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To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what "seeing something" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think about image and visual culture in general, the name Marie-José Mondzain comes to mind. In this interview, she discusses the origin and efficacy of image and image making as they run through history, politics, culture, and across the seeping veins of power in our everyday life. As Mondzain shows here and in other writings, to understand how image works is to understand how individuals, in viewing images, become spectators in their coming to be as desiring and speaking subjects. In print, virtually, or otherwise, images and power serve each other, establishing and policing the zones of distinction between vision and gaze, the visible and the invisible, power and resistance, belief and unbelief. Images are always contemporary, always with the time, always with us in time. This interview sheds light on why and how this is the case, through the anthropological truth image making reveals, as well as the political reality we create and recreate as the image makers and image destroyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 pandemic is the first truly global crisis in the digital age. With death count worldwide reaching 586,000 merely 7 months after its first outbreak in China in late December 2019 and 13.6 million cases reported in 188 countries and territories as of July 2020, this ongoing pandemic has spread far beyond domain of world health problem to become an unprecedented challenge facing humanity at every level. In addition to causing social and economic disruptions on a scale unseen before, it has turned the world into a site of biopolitical agon where science and reason are forced to betray their impotence against cultish thinking in the planetary endgame depicted in so many dystopian science fictions. It is in this context that this forum offers a set of modest reflections on the current impacts incurred by the COVID-19 virus. Blending ethnographic observations with theory-driven reflections, the five authors address issues made manifest by the crisis across different regions, while keeping their sight on the sociopolitical problems plaguing our life both individually and collectively. Taken together, they provide a grounded documentary for the archive that the COVID-19 virus is making us to construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis can be read as a genre of speculative discourse that, recognizing the force of living speech, places itself in competition with philosophy and rhetoric. Performative through and through, it uncovers the ambiguity of meaning as it flows from speakers to addressees who stand to the former as more than themselves. Given its emphasis on language and the pragmatic contexts in which analytic discourse acts to establish and recreate reality, psychoanalysis bears undeniable affinity to rhetoric and, by extension, communication studies and media studies. This themed issue assembles four essays that explore the productive potentials of psychoanalysis to rhetoric and communication studies, and vice versa. Taken together, they demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic perspectives to rhetorical inquiries, especially when they respond to rhetoric's original vocation as technê and epistêmê. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marie-Jose Mondzain is one of the major philosophers writing about image, iconography, and representation today. In this interview, she discusses a few of the central ideas in her approach to and thinking about the nature of image and image-making as they bear upon the emergence of subjectivity and visibility in general. According to Mondzain, images are not visual objects we may or may not see; rather they are the site where the visible and its invisibility crisscross each other in opening the field of presence. Images, as Mondzain says in the interview, are cracks or leaks in being. They are where lights first come in and where man and beings are born to each other in their being-in-the world, that is, in their truth. Moving beyond historical and theoretical reflections, Mondzain turns to discuss things and scenes of mass media of late, addressing issues of pleasure, anxiety, desire, and the like, wherein ideologies, power, and the lure of images can be seen to intersect with our everyday life that has become irrevocably one of passive mobility. To the point at every turn, her answers to questions in this interview provide a glimpse to her forceful thinking and insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about Megi typhoon on September 27, 2016. Topics discussed include wind speed of hitting island of Taiwan, which causes deaths, injuries and changed into flood-prone areas; forewarning of president Tsai Yinwen the typhoon forecast on September 27 in Hualien County in northeastern Taiwan; and face of aquatic goddess, Mazu from the Taiwan Strait to the Pacific and down to the South China Sea.

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00282.x Byline: Briankle G. Chang (1), Garnet C. Butchart (2) Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 (2)Cultural Studies Program, Trent University, Peterborough, ON, K9H 7P4, Canada

Unlike our eyes, which bring us a world in images, our hands and fingers put us directly in touch with things in the world. Touching things directly, but also feeling themselves being touched at the same time, our hands and fingers are our first medium. But by remaining always contemporary – that is, always ready at hand – they are also our latest medium. Taking this observation as a starting point and keeping the idea of ‘the digital’ as a constant, this essay considers a few characteristics that establish German media theory as a distinct research project. It demonstrates, first, how artefacts ‘become’ media and, second, how this ‘becoming media’ can be formulated operationally and be studied in a manner consistent with the digital passages through which media appear as what they are. It is hoped that the discussion will shed some light on why and to what extent German media theory can be understood as ‘posthermeneutical’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00283.x Byline: Briankle G. Chang (1) Author Affiliation: (1)Department of Communication, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003

The article presents an obituary for British professor of sociology and cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

This article discusses the concept of "gift of memory." Memories give; they give themselves in that they come to people whether they are ready to receive them or not. In fact, they give themselves most paradigmatically as they truly are when people least expect them. The coming of memories thus constitutes an event in the time of being, their arrival, unexpected, surprising, and often cruel, falling upon people in the free fall of their own rising. Though coming from the past, memories are in truth about the future. Freedom, generosity, or gratuity thus define the gift, turning an object into a present beyond counterpoise, even beyond justice, that is, into something tendered without any consideration of return and without any measure of balance. A gift is nothing if it is not free; it must be freely given and given for free. To keep memory alive is to take measure of its coming, its ongoing passing in time; it is to bear out the suffering of time itself, its coming and going en souffrance as it manifests itself. At the same time, one should not forget, if something is coming, if it comes only through its coming, it does not and cannot arrive, for what has arrived must have ceased to come, and what has stopped coming necessarily falls short of arrival, and one expectedly stops expecting it.

The article provides information on the usefulness of audience in mass communication research in the U.S. It aims to show why the idea of audience as people, as an individual psychological entities' collection, needed to be rejected. It calls for a focus of an anthropocentric audience as it has been functional in mass communication research in the U.S. in media and general effects research. It advocates audience reconceptualization that situates it as an essential moment susceptible to all kinds of extra-media influences in the structural whole of cultural production, consumption and distribution of messages/meanings.

The transportation of Continental thought to the U.S. has always been greeted with distrust. In the field of humanities and social sciences, ambivalent feelings toward recent European invasions, beginning with phenomenology and structuralism to the latest rewritings of poststructuralism, are particularly acute. In communication studies, however, the situation is not so encouraging. Communication scholars, for the most part, have tended to ignore many powerful works on media research and on social critical theory of communication in general carried out in the Continental style. This blindness or lack of interest may in part be due to the presence of a strong tradition of mass communication research rooted in an empirico-positivist legacy that, enamoured by statistics and survey techniques, finds certain modes of reflection on similar subject matters alien and uncongenial, that is, speculative and unscientific. One point of departure for such a rapprochement can be found in the work of sociologist Jean Baudrillard because he provides a radically alternative view of mass communication as it irrevocably transforms the Western capitalism by expanding the regime of the sign. Baudrillard's work can be understood as a response to the inadequacy of Marxist and semiotic analysis of social structuration in general and of the media in particular. It shows how both "revolutionary" discourses end up reaffirming.

Presents an essay that analyzes the general thesis of intentional fallacy. Relationship between intention and text; Assessment of the radical discontinuity between intention and text; Information on the hermeneutical myth of concealment.

COVID-19 pandemic is the first truly global crisis in the digital age. With death count worldwide reaching 586,000 merely 7 months after its first outbreak in China in late December 2019 and 13.6 million cases reported in 188 countries and territories as of July 2020, this ongoing pandemic has spread far beyond domain of world health problem to become an unprecedented challenge facing humanity at every level. In addition to causing social and economic disruptions on a scale unseen before, it has turned the world into a site of biopolitical agon where science and reason are forced to betray their impotence against cultish thinking in the planetary endgame depicted in so many dystopian science fictions. It is in this context that this forum offers a set of modest reflections on the current impacts incurred by the COVID-19 virus. Blending ethnographic observations with theory-driven reflections, the five authors address issues made manifest by the crisis across different regions, while keeping their sight on the sociopolitical problems plaguing our life both individually and collectively. Taken together, they provide a grounded documentary for the archive that the COVID-19 virus is making us to construct., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© 2020 SAGE Publications.)