Dear Colleagues,

The international, peer-reviewed journal Philosophies invites submissions for a Special Issue devoted to exploring the philosophy of communication technology. Scholars in diverse fields acknowledge that the most central force in social change is the development and spread of new communication technologies or mediated forms. Indeed, the whole of human history and civilization can meaningfully be divided into three major eras based upon the technologies of communication that prevailed at a given time: primary orality, the literate era, and the electronic age. The literate era is often further subdivided into written (chirographic) and print (typographic) cultures, while the electronic age is often organized according to analog and digital media. Scholars further agree that technologies of communication shape both what we know (i.e., ideology) through the content of their messages and how we know (i.e., epistemology) through their structural form. In short, technologies of communication create the underlying conditions of our social world; these conditions, in turn, condition us, shaping both what and how we know.

This Special Issue invites essays exploring any aspect of the relationship between philosophy and communication technology. In the context of this special issue, communication technologies are understood to be any extension of the human sensorium. Potential topics include but are not limited to (1) historical studies related to the development of communication technologies and their role in transforming some aspect of our social, cultural, educational, religious, and/or political lives and experience; (2) explorations of ethical questions and considerations raised by new and emerging communication technologies, especially digital media, related to artificial intelligence, the proliferation of mis- and disinformation, free speech and censorship, the spread of hate speech, and other online anti-social behaviors such as bullying, doxing, or mobbing; (3) analyses of specific media texts or messages that pay attention to how the form and content of those messages foster particular habits of mind; and (4) examinations of the dynamic interplay between communication technologies and contexts, inquiring for instance into how interpersonal, family, organizational, and/or public communication is altered by changing communication technologies, and the consequences of those changes for knowledge, thought, feeling, and their expression.

Abstract Submission Deadline: 6 November 2023

Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 11 December 2023

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200-500 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (BrianOtt@MissouriState.edu) or the Philosophies editorial office (philosophies@mdpi.com). The guest editor will review abstracts to ensure proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Brian L. Ott
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• communication technology
• media ecologies
• medium theory
• digital media
• ideology
• epistemology
• media ethics
• media history
• human sensorium

Title: From Subjects to Assemblages: Insights from Oldboy

Abstract: For decades, the French structuralist Louis Althusser’s perspective on media as ideological state apparatus (ISA) that interpellate individuals as subjects dominated the understanding of media’s role and function. Both the technological features of the cinema and the features of classical Hollywood cinema worked to create the illusion of a coherent, autonomous individuals solving conflicts. This process, in service of furthering the agendas of capitalism and liberal humanism, has been a central feature of ideological state apparatus’ discourses. Media theorists argued that the cinema, thus, served an ideological function not only in its general content but in the very nature of its form and presentation. The concept of interpellation still provides a useful framework in those cases when the audience seem to react in sync to the ideological cues within a media text, especially when the cues relate to individual psychology and character identification. In this essay, I offer an alternative to Althusser's notion of interpellation by suggesting that media transform individuals into assemblages rather than subjects. Drawing on the works of Deleuze and Guattari and DeLanda, I argue that media encourage individuals to become extensions of media themselves by mobilizing representations, feelings, but also habits. To pursue this argument, I undertake an analysis of a South Korean film Oldboy. Although Park Chan-wook’s award-winning adaptation of a Japanese manga series of the same title was released in 2003, its enduring significance as a masterpiece in Korean Cinema remains evident. As a result of a continued widespread interest in the film, Oldboy was restored and remastered in the summer of 2023. Partly due to its polysemic properties, the film has garnered considerable attention from cult film enthusiasts, popular film critics as well as academics. In this essay, I offer my interpretation of the film as an example that demonstrates how, in a contemporary moment, media mobilizes individuals to become not only subjected to the ideologies, but also become appendages of media and consequently perform its function

Title: On Splits, Big and Little: Media, Mediation, and the Tensions that Bring Joy and Terror

Abstract: There is a long philosophical tradition, especially in the Hegelian vein, that places an emphasis on the progressive, transformational role of mediation, envisioned as the key process in constituting syntheses that bridge gaps, transcend difference, and catalyze movement and change. This tradition finds uptake in much media theory as well, with media technologies conceived as extensions or prostheses that create connection, relations, and communication, whose root word connotes communion and community. In the rhetoric of some media theory, Silicon-valley acolytes, and commercial propagandists, connectivity, sharing, and interactivity hold a preeminent, unquestioned, undefined, almost religious significance. Besides emblematizing the mythical “dream of communication,” in John Durham Peter’s terms, this rhetoric elides something more phenomenological and fundamental about media technology – its capacity to split as much as bridge. Besides extending, media operate via splitting human perceptual and affective capacities, and it is this split that enables their generation of joy (their almost addictive attraction) as well as their innervation of insecurity and instability that at their most intense feel more like terror, as the emergent moniker “doomscrolling” aptly denotes. Recently, it has become more common to encounter rhetoric – from Black Mirror to critical media theory to Reddit boards like QAnon Casualties and In the Fox Hole – which stresses the terror much more than the joy. My prior scholarship contributes to this trend, positing a Big Split between the temporality and spatiality of social media that explains the seemingly desperate intensity of the present moment. This “big split” generates a “big tension” suffusing public screens and the lives of those who encounter them. In this essay, I focus on how the big split is experienced in the form of innumerable little splits, like my own recent divorce and the aforementioned reddit boards in which users bemoan and mourn the loss of loved ones to Qanon conspiracies or Fox News propaganda. The claim made here is not just that media technology can be used for evil, too. These little splits, this essay argues, stem from more fundamental and phenomenological characteristics of media technology, which operate by dividing and thereby placing into relation perceptual and affective capacities and capabilities. Such media-enabled splits can, at times, feel like an extension, a transcendence of time and space, a genuine connection – in short, a mediation in the Hegelian sense. Yet, besides for the extensive characteristics, the proliferation of media technology introduces intensive changes as well. I contend one way to conceptualize these intensive changes is as a saturation, and I explicate how such media saturation unfolds, via cognitive pathways of confounding, blurring, confusion, and distraction, that ensure the multiplication of little splits as manifestations of the cumulative, ecological effect of everyday habits. In short, media enable affecto-perceptual splits, which generate little splits whose ecological consequence entails big splits and big tensions. These splits and tensions block transcendence, impede the existentially necessary forms of long-term and wholistic thought, crashing us all back down to earth as we feel endlessly compelled to enjoy scrolling our own doom.

Title: Navigating the Complex Terrain of Photography and Temporality

Abstract: Over the last 15 years, there has been a transformative shift in photography theories from considering the individual photograph's connection to pastness, memory, loss and death (Barthes 1980, Sontag 1977, Benjamin 1931) towards exploring photographic imagery as shared (Murray 2008), networked (Rubinstein & Sluis 2008, Autenrieth 2018), circulating (Pelizzari & Siegel 2021, Moskatova, 2021) in a ubiquitous (Hand 2012) present. However, such an important shift from the singular image to photographs as serial, networked, shared and circulating brings a problematic understanding of time. The article claims that the criticism of linking photography and pastness is superficial and that the emphasis on the present simultaneity and even the future needs to be better thought through. The article will combine Patrick Maynard's concept of photography (1989, 1997, 2017) as a family of technologies with Paul Ricoeur's complex conception of time, a way of thinking about time that has received surprisingly little attention (and ended up in the shadow of Ricoeur's thinking about time and narrative). In the third volume of this great study, Ricoeur discusses his way through a series of philosophical conceptions of time from Aristotle and Augustine via Kant to Hegel. He sorts them into two major categories of time, on either side of what CP Snow called the two cultures (for Ricoeur indicated as the tension between the voluntary and the involuntary), then builds a complex bridge between these two major categories of time, the time of physics and the perceived time to put it simply. Ricoeur does not discuss photography, but the complexity of this conceptual time apparatus will prove itself useful when discussing time and photography. To get a better grasp of photography as a technology, Patrick Maynard's historically nuanced and technically flexible concept of photography as a family of technologies will be integrated. An essential aspect of Maynard's philosophy of photography is that he does not reduce photography to representation but also takes photography into account as an inscription and measuring instrument. The purpose of the article is to develop a concept of time that can provide a better understanding of today's image-sharing culture and the previous preoccupation with photography and the past. References: Autenrieth, U. 2018. Family photography in a networked age Barthes, R. 1980. Camera Lucida Benjamin, W. 1931. A Short History of Photography Hand, M. (2012). Ubiquitous photography. Maynard, P. 1989. Talbot's Technologies: Photographic Depiction, Detection, and Reproduction Maynard, P. 1997. The Engine of Photography. Maynard, P. 2017. Photo Mensura Moskatova, O. 2021. Images on the Move: Materiality-Networks-Formats Murray, S. (2008). Digital images, photo-sharing, and our shifting notions of everyday aesthetics Pelizzari, M.A. and Siegel, S. 2021. Circulating Photographs: A Special Issue of History of Photography. Ricoeur, P. 1985. Time and Narrative Volume 3 (Part IV. Section 1: the aporetics of Temporality, and section 2: Poetics of narrative: history, fiction, time) Rubinstein, D. and Sluis, K. 2008. LIFE MORE PHOTOGRAPHIC. Mapping the networked image. Sontag, S. 1977. On Photography

Title: Generative AI and the Political Song

Abstract: Abstract With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, there is an increasing need to study communication and media through the lens of AI. Particularly, recent developments in generative AI saw inventions of fast and easy tools that can produce visual, speech, text and audio content. This has raised concerns of copyright infringements and potential misinformation among several democratic societies. Particularly, both the United States of America (USA) and India are on the precipice of elections (in 2024) and have already encountered several instances of generative AI mimicking voices of political leaders including President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Christopher, 2023; Klee, 2023; Isenstadt, 2023). The focus of this paper is on the subversive generative AI trend involving users creating renditions of popular culture songs as though they are voiced by Biden, Trump and Modi. I critique two popular sub-trends: 1) A user-generated Instagram trend involving a fictional romantic relationship between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The trend involves using generative AI to recreate popular Indian romantic songs (in multiple languages). The trend has Modi singing to Meloni. 2) A user-generated YouTube trend involving popular song recreations as voiced by Biden and Trump (through generative AI). The trend has Biden and Trump singing a duet. I analyze audience reactions and conversations in the comment sections of the Instagram reels and YouTube videos. While both these trends vary in their mode and cultural context, they provide an opportunity to uncover several implications of generative AI technologies. Some of the implications are: 1) Inviting general users to reject copyright regulations and subvert political authority. 2) Potential for misinformation. 3) Ability to inform people of both the advantages and risks of generative AI. 4) Potential uses of generative AI in political campaign ads and political music. Generative AI technologies provide agency for general public to freely create content and subvert authority while at the same time presenting an avenue for misinformation. Therefore, in the critique, I take a balanced approach with what I call a “cautious embrace” of AI technologies.

Title: Ontology Represented by Media

Abstract: Nature states no ‘facts’, these come only within statements devised by human beings to refer to the seamless web of actuality around them(Walter Ong, 1982). When scientific paradigms change, humans renew “the whole conceptual web and laid down again on nature whole.” (Thomas Kuhn, 1970) In this mind, there are two ontologies, one is the ontology that Nature never states; the other is the ontology recognized by human beings and represented with media. Therefore, media are the technical basis of epistemology. Keywords: media technology; Character; Carrier; Copy; Characteristics of Communication system; Cognitive tools; a general cognitive tool; This paper reviews the history of human knowledge evolution from the perspective of media. Firstly, this paper defines media technology through four dimensions - symbol, carrier, publish, and characteristics of communication. Secondly, it figures out a general cognitive tool composed of "hard" technologies and "soft" arts. Thirdly, it reviews the history of human cognitive evolving in the ecological environment of oral, papyrus and scribe, printing, electronic media and digital media, to underline the role of media technology in the evolution of human cognition. Finally, it summarizes how media technology has led to the transformation of human cognition and knowledge production.

Title: Serres’s Philosophy of Media

Abstract: Contemporary French philosopher Michel Serres has out-of-the-rut thoughts about many things, including media. This article focuses on his understanding of the genealogy of media, the notion of exo-Darwinism, and his forward-looking attitude toward technology. An alternative, counterintuitive take on human nature will be revealed as the discussion proceeds. The article ends on a note of what is irreplaceable about humans in an age when artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving.