Search Results (6)

This article is an invitation to truly postmodern conversational approaches to preaching beyond a monological modern mass media sermon dressed up in conversational style. This involves proposing a new who and how for preaching in the digital age, resulting in a New (Media) homiletic. Engaging with Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, this article first explores issues with the traditional top-down model for preaching solidified during the age of mass media technoculture. Next this article names some stumbling blocks to dialogical preaching in a mainline Protestant US context. Then this article explores what difference the implementation of Palmer’s Community of Truth model could make for preaching in this digital age. The technoculture of social media allows for and expects preachers to be more conversational in the who and how of sermon delivery, preparation, and feedback. Full article

This paper addresses the commodification of the human experience in late capitalism as depicted in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and the potential of technology in helping the human subject in evading commodification. The novel shows how the virtual world and the physical world can become mutually supportive in allowing the characters to search for meaning, pattern and wholeness by using technology as an empowering force for the human subject while managing to avoid being consumed by a powerful capitalist market. The novel’s protagonist’s success in using technology as a humanizing force proves that humans can thrive within its sphere without necessarily being absorbed or overwhelmed by it. Full article

In this article, I use Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to examine the productive associations between Twitter as a technological artifact and the quotidian discourse on Hindu nationalism online. The analysis explores the interplay between (1) Twitter as a technical artifact—examining the interface for its affordances and protocols; (2) Twitter as practice—unpacking the quotidian discourse conventions and strategies used to articulate Hindu nationalism; and (3) Twitter as ideology—examining how Hindutva ideology co-opts the platform’s affordances to promote anti-minority discrimination. My analysis highlights how the online discourse of Hindu nationalism is a constitutive force informing discussions and decisions concerning several vital issues related to governance, policies, citizenship, COVID-19, and other topics. The discourse of Hindu nationalism online has the potential to percolate into the lived realities of people and has material implications for the workings of the state. Full article

Increasing interest in various local construction forms necessitate examining its link to human life. Construction culture should be adapted and applied to the contemporary context to create a harmonious coexistence with diverse local cultures and to strengthen regional sustainability, avoiding the rigid, one-dimensional local construction development. Thus, this study aims to analyze the factors of influence needed for policy decision-making at the local spatial planning stage, with regional technologies and cultural contents from a convergent perspective taken into consideration. This study derived tangible and intangible policy decision-making factors during the spatial planning stage using text mining analysis. Additionally, social network analysis was also used to seek multi-angle correlations among factors. Through big data analytics, 16 key decision-making contents in the spatial planning stage were derived, with ‘regional development, urban policy’ as most influential. Such a result indicates the need for regional and urban policy engagement with strategic development from a holistic perspective—in view of socio-cultural relations and forms of change—and local perceptions of spatial value and significance affecting decision-making in the local spatial planning stage (LSPS). Understanding the decision-making process in the spatial planning stage requires a holistic approach with both visible technological factors (structure, form, and construction method) and invisible cultural factors (ways of life projected during space formation, zeitgeist, religion, learning, and art) included. Full article

This essay expands on the previous discussion, “Positioning Ethos” (Baumlin and Meyer 2018), which outlined a theory of ethos for the 21st century. There, my coauthor and I observed the dialectic between ethics and ethotics, grounding subjectivity within a sociology of rhetoric: Contemporary ethos, thus, explores the physical embodiment (with its “markers of identity”), positionality, and “cultural dress” of speakers. There as here, we looked to Heidegger for an expanded definition, one reaching beyond a speaker’s self-image to bring all aspects of our lifeworld—cultural, technological, biological, planetary—into a dynamic unity. And, there as here, we observed the dialectic between speaker and audience: Within this transactional model, ethos marks the “space between” speaker and audience—a socially- and linguistically-constructed meeting ground (or, perhaps better, playground) where meanings can be negotiated. Crucial to this transactional model is the skeptron, as described by Bourdieu: To possess the skeptron is to claim the cultural authority, expertise, trust, and means to speak and to be heard—indeed, to be seen—in one’s speaking. To our previous essay’s ethics and ethotics, this present essay adds the dialectic arising between bios and technê. We “dwell” in memory, in language, in history, in culture: All speakers in all cultural moments can claim as much. But, writing in an age of postmodernism, we acknowledge the heightened roles of technology, “expert systems,” and urbanization in our lifeworld today. What we had described as the cultural “habitus” of ethos is here supplemented by an ethos of scientific technoculture; similarly, what we had described as the existentialist “embodied self” is here supplemented by the postmodern—indeed, posthuman—ethos of the cyborg, a biotechnic “assemblage” part cybernetic machine and part living organism, simultaneously personal and collective in identity. This posthuman con/fusion of bios and technê is not a transcendence of (human) nature; rather, it acknowledges our immersion within an interspecies biology while expanding our habitus from the polis to the planet. It’s these aspects of our lifeworld—insterspecies biology, bodily health as self-identity, postmodern technology, and urban lifestyle—that COVID-19 pressures and threatens today. In the current struggle between science-based medicine and conservative politics, the skeptron assumes life-and-death importance: Who speaks on behalf of medical science, the coronavirus victim, and community health? Full article

Though the general populace has been introduced to the idea of thin privilege, the fat activist movement has been slow in gaining momentum. This is due, in part, to the symbolic annihilation of “fat” people in media. Within the fat activist framework, women of color are often further excluded from the overarching discourse and white privilege is sometimes unacknowledged. Taking an intersectional approach, I examine the Tumblr page, Fat People of Color. I use Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to examine the images and conversations posted by users. Findings reveal that Fat People of Color uses an intersectional, communal approach to posit counter-narratives against normative ideas about white thinness. This research contributes to an understudied area of sociological inquiry by presenting an analysis of the experience of “fat” women of color within a feminist framework. Ignoring the variation of experiences strengthens the types of privileges that fat activism and feminism hope to dismantle. Full article