D.E. Wittkower

“Ender’s Game is one of the most beloved science fiction novels of all time, in large part because of the deeper questions it forces the reader to contemplate. Ender’s Game and Philosophy uses that same attribute as a jumping off point into discussions that would be at home anywhere from a sci-fi chatroom to a bar full of philosophy PhD’s, blending pop culture with lessons from Plato, Aquinas, and Walzer.”

P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century and Children at War, Director of the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence.



“Ender’s Game and Philosophy” brilliantly captures the philosophical richness and contemporary relevance of this science-fiction classic, exploring its provocative implications for everything from modern drone warfare and just war theory to the nature of other minds, the limits of moral responsibility and the ethics of the ‘noble lie.’ Yet perhaps its most original contributions explore a subject too often passed over by philosophers – our special duties to children, and the dangers that contemporary political, educational and parenting techniques may pose for their moral development.  A must-read for fans of the novel, and for anyone seeking to understand its enduring hold on the philosophical imagination.”

Shannon Vallor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University and author of 21st Century Virtue.



“For those interested in taking up Orson Scott Card’s challenge to decode “the layers of meaning” in his books, this is a stimulating addition to the Ender series.  The essays here range from the ethics of war and cheating in sports to the extended mind, queer theory, empathy, and Hinduism.  In each case the authors thoughtfully engage with the Ender books to draw out philosophical challenges and insights that will surprise and illuminate.  A thoughtful companion to the Ender series and an invigorating introduction to philosophy for fans.”

Kevin Macnish, Teaching Fellow in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds and consultant on automated surveillance

A couple reviews from Amazon:

Little did I know that there was a philosopher lurking within me! Thanks to D. Wittkower's "The Philosopher's Book of Questions & Answers- Questions to Open Your Mind", I've gotten to know my philosopher self and many of my peers in ways I'd not before. Several of us have been reading this excellent book and meeting monthly for informal discussions of the thought-provoking questions posed and then addressed within their historical, philosophical contexts-- usually 3 brief topics per gathering. Dr. Wittkower has beautifully organized a great collection of life's universal questions into an easy-to-read and digest format. He writes with clarity, insight and humor, making philosophy accessible and relevant to contemporary daily life, and, dare I say entertaining.. Who'd have thought a book of questions and answers could be a page turner? In this fast- paced, digital world, it's refreshing to find a book that encourages us to slow down and ponder the essence of life as did those a thousand years ago, those who came and went before I -Phones and Facebook! This book can be enjoyed equally by individuals, couples, discussion groups, book groups, dinner party attendees (!), students, or just as a great tool to have on hand for conversation starters. It would be equally at home at the kitchen table, the nightstand, in a classroom, or as a companion on a long train ride. I will be giving this book as a gift and I highly recommend it. Beth M., Oregon


This book is an excellent and personalized introduction to philosophical concepts for the lay reader. You'll want your own copy of this book in order to literally fill-in-the-blanks, answering philosophical questions about your life and thoughts, and then reading the intro to concepts that relate to the subject to help you see where you stand on philosophical issues. It's a fantastic read for someone who would like to learn more about philosophy and have a guide to help you understand how you can make sense of your own life. This book is the guide. In this regard, the book fills a niche in philosophy that I've not seen from any other book. It's both self-directed learning (you can skip the topics that really don't interest you), part self-help (you can better understand yourself), and part general overview of key philosophical issues. It's obvious D.E. Wittkower wants to make philosophy accessible for all, and he does this beautifully.

That said, I've been thinking about how to use this book in an intro philosophy course, and, while I think some of the exercises for self-reflection would be good, I would hesitate to use it in its entirety because, though the material gives and excellent overview, it doesn't delve deeply enough into any one issue with enough rigor for a college-level course. This book also spends a great deal of time on "continental" traditions in philosophy, which it does well, but I would want to integrate more "pragmatist" and "analytic" traditions in a course. If I were teaching intro philosophy to non-traditional and returning students, I might be more likely to use this as a text.

That said, you should get a copy for your own use and enjoyment. It might not be a perfect college textbook - but that makes it all the better for most audiences, right?

"“Philosophy and science fiction have never been more exquisitely or fruitfully married than in the works of Philip K. Dick. These accessible and insightful essays deftly succeed in their task of clearly articulating broader philosophical matters along with their fine details and nuances as explored in P.K. Dick¹s worlds. Their fortunate readers will (re)turn to both philosophy and the writings of Philip K. Dick with new insight and expanded sensibilities ¬ and be further rewarded in both domains as a result.”
—Charles Ess, author of Digital Media Ethics, and co-editor of Trust and Virtual Worlds and Information Technology Ethics

“The works of Philip K. Dick have long proved to be fertile ground for the cinematic imagination and now, as demonstrated by Philip K. Dick and Philosophy, they prove to be equally fertile ground for the philosophical imagination. As these contributors show, some of the deepest questions that we confront – questions about identity, free will, and our place in the universe – are perfectly illustrated by the memorable characters populating Dick’s fictional worlds, from the Nexus-6 androids, to the Precogs, to the customers of Rekal, Inc. For anyone who’s ever wondered if they might be a replicant, this book should be required reading.”
—Amy Kind, contributor to Star Trek and Philosophy and Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy.

“Wittkower has assembled an impressive collection of original and thought-provoking essays exploring a vast range of philosophical topics and displaying the breadth and depth of Dick’s writing with great style. Philip K. Dick and Philosophy is an intelligent, exciting, and highly entertaining read that will be valued by academic philosophers and philosophically-inclined readers of Dick alike.”
—Marya Schechtman, author of The Constitution of Selves

“Philip K. Dick was one of the 20th century’s most penetrating writers concerned with the human condition. Mortality and self-knowledge obsessed him and his work on these topics is some of the most thoughtful we have seen. Amazingly, Dylan Wittkower has managed to assemble a collection of thinkers who not only understand Dick but whose essays will help the rest of us understand him better. This is a collection of substantial writings each of which contributes to P.K. Dick scholarship (a subject worthy of such concern) and contributes to a humanistic side of philosophy we have not seen enough of lately.”
—Joseph C. Pitt, author of Thinking About Technology"

"This is a brilliant book, don't miss it. It is funny and intelligent, conceptually deep and enlightening. The world is being radically changed by information and communication technologies and the essays collected in this volume help to make sense of some of the new intellectual challenges facing humanity".

—Luciano Floridi, author of The Philosophy of Information

"Facebook has evolved into a significant cultural platform, home to everything from folks hanging out to serious political movements. By critically interrogating everyday practices involving Facebook, Facebook and Philosophy offers an insightful examination of our mediated lives. This book is a must-read for anyone who doubts the social importance of Facebook (and a sheer delight for those obsessed with updating their status)."

danah boyd, co-author of "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out"


http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/facebook.htm

“I not only enjoyed the book, it gave me several new perspectives on a character I thought I knew inside and out. Mr. Monk and Philosophy is a fascinating, funny, and perceptive collection that analyzes Monk like he would a crime scene—and succeeds in solving the greatest Monk mystery of all: Who is Adrian Monk?”

—Lee Goldberg, writer of several Monk TV episodes and author of the bestselling Adrian Monk novels, including Mr. Monk Is Miserable

http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/monk.htm

"The iPod is changing our relationship to music, but also to the spoken word, personal space, and design, and the iPod aesthetic is beginning to affect our expectations of education, community, and engagement. iPod and Philosophy brings real thought to these avenues and more!"

—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/ipod.htm

Academia.edu generated this entry based on mentions. The correct paper for this reference is titled "Principles of Anti-Discriminatory Design," below.

Landon Winner has argued that ‘artifacts have politics’, demonstrating that code can have discriminatory effects, but work in philosophy of technology has not identified what kinds of user exclusion constitute an injustice. Previous theoretical work on affordances has also left non-affordances substantially untheorized, providing no clear basis for distinguishing problematic from unproblematic non-affordances. This paper presents a three-fold division of non-affordances as exclusionary of users due to (a.i) unproblematic mutually exclusive proper functions, due to (a.ii) unproblematic demographically distributed service provision, and due to (b) problematic discriminatory exclusion. Within this third category, two kinds of discriminatory exclusion are identified: (b.i) direct exclusion through interfaces that do not accommodate relevant user groups, and (b.ii) indirect exclusion through recapitulation of existing social prejudices. Within discriminatory forms of exclusion, (b), two ...

The papers in this issue of First Monday were originally presented as a series of panels at the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. This short introduction explains the impetus behind the organization of these panels — which was to document diversity in approaches to the study of Internet economies — and briefly introduces each paper by locating them in the nexus between political economy and cultural studies.

Early and persistent scholarly concerns with online identity emphasized the ways that computer–mediated communications have allowed new, inventive, and creative presentations of self, and the lack of connection between online identity and the facts of off–line life. After the ascendency and following ubiquity of Facebook, we find our online lives transformed. We have not only seen online identity reconnected to off–line life, but we have seen, through the particular structures of social networking sites, our online lives subjected to newfound pressures to unify self–presentations from various constitutive communities; pressures different from and in some ways greater than those of off–line life. After describing identity in computer–mediated communications prior to Facebook, and investigating the kinds of changed conditions brought about in social networking sites, I put forth a dramauthentic model of post–Facebook online identity. This model is comprised of three methods of exposur...

This chapter seeks to further develop, define, and differentiate human-technics alterity relations within postphenomenological philosophy of technology. A central case study of the Alexa digital assistant establishes that digital assistants require the adoption of the intentional stance, and illustrates that this structural requirement is different from anthropomorphic projection of mindedness onto technical objects. Human-technics alterity relations based on projection are then more generally differentiated from human-technics alterity relations based on actual encoded pseudo-mental contents, where there are matters of fact that directly correspond to user conceptualizations of “intentions” or “knowledge” in technical systems or objects. Finally, functions and user benefits to different alterity relations are explored, establishing that there is a meaningful set of cases where the projection of a mind in human-technics alterity relations positively impacts technical functions and user experiences.

We argue that information literacy instruction that aims at developing students’ critical thinking habits should address how safeguards in the information cycle fail. We argue that such “short circuits” in the information cycle can be best engaged with at a “middle distance”—not so distant from students’ lived experience that they seem irrelevant, but not so close that students can’t gain a critical distance—and illustrate this framework with three such cases that concern moral panics about new technologies. We hold that instruction using this framework will help learners critically assess sources while retaining a strong but realistic appreciation for procedural supports for epistemic responsibility like peer review and balanced journalism.

The overwhelming majority of contemporary discussion of privacy focuses on personally identifiable information as property, and research on privacy nearly always finds, in what is called “the privacy paradox,” that users don’t care enough and in the right way about “privacy” as it has been framed in legal and technical contexts. This is a strikingly normative perspective, assuming that users’ mental models must be reformed in order to conform with legal-juridical models of privacy rather than designing systems to follow users’ intuitive mental models. It might be productive in a number of different ways to instead first ask in what way people do in fact care about privacy and to design and redesign policies to afford this good rather than trying to change human values to conform to our legal-technical environment. 

In this chapter, I outline an interpersonal phenomenology of privacy oriented by ethics of care, considering privacy as it appears in parenting, friendship, romantic and sexual relationships, and care for elderly and disabled persons. This phenomenology identifies three distinctive dynamics of privacy in interpersonal contexts, having to do with autonomy, intimacy, and consent. These elements of the phenomenology of privacy in interpersonal contexts are then applied to a variety of kinds of IoT devices and systems: GPS navigators, the Amazon Alexa virtual assistant, Nest, and two medical robots—PARO and RIBA.

The most distinctive and useful of these differences are drawn together into conclusions on two major themes. First, that privacy in a legal-juridical context is commodified relative to privacy in interpersonal contexts: in the legal-juridical context, loss of privacy is framed as negative loss where it may appear instead as a positive gain in interpersonal contexts. Second, the strongly divergent understanding of consent as needing constant renewal rather than being a box to be checked in clickthrough licensing seems to demand transformative reforms from companies interested in engineering ethics.

Crowdfunding remediates pre-capitalist European patronage models of artistic creation with an altered affective economy—one in which artists create within and for communities that identify with the artist and their vision. This article critiques the ideal of autonomous art and uses the ethics of care in order to advance a model of the affective dynamics of the artist-community relationship in heteronomous art, which is applied to crowdfunding in order to distinguish between artist-fan relations which are harmed by heteronomy and those which are supported and enriched by them.

Crowdfunding remediates pre-capitalist European patronage models of artistic creation with an altered affective economy—one in which artists create within and for communities that identify with the artist and their vision. This article critiques the ideal of autonomous art and uses the ethics of care in order to advance a model of the affective dynamics of the artist-community relationship in heteronomous art, which is applied to crowdfunding in order to distinguish between artist-fan relations which are harmed by heteronomy and those which are supported and enriched by them.

Buying music from labels or retailers in our current intellectual property rights regime and copyright-based industry context (1) fails to appropriately support artists, (2) acts against artists' autonomy, (3) hinders the development and accessibility of culture, and (4) reinforces a relationship to art, music, creation, and creativity which is commodified rather than active, and thereby stifles human potential by diminishing the quality of life in our societies. In other words, paying into the copyright industries, as they currently exist, means being complicit in undermining everything that copyright law is meant to promote, and thus means being complicit in acting against the explicit intention of the constitutional basis of copyright law in the United States.

This chapter develops a full theory of discriminatory technologies grounded in Heideggerian, Latourian, and Ihdean theoretical structures and demonstrates its applicability to a wide and widening range of forms of normativity, exclusion, and discrimination, taking place across intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, trans/cisgender identity, disability, and religious identity. Technologies, technical systems, and artifacts considered are wide-ranging, and include algorithms, adhesive bandages, human resource management policies, calendars, VR systems, carpentry, strollers, photographic film formulation and printing, video game character classes, and stairs.

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is juridically conceived and articulated. By considering exchanges of personal information in a human-to-human online informational economy — being friends on social networking sites — we can identify an alternate set of concerns: consent, respect, lurking, and creepiness. I argue that these concerns will provide a better guide to both users and companies about prudence and ethics in information economies than the existing discourse around ‘privacy.’

Was heißt Gamification? That is: what is called gamification?—but also, what calls upon us to gamify? What is it, in our age, that is such that gamification should emerge within it, should be called forth by it?

A reading of gamification through Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, providing an analysis of what makes some forms of gamification life-affirming and true to the earth, while so many others are nihilist.

Full volume here: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/digital-dionysus/

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the context of standpoint epistemology.

Outline of a full theory of discriminatory technologies, based on Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian (Ihde, Latour) philosophy of technology. Addresses how white, male, cis, hetero, able, Christian normativity is constructed phenomenologically and microphenomenologically, through interaction with and through technological artifacts such as hand-tools, photographic film, calendars, résumés, strollers, search engines, and avatars.

Unedited early pre-publication draft, posted for commentary and discussion only. Please contact dwittkow@odu.edu prior to citation or use.

On new dynamics in organizational psychology, self- and group-identity, character, and integrity in an age of social media,

"Organizations may then have a similar relation to our integrity as does our character. Our character is formed by a history of actions and interactions, but we may not identify with the actions that it brings us to habitually perform. When we recognize our vices—e.g., intemperance—and seek to act in accordance with our values and beliefs, we act against our character and contribute thereby to reforming our habits and character to better align with the version of ourselves with which we identify. Organizations may similarly bring us, through their own form of inertia and habituation, to act in ways contrary to our values and beliefs. A confrontation with this contradiction through context collapse may help us to better recognize the organization’s vices and to act according to the version of ourselves, in that organizational context, with which we identify—and contribute thereby to reforming our organization to better align with our values, and with its values as well."

I argue that a new virtue (interactivity) emerges in SNS, along with associated vices (lurking and creeping). Consideration of this interpersonal virtue of caring attention can also help improve relationships between persons and (corporate or governmental) non-persons by shifting attention from justice and privacy to intimacy, care, and recognition.

Early and persistent scholarly concerns with online identity emphasized the ways that computer-mediated communications have allowed new, inventive, and creative presentations of self, and the lack of connection between online identity and the facts of offline life. After the ascendency and following ubiquity of Facebook, we find our online lives transformed. We have not only seen online identity reconnected to offline life, but we have seen, through the particular structures of social networking sites, our online lives subjected to newfound pressures to unify self-presentations from various constitutive communities; pressures different from and in some ways greater than those of offline life. After describing identity in computer-mediated communications prior to Facebook, and investigating the kinds of changed conditions brought about in social networking sites, I put forth a dramauthentic model of post-Facebook online identity. This model is comprised of three methods of exposure through multiply anchored self-presentation (mixed, agonistic, and lowest-common-denominator) and four strategies of interaction (spectacular, untidy, distributed, and minimized), each of which are employed non-exclusively and at different moments by most social networking site users.

"Orson Scott Card presents Ender Wiggin as having the right amount of sympathy to be a military leader—intermediate between his sister Valentine and his brother Peter. But what role is sympathy to serve in war? How are soldiers to have enough sympathy to be humane, and yet not so much as to be unable to fire on the enemy? How can the soldier view the enemy as a person she is able to appropriately kill without that dehumanization which leads to atrocities?

Plato's discussion of the training of guardians in the Republic is used, along with Hume's theory of natural sympathy. Statistics of enemy engagement and commission of atrocities are considered, from World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Iraq War. The use of robot soldiers, championed by Ronald Arkin, is discussed.

The chapter concludes by claiming that Ender represents the perfect balance of sympathy in warfighters, but only because he is deceived. The reality is that this is not a problem with a solution: the conduct of war is and must be fraught with moral and psychological damage, and war is and should be a horror."

In this contribution to a phenomenology of social network sites (SNS), we see how the share button brings about an alteration in our being-with others. On the side of the sharer, we see an experience of the world in a mode of possible retroactive sociality, creating an enigma in the constitution and attention of the subject of a given experience. On the side of the receiver, we see how being shared with creates sometimes unwelcome retrospective ideation of the sharer’s experience, and requires a choice whether, by liking or commenting, to bring the sharer into retroactive awareness of having been experiencing the shared alongside the receiver. Only if and when the shared has been received and the reception has been shared is asynchronous being-with at a distance constituted.

Using an Arendtian framework, I argue that we can understand distinctive and effective elements of the #OWS movements as forms of non-action related to prior strategies of non-violence, the propaganda of the deed, and coalitions of affinity rather than identity. This understanding allows us to see that, while the use of social media in the movement does not provide the same affordances for building and maintaining power as physical occupation, and while online community clearly cannot substitute for physical community in many relevant and consequential ways, Facebook does nonetheless provide a platform well suited to maintaining power through these distinctive forms of non-action.

I argue that a significant and under-appreciated affordance of Facebook is its ability to support and foster valuable and social forms of boredom. Drawing on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, and Adorno, I first discussing the nature and history of boredom, and then consider what forms of boredom are valuable and how they are enabled at a distance on Facebook. Amusement as a form of boredom in bad faith is put parallel to what I call "friendertainment" on SNS. The most important form of boredom enabled by SNS is revalued in analogy to Kant's analysis of beauty—existential boredom is meaningful as a free-play of the faculty of valuation.

An argument against the Aristotelian emphasis on formal and final causes in understanding friendship, and in favor of efficient and material causes. Attempts to establish that social media communications constitute a secondary literacy in the context of a shared asynchronous experience at a distance, and addresses "the sandwich problem:" how we can charitably account for the practice of photographing and sharing one's lunch.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415883528/

In this preliminary phenomenology of the experience of an audiobook, I compare the engagement with language with that of reading and listening to a present speaker, as well as approaching the particularities of embodied audiobook listening on its own terms. The process of constructing meaning at the level of individual sentences is treated exhaustively, while the remainder is approached only in its general contours. We see that the audiobook contains its own temporal structure and forms a context in which physical and social experiences become background.

In discussions of online culture, nobody has yet given sufficient consideration to the importance of cute animal pictures. While there are perhaps obvious reasons for this aspect of online culture being and remaining understudied, from an objective stance we should consider it both surprising and noteworthy that, once given the means of mass communications and internationally accessible publication, a primary activity that people are interested in and committed to is the sharing of cute and funny pictures, especially of cats. This presumably unforeseeable outcome is made stranger yet by the relative lack of commercial motivation for a communications category that approaches the ubiquity of spam and pornography. This chapter investigates three possible explanations of aspects of these phenomena.

"As digital media give increasing power to users—power to reproduce, share, remix, and otherwise make use of content—businesses based on content provision are forced to either turn to technological and legal means of disempowering users, or to change their business models. By looking at Lockean and Kantian theories as applied to intellectual property rights, we see that business is not justified in disempowering users in this way, and that these theories obligate e-business to find new business models. Utilitarian considerations support disempowering users in this way in some circumstances and for the time being, but also show that there is a general obligation to move to new business models. On these moral bases, as well as on practical bases, e-business ought to refrain from using the legally permitted strong copyright protections, and should instead find ways of doing business which support, value, and respect the technical capabilities that users have gained.

http://www.igi-global.com/bookstore/TitleDetails.aspx?TitleId=37328"

A discussion of two of the major themes (equivalent exchange and the homunculi) of one of the most broadly popular and internationally successful anime series.  Discussion centers on economics and human values:  humanism, sin, usury, and the good life.  Primary sources used include works by Marx, Aquinas, Locke, Aristotle, and Calvin.

http://www.opencourtbooks.com/books_n/anime.htm

Copyright-based industries have become revolutionary. That is, the machinery of production of digital wares has itself taken on the role of the revolutionary class within the political economy of digital production. The progress of capitalist production in this industry has undermined the conditions of its own possibility, not because it has driven the proletariat to rise against an oppressive system, but because the means of production, through digital media, have simultaneously made communist production possible, and the continued separation of the means of production from the laborer impracticable.

Part of a special issue on 'swarm methodology,' this paper, written by a swarm participant, reflects upon the purpose and value of this kind of interdisciplinary research methodology. First, by way of a recognition of the interdisciplinary status of this paper itself, the question of what we hope to accomplish when we engage in conversations across disciplinary boundaries is broached. Second, a discussion of the practice of peer-review provides an approximate view of one paradigmatic understanding of how we produce a 'conversation' within a given established research methodology. We are then, third, able to consider a number of possible related ways in which we might understand the value of a conversation between research methodologies. Finally, the common intuition that there is a concrete value specifically within a 'holistic' or 'synergistic approach' is addressed, and the swarm methodology put forth as a likely place for such a value to emerge, if it is to emerge anywhere.

Situationist analysis of Facebook, concentrating on Debord's *Society of the Spectacle* and Vaneigem's *Revolution of Everyday Life*.  Focus is on creative responses to consumer culture and ubiquitous advertising.

Contains one of my favorite lines:  "Botox, jewelry, apricot scrubs, and alcohol abuse project happiness much more effectively than happiness itself ever could."

Download from: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/391067/FoLCatsREVISIONnewnarration.pptx

I seek to articulate what “cats” are insofar as the internet is made of them by looking at cats both as content and as medium in viral and memetic communications, offering multiple and non-exclusive suggestions about why there are “all these cats” (Tim Berners-Lee).

From a workshop at IR15, co-organized with Andrew Herman, including presentations by Andrew Herman, D.E. Wittkower, Ben Light, Susanna Paasonen, Leah Shafer, and Limor Shifman. Attached is an old presentation, parts of which were shown for my presentation here.

Details for the workshop: http://ir15.aoir.org/?page_id=128

Press coverage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnEDduSL0P4

Book chapter related to my presentation: https://www.academia.edu/288256/_On_the_Origins_of_the_Cute_as_a_Dominant_Aesthetic_Category_in_Digital_Culture_in_Putting_Knowledge_to_Work_and_Letting_Information_Play_

Mind-map produced during the workshop: https://www.mindmup.com/#m:a1ce83deb03b240132c74e1227bcf4073b

We joke about those who post pictures of their lunch, and ask how self-important they must be to think that anyone cares about their sandwich. And yet, when we eat with a friend, we ask them what they’re ordering, and, later, whether it’s any good. In the Instagrammed lunch, we make the mistake of thinking that the communicative action is intended to transfer information—in person, though, we have sense enough to know that these communicative acts are about care and sharing, not about information.

New media communications are clearly experienced by users as capable of forming the shared activities which constitute a life lived alongside others in friendship, as evidenced by the large portion of communicative activities better understood in their active than in their communicative aspect: the Instagrammed sandwich, the dull microreportage of quotidian trivialities, and the steady stream of cat pictures. What must the user experience of the world be like, such that it can be retroactively and asynchronously experienced alongside absent others as a shared experience?

In the pre-sharing experience of the experience to be shared, the sharer must experience the experience as currently retroactively to have been alongside others, the identity of whom is to be later determined, forming an “enigma position” in the subject. In the viewing of the shared object of experience, the receiver must ideate the sharer’s experience, and must ideate the sharer’s retrospective ideation of the experience as having been alongside the receiver. Only once the shared has been received and the reception has been shared is asynchronous being-with at a distance constituted—the circle must be closed at both ends, otherwise consisting only of an abstract and generic being-possibly-with on the part of the sharer and a being-merely-alongside on the part of the receiver.

A Nietzschean/Heideggerian perspective on gamification, critical of the "steadily rotating recurrence of the same" that creates the deceptive illusion of purpose, but supportive of those sorts of gamification which produce incentive structures that are empowering to users in their self-creative activity.

My talk begins at around 1:07:30 in the video.

The purpose of the talk was to investigate why students in a large Southern U.S. University were surprisingly sympathetic to contemporary Islamist claims and movements when those claims were presented in the context of Existentialist challenges to modernity.

Current privacy discourses, especially "privacy paradox" studies, depart from normal design ethics and engineering ethics perspectives by expecting users to conform to technical models of privacy rather than designing for users' mental models. This article uses a phenomenology of interpersonal relationships, guided by ethics of care, to establish some elements of a mental model of privacy that we should expect users to have, and applies that model to five cases in the internet of things in order to explore what differences it would make if we designed for privacy as users experience it.

Crowdfunding remediates pre-capitalist European patronage models of artistic creation with an altered affective economy—one in which artists create within and for communities that identify with the artist and their vision. This article critiques the ideal of autonomous art and uses the ethics of care in order to advance a model of the affective dynamics of the artist-community relationship in heteronomous art, which is applied to crowdfunding in order to distinguish between artist-fan relations which are harmed by heteronomy and those which are supported and enriched by them.