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This paper focuses on the Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser's notion of telematic society, arguing that it implies a media-theoretical revision of Friedrich Schiller's project for an aesthetic model of civic education, according to which aesthetic effectivity is reconsidered in light of a history of media based on a technological alternation of images and texts. After a brief overview of Schiller's aesthetic letters, it examines the ways in which Flusser repositions and expands upon Schiller's vision of an aesthetic education (most importantly, the aesthetic condition or middle disposition), highlighting the role that Flusser assigns to the evolution of codes inherent in the most important cultural and media techniques, namely, images, texts, and technical images. It then shows how this modification results in a forecasting of a telematic model of aesthetic education, before concluding by addressing the prospects of such a model in a post-digital world of automated media bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of platforms since the Millennium has drastically reshaped human activities worldwide and transformed our physical world into what is known as platform societies, wherein social and economic interactions are profoundly mediated and defined by the digital infrastructure of platforms. The immense integration of platforms into daily human life prompts inquiry into their capacity to foster social good. This Special Issue presents a compilation of articles that scrutinize the intricate relationship between platforms and their potential to promote social good in the contexts of mainland China and Hong Kong. In both settings, platforms are subject to negotiation and co-creation among technological, commercial, and political logics, although the nuances differ. While social good can embody a wide range of public interests and common goods, this Special Issue specifically explores social good within the domains of promoting good health and well-being, advocating responsible production and consumption, fostering societal equality, advancing decent work and economic growth, and supporting justice and effective institutions. The collection illustrates that platforms may contribute to social good at both macro and micro levels. Platforms have the capacity to provide infrastructure for social and economic activities in the digital realm, driving transformations in business and social relations. Platforms can also offer individuals and collectives access to resources, empowering them to safeguard public interests. Understanding the role of platforms in upholding social good requires consideration of multifaceted forces and interests rooted in the market, state, and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homer's treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer's ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the central tenets of contemporary media theory is encapsulated in Marshall McLuhan’s famous proposition that media are “extensions of man”, that they prolong our senses into the world. In his latest book, Francesco Casetti challenges exactly this assumption by arguing that media just as much protect and enclose, as they extend and protract. He claims that what he calls “the projection/protection complex […] stands for a set of interrelated processes and components […] aimed at creating a ‘protected’ confrontation with the world and at the same time at ‘projecting’ individuals beyond the safe space in which they are located” (14). Like Deleuze and Guattari took Freud’s Oedipus theory and turned it on its head (in Anti-Oedipus), Screening Fears could be read as a kind of “Anti-McLuhan” which acknowledges the significance of the original, but adds important dimensions to it.

Films and texts differ in terms of their possible logical structures and freedom of presentation on an output medium. While texts can be structured at any depth, the capabilities for structuring films are generally limited. In the presentation of textual documents, the sentence order is usually preserved, whereas video documents often allow rearrangements that lead to new alternations of shots. The fundamental difference between textual and video structures is taken as a starting point. Then, based on a detailed analysis of two different layouts of the film The Sunbeam by D. W. Griffith, a formal criterion for distinguishing between internal, discursively motivated and external, diegetically motivated alternations is developed. The results enable a new approach to alternation in film analysis and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Artnodes is the property of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay discusses two approaches I use to teach Anne Finch's—and others'—poetry. Drawing on certain habits of early modern manuscript culture, I make visible to my students ways that reading and writing are socially embedded practices, which may variously involve exchange, reciprocity, or censorship. By adapting the "quaint" habits of manuscript culture practiced by Finch and many others to specific assignments, I encourage students to experience poetry as living, sociable occasions of reading and writing. To augment my students' engagement with early modern poetry I connect it to frameworks from their twenty-first-century reading and writing worlds. These exercises in "early modern social media" provide students with an intimate structure for studying a poem that resonates with many of their interests in creative writing and with their participation, mutatis mutandis, in one or more kinds of twentyfirst-century social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teaching the birdsong poems and compositions for musical settings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, through media theory allows students to connect their own social-media-based expressive arts practices with the multimedia practices of early modern women writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article recounts an instructional event for English majors held in the central campus library. Students engaged with various materials related to the career and editorial history of Anne Finch. The event offered students an introduction to questions of information literacy, textual history, and literary studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the problem of transformation of historical memory in the context of digitalization. The aim of the article is to make a critical analysis of the “cancel culture” as one of the tools for the formation and transmission of historical identity in digital space and beyond. The new media space from where the phenomenon of cancel culture originated is chosen as the research field. The objective of the article is then to bring the conceptual subjects of memory studies and media theory closer together. New media differ significantly from traditional media, and these differences determine the change in discursive rules and consequently imply a reorganization of the discursive space. The vertical paternalistic structure of discourse gives way to a horizontal rhizomatic structure, while the rigid author-reader opposition breaks down. The change in discursive rules entails a change of discursive practices. The changes affect not only discursive but also social space, including the space of historical memory. The digitalization of the past entails new forms of memory existence. At the same time, some traditional functions, such as identity formation, are preserved. New media becomes a platform for identity formation, providing opportunities for the construction and constant reassembly of identities. The article considers “cancel culture” as a marker of this reassembly. It is viewed both as a mode of manifestation and as a source of identity. The critical analysis highlights both the negative and positive characteristics of the phenomenon, explaining its paradoxicality and regularity in the new reality.

The article addresses the issue of historical memory transformation in the digital era. Its aim is to critically analyze the “cancel culture” as a tool for shaping and transmitting historical identity in the digital realm and beyond. The realm of new media where the cancel culture phenomenon emerged, is selected as the field of research. Consequently, the article seeks to bridge conceptual topics in memory studies with media theory. New media exhibit significant differences from traditional media, influencing a shift in discursive rules and leading to the reorganization of discursive spaces. The traditional vertical paternalistic discourse structure is replaced by a horizontal, rhizomatic one, and the rigid dichotomy between the author and the reader dissipates. These shifts in discursive rules bring about changes in discursive practices, impacting not only discourse itself but also the broader social fabric, including the realm of historical memory. Digitalization introduces novel forms of memory existence while retaining some traditional functions like identity formation. New media serve as platforms for identity formation, offering opportunities for constructing and continuously reassembling identities. This article views “cancel culture” as a symbol of this reassembly, acting both as a mode of expression and a source of identity. The critical analysis underscores both the negative and positive aspects of cancel culture, elucidating its paradoxical nature and frequency in contemporary reality.

Synchronous collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow distributed teams to interact and work. CVEs afford a sense of presence, or "being there" in the workspace, as well as the opportunity to "do there" via interactions within the environment. However, there has been limited empirical evidence to support the link of presence and team performance, especially for CVE work. We identified multiple dimensions of presence that reflect relationships known to be essential to collaborative work and conducted a CVE experiment with 80 teams. Our results suggest certain aspects of presence are more important than others in driving virtual team performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese opera film criticism of the late 1950s coincided with the introduction of cybernetics to China. Echoing cybernetics' emphasis on the homeostasis of an artificial or living machine archived by filtering noise from information in the environment, film critics aimed no less at maintaining the steady states of Chinese culture (epitomized by traditional opera) when taking on the treacherous milieu called modernization (in the form of cinema). The whole problematic of opera films—in which one is forced to choose filtering out formulaic operatic gestures or realistic cinematic mise-en-scène as noise to maintain a self-cohesive cultural system—follows from the mistake of essentializing media specificities as prior to the contingent encounter among different mediums. However, an alternative approach lies in treating noise not as interference that must be eliminated but as surplus information that introduces system errors, triggers phase shifts, and brings about random changes for genuine self-organization, allowing us to confront control with the noise in its own channels. A revamping of cybernetics in this regard opens up new possibilities of understanding opera films through the peculiar prism of Guo Baochang's 2005 opera film Chungui meng 春閨夢 (Dream of the Bridal Chamber). And that prism particularly takes the form of a series of moon gates (yueliang men 月亮門), an architectural trope invoked throughout the film signifying the cybernetic circuit of gateways that at once exerts control over and yet is disturbed and reshaped by the noisy signals arising from the mutual interferences among opera, film, and, ultimately, television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies alternative models for the production of AI-generated images to those currently used by mainstream AI platforms. Based on primitive computational art processes, these systems allow designers to gain greater control over the final visual result while avoiding potential issues with intellectual property theft and breach of privacy. The article starts by analysing the level of artificiality that might be effectively attributed to each part of the creative process involved in the development of AI-generated images. It then moves on to discuss the extent to which individual actors intervene in each of these stages, with the aim of untangling the different subjectivities that would ultimately shape the meaning of AI-generated photographs, and identifying existing AI models that are able to offer practical solutions for every designer to retain creative autonomy over their AI creations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychedelic drugs present an intriguing variation on the widely circulated maxim that the medium is the message. Psychedelics are commonly defined as non-specific agents without intrinsic effects, and their effects are described as crucially dependent on internal and external contexts (commonly referred to as set and setting). Psychedelics can therefore be understood as a medium defined by its exceptional pliability and amenability to contextual cues. It thus follows that the effects of psychedelics as a medium are crucially embedded and shaped by their surrounding media. This article observes the intriguing implications and surprising benefits that emerge when examining psychedelics and media ecology in conjunction. It points to ways in which media ecology may enrich our understanding of psychedelics and their effects and to ways in which psychedelics may serve to enhance media ecological literacy and provide a new experimental space for explorations in media ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between film and games as forms of audio-visual play from the perspective of media theory and game studies. Initially, I discuss the research into mimetic audio-visual play, media and genres with their affordances and the transformation brought about by digitization to the mediascape. The comparative analysis starts with an outline of the evolution of films and games, followed by an investigation into their unique modes of representation, narration and audiovisualization. Research findings conclude that the cinematic mode of representation captures external movement, while games model systems dynamically; films present time-based narrative syntagms, whereas games offer space-based multilinear paradigms for playful selection; films still work primarily with indexical recordings, games with non-indexical procedural animations, although hybridization of recording and animation characterizes contemporary media practice. In sum, the relation between films and games can be defined as alterity, an interrelated, reciprocal and mutually influential otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate elevators as media. Our central argument is that elevators manipulate information in time. Time manipulation of elevators (movement data + genetic algorithms) produces temporal order. Elevators have become media objects because they produce data that are digitally manipulated to optimize movement. We conducted an empirical study in a multinational corporation that manufactures elevators, including 4 months of field research at multiple locations and interviewed 64 people. We show how time manipulation changes with the information architecture: first, time manipulation took place inside and during the movement of elevators by pushing the buttons. Second, time manipulation took place in the cloud by statistical mathematics. The latest development is toward decentralized social application where elevators as independent media objects manipulate time using genetic algorithms and communicate with each other. We reveal how largely hidden media affects our temporality and argue that media theory should study its implications in contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the pursuit of problematization advocated by Agre's concept of critical technical practice has been articulated in relation to the increasing proliferation of interfaces across everyday life. While the ethos of Agre's work to bridge the split identity of critique and craft can readily be found in reflexive design or software art, these cases are not always situated within broader ecologies of practice that also grapple with the asymmetries and exploitative aspects of interface design. Drawing from software studies and media theoretical accounts of the interface as a fluid milieu, I provide a navigational matrix to contextualize modes of interface critique at large, namely specifying traps and enclosures, surfacing asymmetries and augmenting alternatives. I argue, finally, that these modes provide an invitation to develop new metacritical theories and common capacities, particularly through the possibilities of grappling with systems of domination otherwise built to prefigure our experiences of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Films and texts differ in terms of their possible logical structures and freedom of presentation on an output medium. While texts can be structured at any depth, the capabilities for structuring films are generally limited. In the presentation of textual documents, the sentence order is usually preserved, whereas video documents often allow rearrangements that lead to new alternations of shots. The fundamental difference between textual and video structures is taken as a starting point. Then, based on a detailed analysis of two different layouts of the film The Sunbeam by D. W. Griffith, a formal criterion for distinguishing between internal, discursively motivated and external, diegetically motivated alternations is developed. The results enable a new approach to alternation in film analysis and production.

As research fields, mediatization and Human-Machine Communication (HMC) have distinct historical trajectories. While mediatization research is concerned with the fundamental interrelation between the transformation of media and communications and cultural and societal changes, the much younger field of HMC delves into human meaning-making in interactions with machines. However, the recent wave of “deep mediatization,” characterized by an increasing emphasis on general communicative automation and the rise of communicative AI, highlights a shared interest in technology’s role within human interaction. This introductory article examines the trajectories of both fields, demonstrating how mediatization research “zooms out” from overarching questions of societal and cultural transformations, while HMC tends to “zoom in” to approach the concrete situatedness of the interaction between humans and machines. It is argued that we need to combine both perspectives to better understand how the automation of communication transforms the social construction of culture and society. This article offers an overview of the key themes explored in this thematic issue, highlighting the productive intersection of HMC and mediatization within each article. Additionally, it identifies potential avenues for future research emerging from this fruitful intersection.

In the Anglophone world of law, the German legal historian and legal theorist Cornelia Vismann (1961–2010) is best known as an acute interpreter of French high theory, especially of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This type of reception is, I argue, somewhat distorted. For her English-speaking colleagues, French “poststructuralism” provides the interface that enables Vismann to enter into shared discursive constellations with her Anglo-American critical legal colleagues. But at the same time, such a reception also downplays the very specifically German soil from which her unique scholarship arose. This Article discusses Vismann’s German background as media theory, the discipline that she was mostly associated with by her compatriots. The Article then assesses what Vismann’s media-theoretical contributions potentially offer to the contemporary study of law. For this “other Vismann,” the media-theoretical study of law was, I suggest, a practically oriented critical discipline that focused on law’s “cultural techniques” and how they operated. I also briefly touch upon what is generally known as “German media theory” through key figures such as Friedrich A. Kittler and Bernhard Siegert.

Copyright of Contratexto is the property of Contratexto and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Anagramas is the property of Editorial Universidad de Medellin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the relationship between video games and Marshall McLuhan's mediologic theories. In particular, this study examines how video games can be seen as contemporary extensions of his ideas on media, technology, and society. Through an analysis of McLuhan's concepts, such as "hot" and "cool" media, the article argues that video games embody the principles of "cool" media, requiring active participation and engagement on the part of users. The article also discusses how video games reflect and shape cultural values, norms, and identities, and how they can be seen as a form of "global village" where players from different parts of the world interact and share experiences. The article concludes that video games offer a unique platform for social interaction, learning, and selfexpression, and that they have the potential to transform the way we think about media, culture, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the technical image, a central concept in Vilém Flusser's later main work Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985a). After identifying its various dimensions, the analysis frames the concept as an amalgamation of disciplines, theories, and artistic practices the cultural philosopher Flusser explored during the 1960s and especially the 1970s. In particular, the field of information aesthetics developed by Max Bense and Abraham A. Moles, among others, as well as artistic video practices in France and the United States played an important role in both Flusser's biography and the formation of his technical image concept. At the same time, in Flusser's cultural philosophy the technical image is the condition and result of a new kind of human imagination, which in this paper is specified as 'projective imagination'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce Vilém Flusser's theoretical trajectory from the philosophy of language and multilingualism to communication and media theory. Our focus lies on his works Kommunikologie [ Communicology ] and Kommunikologie weiter denken [ Thinking Communicology Further ]. Kommunikologie, which was written in Flusser's mid-career in the 1970s, but only published in the 1990s, consists of a set of articles and lectures and offers, among other notions, a great distinction between dialogue and discourse. The article takes this differentiation and explains its advantages and limitations. This leads to the introduction of the concept of algorithmic mediation as a 'communicological' take on current media developments. This also allows us to return to Flusser's question about the disappearing home and the need for windows to the world. We hence offer a combination of different aspects of his work less as a tool for the analysis of current developments than as a call for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Anglophone world of law, the German legal historian and legal theorist Cornelia Vismann (1961–2010) is best known as an acute interpreter of French high theory, especially of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This type of reception is, I argue, somewhat distorted. For her English-speaking colleagues, French "poststructuralism" provides the interface that enables Vismann to enter into shared discursive constellations with her Anglo-American critical legal colleagues. But at the same time, such a reception also downplays the very specifically German soil from which her unique scholarship arose. This Article discusses Vismann's German background as media theory , the discipline that she was mostly associated with by her compatriots. The Article then assesses what Vismann's media-theoretical contributions potentially offer to the contemporary study of law. For this "other Vismann," the media-theoretical study of law was, I suggest, a practically oriented critical discipline that focused on law's "cultural techniques" and how they operated. I also briefly touch upon what is generally known as "German media theory" through key figures such as Friedrich A. Kittler and Bernhard Siegert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectacle and Time in Contemporary Philosophy Through historical and phenomenological analyses, the present paper attempts to centralize the research of the phenomenon of spectacle as a viable subject of contemporary philosophy. We study the notion of the spectacle upon the basis of the historical development of the modern comprehension of time not only as one of the central issues of contemporary philosophy, but also as a central concept for the understanding of contemporary science, culture, and society as a whole. Within contemporary continental philosophical tradition, the concept of time is closely connected with the notions of presence, perception, and mediation. The philosophical debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein brought the ideas of spectacle and time into immediate connection as a part of the new conceptual framework of contemporary philosophy. It demonstrated, for the first time, that science holds an essential value for the construction of modern life. We follow further developments by outlining the philosophical and cybernetic framework for the establishment of a philosophical attitude towards spectacle as one of the fundamental phenomena of contemporaneity. The elaboration of the theme seeks to respect methodological determinations demonstrated in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The groundbreaking critique of cybernetics in Gilbert Simondon allows us, finally, to draft a specific prefiguration of a certain theory of spectacle.

This article addresses the transformation of cultural and communicative memory in the digital space of “new media.” A comparative analysis of three classification options for commemoration practices in “new media” is presented, including R. Smith, L. Zamboni, M. Gibson, and K. Carden. The article examines the transformation of mechanisms of social ties offline and online and argues that commemoration practices in “new media” are increasingly based on simulacra and representations in the media that are recognized by users, rather than personal or historical experience. The article also focuses on the problem of nostalgia and argues that its popularity in social networks and video games is related to a longing for stable symbolic and social ties rather than a specific historical period or its aesthetics. Commemoration practices in social networks and video games involve not only digitization but also active modification of old media, built on a dual logic of recognizability of past images and hypermediation that gives players or users a certain degree of freedom to choose affordances.

Book review: Bruns, A. (2023). Are Filter Bubbles Real? HSE Publishing House.

In this article, I will analyze French rap music as a form of "neolittérature." Rap music actualizes literature both aesthetically and politically. Through media interaction, rap music spreads literary content across different channels and audiences. Therefore, literature enters into a new semantic and pragmatic context in which it is reformulated by new postcolonial actors. As a "postcolonial product," French rap music re-thinks literature through a decolonial approach to build new histories that are more inclusive in today's society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence between world powers. Meese et al. (2020) suggest that controversies around 5G stem from infrastructural anxieties best examined in the framework of geopolitics. We build on this work by analysing the emerging infrastructural ideology and sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) of 5G in light of the changing global division of labour. Sociotechnical imaginaries refer to the vision of technologies themselves, while ideologies refer to the totality of social relations, translating the objective reality of material conditions to subjective lived experience (Bory, 2020). The Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate and sublimate the infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms by China as an emerging hegemon. The controversial nature, contradictory content and fragmented presentation of 5G is a necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western superpowers. We engaged in code ethnography (Rosa, 2022) of GSM, internet and 5G technologies, as well as participant observation in the main standard-development organisations of the internet and 5G. Our methodological assumption, taken from world systems theory (Wallerstein, 2004), is that the character and content of imaginaries and their underpinning ideologies creatively translate the position of actors in the global division of labour. This paper contributes to the understanding of the role of media infrastructures in geopolitical power tussles and straddles the fields of materialist media studies, science and technology studies and international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emoji characters have become indispensable elements of our communication practice. Generally used to express moods or gestures, to clarify or obscure meaning, and to boost a message's illocutionary force, emoji have expanded our communicative options considerably. And while they have also doubtlessly aided in facilitating international and cross-cultural communication, emoji's declared goal, to enable "universal" communication, raises questions about this "universalism's" shapes, forms, and colors. Emoji, this article argues, require us to attend to the texting scene they imply. Their specific history and materiality point to the mechanisms of exclusion emoji, however involuntarily, perpetuate. The article illustrates this in two steps. After a brief discussion of emoji's history and precursors, including punctuation marks (Satzzeichen) and typographical gestalts such as emoticons, the article considers the influence of political protest on the evolution of our communicative and technological means, including emoji's repertoire. A close look at the interplay of political activism and its "Schreibzeug" sheds light on the co-constitutive nature of (political) visions and their (esthetic) visualizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated, and sometimes vilified, Canadian media theorist, experienced a resurrection of sorts with the advent of digital media. This article looks at what makes his style and intellectual method distinctly "electric," beyond the metaphorical sense, and attempts to determine exactly when and why McLuhan "converted" to a brand of thought that remains highly pertinent in our electronic age of computer networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Phainomena is the property of Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article offers an analysis of a recent Russian computer game, Pathologic 2 , which simulates an epidemic in a Russian provincial town. Unusually, the game has widely been called a "literary" experience by both its players and creators. By making use of theories of narration and mediation from Peter Brooks, Friedrich Kittler, and Patrick Jagoda, I ask whether the medium of the digital game can ever produce an experience that is related to or informed by the concept of "literariness" in both a Russian Formalist and broadly intellectual sense. By exploring how Pathologic 2 incorporates material from well-known texts by Fedor Dostoevskii and Aleksandr Blok, I argue that the digital game reduces Russian literature to a "trans-medial" phenomenon, and that this reduction can be understood as one impact of twenty-first-century networked computing on literary activity and institutions. Moreover, I consider the impact of contemporary geopolitics on how the global industry of digital games understands Russia and, by extension, Russian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes the notion of "Two-Worlds Model" (TWM) as a theoretical framework in order to analyse some currents in the contemporary debate on technologically mediated experience. According to this model, technologically mediated experience--especially immersive experience--can be described as a form of "digital metempsychosis"--a feeling of being elsewhere. The paper argues that this model is not new in the history of philosophy, and that it is a very common theoretical and cultural strategy, often used to reduce medial differences--differences in the way of being or of experiencing something--as objectual difference. By analysing some specific topics--the most common accounts of immersive experience, the relation between immersivity and presence, and the notion of "cyberspace"--the paper aims at showing the limits of the TWM, in particular when it is used in order to describe technologically mediated experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]