scholarly journals Communications ’ Efects on Politics and Social Change: A Study on Harold A. Innis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Mehmet Sebih Oruç
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Communication Tools ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media And Communication

The importance of communications on social change increasingly recognized in both academic and popular works. Te effect and presence of communications are felt in all aspects of human life and these tools are usually considered to have signifcant effects on human activities in the social, political and cultural spheres. Harold A. Innis is one of the frst scholar who studied and paid attention to that aspect of communications and came with one of the most original and provocative theory about media and communication systems. Innis’s theoretical legacy is particularly important nowadays as the use of these tools in life is increasing. However, there is not even one single article devoted to present his opinion in Turkish and this is an important missing part for the literature. Innis examined the communication tools on the basis of their relation with time and space. He examined them under two main categories: time-bias communications and space bias communications. He tried to understand what these communications mean today and what they have meant for civilizations throughout history. According to him, the means of communication have many cognitive and social effects and the history of civilization can only be understood when these effects are taken into account. In this article, his theories about technologies, communications and social change will be discussed and evaluated. In this context, the article has two main aims. First, to examine Innis’s works and his Teory in the context of his time. Second, to shortly summarize how communications affect society and human beings by giving some historical and contemporary examples. Te article argues that communications are incrisingly becoming both time and space bieas and thus it becomes difficult to understand their effect. Tat recuires more feld work to see all dimentions of the changes they cause.

Technological Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 64-81
Author(s):  
Enric Bas
Keyword(s):  
Social Evolution ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time

In our condition as human beings, we have experienced a love-and-hate relationship with technology since the very beginning: from primitive humans (probably scared the very first time they saw fire) to 19th century Luddites to the recent conspiracy theories that link 5G to COVID-19, human beings have dreaded technology. But, for bad or for good, machines—which could be loosely defined from an etymological point of view as “structures of any kind created by humans”—have been, are, and probably will be an essential part in the history of mankind, thus playing a fundamental in the social evolution of human. This chapter attempts to shed some light and provide some insights into plausible conjectures by exploring future developments, either in the short and medium or in the long term, which might result from a synergistic context where exponentially-increasing technological innovation may lead to a radical change, an evolutionary paradigm shift in human life and civilization, by reaching toward a post-technological era characterized by consciousness of the noosphere.

New Wars and Their Visual Representation: Dead Bodies without Graves/Mourne

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tuncay Şur ◽  
Betül Yarar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Public ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
War Photography ◽  
New Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This paper seeks to understand why there has been an increase in photographic images exposing military violence or displaying bodies killed by military forces and how they can freely circulate in the public without being censored or kept hidden. In other words, it aims to analyze this particular issue as a symptom of the emergence of new wars and a new regime of their visual representation. Within this framework, it attempts to relate two kinds of literature that are namely the history of war and war photography with the bridge of theoretical discussions on the real, its photographic representation, power, and violence.  Rather than systematic empirical analysis, the paper is based on a theoretical attempt which is reflected on some socio-political observations in the Middle East where there has been ongoing wars or new wars. The core discussion of the paper is supported by a brief analysis of some illustrative photographic images that are served through the social media under the circumstances of war for instance in Turkey between Turkish military troops and the Kurdish militants. The paper concludes that in line with the process of dissolution/transformation of the old nation-state formations and globalization, the mechanism and mode of power have also transformed to the extent that it resulted in the emergence of new wars. This is one dynamic that we need to recognize in relation to the above-mentioned question, the other is the impact of social media in not only delivering but also receiving war photographies. Today these changes have led the emergence of new machinery of power in which the old modern visual/photographic techniques of representing wars without human beings, torture, and violence through censorship began to be employed alongside medieval power techniques of a visual exhibition of tortures and violence.

The Property Species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart J. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Linguistics ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Symbolic Thought ◽  
Core Property ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? The Property Species explores how Homo sapiens acquires, perceives, and knows the custom of property, and why it might be relevant for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century. Arguing from some hard-to-dispute facts that neither the natural sciences nor the humanities—nor the social sciences squarely in the middle—are synthesizing a full account of property, this book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: All human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist. Integrating cognitive linguistics with the philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, this book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. The provocative implications are that property—not property rights—is an inherent fundamental principle of economics, and that legal realists and the bundle-of-sticks metaphor are wrong about the facts regarding property. Written by an economist who marvels at the natural history of humankind, the book is essential reading for experts and any reader who has wondered why people claim things as “Mine!,” and what that means for our humanity.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

scholarly journals The social struggle against death: Human strategies for immortality

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (13-14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Galić
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biological Part ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Social Struggle ◽  
The Social ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Human Death

Death is an infallible part of the human life, and what makes humandifferent from all other beings is fact that he knows that he isgoing to die. Knowing this, human beings are spending their wholelife knowing that the day of their end is going to come. It is clear thatdeath has its biological part, also as a huge event in the existenceof all life forms, including human, death has its philosophical pointof view, and finally, unlike some may disagree, death itself is a hugesocial phenomena as well, and as such, the social influence of deathdeserves close attention and its own part in the social science studies.This paper analyzes the presence of the death in human culture, includinginstitutions, rituals and beliefs following the discourse of lateZygmunt Bauman who left huge influence on this field of study. Sincethe earliest forms of communities, humans are trying to overcomethe death, the state of “after-life” and some form of immortality ofthe being is something that is common to all religions and beliefs everknown to mankind, which stands as a evidence that the final void ofnon-existence know to us as death is something that always presentedhorror in the mind of the humans.

The Second Royal Society Nuffield Lecture Anthropological models and social reality

1966 ◽  
Vol 165 (998) ◽  
pp. 20-34 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Social Anthropology ◽  
Know How ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Social Life

In trying to show you the character of social anthropology as an academic discipline, I might try to sketch some substantive and perhaps intriguing findings in the field, or the history of its development, or some of its major intellectual problems today. I have chosen the last of these alternatives, because by showing the general problems we are grappling with I hope to reveal to you, in part no doubt inadvertently, the ways that anthropologists think, and also how our difficulties in part arise from the character of the social reality itself, which we confront and try to understand. The fundamental questions which social anthropology asks are about the forms, the nature, and the extent of order in human social life, as it can be observed in the different parts of the world. There is no need to prejudge the extent of this order; as members of one society we know how unpredictable social life can be. But concretely, human life varies greatly around the world, and it seems possible to characterize its forms to some extent. We seek means systematically to discover, record and understand these forms.

INTERPRETATION OF SPACE AND TIME IN ONTOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY NAVOI

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-87
Author(s):  
Toji Omonovich Norov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Intelligence ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Holy Book

The universe, the space that make up their basis planets in it, their creation, the main essence of their creation, form, composition, meaning, movements, interactions, their influence on human life and activities, the role of man in the universe and in life on Earth, life, the criteria of activity and processes occurring in time and space have long been of interest to humanity. One of the main problems in the history of philosophy is the question of space and time. This problem was defined in different ways in the great schools of thought by thinkers of different periods. One of these great thinkers is Alisher Navoi. Navoi's works, along with other socio-philosophical themes, uniquely express and analyze the problems of the firmament and time. Its main feature is that it is based on the divine (pantheistic) religion, Islam, its holy book, the Koran and other theological sources, as well as on the secrets of nature and the Universe, the main miracle of Allah - human intelligence, the power of enlightenment, they are the key revealing all these secrets.

their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem by many readers today as humanly constructed, its not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them’ reconstruction in the poem is where we meet. (Defence of Poetry 86). In other words, we do not In his Discourse on Civil Life (1606), Lodowick see beyond, or outside, the virtues to something else Bryskett writes that Spenser is known to be very but rather through them as lenses. Only by so seeing well read in philosophy, both moral and natural, and through them may we share Spenser’s vision of that he intends to appeal to him to learn what moral human life from his moral perspective. It follows that philosophy is, ‘what be the parts thereof, whereby finally nothing outside the poem is needed to under-vertues are to be distinguished from vices’ (21). stand it, except (for us) the shared primary culture of Spenser rightly terms his poem ‘this present treatise’ its first audience. (I adapt the term ‘primary culture’ (in the current sense of the term) for his task is ‘True from the account by N. Frye 1990b:22–23 of ‘pri-vertue to aduance’ (V iii 3.8–9). One chief problem mary mythology’ or ‘primary concerns’ in contrast to is to separate virtue from vice, for what used to be ‘secondary concerns’, such as ideology.) called virtue ‘Is now cald vice; and that which vice To gain ‘an exact knowledge of the virtues’ was hight, | Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all’ (V needed to write The Faerie Queene, Spenser calls proem 4.2–3). Raleigh makes the same point in the upon the muses to reveal to him ‘the sacred noursery History of the World 1614:2.6.7: ‘some vertues | Of vertue’ (VI proem 3.1–2). Since he goes on to and some vices are so nicely distinguished, and so claim that the nursery was first planted on earth by resembling each other, as they are often confounded, the Gods ‘being deriu’d at furst | From heauenly and the one taken for the other’; and he praises The seedes of bounty soueraine’, for him the virtues exist Faerie Queene because Spenser has ‘formed right true transcendentally. As this nursery provides what vertues face herein’ (CV 2.3). The problem is noted Sidney calls ‘that idea or fore-conceit’ by which the in the opening cantos of the poem: in the argument poet’s skill is to be judged rather than by the poem to canto i, the Red Cross Knight is called ‘The itself, his effort as a poet is to plant its garden of Patrone of true Holinesse’, but he is so named only virtue in the minds of his readers so that they may after Archimago assumes his disguise. Then readers share his state of being ‘rauisht with rare thoughts are told – in fact, they are admonished – that ‘Saint delight’. Since ‘vertues seat is deepe within the mynd’, George himselfe ye would haue deemed him to be’ (ii however, he does not so much plant the virtues in 11.9), as even Una does. them as nurture what is already there. Today Spenser’s purpose may seem ideologically To spell out this point using the familiar Platonic innocuous but in his day those who called virtue vice, doctrine of anamnesis: while Spenser needed an exact and vice virtue, may well have regarded the poem knowledge of the virtues in order to write his poem, as subversive. But who were they? Most likely, the his readers need only to be reminded of what they pillars of society, such as Burghley (see IV proem already know (even today) but have largely forgotten 1.1–2n), theologians, such as John King who, in (especially today). What he finds deep within the 1597, complained that ‘instead of the writings of minds of his readers may be identified with the Moses and the prophets . . . now we have Arcadia, primary culture upon which his poem draws. It led and the Faëry Queene’ (cited Garrett 1996:139), him to use allegory, which, as Tuve cited by Roche and those religiously-minded for whom holiness 1964:30 explains, ‘is a method of reading in which meant professing correct doctrine; temperance we are made to think about things we already know’; meant life in a moral strait-jacket; chastity meant the and to use proverbs extensively, as Cincotta 1983 rejection of sexual love; friendship meant patriarchal explains, as a means to give authority to his poem. family ties; justice meant the justification of present Being primary, this culture is basic: simply expressed, authority; and courtesy meant the conduct of it is what we all know as human beings regardless of Elizabeth’s courtiers – in sum, those for whom virtue gender, race, religion, and class. It is what we just meant remaining subject to external law rather living know and have always known to be fair, right, and in the freedom of the gospel. just, both in our awareness of who we are and also Although generally Spenser overtly endorses the our relation to society and to some higher reality claims of noble blood, his poem values individual outside ourselves, both what it is and what it ought worth over social rank by ranking middle-class nur-

2014 ◽  
pp. 29-29
Keyword(s):  
Primary Culture ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
Moral Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

scholarly journals Witnessing, Remembering, and Testifying: Why the Past Is Special for Human Beings

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 428-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes B. Mahr ◽  
Gergely Csibra
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Social Effects ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

The past is undeniably special for human beings. To a large extent, both individuals and collectives define themselves through history. Moreover, humans seem to have a special way of cognitively representing the past: episodic memory. As opposed to other ways of representing knowledge, remembering the past in episodic memory brings with it the ability to become a witness. Episodic memory allows us to determine what of our knowledge about the past comes from our own experience and thereby what parts of the past we can give testimony about. In this article, we aim to give an account of the special status of the past by asking why humans have developed the ability to give testimony about it. We argue that the past is special for human beings because it is regularly, and often principally, the only thing that can determine present social realities such as commitments, entitlements, and obligations. Because the social effects of the past often do not leave physical traces behind, remembering the past and the ability to bear testimony it brings is necessary for coordinating social realities with other individuals.

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