Books by Simone Natale
Oxford University Press, 2021
Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media... more Integrating media studies, science and technology studies, and social psychology, Deceitful Media examines the rise of artificial intelligence throughout history and exposes the very human fallacies behind this technology. Focusing specifically on communicative AIs, Natale argues that what we call "AI" is not a form of intelligence but rather a reflection of the human user. Using the term "banal deception," he reveals that deception forms the basis of all human-computer interactions rooted in AI technologies, as technologies like voice assistants utilize the dynamics of projection and stereotyping as a means for aligning with our existing habits and social conventions. By exploiting the human instinct to connect, AI reveals our collective vulnerabilities to deception, showing that what machines are primarily changing is not other technology but ourselves as humans.
Oxford University Press, 2019
"Believing in Bits is a guide to why media technologies are magical: they create beliefs, manipul... more "Believing in Bits is a guide to why media technologies are magical: they create beliefs, manipulate thoughts, make us see things. After reading this wonderful collection of essays, you realize why the most natural thing about media is that they are supernatural. This book is full of media archaeological joys and insightful contemporary readings." - Jussi Parikka, Professor of Technological Culture & Aesthetics, University of Southampton
"Human beings and their technological creations, including and especially their modern digital technologies, reflect, express, and intensify their fundamental strangeness. Scholars have long known that the history of religions is intimately related to the history of technology, from the ancient practices of agriculture, writing, the domestication of the horse, and the forging of iron, to the more recent invention of the printing press and the telegraph and telephone. This book takes that key insight into the present and near future, to the cell phone in your pocket, the computer game on your screen, and the VR system strapped around your skull. This book takes that key insight into the human-techno cyborg that is you." - Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
Believing in Bits advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices have become inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? How does the internets capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs blur the boundaries between what is considered fiction and fact? Addressing these and similar questions, the volume challenges and redefines established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural.
Penn State University Press, 2018
“This groundbreaking volume embodies a major shift in the historiography of photography. These fi... more “This groundbreaking volume embodies a major shift in the historiography of photography. These first-rate contributions bring to bear the intellectual resources of the numerous disciplines that must inform the holistic study of photography in the future. Taken together, a new approach emerges, in which photography's status as a medium is not taken for granted, and in which its boundaries are defined dynamically by its interactions with other forms of representation and communication in the nineteenth century.”
—Jordan Bear, author of Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject
“This timely and refreshing book challenges the introspective ‘media exceptionalism’ that often accompanies photographic studies. Instead it places photography firmly within the broad field of cultures of communicative technology, from the telegraph to postal systems, enriching the understanding of all these entangled practices.”
—Elizabeth Edwards, author of The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918
Penn State University Press, 2016
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious ... more In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Reviews:
“Approaching Victorian supernaturalism as popular spectacle, Natale makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century spiritualism made a significant contribution to what would become the dominant religion of the twentieth century: the entertainment industry. Rather than seeing the spiritualists and their energetic followers as gullible or deluded, Natale explores the more fascinating possibility that medium, circle, and audience helped redefine the possibilities of domestic leisure and public performance.”
—Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University
“We all know that the supernatural is entertaining. Just turn on your television set or go to the movies. But this entertaining? Supernatural Entertainments is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Simone Natale’s embrace of the history of technology, celebrity studies, material culture, popular culture, photography, and film studies to plumb the immediate historical background of the modern supernatural also makes it astonishingly capacious and interdisciplinary. Get ready for a ride. Or a show.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
"This is an ambitious, overdue book ... Natale depicts a more light-hearted version of Spiritualism than the politically and epistemically fraught social history that other authors have established. Such arguments are detailed, compelling, and themselves enchanting instances of media history."
—Susan Zieger, in Media History
Book review of Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of... more Book review of Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016.
"This is an ambitious, overdue book, steeped in the period's popular culture, and offering a fresh, insightful perspective on a topic familiar to its scholars."
Journal articles by Simone Natale
First Monday, 2022
This paper examines how the deep Web, i.e., Web sites that are not indexed and thus are not acces... more This paper examines how the deep Web, i.e., Web sites that are not indexed and thus are not accessible through Web search engines, was described and represented in British newspapers. Through an extensive content analysis conducted on 833 articles about the deep Web published between 2001 and 2017 by six British newspapers, we demonstrate that these technologies were predominantly associated with crime, crypto markets and immoral content, while positive uses of this technology, such as protecting privacy and freedom of speech, were largely disregarded. The consistent association by the British press between the deep Web and criminal and antisocial behaviors is exemplary of a recent "apocalyptic turn" in the imaginary of the Web, whereby Web-related technologies are perceived and portrayed in more negative ways within the public sphere. We argue that the use of such negative concepts, definitions and associations engender distrust about uses of the deep Web, propagating user stereotypes that reflect what we argue to be an overall criminalization of privacy.
Media, Culture & Society
There is extensive literature on how expectations and imaginaries about artificial intelligence (... more There is extensive literature on how expectations and imaginaries about artificial intelligence (AI) guide media and policy discussions. However, it has not been considered how such imaginaries are activated when users interact with AI technologies. We present findings of a study on how users on a subreddit discussed 'training' their Replika bot girlfriend. The discussions featured two discursive themes that focused on the AI imaginary of ideal technology and the gendered imaginary of the ideal bot girlfriend. Users expected their AI Replikas to both be customizable to serve their needs and to have a human-like or sassy mind of their own and not spit out machine-like answers. Users thus projected dominant notions of male control over technology and women, mixed with AI and postfeminist fantasies of ostensible independence onto the interactional agents and activated similar scripts embedded in the devices. The vicious feedback loop consolidated dominant scripts on gender and technology whilst appearing novel and created by users. While most research on the use of AI is conducted in applied computer science to improve user experience, this article outlines a media and cultural
New Media & Society, 2022
This article proposes the notion of the 'Lovelace Effect' as an analytical tool to identify situa... more This article proposes the notion of the 'Lovelace Effect' as an analytical tool to identify situations in which the behaviour of computing systems is perceived by users as original and creative. It contrasts the Lovelace Effect with the more commonly known 'Lovelace objection', which claims that computers cannot originate or create anything, but only do what their programmers instruct them to do. By analysing the case study of AICAN-an AI art-generating system-we argue for the need for approaches in computational creativity to shift focus from what computers are able to do in ontological terms to the perceptions of human users who enter into interactions with them. The case study illuminates how the Lovelace effect can be facilitated through technical but also through representational means, such as the situations and cultural contexts in which users are invited to interact with the AI.
Media, Culture & Society 44.4 , 2022
The relationship between technology and culture has always been a contested issue in media and cu... more The relationship between technology and culture has always been a contested issue in media and cultural studies. Ongoing advances in computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), however, are posing new kinds of questions and challenges to the field. As many have argued, these technologies invite to rethink the relationship between technology and culture, positing the idea that not only humans, but also machines produce and construct 'culture'. The goal of this themed issue is to consider notions such as 'algorithmic culture' and 'machine culture' from within the tradition of media and cultural studies, in order to move toward a conceptualization of culture in which machines are intertwined within human systems of meaning-making. In this introduction to the themed issue, we discuss why these emerging technologies and the human cultures forming around them are integral to the mission of media and cultural studies, and what the media and cultural studies tradition can bring into ongoing and future debates regarding the nexus of humans, machines, and culture.
Fronteiras - estudos midiáticos 23.3 , 2021
Este ensaio é a tradução de uma versão revisada e adaptada da introdução do livro Deceitful Media... more Este ensaio é a tradução de uma versão revisada e adaptada da introdução do livro Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test, de Simone Natale, publicado pela Oxford University Press em 2021. Focando especificamente em inteligências artificiais comunicativas, o livro nos convida a reformular a questão-chave sobre a IA: não o quão inteligentes as máquinas são, mas o quão inteligentes elas parecem ser. O que chamamos de “IA” não é, portanto, uma forma de inteligência, mas sim um reflexo do usuário humano, pois tecnologias como assistentes de voz utilizam a dinâmica da projeção e do estereótipo como meio de alinhamento com nossos hábitos e convenções sociais existentes. Este trecho apresenta os principais argumentos do livro e introduz a noção de “enganação banal”, descrevendo mecanismos e práticas enganosas que estão inseridas em tecnologias de comunicação e contribuem para sua integração na vida cotidiana. Também discute a relação entre estudos de comunicação e mídia e IA, além de defender a utilidade de uma perspectiva que enquadra a IA dentro da história e da teoria da mídia.
Studi Culturali 18.3 , 2021
Ongoing debates about phenomena such as disinformation, fake news, social media and artificial in... more Ongoing debates about phenomena such as disinformation, fake news, social media and artificial intelligence challenge scholars of media and communication to question the relationship between deception and media. Yet the notion of deception remains a substantially undertheorized topic in communication and media studies. This article aims to address this gap by proposing a theoretical approach that acknowledges the structural role of deception in experiences with media, without dismissing media as forcefully manipulative or malicious. Drawing on approaches in social psychology and in the psychology of perception that show how deception is an integral part of our "ordinary" experience, I propose the notion of banal deception to describe mundane, everyday situations in which media mobilize elements of users' perception and psychology to achieve specific effects. Improving our understanding of these apparently "banal" dynamics provides us with theoretical and analytical tools to assess conflicting claims about media's deceptive powers.
Media, Culture and Society, 2020
Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have recently been the subject of live... more Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have recently been the subject of lively debates in regard to issues such as artificial intelligence, surveillance, gender stereotypes, and privacy. Less attention, however, has been given to the fact that voice assistants are also web interfaces that might impact on how the web is accessed, understood and employed by users. This article aims to advance work in this context by identifying a range of issues that should spark additional reflections and discussions within communication and media studies and related fields. In particular, the article focuses on three key issues that have to do with long-standing discussions about the social and political impact of the internet: the role of web platforms in shaping information access, the relationship between production and consumption online, and the role of affect in informing engagement with web resources. Considering these issues in regard to voice assistants not only helps contextualize these technologies within existing debates in communication and media studies, but also highlights that voice assistants pose novel questions to internet research, challenging assumptions of what the web looks like as speech becomes one of the key ways to access resources and information online.
Communication Theory, 2020
This review article examines two recent publications that explore the relationship between Artifi... more This review article examines two recent publications that explore the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and communication. Discussing Human-Machine Communication (HMC) as an emerging area of inquiry within communication and media studies, two important implications of this body of work are highlighted. First, the "human" component still plays a key role in HMC, since what we call "AI" derives from the technical and material functioning of computing technologies as much as from the contribution of the humans who enter in communication with AI technologies. Second, HMC challenges the very concept of medium, because the machine is at the same time the channel as well as the producer of communication messages. A potential way to solve this challenge is to mobilize existing approaches in media history and theory that expand the concept of medium beyond its conceptualization as mere channel.
The Journal of Media Art, Study and Theory, 2020
Northeast Modern Language Association University at Buffalo www.mast-nemla.org Reading Ernst H. G... more Northeast Modern Language Association University at Buffalo www.mast-nemla.org Reading Ernst H. Gombrich's Art and Illusion, a classic in art history, I was captivated by the following lines:
Media, Culture and Society, 2020
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an incre... more Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capitalism. In contrast, a long tradition of critical thought, from Joseph Weizenbaum to Jaron Lanier passing through hacktivism, demonstrates that engagement with digital technologies is instrumental to develop critique and resistance against the paradoxes of digital societies. Drawing from this tradition, this article proposes the concept of "Disconnection-through-Engagement" to illuminate situated practices that mobilize disconnection in order to improve critical engagement with digital technologies and platforms. Hybridity, anonymity, and hacking are examined as three forms of Disconnection-through-Engagement, and a call to decommodify disconnection and recast it as a source of collective critique to digital capitalism is put forward.
Communicative Figurations Working Paper, 2020
AI voice assistants are based on software that enters in dialogue with users through speech in or... more AI voice assistants are based on software that enters in dialogue with users through speech in order to provide replies to the users’ queries or execute tasks such as sending emails, searching on the Web, or turning on a lamp. Each assistant is represented as an individual character or persona (e.g. “Siri” or “Alexa”) that despite being non-human can be imagined and interacted as such. Focusing on the cases of Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, this working paper argues that AI voice assistants activate an ambivalent relationship with users, giving them the illusions of control in their interactions with the assistant while at the same time withdrawing them from actual control over the computing systems that lie behind the interface. The paper illustrates how this is made possible at the interface level by mechanisms of projection that expect users to contribute to the construction of the assistant as a persona, and how this construction ultimately conceals the networked computing systems administered by the corporations who developed these tools.
This working paper is an early draft of chapter 6, Simone Natale, Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2021.
Critical Studies in Media Communication , 2019
This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives ... more This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on examples of digital media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, we argue that corporational determinism helps companies to market more effectively their products and to build stronger claims in support of their right to inform debates and decisions about the governance of digital technologies. Critical media scholarship should counteract the narratives of corporational determinism with more sophisticated approaches that underline the role of a wider range of actors in media change.
Media, Culture and Society, 2019
Whenever we navigate the Web, we leave a trace through our IP address, which can in turn be used ... more Whenever we navigate the Web, we leave a trace through our IP address, which can in turn be used to establish our identity-for instance, by cross-checking it with a user's Internet subscription. By using software such as VPN and Tor, however, it might be possible to avoid leaving such traces. A lively debate among policymakers, security professionals, hacker communities, and human rights associations has recently ensued regarding the question if such anonymity is acceptable and in which form. This article introduces the Crosscurrent special section dedicated to this topic by providing a brief overview of this debate and by pointing to the necessity of considering online anonymity from multiple, interrelated perspectives. By taking into account both technical and social dimensions, we argue that online anonymity should not be conceptualized in absolute terms but as an inherently fluid and transitional condition that characterizes any kind of social interaction online.
New Media and Society, 2019
Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material w... more Software is usually studied in terms of the changes triggered by its operations in the material world. Yet, to understand its social and cultural impact, one needs to examine also the different narratives that circulate about it. Software's opacity, in fact, makes it prone to being translated into a plurality of narratives that help people make sense of its functioning and presence. Drawing from the case of Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, widely considered the first chatbot ever created, this paper proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of " biographies of media " to illuminate the dynamics and implications of software's discursive life. The case of ELIZA is particularly relevant in this regard because it became the center of competing narratives, whose trajectories transcended the actual functioning of this program and shaped key controversies about the implications of computing and AI.
Convergence
This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of Artificial Intellige... more This article discusses the role of technological myths in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies from 1950s to the early 1970s. It shows how the rise of AI was accompanied by the construction of a powerful cultural myth: the creation of a thinking machine, which would be able to perfectly simulate the cognitive faculties of the human mind. Based on a content analysis of articles on Artificial Intelligence published in two magazines, the Scientific American and the New Scientist, which were aimed at a broad readership of scientists, engineers, and technologists, three dominant patterns in the construction of the AI myth are identified: (1) the recurrence of analogies and discursive shifts, by which ideas and concepts from other fields were employed to describe the functioning of AI technologies; (2) a rhetorical use of the future, imagining that present shortcomings and limitations will shortly be overcome; (3) the relevance of controversies around the claims of AI, which we argue should be considered as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the AI myth.
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Books by Simone Natale
"Human beings and their technological creations, including and especially their modern digital technologies, reflect, express, and intensify their fundamental strangeness. Scholars have long known that the history of religions is intimately related to the history of technology, from the ancient practices of agriculture, writing, the domestication of the horse, and the forging of iron, to the more recent invention of the printing press and the telegraph and telephone. This book takes that key insight into the present and near future, to the cell phone in your pocket, the computer game on your screen, and the VR system strapped around your skull. This book takes that key insight into the human-techno cyborg that is you." - Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
Believing in Bits advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices have become inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? How does the internets capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs blur the boundaries between what is considered fiction and fact? Addressing these and similar questions, the volume challenges and redefines established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural.
—Jordan Bear, author of Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject
“This timely and refreshing book challenges the introspective ‘media exceptionalism’ that often accompanies photographic studies. Instead it places photography firmly within the broad field of cultures of communicative technology, from the telegraph to postal systems, enriching the understanding of all these entangled practices.”
—Elizabeth Edwards, author of The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Reviews:
“Approaching Victorian supernaturalism as popular spectacle, Natale makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century spiritualism made a significant contribution to what would become the dominant religion of the twentieth century: the entertainment industry. Rather than seeing the spiritualists and their energetic followers as gullible or deluded, Natale explores the more fascinating possibility that medium, circle, and audience helped redefine the possibilities of domestic leisure and public performance.”
—Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University
“We all know that the supernatural is entertaining. Just turn on your television set or go to the movies. But this entertaining? Supernatural Entertainments is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Simone Natale’s embrace of the history of technology, celebrity studies, material culture, popular culture, photography, and film studies to plumb the immediate historical background of the modern supernatural also makes it astonishingly capacious and interdisciplinary. Get ready for a ride. Or a show.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
"This is an ambitious, overdue book ... Natale depicts a more light-hearted version of Spiritualism than the politically and epistemically fraught social history that other authors have established. Such arguments are detailed, compelling, and themselves enchanting instances of media history."
—Susan Zieger, in Media History
"This is an ambitious, overdue book, steeped in the period's popular culture, and offering a fresh, insightful perspective on a topic familiar to its scholars."
Journal articles by Simone Natale
This working paper is an early draft of chapter 6, Simone Natale, Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2021.
"Human beings and their technological creations, including and especially their modern digital technologies, reflect, express, and intensify their fundamental strangeness. Scholars have long known that the history of religions is intimately related to the history of technology, from the ancient practices of agriculture, writing, the domestication of the horse, and the forging of iron, to the more recent invention of the printing press and the telegraph and telephone. This book takes that key insight into the present and near future, to the cell phone in your pocket, the computer game on your screen, and the VR system strapped around your skull. This book takes that key insight into the human-techno cyborg that is you." - Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
Believing in Bits advances the idea that religious beliefs and practices have become inextricably linked to the functioning of digital media. How did we come to associate things such as mindreading and spirit communications with the functioning of digital technologies? How does the internets capacity to facilitate the proliferation of beliefs blur the boundaries between what is considered fiction and fact? Addressing these and similar questions, the volume challenges and redefines established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural.
—Jordan Bear, author of Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject
“This timely and refreshing book challenges the introspective ‘media exceptionalism’ that often accompanies photographic studies. Instead it places photography firmly within the broad field of cultures of communicative technology, from the telegraph to postal systems, enriching the understanding of all these entangled practices.”
—Elizabeth Edwards, author of The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
Reviews:
“Approaching Victorian supernaturalism as popular spectacle, Natale makes a compelling argument that nineteenth-century spiritualism made a significant contribution to what would become the dominant religion of the twentieth century: the entertainment industry. Rather than seeing the spiritualists and their energetic followers as gullible or deluded, Natale explores the more fascinating possibility that medium, circle, and audience helped redefine the possibilities of domestic leisure and public performance.”
—Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University
“We all know that the supernatural is entertaining. Just turn on your television set or go to the movies. But this entertaining? Supernatural Entertainments is one of the most original books I have read in a long time. Simone Natale’s embrace of the history of technology, celebrity studies, material culture, popular culture, photography, and film studies to plumb the immediate historical background of the modern supernatural also makes it astonishingly capacious and interdisciplinary. Get ready for a ride. Or a show.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal
"This is an ambitious, overdue book ... Natale depicts a more light-hearted version of Spiritualism than the politically and epistemically fraught social history that other authors have established. Such arguments are detailed, compelling, and themselves enchanting instances of media history."
—Susan Zieger, in Media History
"This is an ambitious, overdue book, steeped in the period's popular culture, and offering a fresh, insightful perspective on a topic familiar to its scholars."
This working paper is an early draft of chapter 6, Simone Natale, Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2021.
tecno-capitalismo digitale, in cui anche il fallimento è propedeutico al successo futuro in piena logica da start up. Adatto a un lettore curioso così come agli studiosi di media e comunicazione, il libro vuole sottolineare come la digitalizzazione non costituisca un percorso scontato e lineare, ma si presenti piuttosto come un processo incerto, molto più traballante e insicuro di quanto siamo comunemente spinti a immaginare.
of narratives about histories of computing within museum environments.
It interrogates how leading museums in the UK are helping to construct and
disseminate historical narratives about computing through which the past, the present and the future of our societies are imagined and culturally constructed. The report presents the findings of a series of practice-based research workshops that constituted the bulk of Circuits of Practice’s research.
Please download the full version of my Ph.D. dissertation at the following link: http://dspace-unito.cilea.it/handle/2318/834
(University of Torino)
Frutto di un lavoro di collaborazione con Andrea Ballatore (University of California, Santa Barbara), l’intervento contestualizzerà in particolare questo aspetto del messaggio del M5S (una “guerra dei media”, attraverso cui i media digitali “uccideranno” la stampa e la televisione) nell’emergere presso le società contemporanee di un particolare immaginario legato alle tecnologie digitali, che trova le sue radici in tradizioni di pensiero quali la “Californian ideology”, sviluppatasi a partire dagli anni Novanta ai margini della new economy statunitense. Ci si interrogherà, inoltre, su come elementi di questo immaginario siano integrati e contribuiscano alla costruzione del più ampio messaggio politico del Movimento 5 Stelle.
- See more at:
http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi-63#sthash.BHM24KGr.dpuf
How did occult and spiritualistic beliefs in automatic writing relate to the scientific belief in “self-recording” instruments as a path towards an objectivity unperturbed by human intervention?
How might nineteenth century intersections between scientific and esoteric styles of reasoning inform the way we understand present-day technological and social innovations, in particular those that may run counter to traditional forms of scientific and hegemonic reason?
What shared forms of visual, graphical, and instrumental notation interpenetrate scientific , technological, and occult knowledge?
Do present-day efforts to transcend space, time, and social difference via social and mobile media recapitulate earlier spiritualistic and technological aspirations?
Conference findings, which will be disseminated as podcasts and in an edited book, will contribute towards a broader synthesis of media and religious studies with research in the histories of technology, science, and cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken).
This course aims to address how and why the future has become the subject of specific forms of knowledge in contemporary societies, and what are the implications for fields such as science, economics, technology, religion, and popular culture. Different disciplinary perspectives will be employed to address the course subject and to discuss different forms of predictions and forecasts. Topics will include: the history of oracles and other ritual forms of prophecies; the emergence since the late nineteenth century of systematic attempts to forecast future events; science fiction literature and film; the role of predictions and forecasts in economy, society and politics; the future as ideology and narrative in contemporary culture; predictions about technologies of the future and about the potential effects of technology on society.
This course focuses on the “imaginary” of media technologies. It will examine and analyse the emersion of popular fantasies, predictions, and dreams in relation to communications technologies, from telegraphy to digital media.
After placing the concept of the imaginary within the history and theory of media, this course will address the case of different forms of media and how their introductions stimulated the emergence of expectations, anxieties, and dreams about their powers and future development. Media technologies taken into consideration will include telegraphy, photography, wireless communication, film, television, and digital technologies. Different cultural discourses, such as futuristic theories developed in science fiction literature and movies, or belief in the supernatural, will be taken into account.
Students will be encouraged to address and discuss insights from the history of media as well as contemporary fantasies about computers, smartphones, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the internet.
Description:
Spirits and ghosts have been part of fictional narratives and popular beliefs for thousands of years. On the stage of Shakespeare’s dramas and in ancient religious rituals, in gothic novels and in spiritualist séances, in horror movies and in the New Age spiritual movement, specters have been responsible for popular amusements, irrational fears, and acts of devotion. Since French philosopher Jacques Derrida inaugurated the “spectral turn” of cultural criticism in 1993, however, the ghost also emerged as a leading analytical tool and a productive metaphorical object across the humanities and social sciences. The concept of haunting have become synonymous with the existence of repressed legacies of the past, as well as of marginalized social groups in contemporary societies. At the same time, the study of spiritualist séances, spirit possession, and fictional representations of ghosts has been increasingly relevant to fields such as history, media studies, anthropology, and literature.
This course aims to interrogate the ghost both as an element of the imagination and as a subject of knowledge. The first part will provide a transversal and multidisciplinary perspective on how the ghost as a socio-cultural object has been approached in different disciplinary fields, including history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, and parapsychology. In the second part, the course will question the role that the ghost has played in the history of technology and scientific knowledge, from the haunted media of the middle nineteenth century to the contemporary digital turn. Finally, the third part will address fictional representations of ghosts in literature, film, and popular culture.
Si comincia con una soggettiva, su una strada che scende giù da una collina ed entra in Prison Valley, la valle dei penitenziari. La voce narrante dà il benvenuto alla città di Cañon City, Colorado, un paese di 25.000 anime e tredici prigioni. “Il sistema carcerario è sempre stato parte della cultura di Cañon City”, ascoltiamo. “La città, in pratica, è cresciuta attorno alle prigioni”.
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We encourage submission of proposals that illustrate the above-mentioned dynamics with specific cases, examples, and empirical studies as well as theoretical and methodological proposals to advance this agenda. We are especially interested in research based within the broad remits of communication and media studies but work conducted in other disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches are also invited.