Unmediated Communication Research Articles

Motivations for Activism: Exploring Bersih Activists’ Communicative Ecologies

Social media provides people with new ways of approaching and engaging in politics. This article explores how Bersih activists develop new communicative practices and motivations for their activism. The study investigates the communicative strategies that they employed in using social media to mobilise their supporters and explores their personal communicative experiences, which are likely to enhance their public commitment. This study draws on data collected from a longitudinal study conducted before and after the 14th General Election (GE14) in 2018, which saw the fall of the dominant Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition after ruling continuously for six decades. Findings show Bersih activism uses mediated and unmediated communication strategies in mobilisation, each of which is organised in a particular way that connects activists with their local and global networks. This study concludes that motivation moderates the three layers of activists’ communicative ecology and the integration of social media into their everyday life helps to actualise collective affordances. Bersih activists use social media to deliver truthful information about their activism as this helps to combat the distribution of fake news, an

"DIGITALIZATION OF TEACHING ROMANIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN SWEDEN"

Sweden has already had an established experience in e-learning, so that the burst of worldwide pandemic restrictions and reformulations did not emerge as a stressful surprise. Despite the fact that Sweden did not impose facemasks and plenty of restrictions common in EU, the educational system reacted promptly to the online transfer where the case was. At Lund University there is the only Romanian Chair left in Scandinavia. For more than twenty years now, there have been used on-line platforms in teaching Romanian and they cover both e-learning and m-learning. I had the opportunity to teach using all three of them: Luvit, live@lund, and Canvas. There has been a crescendo in the communicational and IT facilities secured by these platforms. Finally, Canvas came up with numerous educational resources. Students and teachers have the possibility to generate videos and audio content, to inscribe videos with their own message, and to use this platform for unmediated communication instead of Zoom, for instance. Under these technical circumstances, communicative approach, mentoring, and negotiation were more feasible and the educational input experienced a high degree of resonance and impetus.

Advantages and disadvantages of e-learning. A case study

The vantage point of e-learning, as well as its opposite, will be studied in relation to the e-learning system at Lund University. Sweden has already had an established experience in e-learning, so that the burst of worldwide pandemic restrictions and reformulations did not emerge as a stressful surprise. Even though Sweden did not impose facemasks and plenty of restrictions common in EU, the educational system reacted promptly to the online transfer where there was a case. At Lund University there is the only Romanian Chair left in Scandinavia. For more than twenty years now on-line platforms have been used in teaching Romanian and they cover both e-learning and m-learning. I had the opportunity to teach using all three of them: Luvit, live@lund, and Canvas. There has been a crescendo in the communicational and IT facilities secured by these platforms. Finally, Canvas came up with numerous educational resources. Students and teachers have the possibility to generate videos and audio content, to inscribe videos with their own message, and to use this platform for unmediated communication instead of Zoom, for instance. Under these technical circumstances, communicative approach, mentoring, and negotiation were more feasible and the educational input experienced a high degree of resonance and impetus.

Mapping connections among activism interactional practices and presence in videoconferencing language learning

The pandemic-induced global shift to remote learning revealed that key elements of face-to-face learning fail to translate satisfactorily to the online environment. Among them, group interactions in videoconferencing language learning imply two parallel challenges for learners that must be acknowledged and supported by teachers: a shift from the usual unmediated communication to a mediated one, and a shift from using their first language to using a foreign language. The present study draws on a dynamic and multidimensional notion of presence to address challenges identified in videoconferencing and language learning. From this perspective, a selection of interactional practices observed in activism is proposed, mapping connections between each of the practices and the social, teaching, and cognitive dimensions of presence. The proposal offered in this study contributes to a call from the literature in remote learning for research on practical strategies to facilitate presence within the community of inquiry framework.

‘Forgive Me Reader, for I Have Sinned’: Disponibilité and Confession in the Works of Albert Camus

ABSTRACTIn this article I assess the effects of confessional writing as a philosophical and literary technique, as used by Albert Camus. Drawing on Gabriel Marcel’s concept of disponibilité, I suggest that confessional writing is used as a means of bringing about an intersubjective experience of the Other. The unmediated and vulnerable communication of this form of writing acts in place of the direct, second-person communication we experience in the real world, and the reader is thus situated in a phenomenological space where their empathetic and emotional responses are fully engaged, as if in intimate conversation. I suggest that, for Camus, the openness we experience in encountering a narrative text is of moral significance, as it encourages reflection on the suffering and inner lives of others in a way that otherwise might not be possible, and from this activity we may improve our moral acuity. In bringing together both fictionalised autobiography and philosophical confessional literature, this article endeavours to give the first ever full account of Camus’s vision of the role of life writing in relation to philosophy.

Jenny Lind, Voice, Celebrity

Voice has a long history in modern Western culture as a transparent signifier of subjectivity and presence. This ideology of immediacy has meant that exploration of singing voices as mediated has mostly been confined to classic technological turns marked by specific sound devices. This article examines voice in connection with the mid-nineteenth-century soprano Jenny Lind and the broader London context of contemporary Lind mania. Mediation lends itself to canvassing questions at the crossroads of voice and celebrity studies, for the invocation of a linear, unmediated communication between particular individuals and their audiences lies at the heart of modern celebrity culture's apparatus. The tension between voice and technē , presence and absence, evinced by printed and visual materials suggests mediation was key to the perceptual and ideological system surrounding Lind's voice. Attending to voice within a more porous, relational framework can help us move away from a concern with individuality and authenticity, and listen to a rich tapestry of human and material encounters.

Mediation and Peace

This article applies mechanism design to the study of international conflict resolution. Standard mechanisms in which an arbitrator can enforce her decisions are usually not feasible because disputants are sovereign entities. Nevertheless, we find that this limitation is inconsequential. Despite only being capable of making unenforceable recommendations, mediators can be equally effective as arbitrators. By using recommendation strategies that do not reveal that one player is weak to a strong opponent, a mediator can effectively circumvent the unenforceability constraint. This is because these strategies make the strong player agree to recommendations that yield the same payoff as arbitration in expectation. This result relies on the capability of mediators to collect confidential information from the disputants, before making their recommendations. Simple protocols of unmediated communication cannot achieve the same level of ex ante welfare, as they preclude confidentiality.

Revolutions and Expatriates: Social Networking, Ubiquitous Media and the Disintermediation of the State

This article explores the modern disruption of the state as the territorial control over its citizens and the restructuring of these social structures caused by social media and the unmediated communication of the digital age. Nowhere has this transformation been greater than in the Middle East, a region shaped by arbitrary political expediency and under tremendous popular pressure to redefine itself. But these transformations are not merely the populist uprisings of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria; they can be seen in economic transformations of Asia and economic harmonizations between Europe and North America. In all political, economic and social spheres, the role of social media and non-mediated communication has systematically reduced the role of the state and empowered a new network dynamic that will define the coming decades of the Twenty-First Century. A survey of Diaspora literature, however, suggests that while social media and Internet-age communications tools expand the role of Diaspora communities, they are quintessentially a tool. Some expatriate communities are engaged in peace building efforts and economic development while others are less tractable and using these tools to fund or promote armed conflict. These communities themselves are heterogeneous, so any generalization oversimplifies the community and its internal conflicts. The relative power of the state and the expatriate community are shifting away from the state – sometime evoking additional conflicts. Whatever the role, the significance of the Diaspora will increase and play a more significant part on their former homeland. The role will be determined by the conditions and the community.

Correlation and Unmediated Communication in Repeated Games with Imperfect Monitoring

This paper studies n-player undiscounted repeated games with imperfect monitoring. We prove that all uniform communication equilibrium payoffs of a repeated game can be obtained as Nash equilibrium payoffs of the game extended by unmediated cheap talk. We also show that all uniform communication equilibrium payoffs of a repeated game can be reached as Nash equilibrium payoffs of the game extended by a pre-play correlation device and a cheap-talk procedure that only involves public messages; furthermore, in the case of imperfect public and deterministic signals, no cheap talk is conducted on the equilibrium-path.

Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion

YOHEI IGARASHI Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages ofMediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion We could posit a desire for communication which is so strong, so idealistic and hence so frustrated, that it becomes inevitably a dream-state. —Geoffrey Hartman, “I. A. Richards and the Dream of Communication”1 I N A JOURNAL LETTER OF DECEMBER I 818—JANUARY 1819 TO GEORGE AND Georgiana in Kentucky, writing on the cusp of what will come to be hailed as his annus mirabilis, Keats offers his initial thoughts on the recent death ofTom and then meanders into a truly arresting thought experiment: [S]ometimes I fancy an immense separation, and sometimes, as at pres­ ent, a direct communication of spirit with you. . . . Now the reason why I do not feel at the present moment so far from you is that I rememb{er} your Ways and Manners and actions; I known you man­ ner ofthinking, you manner of feeling [sic]: I know what shape your joy or your sorrow w{ou}ld take, I know the manner ofyou walking, standing, sauntering, sitting down, laugh]ing,} punning, and evey [sic] action so truly that you seem near to me. You will rem{em}ber me in the same manner—and the more when I tell you that I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one {a}t the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.2 Keats’s dispatch had begun by assuring his brother and sister-in-law that, in the wake of Tom’s death, he has “scarce a doubt of immortality of some nature of [or] other” (LJK 2:4). Nor has he any doubt that souls in the af1 . Hartman, in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 35. 2. To'George and Georgiana Keats, December 16, 1818, in The Letters ofJohn Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:5. Keats’s letters are hereafter cited in the text as LJK followed by volume and page number. SIR, S3 (Summer 2014) 171 172 YOHEI IGARASHI terlife engage in unmediated communication with each other, and enjoy, like Milton’s angels, intuitive rather than discursive knowledge: “That will be one of the grandeurs of immortality—there will be no space and conse­ quently the only commerce between spirits will be by their intelligence of each other—when they will completely understand each other” (IJK 2:5). But in the intriguing thought experiment that follows, Keats transposes the ease of immortal interaction to the real world; he imagines a situation whereby he and his correspondents might achieve a similar kind of instan­ taneous, reciprocal “intelligence of each other.” Because each party pos­ sesses an abundant capacity for sympathetic imagination (“I known . . . you manner offeeling” [sic]), ifthey were to engage in a coordinated reading of Shakespeare, they would establish an intimate transatlantic connection and overcome the “immense separation” between London and Kentucky. Re­ membering the name of the ship George and Georgiana took to America six months earlier, the Telegraph—which alludes to the late eighteenthcentury semaphoric communications technology—while looking ahead to Mark Twain’s 1891 satirical treatment of its electric successor, one might name this scene “mental telegraphy.” One might even be tempted to call Keats’s scenario Shakespearean Skype. After all, his proposal of synchronized reading raises the same question about time difference that the railway made newly urgent in the early nineteenth century, and which lives on in the scheduling of today’s planned mediated interactions: “ten o Clock” in whose time zone?3 But even as Keats indulges in this fantasy of instantaneous communica­ tion, he intimates its counterfactual nature and the obstacles to true con­ tact. Note his final simile: he declines to liken his scenario to sighted indi­ viduals each sequestered in far-flung places and hence invisible to one another. That would be the more appropriate simile for the situation he narrates. That would also be a fitting, reflexive image for the very act of postal correspondence in which he is participating; as...

Guanxi and distribution in China: the case of Ferrero Group

This paper aims to analyze how guanxi-based business relations impact on distribution choices of foreign companies entering China. In particular, it investigates the influence of guanxi on decisions regarding both the organization of distribution channels and the management of distribution channels. It emerges that from an organizational point of view guanxi-based business relations may favor interdependence, low integration in the channel relationships, and foster multichannel choices. From a management point of view, guanxi may reduce the control of local partners over channel, create coexistence between conflict and collaboration in the channels relationships, and favor unmediated communication. The authors examine the emblematic case of Ferrero, a well-known Italian multinational company, specialized in chocolate production, which began to develop its entry strategy in China more than 30 years ago.

Safeguarding Cyborg Childhoods: Incorporating the On/Offline Behaviour of Children into Everyday Social Work Practices

Child protection social work's current concern remains largely with offline harm and injury and separate from the focus on child protection in relation to risks online and children's use of computer-mediated communication and the internet. This paper draws on original research reporting children's methods for assessing who they are talking to online, as part of a wider study designed to develop software tools for improved online child safety. It finds that children use similar methods to detect identity online as they do offline, reinforcing the interconnections between mediated and unmediated communication and an ontology of childhood in a digital world that is neither online nor offline, but both. Drawing on the concept of cyborg youth and understanding contemporary child protection in this context allows a re-visioning of the social work role that demands attention to computer-mediated literacy in the assessment of all vulnerable children and in the support of their parents and carers. Language: en

Seeing and Being Seen: The Effects on Gesture Production

Speakers are argued to adapt their language production to their addressee's needs. For instance, speakers produce fewer and smaller hand gestures when interlocutors cannot see each other. Yet is this because speakers know their addressee cannot see them, or because they themselves do not see their addressee? By means of computer-mediated communication we manipulated these factors independently. We found that speakers took into account what their addressee saw. They produced more and larger gestures when they knew the addressee could see them. Seeing the addressee increased gesture production only if speakers could readily interpret the addressee's eye gaze, which is not usually the case in mediated interaction. Adding this affordance resulted in gesturing being similar in mediated and unmediated communication.

Proving the pudding: optimising the structure of academic development

This paper questions the value of the current trend towards mandating formal teaching accreditation in higher education and argues that the ‘just-in-time’ nature of short training programmes coupled with on-going occasional mentoring is likely to result in more productive professional development for academic teachers. Specifically, the paper considers the increasing use of the graduate certificate as a means to improve practice despite the sparseness and contradictory nature of evidential data (as opposed to surveys of perceptions) supporting their efficacy as instruments of professional development. Finally the paper presents a case for less formal training and development, arguing that because universities have changed substantially in response to demands for greater access in terms of a much wider intake; in response to the increasing managerial emphasis on productivity and in response to the maelstrom of unmediated communication that has characterised the early part of the twenty-first century, a more pragmatic approach to academic development is required.

Petrobras’s blog and journalism: what ethical issues are we talking about?

This article discusses the case of Petrobras’s blog, called Facts and Data (Fatos e Dados), created to be a channel for direct communication with the society and a place for presenting the official version of information concerning this state-owned company. Taken as a parameter for questions relating to the ethical issues involved in this communication experience, it suggests some reflections beyond possible redefinitions of making communication as opposed to doing journalism. In presenting its version of events directly to the society, the company opted for a model of unmediated communication, which requires the redefinition of the speech platforms and visibility. It also proposes a reflection on discourse ethics, especially regarding the ideal of individual participation in the processes of debate concerning matters of public interest.

Unmediated communication with partially verifiable types

Abstract This paper studies unmediated communication with partially verifiable types in N-player games of incomplete information. I show that with five or more players, all outcomes that are feasible with the help of a mediator can also be achieved with direct communication between players if verifiable information can be encrypted. Without encryption, the set of equilibrium outcomes attainable with direct communication is generally strictly smaller than the set of mediated equilibrium outcomes, independent of the number of players in the game.

Unmediated Communication With Partially Verifiable Types

This paper studies unmediated communication with partially verifiable types in N-player games of incomplete information. I show that with five or more players, all outcomes that are feasible with the help of a mediator can also be achieved with direct communication between players if verifiable information can be encrypted. Without encryption, the set of equilibrium outcomes attainable with direct communication is generally strictly smaller than the set of mediated equilibrium outcomes, independent of the number of players in the game.

‘… This little ukulele tells the truth’: indie pop and kitsch authenticity

AbstractIndie pop, like rock and other independent genres more generally, has had a complicated relationship with mass culture. It both depends upon and simultaneously deconstructs notions of authenticity and truth. Independent genres have invited scholarly analysis and critique that often seek to unmask indie as ‘elite’ or to show the extent to which indie musics are, ironically, defined and shaped by consumer capitalism. Using songwriter Stephin Merritt's music and career as a case study, this essay explores the kinds of authenticities at work in indie pop. Indie pop, I argue, is a genre especially adept at generating ‘personal authenticity’. It is useful to turn to the concept of kitsch, understood here as an aesthetic and not a synonym for ‘bad’. Kitsch functions to cultivate personal attachment in the face of impersonal mass culture; it is this aesthetic, I argue, that indie pop has cultivated through its lo-fi and often nostalgic sound world and through its dissemination, which has relied upon dedicated collectors. The ‘honesty’ of this music does not arise from an illusion of unmediated communication, but instead from the emphasis on the process of mediation, which stresses the materiality of the music and the actual experience of listening.

Mediation and Peace

This paper brings mechanism design to the study of conflict resolution in international relations. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict, in a simple game where conflict is due to asymmetric information. Unmediated communication helps reducing the chance of conflict as it allows conflicting parties to reveal their types and establish type-dependent transfers to avoid conflict. Mediation improves upon unmediated communication when the intensity of conflict is high, or when asymmetric information is large. The mediator improves upon unmediated communication by not precisely reporting information to conflicting parties, and precisely, by not revealing to a player with probability one that the opponent is weak. Surprisingly, in our set up, arbitrators who can enforce settlements are no more effective in reducing the probability of conflict than mediators who can only make non-binding recommendations.

Topographical Measures: Wordsworth's and Crosthwaite's Lines on the Lake District

Although Wordsworth aspired in Lyrical Ballads to the ‘plainer and more emphatic’ speech of rustics, which he derived from their unmediated communication with ‘objects’ of nature, his Lake District writing also reveals the influence of the tours, maps, and guidebooks that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, articulated picturesque modes of landscape perception and description. In what follows I trace a history of developments within these picturesque representations of the Lakes, showing how they began to feature a productive amalgamation of verse, prose, cartographic notation, and pictorial engraving, so that many effectively became mixed-media publications. Wordsworth’s verse, I argue, was affiliated with the graphic forms of writing and non-verbal inscription found in these publications. The publications that represented the region to tourists deployed poetry and cartography in significant, sometimes intersecting, ways; however, the effects of these intersections are seldom explored. Here I isolate three intersections between mapping and versifying the Lakes with the aim of illuminating the context within which Wordsworth’s poetry was written, printed, purchased, and read. In this context, the matter of measuring the British landscape, and marking it on diagrams and maps, became entwined, visually and conceptually, with depicting that landscape in metre. I aim to reposition Wordsworth’s nature poetry within a critically interrogated inscriptional context – thereby changing our understanding of the graphical features and visual semantics of his verse. I begin by discussing some of the publications that preceded Wordsworth’s in representing the Lakes as a place of aesthetic, moral, and national interest. As Peter Crosthwaite’s maps of the Lakes suggest, these publications directed the attention of readers to visual and verbal encodings of the land. Having considered Wordsworth’s predecessors, I turn to look at several works in which he too addressed the encoding of landscape. These works include poems that discuss map-making, which Wordsworth began in 1811 when he visited the fell in the far west of the Lakes called Black Comb. I investigate these poems in light of their graphic effects, their visual contexts, and their roles in Wordsworth’s self-conception as a poet who speaks for the British landscape. Finally, I turn again to consider how the guidebook tradition was influenced by Wordsworth’s practice. Black’s Picturesque Guide to the Lakes (1841) did not simply publicise spots made significant by Wordsworth and other Romantic writers but also extended the representational interplay between verse