and its crucial role in shaping internet culture. Drawing on a decade of qualitative data, they trace the prominent social media practices of creativity, curation, and community-making, and reveal tumblr’s cultlike appeal and position in the social media ecosystem. The book demonstrates how diverse cultures can – in felt and imagined silos - coexist on a single platform and how destructive recent trends in platform governance are. The concept of “silosociality” is introduced to critically re-think social media, interrogate what kinds of sociality it affords, and what (unintended) consequences arise. This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone interested in an influential but overlooked platform.
Download or read book Camming written by Angela Jones and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first inside look at how sex workers use webcams to make a living The erotic webcam industry, also known as “camming,” is a thriving global business. Angela Jones takes readers inside this multi-billion dollar industry, revealing how its workers experience intimacy, community, empowerment—and, as she compellingly argues, pleasure. Drawing on in-depth interviews, survey data, web analytics, and more, Jones highlights not only the dangers, but also the rewards, of working in one of the most taboo corners of the Internet. She provides an inside look at the public and private shows between cam models and their customers, from exotic dancing and pornographic videos, to masturbation shows and erotic chatrooms. A fascinating, much-needed glimpse into the lives of cam models, Camming takes us behind the webcam lens to experience the power of erotic labor in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Sex in the Digital Age written by Paul G Nixon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-16 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shifts in societal development resulting from economic and technological advancements have had an impact upon the development of human sexuality and behaviour, and with the expansion of developments such as the Internet and associated technologies, it is likely that further societal shifts will ensue. This book recognises the importance of new digital spaces for discourses surrounding sexuality, examining issues such as pornography; sex education and health; LGBTQ sexualities; polysexuality or polyamory; abstention; sexual abuse and violence; erotic online literature; sex therapy; teledildonics; sex and gaming; online dating; celebrity porn; young people and sexual media; and sexting and sextainment, all of which are prominently affected by the use of digital media. With case studies drawn from the US, the UK and Europe, Sex in the Digital Age engages in discussion about the changing acceptance of sex in the 21st century and part played in that by digital media, and considers the future of sex and sexuality in an increasingly digital age. It will therefore appear to scholars across the social sciences with interests in gender and sexuality, new technologies and media and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Afterglow of Women s Pornography in Post Digital China written by K. Jacobs and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinese artists, activists, and netizens are pioneering a new order of pornographic representation that is in critical dialogue with global entertainment media. Jacobs examines the role of sex-positive feminists and queer communities to investigate pornography's "afterglow" (a state of crisis and decay within digital culture).
Download or read book Extreme Cinema written by Kerner Aaron Kerner and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube 'reaction videos', Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.
Download or read book Biblical Porn written by Jessica Johnson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1996 and 2014, Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill Church multiplied from its base in Seattle into fifteen facilities spread across five states with 13,000 attendees. When it closed, the church was beset by scandal, with former attendees testifying to spiritual abuse, emotional manipulation, and financial exploitation. In Biblical Porn Jessica Johnson examines how Mars Hill's congregants became entangled in processes of religious conviction. Johnson shows how they were affectively recruited into sexualized and militarized dynamics of power through the mobilization of what she calls "biblical porn"—the affective labor of communicating, promoting, and embodying Driscoll's teaching on biblical masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, which simultaneously worked as a marketing strategy, social imaginary, and biopolitical instrument. Johnson theorizes religious conviction as a social process through which Mars Hill's congregants circulated and amplified feelings of hope, joy, shame, and paranoia as affective value that the church capitalized on to grow at all costs.
Download or read book Handbook of Research Methods and Applications for Mobilities written by Monika Büscher and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-28 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting the variety and diversity of mobile methods and their applications, this comprehensive Handbook illuminates the multiple dimensions and transdisciplinary nature of mobilities research, from transport to tourism, cargo to information as well as physical, virtual and imaginative mobilities. It brings together key contributions on the state of the art of qualitative and quantitative research, multimethod combinations and co-creation methods within the mobilities paradigm.
Download or read book Gender and Sexuality in the European Media written by Cosimo Marco Scarcelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together original empirical and theoretical insights into the complex set of relations which exist between age, gender, sexualities and the media in Europe. This book investigates how engagements with media reflect people’s constructions and understandings of gender in society, as well as articulations of age in relation to gender and sexuality; the ways in which negotiations of gender and sexuality inform people’s practices with media, and not least how mediated representations may reinforce or challenge social hierarchies based in differences of gender, sexual orientation and age. In doing so, it showcases new and innovative research at the forefront of media and communication practice and theory. Including contributions from both established and early career scholars across Europe, it engages with a wide range of hotly debated topics within the context of gender, sexuality and the media, informing academic, public and policy agendas. This collection will be of interest to students and researchers in gender studies, media studies, film and television, cultural studies, sexuality, ageing, sociology and education.
Download or read book Pornography and Seriality written by S. Schaschek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Repetition and seriality are inherent in pornography and is constitutive for its functionality as a film genre, an industry, and an area of gender studies. By linking the styles of the genre to processes of serial production, consumption, and discussion, Schaschek questions the dominant assumptions about pornography and the stability of the genre.
Download or read book Being Gorgeous written by Jacki Willson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being Gorgeous explores the ways in which extravagance, flamboyance and dressing up can open up possibilities for women to play around anarchically with familiar stereotypical tropes of femininity. This is protest through play - a pleasurable misbehaviour that reflects a feminism for the twenty first century. Willson discusses how, whether through pastiche, parody, or pure pleasure, artists, artistes and indeed the spectators themselves can operate in excess of the restrictive images which saturate our visual culture. By referring to a wide spectrum of examples, including Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Matthew Barney, Dr Sketchy's, Audacity Chutzpah, Burly Q and Carnesky's Ghost Train, Being Gorgeous demonstrates how contemporary female performers embody, critique and thoroughly relish their own representation by inappropriately re-appropriating femininity.
