Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) aim to compensate for the loss of a sensory modality, typically vision, by converting information from the lost modality into stimuli in a remaining modality. “The vOICe” is a visual-to-auditory SSD which encodes images taken by a camera worn by the user into “soundscapes” such that experienced users can extract information about their surroundings. Here we investigated how much detail was resolvable during the early induction stages by testing the acuity of blindfolded sighted, naïve vOICe users. (...) Initial performance was well above chance. Participants who took the test twice as a form of minimal training showed a marked improvement on the second test. Acuity was slightly but not significantly impaired when participants wore a camera and judged letter orientations “live”. A positive correlation was found between participants' musical training and their acuity. The relationship between auditory expertise via musical training and the lack of a relationship with visual imagery, suggests that early use of a SSD draws primarily on the mechanisms of the sensory modality being used rather than the one being substituted. If vision is lost, audition represents the sensory channel of highest bandwidth of those remaining. The level of acuity found here, and the fact it was achieved with very little experience in sensory substitution by naïve users is promising. (shrink)

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central to character education were identified. In Study 1 (N = 77), we asked character education experts to enumerate features of character education. Based on these lists, we identified (...) 30 features. In Study 2 (N = 101), experts assessed which features were central to character education through a categorization task. In Study 3 (N = 166), we assessed the extent of centrality using scalar items. We conclude by offering practical advice for the development of future character education studies and programs rooted in what is deemed central to such programs. (shrink)

I argue that anarchist ideas for organising human communities could be a useful practical resource for Christian ethics. I demonstrate this firstly by introducing the main theological ideas underlying Maximus the Confessor’s ethics, a theologian respected and important in a number of Christian denominations. I compare practical similarities in the way in which ‘love’ and ‘well-being’ are interpreted as the telos of Maximus and Peter Kropotkin’s ethics respectively. I further highlight these similarities by demonstrating them in action when it (...) comes attitudes towards property. I consequently suggest that there are enough similarities in practical aims, for Kropotkin’s ideas for human organising to be useful to Christian ethicists. (shrink)

Children acquire complex concepts like DOG earlier than simple concepts like BROWN, even though our best neuroscientific theories suggest that learning the former is harder than learning the latter and, thus, should take more time (Werning 2010). This is the Complex- First Paradox. We present a novel solution to the Complex-First Paradox. Our solution builds on a generalization of Xu and Tenenbaum’s (2007) Bayesian model of word learning. By focusing on a rational theory of concept learning, we show that (...) it is easier to infer the meaning of complex concepts than that of simple concepts. (shrink)

Peter Brown’s influential book "The World of Late Antiquity" has had a formidable impact on ancient historiography. Before it, historians who studied the period leading to the deposition of Romolus Agustulus—the last Roman emperor—in 476 AD considered themselves ‘classicists’ or ‘ancient historians’, while those who studied the subsequent period called themselves medievalists; therefore before Brown’s book the collapse of the Roman Empire remained the watershed date that brought upon the Middle Ages. It is not the task of (...) this essay to trace the history of this conception, but to examine the assertions, merits, and faults of Peter Brown’s book. Brown magnified, or more precisely, outright invented a new epoch: “[a number of elements] converged to produce that very distinctive period in European civilization—the Late Antique world”. (shrink)

Berkeley argues that claims about divine predication (e.g., God is wise or exists) should be understood literally rather than analogically, because like all spirits (i.e., causes), God is intelligible only in terms of the extent of his effects. By focusing on the harmony and order of nature, Berkeley thus unites his view of God with his doctrines of mind, force, grace, and power, and avoids challenges to religious claims that are raised by appeals to analogy. The essay concludes by showing (...) how a letter, supposedly by Berkeley, to Peter Browne ("discovered" in 1969 by Berman and Pittion) is, in fact, by John Jackson (1686-1763), controversial theologian and friend of Samuel Clarke. (shrink)

È una credenza diffusa che i marchi di origine (DOCG, DOC, DOP, IGT, IGP e PAT, rispettivamente: di origine controllata e garantita; di origine controllata; di origine protetta; indicazione geografica tipica; indicazione geografica protetta; prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali) siano di grande utilità sia per i consumatori che per i produttori: certificando l’origine e il metodo di produzione di un prodotto, essi ne garantiscono una certa qualità di fronte al consumatore. Ma è proprio così? Che cosa giustifica l’introduzione di un marchio di (...) origine? Quanto sostengo qui di seguito è che, sebbene non credo si possa negare che i marchi di origine segnalino anche una certa qualità di un prodotto, forse non sono il modo migliore per farlo. Di fatto, per il consumatore, i marchi non garantiscono niente che vada oltre alla qualità richiesta affinché la certificazione venga rilasciata; ma, al contempo, in quanto forme di protezionismo, favoriscono certi produttori, prevenendo l’utilizzo della denominazione a chi offre un prodotto di qualità analoga o superiore, ma provienente da una zona priva di tradizioni. In altre parole: se vi sono prodotti equiparabili per qualità e gusto ad un dato prodotto di origine, e possibilmente più economicamente vantaggiosi, il consumatore non avrà modo di accorgersene dalla sola nomenclatura. Quindi: i marchi di origine sono (talvolta) un ostacolo all’acquisto e al godimento dei prodotti migliori al miglior prezzo. Talvolta: questo deve essere ben sottolineato, poiché in certi casi (per esempio quello dei PAT) il prodotto certificato dal marchio ha un mercato talmente di nicchia da costituire un tuttuno tra qualità e origine. (Si potrebbe aggiungere che le certificazioni dei marchi non sono sempre ottenute attraverso procedure affidabili. Non insisterò oltre su questo punto, per il quale si rimanda a: Paolo Conti, La leggenda del buon cibo italiano e altri miti alimentari contemporanei, Fazi Editore, 2006; Peter Singer e Jim Mason: The Way We Eat.. (shrink)

The link between human nature and human flourishing is undeniable. "A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit" (Matt. 7:18). The ontology of the human person will, therefore, ground the nature of human flourishing and thereby sanctification. Spiritual formation is the area of Christian theology that studies sanctification, the Spirit-guided process whereby disciples of Jesus are formed into the image of Jesus (Rom. 8:28-29; 2 Cor. 3:18; 2 Peter 3:18). Until the nineteenth (...) century, there was an overwhelming consensus among Christian thinkers that some form of mind-body (or soul-body) dualism is true of human beings. Recently, that consensus has eroded, and with it the availability of a shared body of knowledge about spiritual formation. Some Christian physicalists argue that dualism is incompatible with central elements of spiritual formation. Neuroscientist Warren Brown and psychologist Brad Strawn offer the only substantive account of spiritual formation from the view of Christian physicalism and its accompanying objections to dualism. It is on their arguments that this chapter focuses. We argue that Brown and Strawn fail to support their incompatibility thesis. Additionally, we argue that Christian physicalism stands in tension with important philosophical and theological foundations of Christian spiritual formation. In doing so we offer a specific form of dualism, the bodily soul view, and explain how this view illuminates the importance of embodiment, our neurological and social development, and hence the important physical aspects of Christian spiritual formation. (shrink)

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

Historically, many Christians have understood God’s transcendence to imply God’s properties categorically differ from any created properties. For multiple historical figures, a problem arose for religious language: how can one talk of God at all if none of our predicates apply to God? What are we to make of creeds and Biblical passages that seem to predicate creaturely properties, such as goodness and wisdom, of God? Thomas Aquinas offered a solution: God is to be spoken of only through analogy (the (...) doctrine of analogy). Gavin Hyman argues Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy was neglected prior to the early-modern period and the neglect of analogy produced the conception of a god vulnerable to atheistic arguments. Contra Hyman, in this paper, I show early-modern atheism arose in a theological context in which there was an active debate concerning analogy. Peter Browne (1665–1735) and William King (1650–1729) offered two competing conceptions of analogical predication that were debated through the 19th century, with interlocutors such as the freethinker Anthony Collins (1676–1729), theologian/philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753), and skeptic David Hume (1711–1776). Lastly, I discuss the 18th century debate over theological analogy as part of the background relevant to understanding Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. (shrink)

Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, (...) and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously to a) counter the technology industry's marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. (shrink)

This article theorises the transformation of dissent in the digital age by examining the contemporary figure of the dissident intellectual within the political economy of platform capitalism. Departing from the twentieth-century propaganda paradigm articulated in Manufacturing Consent, the article argues that contemporary media systems no longer prioritise the stabilisation of consensus but instead actively produce, amplify, and monetise division, outrage, and moral conflict. This structural shift is conceptualised as Propaganda 2.1: a regime in which dissent itself becomes an infrastructural resource (...) rather than an oppositional force. Through an extended analytical case study of Noam Chomsky, once emblematic of counterculture as an external critic of power, the article traces how dissidence is reconfigured into a form of performative visibility embedded within algorithmic attention economies. Chomsky’s elevation as ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive’—a phrase that originated in irony—illustrates how critique is converted into symbolic capital, while subsequent scandals and polarisation cycles demonstrate how controversy functions as a generator of engagement rather than a threat to power. Drawing on Cass Sunstein’s concept of cognitive infiltration, the article reinterprets infiltration not as deliberate state action but as an automated process ‘sunsteinization’ performed by digital infrastructures that fragment interpretive communities from within. The analysis further integrates the notion of kayfabe politics to describe a media environment in which audiences knowingly participate in staged moral conflicts between ‘righteous’ and ‘evil’ actors, sustaining a dramaturgy of dissent that produces loyalty, identity, and revenue while leaving structural conditions untouched. The article concludes that contemporary counterculture no longer operates as an external pressure capable of destabilising dominant systems but survives as a conspicuous performance of opposition. Dissent persists, but as spectacle rather than strategy, signalling not the disappearance of critique but its full absorption into the operating logic of digital power. (shrink)

Synopsis Copyrighting the Self: Manufacturing Mirror Selves The book develops a single guiding proposition: modern society has entered a phase in which the human being exists socially not by presence but by recognisable representation. The transformation did not occur through conspiracy, nor through a single invention, but through the gradual optimisation of large-scale coordination. As populations expanded and interactions multiplied, societies required faster methods of identifying strangers. Historically this need was solved through titles, uniforms, roles and documents. These compressed complex (...) persons into readable signs. The digital environment intensifies this principle to its logical conclusion. The image no longer records a life; it prepares it. One becomes known before one is encountered. The person appears as evidence of a circulating description already established. The opening chapters trace this inversion of sequence. For most of history representation followed experience: a portrait confirmed a face, a record confirmed an action and a memory preserved an event. In contemporary conditions the order reverses. Profiles introduce individuals before they speak, archives precede conversation and expectations organise perception. The meeting verifies the representation rather than producing it. This marks a structural change rather than a cultural trend. Interaction now depends on stable interpretability. A person must maintain a consistent public form capable of travelling without the body. Social participation therefore requires recognisability. Identity becomes infrastructure. From this observation the book formulates the Licensed Human Theory. The human being continues biologically as before but enters society through an authorised external figure. Social existence depends on maintaining a stable and readable persona. The individual becomes custodian of a circulating self that operates faster and more widely than the living organism. This condition is not merely expressive. It functions economically and politically. Access to cooperation, employment and credibility presupposes continuity of appearance. To change too abruptly risks exclusion; to disappear risks nonexistence within networks of action. Vanity becomes necessity because coordination requires predictable figures. Three hypotheses organise the argument. First, participation depends on recognisable identity. Collective systems privilege the predictable because prediction reduces friction. The stable persona becomes a passport into shared reality. Second, representation precedes presence in decision making. Responses are directed toward the circulating image since it is widely accessible while direct experience remains local. Behaviour adapts to what is already known about the person. The map begins to structure the route. Third, maintained identity becomes economically productive. Recognition attracts attention, attention generates opportunity and opportunity stabilises recognition. Individuals invest labour into preserving appearance as earlier societies invested labour into producing goods. Identity functions as capital. The middle part of the book extends the argument through the metaphor of biological coding. Consumer genetic technologies translate the body into readable data. A biological sample becomes a dataset that can be stored, compared and interpreted. This development illustrates a broader cultural principle: uniqueness can be converted into transferable information. The genome acts as a mirror made of code. It identifies individuals yet simultaneously connects them to populations. The self becomes both intimate and public, personal and statistical. The significance lies not in medical accuracy but in ontological implication. Once the self is readable it becomes governable. The genome demonstrates how identity can be treated as an asset subject to access, interpretation and regulation. From here the book moves into a political economy of recognition. Drawing on sociological theory, it argues that visibility operates as a form of capital distributed across social fields. A viable life depends on being perceived as legitimate within shared systems of interpretation. Some figures circulate easily while others remain perceptually absent despite physical presence. Platforms and institutions function as arenas where individuals compete for recognisability. The value of a person becomes linked to stability of signal rather than depth of experience. The circulating person precedes the acting individual. Within this environment authenticity changes meaning. Traditionally authenticity referred to inner truth or sincerity. Under conditions of representation it refers to continuity. A trustworthy person is one whose appearance remains consistent across contexts. The self becomes reliable in the way a symbol is reliable: repeatable and interpretable. Memory reorganises into scenes prepared for visibility, and action anticipates observation. Experience acquires significance when translatable into shared form. Humans increasingly live slightly ahead of the present, imagining how events will appear when recorded. The book does not claim that representation abolishes reality. Instead it produces a dual-layered existence. Individuals live biologically while operating socially through circulating figures. The tension between presence and recognisability becomes the defining condition of contemporary life. Visibility enables coordination among strangers but risks replacing encounter entirely. When appearance governs participation, silence resembles absence. The individual must signal continuously to remain socially real. The concluding chapters synthesise these developments into a final anthropological category: the recognisable human. Humanity has moved from speaking beings to interpretable beings. Social existence depends on maintaining legibility across contexts. Authenticity becomes continuity and identity becomes a managed constant. The person survives as manager of their own recognisability while lived experience persists privately beneath it. The book ends not with rejection of representation but with its reclassification. Recognition is necessary for large-scale societies, yet it cannot exhaust human reality. Presence remains the source of meaning even when representation organises coordination. The task for modern individuals is therefore navigation rather than escape: to operate through images without being reduced to them. The transformation described is stable and irreversible, but its interpretation remains open. Humanity has not disappeared into media; it has reorganised itself around the conditions of being seen. -/- . (shrink)

This is the introduction to the Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments.

Synopsis Empires of Writing: The Rise of Scripted Civilisation offers a bold reinterpretation of civilisation itself by placing writing—not myth, not belief, not even violence—at the structural centre of historical power. The book advances a single, sustained thesis: writing is not merely a cultural achievement or a neutral tool of expression; it is a civilisational infrastructure. Once words become durable, transportable, and administrable, they reorganise memory, authority, territory, and ultimately the human mind. -/- The argument begins with a simple but (...) transformative shift in perspective. In oral cultures, speech is event-based. Words occur, resonate, and vanish. They live in time and depend on memory. Writing alters this condition fundamentally. When speech is fixed onto clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, or screen, it is removed from the fragility of sound and placed into spatial permanence. Words no longer disappear. They accumulate. They can be compared, counted, audited, and mapped. This transformation does not merely preserve knowledge—it changes the conditions under which knowledge exists. -/- From the first administrative tablets of Mesopotamia to the bureaucratic machinery of Rome and the cartographic empires of early modern Europe, the book traces how writing enables scale. Ledgers stabilise taxation. Maps stabilise territory. Archives stabilise law. Scripts allow rulers to “read” populations and landscapes as objects of governance. The emperor does not need to see the land if the land can be represented on paper. The literate administrator becomes the hinge between abstraction and control. Empire emerges not only through conquest but through inscription. -/- The book develops the idea that the making of the literate mind is inseparable from the making of empire. Writing does not simply record reality; it provides models for understanding language, law, geography, and thought itself. Once speech is reorganised through script, humans begin to treat words as objects—capable of definition, classification, and logical manipulation. Grammars, dictionaries, and legal codes become possible. With them come new forms of authority. The written law replaces custom. The mapped border replaces fluid frontier. The archived decree outlives the ruler who issued it. -/- A central philosophical movement of the book examines how literacy reshapes cognition. Writing separates representation from world. A map is not territory; a ledger is not grain; a statute is not justice. Yet once representations gain autonomy, they become operational realities. Civilisation increasingly governs through documents rather than direct presence. This abstraction fosters systematic reasoning, but it also creates distance between decision and consequence. Writing allows thought to become reflective and self-conscious, yet it also enables impersonal administration. -/- The book further argues that the history of reading is as important as the history of writing. As texts become central to authority—religious, legal, scientific—communities develop shared hermeneutics, shared rules for interpretation. Textual communities become political communities. The shift from reading scripture to “reading” nature marks a pivotal moment in early modern science, where empirical observation mirrors scriptural literalism. The techniques used to interpret sacred texts migrate into the interpretation of the natural world. -/- Throughout, the work maintains a material perspective. Writing is treated not as an abstract system of signs alone but as clay tablets, ink, paper, ledgers, files, screens, and digital databases. Each medium structures power differently. The archive is not metaphorical; it is architectural. The bureaucrat is not incidental; he is structural. The literate citizen is not simply educated; he is formatted by a civilisation that stores its authority externally. -/- Empires of Writing ultimately reframes modernity as the culmination of a long process in which speech became storage, storage became governance, and governance became abstraction. The modern world is not merely literate; it is scripted. To understand civilisation is therefore to understand how writing turns words into structures, memory into institutions, and thought into infrastructure. -/- . (shrink)

Narrative Affect: The End of Public Opinion develops a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary mass media as an affective system rather than an informational or persuasive one. The book argues that public opinion has been structurally displaced by narrative affect as the primary mechanism through which media coordinates attention, emotion, identity, and participation. -/- Extending the analysis introduced in The Media Scenario: Scriptwriting for Journalists (2026), the book conceptualises media power as the design of affective environments—story-worlds that position individuals as (...) participants before reflection, deliberation, or belief formation occurs. Narrative affect operates pre-cognitively, organising bodily intensity, mood, and emotional orientation in advance of judgement. -/- The book integrates insights from affect theory, media studies, political communication, and narrative analysis to explain why factual correction fails, why polarisation persists, and why influence increasingly bypasses rational debate. It proposes that selective exposure, outrage cycles, and immersion are not cognitive distortions but affective strategies that stabilise identity and narrative coherence. -/- By reframing journalism and political communication as forms of affective design, Narrative Affect challenges established models of propaganda, persuasion, and public opinion. It offers a diagnostic account of contemporary media power and provides conceptual tools for analysing how truth, legitimacy, and social reality are reorganised through feeling rather than belief. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine 'rage bait' and 'anger clicking' as core mechanisms of contemporary digital media economies, arguing that outrage has become a primary driver of visibility, engagement, and profit. Building on the concepts of the ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it shows how the classical logic of propaganda oriented toward silence, conformity, and manufactured consent has been structurally inverted. In platform-based attention economies, dissent is (...) no longer suppressed but actively cultivated, and anger functions as a predictable, extractable resource. The principle that ‘angry people click more’ is analysed not as a psychological curiosity but as an organising rule of digital capitalism, shaping content production, algorithmic ranking, and user behaviour. Rage bait is shown to rely less on plausibility or persuasion than on provocation, exploiting the fact that outrage generates reaction even when claims are openly implausible. Anger clicking converts moral concern into measurable engagement, transforming denunciation, correction, and ridicule into unpaid digital labour. Drawing on research in political communication, social psychology, and the sociology of online harassment, the article demonstrates how anger circulates collectively through networked infrastructures that reward escalation, polarisation, and symbolic conflict. The result is a communicative environment in which truth is economically disadvantaged, outrage is structurally rewarded, and dissent becomes a permanent and profitable output of the media system. Rage bait and anger clicking thus emerge not as pathologies of online culture but as rational adaptations to the incentive structures of platform capitalism. (shrink)

A realist theory of truth for a class of sentences holds that there are entities in virtue of which these sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’ and contend that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments (dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar, we provide a definition and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the (...) account of truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of logical form’, which says that atomic sentences cannot have more than one truthmaker. In contrast to this, we uphold the mutual independence of logical and ontological complexity, and the authors outline formal principles of truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity. (shrink)

This article theorises ‘the morality of anger’ within the framework of manufacture of dissent and moral outrage networks , arguing that anger’s ethical status cannot be assessed as a private psychological state once it becomes infrastructural, amplified, and monetised. Classical condemnations of anger, from Seneca’s image of anger as madness to Martha Nussbaum’s critique of retributive ‘payback’ thinking, treat anger as morally suspect because it tends to imagine compensation through another’s suffering. Yet rehabilitative traditions, from Aristotle’s doctrine of fitting anger (...) to contemporary defences of righteous anger in response to structural injustice, insist that anger can be a condition of dignity, recognition, and moral repair. The article resolves this tension by shifting the unit of analysis from individual anger to networked anger. In digital publics, the boundary between justified anger and arrogant status-anger becomes systematically blurred: status anxiety is reframed as injury, grievance is aestheticised as virtue, and indignation is rewarded as a performance of belonging. Drawing on relational and pluralist accounts, the article treats anger as behaviourally pluripotent, capable of motivating communication, withdrawal, reconciliation, or retaliation depending on social cues and institutional constraints. In outrage-driven media ecologies, those constraints are stripped away and replaced by engagement incentives, so anger is selected for portability, intensity, and punitive clarity rather than proportion, truth, or repair. The article therefore distinguishes moral anger as ethical work from outrage as moral fuel. Moral anger retains value when it remains accountable to truth, proportionality, and the possibility of recognition, and when it is disciplined by compassion understood as agape rather than weaponised into hatred. Outrage networks, by contrast, convert anger into a renewable resource for attention extraction, stabilising communities through shared enemies and escalating moral certainty without increasing responsibility. The central claim is that anger is structurally necessary to moral life, yet morally dangerous when engineered as infrastructure: the ethical task is not to abolish anger but to recover the conditions under which it can still point beyond punishment toward repair, restraint, and civic coexistence. (shrink)

This article develops the concepts of 'manufacture of dissent ', ‘moral outrage networks ’ , and 'Propaganda 2.1 model' as an analytical framework for understanding power, communication and media control under conditions of platform capitalism. Building on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classical propaganda model and Christian Fuchs’s formulation of ‘Propaganda 2.0’, the article argues that contemporary propaganda no longer operates primarily through persuasion, ideological coherence or the manufacture of consent. Instead, it functions through the systematic production of dissent and (...) the monetisation of moral outrage as its core economic logic. Propaganda 2.1 describes a media environment in which engagement optimisation displaces truth, meaning and deliberation, and where outrage becomes the most efficient unit of value extraction. The model identifies three interlocking mechanisms: rage-baiting as industrial provocation, semantic banalisation through automated and repetitive content production, and parasociality as simulated intimacy that replaces civic participation with emotional attachment. Together, these mechanisms transform public communication into an infrastructure of affect extraction, where attention is continuously harvested while collective judgement erodes. The article further reframes the classical five-filter model for the digital age, showing how ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology are reconfigured around engagement metrics, algorithmic governance and emotional volatility. Propaganda 2.1 thus marks a shift from shaping belief to engineering reaction, from public opinion to emotional circulation, and from ideological persuasion to the liquidation of meaning itself. In this environment, dissent is no longer oppositional but systemic, and outrage becomes the dominant technology of power in the digital public sphere. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine why anger exists by combining evolutionary psychology with a sociology of digital communication. Drawing on the recalibrational theory of anger developed by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, it argues that anger evolved as a strategic social emotion designed to renegotiate unfair welfare tradeoffs, enforce boundaries and deter exploitation. Far from being a loss of control, anger functioned as an internal alarm system (...) that mobilised energy, signalled resolve and restored balance within small-scale social environments. The article then shows how this adaptive mechanism becomes systematically distorted in digital societies. Networked communication systems continuously activate anger through symbolic cues, algorithmic amplification and attention-based incentives while removing the conditions necessary for resolution, negotiation and recalibration. As a result, anger shifts from an episodic corrective response to a chronic background state. What once stabilised cooperation now accumulates into permanent grievance, narrowed judgement and identity-based hostility. The article argues that digital platforms do not merely host anger but exploit its evolved alarm properties, transforming a survival mechanism into an infrastructure of engagement, visibility and power. Understanding why anger exists is therefore essential for explaining both its historical value and its contemporary dysfunction in networked public life. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that a person’s moral judgments (about both their own and others’ actions) are constrained by the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance and, thus, that such judgments are determined in the first instance by the person’s epistemic circumstances. It has been argued, in other words, that the epistemic is logically prior to other normative (e.g., ethical, prudential, pecuniary) considerations in human decision-making, that these other normative considerations figure in decision-making only after (logically and temporally) (...) relevant ignorance has constrained the decision-maker’s menu of options. If this is right, then a person’s moral judgments in some set of circumstances should vary with their knowledge and ignorance of these circumstances. In this study, we test the hypothesis of the logical priority of the epistemic. We describe two experiments in which subjects’ knowledge and ignorance of relevant consequences were manipulated. In the second experiment, we also compared the effect of ignorance on moral judgments with that of personal force, a factor previously shown to influence moral judgments. We found broad empirical support for the armchair arguments that epistemic considerations are logically prior to normative considerations. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse how moral anger is grammatically organised, economically exploited, and politically stabilised within contemporary media systems. Rather than treating outrage as a spontaneous emotional reaction, the article argues that it functions as a reproducible linguistic infrastructure that structures trust, suspicion, and collective alignment. Through a series of interconnected case analyses, the article demonstrates how outrage operates as grammar rather than affect: a set of recurring (...) linguistic cues, moral codes, and classificatory mechanisms that pre-structure interpretation before empirical evaluation can occur. The discussion examines the revival of the term ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany as a compressed moral judgement that bypasses factual dispute and encodes institutional betrayal; the Bulgarian media environment, where the language of Russophilia and Russophobia transforms geopolitical orientation into enforced moral identity; the role of hostility indices as bureaucratic technologies that quantify and industrialise anger; and the emergence of cult-like linguistic practices in which double meanings, taboo-breaking, and initiation rituals consolidate moral communities through managed outrage. Drawing on research in moral psychology, hate-speech studies, and evolutionary accounts of threat perception, the article situates outrage within a harm-based moral framework in which competing claims of victimhood displace deliberation. It further argues that digital media environments monetise this moral grammar through attention economies that reward indignation, escalation, and ideological certainty. The central claim is that contemporary media no longer primarily manufacture consent but systematically manufacture dissent by converting distrust, hostility, and moral accusation into stable communicative resources. The result is a condition of post-democratic inertia in which speech proliferates while shared understanding collapses, and moral language persists not as a foundation of solidarity but as an infrastructure of permanent division. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to explain how righteous anger is transformed from a morally oriented response to injustice into a managed, pleasurable, and self-reinforcing form of dissent within digital media environments. Drawing on moral philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, religious ethics, and media sociology, the article argues that righteous anger possesses a distinctive affective appeal rooted in both evolutionary alarm mechanisms and reward-related neural processes. Moral anger not only signals norm violation (...) and motivates corrective action; it also restores a sense of agency, reinforces moral identity, and produces emotional gratification. This hedonic dimension helps explain why righteous anger is difficult to relinquish, even when it no longer leads to effective action or repair. The article traces how digital platforms amplify this dynamic by rewarding outrage with visibility, affirmation, and social belonging, converting moral judgement into a repeatable emotional loop. Through analyses of moral panic, indignation, addiction-like outrage patterns, and distinctions between righteous and entitled anger, the article shows how ethical concern can be redirected toward performative condemnation and identity formation. Classical and religious traditions on anger, alongside Aristotelian moderation, are revisited to demonstrate that the moral value of anger depends not on its intensity but on its orientation, limits, and willingness to dissolve once justice is pursued. The article concludes that contemporary media systems increasingly govern dissent not by suppressing anger, but by sustaining its pleasurable form, detaching moral energy from responsibility and embedding outrage within the political economy of attention. (shrink)

An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...) that AI audits should similarly provide assurance to their stakeholders about AI organizations’ ability to govern their algorithms in ways that mitigate harms and uphold human values. We discuss the necessary conditions for the criterion audit, and provide a procedural blueprint for performing an audit engagement in practice. We illustrate how this framework can be adapted to current regulations by deriving the criteria on which ‘bias audits’ for hiring algorithms can be performed, as required by the recently effective New York City Local Law 144 of 2021. We conclude by offering critical discussion on the benefits, inherent limitations, and implementation challenges of applying practices of the more mature financial auditing industry to AI auditing where robust guardrails against quality assurance issues are only starting to emerge. Our discussion as informed by experiences in performing these audits in practice highlights the critical role that an audit ecosystem plays in ensuring the effectiveness of such methodology. (shrink)

By 2026, the power elite described by Mills has reconstituted itself as a conspicuous platform elite, whose authority no longer rests primarily on institutional position but on continuous visibility, narrative performance, and algorithmic amplification. Power is now exercised less through command and deliberation than through spectacle, biography, and attention, transforming elite domination into a publicly staged and culturally aspirational form of rule. This article rereads The Power Elite from the standpoint of 2026 with particular emphasis on C. Wright Mills’s warning (...) about "higher immorality", first formulated in 1956. Mills described higher immorality as a structural condition in which those occupying the summits of economic, political, and military power are insulated from the moral consequences of their decisions by size, distance, bureaucracy, and institutional abstraction. This article argues that higher immorality was not a historically contingent pathology of mid-twentieth-century American capitalism, but an early diagnosis of a durable logic of modern power that has since intensified. In the contemporary context of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, media spectacle, and elite celebrity, higher immorality no longer operates primarily through secrecy or denial, but through visibility, narrative performance, and normalisation. Power today presents itself openly, confidently, and often pedagogically, while responsibility dissolves into systems, procedures, and technical necessity. By tracing the transformation from institutional opacity to conspicuous authority, the article shows how higher immorality has evolved from organised irresponsibility into a cultural atmosphere in which success no longer requires moral justification, authority no longer requires reason, and domination no longer requires belief. Reclaiming Mills’s concept as a sociological warning rather than a historical footnote, the article argues that higher immorality remains a central obstacle to democratic accountability in the twenty-first century, precisely because it has ceased to appear immoral at all. In this sense, the power elite of Mills’s era has culminated in what this article defines as ‘The Conspicuous Elite' or 'Platform Elite’, a form of authority in which domination is no longer concealed by institutions but performed openly through visibility, narrative, and algorithmic attention. (shrink)

This article examines Chris Knight’s lecture ‘Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics’ (27 February 2018), situating it as both an intellectual self-clarification and a broader critique of postwar academic culture. Responding to Les Levidow’s appreciation of his book , Knight reconstructs the paradox at the heart of Noam Chomsky’s legacy: the coexistence of uncompromising dissident politics with a scientific career embedded in Cold War military research environments, particularly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its offshoot MITRE. The article traces Knight’s (...) argument that this paradox is not a biographical anomaly but a mythological solution to a deeper contradiction between science and politics institutionalised during the cognitive revolution. By analysing Knight’s use of anthropology, mythology, institutional history, and first-hand testimony, the article shows how the professional separation of theory and practice became an ‘ideology of anti-ideology’—one that sanitised language, depoliticised cognition, and normalised proximity to power while preserving moral authority. Rather than reducing Chomsky to hypocrisy or vindication, the article argues that Knight’s lecture reframes him as a cultural figure whose authority derives precisely from the unresolved tension between insider knowledge and public denunciation. The lecture thus functions as a critical lens on the moral economy of modern academia, where intellectual freedom, military funding, and ethical self-justification are structurally intertwined. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse ''Outrage exploitation networks'' as a central mechanism of contemporary digital power. It argues that moral outrage has been transformed from a situational ethical response into an engineered, scalable and monetisable resource embedded in platform capitalism. The article conceptualises the ''Outrage-industrial complex'' as a loosely coordinated but structurally coherent subsystem linking media organisations, platform infrastructures, influencers, political entrepreneurs, fundraising operations and, at its most extreme (...) margins, criminal and extremist actors. Within this system, outrage is not an accidental by-product of polarisation but a deliberately cultivated affective state designed to maximise engagement, visibility, loyalty and revenue. Drawing on sociology of emotions, political communication, platform studies and extremism research, the article shows how outrage exploitation networks operate through algorithmic amplification, ritualised discourse, identity-based antagonism and emotional feedback loops that reward escalation while penalising moderation. Outrage functions simultaneously as attention fuel, identity glue and mobilisation infrastructure, sustaining permanent dissent without resolution. The analysis further demonstrates how the same emotional logics underpin commercial outrage media, radical communities of hate and criminal exploitation networks, revealing a structural continuity between profit-driven polarisation and coercive or violent forms of digital harm. The article concludes that outrage exploitation networks represent a mature form of Propaganda 2.0: a system no longer oriented toward persuasion or consensus, but toward activation, antagonism and the continuous extraction of moral anger as economic and political value. (shrink)

This article examines the future of mass media at the point where the twentieth-century information order reaches structural exhaustion and a new paradigm of mass communication becomes unavoidable. Revisiting the critical legacy of UNESCO’s New World Information and Communication Order, Denis McQuail’s paradigm shift thesis, and the political economy critiques articulated in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent, the article argues that these models described a media system oriented toward stabilising power through manufactured consensus. Drawing on The Economic Policy of Online (...) Media: Manufacture of Dissent, it develops the claim that contemporary digital media no longer primarily manufactures consent but systematically produces, manages, and monetises dissent through platform architectures, algorithmic amplification, and attention economies. The article situates this transformation within broader technological changes, including artificial intelligence, instant translation, permanent archiving, and global connectivity, which undermine secrecy and force power systems into unprecedented exposure to the past. Against this background, the article asks whether a new form of consent is possible by 2088—one century after Manufacturing Consent—under conditions of radical informational transparency. It concludes that the future of mass media is inseparable from the emergence of a new anthropological figure, the New Information Human, for whom knowledge replaces belief and verification replaces narrative loyalty, marking a shift from mass persuasion toward individual responsibility as the foundation of any future information order. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of the Longitude of Power to analyse how authority decays not primarily through corruption or defeat, but through duration, optimisation, and institutional fatigue. Using Star Wars, Dune, and Foundation as a comparative political mythology, the text argues that long-lived systems inevitably mistake endurance for legitimacy, converting stability into paralysis and moral authority into bureaucratic inertia. The Jedi Order, the Galactic Republic, Herbert’s God Emperor, and Asimov’s Empire are examined as variations of the same structural failure: (...) institutions that survive too long without mechanisms for self-obsolescence become blind to the conditions of their own collapse. This framework is then extended to the real universe of cultural production through a meta-analysis of New Hollywood. The careers of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola are read as a real-world enactment of the same imperial logic they dramatised on screen. The article interprets Lucas’s sale of Star Wars to Disney as a contemporary analogue of republican surrender through fatigue, while Coppola’s self-financed Megalopolis is framed as an intentional embrace of failure as resistance to total optimisation. Drawing on theories of play, failure, and institutional entropy, the article concludes that in late modernity the final form of rebellion is not victory but the willingness to lose. Where power seeks immortality through systems, brands, and infrastructures, meaning survives only through finite, risky, and self-terminating acts. The Longitude of Power thus names the central paradox of civilisation: power always endures, but freedom survives only if it is allowed to fail. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine the rationality of anger within contemporary media environments shaped by digital capitalism, situating anger at the intersection of instrumental action, moral judgement, and epistemic perception. Drawing on the concepts of ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it argues that anger cannot be evaluated solely as an individual psychological state but must be understood as a socially conditioned and increasingly engineered communicative force. Classical (...) and contemporary accounts of anger are revisited to show that anger can be instrumentally effective, normatively appropriate, and epistemically revealing under specific conditions, particularly when it functions as a demand for recognition rather than retribution. However, the article demonstrates that these rational capacities are fragile and context-dependent. In digital communication systems organised around attention, engagement, and escalation, anger is systematically detached from recognition and resolution and repurposed as a visibility amplifier, identity marker, and economic resource. What appears as rational anger at the level of individual interaction becomes structurally irrational at the level of collective outcomes, producing polarisation, cognitive rigidity, and the erosion of trust. The article further argues that contemporary media infrastructures exploit anger’s rational form while neutralising its corrective function, transforming it into a reproducible grammar of miscommunication. Under conditions of planned obsolescence of communication, anger no longer serves cooperation or moral repair but becomes an infrastructure of permanent dissent and discommunication. The rationality of anger, the article concludes, must therefore be assessed in relation to the communicative systems that shape its expression, reward its escalation, and redirect its moral force toward systemic instability. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe a structural shift in the contemporary public sphere: moral emotion is no longer primarily episodic, locally regulated, and socially costly, but increasingly produced as a network function embedded in platform architectures. Drawing on the classical insight that collective anger can unify fractured worlds more effectively than justice or wisdom, the argument traces how digital media transform indignation into scalable infrastructure through the conversion of (...) reaction into metrics, and metrics into revenue. In this environment, anger circulates more efficiently than truth because online communication is increasingly organised around affect management rather than deliberation, persuasion, or shared inquiry. Moral outrage becomes syntactic: titles, captions, hashtags, memes, and comments operate as portable triggers that recruit strangers into temporary moral collectives, while the design logic of visibility rewards escalation, certainty, and denunciation. The article reframes propaganda beyond the binary of truth and lies by showing how audiences participate in the production and amplification of outrage as a form of distributed labour, and how the attention economy privileges high-arousal moral signals (‘angry people click more’) as a reliable mechanism of engagement. It proposes seven hypotheses describing the infrastructuralisation of moral emotion, the dominance of feelings over facts in networked persuasion, the role of indignation in identity formation, the convergence of platform governance and political authority into anger management regimes, and the emergence of outrage exploitation systems that sustain perpetual moral trial. The result is a moral public sphere without durable morality: a simulation of righteousness detached from slow interpretation, mutual responsibility, and civic repair. Until digital communication is redesigned to reward restraint rather than reaction, moral anger will remain a primary organising principle of mass society, corroding trust and replacing democratic deliberation with cycles of manufactured indignation. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine anger management not as a therapeutic technique or individual coping strategy, but as a central problem of contemporary communication systems that actively produce, circulate, and stabilise anger as a social resource. Drawing on the concepts of ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, the article argues that anger has shifted from a personal moral challenge into a managed and engineered medium of power. Classical (...) and modern approaches that frame anger as a matter of self-control or choice are reinterpreted in light of digital environments in which anger is repeatedly invited, rewarded, and prolonged. The analysis shows how anger operates simultaneously as permission, displacement, and misdirection: it legitimises actions that would otherwise require justification, redirects frustration away from structural causes, and sustains attention economies that profit from unresolved conflict. Organisational, managerial, and institutional contexts further illustrate how anger is not eliminated but formatted, channelled, and selectively validated according to its usefulness for stability, compliance, and symbolic governance. Rather than resolving injustice or restoring trust, contemporary anger management practices often neutralise anger’s disruptive potential while preserving the conditions that generate it. The article concludes that anger management has become less about calming emotions and more about regulating dissent, converting moral energy into predictable, non-transformative forms. In this sense, anger is no longer managed to restore communication but engineered to sustain miscommunication, preparing the ground for discommunication as a durable social condition. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe anger as a patterned social force that has been reorganised by digital communication systems into a form of distributed social infrastructure. Drawing on sociological work on anger and emotion, it argues that anger is neither a private disturbance nor a purely spontaneous moral reaction, but a socially produced, socially sanctioned, and unevenly distributed process shaped by status, roles, inequality, and institutional pressure. In networked (...) publics, the article shows, anger is increasingly detached from immediate interaction and reattached to platform-driven cycles of provocation, attribution, display, and reward. This shift produces a public sphere in which low-level irritation becomes continuous, moral interpretation is accelerated, and blame is made readily available through simplified causal stories and symbolic enemies. Anger operates simultaneously as a power emotion and a mechanism of social control: it asserts dominance, signals entitlement, disciplines boundaries, and legitimises punishment, while also arising from perceived powerlessness when harm is judged remediable and blameworthy. By integrating research on social rage, political escalation, and social learning, the article proposes that moral outrage online is best understood as learned behaviour reinforced by metrics, imitation, and network norms. The result is not simply ‘more anger’, but a new architecture of anger in which outrage becomes predictable, reproducible, and strategically valuable for actors and systems that benefit from attention, polarisation, and moral drama. The sociology of anger, the article concludes, must therefore expand beyond roles and institutions to include platforms, algorithmic feedback, and network effects as central determinants of how societies feel, judge, mobilise, and govern dissent. (shrink)

This article argues that the moment large language models begin to ‘read’ better than humans marks a civilisational reversal rather than a merely technical advance. The modern ideal of reading as slow contextualisation and logical continuity collides with an archive whose scale exceeds ordinary human attention, producing a public language of fragments, slogans, and performative affiliation. In that condition, the language model functions as a speaking mirror: it answers back with coherence across scale and exposes the decline of human mapping, (...) the ability to place statements inside wider structures of relations, histories, and consequences. The article proposes that a spatial turn in intelligence follows from this reversal. As models inherit the maintenance of complex linguistic memory, humans must recover embodied orientation, acoustic presence, and quiet understanding within shared physical space. The argument is developed through a philosophical reading of Fei-Fei Li’s spatial intelligence manifesto, a theory of machines as librarians of the symbolic archive, and a concluding claim that complex language must be reevaluated as a world-making instrument whose destructive power requires containment, restraint, and strategic silence. The article proceeds in a deliberate movement from diagnosis to reorientation. It begins by identifying the emergence of the speaking mirror, the moment in which large language models reveal the exhaustion of public discourse and the limits of linguistic intelligence. From there it shifts toward the world mirror, introducing spatial intelligence as the conceptual alternative to language-centred cognition and situating this transition through the analysis of Fei-Fei Li’s manifesto. Having redefined intelligence beyond verbal fluency, the argument then outlines a new division of labour in which machines maintain the symbolic archive while humans recover embodied orientation. The final sections develop the implications of this arrangement: artificial systems become custodians of linguistic continuity, and human life re-centres on acoustic presence, spatial understanding, and practical coexistence. The structure culminates in a normative claim that complex language must be treated as a powerful but dangerous world-making instrument whose future lies in containment rather than permanent human habitation, allowing the restoration of shared reality through silence, presence, and lived space. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' by treating scriptwriting as the hidden architecture of modern mass communication rather than a specialised craft confined to cinema. It argues that the screenplay, historically shaped by the tension between improvisation and control, has become a general cultural form: an organising logic that structures attention, emotion, and role-performance across television, news, platforms, and interactive media. Beginning with the scenario traditions of commedia dell’arte and the industrial (...) rationalisation of Hollywood, the article traces how screenwriting standardisation migrated from production management into social management, turning dramaturgical rhythm into a governing principle of contemporary visibility. Within this framework, narrative form no longer primarily serves truth, catharsis, or artistic completion; it increasingly functions as an instrument for sustaining engagement and directing perception through hooks, escalation, and delayed resolution. The article further examines the ethical dilemma of the writer in a media environment where dramatization routinely substitutes for explanation, and where documentary codes can simulate authenticity while remaining deeply constructed. By bringing journalism, documentary practice, role-playing interactivity, and screenplay theory into a single account, the text proposes that the ‘new paradigm of mass communication’ is not merely about new technologies but about the universalisation of scripting as a social technique. The central claim is that scriptwriting has become a civic force: it shapes public reality by organising what can be felt, believed, and enacted. The question is therefore no longer only how to write a script, but how to write responsibly in a culture where reality itself is increasingly produced in script-like form. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to analyse how moral anger operates as a central motivational force in contemporary societies and how it is increasingly captured, organised, and amplified by digital media systems. Drawing on moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology, sociology, and media theory, the article argues that moral anger is not a pathological excess or a mere expressive outburst, but a socially structured emotion that links ethical perception to action, recognition to (...) resistance, and individual judgement to collective mobilisation. Moral anger is examined through several interrelated forms, including indignation, moral panic, righteous anger, and organised outrage, each of which demonstrates how anger becomes morally charged, narratively framed, and politically consequential. Classical and contemporary debates on the moral justification of anger are revisited to show that anger has historically functioned as a signal of norm violation, a demand for recognition, and a catalyst for social change. At the same time, the article demonstrates how digital infrastructures transform these functions by rewarding escalation, permanence, and visibility, detaching anger from resolution and embedding it within attention-based economies. Moral panic illustrates how anger can be redirected toward symbolic enemies and used as a mechanism of governance, while moral outrage networks reveal how indignation is synchronised at scale, monetised, and converted into identity and power. The article concludes that moral anger remains indispensable for recognising injustice and motivating change, but that its contemporary amplification risks transforming a corrective moral force into a permanent infrastructure of polarisation, control, and managed dissent. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ', ‘the media scenario ' and pseudo-events and pseudo-worlds as the central operating units of the new paradigm of mass communication and of the media scenario. Building on The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, pseudo-events are treated not as occasional distortions of public life but as a routine mode of reality-production: events increasingly occur in order to be narrated, circulated, replayed, and emotionally ‘confirmed’ by audiences. The argument extends this (...) logic from events to worlds. Drawing on possible worlds theory and contemporary narratology associated with Marie-Laure Ryan, pseudo-worlds are defined as coherent but strategically engineered storyworlds that can be entered, inhabited, and defended as if actual. In networked environments, these worlds are sustained less by evidence than by repeatable narrative roles, affective cues, and the infrastructural design of platforms. Hyperlinks, interfaces, and procedural media function as ontological switches that intensify re-centring and multiply ‘world transitions’, enabling rapid movement between fiction, documentation, and hybrid scenography. As a result, publics no longer share a single ‘mass’ reality but participate in overlapping and competing world-models, each with its own internal truth conditions and moral coordinates. The media scenario is therefore approached as a system of world-building in which attention, identity, and political alignment are organised through scripted participation rather than deliberation. The article concludes that the key struggle of contemporary communication is not primarily over facts, but over the design, accessibility, and durability of pseudo-worlds that convert narrative coherence into social power. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and examines Kurt Vonnegut’s concept of the ‘shapes of stories’ as a key to understanding the new paradigm of mass communication and the logic of the media scenario. Revisiting Vonnegut’s early and long-dismissed insight that narratives can be mapped as simple movements between good and bad over time, the article situates his graphical models within contemporary media environments dominated by platforms, algorithms, and participatory storytelling. Drawing (...) on Vonnegut’s diagrams and their later empirical confirmation through computational literary studies, the article argues that narrative simplicity is not a reduction of meaning but a structural condition of emotional orientation. In digital culture, these basic narrative arcs migrate from literature into journalism, politics, and platform media, where they function less as representations of reality and more as behavioural templates that organise attention, expectation, and collective emotion. The article further proposes that media scenarios increasingly impose pre-structured emotional curves onto public life, transforming events into recognisable plots and citizens into participants within scripted arcs of crisis, recovery, decline, or ambiguity. Vonnegut’s insistence on the straight line—exemplified by his reading of Hamlet as an emotionally flat narrative—is interpreted as a critical counterpoint to contemporary dramatisation: a reminder that life itself resists narrative closure. By linking narrative form, emotional rhythm, and media power, the article reframes Vonnegut’s playful diagrams as a serious theoretical tool for analysing how stories shape not only meaning, but social time, moral judgement, and the experience of reality in the age of mass communication. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and analyses how narrative has become the dominant operating system of contemporary media and how this shift defines a new paradigm of mass communication structured by what can be called the ‘media scenario’. Rather than treating media as neutral channels that transmit information, it approaches them as narrative environments that script perception, organise attention, and turn social reality into staged experience. Drawing on conflict-management research on (...) polarised societies, the article shows how public disputes escalate when narrative collapses into single, identity-protective stories that simplify complexity, moralise disagreement, and convert facts into instruments of mobilisation. It then situates this narrative condition within broader media theory, arguing that interactivity intensifies the transformation of audiences into participants whose roles are shaped by platform design, metrics, and algorithmic visibility. In this context, narrative is no longer primarily a cultural form but an infrastructural mechanism: it governs what becomes socially legible, emotionally actionable, and politically believable. The article concludes that depolarisation depends less on enforcing a single ‘truth’ than on cultivating narrative literacy, institutional incentives for complexity, and media practices that can hold plural stories side by side without converting disagreement into war. (shrink)

This paper argues that Åsa Burman’s concept of telic power in nonideal social ontology can be deepened by integrating Michel Foucault’s account of power in both his mid-period work on governmentality and his later work on ethics. Telic power is the ability of individuals to act in relation to shared ideals. It emerges from two distinct but interrelated sources: (1) the internalization of ethical ideals through subject-formation and (2) governmentality as a structuring of conduct through rational norms and practices. To (...) capture how ideals circulate across both registers, I introduce the notion of ethical discourse – the socially embedded circulation of exemplary ideals and role models. Ethical discourse functions both as a medium of normalization and as a resource for self-formation. Drawing on feminist critiques of gendered ideals, such as postwar femininity, and a critique of neoliberalism, I argue that Foucault’s dual account of subjectivation and governmentality clarifies and expands Burman’s schema of telic and structural power, offering a richer framework for nonideal social ontology. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and develops a practical and theoretical answer to the question of how to write a media scenario within the new paradigm of mass communication. It argues that contemporary media no longer operate primarily through finished narratives, but through scenario-based structures that organise participation, emotion, and attention in real time. Drawing on classical screenwriting theory—especially Robert McKee’s principles of structure, conflict, and character—the article reframes dramaturgical tools (...) as operational devices for media environments shaped by platforms, algorithms, and perpetual circulation. In this context, the media scenario is not a story with closure, but a designed field of expectation gaps, role distribution, and escalating tension that keeps audiences engaged as participants rather than spectators. The analysis shows how inciting incidents, dilemmas, turning points, and climaxes are translated into recurring media formats such as breaking news, live commentary, scandals, and moral conflicts, producing a continuous psychodramatic flow rather than cathartic resolution. Writing a media scenario therefore requires understanding not only narrative structure, but also the mechanics of anticipation, emotional amplification, and role assignment that sustain engagement over time. The article proposes that effective media scenarios are written backwards from their desired effects—attention, identification, outrage, or mobilisation—and forwards through controlled escalation, while deliberately postponing closure. By bridging screenwriting craft and media theory, the article outlines a model of media authorship in which scripting becomes a form of governance over perception, emotion, and participation in the digital public sphere. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ', ‘the media scenario ' and the shift from narrative to script to psychodrama as a defining pathway of the new paradigm of mass communication. It argues that contemporary media no longer organise experience primarily through finished stories with closure, but through script-like formats designed for continuous participation, escalation, and measurable reaction. In this environment, the ‘media scenario’ functions as an operational structure that distributes roles, cues emotional performances, and sustains attention (...) through open-ended conflict. The article proposes that the classical narrative contract—distance between spectacle and spectator, temporal boundaries, and interpretative reflection—has been progressively replaced by a culture of enactment, in which audiences become performers and meaning is generated through real-time feedback. Drawing on psychodramatic concepts such as role reversal, doubling, mirroring, and the management of spontaneity, the analysis shows how media platforms translate therapeutic techniques into industrial systems of visibility: emotion becomes content, identity becomes a role, and authenticity becomes a function of immediacy. The result is a public sphere increasingly structured as an endless session without frame or closure, where crises are staged as episodic confrontations and social belonging is secured through shared affect rather than shared deliberation. By linking narratology, screenwriting theory, and psychodrama, the article outlines a media-critical model of contemporary communication in which scripts govern participation and psychodramatic intensity substitutes for public reasoning—raising urgent questions about agency, responsibility, and the ethics of staging in digital culture. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and rethinks the concept of the mass audience under conditions of digital media, narrative proliferation, and participatory communication. Drawing on contemporary media psychology, narratology, and media-conscious narrative theory, it argues that the classical notion of a homogeneous, passive audience is no longer analytically adequate. Media narratives today operate through processes of identification, interpretation, and participation that transform viewers into active agents within a broader media scenario. (...) Building on empirical research into the effects of narrative identification on the audience’s sense of self, the article shows how media stories exert both immediate emotional influence and delayed cognitive effects that reshape self-efficacy, motivation, and identity orientation. Narrative engagement functions not as simple persuasion, but as a mechanism that activates latent personal traits and integrates them into the individual’s self-conception over time. At the same time, narratological theory demonstrates that these effects are structurally produced through narrative organisation—fabula, focalisation, character construction, and event sequencing—rather than through the ‘reality’ of the story itself. In networked and transmedia environments, audiences no longer merely interpret narratives but actively extend, remix, and inhabit storyworlds across platforms, dissolving the boundary between author, character, and viewer. The mass audience thus fragments into a multiplicity of individual narrative trajectories, each shaped by biography, attention, and interaction. The article situates this transformation within a broader paradigm shift in mass communication, from message transmission to media scenarios in which audiences perform roles, rehearse identities, and generate real social effects through fictional and semi-fictional constructs. The mass audience is reconceptualised not as a collective receiver, but as a distributed field of narrative participation in which fiction produces real consequences and media narratives become engines of self-formation and social coordination. (shrink)

If imagination is subject to the will, in the sense that people choose the content of their own imaginings, how is it that one nevertheless can learn from what one imagines? This chapter argues for a way forward in addressing this perennial puzzle, both with respect to propositional imagination and sensory imagination. Making progress requires looking carefully at the interplay between one’s intentions and various kinds of constraints that may be operative in the generation of imaginings. Lessons are drawn from (...) the existing literature on propositional imagination and from the control theory literature concerning the prediction and comparison mechanisms (or “forward models”) involved in ordinary perception. A more general conclusion is reached that, once we have the tools to understand how some imaginings are both under willful control and helpfully guide action and inference, we will have what we need to understand the cognitive basis of imagination in general. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and develops the claim that civilisation increasingly functions as a role-playing game: a lived architecture of roles, rules, and scripted interactions through which people learn what is ‘real’, what is ‘allowed’, and what counts as meaningful participation. Building on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, it argues that the contemporary media environment intensifies this performative structure by converting publics from spectators into players. Within the new paradigm of (...) mass communication, media do not merely represent events; they design scenarios—interactive dramaturgies organised around quests, conflicts, reputational rewards, and ritualised reactions. The article uses live action role-playing (LARP) as an analytic lens for understanding how digital platforms produce collective ‘game worlds’ in which identities behave like avatars and political, moral, and cultural positions become roles to be performed. It further shows how immersion technologies and participatory narrative formats dissolve the boundary between fiction and social reality, making ‘playing’ a primary mode of civic presence. This transformation generates a double effect: it heightens engagement and the feeling of agency, yet it also narrows imagination by standardising identity into scripts and collapsing truth into the continuity of narrative moves. Finally, the article situates scenario thinking and strategic communication within this ludic turn, arguing that power increasingly operates through the design of playable futures: frameworks that distribute roles, set tempo, and normalise certain choices as ‘the next move’. Civilisation, understood as a media scenario, is therefore not simply narrated but enacted—an ongoing multiplayer performance in which control over roles becomes control over collective time, attention, and social possibility. (shrink)

This article theorises 'the new paradigm of mass communication ' and ‘the media scenario ' and develops a theory of time as the hidden infrastructure of contemporary mass communication, arguing that the ‘new paradigm’ is best understood as the industrial production and governance of temporality through narrative form. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s account of narrativity, emplotment, and the ‘third time’ of narrated experience, the article proposes that media do not merely represent events but configure how societies inhabit ‘before’ and ‘after’, (...) urgency and delay, memory and expectation. In this framework, narrative causality is practical rather than physical: media plots translate motives, goals, and collective intentions into intelligible sequences, converting contingent occurrences into purposeful arcs. The concept of the ‘media scenario’ is introduced to name the contemporary form of this process: an environment in which platforms, formats, and algorithms continuously script attention, pace public emotions, and synchronise dispersed audiences into a shared ‘now’. News cycles, serial formats, viral controversies, strategic communication, and scenario-planning narratives are treated as techniques for abducting attention and stabilising a hypernormalised present, where participation matters more than belief and visibility competes with verification. The article argues that this engineered temporality intensifies polarisation by rewarding dramatic simplification and accelerating moral response, but it also identifies a constructive possibility: narrative literacy as civic capacity, enabling societies to recognise the time-making power of media, resist compulsory dramaturgy, and re-open public time to deliberation, plurality, and ethical agency. -/- . (shrink)