INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CULTURAL RESEARCH

Valery SAVCHUK

Russia, St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg State University. Faculty of Philosophy.
Department of Ontology and the Theory of Knowledge. PhD, Professor,

On the Subject of Mediaphilosophy

The article introduces the reader to the contemporary context of mediaphilosophy, discussing the irreversibility of the mediareality`s existence and presence. In addition, the article sharpens the focus on the key to transformation which has taken place in the 20th–21st centuries, wherein media activities have themselves become the object, rather than the objective reporter:: The media is not a subject that speaks, sees, perceives, but rather the speech speaks, the image sees, while the media is perceived by the subject. Following the logic of the important cultural "shifts" of the 20th century (ontological, linguistic, iconic), the author suggests the following: — the media shift — from which the key theory of mediaphilosophy arises — may be summed as “everything is media”. The soluble limits of this theory are justified.

Key words: media, mediaphilosophy, linguistic turn, iconic turn, medial turn, communicant, mediareality, medial configuration, existing

Lidia STARODUBTSEVA

Ukraine, Kharkov.
V. N. Karazin Kharkov National University. Chief of Media & Communications Department.
Professor, PhD, Director of the Center of Media Communications and Visual Studies.

Medium and Distance

How are the concepts of “media” and “distance” related? Whether the media “shells of consciousnesses” are called on to remove the distance between the knower and the known or vice versa, do they become a way of articulating it? The notion of “distance” has an inevitable double meaning: it both dis-connects and inter-connects. From this point of view, distance is a conditio sine qua non of the medial phenomenon as such. The space of our reflections is perceived by three semantic points, two of which are associated with allusions encrypted in the phrase “medium and distance” (essay by Fritz Heider “Thing and Medium” and the book of Jean-Luc Marion “Idol and Distance”), while the third point is connected to Walter Benjamin's definition of the aura as a “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be”. The destruction of the aura “in the age of mechanical reproduction”, gives rise to the euphoria of the total removal of spatial, temporal, and mental distances. That’s why we must return to the experiences of reflections on the problems of distance which brings together, and proximity which alienates (“The Sickness unto Death” by Søren Kierkegaard, “Thing” by Martin Heidegger). However, the old-fashioned, sublime pathos of thinking about the metaphysics of “distance” is now increasingly giving way to suffocating reductions and speculations about the “human, all too human” world. One of the main questions of the utterly “medialized”, “virtualized”, and “digitalized” consciousness in the beginning of 21st century, with its immersion toward a dangerous illusion of proximity and accessibility of knowledge, is the question of the (dis)ability to maintain a life-saving insuperable distance: both “stored” and “stores”, between hearing and hearable, vision and visible, thinking and thinkable.

Key words: medium, media, medialized, distance, approximation, alienation, destruction of the aura

Natalya SOKOLOVA

Russia, Samara.
Samara State University, Sociology Department.
PhD, Associated Professor.

Transmedia and «interpretive communities»

Article is devoted to the analysis of transmedia in field of popular culture. Transmedia are considered as a new, characteristic for the New Media Times phenomenon. It is shown that transmedia have certain cultural tradition (namely migration of genres), however their occurrence is caused by logic of postindustrial society development and distribution of new information and communication technologies. Transmedia are characterized by specific (in comparison with «pre-digital» times) mode of media-production, a synergy of genres and media formats, new cultural practices of the consumers and specific experience of mass media reception. Transmedia are produced by a special policy of the media companies and the consumer’s activity. The role of «interpretive communities» (spectators /readers/ listeners/gamers which are involved in media texts interpretation, communication, interaction and content-generation) in transmedia production is shown. Transmedia give evidence not only transformation of media-textuality but also the changes in traditional model of cultural production and consumption. Transmedia demonstrate contradictory character of modern popular culture: they are substantially created by vernacular activity and creativity but finally serve formation of sense of an accessory to a brand.

Key words: new (digital) media, transmedia, media-convergence, popular culture, Web 2.0, interpretive communities, migration of genres, branding, media-production, media-consumption

Vitaliy DARENSKIY

Ukraine, Kiev.
National Academy of Personnel Management / Center of Arts and Culture. Department of Theory аnd History of Culture.
PhD, Seigneur Lecturer.

Book and Media-text: Paradoxality of Succession

This article analyzes the specifics of a book, as a phenomenon of virtual reality in its correlation with media-text. The function of a book and media-text, as important remedies for a holistic worldview, are demonstrated in article. The comparative analysis of books and texts from the Internet, as regulators of the human psyche and existence, are proposed here.

Key words: book, media-text, Internet, holistic, worldview, existence

Konstantin SHEVTSOV

St. Petersburg, Russia.
St. Petersburg State University, Faculty of Philosophy.
PhD, Senior Lecturer, Fellow of the center of mediaphilosophy.

Mediaarhiv as a Form of Presence of the Past

The aim of the article is to demonstrate how the changes in leading forms of media are reflected in the concept of the “Past”, and dominated in the culture. The archive, as the medium of the past and different discourses legitimizing it, is chosen as the subject of analysis. The starting point is that, historically, only the media has been a favorite model for understanding memory and the nature of past memory, as it is intended to be understood. If an oral story makes the past dependent on the openness of the future, writing encloses any text within framework of a special medium (a wax tablet, scroll parchment, paper, book, etc.), thus forming the concept of a closed storehouse, outside both the present and the past. On the one hand, typography and modern audio and video media disperse the past in a stream of copying and retranslation; on the other hand, they reduce the past into a pure, negative force, full of gaps and violence.

Key words: media, archive, past, memory

Alexandr LVOV

Russia, St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg State University of Service and Economics. Associate professor, PhD.

Viktor TRESHEV

Russia, Kursk.
Kursk State University. Associate professor, PhD.

The Morality of Material: Medialogical Reflection upon the Records

The article aims at providingthe mediological meaning of records. The dynamics of records is viewed with an emphasis on the material they were produced from (celluloid and vinyl gramophone records, CDs). In addition, the role of the music industry in the process of the restructured reading procedure is analyzed. Reading becomes reduced to playback. Temporal experience faces the problem of recorded time consumption. The authors coin a new phrase “plastinka”, taken from modern Russian melomaniac circles. “Plastinka” is a material disk form of a musical record, serving for listening and playback. Medialogically, “plastinka” limits communication and personal creativity, implies conformity, and causes deafness.

Key words: audio media, «plastinka», LP, CD, music lover, record collector, phonogram, phonotop, hearing, power

Michael STEPANOV

Russia, St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg State University. Faculty of Philosophy. The center of mediaphilosophy. Researcher.
St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Institute of Cultural Research. Researcher.

Machina ludens: The multiplicity of dimensions of new media

Subject of “new media” is extremely popular. Thinking about them are usually reduce to the Internet and its instrumental use, with a rare analysis of the reverse effects. In the article analyze main aspects of the definition of “new media”, meaning digital technology in an interconnected set of concrete implementation. “New Media” can not be reduced solely to the internet as a unity of form the set of game spaces, technical, social, political, psychological interaction with unpredictable effects.

Key words: new media, multi-dimensional media, the game, machine, instrument, V. Flusser

Helga PESKOLLER

Austria, Innsbruck.
Leopold-Franzens University, Innsbruck. Pedagogical Institute.
Professor, climber.

Moments of Unfeasible Freedom

The author explores the state of base-jumpers, who execute their “flight” from buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs) (from which the acronym BASE derives), together with a video recording of the jump, as a media event. There are moral questions at stake here: What kind of freedom is this, really? How does it manifest itself? There are epistemological questions as well: How can one intuit the intense state of the jumpers? What is the method of capturing the jumpers’ feelings? The answers to these questions are based on the assumption that the body, with its ability to perceive, feel and remember, experiences this intensity. Therefore, the body becomes a subject and a method of analysis. The main goal of the article is to examine the role of the body in a media event, and to demonstrate the possibility of freedom inherent in such an action.

Key words: body, freedom, feeling, media event, extreme sport, basejumping

Alexander LYUSY

Russia, Moscow.
Russian Institute for Cultural Research, Seniour Rearcher.
PhD in Cultural Science.

MEDIA JAZZ: About a Deconstruction of a Local Captivity and Medialization of Culture Texts

Parade of mental elite armies is spent in a media jazz genre. By means of consideration of interference of media and the literature on a material of some concrete products the media critical panorama of modern Russia is given. The special attention is given a captivity deconstruction as one of the basic motives of the Caucasian text of Russian culture.

Key words: revolt of elite, corporate space, a brand, the media critic, a media jazz, an information labyrinth

Round Table: “Media and Contemporary Art”

This is an edited version of the audio record of the Round Table: “Media and Contemporary Art”, which took place on November 28, 2008. The Round Table was part of the 2nd Russian Congress for Cultural Research with international participation on the topic “Cultural Diversity: From the Past to the Future”.

Key words: media, contemporary art, techno-art, new technology, perception

Nina SOSNA

Russia, Moskow.
Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Science
PhD, Scientific Secretary of the “Philosophical Journal”

The Dispersed Human

Among many articles that examine the media, this article seeks to describe anthroplological structures bound up with the “medial” and articulated by it, using concrete material as a base. Looking for the path between a cultural approach to media based on mathematical methodology and politicized media analysis on the terrrain of globalization, it pursues those modes of relation on the level of subjective perception, to which the media attracts attention. The focus then shifts from the (quasi)mechanical combination of media and the unification of its effects upon the frontier of subjectivity - a frontier which is always moving because of continuous shifting change processes of the “vision” itself. The simple fact that Andreas Gursky’s photography can be found among paintings of Altdorfer or Mondrian and NASA photography, illustrates the disorientation in defining the foundation of media works analysis. Vague and evasive terms like “reality”, “referent”, “imagery”, “event”, among others are being used to discuss the media in relation to the “shared”, “human”, “close”, “intensive”, and “multiple”.

Key words: medial, media compatebility, patterns, new forms of perception, subjectivity edges, multitude

Michael STEPANOV

Russia, St. Petersburg.
St. Petersburg State University. Faculty of Philosophy. The center of mediaphilosophy. Researcher.
St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Institute of Cultural Research. Researcher.

Thinking Movies

This book review on film historian, Oksana Bulgakova, "Soviet sluhoglaz ..." analyzes the metamorphosis of Soviet cinema during the transition from the 1920s to the 1930s. The review discusses the program "medial anthropology." The media has enabled the organization of a new sensibility, a new way of thinking, and is transforming the world. Through this program, the media is not only used by us, but also uses us.

Key words: A. Bulgakov, film, body, feeling, thinking, media, medial anthropology, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein.

The Sixth Sense

This book review on "The feeling, the body movement”, discusses the disclosure of the mechanisms of interaction between emotion and the media.

Key words: body movement, the sense, emotion, media